When someone you love is unhappy, it’s easy to become a fellow traveller in their unhappiness. I know this because I carried my father’s sorrow about his Parkinson’s disease with me for 20 years. It was a misery that only deepened with time. In his last years, when I’d visit Dad in his nursing home, he’d cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, a word or phrase would set him off: any mention of Winston Churchill or the war. Other times, it would be spontaneous, disconnected from any clear source. Geriatricians call this pathological crying: an unhappiness that blows over you like weather. When Dad cried, I’d keep my tone light and try to steer his attention elsewhere. Afterwards, I’d go back to my car and cry myself.
Relatives of people who are incarcerated talk about doing time with their loved ones and I knew an echo of that feeling. Guilt rode alongside me when I dived into the ocean, ate at a good restaurant, or boarded a plane. I was haunted by the thought of my father in his small, circumscribed room, by his severance from the world’s freedoms and pleasures.
When Dad died, I expected the guilt and sadness to lift. Instead, it was replaced with grief and imposed loneliness. Dad died in March of 2020, just as the world stilled to watch the slow and mesmerising dawn of something enormous. Rules came in waves: masks, isolation protocols, exercise radii. Groceries appeared on my doorstep. Flowers arrived. The only sign these deliveries were carried to me by human hands was the sound of footsteps receding down the stairs when I opened the door. I didn’t see a friend in person for months.
My mother and I recorded our eulogies in our houses, like strange, isolated performance pieces of grief. I filmed mine in the middle of the day, and as I started to speak, my neighbour revved his leaf-blower on his driveway. I timed my eulogy so it fell in his breaks.
The weeks blurred together, shapeless. I spent my one hour outdoors a day walking along the river to Brisbane’s Newstead park. Cockatoos flocked there at dusk, screeching in the Norfolk pines. The days got shorter. The air was cool, the river a cold nerve.
I started to rely on these walks. They were an off-ramp from nostalgia: walking, I existed only in the present tense. I studied the faces of joggers and rollerbladers. I snuck photos on my iPhone of the dogs I saw, and texted them to a friend: a snowy white samoyed, a borzoi, a black chihuahua in a green vest. I came to know the park’s regulars: the drinker who fed the pigeons; the painfully thin woman who powerwalked morning and night; the shirtless guy who shuffled along in thongs, his huge potbelly shining in the sun. Solitude and grief still rhymed, though the grief was duller now.
When my circle of possible movement expanded, I climbed Mount Coot-tha, scrambling up its heart-starting face. As the rules relaxed, I got up on Saturdays before dawn, made a vacuum flask of tea, and drove past the horse paddocks of Samford or the wonky smokestacks of the Glasshouse Mountains to different trailheads. Sometimes friends joined me. Other times, I went alone. I went when it rained. I went when it was cold. That was what I did: I got up and I walked.
At first, I didn’t think about why I was walking. Walking had become a ritual: structure for my unstructured days. Paradoxically, I felt less alone out in the forest, far from humanity, than I did in my own home. One morning, climbing steep stairs in a cutting wind, I realised I felt happy. Not a jolting, giddy happiness, not the peaking type with its inevitable trough – but a contentment that came from a sense of my body moving in time.
A year after my father died, I booked a cabin at Springbrook for a week, overlooking the gorge’s pour of dense greenery. The trip was a pilgrimage of sorts: my father had taken me walking along Springbrook’s trails as a child. But by the time I arrived, it was raining: sheeting, monsoonal. Clouds drifted past the cabin at eye level. The weather app showed nothing but storms.
Stubbornly, I set out for a walk in a brief patch of sun, which held out just until I hit the bottom of the loop’s sharply descending 450 stairs, then the torrential rain returned. Leeches seethed in the mud. My shoes were soaking. There was no time to think of my father, no room for the past. The rain and the huge spray from the thundering waterfall made it hard to gauge where I was. I missed a fork I knew well. I expected the trail to curve around to my right, but it never did. After 15 minutes, I realised my mistake: I was heading down one of the great walks of Australia, a 54 kilometre unbroken trail cutting right across the entire national park.
Slogging back uphill, I ran into a group of hysterical teenagers who’d taken the same wrong turn. Hopelessly out of their depth, they were wearing street shoes with no socks, and were covered in mud and leeches. One of the girls was sobbing. I sprayed their ankles with repellent from my bag, and led them back to the stairs, which were safer to take than continuing around the other sloping half of the loop, which would be a mudslide by now.
Heading up the stairs, I tried to put some distance between myself and the shrieking teenagers, but they closed the distance. I sprinted up a few flights, and they sprinted too. There was no escaping them. They wanted to keep me in sight: I was their ticket back to the car park. The stairs were endless. The rain didn’t let up.
Finally, we were safe. As I pulled out of the car park, the teenagers were peeling off their shoes and screaming about the leeches on their feet. Back at my cabin, I got a fire started, and ran a bath. I was relieved to find no leeches on my feet, and strangely exhilarated, too.
This, I thought, was happiness: not a permanent state or a destination, but a vanishing point you could only keep in view by putting one foot in front of the other. To get closer, you had to keep moving.
