by Tim Cope
The battery died and my screen went blank.
For most of the last two years, my home and childhood had seemed like another lifetime, a reality so detached it was in a parallel world that didn’t belong. Now, however, I felt myself drawn into memories and feelings that cut to the present. My surroundings faded until I was back at Sandy Point, running along the beach and into the water with my brother Jon to catch a wave, Mum and Dad watching from the shore.
I recalled all the times that I had visited Dad at his university office and the long drives to get there and back home, when he would open up and vent all his frustrations, hopes, and ideas. It had been hard to weather his negative outbursts, but underneath there was a camaraderie during those trips that perhaps only a father and son can experience. He had resigned from his work toward the end of my stay in Kazakhstan, and I wondered with sadness and even guilt what it must have been like for him. We had all encouraged him to take the early retirement package he was being offered, yet now he was left at home alone, all four of his children pursuing their own lives.
What moved me most about the message, though, was the absence of anger. It disarmed all defenses and left me pining to tell him how grateful I was, how brave I thought he was for making the decision to resign, and how I sympathized.
My reflection was cut short by someone clearing his throat. Tigon woke with a growl, and I unzipped the tent door to meet the eyes of a startled cow herder.
“Do you have any cigarettes?” the man asked, trying to mask his curiosity.
I was the first foreigner that Kolya had ever spoken to. He and his wife were from western Ukraine and had moved here to take up beekeeping. Later that evening when they had finished their village cow-herding duties, they returned to my camp to invite me to stay with them in Vasylivka.
My arrival at their home was a stark reminder of the settled world of Europe I had begun to enter. As I pulled in, Kolya invited my horses into a cramped barn, but even Taskonir pulled backward.
“Your poor horses!” Kolya exclaimed. “They have been out in the elements for so long they have forgotten what a stable is!”
I gave him a wry look. “The problem is that my horses have almost never been in a stable!”
Kolya shook his head and grinned, then took a longer look at my horses.
I’d become used to this misperception since arriving in mainland Ukraine. Some people had refused to take me overnight because they didn’t have space in their barn and thought it cruel to make the horses stand out in the rain and cold.
Clearly Kolya had associated horses with stables all his life, and his innocent comment well illustrated that although Europeans had originally inherited horses from nomads of the steppe, they could not comprehend the extreme conditions that define the native environment of the horse, nor the horse’s ability to survive in it. The horse, after all, evolved as a herd animal with a physiology honed for outrunning predators in the harsh climes of the Eurasian steppe. It was not naturally conditioned to either a stationary life isolated from other animals or a regimented diet of hay and grain.
It was difficult to explain to Kolya that to my horses his stables would have appeared more prison than refuge. Even more difficult to get across would have been that to me the stable symbolized the greatest difference between nomads and sedentary society: while nomads adapt their lives to the needs of their animals, migrating from pasture to pasture in symbiosis with nature, sedentary beings tend to control their animals and environment for their own convenience. In a similar vein, I felt it ironic that many times on my journey people had pitied me for living out in the elements. The truth was that after being so long on this journey, I found it hard to imagine living in a town or village, let alone a four-wall dwelling in a city.
That night I proudly tied the horses up outside and Kolya gave them generous piles of hay. In the morning, however, it was with a hint of hypocrisy that I found myself relishing the feel of my warm clean skin and the fresh sheets. The furnace was going and the smell of fried pork, buckwheat, and eggs wafted into my room. Outside, the first snow of the season had blanketed the earth. Life under the open sky wasn’t as inviting as it had seemed the night before.
With some reluctance I saddled up and rode out over the frozen waves of mud in the streets of Vasylivka. Kolya walked with me to the outskirts, where my goodbye was marred when a man came hurrying up to us to ask if he could buy Taskonir. His dog attacked Tigon, and by the time we had separated them, blood was dripping from Tigon’s mouth onto the snow.
Beyond Vasylivka I carried on through high open plains broken by the occasional gully. Bitten by frost, the land had lost its autumn gleam, and leaves on the odd trees that we passed were dull and brittle. By evening it was so cold I was forced to get off and walk to bring life back to my toes. It was only –2°C, but the moisture in the air and the ceaseless northwest wind were grinding me down.
The next day promised to be warmer, but by midmorning gray clouds swooped in and the headwind brought flurries of snow. My ropes turned stiff and frozen and the horses attempted to shy away.
Sometime in the afternoon we emerged from the plains like wild animals to cross the Odessa–Kiev freeway, then scurried our way back into the hills to the village of Demydivka. Ostensibly I entered the village looking for water, but the cozy homes under their wreaths of smoke broke the nomadic rebel in me.
At the first house a woman carrying the weight of middle age on her hips came out wrapped in a scarf and coat. She hurried back inside and emerged with a man bearing glazed, bloodshot eyes. He stopped a short distance away, corrected the angle of his fur hat, then broke out in staccato laughter.
“Tie up the horses! Fuck your mother and a donkey, too! This kind of traveler comes once in a hundred years!” His hands were up in the air as if praising the gods. “Nina!” he called to his wife. “We will feed the horses beets, hay, straw! Prepare porridge for the dog! Get the borscht ready! Tim, listen to me, I don’t drink … Well, today I am because it is thirty years since my father died. Tomorrow I will also drink, and then I will stop. But come in, come in, you must be cold!”
Vasya, as he was known, had apparently only just raised a toast in memory of his late father when my caravan came clopping into town. It was an event he wanted his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to know about. Who was I to argue?
With the horses tied and beets, hay, and grain raining down, we rushed inside, where samohon (home-distilled vodka) was poured. There was apparently no need for me to worry about my horses. “I am a gun lover, you see!” he explained. “The special forces came to take away my guns, but everyone in the village suspects, rightly, that they didn’t find them all! One puck,” he said, pulling an imaginary trigger, “and the thieves will all be gone in a second!”
The vigor of his words made him quite a coherent and pleasant drunk—that is, until I stopped drinking and he carried on to finish the 2 litre soft drink bottle of home brew. By that time, I could not avoid confronting the circumstances in which he, his two young children, and their wife found themselves. The whitewashed walls and ceiling of their tiny two-room house were coated in years of grime, smoke, and cooking fat. It was better not to take shoes off, given all the muck on the floor. As I lay down to rest and the world faded away, I was vaguely aware that the boy had plucked out a gun from under Vasya’s bed and was scampering about the house pretending to shoot.
After a shallow sleep I woke to suffocating wafts of stale samohon, body odor, and cigarettes. It was not the refuge, nor the sense of family, I’d been looking for.
For the next three days I rode into sleet and snow, became lost in a tangle of hills, and felt my spirits fall into a tailspin. In the town of Obzhyle I was greeted by drunken men driving a horse and cart. “Where the fuck! From where the fuck?” they hollered when they saw me. They were coarse and unhelpful, and I realized that while they marveled at my adventure, they did not identify with it—I had become a novelty.
I rode o
ut fast, aiming to camp in the hills nearby, but as dark fell a Lada pulled up and a man in uniform stepped out demanding documents. I told him angrily that I did not have time, for it was getting late, but a second man emerged and took Taskonir by the reins. “Hand over your papers. Now!”
By the time they concluded I was legal, it was too dark to get safely out of town and find camp. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep in the last few days, but I felt distraught and vulnerable. I told them that since they had held me up, they were responsible for finding me a place to stay. It was a mistake.
I was sent home with a drunk Gypsy bachelor, who after half a bottle of vodka outlined his plan to steal my horses. I broke out of his squalid hut in the middle of the night and slept on the frozen earth among the horses, which were tied up outside.
Another day took me to the town of Kodyma, where by chance Rodion, the brother of a Ukrainian friend of mine, had agreed to meet me. He had generously prearranged for my horses to be looked after at a collective farm with the help of the head of the local forestry department, Vladimir Sklyaruk.
For two days I enjoyed a respite, and when I left the weather had cleared somewhat. Still, when I rode out I felt directionless. The trees had finally been stripped of all life, and like my spirits, the autumn leaves skittered about in the breeze. I had a formidable distance to go to get to the Carpathians, and I wasn’t sure how I could sustain my pace through the winter. I was also unsure how I fitted into this sedentary world. Irritated, I tried calling Dad on his mobile via satellite, but time after time, the call went to voicemail. There was only one solution: it was time to grit it out and get this journey done.
Two days out from Kodyma I rode toward the sun as it was sinking from a clear peach sky. I passed a herd of cattle returning for the night, and noticed a horse and cart clopping along a track in the distance. A ways in front of us to the west the land planed off into a gully, and I reasoned that if I hurried, I could make it there for camp before dark.
Before speeding up, I reached into my backpack and pulled out the satellite phone. For some time now it had been beeping—a sign that I had accidentally left it on. As I went to switch it off, however, I noticed a new message.3 It was from my brother Jon: Tim! Call home please!
I stopped, leaped from the saddle, and knelt in the grass. Clutching the handset, I dialed home and waited. When our family friend Peter Nicholson answered, it was obvious something was wrong. As the handset was carried to Mum, I could hear other familiar voices of friends.
Mum was in the bathroom when she picked up. “Tim?” Her voice crackled down the line, shaking. There was a long pause. I held my breath.
“It’s Dad,” she started, her voice strong, but in an instant it wavered and she began to cry. “He was in a car accident … I’m so sorry, Tim … he is dead … I can’t bring him back.”
It’s not hard to remember the first few moments after I hung up that evening, November 16, 2006, but they are hard to describe, and it’s harder still to do them justice.
On the one hand, sitting there by the roadside at the feet of my horses, the journey that had consumed me for two and a half years evaporated as if it had never been. I couldn’t breathe, and my back muscles heaved. I vomited two or three times, cried, and felt my body convulse. Inside, it was as if a bullet had ripped through me, cutting the tensioned cords that held me together, and they were recoiling, whipping at my interior.
But simultaneously there was a numbness and a surreal sense of calm and normality. I was still on a horse somewhere in the Ukraine, and I needed to camp, find grass, and unsaddle. I fragmented into two distinct parts from that moment—the practical, steadying me, and the passenger.
Among the myriad thoughts competing for space in those first few moments, the predominant one was that I had to be alone, to be away from anyone who had not known my father. Somehow I knew that if I was quick about making camp, out on the steppe under the stars I had a fleeting chance of communion with Dad before he was gone.
In a gully somewhere I worked fast. Poles broke through sleeves in the tent, Tigon whined for his food, and the horses tried to bolt. For a fleeting moment it felt as though the two disjointed parts of me merged to focus and get the job done. But then the horses were tethered, the food was cooked and eaten, and I crumpled onto my canvas bag. I gazed up at the sky, and suddenly it was so big and so lonely. Where could he be? Did he know how to find me?
I wanted to know when Dad had died, how many hours I had been pretending that life was normal. I computed what Mum had told me, weighed up the time differences: he had been alive when I woke up but dead by lunch. My lungs seized again at the thought.
How many times had I called? How many times had he not answered? I could imagine his phone lighting up, my name coming through. Maybe when I made that last call he had still been alive, trapped in the wreckage, watching the phone. And all I could do was get angry and leave a message to say how pissed off I was that he wouldn’t pick up!
Sleep didn’t beckon. To sleep would have been to abandon him, and he had to be aware of me, he had to know that I was here. And yet the steadying hand of the other me guided and caressed until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.
When I awoke again, I felt frozen—the sleeping bag was half on. There was ice on the tent, and outside a sea of mist was gushing in and devouring us. It must have been about four in the morning. I picked up the phone again. This time I got Jon. We just cried. Then I talked to my sister, Natalie. The first thing she asked was, “Did you reply to his email?”
“No, I didn’t,” I replied.
“I didn’t, either.”
There was only one thing to do: go back. Back to the spot where I had eaten lunch after he died, back to where I’d camped the previous day, when he was still alive. Back home, where I could return to the life I’d had as his son.
I packed faster than I had ever managed. To stop and think would be to let time carry on.
We trotted through the village under the cover of heavy mist, and before the sun could illuminate a world without Dad we were lost in the folds of the land. The sun gradually melted through, a silvery disc suspended in space. Delicate, frost-encrusted birch limbs fingered their way into reality. I pushed the horses harder, into a canter. Mist began to swirl, then above me a circle of clear sky turned peach. I craned my neck and twisted around but urged the horses on.
Dad, I’m coming!
I was catching up with him. But then Ogonyok pulled at the lead rope, I slowed, and the mist began to rise.
I lost Dad for some time. Then, as we entered a tract of forest, he seemed to return. I slowed to a walk, breathing in the tang of rotting leaves that littered the ground. Dad walked to my left in his shorts and hiking boots, carrying one of his weathered old daypacks. We stopped momentarily as he leaned over and lifted a plant from under a tree. Cradling it in his palm, he brought it over to me and held it up. I was back in the Australian bush, one of the many times when he’d turned to me and said, “Tim, isn’t life amazing?” Back then I hadn’t understood what he meant, though I could see from the look of fascination in his eyes that he was right. Now he looked up at me in the saddle, his eyes alight with the same sense of enchantment. We rode on together.
So many times by phone and email we had talked about him joining me on this adventure. Since resigning from work he had taken interest in the histories and cultures of the countries I traveled through and read many books on the subject. Nevertheless, neither of us had committed to the idea of him coming over. The naked forest glared angrily—I had missed the season of opportunity—and as the edge of the forest drew near I began to sob.
When I was halfway back to Kodyma, Vladimir Sklyaruk met me and took my gear back by car. I’d phoned his family in the middle of the night, and he had promised at once to find a way to look after Tigon and the horses in my absence. I galloped past the lunch spot and camp and rode another 15 km into town.
The following dawn I fell into Anya’s arm
s at the Kiev train station and about thirty hours later walked out through Australian customs—the same gates I had recently passed with so much celebration.
Then they were there: Mum with her pale face and wet blue eyes, Jon behind her, nervously grinding his teeth. I was the eldest child, and Jon was my junior by two years, although from an early age he had been much stronger and more athletic than me. As he leaned over and hugged my skinny frame there was a seniority in him I hadn’t recognized before.
Natalie and Cameron were there, too, but it wasn’t until we made the two-hour drive home that it felt like we were all finally reunited. And Natalie had some good news: although neither she, Jon, nor I had answered Dad’s email, Cameron had. He had also made sure, by looking at Dad’s email account, that his response had been read.
In the coming days it was obvious that Dad’s death meant something unique and different to each of us, but in some ways the four of us were together in our grief. There was no one who could share what Mum must have been going through, however. Mum and Dad had been married for thirty years and had lived in the same country house in rural Victoria since the year I was born. On the previous Thursday, the day of Dad’s accident, Mum hadn’t been expecting him home. He had spent the week helping out at a surf lifesaving camp at Sandy Point and had promised to be back on Friday morning, as the two of them would be attending a wedding in Canberra on Saturday.
Sometime in the early evening of Thursday there had been a knock at the front door. This was odd, since anyone who had been to our home knew that the back door was in fact the proper entrance.