The Joy of High Places Read online

  But he would try again the following day. Every day, four times a day, up and down the corridors, around the foyer. He became a familiar sight in the spinal unit; his thin, determined body, in T-shirt and shorts now hanging a bit loose, pacing by. One of the unit’s success stories. The medical staff knew that only half of patients with spinal cord injuries ever walked again.

  Four weeks after he fell out of the sky, he decided to walk from the hospital a couple of blocks to the barber to get a haircut. He always liked to look tidy and neat, and anyway, it would be good practice. It was probably against the rules to leave the hospital grounds, but the doctor had told him he would be allowed home in a few days, so he would need to be able to get out and walk down the street if he wasn’t to be housebound for the rest of his life. He dressed in his usual T-shirt, shorts and gym shoes – the compression bandages were gone – and took the lift down to the foyer. There was no point in tiring himself out with stairs before he even started.

  He stepped out the glass front doors of the hospital and stopped for a moment – it felt good to feel the late spring sun and the soft moist air of Brisbane on his skin – then looked up to see the whole arc of the sky above him. It was the first time since the accident that he had seen the vastness of the sky that had been his home, the place where he felt most himself. He could see a bird high up, dark coloured, perhaps a crow. A sky creature.

  But he had to keep his gaze at ground level. The lawns around the hospital stretched down to the main road and the footpath was slightly sloping so he walked even more slowly than usual, and there was nothing to grab onto if he lost his balance. When he came to a driveway sloping across the direction of his walking, he stopped. He realised he couldn’t cross it without falling over. He could not make his ankles adjust for the slope. He stepped with care off the footpath and walked on the road around the driveway then stepped back up onto the footpath. This was going to be his way of crossing driveways for well over a year; sensation and use of any muscles in his lower legs did not start returning for 15 months.

  But he wasn’t there yet. Not even at the barber. He had to cross busy Ipswich Road to the shopping centre. He waited for the lights to change then started to cross. He walked as fast as he could in his shuffling stiff-legged style, but even going ‘flat-out’, as he put it, the lights changed back while he was still halfway across. To his surprise, the cars waited for him to reach the safety of the other side without revving or honking. Perhaps they had seen his red hospital wristband, or recognised in his gait that he was doing the best he could. It took him over 45 minutes to cover the 300 metres from the hospital, a distance that would take me less than five minutes.

  He reached the barber with its red, white and blue pole painted on the front window and pushed into the shop, relieved to be able to sit down. When it was his turn, he confessed to the barber that he had gone AWOL from the hospital. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said drily, looking at his wristband. When he finally made it back to the hospital, this time crossing the highway on the over-pass, which he hadn’t noticed before but which required climbing stairs, he was exhausted and in severe pain. Still, when one of the nurses complimented him on his haircut, he couldn’t help boasting he had walked down the street to the shopping centre to get it.

  Just over four weeks after the accident, Barney was released from hospital and Jenny arrived to drive him home to Murwillumbah. He got out of the car in his driveway by himself and walked slowly up the steps into his own house.

  Everything in the house was glowing – Jenny always kept everything neat and fresh. It was the way he liked it and, in fact, he often did it himself, making sure everything was orderly. Sun streamed in onto wooden floors, his paintings were bright and cheerful on the walls. Even though he was still in almost constant pain – and would be for more years than he could have borne to imagine – and he still had the catheter and urine bag to manage – at least he was home. He had only been away a month and everything around him was the same, but it was a lifetime since he had been here; his old life had been taken away from him and he still had to work out how to make a new one. The Fates had smacked him out of the sky, dropped the thread holding him up, but he was up and ready to shake his fist and give it another shot.

  The Fates

  The Fates have a lot of bad press, they’re always doing something low or tragic, but I like them. I’m not trying to stay on their good side – I would if I could – but I am impressed with the idea of them. They’re deeper than an idea; more a dark pool under conscious thought, born of the knowledge of having come from non-existence for no known reason, and the dread of having to return to it. We’re in the daylight for such a short time, in sun and rain and wind, with a bloody raw heart, drowning in babies’ unprotected eyes, lost in lips and skin, power sparkling from our hands as we build blinding cities; how can all this disappear? Then lightning strikes, avalanches fall, wars explode, cars crash, illness shrivels, addiction splits, and all that is precious is taken away.

  There must be someone we can persuade to let our dear ones stay longer, someone we can propitiate, someone who knows when the thunder will roar. The Fates, the Moirai, holding the threads of our destiny, they know: Clotho who spins the threads, Lachesis who blindly hands them out – a black, knotty one for you, a shiny golden one for you – and Atropos who cuts all the threads in the end. But the Fates are implacable, they cannot be persuaded. No-one can escape the Fates, not even the Gods.

  I like the toughness of this idea. No, not like, that’s the wrong word; it’s terrifying, but on a good day I admire its truth-fulness. Things happen and no amount of pleading or offerings will make any difference. It takes such courage to live without a story that will save you. Barney wouldn’t talk about it in terms of the Fates or Destiny – it would be making too much of it – but I can’t help seeing things that way; the story that explains what happened, images that make the heart quiver, the traces of our journeys. It’s where Barney’s story and mine weave together, not in time or place, but in the tangle of threads, which we imagine we have created. I’m nowhere near tough enough to willingly accept whatever threads the Fates spin and hand out – let alone cut – but I understand the need and the pleasure of making threads and of placing them in a pattern.

  When I look at the paths Barney has traced in the sky – and I can see them clearly on his computer track-log – and mine scribbled in my scruffy notebooks, I can see now how much they echo each other. We both have endless practical matters to take care of before we start – careful packing of equipment, weather reports, fitness, we both climb upwards with effort, circling around the mountain, we both teeter on the edges of cliffs made of air or rock, and on occasion we both soar with the unbelieving eagles in weightless joy.

  And then there’s our recording of our journeys. It’s not enough for either of us to traverse the earth or the sky and know their wonders; we both must keep note of it. Although his records are computerised and mine are handwritten in small notebooks, we both record dates, distances, location, altitude profiles. It’s a compulsion that we share, a need to keep evidence – although neither of us knows why. Scratching ‘I was here’ on the slippery surface of existence?

  And there is the natural world we both long to dissolve into. For Barney it’s eagles and hawks, the intricate sky, the spread-out geography of earth, endlessly patterned; for me it’s magpies and sparrows, eucalypts and oaks, rocks, a close-up view in the folds of the intricate earth. It strikes me that Barney’s view is more god-like than mine. He sees the wide view, the vast unity of earth and sky; I see the ground beneath my feet.

  I notice the colour of rocks: grey, purple, white, black, pink: I notice the shapes: some are geometrically regular and pleasing – I like ovals best – some resemble other things. I have one which is an almost exact map of Australia; most are random, uneven shapes. I notice textures – silky smooth, granular, glassy – and I spend a foolish amount of time as I walk trying to recall names from high school geology �
� basalt, granite, quartz, limestone, sandstone – and trying to decide what formed them: volcanic activity, glaciers, metamorphic pressure. Sometimes I take photographs of them, thinking that later I will identify them. Often I bring one or two home with me, zipped into the side pocket of my pack.

  But there are other rocks, huge boulders sitting on the surface and monoliths rooted in the earth, which I have visited as well. Baron Rock, the monolith behind my childhood farm for a start. And the Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia, the hooked eagle rock leaning towards the sea, the wind-worn bones of mythical creatures curving over the rock platform, the lacy boulders a dreamscape of orange lichen and sandstone.

  And then there is Uluru, the vast rock temple in the middle of the Australian continent. For a long time I wanted to walk around the Rock; I wanted to see it and touch it and circum-navigate it. When I finally did see it, from above first as I flew in over it, it looked like a bare red heart in the desert, something exposed and necessary. The ground level view, the Uluru shape, had been there from earliest childhood, ochre against blue, a rough oblong rising out of the flat desert. That moment, looking down at it, it was unrecognisable.

  The Uluru offering

  The way that memory comes into the present is not in a dated time sequence. Memory isn’t logical, it’s not ordered by time or place; events don’t present themselves in months and years with an unending forward movement. But neither are they random, although they often seem to be when they first present. Memory is deeply structured in its images, symbols, smells, colours, sounds, tastes; all circling, repeating, spiralling, like poetry. Like Barney’s track-log. With each circle on his log, it’s hard to tell whether he is in the same location in relation to the paddocks below, just higher up, or whether he is, in fact, further along. It’s not until I zoom in close on the computer that I can see it unfurl and stretch out in space and time. In his unfurled story, time is measured in minutes of pain and hours of learning to walk a little further every day; the dates do not line up neatly with my walking. But if there needs to a be date, then the day I walked around Uluru was four years after Barney’s fall.

  Uluru had always seemed impenetrable, unknowable. Its shape was too familiar, like the shape of your own child’s face. It was a picture I had seen too many times. Whenever an image comes first, the original gradually becomes impossible to see or know with any intimacy. But I wanted to try.

  I had a Rock in my childhood, so I did know something about the nature of rocks. Baron Rock wasn’t on our farm, it was on Harry Wykes’ place, but it’s at the centre of my family’s mythology of place. The lopsided egg shape of it – I know I can speak for Barney and all of us – is the oldest and deepest shape in our lives. And a repeated image in my writing. My sense of being is unimaginable without it hunched there underneath all my memories like the bottom-most turtle holding up the world.

  When I walked towards it with my brothers and sisters, scrambling over the wire fence into Harry’s farm, we always called out to it. We had to wait until we were halfway across Harry’s paddock to get a response, although we often impatiently called before then.

  ‘Hallooo,’ we yelled.

  ‘Allooo,’ it called back in its clear cool stone voice, not quite catching the first consonant of the greeting. Ah, I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have a Rock speak back to you. Such a clear cool voice our Rock had.

  Jung wrote, ‘no voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them thinking they can hear’, but we called out and our stone answered. Our hearts stretched, our skinny chests expanded, and we started to run; always we ran when the Rock answered.

  Baron Rock, I understood later in geography class, was made of solidified lava, the weathered basalt heart of a volcano left after millions of years had worn down the crater and revealed the volcanic plug. Rain running over its sides had created a small micro-environment around its base – native pines, eucalypts, native grasses – and on the rock itself, pale green-grey and orange lichens and small ti-trees grew in crevices.

  The front was too steep to climb so we walked through the pines and gums until we came to a cleft in the rocks we could scramble up. We were on our own with no-one to worry that we were too near the edge, so we skittered like large lizards across the rocks, trying to find the quickest way up. We stood with the wind in our hair, with hawks, and sometimes eagles, circling nearby. It was the first time the joy of high places coursed through me.

  But that didn’t mean I wanted to climb Uluru all these years later. For the local Anangu people, Uluru is a sacred site, which they ask visitors not to climb. But even given my love of high geography, I didn’t have any desire to climb it. Climbing to the top seemed an act of domination. I wanted the opposite, to submit myself to the Rock Heart, to walk around it, head bowed, to feel the passing of the Rock at a walking pace, step by step on the earth.

  In Tibetan Buddhism there’s a practice called kora, circling the mountain. You walk clockwise around the mountain paying homage to its sacred being. The more powerful the site, the more merit can be gained. Prostration, lying flat on the ground after each step, produces greater rewards than simply walking – apparently the practice can expunge the sins of a lifetime – but I was hoping walking might be enough for someone who was not so much a sinner as a non-believer.

  Belief looks real, so elaborated with stories and rituals and sacred objects – I love all that – but it depends on accepting the stories of ethereal beings and gods and ancestors walking the earth without verifiable evidence. That sounds so dry – verifiable evidence – so snooty and superior even, but after a childhood of faith in God, and then decades of faith in an amorphous Higher Reality, now it seems everything could be explained as brilliant constructions of our brilliant minds. I like the stories still, the rituals, but they are artefacts, like stone carvings and painted mandalas in a museum. Now I can be happy with a few facts.

  The geological facts of Uluru, and Kata Tjuta, the domed rocks nearby, are a fantastical story. Both rock formations lie on the southern edge of the Amadeus Basin, a depression on the earth’s surface, which, twice over hundreds of millions of years, has been a shallow sea. The elusive Inland Sea the explorers searched for in the early days of British colonisation really did exist; they were just 300 million years too late for it.

  After the sea receded the first time, the buckling earth created the Petermann Ranges, bare mountains that eroded into two vast fans, one rocky, the other sandy. A second shallow sea covered the fans in mud and sand and, over time, the pressure turned the fans to stone. About 300 million years ago, the sea receded and the earth buckled again in its restless way, twisting the two fans on their sides. The rocky fan became the conglomerate Kata Tjuta, and the sandy fan, the arkose sandstone of Uluru; both of them red due to iron in the rock oxidising as it came in contact with the air. So there we have it, Uluru is the edge of an ancient red fan that once lay under a primeval sea. Anything is possible.

  The red fan is over 2000 kilometres from where I live in Sydney and it took more than three hours to fly there. Somewhere below me, Baron Rock dreamed on, quiet now I suppose, without any children to talk to. From above, the geometry of paddocks shifted to the organic curves of a landscape where humans were barely noticeable. The amoeba-like shapes of vegetation and claypans, red and grey-green and cream, floated on the surface. By the time Anthony and I arrived at Uluru, it felt as if we were in another country.

  In this new country there was thigh-high spinifex, creamy-white, covering the red earth as far as the eye could see, purifying all the elements of the landscape. Red sand, pale jade sage bush, narrow desert oaks, mulga, cassia, occasional white-skinned gums, all bound together by a wash of soft spinifex – and above, an infinite sky.

  It looks like a simple ecosystem, reduced to fundamentals, but there are more than 400 species of native plants in the region of Uluru. The local Anangu divide the fauna into Puni (trees), Puti (shrubs)
, Tjulpuntjulpunpa (flowers) and Ukiri (grasses). One of the most distinctive trees is the Kurkara, or desert oak, which is Christmas tree–shaped when it’s young, and the shape of a small English oak when it’s mature. Their dark green leaves looked fresh against the silvery grey of the Wanari mulga. I saw Sturt’s Desert Pea, red and black and pointed like pixie hats, in the gardens around the unit where we were staying, but didn’t see any that weren’t cultivated.

  The flora here has to be able to survive on just 300 mm of rain each year. That’s half the annual rainfall of central western NSW where I grew up, which was just enough, some years, to grow wheat and oats and lucerne. Here, no European crops would be likely to germinate, let alone survive. The average temperature for six months of the year is over 30 degrees Celsius, so what moisture there is doesn’t last long in the desiccating heat. At night in winter, as Europeans call the season, the air temperature is cold enough for frost and dew to settle on leaves and grasses, and once, in July 1997, slushy snow fell on Uluru. I’ve only seen photographs of it; the snow and grey clouds and waterfalls pouring off the Rock made it look like a vast and wild fortress fit for a European story.

  The Anangu seasons are differentiated not by rainfall or temperature nor climatic conditions of any kind, but by what foods are available. The Anangu say there are five seasons: Itjanu is from January to March; Wanitjunkupai is April and May; Wari is late May, June and July; Piriyakutu is August and September, then Mai Wiyaringkupai around December. According to the seasonal timetable, the Anangu look for bush tomatoes, wild figs, wild oranges, conkerberries, mulga apple, wild passionfruit, in a landscape where I can see no food.