It began on one of those long summer drives, him wedged in the middle of the back seat of the family car, drifting off into his own head.
He wasn’t the youngest or the eldest of the five, so the window only came to him if he got carsick. He faked it a few times — no one bought it. Hemmed in on that sagging middle seat, he saw little more than a scrap of sky — blue or grey — and now and then the sharp tip of a mountain or a far-off tower.
For those thousand kilometres each year, except for the loo stops, his world was that bit of sky and the swaying rhythm of the car.
Until the day he noticed something else: the electricity lines — or telephone wires — that ran along the roadside like travelling companions.
He watched their soft, steady sway, almost musical.
He imagined the people who had put them up: some cables pulled tight to the limit, others slack and older; poles that carried two, three, four lines; brand-new stretches, weather-beaten ones. In his mind everything had an age, a weight, a whole history.
And then he slipped onto them.
At first it was like sliding down an endless chute.
Then like a zipline — the same pose he would use years later to cross rivers in the Himalaya, and that his own children, more than half a century on, would imitate in a Chilean adventure park.
Soon he was swinging from pole to pole without tiring, until he dared to leap between them. Little by little he made the moves more elaborate: forward rolls, backward rolls, doubles, acrobatics invented on the fly, each bolder than the last.
His own agility astonished him: he always managed to grip the next pole, sometimes at the very last second. Each jump seemed to lend momentum to the next.
It took him ages to work up the nerve to go over a pole. The first attempt barely made it. The fright was so sharp he wasn’t sure he’d ever try again. But once he did, and once he felt at ease with the long jumps, he began to focus on the grace of the movement rather than any idea of urgency.
Still, whenever he tried something new, he kept to two neighbouring poles — a distance that now felt tiny — and gave all his attention to height rather than length.
What unsettled him most were the places where the cables crossed the road.
For a few seconds they vanished completely, skimming right above the family car. It felt as if he himself disappeared. All he could do was trust he’d judged the next pole’s position correctly.
Leaping over two poles happened almost without him deciding it.
He can’t quite remember when two became three or four. By then he already knew he could fly.
He nearly shouted it out:
I can fly — I can fly!
But he kept quiet.
And from that day on, he never needed to fake carsickness again. He could see whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, however he wanted.
Sometimes he perched — like a bird — on a pole, just to take in how far he’d come.
When the journey neared its end and the road fell into darkness, he’d drift back into the car, nestling between his sleeping brothers. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, but he wasn’t yet ready to fly through it. Though he longed to.
Until one night, in the thick stillness of midnight, he launched himself over the bonnet of the car.
His father jerked the wheel.
His mother, half asleep, jolted awake and glanced back to see if the children were up… In the jumble of arms and legs she spotted nothing unusual.
He, meanwhile, was already riding the roof of the oncoming car. He stood there a few heartbeats, letting the wind carry him, and when the two vehicles crossed, he hopped from one to the other with a freshness that felt newly minted.
Just like that!
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