Rescue yourself

while you still can

He thinks of the bed, thick white cotton sheets and the extra blanket Mum gave him, while he lies face down on the rock. He would like those sheets and blanket now. It’s cold. Not shivering, just aware of a light southerly through the hair on the backs of his legs, and cooling the soft skin behind his ears. He wears two jerseys, so that’s something. 

‘Come straight home after school today.’

‘I will Mum.’ 

But he hadn’t.

He can smell cut grass, the first cut of spring? His head hurts a bit. Stone doesn’t have a smell, or maybe it’s powdery, like dirt. He wants to tuck his hands under his hips to keep them warm, his shoulder tells him not to. He waits. The boys are shouting. Someone will come. 

After school it had been: ‘Let’s bike to the quarry. Chuck some stones.’

‘Okay.’

He botched the skidder at the gravel edge, and then he was sailing out, the bike falling with him. He stood up when he first hit the ground. That was a bad idea. So he lay back down on the flat rock.

In the distance he hears a siren. 

‘Alright son, we’ll get you out of this,’ a man’s voice. A hand gently on his cheek. He feels the feathery warmth of another jersey being laid over his back, ‘Won’t be long, you just hang in there okay.’

Okay. He’s too tired to speak.

In 2023 I’m working at the Heritage department at the library. An older guy approaches the enquiries desks and says, ‘I’m trying to find an article about a fall I had when I was a boy. It was in the paper,’ He has bright blue eyes, white hair and looks strong for his years, there’s a slight droop in one shoulder. 

In 1962 the librarian penned several accidents on the index card for that year, most of them fatal, the boy’s fall skirts the punched hole at the base of the card. The librarian’s handwriting is precise in blue fountain pen: Boy Falls 100ft Down Quarry. 

‘I’d been sick in bed for two weeks, a flu. Mum told me to come straight home after school.’

I thread microfilm of the Otago Daily Times into the reader and scroll to the page in 1962.

‘I’ve had a good life,’ he tells me, ‘I became a builder, I have a family. I still have a bit of trouble with my shoulder from the accident. I’m not religious but —’ he trails off, ‘I think there was a photo.’

The Otago Daily Times article doesn’t have a photo, so I go down to the basement stacks, and lug a heavy green canvas bound volume of the 1962 Evening Star up to the Heritage department. He watches over my shoulder as I turn the yellowed pages, looking for a photo, and there it is: a picture of the quarry with a big white arrow indicating the drop. 

‘That’s it,’ he looks at me, and the expression on his face is: wonder, and a glitter of tears. ‘My Dad drove past the ambulance on his way home from work. He said to me later, in the hospital, “I could have reached out and touched you, but I didn’t know it was you.”’

I think of how the only thing the boy could do to save himself was to lie still. I think of the unknown man who climbed down into the quarry to sit with him until the ambulance arrived. 

I went through a stage of reading books about heroes, trying to understand the dynamic. I played and replayed the Chris Rice song I need a hero on my guitar. I liked the subtle jazz of the rhythm, the pared back and truthful vulnerability of the lyrics ‘please dare to find me.’ I liked that it was sung by a man, inverting the damsel in distress motif of many of the movies and stories I grew up with. Chris Rice sang something I felt: I didn’t know my next move, all I knew was, I was stuck and needed — I couldn’t figure out that part.

Rescue yourself while you still can. I read that recently —

Flicking through the pages of my Penguin Classics paperback edition of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I find the quote, only to discover I’ve morphed it. Here is the original:

“No more wandering. You are not likely to read your own jottings, your histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans, your extracts from their literature laid up for your old age. Hurry then to the end, abandon vain hopes, rescue yourself, if you have any care for yourself, while the opportunity is still there.” ¬ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 3:14.

In Fleur Woods’ book The Untamed Thread, she communicates the idea of 100 days of creativity. When I read this I thought: this is no more wandering. One hundred days of writing, knitting, drawing and paint work. Activities which feel like rescue, in particular from the battering demands of my own perfectionism, and also: a way to use the material of grief, strangeness and wonder of life to make something.  

“Being softer and gentler with yourself, and your creativity, can allow for much more learning and growth. Release all expectations, gather the materials you love, and play with them to create things that have no purpose other than to allow you to explore their qualities and function.” ¬ Fleur Woods, The Untamed Thread.

In Sandie Forsyth’s mythic poem A Tower of One’s Own, the tower is a safe hiding place. Gradually the one contained within allows herself out. There’s an inkling, a moment of recognition, and a call to the truth of oneself. The poem and the making of the poem: a rescue. 

A Tower of One’s Own

Her tower
is high enough for her to gaze down on the roof next door,
and on the birds hopping about with the city before them.
She has the door closed and a view to die for.
This was a dream for her;
Rapunzel, she has always assumed,
but her hair is thin and grey,
so perhaps she is the other one,
which is a bit of a shock.
Nevertheless, she wraps this high altitude around her
and breathes.
You might think she is lonely,
but you know
there are stairs all the way down,
and a door she can open into the sunlit day
where she can gaze up at the birds,
and stand beneath the giant oaks
and be with all those others.
And she does.
But at this point she is pretty sure
that some things need this kind of solitude,
like grief,
like memory,
like letting in a poem,
and also, 
the unexpected,
like the time she looked out of the window
and saw the light and dark of Mollymawk
on the parapet below
and felt close
and more still than usual.
And then she was there all muscle and feather,
the most natural thing in this world
to feel herself and bird
with one heart spread wings
and lift up
and out over the edge.

¬ by Sandie Forsyth

Sandie’s poem speaks to me of the process of creative rescue which started when I began, without any knowledge of art or materials, to paint butterflies. I chose this art form because I couldn’t paint, and because I wanted to learn how to make something and allow the internal critic to lie quiet. The loose playfulness of painting emotion, brought me to drawing, and from there to Substack to write with the materials I find, where the moment before each post feels like a 100ft drop.