The Joy of High Places Page 8

  I keep asking questions, Barney keeps answering. Mostly in writing. I send him the first part of the story I have written and ask him to check the facts. I tell him to allow me some poetic licence, which makes him laugh. He answers with precise detail and generosity, but there is something impermeable about the facts he sends. They are beautiful facts, but I am outside them. Most of the time I have to find a way in, and the only way I can think of is to walk with them.

  On the day he sends me sent me his corrections, it’s late when I head out. I get up from my writing desk and head out the door towards Woolloomooloo Bay at the end of my street. The sun has gone down, and twilight doesn’t last long in Sydney so it will be dark by the time I get back. But I need to go now. I’ve been thinking about the long years when we didn’t see each other, despite a childhood on the farm together. Why do I want to tell his story now? The question is still there.

  The cafes on the wharf are noisy with people having dinner, but as soon as I head up the stone steps to the gardens, it is quiet. I gaze at peppermint gums, blackbutt, scribbly gums, apple gums, paperbarks, grevillea, bottlebrush, Moreton Bay figs. And at the sandstone, wind-carved with lacy patterns. The patterns have been here for eons, slowly changing. I am merely a shadow passing by them, a faint vibration.

  I’m trying to understand, too, why walking has such a hold over me, why it exerts such an irresistible pull. And I know it’s not just me, there’s hundreds of thousands of us tramping over the earth like a nomadic tribe that never stays in one place for more than a night. Day-after-day walking, where each morning we get up merely to walk. When we are walking, our whole life happens; when we are not walking, we dream and plan the next long walk. Does it have any purpose, let alone meaning? It needs to be faced before I go too much further.

  It’s not all blasts of joy on wild fells; in fact, it rarely is. Although I’ve never weighed it up, on balance there must be more pain, irritation, fear, anger, hunger, blisters, rain, sweat, bruises and the need to pee when there’s no tree or rock to squat behind. And yet I don’t want to even consider not walking.

  It’s not as if I’ve seen everything already. I’ve not travelled much of the world at all; I’ve not seen vast tracts of my homeland, Australia; I’ve never been to North or South America, Africa, Russia, the Middle East, most of Asia, half of Europe. At a walking pace, I’m not likely to see much of it either, even if I walked, as I’d like to, for the rest of my life. It seems impractical and pointless and then there’s the secret worry that it’s self-indulgent, and yet I can’t shake off the desire.

  I don’t have to walk; I’m not impelled to trudge with animals in the hot sun in search of fresh grasses, nor plod all the way to the well and back to get water for the village. I don’t have to stumble thin-bodied to a food depot to save my skeleton children from death, nor flee on foot with millions of others from chemical weapons and bombs falling on my home. I walk for hundreds of kilometres across plains and mountains, scramble down rocky slopes, trudge through snow, ford streams, because I choose to, because I’m trying to find … God knows what? That pulls me up in my tracks, but only briefly. The longing is still there.

  At school, I listened to the stories of Aborigines who went walkabout, as it was called, to find new sources of food and water or to visit sacred sites. I lived in the same place on the farm – on Wiradjuri country, without knowing it – day after day, year after year and the only elsewhere was in books. The idea of walking to somewhere else and then back, a rhythmic departure and return, promised the excitement of difference and the reassurance of home. You never knew what you might find in a new place: caves in hillsides, gold in rivers, baby kangaroos, bones of prehistoric dinosaurs.

  At high school there were the stories of hundreds of thousands people walking across Europe during and after both world wars, escaping their bombed-out homes. There were gaunt prisoners of war being marched across Germany to Eastern Europe, partisans flitting like shadows through forests and along hedgerows. And black and white images of families on exposed roads, mothers holding babies and carrying suitcases, children struggling along behind, which meant that walking was also brave and heroic. It was not for the faint-hearted.

  Walking was also claimed by the philosophers. Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school of philosophy around 300 BC. He and his students walked about the Lyceum, their school in Athens, as they aired and questioned their thoughts. Peripatetic, in fact, means given to walking. I like that phrase, the sense of walking being something that you willingly offer yourself to, that you allow to possess you.

  I am given to walking.

  I went to Athens not so long ago, on my way back from a walk in Crete, and trudged across town, still in my walking boots, to see the ruins of the Lyceum. It had lain under other buildings for centuries and was only rediscovered and opened to the public in 2009. Although the Parthenon and the museums were packed with tourists, there was only one other person at the Lyceum. I wandered around the low walls and bare lines of bricks, aware of putting my feet in Aristotle’s footsteps.

  Contemporary science reveals walking is good for your health, just in case I hadn’t noticed. Walking improves brain function and sense of wellbeing, and not just because of the calming effect of moving at a natural pace through the world. Data suggests there is a relationship between footfall and blood flow, the impact of the foot hitting the ground creating pressure waves, which force an increase in blood flow to the brain. Apparently there is an optimising rhythm between brain blood flow and walking, as if walking is tuning the brain.

  All this mythology and history, philosophy and science could be seen as a defence against accusations of time-wasting, a sensitivity to the fact that not everyone can wander at length across the planet. I could try to argue that I walk simply and frugally, but there is no getting around the reality that I can do it because I’m a western woman with enough time on her hands.

  All I can do is trace my walks in, one by one, to see what can be made of them. I have been on long distance walks every year since Barney’s fall. The chronology of the walks doesn’t matter that much, but the one from France over the Pyrénées was nearest in time to Barney’s fall and his excruciating shuffle back from the abyss. I straighten the map, which is already a bit tattered, and start marking in the route.

  A handful of people

  St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France to Logroño, Spain

  On the first day of walking across the Pyrénées, I thought walking was about physical effort. It was only a couple of hours since I had started and I was already feeling stretched on the first slope. Ridges and peaks rolled away to the horizon on either side of me, looking at this angle, like the spines of some vast green creature. The air was quiet and still. I stopped to listen to the silence and heard crickets, bees, flies, cowbells.

  It was mid-afternoon, the hottest time of the day, and with the unaccustomed steep climb I was overheated and sweaty. My genetically Irish complexion flushed with sun and exertion and I was suddenly light-headed and nauseous. My arms felt bulky and I looked down to see that my hands were swollen, with blotchy white and red fingers. My heart beat faster and I felt faint.

  ‘I feel weird,’ I said. ‘I think I might have heat-stroke or something.’

  I sat down on a rock on the side of the path and asked Anthony to look in the guidebook. I sounded calm but felt panicked. What if I wasn’t up to crossing mountains and walking hundreds of kilometres. In real time, it was my first long- distance walk. What if I keeled over and fell off the edge of a cliff, smashed like Barney. What if all of us were being picked off now that our mother was gone. My mind was over-colouring the scene and wouldn’t stop.

  ‘Sit down. Sips of water,’ Anthony read. ‘Wait until you cool down before you walk again. If it’s heat-exhaustion, stay cool and have some water; if it’s heat-stroke, stay cool and get medical help, it could be fatal.’

  ‘That’s not what it says.’

  ‘It does. Are you dizzy? Restless?’
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  ‘What? No. I’m hot and my hands are swollen and I feel sick.’

  ‘So it’s heat exhaustion. And probably dehydration. You’ll be right.’

  After sitting for 40 minutes cooling down and sipping water I stood again, ready to keep walking. It was still hot and I overheated again quickly, which forced me to stop every 100 metres or so to sip more water. By the time I arrived at the refuge at Orisson, under ten kilometres away but a 600-metre gain in altitude, I felt as if I’d been walking all day.

  At the refuge, Anthony and I were allocated bunk beds in a dormitory and that night shared in the group meal. After dinner, each person was asked to say where they were from and why they were walking.

  ‘Australia,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why.’ I didn’t even think about my brother. Next morning in the Pyrénées, Anthony and I were on the road before dawn. It was cold and shadowy, the dark silhouettes of mountain spines – perhaps a vast sleeping dragon – stretched out around us in the dreamscape. The cool air and the altitude created a sense of being in the sky and I remembered dream-flying in the night air as a child. Even in the dim light I could see forever, like an eagle circling above the wild terrain. I was reminded of my brother flying and for a moment knew that he must have turned into a bird, wing above his head, floating and circling, looking down on the far world. The full 360 degrees shape of hills and valleys revealed in his binocular eagle-vision, must have been what drew him in, caught him. What would he do now? Even if he did manage to walk properly again, it surely would not be enough for him.

  Gradually the dark shapes of fence posts and fields and ridges began to fill with colour: distinct emerald blades of grasses, and leaves of marshmallow and mint and yarrow by the side of the road, and further away a smooth dense green cloaking the slopes which turned blue at the horizon. Then the sky was a brilliant fiery red against the blue and velvety green, creating a drama of light and shadow in the folds of ridges and glittering on a multitude of dewdrops, an absurd display of heart-cracking beauty.

  I kept craning my neck to the east, awestruck. I should have been silenced by the beauty, but the landscape was so new to my mind that it couldn’t help trying to name everything: the glowing light, the dragon spine ridges, the fiery sun.

  The road became a wide, grassy path, steep and zigzag-ging further up, high above the clouds into the wild mountains. On the slopes there were shaggy, black-legged sheep with bells, woolly ponies, and occasional shepherds in four-wheel drives. It was the country of the Basque shepherds, traditionally keepers of sheep in the high country, a people who have their own words for everything.

  A cattle grid indicated the border into Spain, and on the other side was a sign in both Spanish and Euskara, the Basque language. Basque isn’t related to any other Indo-European language, the language tree that most European and many Indian languages branched from, although to my uneducated ear, there was an Eastern European sound to the conglomeration of g’s and z’s, x’s and k’s. There’s a genetic continuity between present-day Basques and their Palaeolithic ancestors, which means they have been in this country just about as long as the Wiradjuri have been in theirs. And they already had their own language when Indo-Europeans arrived. My heritage is of transplantation, so I cannot know what effect tens of thousands of years in the same country and the same language would have on genetic memory.

  ‘Kaixo,’ I said to myself. Hallo.

  ‘Zer Meduz?’ How are you?

  ‘Egun ona izan dezazalu.’ Have a nice day.

  The words clicked under my tongue, softly.

  The path continued to climb. My feet and legs felt strong now, the sun was warm. ‘On top of the world,’ I thought. The first day was an aberration. I could do this. Anthony, ahead of me, turned around and smiled as if I had said it aloud.

  That evening in the monastery at Roncesvalles, I met James for the first time. He was sitting across the table, a stocky, dark-haired Australian, listening and watching. I felt drawn to him, even before he said anything. I recognised a combination of traits I’ve always found intriguing: a sweetness of nature paired with concealed hurt. I think he said he came from northern New South Wales, but I’m not sure about that. What I do remember is a shadowing in his eyes and a sense that his sweetness had been wounded. Somehow his well-being mattered to me immediately, but I was also curious about the shadow.

  He was sitting beside Anthony and they talked for a while. I found myself leaning in, trying to catch their conversation. Afterwards Anthony and I returned to our small cubicle in the dormitory but neither of us mentioned James.

  We arranged our packs around two Austrian boys who were sharing the cubicle with us. One of them had a carved wooden walking stick, a stocknagel, which his grandfather had carried with him all over the Austrian Alps when he was a young man, 50 years earlier. It was a dark-coloured wood and had tin mementoes from his grandfather’s journeys nailed onto it. I saw the Austrian several more times along the road in the next several days; he became ‘the boy who was taking his grandfather’s stick on another walk’.

  In the morning, the hospitalière at the monastery woke everyone by walking along the corridors chanting ‘Alleluia’. Apart from the yearning sound of the call to prayer in Istanbul, it was the most soothing way to be called into the waking world I have ever experienced. I thought of Montaigne, the sixteenth-century French essayist, who, when he was a child, was woken every morning by the strains of a harpsichord; his father believed that no-one should be dragged harshly into consciousness. For me as a child, it was the magpies and the kookaburras I listened to as I awoke. I realised for the first time that Barney must have listened to the same sounds, but we had never talked about it, never elaborated our shared library of sense memories. The ‘Alleluia’ echoed down the corridor, diminishing in volume and then increasing as the singer walked back up past the reluctant bodies.

  Out in the cool air before dawn, the path led through a beech forest. The leafy covering made it even darker, so that I had to use my torch. Other walkers passed by, dim shadows in the gloom. I had my first pang of the pointlessness of it; walking through the dark just to get to the next town. I was floating, untied from my moorings, bobbing on some wide dark ocean. I suddenly knew that although I was long grown-up, I was slightly adrift without my mother there in the background. I caught up and walked beside Anthony for several steps.

  ‘It’s an odd thing to be doing,’ I said. ‘Walking across a foreign country before the sun is up. It doesn’t make sense, really.’

  ‘Nor do most things,’ he said.

  Anthony touched shoulders with me and our packs bumped together. Putting words to it were enough to reattach the solid world. My mother was gone, my brother had fallen from the sky, but we wouldn’t all fall apart. I settled, re-knotted myself and walked on, watching out for tree roots and sticks in the torch-light, reassured by the yellow arrows painted on posts and trees and rocks. The limits of the path formed a line through the vast unknown. For this time, in these terms of reference, I could find my way.

  Soon there were meadows, and beech forests now dappled with light, an oak wood on the side of a hill, and then pine forest, fresh smelling and carpeted with pine needles. In the meadows there were more black-legged sheep, short shaggy horses and golden cows. Each tree and animal carried an aura of the imaginary made real, a sense that by some powerful magic, they had come into being. They were now existing, but still shimmered with their recent magical translation into the physical world.

  I walked easily for most of the day, but by afternoon, one toe was starting to feel sore. When I took my boot off and examined it, I realised the toe was naturally bent under and the all-day walking was causing it to be squashed by the other toes. It hurt but it didn’t seem to be anything to worry about.

  We stopped at a village and bought cheese, apples and a bread stick for lunch, then sat in a soft green field and ate. We didn’t carry much food because our packs were small, the size of other people’s day-packs, with
just the essentials of a change of clothes, raincoat, toiletries, compass, thermos, thin towel and sheet bag. Villages were mostly five or six kilometres apart, and because it was such a well-walked pilgrimage route, there was always a cafe to buy a tortilla and jambon so there was no need to carry supplies. Some of the way was in the wilds, over mountains and through woods, but I realised that I liked the feeling of walking through a landscape that had been long-settled, vineyards and fig trees offering ripe fruit, and of walking into a medieval village where there was sure to be a quiet square and a shot of coffee.

  That evening in Zubiri, Anthony and I saw James in a bar. We sat down at a table and he came to sit with us as if it had been arranged. I noticed my delight and felt disconcerted. It wasn’t a physical attraction, perhaps motherly – he looked the same age as one of my sons. We drank beer and talked but I have no recall of what we said to each other although I can picture where we sat, the veneer table and the computers in the dim light at the back of the bar. The pain in him was evident in the shadowing of his eyes but he made no mention of it.

  ‘There’s something about him,’ Anthony said later.

  ‘You too?’ I said.

  On the way to Pamplona next day, I started listing the people I had met: the Austrian boy, James, an older French man who loved Arabic culture, a Japanese couple, a middle-aged Frenchwoman and her 20-year-old son who kept losing each other, a Canadian surfie with tangled blond hair. It was a way of distracting myself from my toe, which had become painful, much more painful than seemed reasonable to expect from one squashed small toe. I pulled my boot off to examine it again and it was white and shapeless, looking like a flattened haricot bean.