The Joy of High Places Read online

  The JOY of HIGH PLACES

  PATTI MILLER is the author of nine books, including best-selling memoir-writing texts and the award-winning narrative non-fiction book The Mind of a Thief. She has published numerous articles and essays in national newspapers and magazines. She grew up on Wiradjuri land and now lives in Woolloomooloo on Gadigal land. She teaches memoir workshops around Australia and in Paris and London.

  To the bird-children

  The JOY of HIGH PLACES

  Patti Miller

  ‘A moving meditation on the way we doggedly court both bliss and death. Though Patti Miller strides the world in her hiking boots, and though her mind ranges through world history, mythology and societies, this danger-defying philosopher remains unmistakably, quintessentially Australian.’

  Sue Woolfe, author of Leaning Towards Infinity

  ‘A clear-eyed celebration of the capacity for joy and risk that makes us human. I finished this book feeling quietly elated.’

  Delia Falconer, author of Sydney and The Service of Clouds

  ‘A true tale of daring and endurance, pain and exuberance, told like a myth, The Joy of High Places is the most transcendental, most spiritual book written by a non-believer I’ve ever read. Strange, compelling, irresistible – it sings with poetry and wisdom, and keeps surprising to the very end. Creative non-fiction at its finest.’

  Lee Kofman, author of Imperfect

  ‘Each time I opened this book, I felt as though I was returning to a wise and true friend. Patti Miller captures the pleasures of the body, the joy of landscape, the thrill of knowing and being known. More than that, she unpacks the mysteries of memory, and the way we carry our past into our present. I loved it.’

  Kathryn Heyman, author of Storm and Grace

  ‘Patti Miller is a national treasure, who has not only led the way in gently parsing the past – both personal and collective – in her previous books, but has guided many of us on our own writing journeys. This new book is a delight to read, filled as it is with the “soul oval” of “wild joy” that she describes from childhood, a feeling she re-experiences in fleeting moments on her long, questing walking pilgrimages. It’s also a moving portrait of a once-strained sibling relationship: a sister bound to the earth; a brother drawn to the sky. In the face of trauma, Miller writes this book to heal old wounds, to truly get to know her brother, and in doing so, she discovers a shared sibling language of joy (in walking, in flying) – as well as awe for all that remains mysterious in a loved one who is on the other side of tragedy.’

  Ceridwen Dovey, author of In the Garden of the Fugitives

  ‘A superb, soaring memoir of longing, resilience and delight in the natural world. Patti takes us with her through some of the most beautiful parts of Europe, describing the simple pleasure of walking and how it has held her captive throughout her life. Alongside is the story of Patti’s brother finding transcendence in flight, the agony of it being taken away and the determination of mind over body.’

  Jemma Birrell, Creative Director of Tablo Publishing

  A NewSouth book

  Published by

  NewSouth Publishing

  University of New South Wales Press Ltd

  University of New South Wales

  Sydney NSW 2052

  AUSTRALIA

  newsouthpublishing.com

  © Patti Miller 2019

  First published 2019

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  ISBN: 9781742236513 (paperback)

  9781742244587 (ebook)

  9781742249070 (ePDF)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

  Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Cover design Peter Long with Josephine Pajor-Markus

  Cover image Peter Long

  All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

  Contents

  The man who fell to earth

  Childhood dreams

  How the story came to be told

  What are you doing out here?

  Gods and monks

  Icarus

  Chronologies

  A handful of people

  Lucy

  Walking around the mountain

  Lazarus

  The Fates

  The Uluru offering

  Phoenix

  The Rosetta Stone

  Phoenix rises

  Becoming wild

  A short walk home

  Chrysalis

  Acknowledgments

  The man who fell to earth

  One day a few years ago, one of my brothers fell to earth and smashed his spine in several places when his paragliding wing collapsed. He believed he was going to die and then, when he realised he was still alive, he thought he would never walk again.

  That’s the most straightforward way to begin the story, but, of course, it’s not necessarily the beginning. Many things happened before that; the dreams Barney had as a little boy for one, flying over the farm where we all grew up, swooping above the paddocks and fences in the night; that could be the real origin of everything that happened to my sensible brother. Or it could be more scientific to start with the weather, the rain damping down the silent grass, the unstable air producing patchy bullets of up-current, the warm pocket of air under a cool layer spinning into the hidden dust devil that brought him down. Or perhaps the real story begins eons ago in his genes, the particular and peculiar combination of methodical good sense and the longing for transcendence that he inherited from his German and Celtic ancestors. How far back would that make the beginning?

  And neither is the story all about him and his flying and falling. The year he fell out of the sky, I began long-distance walking, which, in a way, is as absurd a means of getting about as flying under a piece of nylon cloth – albeit a lot safer. It is a ridiculously slow method of traversing the countryside, not much happens for hours, feet become painful, you get too hot, you get caught in storms, dogs snarl threateningly. But it is democratic – anyone with two legs can walk, it requires no training, once you’ve bought solid walking boots it costs very little money, and doesn’t usually risk anyone’s life. Walking is fundamental, everyday, without drama.

  Flying is faster and more graceful, but it depends almost entirely on what appears to be the random and therefore unpredictable movement of invisible flows of air. It requires a high degree of skill and strength, it’s dangerous, it’s otherworldly. Imaginary beings fly – angels, dragons, fairies, griffins all soar with feathery or scaly wings above the earth in a detached parallel reality – while we who walk, un-winged, two-legged, are down in the folds of the earth with the sights and sounds and smells of the world right under our noses: a grub in a cocoon, the sweet clang of cowbells, sheep poo on the path.

  On my two legs, I’ve walked thousands of kilometres across the countryside. I’ve walked day after day, week after week, for hundreds of kilometres on footpaths in France, England and Scotland, in Italy and Spain and Switzerland and in Australia, and most days I walk a quiet five kilometres to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair on the sandstone headland opposite the Opera House near where I live in Sydney.

  My brother has flown hundreds of kilometres over Bundjalung country in northern New South Wales and across the rainforests of southern Queensland, following where the cloud-streets let him fly. Other days he’s flown only a
few kilometres and realised that the air currents were not strong enough to take him anywhere and he’s had to land again.

  None of our journeys are continuous so there’s not just one journey to follow from beginning to end for either of us. I can’t draw one line for each of us and leave it at that. What is needed is a large paper map that I can fold out, smooth the creases and mark the walks and flights in different coloured pens. The journeys won’t cross over geographically, that’s clear already, but they are connected. For a start we are both making tracks, tracing visible muddy patterns on the earth and invisible airy arabesques above it.

  In fact, I wonder if flying and walking are both a type of inscription on the world: footsteps in the dust, unseen patterns in the sky.

  The reason I suspect walking, at least, is a kind of writing, is a slip of the tongue I’ve been making over the last few years. I’ve said walking when I meant writing, and writing when I meant walking, far too many times for it to be purely accidental. There’s plenty of overlap. In both writing and walking you explore inner and outer landscapes: cliffs of fall, uneventful plains. And inner and outer weather: sunny, gloomy, stormy. There are hardships in both: getting lost, wondering which way to go, sometimes strenuous effort, sometimes ordinary plodding; and there are pangs of delight and even revelation: a valley in the Pyrénées afloat with white butterflies. In both, joy is rare and unpredictable, but it’s worth it when it appears. In both, you hope to arrive somewhere, although at times you have to turn back to the beginning and start again. And most of all it’s that each step, each word, connects you to the world, impresses you into it, makes you one with it. I imagine it’s the same for Barney, that flying is a reflection of his inner life, but I don’t know. The fact is, I don’t know my own brother very well.

  I have childhood memories of him; the two of us walking to the farm gate to catch the teacher’s ute to school, Barney always a long way ahead; Barney saying, ‘You have itchy-powder hair’ – a mysterious insult unless you know ‘itchy-powder’ was our name for an ugly greenish sack that appeared at times in gum trees and which, for us, was a symbol of all that was revolting and disturbing. Of course I cried to our mother about that, and she said, ‘Take no notice,’ but I was a child and I did take notice. Years later, I believed Barney had forgotten all about it – the one who delivers childhood insults rarely remembers them – but when my first book came out, our mother said, ‘Barney asked me what you had written about him. He must have a guilty conscience!’ She had a wry expression on her face so I knew she remembered. I laughed – I hadn’t said anything at all about him – but I was pleased in a childish part of myself.

  Randomly distributed genes bring odd collections of people together. The vectors of lives intersect in families through shared inheritance and upbringing and then ricochet off into the future. When there’s so many – there were eleven living in our battered old farmhouse – there’s always going to be some missed connections, but for as long as I can remember, Barney, the third eldest of eight, held himself separate from the general melee of brothers and sisters, parents and grandmother. He had to share the boys’ sleep-out with all the rest, but he kept his small area impeccably neat, as if there were an invisible wall beyond which the tide of shoes and dirty clothes could not flow. He had a box of comics stowed under his bed, which he wouldn’t let anyone read – a distinct offence as everything (clothes, toys, books) was shared – and later he had a transistor radio which we were not allowed to listen to except on rare occasions of munificent bounty. He was tidy, methodical, rational, unemotional. It seemed that he dis-dained his family’s general messiness – and my Irish red-haired temperament and disorderliness in particular. Decades later I was bewildered when he stepped off the side of a mountain into thin air as if he were a poet all along.

  We inherited the same Irish, English and German genes – and some unofficial Wiradjuri and Asian – we were told the same God story of prayers and ritual, we walked on the same low rolling hills and plains. If you mapped our past, the lines would overlap for at least all the childhood years. Or perhaps not; perhaps we were always on different paths.

  Childhood dreams

  I remember the Sunday that Barney stepped off one of the paths laid out for us. He simply refused to go to Mass. My father had gone into the boys’ room to see why he wasn’t ready. I followed him in.

  ‘I’m not going,’ Barney said. He had been sitting on the bed strumming his guitar, but he stood up when Dad entered.

  To an outsider this rebellion might sound small, but such a refusal was unheard-of in our family – it felt as shocking as a declaration to commit murder. We weren’t just Sunday believers; our every day was shaped around religion. We prayed the Rosary on our knees every night, recited more prayers before we went to bed, learned our catechism, examined our conscience and understood sin.

  Dad was a gentle man by nature – Mum used to say he would walk away rather than have an argument – but rigid in his religious beliefs, and on the day Barney refused to come to Mass, he tried to force him. He grabbed him by the shoulder. Barney was 15 by then, dark-haired and skinny but taller than our father, and he pushed his hand away.

  ‘You’re as bad as a Communist, making people do things they don’t want to do,’ he accused.

  I stood there, terrified, knowing there was no worse insult to my father, who prayed every night for the downfall of Communism. And then our gentle Dad lifted his fist and punched Barney about the head and shoulders, several times. I can still feel the shock and the fear at seeing my father lose control of himself. I feel disloyal writing that, and, in fact, when I wrote this once before, I softened it to ‘started pulling him’, but memory stands firm against the written word. It was the most frightening thing I’d seen in my peaceful childhood, and it’s the only time I can recall my father losing his temper with any of us. Still, he did lose it and he did attack Barney with his fists, which, I imagine, only hardened my brother’s resolve against religion.

  The side paths and deviations are hard to track in anyone’s life. It’s easier to think there’s one path with a few twists and turns when, in fact, they are multiple, braided, for all of us. And every moment along every one of those braids contains another possibility, another way through the maze. I was going to say labyrinth, but there is only one way through a labyrinth, one entry and one central destination, so it was a key symbol for the Catholic church. Barney decided there was nothing at the centre and gave up on the labyrinth when he was a teenager. How he plotted his life after that, I don’t really know. Maybe, like me, he made it up as he went along.

  Our paths didn’t cross over very often after we both left home, but there was one meeting I remember clearly. It was decades after our childhood on the farm, the immersed years that last forever. We had arranged to meet at the Fountain cafe on a shady square near where I live in Sydney. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He and his wife, Jenny, lived over eight hours drive away in northern NSW, and neither of us had been much inclined to breach our mutual incomprehension. We were both there, I suspect, out of family duty. I think he was actually visiting one of his daughters and added me into the arrangement. This was after he started flying, but before he fell.

  I knew the man sitting in front of me, still skinny and dark-haired, was the boy who had inhabited the same dry landscape as I did, and had lived in the same falling-down house and who had defied our father one Sunday morning, but he seemed a stranger to me, had always seemed a stranger.

  It was sunny that day at the cafe in Kings Cross. We were sitting outside under umbrellas, looking towards the dandelion spray of the El Alamein fountain. Anthony, my partner, was at the table, and Jenny, but I don’t think their daughter had arrived yet. Virginal white seagulls and dirty ibis stalked around the fountain pool looking for scraps. Nothing about the place connected to our shared past, no context for a meeting of minds, but something did happen there. It was the first time I realised I may have got my brother completely wrong.<
br />
  ‘What’s it like?’ I asked. ‘Flying like a bird?’ I hadn’t seen him since he had taken it up a few years before. A polite question.

  ‘It’s the most extraordinary experience of my life,’ he said.

  I looked at him, startled. Barney was not given to hyperbole. His eyes lit up in his narrow face. He has our mother’s dark Irish look, high cheekbones, wiry body. When he shaved his beard off – about the time everyone else was growing one – it was obvious he was identical to her adored brother, Jack, who had died in a car crash when we were children.

  ‘Really?’ I said. It was as much as I could manage. My tone wasn’t doubting, just shocked.

  ‘There’s such a feeling of great power when I’m first surging upwards and swinging around like those swing-out horses on a merry-go-round. And on a smooth glide, it’s peaceful and calm and I feel so joyful – I’m actually 4000 feet above the ground! Or higher. It’s dreamlike to be sailing along in the sky, talking to a wedge-tailed eagle, looking at the world from above.’

  My pragmatic brother chatting to wedge-tailed eagles? Talking about peace and calm and joy? I was rattled. And there was something else niggling. What was he doing being the poetic, untethered one.

  ‘When I’m on a strong climb I feel totally exhilarated and when I’m well into a cross-country flight there’s such a feeling of mastery – I’m actually a human flying! And I look down and see the beautiful highlands beneath me. The view from just under the clouds …’

  His eyes and face were shining and I couldn’t hide my astonishment. I didn’t know who this enthusiastic, passionate brother was. He had become a winged creature, swooping and soaring with snowy-feathered wings in the heavens, communing with sky dwellers, looking down on the wide green earth below … He sounded like someone in love, or someone with a wild excessive temperament.