by Tim Cope
It was the police. At about 4:30 P.M. that day there had been a crash on a stretch of the South Gippsland Highway—the road we traveled from home to Sandy Point. A man carrying Dad’s identification was deceased.
“It can’t be him! There must be some mix-up!” she’d told them.
Our neighbors, who had come over after seeing the police car, had helped Mum to an armchair and tried to calm her down.
In hindsight, Mum said, there were signs that something was going to happen. Every day of their married life she had been picking up after Dad—his clothes sprawled over the bedroom floor, the mess he’d left in the kitchen, his Ventolin inhaler not where it should have been. Yet when he’d left to go to Sandy Point, almost everything had been in its place. In the final weeks before his death he had also met with an unusually large number of old friends and acquaintances—mostly coincidental meetings, such as in the supermarket or at various functions. Then there was the email to us, and other subtle things—it was as if he had been unconsciously preparing to sign off.
Out in the garden I joined Dad’s brother Kim, who had been liaising with the police, and learned something that Mum and the others had been keeping from me. “First, Tim, I want you to know that there was little chance for your Dad—it was a head-on collision,” he told me. “People went to his aid within a few minutes, but he was trapped in the driver’s seat and unconscious.”
He took a deep breath.
“But not long after the crash, your dad’s car started burning. They tried to get him out, but it was impossible. I am still trying to get details from the police. They think that someone checked for his pulse before the fire and he didn’t have one, but we don’t know. Only the autopsy will give us the answer.”
The accident had been a tragedy for those in the other car as well. One woman had died and her husband had been airlifted to the hospital. Their granddaughter, who had Down syndrome, had been in the front seat and had survived, but with possible spinal injuries. No one yet knew how the accident had happened.
I passed out for some time in the afternoon and woke feeling groggy and disoriented. The house was strangely empty, and I stumbled down the hallway into the living room. Surely if I sat there long enough, something would break the silence—perhaps Dad would talk to me, or walk through the door.
As I closed my eyes I could hear the screen door open outside. In my mind I heard his work bags land on the floor and his shoes come off, but when I opened my eyes and looked up it was Mum. She had come running to hold me.
Eleven days of life without Dad.
The house was filled with guests, and we spent much of our time organizing the funeral. Unlike out on the steppe, in our Western world dying was complicated. Dad’s body couldn’t be released until the autopsy was finished, and until the death certificate arrived Mum’s bank accounts were partially frozen. We were not allowed to see Dad.
Finally, though, we had chosen a coffin, Dad had been returned, and on the eve of the funeral I lay awake hearing nothing but the odd creak of a bed and the rustle of possums on the roof. We had several large specimens living up there; they were nocturnal animals, and slept in the attic during the day, but at this time of night you could hear them venturing out for food.
I was still suffering jet lag, but more than that I craved the calm of night, which held me close to Dad. I knew that when daybreak came it would bring with it terror, sobbing, guests, and frantic preparations. I’d come to think of my nightly vigil as a duty.
The darkness moved slowly until a cack cack cack from a magpie sounded, then the warbling of a hatchling. An ever so pale light cracked through the fronds of the giant cypress trees, and a thrush hopped by the window—so innocent and unaware that the world had stopped.
I couldn’t lie there any longer.
From the back corner of the wooded yard I gazed out over the paddocks toward the emerald hills of the Strzelecki range. A fox and her cubs appeared, moving stealthily across the dew-laden grass. They were hurrying back to their den before the magic of dawn was eclipsed by the sun.
To the east I fixed my eyes on large eucalypts that stood with their limbs outstretched, silhouetted against the blanket fog. These ancient trees were what Dad loved, so much so that they were somehow inseparable from him. How could they still be here, continuing to exist as if everything remained as it had always been?
Finally I sat on an old cypress stump and watched the sun grow near. For a while it seemed like an even race between it and the mist to reach the horizon, but in the end the mist won, rising like a cloak from the land, embroiled in pinks and reds that glowed brighter and brighter. From the gap between the mist and the horizon, subtle rays of golden light began to feel their way over the land, rendering the dew a million glinting marbles. The deciduous trees around the house behind me lit up with their translucent, wafer-thin spring leaves. Then came the sun, this lifting yellow orb of life, so full of spirit yet indifferent and coldly calculating. It was rising for another day, one of millions and millions of cycles.
Then the sun was gone, hidden behind the fog. The sound of a crow. A breeze. The leaves in the trees beginning to move—they were no longer translucent, but opaque and dull. Everything was returning to the mundane, to the passing of time.
The funeral passed, then the wake, then the memorial service at his university, and gradually the visitors and letters of sympathy slowed to a trickle.
Sometime after Christmas Jon and I decided to board up the holes around the house where the pesky possums were getting inside to sleep in the attic. We did it late at night when they were out looking for food. As dawn broke I was woken by the sound of possums frantically scratching to get back in before the sun exposed them. Their days had begun just like any other, yet they had returned to find that their whole life had changed, and try as they might, there was no way back.
Since receiving the news about Dad, there had only been room to confront his death and what it meant, but as time wore on the journey re-emerged. I received emails that Tigon was well but missing me. The horses, however, had been hastily left at the collective farm, where they were tied up in a barn with dairy cows. I wasn’t sure if the men there had managed to remove their horseshoes, or how often they saw daylight. Fodder was scarce, and it was a big thing to ask strangers to feed three extra horses.
Come February I had to make a decision. If I left it much longer, I might not have horses to return to. But on the other hand, I was the eldest of four children and it didn’t feel right to abandon everyone so soon. And in any case, my Ukrainian visa had expired, and I’d spent the last of my money on a plane ticket home. Underneath, though, I knew that Dad would have wanted me to continue, and I simply couldn’t abandon my animals.
The answer came when I was offered work as the subject of a Discovery Channel promotion film. It was to be filmed over two days in March, and I was to be given a round-trip ticket to Dubai, valid for twelve months, as well as almost $2,000. From Dubai it was a relatively cheap and short plane trip to Kiev.
So on March 14, 2007, four months after arriving in Australia, I was back at Melbourne airport, feeling as if I had left my horses too long but was saying goodbye to Mum and the family too early.
Andrew John Cope, born on December 13, 1950, passed away on November 16, 2006. He was the oldest of five children. The autopsy report eventually determined that there was no sign of smoke inhalation in his throat or lungs; he had died on impact of a broken neck. At the coroner’s hearing it was concluded that Andrew had veered into oncoming traffic. The coroner found that he had most likely fallen asleep at the wheel.
22
TAKING THE REINS
On a brisk spring morning in central Ukraine a small crowd of workers was assembling by the buckled iron gates of Kodyma’s collective farm. I stood with them, a compass strung from my neck and dressed in the patched trousers and faded Russian army hat that I had lived in for the better part of two and a half years but which, at this moment, felt like obj
ects from a former life.
Among those gathered were the many generous people who had looked after my animals during my absence in Australia. Incredibly, for the four and a half months that I had been away the director of the collective had not charged me a cent. I shook his hand and presented him with an Australian oilskin coat. In a gesture recalling the Mongolian tradition of throwing milk to the sky, he then raised three toasts of vodka for a fortuitous journey to Hungary.
It was at that point I hauled myself up onto Taskonir, shouldered my backpack, and, with Tigon choking himself to get moving on the lead in front, felt my journey pulled back into motion.
At first I rode slowly and carefully through the outskirts of town, my body settling back into the saddle, hands and feet feeling their way instinctually around the reins and into the stirrups.
It was early April, the time of morning when the frosted-over furrowed earth in the fields was acquiescing to mud and the pall of smoke from wood fires and coal stoves was beginning to lift. We passed graying timber homes and snow-trampled stretches of pastureland that were yet to spring back after the post-winter thaw. To me, everything about this mash of brown and grays signaled a land at its lowest ebb, and it mirrored the way I felt internally. It wasn’t a pleasant analogy, but one I had grown comfortable with—after all, it wouldn’t have felt right to return to the bloom of spring or the gaiety of summer.
If my state mirrored that of the land, then the condition of the horses was a good metaphor for where my journey was at as a whole. Two weeks earlier I had arrived in Kodyma to find Kok, Taskonir, and Ogonyok in a cavernous cow barn where they had been tied up for the better part of four and a half months. Their muscles had atrophied, their hooves had grown out, and their winter coats were matted with muck. When I saw them, it had sunk in that to reach Hungary would not be a simple a matter of picking up from where I had left off. Though I had already traveled around 8,000 km from Mongolia, the momentum had dissipated, and ahead still loomed over 1,000 km to the Danube River, including a crossing of the high Carpathian Mountains. These initial few weeks would be as much a journey of spiritual and physical recovery as a passage through the landscapes and people of central and western Ukraine.
There remained one last but important moment for pause and reflection before I could truly get moving. Not far beyond Kodyma I turned onto a muddy trail and pulled the horses into a familiar meadow. Winter had preserved the ghostly footprint of my tent from the previous year. I dismounted and lay on the earth. It was the last place that I had slept and woken while Dad was alive.
It was just an insignificant patch of grass and weeds near a railway, but it was also the place where my life had been broken in two—life with a father, and life without. For the past five months I had been dealing only with the latter, and time, like my journey, had effectively stood still.
Beyond this point lay horizons where I had never been while Dad was alive. Without him the road ahead seemed more fraught with dangers than before. My guts twisted at one thought in particular—that somewhere in a village ahead, at some point in time, I would be asked the inevitable question: “Do you have parents?” On the steppe it had been a standard greeting that I found odd and even amusing. I’d answered without thinking.
Before remounting I noticed a solitary dandelion that had blossomed. With it firmly pressed into my breast pocket I moved on.
That night a snowstorm swooped in, and I spent the following day in camp listening to the snow rap against the tent, the rise and fall of Tigon’s chest pressing into my side. When morning came the snow had stopped, and anticipation hung as heavy as the frost. Tigon lay next to me, feigning sleep, with one ear cocked and an eye half open. When I rose, he rose with me, and together we jammed our heads through the tent entrance. The sun was nudging its way into a deep blue sky. Golden fragments of light splintered through the snow-covered grass. There was a stillness that beckoned with the promise of the kind of crisp, calm weather that a horseman could only dream of.
After packing up I rode quietly through empty meadows and woodlands. A couple of hours later I crested a hill overlooking the village of Horodkivka. Cupolas of an Orthodox church reached gracefully above a huddle of timber homes—rather like a priest towering over his flock. As I rode down the hill I met a procession coming up. I pulled over to yield the way.
Leading the march was an elderly man bent forward carrying a heavy wooden cross. His face was a haggard topography of shadowy ruts draining tears from glassy blue eyes. Beyond him women carried the lid of a coffin, followed by a priest, who, with his flowing black robe and beard, seemed to glide rather than walk. Next rumbled an old truck with an open coffin in the back. The deceased was an elderly woman, the skin of her pale, uncovered face lightly warmed by the sun. Two children sat in the back holding her in place as the truck wobbled and rocked its way up the road to the grave.
As I turned to move on, the land ahead seemed touched by the beauty and sorrow of this traditional passage. It felt as if we, too, were passing through the gates into another world.
From Horodkivka I tracked west. I rose to high plains, then dipped into deep, meandering river valleys that flowed southward to the Dniester. Hamlets drew me away from heavier thoughts. Most were nestled on the steep valley sides and on riverbanks, tucked away from the cold wind. They were places far from main roads where the only movement to be seen were dogs running to the end of chains and babushkas bent over scattering seeds in furrowed plots, looking as twisted and knotted as old birch trees. I seldom stopped, registering only the occasional greeting.
In Dakhtaliya an old man yelled, “Hey, sell me your horses.”
In the next village, Netrebivka: “Hey, Gypsy, where are you going?”
On the cobbled, windy streets of Hnatkiv: “What’s this caravan?”
In Stina, a lady pointed in horror at my packhorses: “Hey, stop! You have lost your passengers! They must have fallen off !”
There were so many villages that sometimes these greetings were the only means of making sense of where I’d been and when. Perhaps my lacking clarity of mind was also because I felt withdrawn, unable to engage as normal. I tried to let my mind go blank and allow thoughts and feelings to come without force, relying on the land, the animals, and people to lift me.
The first inkling of a smile surfaced one morning as I lay in the tent. It had been another cold night, and I cautiously opened the tent flap so as not to give myself away. Outside, the horses were making the most of their newfound freedom.
Ogonyok was irrepressible, erupting in fly kicks, shaking his neck, and teasing the others into play fights. Taskonir had his regal reputation to uphold, but Kok was more than happy to join in, rearing on his hind legs and softly biting at Ogonyok’s neck.
As the sun rose, the brittle frost softened and the needling air turned friendly and ambient. Taskonir dropped to the ground with a sigh, then stretched out on his side and closed his eyes. Kok joined him, lying opposite, followed by Ogonyok. Together they lay breathing in the promise of spring. The snow and rain had washed away all traces of their ordeal in the barn, and their bodies rippled and shone with vitality.
It was rare when the horses were so benign, and sensing this, Tigon took the opportunity to get up close and sniff around them. Then, as if it were one of his first days out of prison, he wriggled around on his back, paws punching at the air, chewing lazily on grass. When he was done with that he sprinted circles around camp and cocked his leg on everything in sight. Eventually he lay upside down playing dead—legs in a tangle, tongue hanging slack out of his jaws, and back legs wide apart, proudly displaying his jewels to the sky.
It was to be a charmed day. Not long after setting off, a wiry, little man pulled up in his ancient Lada and surveyed me with astonishment. “What’s this? It’s my dream! I’ve always wanted to travel like a free Cossack!” he exclaimed, grabbing my hand with both of his and shaking like a madman. “You are coming to my village! To Rivne! Follow me!”
; Yanked rather than coaxed from my withdrawn state, I found myself that evening at a long wooden table jammed with burly farmers. “Pork fat is life! Sport is your grave!” they chuckled, slapping their bellies and pouring vodka. “Eat and drink! This isn’t Russia, where they drink a lot and eat little. We eat a lot and drink a lot!” It was the beginning of two days of utter embrace by the villagers of Rivne.
My time in the village was marked by a particularly special visit to the local school. At the school’s entrance the principal—a fiery lady with red permed hair—had ordered the children out into the front yard. There, as she shook my hand and kissed me on the cheek, Tigon proceeded to stick his snout under her dress. Teachers and students alike erupted in hysterics, then descended on Tigon. While tens of pairs of hands reached out to stroke him, he sat like a prince, then surrendered to a lying position, spreading his back legs in an effort to direct scratches to his belly.
When things had settled down I was ushered into a classroom where children with wide, uncorrupted eyes divided their attention between this funny Australian and the dog. I fielded questions for over an hour: “How many kilometres a day do you travel?” “What do you eat?” “Do you have a girlfriend?” “When do you wash?” “Is Tigon a father?” Their questions were simple and the right ones to ask. Unlike adults, who were full of astonishment that I hadn’t been knocked over the head and killed along the way, they saw my adventure in all its simplicity. It reminded me that in truth, before setting off from Mongolia, I had never worried about death, bureaucracy, conflict, drunkards, or robbers. I had wanted to come here out of curiosity, to appeal to the better side of people whoever they were, and live the kind of dream that most forget when they grow up.
I left the school feeling light and unburdened in a way that, after the past few months, I could not remember.