The Joy of High Places Read online

  Still, miracle or not, walking is slow. If you are in a hurry, if you want something to happen quickly, there’s no pleasure in walking. It’s not a fast-paced narrative, it unfolds in moments – a moth breaking out of a chrysalis, a cow staring with unfathomable eyes – the texture of the world is constantly under your fingertips. It always takes me a while to slow down to a walking pace.

  Walking undoes hierarchies too. When I walk, nothing is more important than anything else. The mountain doesn’t mean any more than a chrysalis or any more than my own past; each one is absorbing. It doesn’t feel anarchic, nor lacking in climactic moments; it’s more that there’s no hero. I am just part of the story.

  After reaching the tiny village of Burnsall, we returned along the river Wharfe, past an old water mill and through a gorge where teenagers were jumping off a high bridge into the water. The clouds were shifting and reforming, making patterns of light and shade on the river and fields. The river most of the way was lined with horse chestnut trees, and conkers littered the path. I didn’t know what they were but Anthony said he used to play ‘conkers’ as a child in New Zealand – they would tie a conker to a piece of string and hit at each other’s until one broke.

  ‘We had our own language for it,’ he said, ‘but I can’t remember. I think there were noneers when you had not beaten anyone.’

  ‘Like marbles,’ I said. ‘I remember taws that we used to knock the other marbles out. And the really big ones were stonkers. And I liked the cats eyes.’

  The words brought the feel of the marbles back to me, the smoothness of the glass ones and the slight roughness of stone marbles that had been chipped from rough play.

  We talked all the way back to Grassington, indulging in the sweetness of reminiscing as the words brought back the lived feel of the past. They wove a kind of transparent fabric around us, creating the past in the present without any disjunction, but I didn’t see much of anything around me.

  We walked in Cornwall along the coast for three days, and then in the Cotswolds, leaving the oldest path in England to last. The Ridgeway is around 5000 years old, and was used as a trading route by the Celts and then Romans, Saxons, Vikings and by the English right up through medieval times and later. It’s part of the Icknield Way that originally ran from the Salisbury Plains to East Anglia. Because it was high, dry ground it was easier to drive stock along and, in times of war, the long outlook made it easy to see danger.

  There are much older walking paths in Australia, used by the Wiradjuri and other Indigenous peoples. In 1817 a Wiradjuri man led the early English explorer John Oxley along a Wiradjuri path to the site where my hometown was established 200 years ago. And the Bundian Way, 365 kilometres over the Snowy Mountains from the Monaro country in the west to the eastern coast, was used by the Yuin, Ngarigo, Bidhawal and Monaro peoples. It pre-dates the Ridgeway by tens of thousands of years, but this and most other paths were obscured by two centuries of English settlement. In the last few years the Bundian Way and other Indigenous paths have been rediscovered and work has begun clearing and preparing them for walking again. These are the paths of ancient Australia and I long one day to walk them, putting my feet on the earth where others have walked for millennia.

  There is a communion in it, a deep intimacy, to put your foot exactly where another traveller has. It is safer, of course, the ground already tried and been proved secure, no hole or bog to fall into, but it is also a kind of marriage, foot on foot; you have both connected to the earth in the same place. I don’t think I have the true explorer’s desire to walk where no-one else has. Penetrating virgin country has no appeal; why be first? To walk in the footsteps of my Celtic ancestors, to put my twenty-first century feet on the earth, on the rock, where my ancestors did, was what I wanted.

  We had time to walk the first 17 kilometres of the Ridgeway from Avebury to Ogbourne St George. Just before the beginning of the path is the Avebury stone henge, a circular bank with a ditch on the inside, and sarsens, a ring of hard sandstone monuments, making three circles. It’s assumed the henge was used for rituals, although there’s still no way of knowing what the rituals or their purpose were. The stones are variously shaped, not regular like those at Stonehenge, each one seeming to have an individual significance. They are solid, ancient, imposing, but goats were grazing nearby and houses were scattered about so that the scene looked homely. The stones have been there for over 5000 years, which, compared to Australian Indigenous artefacts, is not so long. I wondered why I had come so far to experience ancient connection when it was right there in my homeland.

  The trail proper began at Overton Hill, just outside Avebury. Almost immediately Silbury Hill rose on the right, a Neolithic mound more than 40 metres high, similar in height to a smaller Egyptian pyramid. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was begun around 2400 BC but no-one knows why. It’s made of chalk and clay and would have taken many people many years to build – one archaeologist estimated 500 labourers working daily for 15 years. It had been thought to be a burial mound, but recent research has shown there are no human remains at its core, just more clay and turf and freshwater shells, oak and hazel wood, sarsen stones and a few ox bones and antlers.

  The trail led upwards for a while and then we were on the ridge itself, with a view over the rolling Wiltshire countryside. It didn’t create the wild-hearted excitement of high places, but a sense of safety and expansive ease. We passed coppices, spinneys, thickets, copses and groves. The word bucolic came to mind – a word that seems only to apply to English countryside – like the names on the map: Ogbourne Maizey, Winterbourne Bassett, Miltonhall.

  The trail continued along the ridge, flat and easy – it wasn’t difficult to see why ridges were the quickest and safest way to get anywhere – and arrived at the Barbary Fort, one of several forts built along it in the Iron Age – between 800 BC and 100 AD. It had two defensive ditches and ramparts, and originally there were more than 40 dwellings within it. As I wandered over the ditches and ramparts an unexpected dreaminess drifted in. It was the kind of reverie that comes unbidden, most often while reading or walking. I’m not sure that reverie is actually the right word. It feels ungraspable and I can’t call it back at will. Even if I go back to certain places, or re-read phrases in an effort to call it back, it won’t work. That day it fell around me like an intensely pleasurable drug. There was stillness and strength somewhere under the heart; my mind was dreamy, as if in a trance, but sights and smells of the autumn day were heightened.

  I have wondered about these kind of experiences of unbidden reverie or joy, especially when they come from a particular place elsewhere in the world. There’s no childhood memory to influence my response and yet there is something unthought happening. I don’t attribute it to God or anything otherworldly but I do accept the possibility of inherited cellular memory of place. Who can say how time works. Thoughts drifted with images of the men and women and children who had lived here more than 2000 years ago, but at the same time I could see a dandelion clock moving in the breeze, hear a bee buzzing, feel the softness of the meadow grass under my boots.

  We stayed there at Barbary Fort for a long time, and in the end only left because Anthony said we had to keep going if we wanted to get to Ogbourne St George before dark. I felt the place pulling me back as I turned and walked away along the ridge.

  Further along the ridge the gravel path was lined with late summer grasses and herbs – yarrow, dandelions, blackberries, rye grass, a few bluebells and buttercups. The path stretched out in front, flat and clear, not even a gully or rocks to adjust my gait to. In the days when my ancestors walked it, it must have been uneven, scattered with stones and tree roots, scuffed by cattle and sheep and horses.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived at Ogbourne St George, where we stayed the night before I had to leave to work in Paris. I wrote in my notebook:

  If only I could keep walking, then I would find whatever it is I’m looking for. It feels like a compulsion, like a love af
fair, or the search for God. Am I looking for answers, something outside of myself? Is it the occasional hit of enchantment – an addict’s desire to live only for the dreamy high? The moment of revelation?

  By the time I was a teenager, the walks across the paddocks and up to Baron Rock, a volcanic outcrop behind the farm, hinted at revelation. I didn’t ever have to walk far before the feeling rose like an invisible vibration and shimmered around me. It was more than reverie; it contained a promise. This feeling, which first arrived then, has often happened when I walk in the Australian bush, but never anywhere else. It’s only the promise of revelation, never fulfilled, but it’s enough to keep me coming back.

  I don’t remember walking much with Barney except to Baron Rock and to school with my other brothers and younger sister. When I picture him, there’s an air of separateness from all the rest of us. He’s listening to his transistor radio, or doing his homework, or painting neat, accurate pictures, often secluded at his end of the sleep-out. When we sat around the fire in winter, he liked to pose worrying questions: what if we are all just in someone’s dream and one day they will wake up and we won’t exist? And then he didn’t believe in God anymore and didn’t seem to care what anyone thought about that. Without being able to say so, I sensed he was made of ideas, rather than feelings, but perhaps I was noticing that he was no longer a child and I still was.

  By the time we were both young adults, a mutual avoidance was well established. Our paths had diverged almost as soon as we left school. I was a hippy, living under canvas in the Sunburst commune in the wet New Zealand bush with Anthony, and in large share houses in the city. Wherever I lived, Nature was the highest good; the way of the natural world was law. I stopped taking the contraceptive pill and let nature take its course, so that I was literally barefoot and pregnant before I was 21. I padded around the land with my round belly, feeling the dirt beneath my feet and the soft rain on my hair and face. The week before my first son was born, I walked the four kilometres along Gentle Annie Road, a gravel track from the commune to the main road, to hitchhike to Auckland. It was a short walk, but a significant one. My belly was ungainly and my home-made sandals kept turning on the gravel and I was so young – I must have caused anyone who saw me to worry for my future – and yet I felt like someone in procession, carrying a new life into the world like millennia of women before me. I was barely more than a teenager and I was already walking into the next part of my life.

  Barney, the few times I saw him, thought I was weird in my long loose dresses with my long loose hair, non–meat eating habits and dope-smoking share households. I thought he was too narrow, too controlled, going off to teach at primary school in his suit and tie every day. It didn’t look as if our paths would cross much anymore, and for years, they didn’t.

  Gods and monks

  And then one day, decades after leaving the farm, in a change of direction that startled all of us, Barney stopped going to work and started to fly. It was nearly as simple as that. He took paragliding lessons, bought a second-hand glider and off he flew. He became one of the bird-people.

  There have been many bird-people in mythology and in history, earthbound creatures who wanted to fly. They used feathers and wax and paper and glue and string, and they leapt off towers and abbeys and longed for transcendence. Mostly they died. Sometimes they ended up as stars, living in the sky world forever.

  Why did they risk their lives to soar in the sky, and why have I remained earth-bound? I walk on the earth, step by step, let the earth spin under my feet. My brother stepped off the sides of mountains into the air. He defied gravity, let the air currents hold him above the earth. Like a creature in a myth or dream, he took to the realm of the gods. It makes me wonder about the human desire for flight, where it came from, how it grew.

  In many places around the world there are myths of humans flying. In the stories of Indigenous Australians, there were two brothers from the Adnyamathanha people of the northern Flinders Ranges, who were caught by a bushfire on top of a rocky mountain. There was no way out and they screamed in fear. The conflagration was of their own making – they had lit a small fire to smoke the flies away from an emu they had caught – but the flames had roared up around them. The Ancestors took pity on them and gave them the gift of flight. The brothers flew into the sky where they realised they were safe at last. They made their camp there in the sky and every night everyone can see their campfires, the two pointers of the Southern Cross.

  For the Wiradjuri, the original people of the land where Barney and I grew up, the world is divided into halves, or moieties, represented by birds: the eaglehawk and the crow. Every Wiradjuri is one or other of these birds in their soul. I remember Rose Chown, a local woman from my hometown, who told me she ‘would come back as an eaglehawk … because [he] flies up so high he’s detached from everything … he must have some wisdom about all this’. Both birds were always there in my childhood: the crow presaged death to me – oh, it stole eggs and it picked out the eyes of newborn lambs – and the eaglehawk was freedom and wildness as it floated on air currents in the distant blue above the farm.

  On the other side of the world in ancient Greece, Pegasus, the flying horse with glowing white wings, soared through the heavens. Pegasus was caught, tamed and ridden in the skies by the human, Bellerophon. Together they defeated the Chimera with its lion head, goat body and serpent-headed tail, but eventually Bellerophon was dashed to earth by Zeus for thinking he could match the gods. Pegasus, like the Adnyamathanha brothers, was changed into a constellation in the night sky.

  It was in mythic Greece too, that Daedalus constructed wings from feathers and wax so that he and his son Icarus could escape the labyrinth in which they were imprisoned. We all know he told his exuberant son not to fly too near the sun, the abode of the gods, as he carefully attached the wings with wax. But Icarus didn’t listen. He flew too high, the wax melted, the wings collapsed and he fell to his death. Ah now, ah now, don’t fly too high, don’t forget you are an earth creature, don’t forget your limits even in the midst of joy.

  Jewish and Christian angels could fly from heaven to earth and back again, whenever they liked. How I loved them when I was a child: the seraphim – fiery beings with six wings – and cherubim, dominions and principalities, angels and archangels, all of them with splendid feathered wings curving over their heads. There was a guardian angel too, one assigned to watch over each and every one of us, always pictured on holy cards standing just behind a child – me – walking on the edge of a river or cliff. Guardian angels were male but had feminine faces and wore flowing robes and mostly had white wings, although some had crimson, green and blue wings like human rosellas.

  In African cultures, both before and after people were seized and transported to the Americas, stories of humans flying were widespread. ‘Flying African’ myths could be seen as a reaction to slavery, a way of escape, but flying stories already existed in pre-slavery Africa. In the words of a traditional African American spiritual, ‘I got wings, you got wings, all God’s chillun got wings’. One of the stories, ‘All God’s Children Had Wings’ begins ‘Once all Africans could fly like birds’, and immediately I found myself believing it.

  In Egyptian mythology the god Thoth took the form of a bird, an ibis. He is often pictured with an ibis head, although sometimes as a whole ibis with bird wings and feet. He was the god of wisdom, writing, mathematics and magic – and as if that were not enough, he also took charge of the judgment of the dead. He served as the scribe of the gods, and is said to have invented the alphabet itself. If a bird-god invented the alphabet, then that seems to connect flight with written words. Written language was first employed for inventories and recording deals, but it would soon be used to inscribe stories on clay tablets for the first time, preserving them from the vagaries of human memory.

  But humans weren’t content to leave flight to gods and angels and mythic creatures. With our thick legs and bulky bodies, we have no physical characteristic
that makes us fit for flight, which makes me think there must be something in our neurophysiology that creates the desire to step off the earth, to see it from above. Of course it could just be that watching the graceful flight of birds made us long to emulate them, but it turns out that walking and flying may not be so very far apart. Ethnologists have recently suggested that the desire to fly was born when we first began to walk upright. The human sense of balance developed at the same time – we needed that to stay upright on two precarious feet – and our sense of being in space, along with the ability to imagine other perspectives, predisposed us to the idea of flight. And then two or three adventurers walked up a mountain out of the Great Rift Valley in Africa and looked back and saw what might be possible, what vistas could open up, if only they could fly. The idea was born.

  I don’t mean to write a whole history of the human efforts to fly, but long before Barney, there were many people through the centuries who yearned to be birdmen. I couldn’t find any records of winged women leaping off towers and mosques and castle walls, but 50 or so men have been recorded. In Andalusia, in the ninth century, the Muslim inventor, Abbas ibn Firnas, covered himself in feathers, attached wings to his body and flung himself into the air – it’s not recorded whether from a building or cliff – and, according to reports, flew a considerable distance but broke his back when he landed. In the eleventh century, an English monk, Eilmer, attached feathers to his arms and leapt from the top of Malmesbury Abbey. He was airborne for about 15 seconds before he landed and broke both his legs.