Another time, when a stranger visited the office and asked, âWhere does Ken sit?', my workmate Seamus replied, quick as a flash, âEverywhere.'
Considering what I have been through, there is no point in upholding some taboo that preserves a fear I have long since overcome. Political correctness as a sign that you care about other people's sensitivities is something I respect, but not the avoidance of certain words
per se
. For some people, âcripple' is a no-no: well, not for me. Able to move most anywhere I want, by a perfectly good mode of personal transportation, I know who the real cripples are. They are those people bound up so tight by the fetters of their resentment at life's cruel twists that they are mean with themselves, and thus incapable of relaxing and giving of themselves to others. I feel sad for them.
Back home in 1999 I decided to use my international travel experience and media contacts to apply for work as a sub-editor wherever they would have me. Clearly, I felt no sense of alienation whatever country I went to work in, which is why I cast a wide net, but nevertheless it was greatly reassuring to have a âpad' to come home to.
After some time, this round of applications yielded a bite: from Japan's
Asahi Evening News
, the English-language publication of
Asahi Shimbun
, which sold just eight million copies a day and was tearing its proverbial hair out because it was only coming second in its market.
First the
Asahi
management asked me to do a subbing test, which was faxed over and completed within the set hour before I faxed it back to head office. Upon being told, 24 hours later, that I had done well enough to be offered the job, I chose that moment to bite the bullet and mention my sedentary status. To say anything earlier might have led to there being no subbing test to sit or even to a rejection on grounds that I would forever suspect were paralysis-based rather than merit-based, but now was the time to pipe up. After all, if I got to Tokyo and the office were inaccessible, bad vibes would flow both ways.
The sound of an editor biting his lip across 8000 kilometres was quite unmistakable, if scarcely audible. But the Japanese don't pride themselves on courtesy for nothing, and Mr Asano sounded very concerned. âThings will be difficult for you. How can we help you?' he said. Going onto the front foot, I pointed out that he need have no fears about my ability to move round the office in a wheelchair, provided the building itself and the toilets were accessible. If I could take an English-speaker along with me to the nearest real estate agent, that would be a great help, because finding lodgings was of prime importance. Then I could safely be left on my own to arrange for a taxi to bring me to work every morning.
Asano-san sounded sympathetic but still faced a conceptual problem with his management colleagues. And then, at two o'clock one February morning in 1999, he phoned back with an ingenious solution. Explaining that the paper was starting up an international division and had a guy filing sports copy from New York, he asked whether I would like to sub-edit from home. Every day, features and some news articles would be sent for me to edit and send backâall by email. When I asked how much work there would be, a minimum was set and
Asahi
honoured its word generously for the next two years. During that time I settled into the life of an open-collar worker, or e-lancer, and would sometimes smile to myself on realising that, had I not been in the wheelchair, the work would never have come in this form.
In April 2001, just before my Eurasian crossing, I was a guest speaker at a conference of the American Copy Editors' Society held in Long Beach, California. There I reprised my
Asahi
experience of telecommuting for the benefit of America's finest. Life No. 2 was still looking up.
Beware of those who would have you believe everything is rosier now that they are spinally injured. Good luck to them, I say, but let's not kid ourselves. And yet ⦠I have often said that if a remedy for my paralysis appeared tomorrow I am not sure I would take the cure. If you genuinely don't miss walking, or rather see it as just one form of locomotion, why would you go back to it?
When I survey the past two years, and then the past fifteen, and even (whisper it) 50, and think how far I've come, and the wealth of things I have seen, suffered and done, I'm not mad enough to say I wouldn't have done anything differently. To take that view would imply an enormous love of suffering combined with an inability to learn from my mistakes. But I am generally happier with the way things in my life are now than I ever expected to be, while having acquired enough wisdom not to want to examine too closely just why this is so.
The breakdown didn't make me an all-round better person, but it did make me a more aware one, and that's an improvement in one direction. To be truthful, it is the only improvement I have been able to detect, and others must be asked about any reverses that offset it.
Recovering from the breakdown was neither smooth nor steady but fitful, with fully as many obstacles, speed bumps, âWrong WayâGo Back' signs and detours as wheelchair users confront every day. It took me two years after the descent until I felt good about myself and wholly at ease with my newly configured physique. (Fortunately, the old one was not so great that decades of mourning were called for.)
In the healing I received not so much wisdom as a stock of new insights, amounting to a better appreciation of what moves the world. Presumptuous and preposterous as it sounds, I cannot help wondering when people will come to see that the strongest forces in the universe are not weapons of mass destruction but abstract nouns: hope and fear, compassion and anger, pride and shame, love and hate. If we could control these, rather than the other way round, we would be right to consider ourselves masters of the universe, rather than the cleverest fish in this most beautiful of ponds.
Chapter 24
FINNISH LINE
O Fortune, variable as the moon. Always dost thou wax and wane. Detestable life, first dost thou mistreat us, and then, whimsically, thou heedest our desires. As the sun melts the ice, so dost thou dissolve both poverty and power
.
LIBRETTO FROM CARL ORFF'S CANTATA
C
ARMINA
B
VRANA
EASTER 2003
FINLAND: 10â28 APRIL
In one of Monty Python's undeservedly lesser-known songs, Finland is pictured as such a boring place that it comes âa poor second to Belgium when going abroad'. The unexciting truth about the land of Nokia is that for pristine natural beauty and polite unfussy people there are few places on Earth as calming to the soul. Add to that the most comfortable and efficient transport system in the entire journey and there are plenty of moments when I suspect the best has been left until last. Dare I say it, Finland is a nice place to live, but its remoteness explains why so few want to visit.
My route here would take me west from Helsinki to the seaside town of Turku and northward from there to the Arctic zone. When I reached Oulu, in the Gulf of Bothnia's upper reaches, the scale of my exploit defied the ability to comprehend it: that glassy sea was the far edge of the continent I had now crossed. The epic had encompassed one fifth of the land surface of the globe.
DAY 648 (11 APRIL): TALLINN TO HELSINKI
Leaving Estonia and its ferocious blizzards astern, the oldest ferry in the Tallink Express fleet shears its way relentlessly through great slabs of pack ice that Peary or Amundsen would have felt at home amid. By the time I've become acquainted with all that a ferry of this type has to offerâfrom cinemas to video parlours, restaurants, cafés, TV rooms, lounges and viewing decksâit's time to disembark.
My first choice of lodgings in Helsinki, the snazzy Eurohostel, is full and it takes three or four hours to find an accessible alternative. The bad news is that this alternative is a dive, a boarding house where, the manager warns me, one of the residents is a drunk
and
a kleptomaniac. (I lock and bolt my door.) The good news is that it is right in the heart of the city.
DAY 650 (13 APRIL): HELSINKI
Sixty degrees above the Equator, Helsinki, the most northerly of all capitals after Reykjavik, has its share of urban problemsâand is up near the head of the world's-worst-practice league table when it comes to suicide and alcoholism ratesâbut the city itself is subdued, pleasant and orderly.
On Sunday morning the city artery called Alexanderinkatu (Alexander Street) is empty and windswept. Factor in tram tracks, and the sight is oddly reminiscent of Melbourne on a Sunday. Or am I just getting homesick?
I wander between landmarks, a snap-happy chappie. Helsinki is a photographer's delight, even if today is one of those grey-sky affairs. Onion-domed Uspensky Cathedral, which towers over the port, is packed with the Russian Orthodox faithful.
By way of contrast, I seek out Finlandia talo concert hall, the white Lego-like work of Alvar Aalto, Finland's most renowned (and controversial) architect. During his lifetime he worked on 200 000 designs and left 500 buildings behind for observers to admire, or loathe.
Temppeliaukio (the Church in the Rock, 1969) has become the country's most visited building. The idea of burrowing into the conic section of a hill so that your construction sits below ground level was adopted here years before Canberra welcomed its new Parliament House.
This being Sunday afternoon, a service is about to begin when I arrive, so I decide to swap my mobile pew for a fixed one. Well over a hundred worshippers are here (the church is multi-faith) and I hardly believe my ears when the American minister who is giving today's sermon compares the Jews' return from Babylon to Jerusalem with âthe liberation of Baghdad'.
A feisty woman of about 80 to whose side he returns afterwards (his mother?) then stands up and, turning to address us all, introduces a busload of male choristers from Oslo âsent to us by God' who sing an Ethiopian hymn in Norwegian. Well, this is something different.
After the service, the minister ushers the old ladyâyes, definitely his motherâinto a car bearing diplomatic plates. Blessed be the speechmakers.
DAY 652 (15 APRIL): TURKU
On the bus here I noticed my rabbit-fur hat had âwalked'. Then I recalled with a shudder that, after locking my room door in Helsinki, I had placed it on a table in the corridor that was one of the light-fingered vagrant's usual haunts. Upon arrival at Turku, I ring the manager and ask him whether my hat is anywhere to be seen. Silly question, really.
This is the hometown of Paavo Nurmi, the great Finnish long-distance runner and Olympian from the 1920s. He is still runningâalbeit as a statue these daysânear the stream that flows through Turku.
DAY 653 (16 APRIL): OULU
When you're staying at a luxury hotel, the temptation to venture outside isn't all that great, especially when the view from inside is a stunning panorama of the gulf as a field of ice.
With funds getting low, it had not been my intention to go upmarket. The likeliest-looking option here was Nallikari, a campground occupied by bungalows and chalets. Unfortunately, the only cabin I could have stayed in (the others having steps) was one the key to which was kept by the manager. And the manager, so the duty clerk informed me with averted eyes, had a strict rule not to open it to visitors out of season. So if I could come back in June I would be welcome to stay.
Where would the clerk suggest for tonight? âOver there,' she pointed to the Kylpylahotelli Eden, where room tariffs begin at US$100 and skyrocket from there. If campground management was about as hospitable as an iceberg, the Eden's displays a refreshing flexibility. On seeing that I genuinely have no affordable alternatives (Finland, like all the Scandinavian countries, is extremely expensive), the receptionist agrees to reduce the room rate to US$40.
The waking part of my night is spent indulging in the myriad delights of cable television, eating a juicy steak and drinking on the terrace. For the other part of it, I sleep like a dream. My gosh, I think before pegging out, if I had stayed in hotels like this all along, I'd have had a ballâand gone home 21 months ago.
DAY 654 (17 APRIL): ROVANIEMI TO
SOMEWHERE NEAR THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
Where Rovaniemi ends, just 8 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle as it says on the signboard, I wait for a bus to that old familiar dotted line. Waiting with me is a woman in her seventies (she was proud to tell me that, I would have guessed late fifties) who is steadying herself on ski poles planted in the grass verge. The Finns' habit of using ski poles to propel themselves along, even while out walking in summer, has occasioned the odd sly dig from foreigners. As if reading my mind, my prospective fellow passenger says in flawless English, âPeople think we're silly, but it keeps us fit, and most of those who criticise us for it will be dead before we are.'
What an exciting ride this is: I've never been
above
the Circle before in all my meanderings and, if I'm ever denied the chance to plant a flag at the Pole itself, this will do for a substitute. When the bus pulls up, I am steeled for the sight of a little commercialism but here, in garish letters, we have Santa Claus Village theme park. (Don't they know he lives in Turkey?) A signboard immediately captures my attention: I am now 2648 kilometres from the North Pole.
At the service counter just inside the entrance, I hear a vaguely familiar accent: broad Australian. The voice belongs to Eva-Marie, a German-Australian formerly from Adelaide whose main stock in trade is selling certificates that enable visitors to make their friends envious that they have been to the Arctic Circle. But, on learning that I am an Australian too, she comes clean, whispering conspiratorially, âDid you know the Arctic Circle is no longer here?'
âI beg your pardon,' I counter, âbut the bus that brought me here had the destination “Arctic Circle” written on the front.'
âWell, it was here,' proceeds Eva-Marie, âin 1887. But since then it's moved up the road 1.4 kilometres.'
âThen those lines out there in the yard are a fraud.' âCertainly are,' she beams, like a schoolteacher who has just succeeded in imparting a difficult concept to a quizzical pupil.
But her enlightenment has left me in the dark. Outside it gives the latitude as 66°32'35''N. Over in Santa Claus's Post Office, where the workers wear ridiculous red-and-white bobble hats all year round, it is given as 66°33'7''N. And, if I recollect my schoolbook accurately, the line is actually parallel 66°30'N.
It is beyond my grasp how the line could have moved. Oscillation of the Earth? Changes in the magnetic field? And, if the Circle marks the southernmost latitude at which the Sun never sets on the longest day of the year, mustn't it be 66°30'N even if the North Pole gets up and relocates? By this time my head is spinning rather like the planet itself.
âYes, it is a bit of a fraud,' Eva-Marie drags me back from my reverie. âBut we have a business to run.' She breaks off to prepare more precious certificates for a gleeful quartet of students all the way from China and says not a word to disillusion them. As they shuffle off to be photographed on the line, Eva-Marie completes her point. âNobody's going to go to the expense of moving the village all the time, so we don't usually let on.'
DAY 656 (19 APRIL): ROVANIEMI TO INARI, LAPLAND
According to my best estimate, the bus bearing me north is crossing the Arctic Circle right now at 12.15 pm.
It's 6 pm and here I am at the end of
my
road.
The
road goes further, over the border into Norway, but mine stops here.
Down I get from the bus, carefully transferring myself from the bottom step to my waiting chair, right in front of the Inari pub. The Inari pub is called the Hotel Inari, and rightly so, because it is the only one in Inari (population 550). From here, a point 300 kilometres indisputably beyond the Arctic Circle, and going north almost to Nordkapp, you would pass through the traditional land of the nomadic Sami, a people whose lives and general fate sound curiously familiar to someone from the Antipodes. From Nordkapp all the way down to the Gulf of Finland was once the land of the Sami, before they were driven to the edge by Finnish settlers.
It is Saturday ânight' and everyone in this Arctic equivalent of an outback pub is a bit over the topâsome quite a bit. Technically, I suppose, ânight' doesn't really begin until the sun goes down, and at this time of yearâin what will soon live up to its tag as the Land of the Midnight Sunâit does that at about half past eleven. But a mere four hours later, at 3.30 am, it reappears to scare the living daylights into those still at the bar.
A teacher, Nils Joks, sits by the bar-room window tonight, his hands locked in those of his Finnish girlfriend, Maria. Joks, who is a Sami and a Norwegian, feels no conflict about his dual heritage. You might say he has mastered the art of living on the edge. Others are still struggling, like the barman who frogmarches âMichael'âanother northern Sami in town for the weekend, and a man who could best be described as harmlessly drunkâout of the pub.
Michael is no more inebriated than some of the Finnish patrons sipping their beers undisturbed but, resplendent in his bright yellow-and-red traditional jacket, he is treated as a stranger in his own land. No, on second thoughts, the stranger in his land gets treated better. I have nothing to complain of.
DAY 657 (20 APRIL): INARI
Today is Beassazat, what the Christianised Sami call Easter, and I'm off to learn more about these aboriginal people of the Arctic. Despite its minuscule size, Inari is the site of a magnificent museum in their honour, crisply known as Siida.
At the end of the last Ice Age, around 10 000 BC, reindeer-herding Sami followed the receding icecap inland from the Atlantic and Arctic coasts of Scandinavia. Antlered animals remain important to the lives of their descendants today. On the way to the museum I pass a deerskin that has been left out to dry in the sun, the first step in an ancient Arctic-wide tanning process.
DAY 658 (21 APRIL): INARI
In ten days' time it will be two years since my plane trip to the other side of this continent, the first step in a long trek that I have now completed just a fraction over budget (for every A$40 of estimated expenditure, I spent A$41).
To gauge how the times have changed since that touchdown, I have only to consider that you can no longer jet into Karachi. The Pakistani government itself considers its most populous city too dangerous to visit. People talk glibly of the âglobal community', yet every day people on the subcontinent live behind curtains as opaque as the one of iron that divided Europeans from one another not so long ago. Sooner rather than later, I hope and pray, those curtains will be rung down, too, and people everywhere will see one another in a truer light.
This Easter Monday, 69°N of the Equator, we are on the cusp of winter's miraculous transformation into spring. Fresh air tingles my nostrils, and my ears can almost hear the silence. The sun today is surprisingly strongâpowerful enough to cleave the ice, unleashing waters long pent up, and their mighty rush is all that disturbs the stillness.
If you were here, you would see me pushing up the road in the direction of Norway. My arms feel ready to drop out of their sockets. Hunger starts to gnaw. At 5.30 pm, beside a wilderness trail, I pause to rest and reflect on how far I have come, and where I have been, these past two years.
Projected on the screen of memory are the highlights, and the lowlights, of this odyssey that has taken me further from home than I have ever been. I see it all, as if for the first time, and wonder how on earth anyone can say there is nothing new under the sun, no untrodden path waiting to be discovered. Then, warmed by the sunshine and steeled by that mental trove of memorabilia, I glance over my shoulder and turn my wheels for home.