The Joy of High Places Read online

  His flying friends – Gavin, Drew, and others – came to visit him regularly, and phoned and emailed, mostly enquiring about his progress, but also to talk about flying. They didn’t steer away from the topic and Barney didn’t want them to. He was having recurring nightmares about the crash – always the moment he lost control and the helpless moments that followed – and he would continue to have them for two years, but he wanted to hear about flying. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t even run, and still didn’t think he ever would, but he wanted to hear the stories about being aloft, up there in the sky. It was his world.

  In the first week after he arrived home from hospital, he measured out a 100-metre course along his veranda, down the steps and around his backyard, and began training several times a day. By the end of that week he could walk 300 metres without stopping. It took half an hour and his gait was an oddly straight-legged shuffle, but he could do it. It must have looked strange, the thin man stepping out with unnatural determination, around and around his garden every morning and every afternoon. ‘I suppose I looked like a robot,’ he said. ‘My stiff-legged walk.’

  I never saw him at his practise, but, when I imagine it, I see it from above; a small figure circling an enclosure in a small town in the hinterland of northern New South Wales, a not-yet striding figure wrenching back his destiny from the Fates.

  Three months after the fall, he could walk a whole kilometre without stopping, although it still looked more like a shuffle. He had been concentrating on increasing how far he could walk, and how fast, but now he started to think about gait, and about running. He still could not feel his feet, not even the sensation of the ground underfoot, and wouldn’t for another year, which meant he could not direct his feet. Nor could he direct his lower leg muscles, his calf and ankle muscles. He watched people walk, trying to analyse how a natural gait was achieved. It wasn’t that he wanted to avoid looking odd, but he knew that if he looked as if he were walking naturally it probably meant he was exercising the right muscles and training the right nerves. Because he didn’t have the muscle control to do what everyone else was doing without thinking about it, he came up with a way to achieve it.

  Before the accident, Barney and Jenny had both been keen ballroom dancers. It was Jenny’s passion, but Barney had gone along to please her and applied his usual methodical attention until he was a skilled dancer. He could waltz, foxtrot, salsa, rumba and swing with the best of them. In fact, he and Jenny had done dance ‘exams’ and won ostentatious trophies in both ballroom and Latin dancing. Once when I visited them, Barney had opened their wardrobe and shown me his outfits of shiny shirts, vests, narrow black pants and pointy-toed shoes alongside Jenny’s multi-coloured dresses of froth and glitter. They had gone out dancing two or three times a week.

  Because Barney had been a teacher all his working life, he knew how to study a sequence of ideas or actions and work out how to teach them. He thought about the physiology of dancing and realised that the heel step in the foxtrot could be used to help him learn to walk with more control. The heel step grabs the surface with the heel and pulls the leg forward from the hip, rather than pushing off from the heel behind. It meant he was using his thigh muscles, which worked, rather than his calf muscles which didn’t. And then he got the idea he could try this running. If he could run, he could take off and land on his feet.

  It was at this time, only three months after the accident, that he sent an email to his flying friends: ‘I just managed to do 4 x 10 metre dashes! I can only keep going as far as I can hold my breath, as I have to clench my body core against jolting my back. It was very flat-footed, but I was getting both feet off the ground at once and taking long strides and making reasonable speed. I think I’m going to win this battle! Save me a spot on the launch in three to four months!’

  He told me later that in reality his ‘reasonable speed’ was a brisk walking pace and that he only went the length of the veranda, where he could grab the railing if he overbalanced. Without the use of his ankle muscles, the slightest movement sideways meant he would fall over. He also said that he had to psych himself up to imagine the action exactly and then to use all his strength and willpower to do it, as every step created a spasm of agony through his entire body. It happened every time, even though he was still on a full dosage of gabapentin for nerve pain. But it led him to imagine, for the first time since the accident, that he might fly again, like a phoenix reborn.

  I don’t imagine he thought about the phoenix, burning and then rising from the ashes, it’s not the way he thinks. To me, the point about the phoenix is not so much that it’s reborn, but that it actually burns itself. No-one does anything to it. It collects the sticks itself, aromatic branches of cinnamon and sandalwood, it sets them alight with one clap of its wings and it stands within the flames and is consumed by fire of its own will. It willingly faces death. It expects to be reborn, that’s the storyline; it will be young and powerful again, its sapphire eyes glowing, its red and purple wings glinting in the sunlight. But still, facing annihilation is a high price to pay. What if the story doesn’t unfold the way you think it will?

  It’s the point in my brother’s story that I find extraordinary. That he was willing to pay that price again, to step out again into the fiery air – and without any mythic promise that he would arise glorious from the ashes. That he would arise at all.

  Sometimes Barney sat quietly in the evening on the veranda, looking out towards Wollumbin, the cloud-catcher, looming in the distance. If the day had not been too hard and the pain had eased, the feeling formed in him that he could walk, run, even dance, like he used to. He could jog in the early morning, he could spring up to catch a ball, or leap over a log, or run down the steps without having to think about it. He stayed as still as he could when this feeling crept over him, because if he moved, the illusion would be shattered.

  He kept up the walking and running training every day, some days doing too much and finding he could do nothing the next day. The weariness would overwhelm him at times, but he was getting used to the mental and emotional pattern of it. He reminded himself to use the days when he had the energy to build up his strength and control, and not to berate himself too much on the days he could barely get out of bed. He had never been someone who could do nothing, so he set himself small household tasks to take care of on the days he was too weary to train. He could paint a stool and he could make the wooden louvres for the windows Jenny had wanted him to install for ages. And then the next day he could attempt the four kilometre walk again. And a short run.

  At the beginning of March, not quite six months after the accident, Barney decided to start training on specific flying skills. Again, he applied his methodical teaching brain to the task. First he started walking short distances carrying the 22-kilo pack containing his glider and equipment. It felt heavier than it had before and the straps pressed into his thin shoulders, but he expected that. Then he added setting up and packing up the glider in the backyard. It should have been simple but the constant bending and squatting to unfold, spread and refold the wing was exhausting and painful. The fact that he couldn’t adjust his ankles meant every action had to be thought through carefully so that he didn’t tumble ignominiously over from a squat.

  One bright blue windless day in late March, he pulled on his hiking boots and strapped on his flight pack and walked down to Knox Park, just over a kilometre away. There, on a flat playing field, he unpacked the glider, laid it out, checked all the lines and buckled on his harness. It was the same harness the paramedics had cut from him in September the previous year. He’d had it restitched and it was as good as new.

  The leaves on a gum tree on the edge of the field moved slightly. Just a faint movement, but he waited anyway. Now they were still. He attached the risers to the carabiners and stood there, feeling the strangeness and the familiarity of the harness and the wing lying behind him. Then he pulled on the A risers, letting air into the cells at the front of the wing. He felt the tug and t
he gentle lift. He looked over his shoulder, checking that the lines hadn’t tangled. The wing rose quietly, a red curve, like a new species of giant mono-winged red butterfly coming to life as air breathed into it. It rose above his head and he pulled on the C risers to prevent the wing sailing over in front of him, but he wasn’t quick enough and the wing lifted him. It was just a few centimetres above the ground and only for about a metre, but he still had to land. His feet touched the ground but he couldn’t feel it and with little control over his lower legs and none over his ankles, one of his ankles rolled and he fell on one knee. Pain jolted through him. He could feel his heart thumping harder than it should.

  He unbuckled the wing, stood up and rearranged the lines and risers, then buckled into the harness again. He checked that the leaves on the gums were still, then pulled on the A risers – the wing rose again; he pulled on the C risers – he was lifted slightly again and he focused on the strength of his thighs and a slight bend in his knees. He landed again, if you could call it that from only a few centimetres up, with both feet straight on the ground.

  He kept practising his kiting and ground-handling that day and for weeks afterwards. He had to imagine and rehearse the landing over and over. It wasn’t even a matter of not crashing again. Even if he just landed heavily and at an awkward angle, he knew he would undo all the progress he had made in the last six months. His freshly knitted bones and the pins in his spine could break apart and he would be back in that world of agony with no guarantee he would come out of it walking the second time.

  He knew falling out of the sky once didn’t give him immunity from it happening again. The Fates don’t care anything for paying your dues, nor the power of positive thinking. Only the laws of probability: there was as much chance that he would fall out of the sky every time he left the earth. Every time.

  The Rosetta Stone

  Le Puy-en-Velay to Figeac, France

  I have a folder containing all my walking notebooks. The notebooks are all small, but not exactly the same size, and different colours – black, orange, green, light blue, brown – a few are hard-backed, the others are soft moleskin. They are all a bit dirty and tattered, with the odd page torn out. Inside the back covers of each are necessary phone numbers and internet codes – recorded in code – and inside the front covers is written the year and the start and end-point of the walk.

  Apart from walking around Uluru, I’ve kept very few notes of walking in Australia. When I walk in my homeland it’s mostly day walks and they don’t seem to require note-taking. Most weekends in the cooler seasons, we head out walking in the national parks near Sydney, or in the Blue Mountains and the Snowy Mountains, but not usually overnight, not day-after-day walking. There’s little accommodation along walks in the bush and I don’t want to carry a tent and stove, bedding, food. I do it sometimes, but I like the feeling of unimpeded walking, of not being burdened with all the necessities of life. Most of my walking has been in Europe, for that reason.

  In Europe, and in France in particular, there are low-cost communal refugios or gites where walkers can stay overnight. Sometimes it’s a small cabin with a fireplace, a kitchen, a dormitory, perhaps a tin of lentils left for a meal; other times it’s a well-equipped gite with dinner provided by the owner. French is the only other language in which I can find my way, which makes France’s network of long trails known as Grande Randonnée or GRs appealing. I can read the guidebooks, which give detailed notes of the walks in French, and can ask directions when the signs are confusing.

  It was pure chance that our walk along the GR 65, the year after walking in Spain, ended in the small town of Figeac on the other side of France’s Massif Central. Fated, you could say. I’d had no idea until I arrived there that it was the birthplace of Champollion, one of my childhood heroes. We had decided to finish at Figeac because it was 260 kilometres from the starting point in Le Puy-en-Velay, making it a possible destination to achieve in two weeks. We walked further than that of course, because we lost the way a few times, even on the first day. That day it was in some part due to jet lag – Anthony and I had arrived in France only the day before – but it was also a failure to notice that the signs had changed.

  Time and space had seemed stretchy even before we arrived. The flight from Australia, high above places I’ll never get to, was as eternal as always. I turned on my flight map in the interminable night to see Mt Ararat and Baku and the Caspian Sea, and, even in my stiff weariness, felt a yearning pleasure in the myste-riousness of the world below. Once we had landed, the train from Paris took hours longer than scheduled after a storm brought trees down on the rail line. It was raining in Le Puy-en-Velay when we arrived and everyone – the ‘inn-keeper’, shopkeepers, waiters, passing strangers – wore doublets and stockings and velvet gowns. A horde of young men ran by pushing and pulling a metal dragon with a pot of fire under it that shot flames and sparks in the darkness. Banners in the street proclaimed it was the annual Fête du Roi de l’Oiseau, the Feast of the Bird King, celebrated since 1524. In the rain and dark and my spaced-out state, it felt as if I had fallen into a time warp.

  Next morning, the cobblestones gleamed in the narrow alleys as we crept out into a dark medieval-looking dawn. Le Puy-en-Velay is in the volcanic region of the Massif Central – it has a chapel and a large statue of the Virgin, each built on its own volcanic plug – and as I left the town I kept looking back to admire the drama of the monuments against a blue sky scudding with clouds. The path was quiet, leading through grassy meadows and occasional oak and birch forests. Even though it was September, late autumn, there were flowers everywhere: white yarrow, marguerites, blue harebells, faded cornflowers, dandelions, milkwort. I still liked to make lists in my head as I walked: plants, kinds of buildings, uses of walking poles, reasons for stops when walking, locations of signs, people I met, things remarked on when walking, surfaces underfoot. It was a pointless, absorbing activity, which was probably why I didn’t notice the signs change colour.

  We followed the red-and-white GR 65 signs, painted on posts, trees, telecom boxes, rocks, sides of buildings, anything at hand. The signs are easy to read: short horizontal red and white stripes for ‘continue on’, a horizontal red stripe with a white right-angle for ‘turn here’, and an adamant red cross for ‘wrong way’. At a certain point, which I didn’t notice – and neither did Anthony – we switched to following the yellow signs used to indicate local walks. We dreamily continued for several kilometres, not bothering to check the GR 65 guidebook.

  When Anthony did check, he noticed the description in the book didn’t quite match the landscape as well as it might, until we finally realised we had been following yellow signs for we didn’t know how long.

  ‘We have to go back until we find the GR signs,’ he said.

  I was fatigued by then and afternoon jet lag was settling. I could have closed my eyes and gone to sleep standing up, but stoically turned around and followed the directions back until we saw red and white stripes on a fencepost. It was another tired, irritable hour to the gite in the village of Montbonnet.

  That night I read back over the directions to find where I had stopped paying attention, and realised the walk notes described another location altogether – another set of fields and hills and roads – and yet we had followed them to the right destination. The instructions, in relation to our actual location, were fictional.

  ‘It’s a sign,’ said Anthony.

  ‘A sign of what? We don’t need a guidebook ’cos we’ll get there anyway?’

  I thought about that for a while. I like following signs – there’s a certain reassuring pleasure in it. And it’s disturbing or even frightening when there are no signs. How do you know you are going the right way? When I walk, the flash of red and white on a tree is all I need. For Barney there are no painted signs – it’s a matter of reading the signs by their effects; a circling bird can mean a thermal, a cloud-street of small cumulus clouds means a run of thermals. That’s a riskier business;
the signs could always be misread.

  I suppose there’s a bit of the medieval mind in me – the hope that the world is a book I merely need to learn how to read. Practically speaking, it is a type of book: a circle of flattened grass can be read as ‘a cat has been sleeping here’; boot prints reveal someone has been this way before and I am perhaps safer than I was. But I can’t help reading metaphysically as well: a magpie carolling on a desperate day means there is still hope and beauty; a crow on a fence is a warning. The red and white signs along the walking track reiterate a simple message: in this place and at this time, there is a way. All I have to do is follow the signs. It makes life easy for a while.

  The next day took us further into the wild volcanic country of the Massif Central. It was formed 60 million years ago when the African and European tectonic plates collided in that unimaginably dramatic way continents did in those days. The European plate slipped under the African plate, creating the fault lines that caused volcanic activity 25 million years ago. There are 450 extinct volcanoes in the Massif Central, and in the area where we walked, a chain of volcanic plugs or domes called puys, which became extinct – or at least dormant – only ten thousand years ago. They created a dramatic landscape of rock domes, some of them rounded, others more like the thick column on which the chapel at Le Puy-en-Velay is so theatrically built. The high limestone plateau is also cut with deep ravines – causses – and was dangerous and difficult to cross until late twentieth century motorways pushed through.