The Joy of High Places

by Miller, Patti

  In the middle of another forest a text arrived from my younger son, the one who gave us the 500 Walks book, with a video of his one-year-old daughter taking her first steps, and I watched it over and over. I couldn’t stop smiling at the delight and pride shining in her face as she walked upright from the kitchen and across the hall and then sat down, overcome with her accomplishment. Today she had stood upright and headed out across the world for the very first time, staggering a little, but pleased that she had joined the two-legged ones.

  From Escaladieu to Bagnères-de-Bigorre and from there to Ourdis-Cotdousson there were several steep climbs, one of them over 1100 metres. Each time, there was a resistance to the effort required, the stretch of calf and thigh muscles, facing back down the mountain to stretch muscles the other way, clambering across streams on bridges made of fallen trees, stops for water, scrambling over rocks, sure-footed, sweating in the autumn heat, then finally reaching the top. The joy of high places sang through my body. I was a winged creature. There in front of us was the astonishing beauty of the Pyrénées, the peaks ranging back into infinity in patterns of light and shadow, and I felt the physical pleasure of a body extended and a kind of pride in having endured.

  I’ve been trying to remember the details of the sensation at the top of mountains, but they slip away and all I have are the brief notes I took in the evenings. Then I wonder why I want to re-create the joy of high places, or in fact any of the experience of walking. It can never be what actually happened, no matter how many details I recall. When it happens, it’s in the body, the muscles and joints and cells; and in the brain, the thousands of neural pathways firing with electricity, somehow constructing the shock of beauty and pleasure along with a self who experiences it all. Then there is a feeling of lightness filling the chest cavity and a joyful sensation floods through the cells of the body. I know people who are religious call this a spiritual experience, but I think it’s human. It ought to be enough that it happens.

  On the nineteenth day we walked into Lourdes. The journey took longer than expected as we both missed a GR sign. I don’t know why Anthony missed it, but I was gazing southwards, to the left of the track, trying to imprint the Pyrénées in my memory. I had seen them many times by now, rising as I climbed upwards, and disappearing as I descended into the valleys, but this time I was traversing the side of a hill that gave a balcony view of the serried ranges, dreaming back in shades of blue. It was photo-graphically perfect, the exact image of mountainous beauty I had seen in books as a child, the pleasure of perfect verisimilitude, but there was a physical sensation that I don’t think any representation could convey. There was a startling clarity and then a sense of being in this landscape, of being an element in it. I was not apart from it, an observer looking at a view, but immersed in it, part of it. I came to the end of the balcony road, and realised I hadn’t seen a sign since I didn’t know when. Neither had Anthony.

  We decided to walk onwards down the hill towards a village – the impulse is always to go forward – but no signs appeared. Neither of us were sure where we were so the guidebook instructions didn’t help. We finally faced the fact that we had to go back up the hill, back along the road of astounding views, this time looking for signs instead of beauty.

  We clambered up a long hill and along a ridge for a few kilometres, then scrambled down the long slate-covered slope of the Pic du Jer, through prickly bushes, until we reached the city where the Mother of God had appeared in a small cave on a rocky hillside.

  In Lourdes in 1858, Bernadette, a pretty, dark-eyed teenage girl came home from gathering firewood and said she had seen a ‘a small maiden’ who spoke to her in a cave. She appeared several times, then, Bernadette said, she declared herself to be Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, the Mother of God. This was when she told Bernadette to dig in the ground at a certain spot where the spring with healing properties bubbled up. At first the young girl was ridiculed, but when miraculous cures were reported she was believed, not just by the townspeople, but by the officials of the Church; and the pilgrims began arriving. Even now, in the twenty-first century, over five million people visit the shrine every year.

  Who knows what Bernadette saw, or what was happening in her mind, but this was a familiar story for me, a familiar place with familiar furnishings: statues of saints, rosary beads, candles, holy water; objects which were perfectly normal in my childhood in the scrub on the other side of the world. I felt a fond detachment looking at it all. I was an unbeliever, but also recognised that I felt at home.

  I walked up to the grotto in the valley of the Gave de Pau River, surrounded by three high peaks, the slopes on three sides creating a feeling of enclosure and protection. It had been raining the morning after we arrived, but now it was clearing and a few others had ventured out into the damp grey afternoon. A queue had formed at the grotto, moving slowly and peacefully into the dimness and coming out the other side. Above the grotto was a veiled statue of the Virgin Mary. I joined the queue while Anthony waited.

  As I entered the cave opening, the young, dark-haired, olive-skinned man in front of me placed his palm on the rock, and then I saw that everyone else was doing the same. In fact, the rock had been worn as smooth and shiny as marble from millions of hands doing the same for more than 150 years. The touching of holy places was not part of the Irish Catholicism I grew up with, but I put my hand out too, laid my palm flat on the rock. None of it, the prayers and candles and the Virgin Mary, were part of my story any more, but I understood this, the laying of hands on ancient cave walls. Touching the earth was like cupping a child’s cheek, or holding one of my stones; for a moment I was at one. The overhanging wall was slightly warm, oiled and darkened by sweat, the roughness of the rock worn smooth.

  I thought about Barney and how, even in the depths of pain, he had not resorted to our childhood faith or in belief in miracles of any kind. He used reason, trained his mind. I hadn’t even realised he was in pain most of the time until one evening when I was having dinner in Byron Bay with him and Jenny. It was a noisy, busy cafe in the main street with windows opened to the buskers playing outside. Barney sat quietly like he always did, not saying a lot, while Jenny told me about their trip to Europe. Barney said he couldn’t walk far when they were sight-seeing because of the pain. I was surprised. It was a couple of years since the accident and he hadn’t talked about pain for a long time.

  ‘Are you still in pain sometimes?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m always in pain,’ he said. It sounds melodramatic but it was the most matter-of-fact statement you could imagine. The fact that there was no asking for sympathy or any sense of drama in his tone was just as shocking as the fact that I had been totally unaware of his pain.

  ‘What do you do about it? How do you manage?’ My ignorance made me uncomfortable.

  ‘I concentrate on the parts of my body that are not hurting. Early on, that was only my hands. Or that was what it seemed. It was hard to tell where the pain was coming from.’

  ‘So it was, is, all over your body?’

  ‘Not now. It’s mostly just my feet and legs now. Before, it was everything from mid-torso down. In the first few days there was this weird 360-degree sphere of pain around my legs. It was like my brain didn’t know where my legs were because of the damaged nerves, so it gave the range of every possible place my legs could be in pain.’

  I don’t think I had ever been so aware of how much of other people’s experience escapes me. Why hadn’t I noticed something as vast as a ‘sphere of pain’, or at least its aftermath? I had read his silences for far too long as lack of interest, getting his story entirely wrong.

  In Lourdes I walked around the grassy valley outside the grotto, and along the river, looking at the stands of candles, the flickering flames and the twisted forms of melted wax. Touching earth, watching fire. I thought about my father and how much he wanted to believe in God in His heaven; to know, with his whole heart, that He was there. The air was fresh and cool, the sun had
broken through and calm enveloped the valley. For me the earth was enough.

  It was still cloudy but not raining next morning, the beginning of the fourth week of walking. The first signpost said Grotte du Loup, the cave of the wolf, and the path led along the Gave du Pau through a Pyrénéen oak forest. I’d read there were a few wolves in the eastern Pyrénées now, and once on that day I did see a set of paw-prints in the mud that were much bigger than any dog-print I’d ever seen, but it wasn’t likely to have been a wolf that far west. I thought about my horse-companion and how she would have reared up in terror if she’d seen one. Her hoofprints continued on steadily, now on a path that was veering away from the mountains and was not quite as steep and rocky. In the woods, the forestry track was knee-deep in sticky clay-mud, churned in places to a metre deep by heavy logging trucks and tractors. I struggled, clambering along the edges of the quagmire for nearly a kilometre, trying not to fall in. Afterwards, in the ‘cow alleys’ between fields, wet green cow shit mixed with the mud. Mud spattered up my trouser legs as far as the thighs and then onto my face as I swung my poles around after heaving them forcibly out of the wet clay.

  The next day when the sun came out it was hot whenever there was no shade, but the mud continued. By the following morning, the choice of clothes was muddy or muddier, but it didn’t matter. I remember standing in a dappled clearing – I had stopped for a coffee from the thermos and then a pee behind a log and I was ready to go again. It was day 24 or 25, I had lost count. I stood with both poles in one hand, dried mud pale on the bottom of my pants. I looked at my arms and saw on each inner arm near the elbow, a new muscle, or at least one that hadn’t ever appeared before. Every muscle felt hard and working the way it should, there was a lithe sway to my body, the sweat had dried on my skin; I could walk forever; I could ask for what I needed – water, food, directions – and someone would give them to me. I felt pleasure in my dirtiness and in my unbrushed red hair, and in not needing anything else. I would go where I wanted, when I wanted. I would look after myself and other people would offer me whatever leftovers they could. Feral, I thought, a wild creature gone bush.

  ‘I do know how to walk,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anthony. ‘It takes a while.’

  The path wound on easily and allowed the mind-floating that comes on long walks when you don’t have to concentrate on keeping upright. It can’t be called thinking; it’s not that distinct and probably is nearer to dreaming. The French philosopher Frédéric Gros said, ‘There is a moment when you walk several hours that you are only a body walking. Only that. You are nobody. You have no future. You are only a body walking.’

  I remembered the question on the boulders on the Lairig Ghru walk. ‘Why are you out here?’ If such things were said aloud, and if I’d had a surer footing on the boulders at the time, that’s what I might have said to the three young men when they asked what I was doing out here. I am only a body walking.

  I suspect it is the same for Barney. That when he flies, he is only a body flying. And even though flying is only possible because of modern aerodynamic physics and technology, it seems more primal than walking, more fundamental. The dreams of sleeping children flying through the sky above farms and towns and oceans – does every human have such dreams? – tells me the longing is not constructed, it is seeded deep within us. Under all our wars and cruelties, inequalities and pettiness, it would seem there is the longing to fly, to be at one with the elements. My brother is in the sky with his eagle eyes, finding the thermals and cloud-streets and letting the wind stream through his wings.

  I thought about people helping us along the way. Giving directions, filling our water bottles and thermos. Making us meals, giving us shelter. We had relied on them, especially for water. Every day we had to depend on strangers. We had become vulnerable. And then I understood that vulnerability connected us to others and saw for the first time that making myself independent, self-reliant, ‘strong’, actually distanced me from others. Why had I spent so much time doing it? Vulnerability is our shared condition.

  The path led out of the forest, through meadows of wet grass and then open fields of stripped sunflowers and then, on the way to Oloron-Sainte-Marie, I thought about writing. Mostly I thought about what is selected to write about, and what is left out; the usual impossibility of including every thing, every moment, the multiplicity of the texture of being. I want to put the whole world on the page, all the sights and sounds I’ve left out of my notebook: a bull in a meadow regarding us with solemn disinterest; the church bells that rang every half hour through the night, keeping me awake; the palest salty yellow of sheep’s cheese; the hot air balloon that rose outside the early morning window in Escaladieu; the laundromat day in Lourdes; listening to Janis Joplin in a cafe one night with my 16-year-old heart stretching beyond itself; a spider’s web with dew jewels glittering on it; a snarling dog just as we came out of a beech forest, the low terrifying sound of it and the red-black of its inside lip.

  Do I need to say everything? James Joyce said, ‘Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incomprehensible aeon of the Gods’. Maybe just one thing, any object, is enough.

  However much truth is told, most of it is left out. There’s just not enough time to tell it all; how can anyone ever say what happened, even in one day? Even in one minute. I could start a list in my head: bootlaces need tightening, my palms are sweaty on the walking poles, there is mint and yarrow all along the road, Anthony is 50 metres ahead of me, one hip is sore, the path is heading upwards into a cool birch forest, a hawk circles, an image of my brother chatting to eagles flits into my head, I’m hungry, there’s a cool breeze on my face. And, because I’m thinking about all of it, mirrors reflecting to infinity form in my mind. I know that when I write I am trying to do something impossible. Sometimes that thought hurts the inside of my ribs, but today it doesn’t matter too much.

  The walking is not difficult now, although there are steep hills to climb. There are two or three days to go, to L’Hôpital-Saint-Blaise and then to Mauléon-Licharre, and maybe further if there’s time and if knee and hip joints hold up. I am not sure which day it will finish, but I know for certain I will be sad for days afterwards. Whenever I finish, however far I walk, I know it will feel as if I must keep walking. I keep believing that one day, one day, I will start to walk and continue walking until the end of my life. But today the sun is shining and I’ve reached a birch wood and there are drifts of leaves underfoot. I start singing. I’m not much of a singer, but I was in a choir once, so I sing every fragment of every song I can remember. I walk and sing for hours.

  A short walk home

  Suntop Church to Baron Rock, Wellington, NSW

  I let my brothers and sisters know I was going up to the farm and Baron Rock. It’s something each of us does every now and then, a return to our country. It’s not owned by anyone in the family anymore, hasn’t been for more than 40 years, but it’s still ours in heart and memory, which meant I didn’t like having to ask to walk on it. Why should I have to ask to walk through my own heart? It’s Wiradjuri land by a much longer story than mine, but I was born there and took my first steps on that soil and all my memories have that earth underneath them and that sky above them.

  But I rang Robert Anderson, who was five years old the last time I saw him, and asked him if I could walk on Marylands, the old farm. I explained I was Don Miller’s daughter. ‘No worries,’ he said.

  Then I rang Owen Johns who owns Baron Rock, to ask him if I could walk across his back paddocks to the Rock.

  ‘I’ve got some ewes lambing in the back paddock,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be careful of them,’ I said. There was a short silence. Even when I explained I’d grown up there, he sounded a bit puzzled.

  ‘It’s pretty dry and bare there at the moment.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It was a drought most of my childhood. I’m used to it.’

  I agreed to send him a text when I arr
ived, just so he would know I was there.

  Anthony drove up to Wellington with me the night before and we went to the Lion of Waterloo for a drink. It’s the oldest pub in Wellington, built in 1842, about the time my ancestors first arrived there. The last time I had been to the Lion was for the wake after my mother’s funeral five years before and the pub had been packed with her descendants and their families; eight children, about 25 grandchildren and countless great-grandchildren. The winter night had vibrated with sadness and lost children. Tonight it was full of footballers happily celebrating their afternoon game with their families and supporters; young mothers carried babies and kids ran up and down on the bricked veranda dodging the drinkers spilling out the door.

  Anthony read aloud, but quietly, from Patrick White’s Voss and I leaned close to hear. We had been reading it every evening for weeks – he read, I listened – trudging through the outback with the German explorer. Tonight the chapter wasn’t about Voss’ great and hopeless walk, but the story of the birth of the baby, Mercy, not far from where we live in Sydney now. I sat there in the noise of sporting victory, my eyes filling with tears at the birth of a fictional baby.