It was inevitable we’d be thrown together, my mother and his forging a lifelong friendship as trailblazers in an industry few women dared to tread at the time. I had a 6 month head start on him, but before I was two years old I recognised him as a friend, and by the time we were five we were like brothers.
There’s a picture mum has of my fifth birthday, with me standing before a huge cake in the shape of an aeroplane. I always liked planes. I’m grinning like a cheshire cat because to my left stands Chris, and to my right stands my other best friend and cousin, Constance. I can still remember the day, how the cake and Fanta conspired against Chris’s little brother Mikey’s digestion and ended up deposited on the back step, how Connie grinned cheekily as she ate her icy pole, and how we played pass the parcel and I cried when I didn’t win.
I’m sure our parents had a sort of prisoner exchange arrangement going over school holidays. In our primary school years we’d each spend a week staying at each other’s houses, each kid’s parents bearing the brunt of arranging amusement for three little boys and keeping them out of trouble. The latter requirement wasn’t always met, and we generally found ways to be doing things we really shouldn’t have been doing. We weren’t bad kids though - we never did anything illegal or potentially life threatening. Well… not often.
When I was 10 Chris’s family moved to the Riverland and set up a plantation. It was 6 months before I saw him again, and as the Christmas holidays drew near I became increasingly impatient and excited. Within 10 minutes of mum and dad dropping me off, Chris and I had disappeared off among the plantation rows looking for adventure - destined not to return until dinner time. Etched in my mind are the colours of the red, sandy soil, the piercing and endless blue of the huge sky above us, and the green of acre upon acre of citrus trees.
One summer we found an old loam pit that we could ride our bikes to in under 10 minutes. There was a huge mound the size of a two story house at one end, and during the day it became strewn with our footprints. Chris suddenly had an idea that we should make a parachute, and jump off it - sailing gracefully to the bottom just like on TV. Excited by the notion we tore back to his house, asking his mum oh-so-innocently if she had an old sheet we could borrow, for “nothing in particular”. We found some nylon rope and scissors in the shed, and and two old leather belts in his dad’s wardrobe… and dashed back to the loam pit. It took some engineering, but within about an hour Chris and I had fashioned a canopy, with four lines tied to each corner of the sheet. We made shoulder straps from the belts, tying two of the cords to each one, and then we were set. We climbed to the top of the mound, and with all the seriousness of a test pilot about to tackle the sound barrier for the first time, he leapt off as I threw the chute out behind him. Moments late he lay rolling about in the sand clutching his wrist and wailing, the unopened chute coming to rest a few feet away. As it turned out, nothing was broken, but we decided then and there that perhaps parachuting was best left to experts.
A few years later they sold up the plantation and moved back to the city. That summer I stayed over for a week, our days spent video gaming frantically, BMX-ing, and scoffing lollies, evenings glued to the cassette recorder listening to the BBC radio plays of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy as we rolled about the floor laughing and regurgitating numerous Marvin-isms. Over the next two summers we got heavily into BMX, Chris as a jumper and me as a racer. We’d spend hours out scouting around his hilly suburb looking for jumps and tracks, and were among the first to ride some of the now famous ( infamous ) downhill mountain bike trails located nearby. In the air Chris was somewhat of a freak, able to get more hangtime than anyone else, with a style I’d always secretly envy. He’d take on the gnarliest, biggest jumps, usually before anyone else dared… and he’d always pull them off.
One day we were coming back from a lunchtime chip-shop raid, belting flat out down the footpath of the busy road near his house. We’d spent the morning cleaning and working on our bikes, convinced that doing so made them go faster and if not, at least feel faster. As Chris approached a driveway he veered left, swinging back in and bunny hopping off the curve, getting a good two feet of air and kicking the tail out nicely. I was a few seconds behind and followed suit, veering left and then bouncing off the small concrete ramp. In mid air I suddenly became aware of a major technical problem, watching in horror as the front wheel detached. I came down hard, the front forks grinding into the pavement and making a terrible screeching sound as they did. I was duly catapulted over the handlebars, landing on my left shoulder and tumbling three of four times before coming to rest on the footpath. I rolled over, trying to get back the wind the blow had knocked from my lungs, and beheld one of the funniest and most ludicrous sites I can recall ever seeing. Some 100m up the road, I watched my front wheel roll across two lanes of heavy traffic and somehow not get cleaned up, Chris weaving in and out of the cars and screeching brakes in hot pursuit. It came to rest on the other side of the road, right smack bang in the middle of two lanes of westbound weekend traffic. How he was able to retrieve it intact, and not get cleaned up himself, remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of my youth.
It wasn’t long before our interest in bikes and going fast consumed us, and we each got dirt bikes. My parents had a large property, and one week of the summer was usually consumed with the pursuit of building bigger jumps, achieving faster lap times, and surviving heavier crashes. During this time I got interested in competition and started racing, but this was never Chris’s lot. He never cared for proving himself against others who might have had more money, better equipment, or pushier parents, preferring to challenge himself. He became more interested in trials and trail riding, enjoying the solitude and honing his skills in tricky, unpredictable terrain. This desire to do things on his own, to be solitary and not explain himself, became a central facet of his personality.
My interest in dirt bikes continued but Chris’s waned, and after a few years he returned to pedal power. As mountain biking was set to explode, he became hooked early on. He re-discovered all the old trails and quarries we’d haunted years before, soon joining up with a band of fairly hardcore hills-bred riders. They all got into dirt jumping and downhill, the latter satisfying Chris’s natural urge for technical riding. It also got him out and close to nature, where he had felt increasingly at ease.
One night the phone rang, and my mum sounded really serious. She hung up and came into the lounge where I was sitting, and I just suddenly knew she had very bad news. It was Chris’s mum… he’d crashed on a downhill, and was in intensive care with a depressed fracture of the skull and blood bleeding into his head. They gave him a 20% chance of making it. I just sat there, stunned… unable to believe it. The thought of him lying there hooked up to all those bloody machines brought a lump to my throat, and I felt utterly helpless. I couldn’t bare the thought of what might happen… and refused to accept it. I just told myself over and over again that he was tough… he had a strong mind… and that he’d somehow pull through. For the first time in the ten years since giving up religion and anything to do with church, I prayed.
The day after was long, and I fought to keep it together. I was an apprentice by this stage, and in such a blokey environment hiding the emotion was hard. That night the phone rang, it was Chris’s dad. Chris was out of surgery and although early days, they believed it had been successful. The next week was agonising while he lay in an induced coma, and no-one was sure whether he’d suffered any brain damage. When he woke up a week later, with no idea how he got there, he was really, really pissed off because he was s’ posed to be going for a ride that weekend.
He got better sooner than everyone expected, and within a few weeks returned to Uni where he’d started first year of his BSc. It was here that his passion for computers really took hold, and the mischievous side of his personality began to get him into strife. During his second year he became reasonably accomplished at writing shell scripts, learnt through trial and error, and in isolation. Before long he had written fake logins and captured details of every other student, so that when his account got locked out through overuse or abuse, he merely switched to someone else’s. Inevitably he was caught by one of the admins and given an official warning… but this was just encouragement to Chris. He soon cracked the admin’s login, but sat on it until he’d had time to quietly set up a Daemon in an obscure folder. As it turned out, his theory that the admin had root access proved correct… and Chris soon had root to the Uni’s primary Unix system. Exactly what he got up to with it is the source of some speculation, and was the impetus to re-write large slabs of University policy on computer system usage by students. Expulsion was threatened, but Chris somehow managed to talk his way out of it and be allowed to finish his degree. But revenge was a dish he preferred to serve cold, anonymously, and long after anyone could catch him. The year after he finished honours, where he developed his own programming language, a friend related an incident that had become folklore among the would be hacker community studying there. Somehow, a former student had left an easter egg in for the sysadmin in the form of an animated middle finger rising from the bottom of the screen, shortly after which the root password on several non-student machines were reset. The admin was left with no doubt as to the culprit…
His talent for bashing out code led him to a cadetship with one of the largest Telco’s in the world, and he reveled in the challenge. He adopted a less hardcore approach to mountain biking, resorting to peaceful forest trails on level terrain, occasionally with his parents, but mostly alone. Throughout he also revisited two pursuits from his earlier life- wilderness hiking and concert piano. I can remember sitting and drinking a beer with him one lazy thursday when we’d both blown off work for the afternoon, throwing names of classical composers at him at random and watching bash out perfect renditions of a piece from any one I chose. The polished timber floors of that house still echo with those sounds.
Chris was never much of a partier, always drawn to what he considered more intellectual and meaningful pursuits - and more often than not, alone. He missed my 18th birthday, and on my 21st claimed he was unexpectedly double booked and “might try to get along later”. He sent brother Mikey with girlfriend in tow along, carrying a card he’d made from a record sleeve. Inside he’d written with gold texta, the mathematical proof that 1 = 2 . He never showed, but to be honest, I didn’t expect him to. Chris’s solitary life also made him awkward with girls, and although he had several girl freinds, girlfriends seemed in short supply. It wasn’t as if he was ugly, or antisocial, or un-interested… it’s just that small talk was something he really never got the hang of. A few years later he moved in with Mikey’s ex-fiance after they split, but we assumed it was purely platonic. If the case was otherwise, they concealed it very well.
Long periods went by over the next few years where we’d not see each other for many months… at one stage over a year. It didn’t matter though - sooner or later one of us would call the other, and we’d hook up somewhere and catch up. It would seem like no time had passed, and since we thought in very similar ways, there’d always be something new that had fired our imaginations while we’d been apart. I remember sitting down one night with a bottle of Shiraz Malbec and some Belgian chocolate, both of us consumed by the latest revelations in the science of Chaos and Complexity. We ate, drank and speculated into the small hours about its ramifications - and how the theory made so much sense to us.
We spent the next few months exploring the Mandlebrot set and numerous other fractals, and wrote iterative functions and graphics programs to create our own. Chris said he found a fusion of mathematics and nature in complexity that he had always suspected, and he wondered if this lay at the core of his deep attraction to the wilderness. He had just returned from hiking Cradle Mountain in Tasmania, and he showed me a picture he’d taken of a view from one of the remote ridges. He said when he walked into the clearing and looked across that spectacular view for the first time, it was like a tremendous choir opened up in his mind and sang to him alone. “I’ve never believed in God”, he told me, “but that’s as close as I’m ever likely to come to it”.
The day they scattered his ashes, almost 10 years ago to this day, I thought about that. I didn’t go back to work after the ceremony, instead loading up the car and heading for the beach. It was the middle of winter, but it was a beautiful clear sunny day. The beach was practically deserted as I watched empty, clean shoulder high waves roll in. I put on my wetsuit and paddled out alone, only a couple of kilometers away from the place I caught the first wave of my life. It was a day not all too different from this one, except at the height of summer. Chris was beside me when the ocean first cast its spell upon me, when I felt the water draw up under and behind me, and launch me toward the beach for the first time.
Just as it had on that day, a set rolled in from the horizon - and I paddled out over the first wave, letting it go unridden. I spun ’round for the second, and took off, racing the first section and trying to beat it. Just as I made it out onto the open face of the wave, something moved beneath me. I looked down to find a dolphin swerving backward and forward, riding the wave with me. I began to laugh, and I remember time slowing down to the point that it almost ceased to be. Near the end of the wave the dolphin shot past me at great speed, then turned abruptly and launched himself out the face of the wave and into the air right in front of me. It landed in the water behind me with an audible splash, and then disappeared.
As I flicked off the end of the wave I looked up the beach to see if anyone had witnessed it - but there was not a soul to be found. So I just sat there for a moment, wondering. And those words, and a smile, came to me.
“I’ve never believed in God… “
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