The Joy of High Places Read online

  He was aware of someone else in the room, was it before or after he was moved? Another patient, a young man, injured in a car accident he learned later. Then he disappeared and there was someone else in the bed. What happened to him; did he recover or die? Was he walking around somewhere with the memory of a middle-aged man smashed up from a paragliding accident sometimes flitting through his head?

  Jenny rang in the morning. He had rung her the night before, just minutes before the operation. She had been shopping in Rundle Mall in Adelaide, buying a few items for her father – new pyjamas? slippers? – and answered in her usual pragmatic style. She was as practical and sensible as Barney – extreme events did not happen in their lives – and it took more than a few beats for it to sink in. And then he had to go, the surgeon was waiting, and she was left standing in the Mall, her life at right angles to the moment before she answered her phone.

  She had been with Barney since they were in their early twenties. They were both teachers and they’d had three children together, but perhaps more than most couples, they lived for each other. They didn’t socialise much, spent most of their spare time together, playing golf, dancing, or simply being at home sharing their evenings and weekends, Barney painting exact scenes, Jenny looking up exotic meals to cook. When Barney took up flying it had been a bit worrying, but she supported his dream, there was no question she would do otherwise.

  ‘How are you?’ The same question as the surgeon, as everyone, but from Jenny it was a lifeline. She was someone who needed him to be okay. He answered with all the positives. He was alive. There was hope he could walk with crutches in a year or so. There was a brilliant team looking after him. Jenny told him she had arranged a flight back and would see him tomorrow. It was the best she could do.

  Barney said it was hard to remember the details of the first day, what happened when. The days melted together. The opioids dissolved events and the walls. There was Oxycontin and another one was called Endone – a strangely threatening name for a dreamy drug. He remembers sleeping, waking up with pain, eating meals that were hard to keep down – perhaps nausea from the after-effects of the anaesthesia – or perhaps his traumatised stomach and bowels just could not deal with it. He did remember the meals were ‘edible, but not entertaining’.

  Nurses came in and out giving him an endless array of drugs, Tramadol, Paracetamol, Gabapentin, Norfloxacin, Motilium, Lactulose, Docusate, and the Oxycontin and Endone. Not that he knew what any of them were at that stage.

  Perhaps Drew or Jason, who had first swooped down to help him, arrived briefly, or perhaps that was the next day. Perhaps Kevin, the fourth of the five brothers in our family, came too, or perhaps the next day. Barney didn’t remember any phone calls but he might have talked to me. To Kathy. Or Mary. He slept on and off all day.

  There seemed to be creatures – monkeys were they? – and mechanical objects, perhaps made of Lego, crawling on the walls, but nothing seemed definitely itself, more like they were melting from one thing to another, like a Salvador Dali painting. When he asked about the rippling walls and the creatures, the nurses told him he was hallucinating. He remembered Dad exclaiming about the little creatures at the end of his bed before he died, and Mum remarking on the little dog and the kangaroo in her hospital room in the weeks before her death.

  He did recall that a male nurse and a physiotherapist arrived with a contraption called a ‘rollator’. It was a high frame on steel rollers with metal curved armrests on either side, like two small troughs – and apparently he was meant to stand in the frame and try walking.

  ‘We think you can give it a go. What do you reckon?’ said the nurse. It was more an instruction than a question.

  It wasn’t possible. If he couldn’t move his feet or lower legs in the bed, couldn’t even sense where his legs were, how could he stand, let alone move? And there were all the tubes and bags he was attached to.

  Barney nodded. What else could he do?

  They pushed his trolley table out of the way and parked the rollator next to his bed, and then the nurse pushed a button to elevate the head-end of the bed so that he was sitting straight up. Everything hurt, searing absurd pain.

  The drip stand was arranged next to the rollator, then together, the nurse and physiotherapist folded down his sheet and cotton cell blanket. Then they lifted him expertly out of the bed and into the frame, both of them holding his weight the whole time. Then they put his arms along the troughs so that he could support his own weight with his forearms. They continued to hold him, their arms linked around his, one of them carrying his urine bag and the other reaching for the drip stand. Now they were a procession, ready to begin.

  ‘Just slide your feet,’ said the physiotherapist. Her voice was warm and encouraging. Barney looked down. He could see his swollen feet in white compression socks on the pale green vinyl floor, but he couldn’t feel the surface. There was none of the familiar pressure of floor beneath feet, so familiar that he had never noticed it was there before. Perhaps he had been aware of it when he was a baby first learning to walk on the lino floor of the farmhouse, the undulating feel of his foot muscles trying to find balance, his bare soles sensing the firmness, the reliability under his unsteady chubby legs. But of course he had forgotten that, like we all do, in decades of walking without thought.

  I watched my own two boys and, decades later, their own boy and girl, learn to walk, and each time I was struck by the focused determination of the baby to do this very risky thing – standing two-legged, when four-legged is so safe and easy – and by the pleasure everyone who is watching takes in the smallest bipedal step. The baby pulls herself up on chairs and other peoples’ legs, keeps a hand on the surface, looks pleased with herself, reaches out to the next available handhold, judges the distance, only takes a step once the new handhold is secured. Feet wobble, muscles adjust; shifting, understanding the surface, gaining strength, comprehending the new concept of balance. And then there is the triumphant moment when she lets go of every handhold and bravely steps out across the empty space to a waiting, smiling parent.

  Teetering, focused, glowing with a sense of achievement – what makes her do it? Is it seeing all of us so tall and mobile and powerful, able to move wherever we please? Or is it programmed into her – she would walk even if she were raised by wolves? Feral children, the very few who have lived, have been reported as walking on all fours, so it seems the baby is mimicking our standing and walking. Still, she teaches herself how to do it; she doesn’t see adults hauling themselves up on sofas and stepping precariously between furniture. She watches and purposefully teaches herself.

  Later, as I bombarded Barney with questions, he said he realised, not right away, but later, that was what he had to do. He had to watch people walking and see how it was done.

  ‘My legs and feet just more-or-less dangled,’ he told me. He tried to imagine a step. Even imagining was too hard. His brain felt crystal clear, opioid clear, but he’d never had to imagine a step before. What did a step look like? It didn’t matter. No nerve messages were getting through to his feet. A cacophony of nerve messages came from his body to his brain, all carrying notes of pain. But the nurse and physio persisted, gradually rolling him along to the door and back. The grey walls rippled upwards. His feet slid and slipped on the vinyl for perhaps four metres to the door. And back.

  How long had it taken? An age. It couldn’t be usefully measured by any units of time. It was simple agony and fruitless effort. They helped him back onto his bed. He was totally exhausted and in unimaginable pain.

  ‘I was overwhelmed by the enormity of what I had to try to do. I thought that might be as good as it got,’ he said. The nerve damage was too severe. He might try with huge pain and effort and not get anywhere. What was the point?

  I can’t, don’t want to, imagine such pain. Or such despair. It’s not an emotion I know about first hand. I know about restlessness, years of it, urgent and agitated at times, which could be one of the reasons that I
walk. I have to let urgency and restlessness go when I walk. I can’t be in a hurry. I can’t be purposeful or focused on the goal. I can’t even think of it as a means of getting from here to there, because if I did, I would see there are much more efficient ways of doing it. But for Barney walking, or learning to walk again, was urgent; it either had to be the focus of all his efforts, or given up altogether. There was no certainty that any of the pain and effort would be worth it. It would be easier to lie still, not make any of this more unbearable than it was.

  Still, the next day when the nurses returned with the rollator, he tried again. Once again the nurse and physio helped him out of bed and onto the frame and wheeled his drip stand and catheter, but this time, they did not hold onto him. They stood beside him, urging him to take a step, believing in the impossible. He gazed down at his feet. They were still swollen and bruised, he still could not feel the floor, could not even tell if it was warm or cold. With all his weight supported by his elbows, slowly he slid one foot along, using the weak muscle responses in his upper legs. He had moved on his own – or at least with the help of the rollator! He was sweating with the effort, beads of it on his forehead, as he tried again with the other foot.

  It was extraordinarily slow and just as painful as the day before, but he made it the four metres to the door with the nurse and physio at his side, cheering him along. And then, an eon later, he made it back to the bed, each second of it excruciating. He lay on the bed, wondering again if this was as good as it would get. He felt he had made no progress, and the pain was worse, if anything, than the day before. There were no promises and no solid precedents for what might happen – no certainty about whether he would ever be able to walk unaided. It was different for everyone, they said, the infinite varieties of damage to the nerves in the spinal column, the infinite combinations of genetic inheritance, and the unmeasurable patterns of will, endurance and hope in any individual person. It might all depend on the day he took his first step on the farm, the exact strength of the pleasure in mastery imprinted in his cerebral cortex.

  Of course, no-one remembers that pride and pleasure. Barney learned to walk long before I was born and there is no-one left to report when and how he began, what day it was, sunny or rainy, that he took his first uncertain, proud steps. I know when I began to walk, because there’s written evidence. There’s a letter, hand-written in ink, apparently from Barney and my sister Kathy, to my mother, reporting that I had walked a few steps and climbed up onto the lounge when I was 12 months old. I’ve also been told I was atypical in that I was never four-legged – I didn’t crawl. I sat upright, and with a flat pincer movement, slithered along on my bum, perhaps to get a better view of the world, until the day I walked and climbed onto the lounge. My mother was in hospital having another baby, Kevin – hence the letters – so I obviously had to get a move along, but like everyone else I was genetically programmed to walk at a particular time.

  Barney’s almighty efforts made me wonder about the origins of walking. It is, after all, a defining trait of humans, which means Barney was only obeying his genes. Our ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, named after ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ – apparently the cool paleoanthropologists who discovered her fossilised bones were listening to the Beatles that night in camp – was clearly a walker, perhaps the first. Donald Johanson and his research team found her in 1974, when she poked her elbow through the dry bed of a gully in Ethiopia more than three million years after she died. They knew right away that Lucy was important. She had a small brain but she also had a broad pelvis and thigh-bones that angled in towards the knees, revealing that she walked.

  I went to see Lucy in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris several years ago and was moved and awed by her small form. She looked like a child, about eight years old. I gazed at her in her glass case – at least I thought I was gazing at her. I’ve since found out the original Lucy is kept securely in Addis Ababa and that I was gazing solemnly at a cast, but, still, Lucy is impressive. She’s evidence of the idea that walking led to brain development and not the other way around. Quite simply, because she walked, the human brain grew. I find that one of the most beautiful ideas in all of our history, that we owe our lovely brain labyrinth to walking on two feet.

  By 1.9 million years ago, Homo erectus – fully upright and by now larger-brained and longer-legged, her curved spine absorbing the shock of her feet hitting the earth – was striding across the savannah. Her rhythmic stride pumped an optimum blood flow to the brain, which grew larger and more complicated and eventually she gave birth to Homo sapiens. We are human because we walked. It means walking is a radical act – it is a literal return to what has made us human. When we walked, our brains grew. In a way, it’s as simple as that.

  And so we all kept walking. Every slithery fish-like baby, in a few brief months, becomes a walking, speaking autocrat. It’s as if each human child, in less than two years enacts the entire origin of the species: from aquatic creature, swimming in a sea of amniotic fluid; to crawling primate in a low-level jungle of furniture and legs; to upright Homo sapien, walking, running, speaking, asserting dominion.

  I doubt Barney was thinking of any of this, but it was there, forcing him through the pain, day after day. The genetic determination to walk.

  Walking around the mountain

  Mont Blanc – Switzerland, France, Italy

  Barney used to email me – and the rest of his brothers and sisters – links to his track-log so we could see where he had flown, but in those days I mostly didn’t bother looking at them. There was always something else to do. I realise now it was his way of trying to show us his bird soul.

  I study them today: the one from Mt Tamborine in southern Queensland to Wyaralong, a distance of about 70 kilometres, looks like a white string with knots in it at first. Barney said that he had flown at a height of 7000 feet and that if we clicked on the eye-height button on the right of the log, we would be able to track his flight accurately. As I zoom closer in, I can see the detail of knots untangling into loops, the white line spiralling upwards, round and round like a ball of string unspooling; then it lengthens into a long traverse over the ranges and then circles again in the rising thermals, lengthens again, circles again. The ovals and circles above the mountains look fragile, a fine, scrawled writing on the landscape, inscribing his journey through unseen air currents. The shape of the spirals, their urgency and fragility, move me. They convey the danger of floating above the earth using only the moods of the air itself to keep you from falling. There was always danger, nothing was certain, but he wasn’t afraid. This, to me, is a mystery. When I walked around Mont Blanc I was afraid. I didn’t know how to be courageous in the face of physical danger.

  I had read about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. Its beauty, its grandeur, its terror. It was a landscape I knew nothing about firsthand, only from myths and films. It straddles the borders of France, Italy and Switzerland, 4810 metres of rock, ice and snow, surrounded by peaks of almost equal height. Anthony and I were not climbers, but there is a path around Mont Blanc – 170 kilometres, never actually on it, but circling it with correct awe. To walk around the Mountain, it’s necessary to ascend and descend its seven circling mountains, up and over each of the passes.

  I had done the research: the Mont Blanc guidebook warned of storms and of snow patches early in the season. Snow patches? I visualised the occasional crunch of snow under the conquering heroine’s hefty boots; the vast and extreme beauty of the Alps displayed in every direction. It’s obvious my relationship to the Mountain before I started was a relationship to a postcard, a one-dimensional reality – a postcard mountain with postcard snow. As if beauty came for free.

  Anthony and I arrived at Les Houches in the Alps and stayed the first night in a small ski chalet, irises waving out the front, a nest of wood-lined rooms, quiet at this time of year. The owner held out his hand. He had no fingers. Frostbite? I wondered if it was a warning. Over din
ner, when I showed him our topographical maps, he tried to indicate the path around the mountain with his finger stubs and I was embarrassed to have to keep clarifying with my own precise finger which path he meant. He took hold of a blue highlighter, holding it between thumb and stubs, and marked the path, and then wrote ‘snow’ in uncontrolled letters in two places on the map.

  ‘Will there be much?’ I asked. I put aside my dinner plate to make room to unfold the map further.

  He shrugged. He hadn’t been up there this year, but there had been unseasonal late snow at the Croix du Bonhomme. That was where we were heading the day after tomorrow. No need to think about that now. His wife served us tarte aux mirabelles made from plums grown in their garden.

  After dinner we sat in the twilight of the back garden, Anthony reading James Joyce’s Ulysses aloud from his phone. Walking and reading have gone together almost from the beginning. Every afternoon or evening after walking, we settled in at a bar or garden of a hostel and Anthony read aloud from whatever book he had downloaded. Ulysses had been with us for a while.

  The Alps towered, craggy, snow-capped, undeniably magnificent, mirroring every image I’d ever seen of them. Ulysses flowed like light on Irish whiskey, glinting and shifting every second. I took a few photos of the magnificence on my phone as I listened to Anthony read.

  Next morning the mountains had disappeared, obscured by mist and drizzle. I put on every layer – singlet, long-sleeved top, hoodie, walking pants, rain-jacket – and then boots. Now I was an Amazon, metres tall, striding with long limbs, the planet turning under my heel. The short, middle-aged woman in the mirror was merely a cover for this infinitely powerful being in her seven-league boots.