Every journey leads you into a story as well as to a place. Journeys become memorable when you find that you have been deceived about the story which you enter. So Odysseus, the master of journeys, was led to believe that he was a fringe character in the story of a brief war, only to find that the gods had conned him and that he was scripted for the lead role in an odyssey.
My least forgettable journey took place on a Saturday many years ago. Stan and I had decided to go by bike to Mount Donnabuang. We had thought that, like Tobit's journey, this would be a pastoral journey through valleys and hills, that the way there would be safe and the return untroubled. Instead, we found ourselves trapped within the narrative of Job ...
The trip out was uneventful, with only one portent that the valley of the shadow of death may have lain ahead. At the Burke Road lights my brakes proved totally ineffective: a swerve on to the footpath and into a hedge, however, met this crisis adequately. The problem did not recur, for those days what few traffic lights there were between Kew and the township of Lilydale were all on the flat.
By the time we headed out of Healesville up the Mt Donnabuang road, it was quite hot, and on the climb we became thirsty. Fortunately, there were small streams running down the gutters, fed presumably by the snow melting on the mountaintop. Pollution seemed no problem; we drank plentifully.
When we reached the top of Mt Donnabuang, the late winter sun was still slanting on to the snow, but it was beginning to get cold. Stan barracked for St Kilda who were playing in the semi final, so we waited by a car radio until the game was finished. If it thundered out of the clear sky as we so blatantly dallied with strange gods on the high places, we did not hear it. We left the mountain top just before dark.
When you are coming down a mountain at dusk, brakes are useful, but where they are not given they can be improvised. Early on, there was no problem: if the bike was gathering speed, I just allowed it to run off into the banks of snow by the side of the road. The bike jarred as it landed on the left pedal, but it