The Joy of High Places Read online

  ‘Can you stand up.’ It was more like an order than a question.

  ‘No.’

  I looked at him, pleading for him to see I couldn’t do this. I saw something shift in him. Letting go.

  ‘I’ll have to come back over then.’

  I had put him in danger by not being able to cross myself. He could slip and fall to his death this time. I watched him re-traverse the awful crossing, but again, I have no memory, except I know he teetered when he was back on my side because I was in his way in the middle of the narrow track.

  ‘Move,’ he said tersely, and I crawled away. It felt pathetic to crawl, no longer bipedal, but it was all I was capable of.

  Then I stood, shaking, and went back up the path and around the spur where the Czechs were eating lunch.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ I blurted out. ‘I was too scared. We are going back to the other path.’

  ‘That’s okay. Safety always has to come first. You don’t want to die for a walk,’ said one of the young men. I was surprised at his serious and reassuring tone.

  ‘You could wait and cross with us if you like,’ he offered.

  I smiled. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think it would help. If I slipped, I would grab one of you and you would go over as well.’

  He grinned back at me and I was grateful. I looked at Anthony. He had changed his attitude, was no longer impatient.

  We started walking back down the mountain straight away. It kept cycling through my mind; what if I had waited for a while, sat and breathed a while, could I have done it then? What if I faced it?

  I talked all the way down, going over and over the moments. There were many more than I’ve written here, moments I’ve forgotten and moments I’ve left out because perhaps they don’t matter. But then, all of it does matter, even what I’ve forgotten; it’s just the way we make sense of things, selecting and discarding. Making a story.

  The one moment that keeps coming back is the step that I didn’t take. When I started talking to Barney about his story, I asked him what was the one moment that kept coming back to him. Of course I knew the answer; the moment he lost control of the wing. The moment when you have no power to do anything about what is happening to you. Obviously it cannot ever be told if it slips the other way, into eternal silence, but from this side of the moment, it sears into memory and can never be erased. Memory presents and relentlessly re-presents, a mad-making repetition, like a video on endless loop, a crazy internet meme. The mind is in charge of keeping us alive and tries its best to handle powerlessness over death. Over mortality. But it doesn’t work, repetition doesn’t normalise, it makes it worse. When I asked him if he dreamed about the accident, Barney said, yes, that moment, over and over, for nearly two years.

  After two hours of descent, we reached the lower path that followed the river along the valley floor. We stopped at a grassy bank by the torrent and ate leftover baguette and cheese and drank the last of the coffee. It was a pretty picnic spot and I sat, leaning against a rock, glad to be alive.

  That night, in Courmayeur, we lay on the bed in the hotel and talked about what to do: continue or call it quits. I still wanted to circle the Mountain. Perhaps the snow will melt, I argued. I didn’t want to fail. Anthony pointed out patiently that more bad weather was forecast, more snow and, almost certainly, more ‘certain-death’ crossings. I suddenly capitulated. I had to let it go, the months of planning, the dream of success.

  ‘I did find beauty though,’ I said. ‘And terror.’

  ‘You were brave,’ Anthony said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Because you had the courage to tell the Czechs that you were afraid.’

  I said it wasn’t much for me to admit to being afraid; it was just the way it was. And for Anthony it wasn’t much to cross above the abyss. I asked him if he’d been afraid and he said ‘cautious, but not fearful’. His heart was not thumping and his limbs were as wiry and reliable as always. I can’t avoid the truth. I didn’t have the courage in the end for extreme beauty – and this is where it hurts. Anthony did, and my brother did. In fact, my brother does still. His story didn’t end with his fierce attempts to walk again; there’s more to tell.

  Lazarus

  Jenny arrived back on the second day after the accident. She had snatched one-and-a-half anxious days with her father in Adelaide before flying halfway across the country to Brisbane and coming straight from the airport to the hospital. Barney saw the devastation on her face when she walked in and saw him, the companion and lover who had always been by her side, now hooked up to a frightening array of tubes and machines and looking like an old man in a paper gown, wrecked and beaten. Weirdly, he was wearing sunglasses so that he appeared to be pretending to be on holiday or a movie star trying to be incognito. She knew he was wearing the multifocal sunglasses because his ordinary reading glasses had been left in the car when he’d set out flying, but it still added a level of strangeness she could do without.

  She told him she had rung their three children. Their eldest daughter – in New Zealand – would be coming over as soon as she could, but the other two – their son in Dubai and their other daughter in Budapest – probably wouldn’t be able to make it for a while. That was all right. They would be there when they could.

  They talked about practical arrangements. His car had been picked up from the launch site and brought home by his flying friends. One of them had met Jenny at the airport with it. And she had rung Kathy and asked her to tell the rest of us, so we all knew.

  Barney told her about the rollator. Not the agony, none of the detail, just that he had moved to the door and back. He couldn’t say ‘walked’.

  Jenny held his hand. ‘Is there anything you need?’

  ‘I’d like to get out of this paper outfit. Could you bring some T-shirts and shorts to wear. And my reading glasses from the car. And something nice to eat.’

  She smiled. He had always appreciated her cooking.

  He told her about the melting walls and the monkeys and she looked worried. He assured her it was okay; he knew they weren’t really there; the nurses had explained they were hallucinations from the opioids.

  ‘I don’t know why people choose to take drugs,’ he said. ‘It’s very unpleasant and confusing.’ Jenny nodded. Neither of them had been part of the dope-smoking generation, even when they were young.

  Other visitors came that day or the next day. Kevin, the Buddhist brother who lives nearby, came in – Barney didn’t know if it was for the first time or again; and his friends who had been on the hillside with him arrived. He could see in their eyes that they really did feel for him. They all wanted to help, to run errands for Jenny, to bring food. He felt overwhelmed by their concern and kindness. To know that others felt his pain, or were at least affected and distressed by it, was a revelation. People love me, he thought with a surprised bewilderment, not just Jenny, but people. He had never known it before.

  On the fourth day after the accident – all time was measured from this new day zero – the physiotherapist and nurse brought him a pair of crutches. They were made of aluminium, light and shiny, but apart from that looked like crutches from an old war movie. He was one of the helpless wounded.

  The nurse folded back his bedclothes and lifted Barney’s legs over the side of the bed. He put one crutch under his right arm, keeping his arm around Barney while the physio placed the other crutch. They let him go and he was standing there, or rather balancing there, all his weight on the firm pads of the crutches, his legs dangling. His whole body was in pain as it hung there. As if he were on a crucifix.

  Bloody crucifixes were everywhere in our childhood; the sagging, pain-wracked body hanging on a cross on walls, on rosary beads, around necks, on altars, in classrooms. Even in the kitchen. We laugh about it sometimes: that we ate our meals under the image of a bleeding, tortured body. It seemed normal, that nailed, dangling body, always pictured as still suffering, not dead yet.

  Neither was he
.

  He had to do something. Focus on what the physio was saying.

  ‘Swing the crutches forward. We will hold you up.’

  He jerked the crutches forward about ten centimetres.

  ‘Move your right foot.’ The physio leaned down and touched his leg. ‘Feel that. Move that leg.’

  He couldn’t feel the touch of her hand but he could see it, so he tried to direct his right foot to lift. He could not feel or direct anything below his knees but there was the faint muscle strength in his upper thigh. He managed a short slide of a few centimetres.

  ‘Now the other foot.’

  He slid his other foot, managing to lift it slightly. He was shuffling. He suddenly realised he looked like our father with Parkinson’s disease, in the last few years of his life. How frustrated and helpless Dad must have felt; the impossible marshmallow fog between his brain and his feet, nerve messages blocked or sporadic; the overwhelming distress of being dependent.

  He shuffled the other foot. Dolly steps. That was part of a game everyone used to play at Suntop primary school when he was a kid. Dolly steps, giant steps, polka steps, hops, jumps, skips – and then you had to freeze. ‘Statues’ it was called. It was all so easy then. In four shuffles he was upright, his crutches parallel under his arms.

  ‘Swing the crutches again.’ The implacable physio smiled at him. She slid the drip stand and the nurse carried the urine bag.

  They kept going – swing, shuffle, shuffle, rest, swing – over and over, to the door. He was exhausted already. And even though he couldn’t feel the floor or the physio’s hand on his leg when she gave him a tap, his feet and legs were burning with pain. He knew it was referred pain from his spine, not his feet or legs, but that fact made no difference. It was constant, but the movement had made it worse. He wanted to lie down now.

  The nurse and physio helped him turn and then he began the marathon back to his bed. When he finally reached it, he wanted to cry at how inviting it was, the thought of being able to lie down, of not having to make any more effort. The nurse and physio helped him back into bed and he pressed the opioid button. They left the ward, but came back after lunch and then again mid-afternoon, not the same nurse, but another with the same cheerful, determined air, forcing him on the marathon twice more that day.

  On the sixth morning, the sky out the windows was the same grey as the walls. Jenny wasn’t due to arrive for a few hours. She couldn’t come every day because she was still working and it was an hour-and-a-half drive from Murwillumbah to the hospital. The day would stretch interminably until she arrived.

  The crutches had been left by his bed. He looked at them for a while and thought, I could just give up or I could give it a shot. The opioid tube was detached, although the cannula was still in his arm. Other than that, there was only the catheter and urine bag to manage. He pushed back his sheet and blanket, swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for the crutches. He placed them under his arms, held the urine bag handle and gripped the crutch and handle together, steadied himself, stood upright. He took a deep breath, focused on the door of the ward – just four metres, he could do that – and swung the crutches forward in a jerky sudden jump like a nervous frog. Whew! He hadn’t fallen.

  He shuffled his feet forward. He teetered a little to the right and with a sudden snap of fear realised he couldn’t make his feet or legs adjust. He leaned back on his crutch to the left and regained balance. He could only rely on his arms, nothing else.

  He made it to the door and back again. He did it again just before lunch and twice more in the afternoon, feeling proud of himself. He began to let himself dream that it may be possible. He might walk.

  The next day he was in more pain and more weary than ever. He tried to walk with the crutches again by himself but it was impossibly exhausting. Was this it? A painful shuffle on crutches across a room? Being almost completely dependent on others? He would rather be dead.

  A nurse came in to give him his drugs. She asked him his full name before she gave him the Oxycontin and scribbled something on her chart.

  ‘How are we today?’

  ‘Not so good. Going backwards.’

  ‘Don’t overdo it. It’s not about being tough and pushing through it. Keep trying, but take it easy.’

  It was the beginning of realising that if he pushed himself, he paid for it next day with severe pain and exhaustion. Sometimes the most useful thing he could do was not to do anything at all.

  On the ninth day, he woke up again in the grey room. The sun was shining outside. He was now sharing his room with an old man who complained about the breakfast and then about the nurses. He had been complaining since he arrived a few days before, and had been rude to the nurses several times. Barney felt both angry and ready to cry. How dare that bloke complain when everyone was looking after him. He should feel grateful. He looked at his own crutches and thought clearly, ‘I am going to be able to walk. Without crutches. Without any help. I’m going to start right now.’

  When he first told me this, I thought it was a reaction against the old man’s whingeing, but he told me much later that he’d decided that he would stay alive and walk because people loved him. I have to admit that when he said that, ‘because people loved me’, it disconcerted me all over again. I still wasn’t used to Barney using such words; it was going to be slow letting go of my old picture of him.

  He sat up in bed and, using his thigh muscles, swung his legs over the edge. He sat there for a minute, breathing through the pain that always came more strongly when he moved. He clutched his urine pack and catheter in one hand. Then he pushed his bed trolley-table just out of reach towards the wall. He took a deep breath, and with his hands on the mattress, pushed himself upwards, his arm muscles trembling. It took huge effort – and fear – and then he was standing. His right leg was more painful than the left, and felt weaker. He was out of balance. He stood for a moment, adjusting his balance with his upper body, then with a lurching, sliding step, grabbed for the trolley table.

  He held onto the table, regained his balance, breathed, then let go and lurched another step to the wall. Two steps without crutches!

  Leaning on the wall on his right side, holding his urine bag in the other, he took another step, then another. He slid, lurched, all the way to the door. It felt as if he were wading against an almighty current that got ever stronger as he stepped. He turned himself around, using the wall to balance, and headed back to his bed. Each step became more and more difficult as he pushed against the heavy current. When he finally made it back to the bed, he felt as if he had climbed Mt Everest. He lay down, exhausted, but with a feeling of jubilation. Some steely determination had formed in him, along with an image of himself as an upright, walking man. He would use that image to teach his nerves, muscles, limbs, to walk again.

  The physiology of walking is straightforward enough. According to the science, when you walk you become an inverted pendulum, your centre of mass, somewhere in the belly, describing the arc. As you plant your foot on the ground in front of you, the ground exerts a force back up your leg that slows you down and continues to slow you as you rise on that foot to the top of the arc. At this point, your active or kinetic energy is at a minimum, as it is in a pendulum, but your potential energy is at a maximum. There is a small millisecond stop at the top, the ‘alleviation phase’, then, as that knee buckles and releases stored elastic energy in the ankle tendons, the ‘launching phase’, you fall forward as the next step is taken with the other foot, using a passive rotation of the hip. The potential energy is changed to kinetic and accelerates you forward. That’s all there is to it.

  It’s the same for everyone – although apparently Kenyan women have eliminated the tiny millisecond pause, which means they walk much more efficiently than anyone else. Despite the rest of us using the same biomechanics, each of us has a different gait – and different gaits for different moods. Because Barney could not direct his ankles or lower legs – that is, part of the b
iomechanical sequence was missing – he could really only take steps from his hips, so his gait was stiff, robot-like. Even to do that, he had to re-imagine how to walk. He watched people walking, studied their movement, so he could imagine the correct shape of walking. If he had the picture in his mind, he reasoned, eventually his body must learn to follow.

  The day after his first wall walk, Barney managed the two metres from bed to wall without the trolley-table. The next day, the three metres from the end of the wall to the bathroom door. Apart from traversing these chasms, he stayed near the walls, and then in another few days, he made it to the corridor where there were railings. The vinyl floor gleamed ahead of him like a pathway towards the nurses’ station. He held the railings with one hand and shuffled up the corridor towards it. It was as slow as wading through mud, which became thicker as he walked. Several nurses and other patients stopped to watch him, admiring his progress. Near the station he thought he really couldn’t move his legs against the thick blur. But he did, stepping and sliding, he made it all the way to the station and back. He had walked 40 metres!

  ‘I’m walking,’ he told Jenny that afternoon. She was thrilled for him but not all that surprised. She knew what he was like.

  Over the next three weeks, he walked along the walls of the hospital, took the lift downstairs and walked in the foyer, and then one day, after three weeks, tried the stairs. Although he was slowly walking further, the rate of improvement slowed every day, and some days he regressed and could only walk half as far as he had the day before. He had to stay near the wall and had to be careful not to catch or tangle his catheter tube when he passed a door handle or another patient, as he got a painful reminder that the tube was attached to his bladder.

  The muscles on his thighs were starting to strengthen, but below the knees he was ‘free-wheeling’, the bottom half following the motion of his hips. There was still no use of the muscles in his calf, ankles or feet, which, he realised, were the muscles that had adjusted minutely all the time to keep him upright. He walked without holding the walls, but near enough to fall on them if he lost balance. There was no way to correct even the slightest teeter. Some days he still overdid it and suffered the next day with severe pain and exhaustion. It was difficult not to try too hard.