Early Saturday afternoon, about one o'clock. The path led north, hemmed in by a cliff on one side and the creek on the other. Occasionally a ramp or stairway, cut into the hill, cascaded down from a street above and into the valley. Eucalypts scissored the oblique sunlight and I walked on through the flickering kinescope.
From my house I had turned west to the corner, north uphill, and east again, to meet the path following the stream’s s-curves. It used to be an undefined dirt trail, then one year the council concreted it and painted a line down the middle with a pedestrian and cyclist symbol. Today - meaning literally today - it was a human superhighway carrying refugees from the torrid hatefulness of their own four walls, moving north and south like somnolent zombies. Floral-masked Brunswick and Coburg hipsters bearing takeaway coffees; family groups with prams and dogs and toddlers wobbling on first bicycles; old people making painful physical progress towards death; joggers, walkers, strollers, sky-gazers, wanderers, all embarked on a foot journey they never imagined.
Farther along, maybe twenty minutes' walk, the path swung east and then gently north again in a big double arc; a dyslexic 's'. Another mile along, another footbridge carried the path to the east side of the creek. It was no longer in a valley; the creek here - upstream - was a winding crease in a flat plain that had risen triumphantly out of Melbourne's bowl. The demographic changed. I was in a different suburb. The hand-made mask set gave way to the next suburb's sub-continental migrants and formally dressed middle-easterners. There were more children.
I crossed yet another bridge, left the path and took an almost secret exit into the bowl of a tiny court which led out onto the upper reaches of Reservoir, a wide flat pancake of a suburb of concrete and brick built by southern European post-war refugees. I forged on past houses that were brown-brick fortresses with gardens of castellated walls, palm trees, decorative lion's heads and wrought iron gates. East across this concrete plateau until I hit Edgar's Creek, then south along its path until I reached Edwardes Lake where another human procession was in progress around its 1200 metre circuit. The athletics track to its east, from which I excused myself from my teenage teammates to take an epic six-week road trip to Perth, Western Australia, in the middle of a Rolling Stones-soundtracked summer 1972, lay as flat and as sundrenched as I remembered it, and the same butterfly-stomached sensation came back out of the past like a yellowed polaroid.
That was three sides of the square. The fourth was uneventful, familiar, and tiring. I'd had enough walking for one day.
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*The Long March of Everyman, a 1972 British serialised radio production.
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