WHEN THE DARKNESS COMES

One Man’s Journey Through the Rabbit Hole

Chapter 4

The Pilot I Nearly Became

There is an aerial photograph of Mount Buffalo hanging above my desk. I can look up from whatever I am writing and see the homestead, the surrounding country and, among it all, the shearing shed, and if I look at it for long enough I can almost hear the machinery starting up again. It is one of those peculiar tricks of memory where a photograph remains perfectly silent while your head supplies an entire soundtrack.

I can hear the handpieces and the movement on the boards, the sheep being penned, the voices and the machinery that provided the constant industrial accompaniment to shearing. I can remember laying in the wool, picking it up and getting it into the press, and I can certainly remember the old Koertz wool press, which occasionally had ideas of its own about when it should come down. From time to time it descended without waiting for human intervention, something capable of causing considerable injury to a wool presser and considerable displeasure to the cocky, who in our particular case happened to be my father.

I wasn’t injured by it, which was fortunate for both the wool presser and the machinery. Dad’s relationship with mechanical equipment that failed to perform according to his expectations could become fairly personal, and I suspect a wool press that injured his son would have discovered that mechanical objects were not necessarily immune from being at least sworn at.

Shearing had been part of my life long before I ever thought of it as work. We had mustered sheep for years, helped move them through the pens and done whatever jobs were appropriate for boys who were old enough to be useful but young enough to remain somewhere down the hierarchy. My cousin Phil would often be there during school holidays, and between mustering sessions we would help the wool presser, help the rouseabouts pen the sheep and apply ourselves with particular enthusiasm to the morning and afternoon tea baskets.

Mum’s interpretation of feeding a shearing team was not exactly minimalist. Once the shearers had taken what they wanted, Phil and I would descend upon what remained with the appetite of teenage boys who had been working physically and regarded sandwiches, cakes and assorted treats less as refreshments than as a challenge. Before the drudgery and repetition of shearing had a chance to reveal themselves, those days at Mount Buffalo had something almost romantic about them because, once a year, we became part of a team doing this ancient and necessary job of taking the wool from the backs of sheep.

Phil was a year older than me and as close to a brother as either of my actual siblings. We had similar outlooks on life, enjoyed each other’s company and generally got on like a house on fire, although occasionally that enthusiasm extended to finding out which of us could physically rearrange the other. Phil had a brown belt in jiu-jitsu, which theoretically gave him a considerable advantage until we discovered that martial arts technique becomes somewhat less decisive when your opponent is strong enough to pick you up bodily and put you somewhere else.

I had just finished a football season and was extremely fit, so I could do that. There was no great malice involved and probably not a great deal of intellectual development either, but it was one of those contests teenage boys seem capable of conducting without ever stopping to wonder precisely what question they are attempting to answer.

Looking at that photograph now, though, there is another reason the shearing shed stays with me. It sits very close in memory to the first time a future I had constructed for myself simply disappeared, because within days of discovering that I wasn’t going to become an Air Force pilot, I was working in a shearing shed. The connection between those two things makes considerably more sense to me now than it possibly could have at seventeen.

Flying had not been some vague childhood fantasy I mentioned whenever an adult asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. By the time I reached the end of school I had built my academic choices around it, endured subjects because they were part of the pathway and accepted that this was where all of it was supposed to be taking me. There had been a brief flirtation with architecture, largely because I enjoyed the drawing part of Industrial Arts and could happily play around with house floor plans, but I hated the teacher sufficiently to abandon the subject and instead picked up four-unit Maths and three-unit Geography.

That probably says something about the way I was already travelling through life. I was bouncing through it rather than proceeding according to some carefully prepared master plan, but flying was different because flying provided a destination for all that bouncing. Whatever else was uncertain, I thought I knew where this particular road was going, and most of the academic inconveniences along the way could therefore be tolerated because they were taking me somewhere.

The selection process came in the final week of proper school before the study vacation leading into the HSC. Dad and I travelled to Sydney on the Spirit of Progress for two days of testing at the Defence Force building near Central Station, where those of us who wanted to fly were examined, tested, questioned and progressively reduced in number. Somewhere during that process I found myself among the final six candidates for five places.

Those were pretty good odds when you were seventeen and had survived everything required to get that far. Nothing had emerged suggesting that I lacked the academic capacity, physical fitness or aptitude to continue, so there was no obvious reason to think I would be the bloke left standing when six became five. Then we got to the rather unexpected subject of what Jeff Banks did while Jeff Banks was asleep.

The testing had indicated that I potentially talked in my sleep. That became the subject of a discussion with the doctor because, apparently, talking while unconscious presented a rather unusual difficulty for somebody the Air Force intended to entrust with information that wasn’t necessarily meant to be shared with the general public. The possibility existed that I might one day know something secret and subsequently announce it to the bedroom while technically not participating in the conversation.

There is a wonderful absurdity to that when I look back at it now. Seventeen-year-old Jeff Banks had ambitions of flying military aircraft, and one of the concerns standing between him and the cockpit was that at some future point he might lie unconscious somewhere and begin broadcasting matters of national security to anybody within earshot. Of all the obstacles I might have imagined standing between me and an Air Force cockpit, apparently my sleeping self was one of them.

The doctor didn’t need the sleepwalking story to eliminate me. The testing had already identified the sleep-talking, and by the time our discussion wandered into sleepwalking he had effectively completed his day’s work because the numbers now worked. Six had become five, the quota had been filled and I was the bloke who had made the arithmetic easier.

That changed the atmosphere completely. We were sitting in an interview room in the Defence Force building and the mood was relaxed because, at least from the doctor’s perspective, the problem had been solved. His job for the day was finished and, although I probably didn’t appreciate the symmetry at the time, so was the future I had imagined for myself.

The sleepwalking discussion that followed was therefore almost informal, and it allowed me to contribute one of the better examples available. Mum had apparently watched me get out of bed one night, make my way down the long hallway and outside to the area where I practised my cricket bowling, then bowl eight full overs at something approaching the pace I used as an opening bowler.

That was forty-eight imaginary deliveries in my sleep, which seems a fairly committed training session for somebody who wasn’t technically awake. Having completed my spell, I apparently returned inside, went back to bed and resumed sleeping, which must have been quite satisfying for the unconscious cricketer because at least he knew when his eight overs were finished.

I don’t remember any of it because, obviously, I was asleep. Mum did, however, and the story acquired a certain additional significance once the Air Force started discussing what I might get up to while the conscious Jeff was off duty. The story was funny enough in the relaxed conversation that followed, although the reason we were now able to have that relaxed conversation wasn’t particularly funny at all.

There was no anger when I walked out of the building, and that is important because it would be easy, nearly fifty years later, to rewrite the seventeen-year-old boy as furious at the injustice of being rejected for something over which he had absolutely no control. I wasn’t furious. I was numb and disappointed, but the full nature of what had happened hadn’t really sunk in.

I don’t remember conducting any great internal investigation into its fairness or otherwise because a road I had been travelling had simply reached a dead end. There was no appeal to prepare, no extra training that might overcome the problem and no subject I could study harder to improve my chances. If the road ended there, presumably I would take another one, although at that moment I had absolutely no idea where it might lead.

Dad and I had time to fill before the Spirit of Progress left that evening, so he rang his brother Karl and we went out to Dee Why to see him and his family. I was probably more interested in catching up with Phil than I was in analysing the destruction of my proposed career, which tells me more about the seventeen-year-old I actually was than any retrospective emotional reconstruction could. Phil was somebody I didn’t see often enough and somebody whose company I genuinely enjoyed, and for a while that was simply more immediate than worrying about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Dad didn’t offer a great emotional assessment of what had happened and I didn’t ask him for one. That wasn’t particularly unusual in our relationship, nor did I sit there feeling deprived because my father wasn’t probing the emotional wellbeing of his rejected son. We simply sat in the train, slept when we slept, looked out of the window when we were awake and allowed the miles between Sydney and home to disappear into the darkness.

I need to be careful looking back at that silence because it would be very easy to turn it into something I remember resenting, and I didn’t. I wasn’t sitting opposite Dad hoping he would suddenly become somebody different and ask me how I was coping with the disappearance of the future I had spent years working towards. I didn’t expect a hand on the shoulder, a fatherly speech about other doors opening or even an acknowledgement that what had happened that day might have hurt, because none of those things really belonged to the relationship I knew.

But the fact that I wasn’t looking for anything from him doesn’t mean that receiving nothing was without consequence. Dad was already becoming, in my mind at least, the Rock I would later recognise in Paul Simon’s song: emotionally self-contained, apparently impervious to the things that might unsettle other people and much more likely to meet difficulty with action, anger or silence than vulnerability. I didn’t have that language at seventeen and certainly wasn’t sitting on the Spirit of Progress conducting a psychological assessment of my father, but I was watching him nevertheless.

Perhaps that is one of the ways boys learn what being a man is supposed to look like. Nobody necessarily sits them down and explains the rules because the rules are demonstrated instead, repeatedly and often without anybody realising that a lesson is being taught. Dad didn’t tell me that disappointment should be swallowed, that hurt didn’t need discussion or that a man simply dealt with what had happened and got on with the next thing. He didn’t need to say any of those things because, from where I sat, that was largely what he appeared to do himself.

The strange thing is that I probably admired it. There was something formidable about a man who seemed as emotionally approachable as the blue granite I have compared him with elsewhere, because granite doesn’t wobble when the weather changes and a rock doesn’t require anybody else to hold it up. When you are seventeen, strength and emotional impermeability can look remarkably similar, particularly when the person demonstrating them is your father.

What I couldn’t have known was what it cost him to be that Rock, because I never really saw what was happening behind it. Dad had his own pressures with the farm, the complicated ownership left between three brothers, money, responsibility and whatever other disappointments belonged to his life, but I don’t remember him presenting those things to me as emotional burdens. If they frightened him, hurt him or left him wondering what came next, that wasn’t the version of Dad I was shown.

So when my own road suddenly ended in an interview room in Sydney, there was already a model available for what came next. You didn’t necessarily talk about it, you didn’t require somebody to ask how you felt and you certainly didn’t stop the machinery of life while you worked out whether you were disappointed, angry, frightened or simply numb. You accepted that the road had ended, found another road and kept moving.

As a teenager you can live almost entirely inside the silo of your own microcosm, and mine did not contain much expectation that my parents would take an active interest in where I imagined my life was heading. I didn’t go looking for compassion because I didn’t expect any, and I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with it if it had suddenly arrived. The disappointment belonged to me, but increasingly so did the assumption that dealing with it belonged to me as well.

It wasn’t necessarily that nobody cared. It was more that care in our family wasn’t routinely expressed by sitting somebody down and inviting them to explain what was happening inside their head, and I shouldn’t rewrite the 1970s as though we had simply misplaced the family counselling appointment. Dad had taken the train to Sydney with me, spent two days there while I went through the selection process, rang Karl when it was over, took me to Dee Why and then travelled home beside me. Those things were also forms of being there, even if they weren’t expressed in the emotional language I might recognise more readily today.

That distinction becomes important because I don’t want to turn Dad into the villain of a story he didn’t know he was participating in. He didn’t create the Black Dog, and I can’t draw a straight line from a silent train journey to depression decades later. What he did provide, perhaps without either of us knowing it, was another example of the Rock: encounter the problem, absorb whatever it does to you privately and continue standing.

I followed that example extraordinarily well. Within days I would be in a shearing shed, the HSC would become an inconvenience and the future I had imagined would be replaced by whatever happened to be immediately in front of me. At seventeen that didn’t feel like emotional suppression, resilience, avoidance or any of the other labels I might now be tempted to attach to it. It simply felt like life, and the man sitting silently opposite me on the Spirit of Progress had already shown me what you were supposed to do with that.

As suggested, a teenager you can live almost entirely inside the silo of your own microcosm. I didn’t go looking for compassion because I didn’t expect any, and my parents had never appeared particularly interested in where I imagined I was heading, so there was no reason for me to expect the family to convene an emergency meeting because the Air Force had said no. The disappointment belonged to me, but so did the expectation that I would simply get on with whatever happened next.

It wasn’t necessarily that nobody cared. It was more that I had never expected anybody to ask me to explain what the loss of that future meant, and I probably wouldn’t have known how to answer if they had. The language of sitting down with a seventeen-year-old boy and asking him to unpack the emotional consequences of a career rejection belonged to another time, another family or perhaps both.

There was also nothing particularly unusual about a setback being followed by whatever needed doing next. Farm life had never been a realistic alternative for me because I wasn’t interested in it, Dad struggled with the pressures surrounding it, and the farm itself was complicated by the fact that it had been left to all three brothers under his father’s will. There was no obvious moment when Dad could simply hand me the keys to the kingdom, even if I had wanted them, because the kingdom wasn’t entirely his and I didn’t want the keys anyway.

By the time we arrived home, the Air Force was an event that had happened. There was no morning-after counselling session, no prolonged family discussion and no period in which I was encouraged to sit quietly and contemplate the closing of one of the few doors I had deliberately spent years walking towards. Life simply gave me no opportunity to stop, and at seventeen it didn’t occur to me that perhaps stopping was something I was supposed to do.

George Johnson was a mate of Dad’s, although I don’t think I ever actually met George himself. He had work available in a small shed where crutching was taking place, the job was arranged, I turned up and did it, and that was about as complicated as the employment process needed to become. I don’t remember George interviewing me about my ambitions, my recent disappointments or where I saw myself in five years, which was probably fortunate because at that stage I wouldn’t have had a particularly impressive answer.

One shed led to another. The first was local, the second was next door and the third was no more than twenty miles away, although by then I was staying in the shearers’ quarters with the rest of the team rather than returning home each night. Within an extraordinarily short period the boy who had travelled to Sydney expecting his future to involve aircraft had assimilated into the shearing world and was getting on with the work in front of him.

I wasn’t entering an unfamiliar environment. I had mustered sheep for years and had effectively been the wool presser during our own most recent shearing, so the sights, smells, language and rhythms of a shearing shed were already part of my life. What had changed was my place in it because I was no longer merely the kid helping out during the annual shearing at home.

I was now part of the workforce and being paid, and that provided something immediate that the disappearance of the Air Force had taken away. It wasn’t direction in any meaningful sense because I had no ambition to build a lifelong career around shearing, but each morning I knew where I had to be and what I had to do when I got there. At seventeen, that was enough to keep life moving.

At one of those early sheds there were supposed to be two rouseabouts working the board for eight shearers. The second one didn’t turn up, which left me dealing with all eight on my own, and shearers were not necessarily renowned for gently nurturing newcomers while they developed confidence at their own pace. If you couldn’t keep up, the evidence was going to accumulate fairly rapidly in front of you.

I kept up, although I suspect the manager looked after me to some extent. Being on a neighbouring property with my father and his legendary temper somewhere in the geographical background probably didn’t hurt either, but I also did the job that had been put in front of me. Whatever protection might have existed around the edges, nobody else was picking up the fleeces for me.

That mattered in a world where reputation could be established fairly quickly. Eight shearers kept throwing work at me, I kept dealing with it and by the end of it there was no need for anybody to ask how I felt about my performance because the board had provided the answer. I had been given something difficult to do and had done it, which was a language I understood considerably better than discussing disappointment.

There was something wonderfully uncomplicated about that. The Air Force had rejected me because of something I apparently did while unconscious, which left very little room for improvement because it is difficult to apply yourself more diligently to being asleep. A shearing shed offered problems that could be solved while fully awake.

Sheep needed to be penned, fleeces needed to be picked up, wool needed to go where it belonged and eight shearers were capable of creating a very visible problem if I didn’t keep up with them. Those problems existed directly in front of me and could be dealt with by doing something, which was an approach to life that suited me rather well. There was no need to understand the problem emotionally when you could simply get hold of the next fleece.

The timing also meant that the HSC, supposedly the culmination of all those years of schooling and the great academic gateway into adulthood, suddenly became an inconvenience. Only days earlier those examinations had been attached to the future I thought I was pursuing, and now the principal reason I had endured much of the academic program had disappeared. The exams still existed, but their importance in my little universe had changed dramatically.

I didn’t launch some teenage protest and refuse to sit them. I dealt with them as annoyances that interrupted the more immediately rewarding opportunity to work and earn money, leaving the shearing shed when required, going to an exam and returning to work afterwards. The education system was still conducting the grand finale of my secondary schooling while I had already mentally wandered out of the theatre.

Eventually the HSC produced a score of 215 out of 500. It was hardly the sort of result likely to cause universities to fight among themselves for my signature, but by then the scoreboard didn’t mean what it had meant before Sydney because the destination against which I had been measuring it had vanished. A result only matters in relation to where you think it is taking you, and I no longer knew where that was.

What I did have was purpose, even if I didn’t have direction. I think that distinction matters more to me now than it possibly could have then because purpose is immediate: there is a sheep to move, a fleece to pick up, a press to operate, an employer expecting you to turn up or eight shearers expecting you to keep pace with them. Direction asks the considerably more difficult question of where all of this is ultimately taking you.

At seventeen, I don’t remember being particularly troubled by the distinction. I was earning money, I was working, there were people around me and each day presented a collection of things requiring my attention, so life continued to be had. There wasn’t much space left over for contemplating whether I had lost my direction because purpose kept arriving every morning and demanding to be dealt with.

That phrase probably comes closer to describing my attitude at the time than any modern psychological language I could impose upon it. Life was encountered, experienced and moved on from, and there was almost always something waiting on the other side of whatever had just happened. You didn’t necessarily resolve yesterday before beginning today because today had already started and required your attention.

I have used a variation of that philosophy many times since: there is no such thing as stress. It is one of those wonderfully absolute statements that Logical Jeff can now pull apart in about thirty seconds, particularly after a lifetime in which depression has demonstrated that the human mind does not always respect the slogans its owner has constructed for it. At seventeen, however, it made perfect sense even if I hadn’t yet found the words to express it.

The origins of the statement make more sense to me when I look backwards. If something went wrong, there was something else to do, and if there was something else to do there wasn’t much point sitting around discussing the thing that had already gone wrong. Movement itself became evidence that the problem had been dealt with because, whatever else might be happening inside, life on the outside was continuing.

That was not depression treatment, and I don’t remember being depressed after the Air Force rejection. I don’t intend to diagnose my seventeen-year-old self retrospectively simply because doing so would make this chapter fit more neatly into a book written nearly half a century later. There was numbness, disappointment and the sudden removal of a destination towards which much of my schooling had been directed, but that is as far as my memory allows me to take it.

There was also an almost complete loss of interest in examinations that only days earlier had supposedly mattered enormously. Almost immediately there was work as well, and work had the enormous advantage of asking much simpler questions than the ones that might otherwise have been waiting for me. Turn up, keep up and do what needed doing were instructions I could understand without needing to examine what was happening inside my head.

Whether that protected me from something darker is impossible to know. I cannot run the alternative experiment and discover what would have happened if George Johnson hadn’t needed somebody, if there had been no shearing shed waiting, or if I had instead spent the weeks before the HSC sitting at home with nothing much to do except contemplate the cockpit I would never occupy. Any suggestion that shearing saved me from depression would therefore be a story written backwards rather than something I actually remember living.

What I do know is that life gave me no opportunity to stop. That became such a normal response to adversity that I would spend a great deal of my life regarding the ability to keep moving as evidence that everything was fundamentally all right. If I was still working, solving problems, earning money or doing whatever else needed to be done, there didn’t appear to be much reason to investigate whether something underneath all that activity was less satisfactory.

There is considerable strength in that approach. Businesses get built by people who turn up, families survive difficult periods because somebody keeps doing what needs doing, farms continue operating because sheep remain stubbornly indifferent to the emotional condition of the person opening the gate, and a shearing team is unlikely to suspend operations because the rouseabout has recently suffered a vocational disappointment. Life does not always provide convenient intervals in which to analyse the previous scene before the next one begins.

There can also be a trap hidden somewhere inside it. If movement becomes the only test of whether you are coping, then a bloke who keeps moving can remain convinced that he is coping long after the evidence has begun suggesting otherwise. I didn’t know that at seventeen because there had not yet been enough evidence for me to recognise the distinction.

It is only from this end of my life that another irony becomes apparent. I never became the pilot I thought I was going to become, but I am not entirely certain that I ever stopped trying to pilot things. The aircraft simply disappeared from the equation.

I eventually became an accountant, although even that description has never adequately covered what I thought the job should be. Preparing a tax return or a set of accounts after everything had already happened had its place, but I was always far more interested in what happened before the numbers reached the page. I wanted to know where the business was trying to go, what might stop it getting there and whether somebody needed to alter course while there was still time to do so.

That thinking eventually became embedded in the way I approached clients. The idea of acting as a silent partner was not about owning part of their businesses or making their decisions for them; it was about sitting somewhere near the cockpit, looking at the information available and being prepared to say something when the course didn’t seem to match the destination. Sometimes the most valuable thing an adviser could do was not explain where the business had been but help its owner think about where it was heading.

In that sense, perhaps I spent much of my working life around instruments after all. Balance sheets, profit and loss statements, cash flow, tax liabilities and all the other numbers accountants spend their lives examining are instruments of a kind because they tell you something about what is happening even when the person flying the business feels something entirely different. Numbers are not infallible and they certainly don’t make the decision for you, but ignoring them because the view through the windscreen feels reassuring can eventually become rather expensive.

There is another part of the pilot analogy that I understand much better now than I could have at seventeen. Pilots have instruments precisely because human senses do not always provide reliable information about what an aircraft is actually doing, and there are circumstances in which what a pilot feels and what the instruments report can be in conflict. The discipline is not in pretending the sensation doesn’t exist; it is in knowing which information deserves to be trusted when the two disagree.

Depression would eventually create its own version of that argument inside me. Logical Jeff could look at the instruments and see a marriage, children, family, businesses, clients, friends, opportunities and all the other evidence suggesting that the aircraft was not, in fact, plummeting towards the ground. Another Jeff could look at exactly the same panel and still feel absolutely certain that something was terribly wrong.

Knowing that the instruments are right does not necessarily remove the sensation. That would become one of the most frustrating things about the Black Dog because I could sometimes audit the evidence perfectly well, identify the irrational conclusion and still be unable to make the feeling obey the arithmetic. The accountant could reconcile the figures while the bloke sitting beside him remained unconvinced.

I don’t want to take that analogy further than it deserves because depression is not an aircraft and a set of accounts is not an artificial horizon. What interests me is that the boy who wanted to become a pilot eventually spent much of his life trying to distinguish between what the available evidence said and what somebody, including himself, felt it said. I simply didn’t realise in that Defence Force interview room how often I would eventually have to make that distinction.

Nor did I walk out of the building consoled by some mystical certainty that I would pilot businesses instead. That would be a convenient piece of autobiography written backwards, turning an ordinary disappointment into destiny because the author now knows what happened next. At seventeen there was no such revelation because there was only the knowledge that the Air Force didn’t want me and the question of what I was going to do instead.

The answer, initially, was shearing. I knew there was work in a shed, money to be earned and an HSC exam occasionally getting in the way, and after the shearing finished around Christmas there was another opportunity waiting when I was offered work as a swimming instructor at the local pool. Once again the space that might have existed between one stage of life and another was filled almost immediately.

I could have stayed there for four weeks. Instead an invitation arrived from Sydney to go to a party with Phil towards the end of that first stint, I accepted it and, as history would have it, I never really came home. Once again there was no grand plan because one thing happened, then another thing happened, and I followed whatever road had opened in front of me after the one I thought I wanted had closed.

Nearly fifty years later I can sit at my desk and look above me at that aerial photograph of Mount Buffalo. The photograph contains buildings, paddocks and a shearing shed, but my head adds Phil, Dad, Mum’s morning tea baskets, the sheep, the handpieces, the wool and that old Koertz press descending with considerably more enthusiasm than occupational health and safety would now recommend. None of those things needs to become a symbol because they are simply parts of a life I can still hear when I look at the picture.

Somewhere in that landscape is also a seventeen-year-old boy who had just been told that the future he thought he was heading towards was no longer available. He didn’t call it grief, stress or depression, didn’t ask anybody to help him process it and didn’t sit on the Spirit of Progress trying to understand what it meant. He looked out of the window into the darkness, slept for part of the journey and went home, because that was what happened next.

Then somebody needed a bloke in a shearing shed, so I went to work. For a very long time that seemed to me to be all anyone needed to know about dealing with life’s disappointments because something happened, you dealt with it and you moved on to the next thing requiring attention. As long as the aircraft was still moving forward, I apparently saw little reason to wonder whether everything inside the cockpit was working quite as well as I assumed.

There was always another sheep, another job, another exam, another opportunity or another problem. Later there would be another client, another business, another set of numbers and another person looking for some idea of which direction they should take. Without ever intending it, the boy who didn’t become a pilot spent an extraordinary amount of his life helping other people navigate.

The Black Dog would eventually make the navigation considerably more personal. He would teach me that not everything could be dealt with by keeping moving, that being busy and being well were not necessarily the same thing, and that there would be occasions when my own senses and my own instruments seemed to be reporting entirely different things. Those lessons belonged to a much older Jeff and they would take considerably longer to learn.

The boy in the photograph’s landscape knew none of that. As far as he was concerned there was no such thing as stress, there was simply life, and life had already moved on to the next job. He thought he had failed to become a pilot, and it would be decades before it occurred to me that perhaps the aircraft was the only part of that ambition I had actually left behind.