The Joy of High Places Read online

  He saw my look and changed tack.

  ‘I mean, it can get really cold high up and even with thick layers of clothes and gloves it can get so cold it’s painful. And it can be a battle to keep the wing stable – it can become quite unruly and even collapse suddenly.’

  It was too late. I’d already seen his wild bird soul and wasn’t going to be fooled by the practical, taciturn mask he had perfected.

  ‘Well, I hope that doesn’t happen to you,’ I said, a bit too shortly.

  Later I rang Mary, my younger sister.

  ‘What about Barney and flying!’ I said. ‘It’s like he’s someone else!’

  ‘I know,’ said my sister. ‘Haven’t you talked with him about flying before? Isn’t it incredible!’ She laughed with delight.

  ‘I feel like I’ve only just met him – like, who is he?’

  ‘I think he’s only just met himself,’ she said. We all knew Barney was the one on the outside. There was no antagonism, just that none of us knew who he was.

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  After the phone call I wondered why I felt put out.

  In the decades when I hardly saw Barney, there were not even phone calls or letters. Whenever we did meet – a few dutiful family visits by me, then once for Dad’s funeral, and once to help paint Mum’s house – there was civil, but not open, conversation. It was hard to imagine we had grown up on the same farm, in the same family.

  Our judgments of each other had developed. I talked too much, theorised too much, was too fanciful, too messy; he was too technical, too orderly, too detached, and didn’t seem to need any communication with the world other than with Jenny. He looked after his children, provided them with flute lessons and took them to basketball matches and drama classes on his primary school teacher’s pay, but didn’t appear to know how to connect to them. He had an almost eugenic disdain for lack of intelligence, and for those who couldn’t manage their lives. When we visited, there were topics we hopped around. I thought of him as clever and practical – and someone who didn’t have a lot of heart, nor poetry in his soul. Maybe I was wrong about both.

  Back at the Fountain cafe, I tried to rearrange decades of judgment. Barney talked about the practicalities of flying: the facts of the weather, especially the wind, of launching safely, of being able to control his ‘big sheet of plastic’. I relaxed. This is what I expected of him, not spiritual joy and oneness with the elements and with eagles. Not Barney.

  He started with the equipment. A paraglider, he explained, unlike a hang-glider, has no frame, relying only on air currents and the skill and sensitivity of the flyer to stay aloft. A hang-glider remains wing-shaped whatever you do, but a paraglider needs to be readjusted every moment. It requires a much more intimate relationship with the wing. His first paraglider was a second-hand Swing Arcus 3, red on top, white underneath. His current glider was an Alpina 2, red, orange and green on top and again white underneath. Its new shark-nose profile was solid at accelerated speeds and was resistant to spin and stall and it weighed 800 grams less than the earlier model, he explained. The Ronstan pulleys made engaging the speed bar and maintaining pitch control a pleasure and the wing design had created a huge reduction in parasitic drag.

  Then there were the instruments: a 3D GPS, altimeter, variometer, compass, thermal tracker, ground speed indicator, wind speed and direction indicator, and flight recorder. Plus a VHS radio and a SPOT tracker, which provides GPS tracking of his flight to a central site known as SPOT HQ and also directly to Jenny’s phone. If he was in danger he could press SOS and SPOT would alert emergency services with his exact location.

  I did try to listen to my brother’s explanations but I find it hard to pay attention to this kind of technical information and my brain blurred. Still, I did understand the dedication to equipment.

  With walking it begins with boots. On the first long walk over the Pyrénées I thought my street boots would do me fine. They were ordinary lace-up boots with a flat heel, worn-in comfortable, and I didn’t want to buy specialised equipment to use once a year. It seemed an indulgence to have exactly the right thing for everything; it was better to make do with what I had. But I discovered you do need the right kind of walking boots. After getting home from the Pyrénées, I bought a pair of leather Scarpa boots, heavy and thick-soled – and their lovely weight pleased me as soon as I put them on. They are scuffed now and the thick tread is worn down from a few thousand kilometres of walking but whenever I pull them on, they transform me into an Amazon and I eat up the trail, spin the earth under my heel.

  The next most important object is the backpack. It has to be light and built to carry the weight on hips rather than shoulders. The feeling I have for the pack is not as strong as the almost idol-worshipping attitude I have towards the boots, but it still feels like a dear companion.

  And then there are the walking poles, third in in the trinity of venerated objects. They represent another whole level of dedication, or even obsession, transforming me into a stick insect or long-legged goat as I clamber four-legged down steep paths, or an automaton as I stalk across flat landscapes. They can be used to point out wind-carved rocks, bird nests, a horse-drawn caravan, and to threaten snarling dogs.

  I honour the boots, pack and poles not just for their usefulness, but for coming with me; they are fellow adventurers. I have relied on them and I wouldn’t abandon them, even after they are worn out. I noticed recently my younger son, who also walks long distances, has kept his original backpack in the back of his wardrobe even though it is ragged and can no longer be used. It makes me think that in the human soul there is a fellow feeling that extends to wood, silk, stone, steel, leather, even Gore-Tex.

  Then there is the compass and map. I have an old double-sided brass compass with a lovely quivering needle and a glass cover, but it’s not taken walking because it’s heavy. I take a modern Scandinavian one instead, a flat plastic rectangle, which is light and threaded with a red cord so it can be carried around the neck for quick checks. Just having a compass is a talisman against losing your way.

  The compass was, in fact, first used for divination, a meta-physical way-finder, when it was invented during the Han Dynasty in China, around 200 BC. It was before the Vikings discovered magnetite, the lodestone, as a way of knowing north, south, east and west; of literally finding your way. The Vikings also used a sunstone, a crystal of Icelandic spar or andalusite, which polarised light so that they knew where the sun was, even when it was obscured by fog. Now there are satellite navigation devices and no need of compasses or maps or sunstones, just a voice telling us where to turn next. But that’s too pinned down, too exact. You need at least some possibility of getting lost. How else do you find something that you didn’t know was there?

  How the story came to be told

  It wasn’t until Barney fell out of the sky and was told he wouldn’t walk again that flying and walking started to float together in my mind. We had both been tracing tracks across the world – he in the sky, me on earth. Neither of us really understood why we’d been doing it. I kept notes about my own walking, brief jottings in small notebooks, but I didn’t know anything about my brother’s journeys.

  I asked Barney would he mind if I asked him a few questions about flying. This was a while after his accident, and after all that he’d been through I thought he might not want things stirred up. I don’t really get that – I’m all for stirring things up – but I accept it’s not the same for everyone. But he said yes, he was happy to talk about it. We started exchanging emails and phone calls and an occasional meeting when either one of us travelled north or south. It felt strange at first.

  ‘So why did you want to fly? When did you get the idea? What was it like the first time?’ We were back at the Fountain cafe, mid-summer I think. I had seen him a couple of times in Byron Bay when I was working, but it seemed risky to ask such questions so close to where it had all happened.

  ‘The moment my feet left the ground and I was lifted
into the air on my first high glide, it was exactly how it felt in my flying dreams when I was a kid,’ my brother said.

  ‘What were your dreams like?’ I’d had flying dreams as a child too.

  He explained that he ran one or two steps and lifted off easily and flew upwards as if he were swimming up from the bottom of a pool, almost stroking through the air. He could see the farm from above, ploughed paddocks, the roof of the shearing shed, sheep and cows at the dam. In one dream he taught our older brother, Peter, and younger brother, Tim, to fly from the top of the woodheap. In another he was standing at the fence at Granny Miller’s house in Wellington, our nearest town, talking with the kids next door, when he calmly lifted off and swooped about as he pleased. He said he sometimes lost confidence and fell towards the ground, but he always regained his self-belief just before he hit the ground and was able to soar upwards again.

  ‘Not like life,’ he said wryly.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m good,’ he said. He shifted in his chair. This was way before he began admitting to being in constant pain. Saying things out loud can undo you.

  ‘Can I backtrack for a sec. Where was it, your first flight?’

  ‘A place called Possum’s Shoot, it’s a launch site a few kilometres from the Byron Bay turn-off. It was only for about five minutes. I flew into some lift straight away and it took me up along a ridge.’

  ‘So how was it like your dreams? The first time, I mean. Can you remember?’

  ‘I’ll never forget it. The sensation was just the same as when I was a kid. Not the position or anything, the feeling. I can remember the feeling in the dreams and it was the same. I soared upwards, and I swooped and turned into the wind and hovered like a hawk. To move to the left I just leaned my body and off I flew. And then when I pulled my hands down, it was as if my wings were curving downwards and I slowed down like a bird landing. I had never felt anything as exhilarating. I couldn’t stop smiling; my whole body wanted to laugh with joy.’

  Again that feeling in me – what was it? Envy? Perhaps. But it was also like the awe and fear you feel in seeing a newborn. A being freshly revealed – you almost don’t want to look because you know what can happen to anything unprotected.

  And I felt left out. My flying dreams didn’t make me yearn to fly. In my dreams, I had to run fast before I could take off and my flying position was upright with my legs tucked up, almost to a squat. I can still remember what fences looked like from a few metres up and the feel of cool, dark air on my face. I was convinced that it was real, not a dream, even though most of the flying was at night. Since talking to Barney, I’ve asked all my other brothers – Peter, Tim, Kevin and Terry – and both my sisters – Mary and Kathy – who have all told me that they flew in their dreams too. Some of us are sensible and practical, some of us dreamy, but somehow, all of us growing up on Wiradjuri land became bird-children in the night and our mother and father never even suspected.

  But Barney had attempted to fly in waking life as a child as well. He built wooden wings, nailing boards together in a rectangle, like aeroplane wings rather than a bird’s, which clearly didn’t work. He made a parachute from a blanket and binder twine, which also didn’t work. It didn’t stop his Icarus yearnings or his Daedalus constructions. He made dozens of balsa wood model aeroplanes and paper kites, and designed and made one powered model aeroplane, which he never flew because he didn’t have the money to buy fuel. After he mentioned them, I did recall the parachute and the balsa wood planes and the kites, but I had no idea of the longing behind them.

  We didn’t share a childhood after all. We were each in a series of our own moments that we stitched together to create our own story. Deep in the neural pathways, neurones fire in intricate patterns, then the hippocampus joins endless nanoseconds together, creating reality. If we sew neatly, edit judiciously, no-one will see the gaps, the shimmer of the void beneath. It will appear to be one whole story, to make sense.

  It makes me inclined to simply trace the pieces, the walks and flights, one by one, onto a shared map to see what happens. They happened in different times, are not chronological, but they might form a shape that I’m not yet aware of. Perhaps they will remain distinct. Stories are unpredictable, like walking and flying. As you walk or fly you depend on the weather, on air currents, on the body, on other people. You cannot control all the elements, and if you could, perhaps they each would be robbed of their essence, of their random ability to dissolve what has been certain.

  I’ve decided to start unfolding the map and look at our journeys. The map is made of paper in my mind – I like the paper ones better than slithery phone maps – I enjoy the careful unfolding and then the refolding that is never quite right, and I like that they bear all the scars of my travels, the rips and stains and unreadable smudges. Smooth it out on the table. It’s unmarked for now, but it already has the shadows of memory on it, and the blanks of unrecorded and forgotten observation.

  Before I walk I always pore over an actual map – it’s always the first thing I acquire, months earlier than I need it. A map lets you see what is possible. You can mark where you have been before and then the place-names on it inspire the next direction. It’s like a story spread out into all its possible parts, before the elements have been selected and arranged in order, before a path appears. Walking begins with images in the mind, a place on a map.

  Walking comes first. By nature we can walk, flying comes from human invention, which makes it seems logical to start with walking rather than flying. I look at my notebooks and few photographs. The notebooks are battered and stained from being squashed into my backpack and then pulled out each evening in a bar or cafe or hostel. They are written in cheap biro and contain lists, arrows, directions, observations. It’s a scrappy record, not more than a few images noted each day.

  The first image is thousands of bluebells, green forest paths, empty moors, soft meadows, larks singing and wild wuthering crags littered over the low hills of Wiradjuri country in central western New South Wales, a bewildering illusory layering over the drought-stricken land of my childhood. While Barney was trying to make wings and jump off the veranda roof, I dreamed of meadows and streams, the landscape of my reading. Real life was inside books; the rosy atmosphere in those mostly English worlds was the air I breathed. I inhaled it so deeply that illusion became more sustaining for me than actuality.

  Still, even then, as a child I walked. I had to walk to school at first. From the age of five, I walked each morning with my brothers and a sister to the farm gate a kilometre away. There we climbed onto the back of the teacher’s ute and were driven a few kilometres to the one-room school-house. In the afternoon, we were dropped off at the farm gate and walked back through the paddocks to the house. The first year of walking there were two brothers, Barney and Tim, and the next year another brother, Kevin, then a sister, Mary. The older two, Kathy and Peter, were in high school, riding their bikes to the bus stop at the end of the lane, and the youngest, Terry, was still a baby at home. There was no solitary walking.

  In the morning we dawdled out the house-gate, unclipped the house-paddock gate near the kurrajong tree, and walked up the rise between the sheep yards and the creek then through the wire gate and along the track through the wheat paddock. The track undulated along the fence line, sandy and smooth, although occasionally muddy. In winter, the wheat was frosty, the frost starting to melt on each blade, leaving millions of glittering diamonds of dew. In summer, it was ripe yellow, heavy-headed; or already harvested, dry and spiky. After harvest, sheep were let in to nibble any leftovers and to graze on the lucerne planted between the wheat, making their own tracks across the paddock, narrow trails which they trotted along, one after the other. Sometimes we followed the sheep trails because they made a clear pathway through spiky burrs, an easy zigzag along the side of the hill.

  Morning walking was cold, unwilling, red-nosed; afternoon walking was warm, with flies, sweat, skinned knees. In the winter th
ere were icy puddles to break; in summer Barney ran past brushing the colony of flies off my back to make them buzz around my face.

  In high school I rode my bike up the lane to catch the bus on the main road instead of walking, but I still roamed across the farm and across fences into other farms on the weekends. I walked in the winter when everyone else was sitting around the fire – a romantic pride in being out in the cold and wind when everyone else was snug. I walked over stubbly paddocks, looking down in case there was an Aboriginal axe, or a kangaroo bone. I climbed over the boundary fence, and walked across the neighbour’s farm, heading towards a hill scattered with trees and rocks and covered in kangaroo grass and paddymelons; it was too steep to plough so it had been left untouched. It could reveal something hidden in the rough grass.

  The map of bluebells – that’s the right name for it – was unfolded, not the symbolic map of memory, but an actual paper map on the table in my kitchen. I had booked my ticket and was going to the United Kingdom to walk. Lower Slaughter, Pucklechurch, Tolpuddle, Dunblane, Zennor. Days were lost in the romance of names. The bubble of childhood reading expanded around my head making me feel as if I were floating in an overcrowded room. An idealised, never existing Enid Blyton world fogged everything. No precise path emerged. I didn’t want to decide where to walk because that would mean ruling everywhere else out. Not every inch of earth can be walked.

  I talked about it with Anthony, who walks with me. When I am walking, he is often there, even when I don’t mention him for long periods. We have acquired the art of being alone together, each in our own walk, so perhaps the singular pronoun is just as accurate. Before and after walking is another matter. Then we are together, reading and planning the next path.