Vancouver Island was a beautiful place to finish. One day near the end, we were by the water when a bald eagle landed next to us. For my future, I felt as free as that eagle. Until this trip, had I ever lived completely in the moment? I might have thought I had, but this was really my first experience of it. I finally understood the gift my parents had left me: the present moment is all there is and it is precious. Because the past had been broken away from under me, I didn’t sweat about the future.
EIGHT
While I came home refreshed, with a new perspective on life, the family were worried sick about me. Brent and Margaret were convinced I’d gone off the rails. I thought the opposite – I was finally making sense of things – but it was impossible to convince them.
An important event when I got back was the sale of the house in Dorrigo. To have the soft option of sinking back into the old house closed off was a good thing for me, but on the other hand, I didn’t quite know where home was.
I moved into the timber house my cousin Christine and Adam were renting at Dalgety, outside Jindabyne, and started work at Thredbo as a snowmaker. My shifts were at night, either 4 pm to 1 am or 1 am to sunrise. The life was pretty carefree. I saw a skidoo as an invitation to hoon around the empty mountain. Between shifts, we could grab our boards and go out on the snow all afternoon, free lift passes being one of the perks. When I had a few days off, I cut for Bermagui or Ulladulla with my surfboard, just searching for waves up and down the south coast. At the end of the day I would go to a local pub for a feed and a few beers, then just find a car park near the beach and crash out in the car and do it all again the next day.
It came to a sudden end, however, when one day, after a shift and some snowboarding, I headed down towards Dalgety to get the house warm before the others arrived home. Tony, Christine’s brother, was with me, and when we came past Jindabyne we saw a grey cloud rising. ‘Someone must be burning off,’ Tony said. Then, as we got closer: ‘Oh no, that’s the house!’
By the time we got there, the house was gone. I felt terrible for the owner, and for Christine, who’d lost everything she owned as well as some guinea pigs and other pets. I’d lost nothing of real consequence, just some gear and a couple of souvenirs from America: a lump of salt from Death Valley, a bit of wood a beaver had chewed. The investigation found that it was an electrical fire. I felt really guilty. It might have been an electric blanket I’d left on so my bed would be toasty when I got home.
We moved into a caravan park in Jindabyne, but the fire turned out to be a catalyst for change. Adam and Christine had been drifting apart, and decided to separate. For myself, I’d put in an application to work at Deer Valley in Utah, on an exchange deal between the snowmaking companies, so that I could work in both the United States and Canada.
It had been three years since I’d quit college and begun this string of jobs, and even though I was enjoying the snowmaking, a little seed was growing in me and gnawing at my insides. I needed to push the adventure further, not settle into a groove of repeating what I’d already done.
At the snowmaking company in Thredbo, I met a man who said he’d been in the SBS.
‘What’s the SBS?’ I said, thinking of the TV station, but he was definitely not a TV kind of guy.
He told me all about the Special Boat Service, the elite Special Forces unit of the Royal Navy, and I got interested in his descriptions of the ship assaults, the canoeing, the diving exercises. It sounded like an adventure lifestyle where you got paid, which didn’t sound at all bad. This was the direction I was beginning to move in: to try to convert my love of the outdoors and pushing for a new challenge into a job, instead of what I was doing, which was working to fund the adventure lifestyle.
I made some enquiries about joining the fire and ambulance services. Neither was taking on new staff. I thought about the police, but given my background it didn’t feel right. At the end of the season, I was mulling these things over, really thinking about what I’d do after I came back from my next trip to America. So much for letting the future look after itself! But I was entering a more complicated phase of life, and, as it turned out, so was the wider world.
*
I sometimes doubt there’s such a thing as coincidence. In September 2001, I headed up to Newcastle to stay with Brent and Kate. I did some work pulling cables through pits for Kate’s brother Danny, and met a guy called Dominic Freestone, from Woolgoolga, near Dorrigo. He was a great bloke, roughly the same age as me, a bodyboarder, and we liked the same music. We’d surf every afternoon after work at Newcastle Beach, and if we went out at night, we’d catch rides home on the empty coal trains. Dominic was half-Papuan, and we got so filthy after sitting in coal cars, we joked that he’d got so dirty, even the palms of his hands were black.
One night, I got home to Brent and Kate’s unit in Lambton. I flicked on the TV and saw this building with a big gash in it, which they said had been made by a plane. What’s all this? I couldn’t drag my eyes off it. It took me a while to realise it wasn’t just a movie. Then I saw the second plane. I started thinking about friends, wondering if they were in New York. From the commentary, you thought planes were going to start raining down everywhere, even in Australia. Holy shit, I thought, this is a big thing. Brent came home late from work and I said, ‘Check this out, two planes have flown into the World Trade Center.’ I stayed up for hours watching it all unfold. How could somebody do that?
The next day I rang my travel agent and asked if my plane the next month was still going to leave. People were saying I was crazy to fly over there, but things calmed down, and my plans wouldn’t be disrupted.
I can’t say that September 11 was the trigger, but it was an important piece in the puzzle that was falling into place. I was gripped by the horror of what had happened, and cut out and kept newspaper clippings about it. Lots of things seemed to be coming together around me, as if they had a mind of their own. I had started running and going to the gym. Brent had a friend in Newcastle who’d been at school with us in Dorrigo. He was in the RAAF now and he made it sound pretty good. Then one day I picked up the newspaper and there was this double-page spread advertising the anniversary of the Special Air Service Regiment. They were described as the ‘most secretive unit in Australia’ and were being deployed to Afghanistan already. There was one picture of a soldier free-falling, and another of a soldier standing with a gun. I found out later this was from a painting by Ian Coate titled The Sentinel. I thought, What is this? It looks like something I’d really enjoy.
I cut The Sentinel out and put it in my wallet, in the transparent slip for ID. Every time I opened my wallet, there was this SAS trooper. It inspired me. These guys obviously did something special. I asked my RAAF mate, who said he had a friend who’d been really fit and trained hard, but didn’t pass the SAS selection course. He said, ‘It’s not a job you really want to do – you’re away six or seven months a year.’ To me, that sounded perfect – just what I wanted to do.
Before I went to America, I went home for Murray Steele’s mother’s funeral. Kirby Steele had been, along with Jo Beaumont, a kind of second mum to me after Mum’s death. I could walk into their houses and eat food out of the fridge, and they wouldn’t care. I could be myself in their houses. Going to that funeral service and putting Kirby in the ground was very emotional for me. Murray had come to my parents’ services and got tearful. He’d got on very well with Dad. They talked about Vietnam, Dad showing him scars on his legs and telling him what to watch out for if he ever joined the army. I’d think, Why are you telling him, not Brent and me? I asked Mum, and she said he’d find it easier to talk to boys who weren’t his own children. He liked Murray showing an interest in it, and liked Murray generally.
There’s something about being one step removed from the centre of attention that can unleash your feelings. At Mum’s and Dad’s services, when I’d been in the middle and everyone was looking at me, I put a defensiv
e cordon around my emotions. At Kirby’s funeral, when I was on the sidelines, I broke down. When you’re part of the crowd, you’re free to be yourself. I understood now why Murray had gone to pieces at my parents’ services.
He and I hit it really hard after the funeral. Smashed, I drove my blue Ford Laser all the way to Coffs Harbour just to go to Macca’s. On the way back, Murray was asleep, I was drunk, and I drove onto the wrong side of the road. I hit the mountain and pulled the drive shaft out. We were lucky to survive. If I had gone right instead of left we would have plummeted over a cliff and probably been seriously injured or killed. Murray woke up to see me kicking the dented guardrail and throwing rocks at the car. It was four or five in the morning, and he couldn’t help laughing at the tantrum I was throwing. Eventually a bloke came past in his ute and gave us a lift up to Dorrigo, where Murray’s stepdad blasted us. Murray’s cousin had died in a car accident a few weeks before, and we’d just put his mum in the ground. Fair enough.
I got the car fixed and for some reason was wondering if Sally Watt was still working at the bank in Bellingen, where she’d moved back after her stint in Sydney. I’d heard she was getting married. I thought I should stop in, just to say hey and tell her there was no bad blood.
When I got to the bank, the lady behind the counter said, ‘How can I help you?’
‘I’d like to see Sally Watt.’
‘Who are you?’ I could tell by the way she looked at me that she already knew, but I told her. It was the same bank Chris had worked at.
‘Oh. Okay, can you just wait out the back and I’ll see if Sally can come out.’
She did come. We said hello and had a chat. I explained that I didn’t blame her, her sister or their brother for what had happened. ‘I’ll never forgive your dad for doing that to us and taking her away,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got no bad feelings towards any of you.’
Sally became quite tearful, and I was trying to hold back my own emotions. She was apologetic. She told me how they’d dug her mum up and she wasn’t too sure what was going on. We had a bit of a hug and she said she was thankful that I’d come and spoken to her. She’d been wondering for years what Brent and I thought. She might have been scared of us.
As I drove back towards Newcastle, I felt an amazing lightness. It was like I’d been doing squats for a long time and now could put the weights back on the shelf. I’d never felt like that up to then. Obviously I’d been carrying something around in there. I just felt so happy that I had closed that chapter.
Another piece in the puzzle was my opportunity to go through the files from Mum’s case, a lot of which I hadn’t seen: family history material, Chris Watt’s suicide notes, all the evidence that had been laid out for the coronial inquiry. It stirred up a lot of memories, and pressed home that what had happened had marked me out in a special way. Maybe I had to do something of the same magnitude as what had happened to Mum, to put the universe back in balance. Brent and I both felt guilty, at some level, that we hadn’t been able to protect her. Maybe I could atone by taking on the role of protecting others, helping them out, doing what I hadn’t been able to do as a kid. That’s a little deeper into my subconscious than I was thinking at the time, but as time has gone by and I understand myself better, I can see that the urge to protect and to fight was my way of saying sorry.
NINE
Little by little, that picture of The Sentinel was burning a hole in my wallet. I remembered that man from the SBS talking about ship attacks and Brent’s RAAF mate talking about how hard the SAS selection course was. When I got to Park City, Utah, to work as a snowmaker at the Deer Valley resort, I spent my nights on the internet looking up stuff about the SAS Regiment. The book and movie Black Hawk Down, about the incident in Mogadishu in 1993 when the Americans got hammered, came out, and put the hook in me deeper still. I was fascinated by its portrayal of Delta Force, which I imagined was the US equivalent of the SAS. The Delta operators, it suggested, were in but not of the armed services: that is, they did the most dangerous, out-there tasks but were given a freedom to make their own decisions. They were like military mavericks, able to decide how to wear their uniform and cut their hair and pretty much run their own race. To me, it sounded like the best of both worlds.
As I worked, I went for long runs in the snow in shorts and a jumper, pushing myself, visualising myself as doing pre-selection training. There was a winding road I’d get my flatmate, Chris, to drop me at the bottom of in the middle of the night, and I’d run up the hill to work. He was asking, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I wasn’t ready to tell him or anyone else, but I’d made the commitment in my own mind, for myself alone. I couldn’t afford to make a promise; promises are too easy to break. I was swimming laps at the local pool, doing push-ups. I was still having a good time when a party was on, but there was a fire I was feeding.
When I had time to snowboard, I’d go by myself out through the ropes onto the off-piste areas, which were quite dangerous if they’d had a big snowfall. I felt safe, doing big cliff drops – it was all about that addictive adrenaline rush, and also the risks that came with going out alone and being self-reliant. Any trouble I got into, I’d have to get myself out of.
Sitting on top of those mountains and taking in those amazing sights was something I will never forget. The beauty of the mountains is almost hypnotic, especially when all is still and quiet up there. A bit like when you’re the only one out at a surf break: you get a moment to focus on the only task at hand. You live in that one moment and get a chance to find yourself.
This private, obsessive regime culminated on New Year’s Eve when I left a party to get to where I was living, about 15 kilometres away. I treated it like an SAS selection task. I stopped at a 7-Eleven and got a couple of boiled eggs and a chicken hero. I could see the glow of where we lived, and headed across country, drunk, with two boiled eggs and a chicken hero in me, across people’s backyards through thigh-deep snow. Next thing I knew, the snow was up to my chest and there was only loose scrub underneath. Every step, I slipped and sank. I was in jeans, a T-shirt and jacket, freezing, dehydrated, falling over, fighting through this snow. I started to dry-retch. Then I told myself, If I’m going to join the SAS, I’ve got to be able to do this.
Eventually I popped out, and was lying on the highway trying to get my breath back. Welcome to 2002. It was nearly daylight when I walked into a servo, my jeans, frozen solid to my legs, crunching like cardboard. The guy said, ‘You all right?’
‘Yeah mate, I’m right.’
It could have turned really bad, but my mental state was all about training and pushing myself beyond my limits. Any chance for a challenge, no matter how insignificant it seemed, I’d give it a go. Setting myself and completing those small challenges delivered little rewards that drove me further.
My time in the States was excellent. I have so many fond memories. The job was great and hooning around the backcountry on snowmobiles in the middle of the night was one of the best parts of snowmaking. We would often get all the guns set for a few hours of quality snowmaking and then go through to the next valley to visit mates doing the same job for a different resort. Other nights we would take our snowboards and skis out with us while doing checks on the snow guns. We’d take it in turns to shuttle each other up the runs to have some stealthy night runs. It is not so easy boarding down a hill at night, trying to use the hue of the white snow to keep from ploughing off the tracks. Management would have had a pink fit if they’d ever caught us.
During our limited time off, we once made a trip out to Nevada because fireworks were more readily available there. We got up before dawn; five blokes, skis, snowboards and gear all crammed into and onto a VW Golf. A few hours later we had managed to load up with trolleys full of fireworks. On the way back to Snowbird Mountain, which we were riding that day, we almost set the car on fire no fewer than five times. We learnt that fireworks are extra loud in a confined space like a VW
and that attaching them to the rear bumper and having multiple 20-foot sparks flying out really does make the car go faster – as evidenced by the surprised faces of the drivers of the cars we were overtaking. Looking back, we were very lucky not to have been caught by the police. I’m sure they would not have found it as exciting as we did.
By the time I went home, I was really fired up, but still wanted to keep my plan to myself. My family thought I was drifting. Uncle Ken had asked what I was going to do, and I’d said vaguely, ‘Leisure management at uni maybe, I dunno.’ I knew they were going to be shocked when I applied to join the army, but there was no contradiction in it for me. Adventure and helping people – that’s what I wanted, in a nutshell. There would always be the question of how I could handle authority, of course. The army was not some kind of holiday camp where you did cool things whenever you felt like it. And I’d been living by my own timetable for a while now. But I didn’t see authority as a problem any more. Getting told what to do was just another hurdle, as much as getting tired or hungry. I wanted to know if I could handle it. Could I prove it to myself? I’d proved a few other things to myself – what about this?
TEN
Secretly, I started putting in my application forms to the army. I moved back in with Brent and Kate, got my old cabling job with Dom, and bought a motorbike. I designed a proper training regime. Monday: a five- to eight-kilometre run after work. Tuesday: weights training, sneaking into the university gym on Brent’s membership card. Wednesday: hill sprints near the uni. Thursday: more weights. Friday: interval training. And a lot of swimming and surfing in between. I stuck with it religiously, always trying to improve my performance, telling myself, If you want to survive a gunfight, you’ve got to survive this. The more you prepare yourself now, the more ready you’ll be when the time comes.
The Crossroad Page 10