The Joy of High Places Page 9
The track, now sandy dirt, crossed the Rio Argo twice and headed under a major road through a dirty tunnel and across a Romanesque bridge. I made an effort to appreciate the stone curve of the bridge before I hobbled over it. Now my shin was sore as well and the pain in my toe had sharpened and filled my brain. When I checked it again it was now blistered as well as squashed, and almost unrecognisable as a toe. The toenail had disappeared and the flesh was moist like a slug. I tried to wrap more blister pads around it but they squashed the toe further. It was pitiful that one small appendage could have taken over my experience. Anger, and then shame, flickered through my mind. I had no right to even mention it when my brother was still in hospital.
I saw a doctor in Pamplona who explained that my toe was deformed – he couldn’t tell whether naturally or from shoes that were too small when I was a child – and that long walking simply squashed it. He thought there was little to be done except to stop walking. I re-bandaged it and kept going.
The landscape on the other side of Pamplona was dry with stripped autumn wheatfields and vineyards. A concave hillside of stripped wheat lifted my heart and I gazed at it hungrily, a hillside from childhood, the same blue of sky behind it, the same warmth in the air. The slope and curve aroused not a memory, but a sensation of unquestioning reassurance.
After 25 kilometres we stopped in the small medieval town of Puente La Reina where there was a church founded in the twelfth century by the Knights Templar. I decided to go to Mass that evening, remembering sitting in the church in Wellington; the marble altar and painted statues, the gold-embroidered vestments, the enveloping dimness. In those days I’d sat with my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, each of us in our best clothes and shiny shoes, trying to believe. Then I remembered my mother not bothering to go to church any more during the last few years of her life. At first I thought it was because it was too far for her to walk, but then even when I visited with my car, she didn’t accept the offer of a lift down to the church. I wondered if she had stopped believing but it wasn’t the sort of question to ask aloud. Did she think of Barney refusing to go to church all those years ago? She told me once that Dad had felt shame about hitting Barney that time. Not just that he had lost his temper and hit his son, but that he had caused Barney to lose ‘the Faith’. I told her Barney was never going to be a believer. ‘That’s what I told him,’ my mother had said.
That evening at Puente La Reina I listened to the Mass in Spanish, recognising the rhythm of the words, the shape of the ritual, the round white bread that everyone appeared to accept was the actual flesh and blood of God the Son. Women the age my mother had been when she died sat in black dresses in the candlelight. I had given up belief a long time ago, but I liked the incense, the robes and chanting, the light glittering on the excess of gilt.
The next morning the path led out through the silence of the medieval town, with only the sound of boots on cobbles and the feel of cool air on skin. As I crossed the eleventh-century bridge on the edge of town I looked up and saw Orion’s Belt in the south-east and Venus low in the sky. Behind us red rays fanned out through pure gold clouds.
In the cool of the morning when the vineyards were deserted, I took a bunch of black grapes from the end of a row and they tasted as cool as the morning. By the time the sun was well up, there were pickers and large baskets full of shiny grapes at the ends of rows and more baskets stacked on a trailer attached to a tractor. I saw an old fig tree and hummed a song I had learned a few years before: ‘Everyone ’neath their vine and fig tree, shall live in peace and unafraid.’ For a few hours my feet didn’t trouble me and all was well in the world.
The country we were passing through was drier still, clods of earth crumbling underfoot, wheat stubble in fields, ancient almond trees in a field above the path, stone walls holding the path on either side. The almonds, their thick, greying coats splitting, hung within arm’s reach and I picked handfuls and put them in my pocket.
‘I spent summers in the almond trees when I was a kid,’ I said, by way of justification. ‘On the farm.’
I could see my brothers, Barney, Tim and Kevin, and sister Mary, skinny legged, perched in the trees, eating as many almonds as we could – peeling, cracking and biting – in between filling a bucket to bring back to the house for everyone else.
I remembered my mother saying every spring, ‘Aren’t the almond trees the most beautiful thing you have ever seen?’ One year, when I was 12, I looked at the drift of pink and white – there were five almond trees – and realised that they were beautiful, and that beauty was to be remarked on. Years later I was reminded of this when I was driving with my teenage son under a stand of maples in their autumn fire – red, cerise, pink – along a street we had driven along many times before.
‘Has it always been like this?’ he asked in astonishment.
There must be a moment in each life when we suddenly become conscious of beauty for the first time – and then the need to paint, or write, or sing it. I thought of Barney’s painting, his determination to pin down an almost photographic record of the world. Years ago he had made a painting of Dad walking across the farm, with Baron Rock behind him, the wheat shed and chooks, and Dad’s felt hat – clear and detailed – and had given it to him. It seemed to be a peace offering.
I squatted and cracked open the almonds with a rock. They were very hard, I suppose from the dry weather, and not as sweet as the almonds of childhood.
The track led over a Roman bridge, and the road – once cambered, with stones set lengthwise in the middle – continued over the dry hills. The 2000-year-old surface, now pocked and irregular and often sharp, made my feet slip and my ankles turned alarmingly. The squashing pain had returned. I diverted my thoughts away from it, giving myself particular events from long ago to remember in detail: the autumn day I walked across the paddocks towards the farmhouse when I was a teenager; it was stormy and windy, spitting rain, and the proud exhilaration of wild weather filled my body. The bloody toe – it was bloody by now – intruded in the spaces between memory.
The last two hours to the next town, La Estrella, stretched. I hobbled behind Anthony, thinking several times I would have to stop, but each time knowing I wouldn’t. I didn’t have a clear idea why I had to go on; perhaps it was the conviction that walking had become a metaphor for what was happening to Barney. I don’t think I clearly articulated it to myself at the time, but there was a sense that giving up wasn’t an option. I don’t believe it’s necessary to suffer to be transformed, but it felt laughable to be defeated by a literally bloody toe when Barney was struggling to find a way to live inside a mangled body.
As we sat in a courtyard in La Estrella drinking beer, James walked in and joined us. We exchanged the usual ‘How are your feet, and where did you start from this morning, and is there somewhere good to eat here?’ I bided my time to ask what I really wanted to know.
‘Why are you walking?’ I asked it casually enough, just another usual question.
‘I finished my degree and didn’t know what to do next. I just decided to walk. You know, for something to do. Things to get away from. What about you?’
‘I don’t know really. We both just wanted to walk. I’m hoping I’ll find out. What are you getting away from?’
‘The usual. Whatever.’ He looked uncomfortable. I’d been too quick and obvious. ‘Why, do I need to have a big reason?’
‘No. I don’t have one either,’ I said. ‘I just think there is one with you. I can see it, something difficult, I just don’t know what it is.’
He looked caught out, but he covered and shrugged. ‘I’ll just keep that to myself, thanks.’
I had the sense to shut up at last. He and Anthony talked for a while, the easy talk of men who like and respect each other, both of them with a better sense of the right distance to keep than I had.
On the last day, we walked out again through the quiet dark. I have a photograph of that morning in La Estrella, the golden glow of a
streetlamp on the wall opposite me as I pass along the stone alleyway, alone except for the unseen photographer. I seem to have an easy gait at that early hour.
The path led up through a dense forest of gnarled trees whose name I don’t know. The forest had a feeling that it had been here forever and would be here forever, long past the time any humans might pass through it. Its dispassionate age was unnerving. It was tough, much tougher than me and it would give me nothing because I was irrelevant to its existence. I was glad to enter into a sweet-smelling pine forest, soft needles underfoot, clear of undergrowth, a sense of space and greenish light.
Anthony stopped by the path in the pines to take a photograph of whorls of clouds in the western sky, pink from the reflected glory of the sunrise which itself was not visible. While we were stopped James appeared on the path behind us. I again had the strong, almost overwhelming feeling of wanting to connect. It was uncanny, so apparently irrational, although later when I confessed it again to Anthony, he again said he felt the same. In that moment in the forest, I was suddenly unsure. I had stepped over a mark the previous night.
He smiled as he approached, but I could see his uncertainty.
‘Are you stalking us?’ I said as he reached speaking distance. I said it lightly but there was some rejection in the words and my body was turned away towards the reflected sunrise. I wanted him to stop but didn’t want him to know I wanted it. He slowed down, almost stopped, made some remark in return, and kept walking. I felt a pang of guilt. I had done the wrong thing.
I remembered my mother telling me a story about how she had once seen a tough-looking young woman struggling with a pram on the stairs of a railway station. She had spiky hair, Mum said. And tattoos. Mum wanted to help her, but she thought the young woman might tell her to clear out and mind her own business.
‘I didn’t help her,’ my mother said. ‘Just because I was scared of being told off.’
I thought of all the times I hadn’t helped someone in the street. ‘We all do the wrong thing sometimes,’ I said.
Then the path was back into dense, ancient woods; a closed-in, almost claustrophobic air. The trees were not tall, but crowding, tangled and dim, grey-trunked, twisted. There was something fear-inducing about them, unwelcoming.
It was mid-afternoon when we reached Los Arcos, a town built in the middle ages with a central square and arched door-ways through the city wall. I slipped off my pack and sat down at one of the tables in the square. It was the end of the walk, but I knew that something had entered my soul, that this was by no means the end of it.
Some walkers had arrived before us and others were still arriving. I saw the young Austrian with his grandfather’s stick, and the French mother and son. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky and the square was half in bright light, half in deep shade, like a chiaroscuro painting, profoundly dramatic. Nothing dappled, nothing in-between – not like life, I thought. Some people were staying the night in Los Arcos; a few, like us, were finished, catching the bus to somewhere else. Our destination had been Logroño, only 27 kilometres away, but we had run out of time to walk it.
I took my boots off, and sat in my bare feet, letting the sweat dry. The toe still looked a mess, but it had not defeated me. There was some pride in that; not enough to say it aloud, or even think of comparing it to Barney’s long-lasting agony, but there was a flicker of satisfaction.
I looked up and saw James sitting at another table several metres away in the deep shadow. I hadn’t seen him arrive; he must have come from the other side of the square.
‘He looks like he’s staying here. We should say goodbye,’ I said. But I didn’t get up.
‘Let’s finish our drinks,’ said Anthony.
I stretched out my legs, put my arms behind my head, closed my eyes against the sun. There was plenty of time in the slowed down middle of the afternoon. The minutes stretched and bent. I could feel in my nerve ends what I should do. Then James got up, shrugged on his backpack and walked through the chairs and tables into the bright sunlight and left the square through the stone archway. It was the last time either of us saw him.
That was five years ago and I still often wonder what happened to James. I don’t mean what happened on the walk. I knew he was heading for Santiago de Compostela, the end of the pilgrims’ route, and would have made it. I mean what happened to him to make the shadow in his eyes. Sometimes questions are not answered, connections are not made.
Lucy
What happened to Barney next? That’s always the question, the unbreakable thread tying each moment to the next. What happens next? After the accident, it was a continuous unfolding – at least to the rest of us, his family and flying friends. To Barney it was an unrelenting present of pain and drugged confusion. I had rung Jenny before I’d left to go walking. All of us rang, his brothers and sisters, his adult children. Jenny was reassuring, practical, tired. This was days later. We rang each other, trying to find out without burdening her or Barney with our anxieties
‘I don’t think I can get up there to see him,’ I said.
‘Don’t feel guilty,’ Kathy said. Two of our older brothers, Peter and Kevin, who both lived up that way, would see him as soon as possible.
I rang Barney at the hospital before I caught my flight.
‘What’s the story?’ I said.
‘I’ll tell you one day,’ he said. He sounded unendurably weary. What happened next – the list of emailed questions, for the first day:
Did you sleep the night of the operation? (or was your brain speeding over everything all night?)
What was your room like? Colour? Did it have a view?
Were you alone or were there other patients?
What was the weather like? Sunny? Rainy?
When you first woke, did you remember instantly what had happened or did you wonder where the hell you were?
How does a person feel after anaesthetic?
How did you feel – physically? Emotionally?
Could you eat? What food did they give you? Or did you have a feeding tube?
Were you attached to various machines or drips ?
Were you wearing one of those blue or green gowns that tie up at the back ?
Was Jenny back on that day? How was she? (She can answer that one if she wants!!)
Did the surgeon come to see you? (He or she? I won’t use their name; I just want to picture them.)
Did anyone else come and see you?
Could you talk or did you just want everyone to leave you alone?
Are there any particular nurses or anyone else you remember from that day ? Your attention to everything, I imagine, was very heightened?
You said you were on a cocktail of drugs – what were they exactly?
When Barney woke the morning after the accident in Princess Alexandra hospital, the sun was shining. He could see blue sky out the window. He could see! He felt a flood of relief and joy. In all the trauma and shock, his mind had latched onto the possibility of losing his sight as its first priority. The wide blue sky embraced him, welcomed him back.
But then he became aware of his body. He was lying on his back with pillows under both his arms and under his lower legs. He only knew that by peering under the sheet. He could not feel his legs. He tried to move his right foot. There was a blank as if the impulse had hit a wall of cotton wool. He tried the other foot. Nothing. The same weird nothing. He felt sick. He was wearing a blue hospital gown made of paper – he remembered his clothes being cut off him the day before – and there were tubes coming from his body to machines and drip bags: monitoring electrodes, multiple cannulas in both arms attached to drips, a catheter attached to a bag threaded into his bladder, a tube into his back to drain blood from his spine, and a tube for an opioid with a trigger button which he learned he could operate himself for the pain.
For the pain.
It was all-enveloping. There was burning pain, aching, freezing, throbbing pain. The pain of bruised and battered internal organs, b
roken bones, the surgeon’s knife, and the peculiar distress of nerve pain. And nausea. He wanted to vomit. Dread surged through him. A black wave of despair. He said much later that he wished then, and many times afterwards, that he had been killed outright. He remembered the plummet towards earth and the sight of green, soft-looking grass, those few moments which could have been his last. That would have been better.
But there were people around his bed. He recognised the surgeon, Chinese he thought, and other doctors and nurses. Were they the operating team? His head felt weirdly clear, but he couldn’t remember. The surgeon asked him if he knew what had happened to him. Barney said yes, he’d had a paragliding crash and broken his back.
The surgeon said the operation had been a success. He had been able to do what he set out to do. But that didn’t mean he was making any promises about walking again.
‘You have suffered significant spinal nerve damage. I couldn’t reverse that, no-one could, I could only prevent it from getting worse. The extent of your recovery depends on how well your body can repair itself. That’s individual, it depends on your inheritance and general health.’
Barney felt a small surge of hope. He was fit and healthy from flying and from dancing – he and Jenny went to dance classes a couple of times a week – he hadn’t smoked cigarettes or drunk alcohol since he was a teenager, he had a healthy diet.
‘No promises, but maybe with a year or so of rehab, if you work hard at it, you may be able to walk with the aid of crutches.’
The pain and nausea made it hard to concentrate. Someone explained about the opioid trigger. That he could press it whenever the pain was unbearable. He pressed it. Within a few seconds he felt a warm rush through his veins. He had never felt anything like it before. The pale grey wall behind the doctors and nurses rippled upwards. They melted away and then there was no-one there. He looked around. He was in a smallish room, a recovery room, he realised later when he was moved, either later that day or the next day, into a two-bed ward.