Beyond the climb

I briefly mentioned that during a holiday to Central Australia, which took place sometime during my mid teens, I had a certain experience after climbing Ayres Rock in Uluru National Park: that of a wedge-tailed eagle hovering immediately above my head. Now I’m going to elaborate.

What most people won’t know is that there are actually trees growing out of the top of the Rock. They’re not growing very well, but nevertheless, they’re trees. There’s a bunch of them near where you climb up, and another bunch some distance away. Having reached the top, I decided to walk to the second lot of trees and back. The top of the Rock, by the way, is covered in wavelike humps and troughs, so that to walk across the surface one must follow a zig-zag path to avoid the steepest part of each ridge. When I got to the little community of plant life which was my destination, a great wedge-tailed eagle suddenly rose from the bushes and hovered just above me. It was magnificent.

I ran for it. Not because I was afraid of the eagle, but because it felt right to run. It felt right to imagine myself into the role of the eagle’s prey, and use the adrenaline rush to act out that role. What I didn’t know was that my family was watching me through a pair of binoculars…

Some time later, at school, I wrote about all this in a poem. Many years after that, I wrote about it again in a creative writing course at university (The Craft and Culture of Creative Writing). The original spec for the exercise was to write about an event from your childhood in two parts: firstly, from your own perspective, and then, from the perspective of observers. Later in the same course - we covered some of the techniques of postmodern writing - such as the fragmentation of scenes, and I decided to use these techniques in a rewrite of the earlier exercise.

The resulting story, which is available on my website, is fiction. At its core is a real event, but it makes no distinction between reality and imagination. It contains three types of narrative, blended together: fiction, non-fiction, and something in between.