Halcyon days
Halcyon days
Through these fields of destruction
Baptism of fire
I’ve watched all your suffering
As a battle raged high
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brother in arms
-Knopfler/Dire Straits
Stories.
Our lives - no matter who we are, where we are born or what we align to - are created by the different stories of how life has happened to us. We are like a collage, a mosaic, a perfect mash-mash of our experiences, good and bad. If we lost any of our experiences, it would be to deny one small part of ourselves that played a part in making up who we are. It would create a void and a loss of insight to something that only you can fully understand.
This piece will be hard for me to write. These stories are part of my experience that have given a richness to my life - joy and sorrow, fear and trepidation, excitement and awe. Sometimes all in a day. It was not until I was much older that I realised how unique these stories are and how they have partly shaped who I have become. Akin to a rainbow, there are always varying views of an experience and I expect my story to be no different. For every being that experiences the same event, there will be a new perspective. Another story. There are many stories that have been published about what I am about to write about, but not usually from this point of view.
My first memories are very much aligned to my senses. I vividly remember the smell of aviation fuel on my father’s hands. I remember the smell of alcohol on the breath of adults around me. I remember the sound of music that was popular in that era, and the sound of the phone constantly ringing. Helicopters taking off, landing, arriving and departing. I remember the feeling of all-or-nothingness; there were many people or there were no people, just my mother or one of my brothers. I remember the sight of sticky dark red deer blood, overall, boots, jeans covered in blood. The air sickness, being triggered by the smell of some indiscriminate cleaning fluid mixed with av-gas in the back of a Cessna or a 500, emptying my stomach into my gumboot.
I used to hear stories of how some of the men earned so much money that they would simply buy new clothes and burn the dirty ones instead of washing them. New homes, cars, trucks, guns, copious amounts of top-shelf alcohol and parties that went until dawn. Stacks of $100 notes hidden in all kinds of places. Live capture and venison prices through the roof - those in the industry were awash with money. This was glamour, hunting style. Flying a helicopter with a tall-boy of beer between the knees was normal. Parties in huts in the middle of nowhere that went for days at a time.
Death.
The death was everywhere. I remember the sensation of sorrow before I could verbalise what the situation was. A sudden gathering of sorrow, men would group together, hunched over drinks. Silent pauses, face rubbing, heads in hands. The questions, a hundred possible explanations of why it happened. Periods of anger about a wrong decision, or “if only I had...”. People gathering for five days or more for the inevitable funeral.
Widows and children were thrown into despair. A common sight was a new widow or partner, foetal position on the bed or the couch, hair and makeup uncharacteristically untouched since hearing the news. Benches and tables heaving with lasagnes and bacon and egg pies. Untouched by the familes they were left for, where food became unwelcome in their traumatised systems. Quiet visits by doctors to give medication for nerves or insomnia. The endless calculation of when visitors would be appropriate and what one should say.
Funerals were the summit of despair. Always a juxtaposition of the previous few days or even of the being of who was lost. Formal, tidy, quiet and composed, I wonder if anyone else saw the irony of such a contrast to what had led to this day. The speakers always thrown together at the final moment, notes in hand and shaking from nerves. A slide show of the deceased’s life - helicopters, adventure, drinking, childhoods and marriages - a celebration of the man that lay dismembered in the coffin in the centre of the room. That’s if he was ever found.
Maybe I imagined the wafts of av-gas. Then the songs would come. Songs that would forever imprint on the funeral-goers memories of the man inside the box. The widow or children or other family always near to the front, collapsed on each other’s shoulders, heaving with sobs. Nothing will ever be the same again. Raging funeral drinks that would sometimes run into a thousand people, drinking and crying into their Chivas Regal and kegs of beer. Alcohol was the lubricant that was used to pass the dead into the afterlife, a way to make sense of events or to numb the common suffering of everyone in the room. Children left to play in corners until late into the night, relying on a coherent adult to place them into their beds.
Up to Lynwood Cemetery they would inevitably go; another addition to the rows of schist-bound graves. Tragedy after tragedy, young men killed in road accidents, drownings and suicides, but more than what is natural are due to air crashes. Schist from the mountains, brought out like a pilgrimage to honour the dead. Chosen with love to lay upon their loved-one forever, often adorned with imagery or art form of stags or fawns. Frequently there were offerings of beer or whiskey, left to the mercy of the elements, their contents untouched but their labels sun bleached beyond recognition.
Aftermath.
In the 1970’s, 1980’s and early 1990’s, the aftermath was often fleeting. It wasn’t long before it all happened again. And again. And again. I don’t remember a feeling of “who will be next?”, but more an attitude of learning from the mistakes of those that had passed. The flaw in that premise though was that there were a million different mistakes that could have been made. And they were. A new horror each time with a new story, a new experience, a new widow, girlfriend or fatherless child.
We remember these halcyon days with idyllic memories - vast amounts of money, fast helicopters, parties, excitement and adrenaline. This piece of writing is to acknowledge the real human cost of venison recovery. Men were earning their living in the best and most exciting way they knew how. Safety was not always paramount - at least not to today’s standards and there was a tragic cost to that. What happened back then would be disturbing to any outsider looking in - that much excitement, adrenaline and death could only be equaled in combat. Like brothers in arms.
The reckoning.
My childhood was probably different to yours. These experiences were the shaping of me and who I was to become - I have witnessed and encountered more great things than I can count. But it is the tragedy that gave me the insight, the empathy and the perception to see and to understand sorrow and despair. To try to gain a concept of what those men felt in their last moments, the terror and the realisation that their life was about to end. I thought about this endlessly. Every man has to die.
Only when you look back upon what was your life do you sometimes realise that you were part of something unique and what precious things can come from disaster and anguish.
Kathryn Wright (née Deaker)
Counsellor