The Joy of High Places

by Miller, Patti

  The next morning Anthony dropped me off at the old tin church 20 kilometres out of town. It had been our local church, but someone lived there now; they had added a chimney and a dried-out garden. A dog started to bark wildly as I got out of the car. I looked down to see a pale green parakeet lying dead on the yellowing grass. Not great omens, but I shrugged them off; the world was not always here to conduct a personal conversation with me.

  ‘Got enough water?’ asked Anthony.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘See you later. Thanks.’ I strapped my backpack on and tightened my laces. I just wanted to start walking. Down from the church, along Bennett’s lane to the farm and across the paddocks to the old house, then up to Baron Rock. It was under 11 kilometres there and back, just a morning’s walk.

  ‘Shut up, Millie,’ someone yelled at the barking dog. I turned away from the church and walked down to Bennett’s lane and around the corner past the old mailbox lying on its side on the ground. There was white lettering, D Miller and JO Harris, still visible through the rust; the names of my father and the farmer who lived on the other side of the lane.

  It was a bright autumn day, a dome of blue sky overhead; the early morning air was cool. The lane was still dirt, the way it always had been; the same gum trees gathered here and there along the side of it. The slight rise towards Jim Harris’ gate, the hard sandy ground underfoot, the sound of cattle mooing uneasily, the small knobs of lucerne in the reddish-brown dry paddocks unfolded all at once into a papery time-tunnel back to the 11-year-old girl walking home from school. Chasing Jenny Bennett with a pig’s skull; stalking along in a storm of tears about some hurt I don’t recall; collecting shot-gun cartridges at a clay-pigeon shoot on Jim Harris’ farm. Flies buzzed around my face and I brushed them away with a continual automatic movement of my hand.

  A fox ran out into the lane, thin and lithe, and stopped short. We looked at each other, astonished, then he turned and leapt back over the fence and up the bank of a dried-out dam. Then I was at the top of the last hill, where we often stopped as kids to wait for each other. At the bottom was the gate and the track down to the house. From here I could see Baron Rock against the horizon and, in the middle distance, a clump of gum trees in front of the small smudge of the farmhouse. The paddocks were bare and dry.

  I’m home, I thought. Wherever I walk, whatever I do, this is home.

  I walked down the hill eagerly, but the gate was no longer there. The fence line running up to it had been shifted, making the layout of the paddocks different, not quite unrecognisable, but disorientating. I climbed over the fence and tried to find the track I had walked on every school morning of childhood. It had disappeared, not even any rutted tyre tracks, but I knew where it was in the soles of my feet. I threaded back and forth across the unfamiliar fence line, following the track up from the creek, which was nothing more than a dry gully, and then passed where the sheep-yards had been. A large mob of sheep milled and eyed me suspiciously just down the slope towards the creek.

  There was the house.

  I was ready for it. I had seen it a decade before and knew it had been abandoned. Left to the work of weather and time. It was already becoming derelict then – the light blue paint patchy and worn, and the roof rusty – but it had been intact. Now the roof was missing from the back of the house; the outside toilet had a roof but no walls, the toilet pedestal sat white and foolish, open to the world; the mud-hut that had housed the electrical generator had finally dissolved and sunk and was now just a tin roof on a mound of clay. The kitchen chimney had fallen down into a tumble of bricks; one of the water tanks had slid off its stand; sheets of corrugated iron covered what had been the kitchen window. I peered through broken boards into the roofless kitchen and lounge room, cluttered with bits of tin and fibro and boards. How small they were! How could ten people have gathered in these poky rooms? This was where we had all learned to walk on the lino floors, done our homework, argued about who was to do the washing-up. Around the front of the house, the veranda and its roof had slipped off, leaving the walls exposed, ashamed. I wasn’t ready for it.

  I walked around what had been a garden of sorts at the side and front of the house. The cape honeysuckle which, in those days, had red flowers whose nectar we kids used to suck like strange wingless honeyeater birds, still grew as a harsh stalky bush; and one of the row of feathery Athel trees that Mrs Kelly had given our mother one year had survived. And the large pep-pertree, blown over in a freak tornado when I was ten, was still alive, lying on its side. And the kurrajong tree. Kurrajongs always survive. But no grass or bushes grew in the hard ground littered with sheep poo.

  I long to be able to say how all this affected me; the immensity of the past living inside me, threatening to expand and over-flow, and the dissolving melancholy of physical decay, but I can only write down what I saw.

  I hadn’t meant to go into the house because it looked dangerous with sharp tin and rotting boards, but I started clambering over the fallen veranda beams and corrugated iron. I wanted to see my bedroom, the one I had shared with Mary. And my parents’ room, which opened off ours. And my brothers’ sleep-out. The front door was jammed shut but there was a doorway-sized hole into my parents’ room, so I stepped carefully in. It was cluttered with an old kitchen dresser, a television, boxes of books, but what knocked the breath out of me was that it still had the green walls and purple ceiling my mother had chosen in the sixties. I hadn’t realised the wild colours of those years had reached all the way out to the west and into my mother’s quiet, sardonic mind.

  I looked in a box of books, all of them hardcovers from over 50 years ago, but I didn’t recognise any of them as ours. I looked through into my room. There were chairs by the old fireplace, again not ours, but there was a broken-doored wardrobe that looked familiar, perhaps from the boys’ sleep-out, and weirdly, an orange life-jacket. The mantelpiece over the fireplace had disappeared, the floor was covered in ash and dirt so thick the lino wasn’t visible, and the grey slab walls were dirty with cobwebs and dust. I looked up at the board ceiling and thought to count the boards. No, I don’t have to; I know there are 29 and a half.

  I walked into the passageway, always dark, and the boys’ sleep-out, where Barney had designed his wooden wings – and kept his end of the room tidy. I thought of him flying over the farm in his dreams, all of us in the shabby house, flying over the farm in the night.

  I walked outside and had a swig of water in the shade of the kurrajong. Sheep and lambs baa-ed, a crow cawed, magpies carolled in their absurdly fresh way: the orchestra of my childhood. I wasn’t sure what to do. I had intended to walk to Baron Rock – the farmhouse had not been a destination, just a place I was passing by – but seeing it had left me in a vast and tender silence. The past is weighty when it arrives with its full armoury of memory. I didn’t want to move.

  No, keep walking, I told myself. This is not about walking back into childhood, the place of the eternal present. It’s a trap. I am being waylaid by the powerful constructions of the past and they are sapping my energy. Just keep walking.

  It was two kilometres to the Rock, past the shearing shed and the collapsed wheat shed, and then over the fence into Owen John’s property. Here there was long yellowing wire grass and umbrella and kangaroo and spear grass, a creamy apron dotted with ewes and lambs.

  I circled around the sheep as promised, but they still watched me anxiously from the edge of the gully ahead, then scattered away. In the gully I saw a new lamb, which, unaccountably, had its head torn off, and I felt afraid. I had lived for 18 years on the farm and walked all over it and across other farms and had never seen anything like this. Its head was completely gone, just the bloody neck left, although the rest of the body was unmarked. It could have been a wild animal, like the Beast of Gévaudan, I thought, and realised how easily my mind leapt to the fantastical, how little it took to abandon rationality. It must have been a fox.

  The Rock loomed above me and then I climbed over the fence and was
in the shade of the gum trees, kurrajongs and she-oaks around its base. The ground rose steeply and was scattered with boulders, grey-green with lichen, in front of a sheer rock wall. I headed towards the side where the outcrop lengthened into the shape of a crouching animal. I could climb up somewhere along its spine. The ground was dry with only eaten-down knobs of whitened grass clinging here and there among the rocks. A flock of light green parakeets rose, squawking at the disturbance in their domain, and then, as I scrambled over a fallen branch, a kangaroo leapt away in front of me. I looked down and saw a kangaroo path along the side of the slope, a soft, paddled path, not hard and narrow like sheep tracks.

  I followed a track under the eucalypts, heading higher all the time until it reached the shoulder of the crouching animal. We started further back as kids, at the back haunches where the rock sank back into the earth, but I reckoned I could climb it easily here. I stopped for a moment and had some more water. The morning had warmed up and I was hot and sweaty already.

  I reached up, held on to the rock and hauled myself up. It was steep, but there were plenty of ledges and crevices to hold onto, so that it was more of a scramble than a climb. I reached the rock-pool plateau that I knew was at the top of the shoulder. The rock pools were dried out, as I thought they would be; the moss was blackened with the long summer heat and the grey-green lichens were shrivelled. I knew this place. Its geography was in my head, but more than that, each shift in the surface of the rock underfoot and the grassy smell of the air. I breathed it in.

  I continued up along the spine, through the tussocky grasses and small she-oaks clinging onto the rock face. At the summit was a deep crevice with a rock jammed in it to step over before reaching the indented seat formed in the boulder at the very top. There it was, just as I remembered. I slipped off my backpack and sat in the rock seat and let its cool arms enfold me.

  It was silent. I had never been here alone before. A small fleet of swallows circled nearby, but no eagles or hawks. I wondered if this was where all our flying dreams were born. Perhaps this was where Barney first realised that he had to be able to fly, where his bird-soul started to form.

  I had intended to take some notes as I sat there but it seemed superfluous. I’ve thought about, written about, this rocky outcrop so many times, I have wondered if I may have invented it for my own use, my own inner temple to hang my soul in, but I have asked my brothers and sisters, and they all feel the same. It’s enough that it is there, it doesn’t need to be owned. I unpacked my small picnic instead and sat for a while, eating an apple and looking out at the dry landscape.

  I stayed for half an hour then headed back down the spine. As I came off the rock and back onto the steep slope, I saw a mob of four kangaroos bound away out of the bush at the base and head towards the west of the Rock. I climbed back over the fence and down towards the gully and home. I remembered I had not greeted the Rock as I arrived so I turned around to yell goodbye, at least.

  It didn’t answer and, for a moment, I thought, ‘It only speaks to children’. But I knew it was a matter of the right distance, the right angle, so I walked another 20 metres, turned around again and yelled ‘Goodbye’.

  ‘Bye,’ said the Rock, casually. I smiled like a child and turned round and kept on walking.

  Chrysalis

  I had been worried about showing Barney the story of how he learned to walk again. It was drawn from the notes he sent me, his answers to my questions, but it still felt as if I had invaded him in some way. I remembered when he was at dinner at my place one day, volunteering some details about flying, how conscious I was of trying to hide my greedy eyes, my greedy mouth. There’s always the anxiety that our hungry bloody teeth are showing as we eat other people’s stories. But, truthfully, I also worried it might be too confronting for him and that he would realise he didn’t want to have his world exposed in that way. Fair enough, why would you? I didn’t tell him my constant fear that he might refuse to tell me anything else, but I did warn him that it might be traumatic to read.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘It’s long enough ago now. It won’t be a problem. I think I’ll be fine.’

  I still felt doubtful. I know what happens when things are written down. But I was going up the north coast to visit him in Murwillumbah in a couple of weeks and I couldn’t hide it from him any longer. I sent the stories of falling and walking to him, along with the ones about him flying again. I thought maybe the flying again story would balance it out for him, a kind of anti-dote. I also confessed to my past judgments of him and hoped he would forgive me.

  I waited anxiously for a few days. Barney normally answered the same day, or at least the following day. He had realised that none of it was any of my business, I was sure of it, and he was working out how to tell me. I had been expecting it all along. Perhaps he was planning to ring me to tell me to drop it. I wouldn’t blame him; I wouldn’t want someone else digging around in my life like that.

  Then the email came. ‘Strange though it might seem, my emotional response to your narrative was way stronger than my response to the actual events at the time,’ he wrote.

  I knew it. It was always the way. Memory is more powerful than life, and writing is more powerful than memory. Life would be thin, a transparent shadow, without being remade over and over in songs and poems and stories.

  And then he went on to say that ‘there was no need to be anxious about your remarks about me. I know I’ve always been a bit reserved about my inner thoughts and emotions and I realise that most people who know me only get to see a fairly superficial picture of who I am. I’ve opened up more as a result of the accident and the support shown to me by so many people.’ There was more about his feelings, about how he knew he had operated on a ‘need to know’ basis emotionally, and that people from different parts of his life – flying, teaching, dancing – wouldn’t recognise each other’s version of him. I sat there reading, overwhelmed. I felt as if I were meeting my brother for the first time.

  After a neat paragraph break, he changed topic to describe a flight he’d made the day before from Mt Tambourine, how he had been flying at about 6000 feet and it was freezing. He had been so cold he was shivering uncontrollably and was worried hypothermia could set in, so instead of flying on he set down in a landing paddock nearby. Then he added, he had put a painting in the local Rotary art show and had won first prize.

  Anthony and I drove north to Byron Bay a couple of weeks later. As we drove, I thought about whether I could fly or not. The thought had flitted around the edges of my mind ever since I’d started writing Barney’s story. It didn’t pull me in the same way that walking did, but I knew that was partly fear. I gazed out at the coastal rainforest and paddocks and then sugar cane fields, feeling, as always, that I’d arrived in another country.

  I met up with my younger brother Kevin at the Bangalow markets. He was the comic of the family and told me how much fun he and Barney had laughing together. ‘What a great sense of humour Barney has!’ he said. Again, I felt the small jarring that happens when a new piece of the picture has to fit in. It was another thing I didn’t know about Barney.

  The next afternoon we drove through the rainforest in the Nightcap National Park, pulled on our walking boots and walked the 13 kilometres to Minyon Falls and back. Tall tallowwoods and blackbutts and strangler figs towered around us, making the bright blue winter day dim and greenish. On the last morning of our trip, we drove to Murwillumbah, about an hour north of Byron Bay, to have lunch with Barney and Jenny. I had my notebook in my bag.

  When I stepped out of the car, Barney was waiting across the road on the grassy footpath. We hugged as we met and then, when we got to the top of the steps of his Queenslander, he stopped and smiled. It was a welcoming smile, transforming his thin face, but it also had another quality to it, an extraordinary openness. I smiled in return. We knew each other now.

  Jenny was inside preparing lunch in the pristine kitchen. We greeted her and then Barney announced he was goi
ng down to the park to show me how the paraglider worked. I realised when we got there it was the same park he had been practising in for months before he flew again. He hauled out the paraglider backpack and asked me to carry it so that I could feel its weight.

  ‘How heavy is it?’ I asked as I shrugged it on.

  He grinned as I staggered a bit under the weight of it. I was used to carrying no more than six kilos, even on the longest walks.

  ‘When I have the water and all the gear in it, it’s around 22 kilos, but it’s not that much at the moment.’

  I carried it over to the centre of the park – it was a playing field, but there was no-one else about – and put it down. Barney pulled the wing and the harness out and lay them on the grass, a complicated mess of strings looking as if it would take hours to untangle. He put the harness on his back, clipped up the various belts and methodically attached carabiners just as he had described in his careful explanations.

  What he had not told me was the strange effect of the pod of the harness dangling behind him, as if it were part of his body. It was attached to one foot with a loop so that when he flew he could swing it up and put both his legs in it, but at the moment, the pod hung behind him and dragged a little on the ground, like the thorax of a giant insect, so that he looked like a cicada, halfway out of its nymph shell or a butterfly almost out of its chrysalis. He moved about, concentrating on clipping the carabiners and tossing the wing expertly to untangle the risers, unconscious of his metamorphosis into a large flying creature.

  ‘I told you about the eagle attacking me, didn’t I? See where it tore holes,’ he said, holding up the leading edge of the wing. The sets of four holes where the talons had pierced the fabric were neatly patched. I could see the eagle flapping and screeching, attacking the intruder in its territory. It could easily have collapsed his wing or mauled his face.