The Joy of High Places Read online

There were many more attempts, all of them hopeful and hopeless, before various men came up with flying machines, but machines with wings are not the same as winged humans. A mechanical means of flying, even da Vinci’s elegant ornithopter, separates humans from the physical act of flying; the body is not involved. A paragliding wing, however, dependent on air currents and human skill to stay wing-shaped, is an extension of the body. It responds to each movement of the torso and arms; the long lines are like nerves relaying messages all along the edges of the wing. You become, in fact, a winged human.

  There are various competing stories about who thought of paragliding first. Some claim it was the French parachute designer Pierre Lemoigne, whose ‘gliding parachute’, designed in 1962, was modified in 1978 by three Frenchmen – Bosson, Bétemps and Bohn – and renamed a ‘parapente’. It was first used by walkers and climbers in the Alps as a faster way down from the summits rather than abseiling perilously over cliffs. I like the idea that the wing originated from the desire to fly down a mountain after walking and climbing up over rocks and snow and ice, but the strongest claim for its origins is the ‘sail wing’, designed by an American, David Barish.

  In the odd way the world works, Barish was not working on a way of lifting off, of flying, but on a way of landing safely – he was designing and testing ways of recovering space capsules for NASA. He soon realised his ‘sail wing’ could be used for human flight. He tried it himself at the Belleayre ski resort in the Cat-skill Mountains north of New York in September 1965, and finally on that day, a bulky, aerodynamically useless human lifted off the ground and flew without the use of a machine. Using only his wing, Barish flew over 100 metres down a ski slope and ‘slope-soaring’, as he called it, was born.

  Barish was a keen skier and at first saw slope-soaring as a summer sport for ski resorts and he and his son took a trip across the country promoting it in the 1960s. ‘We didn’t know that it might be possible to soar in thermals or dynamic wind,’ he remarked years later. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the wing’s potential for cross-country flight was realised and humans began to soar, dip and dive, spiral and hover, just like birds, for hundreds of kilometres. Barish was busy with his aeronautical work and didn’t fly for years and didn’t even realise until late in his life that the sport he had invented had literally taken off around the world. He took up paragliding again his seventies and flew until the year before he died at age 88.

  I haven’t been able to find out what Barish felt when he first flew like a bird. He was a modest man and wasn’t acknowledged as the inventor of winged human flight during his life. His obituary in the New York Times in 2009 referred to him as ‘the forgotten father of paragliding’. But I like to think that he would have echoed Barney’s words in the Fountain cafe: ‘I soared upwards, 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, to land.’ And his whole body must have laughed for joy.

  Icarus

  I’ve been reading the information Barney has sent me. There are dates and times, longitude and latitude, figures, technical terms, photographs. Every time I ask a simple question requiring a yes or no answer, I receive at least a page of notes. They make me smile – they are so well ordered compared to my messy pile of notebooks. Some things don’t change; we will always go about things differently. Still, the facts in his story matter. I can’t just draw a smudgy impressionistic line and let that stand for what happened to him. Tracing his journey on the map requires precision; it’s a disciplined cartographer’s job, I can see that. What is needed is a transcription of all the detail, exactly as recorded, onto a sky-map. I don’t have a template for it because there are no permanent sky-maps, only maps of barometric pressure that change every day, so it will have to be a transient map that applies to only one day. The day he fell.

  The day that Barney fell out of the sky, 22 September 2011, he took off from Beechmont hill in southern Queensland, at 28°7’3” South, 153°12’7” East. I haven’t been there, but I can visualise the launch site because Barney painted one of his accurate pictures of it, photographed the painting and emailed it to me. It was an oil painting – he likes working in oil because of its ability to represent lifelike textures – showing a grassy slope curving gently down at first, then more steeply into a basin with a stand of eucalypts on the right, more cleared paddocks below and a view out to rugged, bush-covered mountains. He painted three paragliders into the scene; the closest one is red with a black and white zigzag. The painting is neat and precise, a record rather than an interpretation.

  It was a sunny, mostly blue-sky day with a few fluffy cumulus clouds. He had checked the meteorological report online as usual, noting barometric pressures and wind speeds in particular, and checked the weather station at Nerang, and the rain radar and the Doppler wind radar at nearby Mt Stapylton, and there was nothing concerning to note. Visibility was good; the visual flight rules mean you have to be able to see at least five kilometres to launch. The expected maximum temperature was 23 degrees and no rainfall was forecast. There had been a fall of 14 millimetres nearly two weeks before, which meant the countryside was soft with new grass – this is an important detail to note. He had checked the gliding forecast site for buoyancy/ shear ratio of wind, and thermal strength and range of gust strength before he left home and now that he was here he could feel the light south-east breeze, under 15 km/h, coming up the hill towards the launch site – a necessary condition as air needs to be flowing uphill to launch successfully.

  He had dropped Jenny off at Brisbane airport on his way to Beechmont. She was flying out to Adelaide to visit her elderly father for a few days. Their three adult children were spread around the world, in Auckland, Budapest and Dubai, all of them enjoying adventurous lives, none of them concerned about their 61-year-old father leaping off into the sky that day.

  He had been flying for six years by then and was confident in his skills and in his equipment, his red Nova Mentor 2 with its black and white zigzag pattern. He had methodically checked the canopy for tears, the lines (fine ropes) and risers (webbing straps) for tangles, and the carabiners (clips attaching risers to the harness) and the altimeter-variometer (which indicates height and rate of rise or fall) to make sure all was well. He had gained a reputation for being so thorough and knowledgeable about the technical aspects of flying, and about weather conditions in particular, that other flyers rang him to find out what was forecast rather than check the Bureau of Meteorology site themselves.

  He sat on the hillside with about a dozen flying friends, mostly men and a couple of women, enjoying the warmth of the early spring sun and the companionship of being able to exchange stories about cloud-suck, thermal triggers , B-line stall , kiting , anti-G chutes and ridge-soaring with people who knew what he was talking about. They called sitting on the hill para-waiting, which makes me smile again. Their waiting was not like other people’s amorphous waiting; it was formed into a specific shape around their joy and had its own pleasure.

  Sitting with them gave him an easy companionship he had never known before. I didn’t see him much in his twenties or thirties, but he didn’t seem to have any close friends or even mates to hang out with at the pub. In fact, he never went to the pub. He and Jenny married young and he didn’t seem to need anyone else; there still seemed to be a desire to stay apart from the general foolishness of human beings. When his children were young, he didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmases because such celebrations weren’t rational. It put a bit of a damper on ordinary conversational exchange at the times of year families might be expected to be in contact. Conversation at any time was awkward. I used to think it was individualism based on feeling superior, but I’ve since realised it was because he didn’t have anything he wanted to say. He told me lately that he had always felt like a misfit socially, but now that he had found his passion, what he was born for, he
could sit and talk about it happily with other flyers for hours. He felt more comfortable on the hillside than at any other time or place in his life.

  The breeze was light, the air was warm, but not hot, the windsock lifted gently and the grass rippled a little. A few magpies flew steadily without being buffeted. Several other paragliders had taken off – Jason, Al, Kirsty, Bridgette – and it was now Barney’s turn. There’s a wide launch area at Beechmont, wide enough for six to take off at once, which was useful during competitions, but this Thursday morning was just for pleasure; there was no rush. From his reading of the conditions, he expected to climb to over 4000 feet and then fly for about 50 kilometres, perhaps westwards towards Beaudesert where he knew some good landing spots.

  He spent 20 minutes getting ready. He unzipped the harness and wing from the backpack and attached his reserve – a lightweight parachute for emergencies – and instruments to the harness: a flight computer (about the size of a large mobile phone), a 3D GPS, altimeter, variometer, compass, thermal tracker, ground-speed indicator, map, wind speed and direction indicator and flight recorder, a VHF radio, an ordinary magnetic ball compass (in case of being sucked up into a cloud, where a computer screen is hard to read) and the SPOT tracker and emergency beacon. Then, along with his sandwiches, he put the ‘camel pack’ in the storage area of the harness and threaded the tube through to the shoulder strap so that he could drink during the flight.

  When Barney described this whole process to me – my mind blurring with the detail – it was suddenly obvious that his technical brain and methodical nature formed the necessary base for all this flying off into blue sky romance. The equipment had to be assessed and used with precise care, every action had to be done in sequence and checked and rechecked, all the information about conditions had to be gathered and understood. If you didn’t, you might leave the ground, but you wouldn’t last long. It wasn’t just a matter of an ignominious tumble; it was life and death. He was willing to face it, but without the slightest trace of recklessness. I had never understood before the clear relationship between rigorous discipline and utter freedom.

  I had decided to keep out of Barney’s story, to let him have the stage, as they say, but I have begun to realise I am in it anyway. I’m selecting and reshaping his responses to my relentless questions – and I can’t help reacting as well. I don’t mean to be a Greek chorus, but I keep being astonished by him. His disciplined, methodical nature is so unlike mine – I am always being excited by wonders – and yet I am learning awe from him, a strange emotion buried deep in humans. It’s the same feeling I used to have as a child watching a chick peck its way out of an egg. The perfect smooth surface cracked and something showed through, just a murky bit of feather, or a blobby eye, but once it started, I’d have to keep watching until the end, until the new unsteady creature was in the world. I felt lucky, so lucky, to have been there at the right time, I wasn’t going to keep quiet about it.

  Barney continued the process in easy movements. Next he spread the wing out, checking it over and making sure all the lines were clear, then put his harness on loosely and connected the risers by clipping them into the carabiners. Then he bunched up the wing and put it aside with the harness while he put on his helmet and parka and attached his UHF radio to a PTT mic/ speaker system inside his helmet for communicating with other flyers and with his retrieve driver at the end of the flight, and put the radio in his jacket pocket. He already had his hiking boots on – they were heavier than ordinary shoes but they provided stability and ankle support for landing.

  Now he was ready to clip in. He put his arms through the shoulder straps and clipped on the T-strap style leg loop, then bent down and looped a bungy under his heel to keep the bottom of the harness in place so he could easily get his feet into it once airborne – a retractable undercarriage! He then did up the ‘fail-safe’ leg loop system as a double insurance against falling out of the harness, and then clipped the chest strap shut. Finally, he put his gloves on, did a radio check to make sure it was working, picked up the wing and carried it across to the launching area.

  The wing lay on the grass behind him. One of his flying friends, Drew, helped spread it, and he could feel the slight weight of the harness on his shoulders. He went through a mental checklist of everything he had just done to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He gripped the A risers attached to the leading edge of the wing in his right hand and pulled gently, which opened the leading edge and allowed the breeze to inflate the cells of the wing. He checked the lines to make sure they hadn’t tangled again. The wing lifted as it inflated, until it rose above his head, and then he pulled down on the C risers, attached to the trailing edge, to prevent the wing surging over his head and collapsing in front of him. Getting the timing of the C risers right was one of the first things to master – you looked a bit silly when a wing collapsed on top of you before you had gone anywhere at all.

  Flight is dependent on the caprice of the wind, even when everything has been done correctly. If the wind is light and variable, or a wind wafts from the back just as you attempt to launch, the wing will lose air speed, air will flow out of the cells instead of in, and the wing will collapse while you are running downhill at full tilt. There would be no other option except slithering on your bum down the slope to the bomb-out at the bottom of the hill. Today, though, the wind was light to moderate and flowing uphill: nothing to worry about.

  Now that the wing was steady over his head, he checked that all the lines were tangle free and all adjusted to the right length. He held the brake handles in each hand under the riser straps, and then released the A and C risers, still holding onto the brakes, turned down the hill and slightly to the right, making sure he didn’t twist the lines. The wing pulled forward and he walked to keep up with it, pulling the brakes a little to stop it surging over his head. Because the wind was light, he ran for a few steps and then the wing lifted him fluidly off the grassy ground, easily and gently, just like in his childhood dreams. Within an impossible moment he was as weightless as an angel.

  I look up from his notes. The lift-off! All the training, all the work and attention is for this moment. The split second in which the weight of the world loosens, when gravity lets go, when there is nothing holding you down. After that, there is still work to do, a wing to manage, speed and balance and direction to correct, but that first moment, that’s pure intoxication. The scratch of harness, the heat and weight of boots, they are all gone. You are in another dimension, held up by wings that do not beat, but which keep you afloat without effort.

  Barney pushed himself back into his pod harness as soon as he was airborne and slipped his feet into the cocoon, giving him a streamlined and comfortable position. The wing tugged, seeming to want to fly itself as it always did, to have a mind, or desire, of its own. It was swinging light, lazy pendulums; he corrected them by shifting and leaning a little against the swing. It was easy but he still needed to concentrate. Once, a few months earlier, he was caught in a sudden updraft as he took off and shot straight upwards like a skyrocket. That got his adrenalin pumping, he said. Even observing every detail, the invisible caprices of the air were not entirely predictable.

  The slope was already metres beneath him, but he could still see blades of feathery spear grass, clover and native grasses, looking deceptively soft and thick. He leaned to the right and the wing dipped and turned towards the basin. The balance of his wing, its pendular stability, came from his body being the central weight of the pendulum, as if his body were the brass knob swinging on the end of a string. It meant the wing would continue to fly straight ahead and level if nothing else interfered; direction could be changed using the left and right brakes or by leaning to the left or right. Pitch, roll and yaw – twisting or oscillating around the vertical axis – were controlled with either the brakes or lean.

  The air was turbulent, buffeting the wing and his body sideways and upwards, jerking him around as if he were on a roller coaster. He headed towar
ds the top of the ridge, looking for some thermal lift. He was about 150 feet above the eucalypts, close enough to see the detail of foliage and his friends’ faces, high enough to see out across the ranges, but he wasn’t looking towards them because he needed to concentrate on gaining height. He was aware of the blue haze of the mountains on the periphery of his vision, the light and shadow of peaks and valleys, and below, a smooth green carpet.

  This was his country, the part of Australia where he had planned to live for years. His place, the house where he lived with Jenny on the edge of Murwillumbah, looking out over cane fields towards Mt Warning – Wollumbin or ‘cloud-catcher’ to the local Bundjalung people – was 50 kilometres away as the crow flies, as he could fly. It was on the other side of the Springbrook National Park; the road he drove on to the launch area snaked along the Nerang River, a brownish thread he could use as a geo-graphical marker when he flew southwards.

  This part of northern NSW and southern Queensland is subtropical, mountainous, wild, but also dotted with farmlands and towns – it is fertile and well-watered, green for most of the year. He felt at home there, felt connected to the calm, unthreatening landscape, although he had also felt he belonged in the dry central west when he was growing up there. He had not imagined or longed for anywhere else until he was an adult. When he told me that, I felt disloyal that even as a child I had dreamed of elsewhere.

  The valleys and mountains of Bundjalung country had attracted thousands of hippies looking for a sustainable life in the rainforest in the 1970s, and by the time Barney arrived with Jenny and their three children in the late 1980s, the region was dotted with communities that grew their own everything. Feral living in the bush without modern conveniences didn’t really interest Barney, and the belief systems and practices – Gaia and goddesses and chakras – were as irrational to him as the religion he had rejected as a teenager. It’s obvious from the paintings he did in his spare time – his choice of subjects: fields, houses, river, fences, backed by neat mountains and large skies – that he was drawn to orderly beauty and especially the linking of human and natural order. There was no starkness or wildness in his pictures, but a sure appreciation, almost an imprisonment, of a safe and pleasing world.