The Crossroad

by Mark Donaldson, VC

  I realised that I’d risked missing out on my chance to enjoy this stage of my life. I had to look at the positives in suddenly having no parents. If there were any, it was that losing them gave me an opportunity for freedom. I could do what I wanted with my life. Nobody was telling me to live a certain way. It was all up to me. What an incredible gift.

  Brent had been motivating himself in a similar way. He’d become a PE teacher, as he’d always wanted, and had a beautiful girlfriend he was in love with. Life was working out for him, but he was concerned about me and was still into me for quitting college.

  ‘Where are you going to be in five years?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll show you, just wait and see.’

  Gary Beaumont took me down to the Dorrigo pub to meet the manager of a company laying optical fibre. ‘It’s not a nine-to-five job,’ he said. ‘It’s two to three weeks on, you travel and stay with the crew, and then have one to two weeks off.’

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘Twenty-four hundred a fortnight clear.’

  I tried not to jump out of my seat. In the tree-planting job, you were paid per tray. There were twenty-five trees per tray. You had to plant fifty to sixty trays a day – 1250 to 1500 trees – to get a half-decent wage of $100 to $150. The terrain varied and you might only get ten trees in a row before you had to walk somewhere else to plant more. They were long and difficult days.

  ‘When do I start?’ I said.

  The cable-laying wasn’t difficult: 8 am starts, helping guys on huge Unimogs – multi-purpose, off-road, medium-sized trucks – by digging holes and guiding the cables that spooled out of their machines. I worked for them for a year and a half, up the north coast, out west to Tamworth, Dubbo, down from Sydney to Melbourne in one contract. I loved working with the older men, a lot of whom were good-natured Kiwis. They always had plenty of jokes and funny stories. There were only twenty people in the company and six machines, so I was given more responsibility the longer I was there.

  Without realising it, from that job I got some of the basic elements of working life that I would enjoy and develop later in the SAS. One was that we had plenty of autonomy to solve problems as a team out in the bush, and were free to take the unconventional approach. The Unimog was a 15-tonne 4WD truck with a winch that we hooked up to a big plough-like wedge that moved along the ground behind it. The cable connecting the truck with the wedge would go out up to 100 metres, but if the wedge got stopped by a rock, the winch would start lifting the Unimog off the ground, nose first. At the wheel, slowly winding the winch, going back and over and almost upside down, you could manipulate the weight of the truck to lever up the rock. I’m sure it wasn’t the way they were designed, but there wasn’t as much OH&S in those days!

  The physical danger in the job also appealed to me. Once, a younger guy had to chain the Unimog to a bulldozer to keep it weighted down. The tension in the cable was enormous, and it wasn’t long before it snapped with a loud crack! The Mog, with operator inside, went flying backwards before slamming upside down into the earth. The driver, shaken up but extremely lucky, escaped with a minor injury. Another day, a branch had fallen over the cable and an executive came up in his car to move the branch. The operator in the Mog didn’t see him and winched the wire taut. It came up and clipped the executive in the head and spun him 360 degrees. He flew over, hit the bonnet of his car, and tumbled onto the ground. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, and part of his scalp was missing. He tried to stand up, but was staggering about. We ran over and told him to sit down. He went to hospital and ended up with brain damage. They were dangerous machines – nothing like being in a war, but the presence of life-threatening hazards kept me sharp.

  Another aspect of that kind of work that carried over into the SAS was the sense of humour you develop when you’re in a team out alone in the bush. Outside Goulburn, we were digging a trench trying to find an existing Telstra cable. The company’s representative was overseeing our work, and I couldn’t resist a prank. We got a couple of broken offcuts of optical fibre and buried them in the trench. When the Telstra man came around again, we told him we were pretty certain we’d nearly found it. Then, as he stood there, we drove the shovel into the dirt through the pre-cut cable and cried, ‘Ohh, shit!’

  He saw the cut cable and, thinking we’d just severed the main line between Sydney and Melbourne, turned white as a ghost and started stammering and gibbering. He ran to his car and got straight onto his mobile phone to his boss. Pissing ourselves, we grabbed the broken cable out of the trench and threw both pieces onto his bonnet. He had to take a few looks before he believed us. It was a priceless moment. He was a good sport about it and had a laugh at himself. Since then, I’ve always thought that a well-constructed practical joke can be one of the best team-building exercises.

  In the winter of 2000, we were working near Canberra and I had two weeks off. My cousin Christine, Margaret’s youngest daughter, was living at Jindabyne. Her boyfriend Adam worked with the snowmaking machines at Thredbo. She said I should come down for my weeks off and see if I liked the snow.

  Did I what! Snowboarding was a revelation, like surfing. I was hooked, first day out. Yep, I thought, I want to do this properly. I had visions of travelling to surf and snowboard and see the world.

  While working for the cable-laying company, I’d saved up ten grand through living frugally and working hard. I’d bought a V8 Sandman panel van, and when I had my weeks off I threw in the surfboards, took my trusty Lister and went where I wanted. It had been a good job, but again, it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. Now, just when I discovered snowboarding and thought about travel, fate stepped in and gave me a push. The company was under strain. One day they told me I could take a week off, so I went snowboarding. By the time my week was up, the company had gone under.

  While I hadn’t planned on losing my job, having a bridge burn behind me was good. There was only one way forward. I spent a few months working as a labourer and farmhand on the mid-north coast of New South Wales and surfing some great waves on days off. I was having a good time, until one weekend in Sydney my beloved V8 was stolen. Van, clothes, two surfboards – all gone. I was pissed off, and of course I had no insurance, having prioritised replacing the gearbox, the diff and the clutch after all the burnouts I’d done. It was a hard way to learn that maybe insurance is just as important as upgrading the parts. Oh well, at least they could never steal the great memories.

  I decided to travel to Canada to go snowboarding. Why Canada? My aim was simple: minimum cost, maximum snow. Hoping to test myself in extreme conditions, I wanted to go deep into the country, off the beaten track, rather than to a big resort full of Australians such as Whistler Blackcomb. My research pointed to the town of Fernie, far into British Columbia, with a population of only about 4000. It got as much as 10 metres of snow every season – that’s a lot of snow. So in December 2000, I just bought a ticket, packed a small rucksack and a snowboard bag, and asked Brent to drive me to Sydney Airport.

  He and Kate were getting married after Christmas, and I think he had his doubts about whether I’d come home for it. In fact he was a bit puzzled about what I was doing in general. Here I was with massive dreadlocks hanging down the middle of my back, off on some unspecified ‘adventure’. It reinforced all of Brent’s worries about me.

  ‘But what are you going to do over there?’ he kept asking.

  Telling him I wanted to snowboard and make my couple of grand last as long as possible didn’t seem to satisfy him. Eventually I shrugged and said, ‘Something’ll happen.’ And when I jumped out of the car, I grinned at him: ‘See you at the wedding.’

  He looked at me as if to say, ‘Yeah, right.’

  I think he was probably a little worried.

  SEVEN

  How did I ever end up in the Australian Army, let alone its most elite unit? My family and friends still shake their heads. When they think of w
hat I was doing in those years after Dad and Mum died, nothing could have seemed further from my future. How could this deadbeat kid end up having a personal audience with the Queen? I was anti-authority, anti-commitment, looked like something out of Mad Max, and prized, above everything else, my personal freedom. I refused to answer to anybody. What could have been further from the military? I was on track for a professional career as a dirtbag. They saw me as the image of my father, which in many ways I was, and I was living the young man’s life he couldn’t live at that age because he spent those years in Vietnam. Anyone who knew me would have seen a total rebel, the opposite of a uniformed soldier. For them, the truest statement I’d ever made about my future was when I burred up at that kid outside the Dorrigo post office when he’d said, ‘What are you going to do, join the army?’

  ‘Get fucked!’

  When I did eventually join up, it looked like a massive U-turn. ‘What’s he doing?’ my family asked. Some of them predicted I’d last one week. At best, two months. But to me, it wasn’t a change in direction at all. In my mind, I was always heading on this path – if not to the SAS, then something like it. I may not have taken the direct route, but in the five years between Mum’s death and my joining up, even if it looked like an extended party, I did have a sense of purpose. If nobody else understood what it was, that was okay; it took me some time to understand it myself.

  *

  By the time I flew into Vancouver twenty hours after saying goodbye to my brother, I was jumping out of my skin. The city was blanketed in snow, with as many snow ploughs as planes at the airport. I was tingling. How awesome is this going to be? Where’s it going to take me?

  The only negative about the next few weeks was that they passed too quickly. In Fernie I stayed in a big dorm-style house with about eighteen people sharing four or five rooms, with a hot tub out the back below an elevated deck, and made lots of great friends with the snowboarders. Whether it was improvising runs using a handrail and a ramp off the back deck of the house, or going into the back country, I was feeding my lust for adventure. Often I thought, If only Dad and Mum were here. Probably they’d have been worrying and telling me what I should and shouldn’t be doing.

  Brent’s wedding, on 13 January, was coming up fast. On New Year’s Eve, a few of us decided to catch an eighteen-hour bus ride down to Vancouver for a party. I was trying to pack a lot in, and knew I was running the risk of missing the wedding if things went off the rails, but that was the spirit of the adventure.

  The snow was really dumping, and getting to Cranbrook, the nearest airport to Fernie, to catch my flight was no sure thing, but I made all my connections and got back to Newcastle the day before the wedding. The surreal part was, the surf at Newcastle Beach was cranking, so here I was, on a pristine afternoon, getting sunburnt as hell, the day after I’d been snowboarding in a tiny inland town in Canada. The more extreme the transition, the more challenging the adventure, the more it suited me.

  Brent and Kate’s wedding was happy and very emotional. There were tears everywhere when they made their speeches, talking about Dad and Mum. I was best man, and thought I had to lighten the mood – they were killing their own wedding! – so I made some jokes about how Kate had a life of punishment ahead of her if she realised that soon he’d be dragging her into the backyard to bowl cricket balls all day and get flogged in one-on-one footy. Jokes aside, I was really proud and ecstatic to see them so happy. I was on a bit of a high myself, and these were good days to remember Mum and Dad.

  Two days later I was back snowboarding in Fernie.

  I stayed in Canada until May 2001, living from one day to the next, loving my snowboarding and ice hockey and making new friends. I left the big share house I was living in after breaking the caretaker’s rule of no hot tubs after midnight. One night I brought about ten people back from the pub, guys and girls, and we all piled in nude. We started a competition to see who could get the furthest away and make snow angels. The caretaker stuck his head out the window and told us to shut up. One of the people I’d brought back, an Australian named Mikey, made a snowball. The next time he poked his head out, wham, Mikey nailed him.

  To keep myself going, I got some work helping Mikey clean the spas in the resort on the mountain. It wasn’t the worst job: we were paid cash to do the cleaning up after the guests, and were allowed to take whatever food and beer they’d left behind. If we were in the mood, which was most nights, we’d have a bit of a spa party ourselves.

  I found the snowboarding as rewarding as surfing. It was amazing to be flying down a mountain at breakneck speed and laying down long, hard, sweeping turns in the lush powdery snow. It had a really relaxing effect on me and I was able to just focus on making the turns, picking the best lines down a cliff or through a forested section. It was the feeling during those moments that attracted me to it so much: just being with myself, executing a difficult but exhilarating task, in the wilderness.

  At the end of the ski season, when I was thinking about going back to Australia, Mikey said, ‘Who wants to go on a trip through America for three weeks?’ I had a simple motto: ‘Say yes to everything.’ So we formed a group: Mikey, two girls, Misty and Lou, another guy, and a little blond Canadian snowboarder named Drew. He and I established an instant friendship.

  My travel mates knew people everywhere, and Americans let us sleep on their couches in Seattle, down through Oregon to California. If we couldn’t crash in someone’s home, one of us would go to a hotel and book a double room, and then, when none of the staff were looking, the rest would pile out of Mikey’s van into the room and sleep on the floor. I celebrated my twenty-second birthday in northern California in a seedy pub with my mates and some of the locals, and couldn’t have thought of a better way. We got wetsuits and boards and took Drew surfing for the first time. It was far colder than anywhere I’d been in Australia and conditions weren’t great, but he absolutely loved it. He got hooked as instantly as I had and a few years later I would meet him on his own surfing odyssey.

  Living on a shoestring, we all had the same lack of a plan. Each day we’d just go where we’d go. We went to San Francisco, Big Sur to see the redwoods, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. It was snowing when we were in the red desert of Arizona and Utah, which looked bizarre, but that countryside struck a chord with me for some reason. I fell in love with Monument Valley, which became my favourite place, climbing around the rocks in the Valley of the Gods nearby. After all that had happened, I felt like I was leading a different life, that it was many years ago that Mum had disappeared.

  But it had only been two years. On the anniversary of her disappearance, we were on the Californian coast, and I took some time out and dropped a flower in the ocean for her. Not a day went by when I didn’t think about what had happened. Every year, on her anniversary, if I can be by the ocean, I drop a flower in for her. What I was thinking about most, I guess as a way of suppressing my feeling of being cheated, was how much I’d love to tell her what I was doing and where I was. That’s the thing I’d lost: being able to share this with her, even if it was only in a letter or a phone call.

  I missed her and Dad especially when we were in Lake Tahoe. There was a bridge where Mikey had seen some massive steelhead trout swimming by. You weren’t meant to fish there, but he wouldn’t be stopped. We went on a mission at night and chucked a lot of bait in but didn’t get one hit. It looked easy, but they were probably so used to being fed they weren’t going to be tempted by something on a hook. But the act of finding this fishing place, and doing it on the dodgy, made me literally ache to get on the phone and call Dad. It was the type of thing he’d do. And the next day we walked out onto a jetty on the lake, and Drew and I were daring each other to jump in. When we jumped, it was fucking icy – everything froze up. We had to swim 25 metres back to the ladder to climb out. I’ll never forget it. That ‘will I or won’t I’ anticipation, and finally having the eggs to jump, felt like being o
n holidays with Dad and Mum and Brent.

  We headed back north, through Salt Lake City, Utah, then Wyoming and Yellowstone National Park. There were a few more weeks’ worth of snow in Fernie in May, and we took another trip up into the north-west of Canada, mainly to fish and spot wildlife. The end was coming, though: I was close to running out of money. To evade a per-passenger fare on the car ferry from Prince George to Vancouver Island, Lou and I hid under the blankets in the van and Mikey and Misty drove on. Once aboard, we scrambled out. The sun didn’t go down till ten at night, and we sat on deckchairs enjoying the incredible scenery, the fjords and the whales bobbing up, while finishing off a bottle of rum. I had just one ratty dreadie sticking out the back of my head. In every new place, I’d cut one off and left it there. On the deck of this ferry, I stood at the rail and cut off the last one, marking the end of the trip in a ceremonial way by dropping it into the ocean. Only, the wind caught it and it landed on this bloke’s shoulder on the deck below. He hadn’t seen it. It was tickling his neck and he was scratching at it, then he grabbed it and absolutely freaked out. He jumped like it was a rat or something. He looked up, but we were rolling around laughing, out of view.

  We finished the trip with some more fishing and camping on Vancouver Island, where a local lent us a lot of gear. The people were so spontaneously generous, for me it was like a cleansing of the spirit. After seeing the worst a person could do, I felt I was now seeing the best. I wanted to say to Mum, Here, see, there’s goodness in the world too. I was beginning to really value the world I lived in, and wanted to protect it. Every small gesture could help in that way. Just before I left, I offered Mikey the rest of my Canadian dollars. He wouldn’t take them, so I snuck out and stashed them under the visor in his van. It was just a couple of hundred bucks, but I wanted to say thanks somehow. Years later, we met up again in Sydney, and he said, ‘That was you that left that money?’