The Joy of High Places

by Miller, Patti

  Then Barney took out a white mask made of a heavy cloth; calico, I think. There were hemmed square holes in it for eyes and mouth and hemmed slits above the ears for his sunglasses, but other than that it covered his whole face and neck. He had made it himself to give protection from wind, cold and sun-burn when he was high in the thin atmosphere. He was good at sewing – when he was a teacher he used to make all the outfits for his classes at school concerts, sewing 60 leotards at a time. He pulled the mask on, and his sunglasses and helmet, and suddenly looked extremely bizarre.

  ‘It scares the kids when I land in their paddocks,’ Barney said.

  ‘It would scare me,’ I said.

  ‘And then I breathe like this,’ he said, doing the long slow Darth Vader breathing. We both laughed. I had somehow thought of Barney as being outside of popular culture, that he wouldn’t know about anything that had happened in films and music in all the decades since we were children.

  ‘How often do you do this?’ I asked.

  ‘Flying? Three or four times a week if the conditions are good.’ He spread part of the wing out. ‘Would you get that corner and spread it for me?’

  ‘Sure. Wow! You really fly that often?’ I knew it would take up most of the day each time he flew, driving to the launch site, flying, landing and having to hitch-hike back unless Jenny or one of his flying mates were handy to pick him up. In all this time, I had not realised how much of his life was centred on flying. Most of his life. I had thought it was something he did every few weeks.

  I ran and spread both corners of the wings then watched, fascinated, as my insect-brother walked forward with his chrysalis dragging behind him, tugging on the C risers and letting the air fill the cells of the wing. It lifted instantly, gracefully, billowing overhead. Barney ran, and I ran to keep up with him. It was a flat playing field, no slope, so he only lifted off a few centimetres, but the wing was tugging at him, making him light, ready to leave the ground behind. The unknowable blue sky was opening up in front of my fresh-winged brother.

  Afterwards he let me try the harness to test its weight and feel the wing behind me. I put on the mask and helmet as well, and became the insect-woman. I could feel my thorax and chrysalis against the back of my legs. One day perhaps I would fly. Not alone – the skills and strength required years of practice – but one day with Barney. It could be possible.

  Barney looked at me questioningly. I smiled and shook my head, just a little. Perhaps I hadn’t said no.

  Later, when we arrived back at the house, he hung the harness on hooks in his shed so the pod formed the seat of a swing. I climbed in, belted up and sat back. I tucked my legs into the pod and stretched luxuriously.

  ‘It’s so comfortable,’ I said. ‘You could read a book while you were flying.’

  ‘Well you could, people do all sorts of things, but you really need to be paying attention.’ And he told me about a hang-glider pilot who had been posting photos on Facebook as he flew and had crashed into the wing of a paragliding friend of Barney’s, and the two had become entangled. Her wing wrapped right around her – ‘she was gift-wrapped’, he said – and they both plummeted towards the ground, still wrapped together. The hang-glider pilot was able to release his small emergency ’chute at the last moment and they had landed in a tree, neither of them badly hurt.

  ‘So, no reading books then,’ I said.

  We went inside as Jenny started to bring the lunch to the table.

  ‘I couldn’t get Patti to come and fly with me,’ said Barney. We all laughed.

  We talked over lunch about our families. Barney and Jenny’s adult children were still all living overseas: in Auckland and Dubai, and one had moved to Chiang Mai, so they didn’t see them very often. I noticed the sideboard behind was covered with photographs of their son and two daughters and their two grandchildren. ‘We take what we can get,’ Jenny said. ‘And we Skype.’

  On the walls there were several large paintings that Barney had done. There was one seascape of rock pools with a sea-eagle flapping in just above the rock platform and another of a field with a mountain in the background, both of them photographically exact. ‘Contemporary realism, I’m told,’ Barney said. He didn’t care about any of that. He painted because he liked solving the technical problems.

  I looked carefully at the seascape. The rendering of water and sand and rocks was precise but instead of a methodical coldness there was an air of peace and wonder at the ordinary existence of things. Even when people don’t know what they are feeling, it comes out in word slips and glances and strokes of paint.

  ‘I take lots of photographs, visit the place I want to paint in different lights, but I paint at home.’ Barney said. ‘I can’t stand for long – the pain comes back – so I don’t paint outside anymore.’

  ‘So the pain is still there. I thought it was okay now.’

  ‘It is most of the time. They told me it would be for the rest of my life, but about a year ago it lifted. I don’t know why. Now it’s just when I stand up for too long, or walk too far.’

  ‘Do you think it changed you? Dealing with pain, I mean? I think it would make me angry.’

  Jenny looked at him. I could see she wanted to say something but didn’t know if she should speak for him. He was still trying to find the words.

  ‘He’s more accepting,’ Jenny said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of other people. Of help from other people. He was very self-reliant. Now he knows that we all need each other. That it’s okay not to be able to do everything. To be vulnerable. And it’s okay for other people not to be capable either.’

  Barney nodded.

  Lunch was nearly over. Jenny brought a bowl of strawberries and cherries and put them in the middle of the table.

  ‘Cherries always remind me of Dad,’ I said. ‘He loved them.’

  Barney looked at me and nodded again. ‘Me too.’ His eyes were warm with remembering our father and – I felt sure – with knowing we had the same picture in our heads. Our mother stewed the cherries and gave them to him in a bowl, sometimes with custard or ice-cream, and he ate them with such pleasure. The whole family sprang into being around our mother and father in the shabby kitchen.

  Barney got up and limped away into one of the spare bed-rooms. I hadn’t noticed before that he limped so badly. He came out with a small painting in his hand.

  ‘This is for you,’ he said. ‘It’s called Reading Glasses.’

  It was an oil painting of a glass of red wine, wire-framed reading glasses and an exact rendition of one of my books sitting on a wooden table. It was the book with a magpie on the cover, about the land we grew up on. The corners of the painted book were turned up as if it had been well read.

  When I arrived back home after the trip north, I made the fact-check corrections Barney had given me. Then I emailed and thanked him for answering all my questions and for Reading Glasses. He sent me a track-log of his latest flight. He said the air had been choppy and his wing had collapsed at one point but he was thousands of feet up and had been able to correct it. He added that he and Jenny were coming down to Sydney in November and asked if we would be back from our latest walk. ‘We’d like to come and visit,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  It’s a couple of months away and I have several hundreds of kilometres to walk before then, but I am looking forward to Barney’s visit. I take a photograph of the map of where I will be walking next, from Port-La-Nouvelle to Foix in south-eastern France, and email it to him. The narrow red line scrawls across shaded mountains and rivers and appears simple until you zoom in close. It looks a lot like Barney’s track-log looping above the landscape, a long script imprinted on the countryside. It looks like it could keep going forever.

  Acknowledgments

  The first and deepest gratitude is owed to my brother, Barney Miller, without whom this book could not have been written. His generosity and thoroughness with my persistent questions have been extraordinary. Thank you B
arney. I hope you will forgive any inaccuracies that may remain. You know I can’t always be trusted with the facts, but this time I have tried.

  Many thanks are due to Delia Falconer, Pamela Freeman and Anthony Reeder, who all said the right things at the right time. Their insights and suggestions kept me from getting lost for too long.

  Thank you also to my agent Clare Forster for her thoughtful comments and support, and to publisher Phillipa McGuinness, editors Paul O’Beirne and Fiona Sim, cover designer Peter Long and all the team at NewSouth for their support and care.

  I want to acknowledge the Anangu and Adnyamathanha people for the cultural knowledge they have so kindly shared in various public forums, online and at tourist sites. Also Rose Chown, now deceased, of the Wiradjuri people, who allowed me to tell a little of her story and of which I’ve used a fragment.

  The ebooks read aloud after walking each day must be acknowledged. Some of them are not mentioned in the text as I have not written about all the long-distance walks I have taken, but they have been companions:

  Bouvier, Nicolas, The Way of the World , Eland Publications Ltd ebook, 2011.

  Joyce, James, Ulysses, Project Gutenberg ebook, 2008.

  Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, CK Moncrieff trans, Project Gutenberg ebook, 2009.

  Rushdie, Salman, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Random House epub, 2012.

  Sebald, WG, The Rings of Saturn, Vintage digital, 2013.

  White, Patrick, Voss, Random House epub, 2012.

  These books have been a much deeper part of the walking day than I have been able to convey. I also acknowledge other books that I’ve mentioned:

  Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2013.

  Gros, Frédéric, A Philosophy of Walking, Verso, London, 2014.

  Jung, Carl, Man and His Symbols, Penguin, London, 1990.

  Wordsworth, William, The Complete Works of William Wordsworth, Delphi Classics, London, 2013.

  And lines from:

  Auden, WH, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Collected Poems, Random House, London, 1976.

  Baxter, Sarah, A History of the World in 500 Walks, Australian Geographic, Sydney, 2016.

  I want to acknowledge the numerous online sources I consulted; in particular:

  ‘All God’s Chillun Had Wings’, Kids Stories, The Moonlit Road, .

  ‘Animals’ (topic), How Stuff Works, .

  Ayers Rock Resort, ‘Travelling to Uluru: Natural environment’, (information on Anangu botany and seasons) .

  Cross Country magazine, .

  Dorey, Fran, ‘Australopithecus Afarensis’, Australian Museum, updated 16 November 2018, .

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, .

  Helvesi, Dennis, ‘David Barish, a developer of the paraglider is dead at 88’, New York Times, 1 January 2010, .

  ‘How Walking Benefits the Brain’, Science News, Science Daily, 24 April 2017, .

  Kunzig, Robert, ‘The Physics of … Walking: Why humans walk like an imperfect pendulum’, Discover, July 2001, .

  ‘Lucy’s Story’, Arizona State University, Institute of Human Origins, .

  National Geographic, .

  NewScientist, .

  Omniglot, .

  Schiller Center for Connective Change, .

  Science Daily, .

  Scottish Natural Heritage, .

  Walking Britain, .

  ‘Walking Upright’, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, .

  Wikipedia for being a useful quick check of the names of birds and flowers and other important details.

  Wong, May, ‘Stanford Study Finds Walking Improves Creativity’, Stanford News, 24 April 2014, .

  Finally I want to thank Anthony Reeder, again, not just for his editorial comments, and not just for reading me the whole of Ulysses – although that alone is enough – but also for his fierce engagement with the endlessly challenging process of writing.