Emails from the Edge - A Journey Through Troubled Times
Emails from the Edge - A Journey Through Troubled Times
by Ken Haley
Transit Lounge Publishing, HK$248
In early March 1991, journalist Ken Haley, having taken a dozen sleeping pills, reasoned that he might survive jumping from the third-floor bedroom of his lodgings in Melbourne, so made his way up one level higher. And launched himself into the void.
It's a measure of this admirable chap that he should record the next few moments in mock humorous blank verse. 'The Earth broke my fall ... my pelvis cracked. Spine snapped. Neck was dislocated. The Earth is 13,000km thick. It emerged unscathed.'
Emails from the Edge is subtitled A Journey Through Troubled Times and the author traces with stark and arresting clarity his descent into madness, gradual recuperation after attempting suicide and subsequent peregrinations around the globe, not so much wheelchair-bound as revelling in the extra dimensions allotted by four wheels.
Rather than being a conventional travel book, Emails from the Edge is primarily an odyssey into the foreign climes of the mind.
While working as a sub-editor on a newspaper in Bahrain during the outbreak of the first Gulf war, Haley became delusional and was briefly detained in a psychiatric hospital after running through the city at night shrieking that the world was about to end. After being released, he made his way back to his native Australia, haunted by images of war and pursued by personal demons. Suicide seemed the only way out.
'If every minute of the day is torture, and there's every indication of this continuing remorselessly into the future, then dying becomes the least painful course.'
Thankfully for Haley, a friend heard his body hit the ground and promptly summoned an ambulance, thus saving his life. Months of surgery and physiotherapy were followed by a simple realisation. 'I'm alive,' writes Haley, 'so, what am I going to do about it?'
The answer, initially, was sub-editing at home and abroad, interspersed with bouts of travel. In 2001, after a well-remunerated online stint at the Asahi Evening News, he embarked on a two-year grand tour of Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, lining up an itinerary that embraced 41 countries and vowing to avoid airlines and run-of-the-mill accommodation whenever possible. A third rule - to keep out of war zones, both actual and potential - gave some pause for thought in the wake of the September 11 attacks, but Haley resolutely carried on into the eye of the storm, meeting Osama bin Laden in Tehran (a humble merchant rather than the arch terrorist) and providing a flightless bird's-eye view of the war against terrorism.
The resulting, rollicking travelogue forms the bulk of Emails from the Edge, and it's all the more inspiring for not containing a shred of self pity. Getting around undeveloped countries is problematic enough for 'uprights', as the author dubs the able-bodied. A stolen suitcase containing vital medical gear is simply another hurdle that the paraplegic Haley views with the same amused detachment as trying to find a hotel with a functioning lift or being arrested by an overzealous policeman. More often than not his disability excites courtesy and compassion from his hosts, and the kindness of strangers becomes an everyday reality. Best of all, Haley has the gift of being able to drop into people's lives and come up with crisp, bonsai biographies that say as much about the subjects as the countries they inhabit.
Haley's path through life hasn't been an easy one, but he concludes Emails from the Edge with some uplifting thoughts.
'I am generally happier with the way things in my life are now than I ever expected to be, while having acquired enough wisdom not to want to examine too closely just why this is so,' he writes. Few people in their 50s can say they have achieved such a measure of content. Edge should incite wanderlust in hesitant travellers, whatever their abilities, and a modicum of soul-searching by anyone who feels they haven't realised their full potential.