Icarus

I’ve been reading the information Barney has sent me. There are dates and times, longitude and latitude, figures, technical terms, photographs. Every time I ask a simple question requiring a yes or no answer, I receive at least a page of notes. They make me smile – they are so well ordered compared to my messy pile of notebooks. Some things don’t change; we will always go about things differently. Still, the facts in his story matter. I can’t just draw a smudgy impressionistic line and let that stand for what happened to him. Tracing his journey on the map requires precision; it’s a disciplined cartographer’s job, I can see that. What is needed is a transcription of all the detail, exactly as recorded, onto a sky-map. I don’t have a template for it because there are no permanent sky-maps, only maps of barometric pressure that change every day, so it will have to be a transient map that applies to only one day. The day he fell.

The day that Barney fell out of the sky, 22 September 2011, he took off from Beechmont hill in southern Queensland, at 28°7’3” South, 153°12’7” East. I haven’t been there, but I can visualise the launch site because Barney painted one of his accurate pictures of it, photographed the painting and emailed it to me. It was an oil painting – he likes working in oil because of its ability to represent lifelike textures – showing a grassy slope curving gently down at first, then more steeply into a basin with a stand of eucalypts on the right, more cleared paddocks below and a view out to rugged, bush-covered mountains. He painted three paragliders into the scene; the closest one is red with a black and white zigzag. The painting is neat and precise, a record rather than an interpretation.

It was a sunny, mostly blue-sky day with a few fluffy cumulus clouds. He had checked the meteorological report online as usual, noting barometric pressures and wind speeds in particular, and checked the weather station at Nerang, and the rain radar and the Doppler wind radar at nearby Mt Stapylton, and there was nothing concerning to note. Visibility was good; the visual flight rules mean you have to be able to see at least five kilometres to launch. The expected maximum temperature was 23 degrees and no rainfall was forecast. There had been a fall of 14 millimetres nearly two weeks before, which meant the countryside was soft with new grass – this is an important detail to note. He had checked the gliding forecast site for buoyancy/ shear ratio of wind, and thermal strength and range of gust strength before he left home and now that he was here he could feel the light south-east breeze, under 15 km/h, coming up the hill towards the launch site – a necessary condition as air needs to be flowing uphill to launch successfully.

He had dropped Jenny off at Brisbane airport on his way to Beechmont. She was flying out to Adelaide to visit her elderly father for a few days. Their three adult children were spread around the world, in Auckland, Budapest and Dubai, all of them enjoying adventurous lives, none of them concerned about their 61-year-old father leaping off into the sky that day.

He had been flying for six years by then and was confident in his skills and in his equipment, his red Nova Mentor 2 with its black and white zigzag pattern. He had methodically checked the canopy for tears, the lines (fine ropes) and risers (webbing straps) for tangles, and the carabiners (clips attaching risers to the harness) and the altimeter-variometer (which indicates height and rate of rise or fall) to make sure all was well. He had gained a reputation for being so thorough and knowledgeable about the technical aspects of flying, and about weather conditions in particular, that other flyers rang him to find out what was forecast rather than check the Bureau of Meteorology site themselves.

He sat on the hillside with about a dozen flying friends, mostly men and a couple of women, enjoying the warmth of the early spring sun and the companionship of being able to exchange stories about cloud-suck, thermal triggers , B-line stall , kiting , anti-G chutes and ridge-soaring with people who knew what he was talking about. They called sitting on the hill para-waiting, which makes me smile again. Their waiting was not like other people’s amorphous waiting; it was formed into a specific shape around their joy and had its own pleasure.

Sitting with them gave him an easy companionship he had never known before. I didn’t see him much in his twenties or thirties, but he didn’t seem to have any close friends or even mates to hang out with at the pub. In fact, he never went to the pub. He and Jenny married young and he didn’t seem to need anyone else; there still seemed to be a desire to stay apart from the general foolishness of human beings. When his children were young, he didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmases because such celebrations weren’t rational. It put a bit of a damper on ordinary conversational exchange at the times of year families might be expected to be in contact. Conversation at any time was awkward. I used to think it was individualism based on feeling superior, but I’ve since realised it was because he didn’t have anything he wanted to say. He told me lately that he had always felt like a misfit socially, but now that he had found his passion, what he was born for, he could sit and talk about it happily with other flyers for hours. He felt more comfortable on the hillside than at any other time or place in his life.

The breeze was light, the air was warm, but not hot, the windsock lifted gently and the grass rippled a little. A few magpies flew steadily without being buffeted. Several other paragliders had taken off – Jason, Al, Kirsty, Bridgette – and it was now Barney’s turn. There’s a wide launch area at Beechmont, wide enough for six to take off at once, which was useful during competitions, but this Thursday morning was just for pleasure; there was no rush. From his reading of the conditions, he expected to climb to over 4000 feet and then fly for about 50 kilometres, perhaps westwards towards Beaudesert where he knew some good landing spots.

He spent 20 minutes getting ready. He unzipped the harness and wing from the backpack and attached his reserve – a lightweight parachute for emergencies – and instruments to the harness: a flight computer (about the size of a large mobile phone), a 3D GPS, altimeter, variometer, compass, thermal tracker, ground-speed indicator, map, wind speed and direction indicator and flight recorder, a VHF radio, an ordinary magnetic ball compass (in case of being sucked up into a cloud, where a computer screen is hard to read) and the SPOT tracker and emergency beacon. Then, along with his sandwiches, he put the ‘camel pack’ in the storage area of the harness and threaded the tube through to the shoulder strap so that he could drink during the flight.

When Barney described this whole process to me – my mind blurring with the detail – it was suddenly obvious that his technical brain and methodical nature formed the necessary base for all this flying off into blue sky romance. The equipment had to be assessed and used with precise care, every action had to be done in sequence and checked and rechecked, all the information about conditions had to be gathered and understood. If you didn’t, you might leave the ground, but you wouldn’t last long. It wasn’t just a matter of an ignominious tumble; it was life and death. He was willing to face it, but without the slightest trace of recklessness. I had never understood before the clear relationship between rigorous discipline and utter freedom.

I had decided to keep out of Barney’s story, to let him have the stage, as they say, but I have begun to realise I am in it anyway. I’m selecting and reshaping his responses to my relentless questions – and I can’t help reacting as well. I don’t mean to be a Greek chorus, but I keep being astonished by him. His disciplined, methodical nature is so unlike mine – I am always being excited by wonders – and yet I am learning awe from him, a strange emotion buried deep in humans. It’s the same feeling I used to have as a child watching a chick peck its way out of an egg. The perfect smooth surface cracked and something showed through, just a murky bit of feather, or a blobby eye, but once it started, I’d have to keep watching until the end, until the new unsteady creature was in the world. I felt lucky, so lucky, to have been there at the right time, I wasn’t going to keep quiet about it.

Barney continued the process in easy movements. Next he spread the wing out, checking it over and making sure all the lines were clear, then put his harness on loosely and connected the risers by clipping them into the carabiners. Then he bunched up the wing and put it aside with the harness while he put on his helmet and parka and attached his UHF radio to a PTT mic/ speaker system inside his helmet for communicating with other flyers and with his retrieve driver at the end of the flight, and put the radio in his jacket pocket. He already had his hiking boots on – they were heavier than ordinary shoes but they provided stability and ankle support for landing.

Now he was ready to clip in. He put his arms through the shoulder straps and clipped on the T-strap style leg loop, then bent down and looped a bungy under his heel to keep the bottom of the harness in place so he could easily get his feet into it once airborne – a retractable undercarriage! He then did up the ‘fail-safe’ leg loop system as a double insurance against falling out of the harness, and then clipped the chest strap shut. Finally, he put his gloves on, did a radio check to make sure it was working, picked up the wing and carried it across to the launching area.

The wing lay on the grass behind him. One of his flying friends, Drew, helped spread it, and he could feel the slight weight of the harness on his shoulders. He went through a mental checklist of everything he had just done to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He gripped the A risers attached to the leading edge of the wing in his right hand and pulled gently, which opened the leading edge and allowed the breeze to inflate the cells of the wing. He checked the lines to make sure they hadn’t tangled again. The wing lifted as it inflated, until it rose above his head, and then he pulled down on the C risers, attached to the trailing edge, to prevent the wing surging over his head and collapsing in front of him. Getting the timing of the C risers right was one of the first things to master – you looked a bit silly when a wing collapsed on top of you before you had gone anywhere at all.

Flight is dependent on the caprice of the wind, even when everything has been done correctly. If the wind is light and variable, or a wind wafts from the back just as you attempt to launch, the wing will lose air speed, air will flow out of the cells instead of in, and the wing will collapse while you are running downhill at full tilt. There would be no other option except slithering on your bum down the slope to the bomb-out at the bottom of the hill. Today, though, the wind was light to moderate and flowing uphill: nothing to worry about.

Now that the wing was steady over his head, he checked that all the lines were tangle free and all adjusted to the right length. He held the brake handles in each hand under the riser straps, and then released the A and C risers, still holding onto the brakes, turned down the hill and slightly to the right, making sure he didn’t twist the lines. The wing pulled forward and he walked to keep up with it, pulling the brakes a little to stop it surging over his head. Because the wind was light, he ran for a few steps and then the wing lifted him fluidly off the grassy ground, easily and gently, just like in his childhood dreams. Within an impossible moment he was as weightless as an angel.

I look up from his notes. The lift-off! All the training, all the work and attention is for this moment. The split second in which the weight of the world loosens, when gravity lets go, when there is nothing holding you down. After that, there is still work to do, a wing to manage, speed and balance and direction to correct, but that first moment, that’s pure intoxication. The scratch of harness, the heat and weight of boots, they are all gone. You are in another dimension, held up by wings that do not beat, but which keep you afloat without effort.

Barney pushed himself back into his pod harness as soon as he was airborne and slipped his feet into the cocoon, giving him a streamlined and comfortable position. The wing tugged, seeming to want to fly itself as it always did, to have a mind, or desire, of its own. It was swinging light, lazy pendulums; he corrected them by shifting and leaning a little against the swing. It was easy but he still needed to concentrate. Once, a few months earlier, he was caught in a sudden updraft as he took off and shot straight upwards like a skyrocket. That got his adrenalin pumping, he said. Even observing every detail, the invisible caprices of the air were not entirely predictable.

The slope was already metres beneath him, but he could still see blades of feathery spear grass, clover and native grasses, looking deceptively soft and thick. He leaned to the right and the wing dipped and turned towards the basin. The balance of his wing, its pendular stability, came from his body being the central weight of the pendulum, as if his body were the brass knob swinging on the end of a string. It meant the wing would continue to fly straight ahead and level if nothing else interfered; direction could be changed using the left and right brakes or by leaning to the left or right. Pitch, roll and yaw – twisting or oscillating around the vertical axis – were controlled with either the brakes or lean.

The air was turbulent, buffeting the wing and his body sideways and upwards, jerking him around as if he were on a roller coaster. He headed towards the top of the ridge, looking for some thermal lift. He was about 150 feet above the eucalypts, close enough to see the detail of foliage and his friends’ faces, high enough to see out across the ranges, but he wasn’t looking towards them because he needed to concentrate on gaining height. He was aware of the blue haze of the mountains on the periphery of his vision, the light and shadow of peaks and valleys, and below, a smooth green carpet.

This was his country, the part of Australia where he had planned to live for years. His place, the house where he lived with Jenny on the edge of Murwillumbah, looking out over cane fields towards Mt Warning – Wollumbin or ‘cloud-catcher’ to the local Bundjalung people – was 50 kilometres away as the crow flies, as he could fly. It was on the other side of the Springbrook National Park; the road he drove on to the launch area snaked along the Nerang River, a brownish thread he could use as a geo-graphical marker when he flew southwards.

This part of northern NSW and southern Queensland is subtropical, mountainous, wild, but also dotted with farmlands and towns – it is fertile and well-watered, green for most of the year. He felt at home there, felt connected to the calm, unthreatening landscape, although he had also felt he belonged in the dry central west when he was growing up there. He had not imagined or longed for anywhere else until he was an adult. When he told me that, I felt disloyal that even as a child I had dreamed of elsewhere.

The valleys and mountains of Bundjalung country had attracted thousands of hippies looking for a sustainable life in the rainforest in the 1970s, and by the time Barney arrived with Jenny and their three children in the late 1980s, the region was dotted with communities that grew their own everything. Feral living in the bush without modern conveniences didn’t really interest Barney, and the belief systems and practices – Gaia and goddesses and chakras – were as irrational to him as the religion he had rejected as a teenager. It’s obvious from the paintings he did in his spare time – his choice of subjects: fields, houses, river, fences, backed by neat mountains and large skies – that he was drawn to orderly beauty and especially the linking of human and natural order. There was no starkness or wildness in his pictures, but a sure appreciation, almost an imprisonment, of a safe and pleasing world.

Above the earth, it looked different, especially when he was thousands of feet high. Geographic features were easy to see, but mountains and hills seemed flatter and lower from above. He was often surprised to find a landing area quite steep when from higher up it had appeared to be flat. Usually he flew at between 3000 and 7000 feet – flyers measure height in feet rather than metres – and one day he reached 9500 feet in a thermal. He could have gone higher but he wasn’t carrying oxygen – any higher than 10 000 feet and flyers are legally required to be on oxygen. It sounded terrifying to me to be so far above the earth with only a slim arc of nylon holding me up, but he said the higher the better.

‘It’s much safer than being close to the ground – if something goes wrong there is plenty of time to either sort it out, or throw the reserve,’ he said. ‘There’s also more time to find the next thermal and more chance of reaching it if it’s far away. And,’ he added, ‘the view from up there is more spectacular’.

When I pushed him to tell me why he did it, what he really got out of it apart from the great view, at first he gave me evolutionary theory. That is, we are hard-wired to enjoy anything that develops survival skills, giving us an evolutionary edge – mobility, speed, dexterity, problem solving and especially the ability to use the forces of nature to achieve our own purposes. Flying did all of that. Then he’d realised from the look on my face that I wanted something more personal and grinned and said ‘Flying makes me feel good. I mean really, really good!! Happy, excited, stimulated, amazed.’

Afterwards he wrote, trying to explain his experience more precisely:

The feelings of just flying around, turning, swooping, skimming over the trees, floating along under a cumulus cloud, circling with soaring birds, landing softly or taking off from a hillside, are all thrilling physical and emotional sensations. When I lock into the core of a thermal there is a ‘yes!’ feeling and at the top I feel triumphant and then, immediately re-focused on what I need to do next. When the conditions are good, it is also a very liberating feeling to be able to just choose where I want to go and then fly there.

He sent me a photograph of himself as a dot in the sky under a red and white wing. There was blue sky all around him and clouds beneath, then, far below, a farming landscape patterned with cloud shadows and, in the distance, mountains and a far blue horizon. He said he had often thought of painting the view from up there, ‘but to do it justice’, he said, ‘it would have to be painted on the inside of a large sphere and viewed from the inside’.

When he said that, it made me realise how being up there, floating in the sky, gave him the sense of being in a 360-degree reality. When I’ve reached the highest pass walking across mountains, I have gained some sense of that: the great dome of the sky above and the land below. Of course, everyone on the planet is in that reality, but with the solid earth beneath our feet, I suppose we see in horizontal and vertical planes. He was inside the egg of the world, a tiny speck of matter at the beginning of the infinite universe, soaring and circling above the curved earth.

On this day though, he was still only about 200 feet up, trying to climb using the usually reliable thermal triggers along the ridge. He had been circling for a while and it was starting to feel like he wasn’t going anywhere today. He knew from experience it would become fatiguing to keep pulling on the brakes on the turns when the rising air was weak. A series of punchy thermal bullets, narrow columns of rising warm air, lifted him, but then he lost them and flew into a moderate sink of falling cool air. It was hard work and nothing he tried was getting him any further ahead. Flying wasn’t about wandering in a dreamy fashion; it was a focused seeking of invisible paths. Today wasn’t going to be the day he soared above the glorious world chatting to wedge-tailed eagles.

He decided to head back in for a landing on the bomb-out and try again later on. Sometimes, as the afternoon progressed, there were better thermals and cloud-suck – the lift created under clouds by the latent heat of evaporation released during condensation – so it could be worth sitting back on the hill and para-waiting for a while. He turned back and flew towards the bomb-out from the direction of the launch site for a clear approach, away from the stands of gum trees at the bottom. There were still plenty of punchy updrafts, so he was alert for any sudden changes. A sudden strong updraft near landing could collapse the wing and leave him in a very dangerous position.

He slid his legs out of the pod, ready for landing, and made a wide 180-degree turn for his final approach. He scanned the trees and the grass for any signs of unusual movement, especially the sudden flutter of dry leaves and dust on the ground, but the soft green regrowth from the recent rains gave nothing away.

He glided in gently and was in the middle of the landing site, just a few metres above the ground, when he was suddenly shot straight upwards in a violent twisting corkscrew of air. He realised afterwards it was a whirlwind, or dust-devil, but without the tell-tale dust – the short spring grass had hidden the signs. But at that moment there was no thought, only the sensation of his body being spun upwards in a nightmare whirl. The wild twisting upthrust caused a total collapse of the wing and the force of the swiftly rising air was so fierce he kept going upwards, reaching about 40 feet, the height of a four-storey building. He was at the same height as the wing itself as it tried to disentangle and re-open. The lines were slack and the leading edge of the wing was pointing towards the ground as it began to reinflate – and then it collapsed again. There was no time to reopen the wing or use his reserve. From four storeys up, he plummeted, feet first, towards the ground.

‘Just eternal blackness now,’ he thought. It was the only thing in his head, he told me later. Since his teenage rejection of religion, he had refused the comfort of any kind of afterlife, any kind of God. Now, as he faced eternal non-existence, he didn’t change his mind.

As he braced himself for impact, he made one almighty effort and flared, pulled on the brakes of the just-reopening wing, as hard as he could a second before hitting the ground. That last-second flare changed the angle of impact from 90 to 60 degrees – and saved his life.

‘I hit the ground very hard,’ he told me later in an email. Every time I read that comment, I think he deserves some sort of award for understatement. Dropping to the ground from four floors up, I imagine you would hit very hard.

His legs buckled instantly and the bottom of his spine hit the ground with tremendous force. He felt two large bangs, like fire-crackers going off in his back. His first thought was a surprised recognition that he was still alive. No eternal blackness. Then he realised he couldn’t feel or move anything from the waist down and knew immediately that his back was broken. At that moment he was sure he would never walk again.

His injuries, later catalogued, were: a burst fracture of the T12 vertebra with shards damaging spinal nerves; stable fractures of the T2, T4 and S5; a chip off a higher vertebra; two broken ribs; severely bruised and battered feet, ankles and knees; nerve damage in the right hip and leg; and trauma to the lower bowel and bladder.

He didn’t know any of that yet. He was alive and had to get help. Although the upper half of his body was in severe pain, he could move his torso and arms. He took his gloves off and pulled his radio out of his flight-suit pocket, and called for help. He can remember exactly what he said.

‘This is Barney. I’m in the bomb-out. I’ve crashed. My back is broken. I can’t move or feel anything from the waist down. I need help.’

There was no reply. He realised the radio must have changed channels in the crash, so he took his glasses from his pocket, changed the channel and called again. This time he received a reassuring response from Jason, who was flying nearby.

While he waited, he tried to detach his wing but the carabiners were under him, impossible to reach. He could see other flyers, Drew first and then Jason, spiralling down from the cloud-base to land beside him, so he waited. But the dust-devil suddenly showed its truly diabolic nature, returning and switching directions, instantly re-inflating his wing. He was picked up and swung along with just his toes touching the ground, dumped down again, then dragged, broken-backed, for 40 metres before he could pull down on the risers and bring the wing back under control. Now his gloveless hands were burned red-raw from pulling on the strings to save himself from the dreadful battering.

I find this moment, the dragging after the fall, more unspeakable than anything else. The fall is terrifying to think of, but the broken-backed dragging is sheer horror. It seems a stroke of extreme malice, even for the Fates who care less than nothing for any of us. Just leave it at flinging the body to earth, why don’t you?

Drew landed and unclipped his own wing then ran towards him, followed by Jason and then Kirsty, Al and Bridgette. They knelt beside him, asked him foolishly if he was all right. They told him to lie perfectly still. Gavin, who had stayed back at the launch site, contacted the ambulance and coordinated messages from other emergency services – but didn’t yet let Jenny know. Barney wanted to know what he was facing first. He had survived when he thought he was about to die and didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not.

‘This has actually happened,’ he kept thinking as his mind struggled to make what had previously been an imaginary situation, into a real one, presenting it over and over. Soon, but not yet, the idea would stop slipping off the shiny surface of consciousness and gain the bleak texture of reality.

He would be a paraplegic for the rest of his life. His brain circled relentlessly over the many things he would never do again; the reality of not being able to stand, walk, run, dance, have sex, fly, or even go to the toilet. No more wandering in the sky, nor on the earth. The loss of independence. Being in a wheelchair forever and being a burden to Jenny. He dreaded having to tell her the news. And then he felt grateful that at least it didn’t happen while Mum was alive; it would have been too distressing for her to bear.

I have to say this last remark reveals more than anything else how limited my knowledge of my brother had been in the past. To feel gratitude for sparing someone else pain at such a moment strikes me as extraordinary. Then I remember when our mother was dying the year before, he made the ten-hour drive from his home in Murwillumbah to Wellington to be with her during her last days. Kevin, our younger brother and a Buddhist, was there at the same time. We had a roster, all of us taking turns to sleep in her room and tend to her every hardly-existent need. Kevin rang me one day while Barney was out, praising his gentle and loving care of Mum.

‘He gives her a little spoonful of mashed banana and a little sip of water, and he wipes her face and holds her hand.’

I was surprised, as I was meant to be. Even mentioning it carried the subtext: ‘We didn’t expect this of Barney did we, huh?’ I hadn’t been the only one in the family to build a simple and inaccurate picture of him.

He lay on the soft grass while the others gave him water, talked to him and held his wing over him for shade. He was dressed for high altitude and realised he felt too hot in the midst of the extreme pain. He clenched his teeth and waited. The others kept talking to him, reassuring him that things were perhaps not as bad as they seemed and that help was already on the way. He said afterwards he couldn’t begin to describe his gratitude for the fact that his comrades – that’s what he called them – were there with him.

‘I never realised before how much we need other people to survive,’ he said.

The ambulance arrived after about 40 minutes. The paramedics asked him questions and tried to diagnose his injuries but didn’t give him any painkillers – when spinal cord injuries are suspected, painkillers are withheld because the medication can interfere with the specialist’s diagnosis. He kept clenching his teeth while the paramedics cut him out of his wing and flying suit and then lifted and strapped him onto a stretcher. Twenty minutes later, the medical helicopter arrived. The doctor on board also didn’t administer painkillers – and warned him that the helicopter would vibrate a lot as it revved up to take off and that it was going to hurt.

‘He wasn’t wrong,’ Barney said.

Once they were airborne the flight was smooth and was ‘okay’. Barney lay on his back staring at the padded ceiling while the doctor kept a close eye on him. They flew him to the specialist spinal unit at Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra hospital, where the helicopter landed on the roof. Hospital staff, nurses and doctors, ran out and he was trolleyed to an emergency theatre, nurses plugging in electrodes and cannulas and doctors calling out directions and ordering equipment as they ran.

‘Just like on TV shows,’ Barney said.

The damage was quickly assessed. First, before the operation, Barney had to sign an indemnity form. The surgeon stressed that all he could do was to prevent the bone pieces from further cutting his spinal cord. Only time would tell, he said, the extent of the nerve damage and how much of it would repair. He hoped for the best, but he made clear that there was no guarantee Barney would walk again. He explained that as well as the danger of further damage to his spinal cord, there was a chance he could also lose his sight as a result of the operation.

The surgical team was introduced to him, which seems oddly polite in the circumstances – Barney says he remembers the introduction happening but not anyone’s names. Then he was anaesthetised and the surgeon began the delicate five-hour operation on the shattered T12, the lowest thoracic vertebra at the inward curve of the spine. He pulled the shards of bone away from the spinal cord and stabilised it by binding it with titanium rods to the vertebrae above and below it. The T12 is in the region that sends messages to and from the legs, so that any hope of walking again depended on the success of this reconstruction. It was the evening of the day the accident happened and none of us yet knew any of this.

Auden wrote in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, his lovely poem on Brueghel’s painting of Icarus falling into the sea, that cataclysm and suffering happen ‘While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. I’d had a quiet Thursday at home. It was our older son’s birthday, but he had gone out with his girlfriend, and Anthony and I had walked along the water-front near where we live to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. It was the usual short walk down the McElhone Stairs, across the wharves and along the harbourside under paperbark gums and banksia. Weathered sandstone created natural sculptures along one side of the walk; on the other the waves lapped against the sea wall as always. It was spring and grevilleas and bottlebrush were blossoming, but the evening was cool so we walked quickly.

When Kathy – the oldest in the family and a trained nurse – rang next morning, I knew from the tone of her voice something was wrong. She told me that Barney had had a flying accident, that he had broken his spine in several places and it looked like he wouldn’t walk again. I remember thinking, Barney will never fly again. In those first moments, it seemed worse than the fact that he wouldn’t walk again. And, of course, I thought about Icarus. The non-existent Gods would always have their way.