The Blue Mountains Trip Diary

The Blue Mountains Trip Diary

I feel most keenly the futility of writing when I’m in a national park. Any national park. There is far too much to describe. Mainly trees. Sometimes vistas.

See, I’m being vague!

I felt this futility most intensely a couple of days ago when on a walk in the Blue Mountains. We had only just begun our trek and we were on this heath-covered plateau, fully exposed to the wind, which was blowing fiercely. It was a powerful wind, and it made the already cold day seem colder. My face numbly stung; I could tell it was red. I was wearing a number of layers, including both a beanie and a hood, but my face was exposed. With a cold resolve, we walked along a dirt path snaking its way through the vegetation. We were kind of spread out, my dad was way behind I think, taking photographs, my sister was ahead and my mum was just behind me. With a sense that there was something sublime about this landscape and that I ought to appreciate it, I made sure I looked around. I looked left and up and saw a number of thin, crooked gum trees shaking violently. I looked right and saw we were indeed on a plateau covered in a dark heath, like a moor. Simultaneously, I saw that next to us was a massive canyon, with four big walls and that on these and on everything around, as far as the eye could see, was the same dark heath. I remember feeling that it was really profound, the sense of power, of size, of the complexity and majesty of the landscape –  

That’s why I knew this wouldn’t suffice. I took it in all at once but I can only describe things sequentially. And words ain’t nothing.

Movies are heaps better. But they’re short. Which is the weird thing. 

Speaking of movies, after the walk and after my dad bought new walking pants and overpants and gloves for me at exorbitant prices in various Katoomba hiking shops, we decided we were going to borrow a movie. Outside a Woolworths in Loura, there was one of those DVD rental machines. I wanted to borrow Inside Llewellyn Davis because it’s a Coen Brothers movie and I love Coen Brothers movies. I was indicating as much as our family deliberated over which one we would borrow in front of the machine. But they cruelly ignored me, and decided on 12 Years a Slave, even despite my protestations that it would be bleak. These protestations, by the way, caused my sister to say, kinda jokingly, “Everything’s bleak with you”. This was because I had said the same thing the day before about watching Deliverance. In retrospect, I feel that I shouldn’t have been so worried about bleakness. It’s unusual for me to be reluctant to watch bleak movies (it’s normally my mum) but I think I was worried watching a movie like Deliverance or 12 Years a Slave would just be a bit too much, considering I have been feeling pretty anxious recently, about, you know, everything.

And, you know what, both movies were a bit too much. They both made me recoil in horror multiple times. Deliverance was a powerfully horrifying movie, and despite my concerns that it would be trite and super derivative of Heart of Darkness, I really – well I was gonna say “enjoyed it” but it would be better to say I thought it was good. I thought it was good.

And 12 Years a Slave has got to be the most powerful movie I’ve ever watched. Despite watching it on a shitty little TV in the shitty little cold cottage we were staying in and despite my prior reservations, I felt at its conclusion that I was, like, a changed person. I can’t be bothered to deconstruct it in detail – I’m just going to say a few things about it and my experience afterwards.

God, there were some horrifying bits. There was a great shot at one point where you watched Solomon choking on a rope with his feet dancing on the ground for what feels like an eternity. It’s probably only a minute or so, but that’s the most incredible thing about this movie: the way it actually gives you a palpable sense of time. Massive stretches of time. Of how excruciatingly long each day, toiling in the sun without rest or respite, must have been for a slave. Of how long 12 years is. I felt like I was living next to Solomon, experiencing his life vicariously, and his relationship with Patsy (which becomes most prominent in perhaps the most disturbing scene of the film where Solomon is forced to whip her and eventually can’t do it and gives up, weeping, and the master continues the job, until Patsy is collapsed on the floor, and we get this single shot, which is now seared onto my retina, of her back with these huge, deep red gashes crisscrossing it), experiencing his struggle as the days turned to weeks and months and feeling with him the immense pain of having to eventually acquiesce, to relinquish his identity, to try, futilely, to forget his family and his previous life. Having to forget everything and just focus on the manual labour in front of him, as he pointlessly works and works and works.

The end was possibly the most affecting thing about the movie. When the carriage suddenly turns up at the ranch and Solomon sees it and runs towards it and jumps on and then sees Patsy and says goodbye to her and then gets back on and waves her off, I remember that being a really really emotional moment. An emotionally confusing moment, and one so well done.

Same with the very final scene when Solomon arrives back at the family home. When he walks in, crying, and says “These past few years have been rather a difficult time for me”, his voice cracking, there was something so horrific about that, to me, because there was a sense that these 12 years, these 12 years that Solomon has been a slave which I’ve vicariously experienced, this life, this myriad of events that we’ve both stored in our memories, of events traumatic, of events solemn, of the daily struggle to exist, are indescribable. They’re lost. They’re locked in Solomon’s and my mind and there’s no way he’s ever going to be able to truly convey to his wife what it was like, what happened in those missing years, those 12 years, in which he has aged and his kids have grown up and he now has a grandson. And that was the oddest thing. I imagined myself being Solomon, I imagined having been wrenched away from my wife and my kids and having been tortured as a slave for 12 years without any contact with them and a slowly dwindling hope of ever returning, and then suddenly returning, and seeing my daughter as an adult and having a husband and a grandson, and seeing my wife, the same, just a little greyer and wrinklier, and hearing her say the words “I tried so hard to forget you”.

Like Solomon, I’m confronted with the hard reality that it is really impossible to describe what I felt then. The only thing I can say is that I’ve probably never felt so many emotions.

But when the credits rolled and I was confronted with the hard reality that I hadn’t just experienced 12 years, but watched 2 hours and a bit of someone’s life in another era on a shitty little TV and that I was sitting on a black lounge next to my sister and that we all existed in our little world and that we had a dinner booking for 8pm, which was in less than ten minutes at a restaurant nearby, and when my mum got up and said something about the booking and went off into the adjacent bedroom to get ready or freshen up or whatever, I just felt so generally emotional and confused. I didn’t know if I should be thinking ‘Well, that’s it, life goes on, let’s get up off this couch and put a beanie on’ or whether that was like a betrayal of how I feel and what I just saw, what I just experienced, And while I knew that life would go on and that this feeling was transient and that slowly this movie would fade into unimportance, possibly as soon as we started eating, I wasn’t sure if this fact was right, if it was ok, if I should just deal with it and move on. It felt so important to me at that moment. That’s why the only two things I was sure about were that despite the shittiness of the environment, watching it was the most powerful cinematic experience I’d ever had, and that I must write about it.

Just before we left the house, I was standing in the living room with my mum and I felt I should try and get some of my feelings about this moment out of my head in advance. I tried to formulate in my head something that would go some way towards expressing how I felt. I ended up saying “It’s so weird how you can experience 12 years in the life of someone, as a slave, and then are suddenly thrust back into your own mundane world”. I wasn’t sure if I was happy with saying that. As has happened many times in my life recently, I felt this stark disconnect between what was in my head and what came out. Plus I wasn’t sure if my mum understood, but I hope she did. Her response was an affirmative “Mm”.

When we were in the car a few minutes later, about to park in front of the restaurant, and my sister said “That was a good movie” and my dad said “Yes” and she said “I loved the time lapse, like that one really long scene where he was choking” and my dad said “Yes” and my sister said something like “But because it was meant to make you feel how long it would have felt in real life” and my dad said “Of course”, I felt that I must write about that, too. My sister’s words just struck me as a stupendously immense understatement. I knew at once that the movie hadn’t affected her as much as it affected me, and I felt vaguely appalled that she had tried to express her feelings about it. I also sensed at once that there were so many thoughts in my head than hers. It made me feel really different from her, and possibly my dad, because I knew if I was talking to her, I would have responded in a completely different way. I felt the same feeling when they were talking about Deliverance.

Sometimes it’s horribly isolating to feel like you’re deeper than the people around you. What’s worst is you never know if it’s true.

When we started chatting at the restaurant, I felt really kind of sad and distant and I was staring bitterly into the other side of the restaurant. This my dad noted with a sarcastic comment: “You seem really happy”. Eventually, I made a comment about the photos on the walls on the restaurant, which were all portraits of celebrities taken by the same guy, and about there being something really sad about taking portraits of celebrities and I questioned why he couldn’t take photos of ordinary people, and my dad replied that it was to make money, and I said obviously, but I was asking more why he would do that artistically, and a sort of weird argument began. This also made me feel weird by the end, and I wondered why I always end up talking in an intellectual way to my parents, considering I don’t really feel that I need to impress them with my intellect and debating with my dad (or indeed anyone) always makes me feel hollow anyway. But after that, the night was fine, and, bar a few times when I thought about the movie and thought I ought to think about the movie, the movie escaped my mind.

That profound moment was over, forever.