Adrenalin
DANGER. KEEP OUT.
(Most of us avoid danger. Some live it.)
(c) David Astle
We turn off the main road onto the gravel. The mood in the car has that Friday kind of lull: work done, drinks due, not a cloud in the sky. Dan the cameraman is telling a story about his time in Canberra and the laughs come easy. A feel-good soundtrack feels the only thing missing.
Around the corner a Ford ute is blocking the road. The car is skewed sideways, and a blonde in her 40s is peering at the engine. Her frown disappears when she sees our car.
‘Wait,’ says Mark, in the passenger seat. ‘I don’t like this.’
I stop our car some 10 metres short and look for signs of trouble. I see a woman with car hassles in need of help. How sinister can that be? I’m just about to open my door when Tim, behind me, says, ‘Ask her who she’s aligned with.’
Aligned with? For godsakes, her battery is flat. Dan the cameraman winds his window down and yells, ‘Are you by yourself?’
She nods and waves us closer. Perhaps she doesn’t speak English. The phrase ‘jumper leads’ is on the tip of my tongue when suddenly a man in baseball cap is standing at my window, belting a gun muzzle against the glass and screaming. ‘Get outa the car! Get outa the fucking car!’
Too late to reverse. Or duck. Or bolt. A second gunman looms on the passenger side. He’s smacking the duco, wanting everybody out. Now! He’s huge. Two metres tall and solid. The yelling and banging is terrifying. My skin is cold, my nerves on fire. Dumb questions race through my head, like: Did I kiss my wife this morning? Or why me? Or do I put the car in Park before getting out?
My hands are empty, I show the gunman. I’m innocent. Unarmed. I don’t belong to this situation. Tim, the coolest captive among us, says, ‘We’re just working here. We’re not soldiers. We don’t carry weapons.’
Mr Baseball grabs the keys. He slams the door shut and waves his gun. I lean on the car as the shouting rages around me. The taller gunman has a Cockney accent. He wears a rugby jumper with a springbok stitched on the breast. Could our kidnap be political? Are we victims for a cause? He stands beside me with his barbecue breath and his 9mm Glock automatic and says, ‘Who do you work for?’
Sunday Life, I want to say. We don’t do atrocity so much. Or geopolitics. I’m a colour writer. The lighter side. We favour celebrities and mango salsa. Let me go. I’ll tell the editor to change her formula if you just let me go.
Of course, when I say 9mm and Glock, those little ballistic details don’t spring to mind at the time. Hitting the dirt, getting hogtied by lunatics on a deserted road, you tend to think in simpler terms: gun, death, escape, sucker, doom… You promise yourself you won’t trust another blonde in your life, assuming your life is still a negotiable thing.
++
Danger, the word, belongs to our earliest vocab. Before we can speak we hear the word chanted by our guardians – the no-go zones of power points, stovetops, bathtubs, roads and men in macintoshes. Danger is a plastic bag we put on our head, a marshmallow we gulp the wrong way. We see the word on signs. Go Back. Hard Hats Only. We live with the word – our fondest taboo. Danger is part of life.
Yet some individuals can’t get enough of a risky thing. Most of us in fact are lured to such titles as Worst Case Scenario but there are those who work with danger every day – coal miners, firefighters, stunt doubles and men like Gosta Liljeqvist.
Liljeqvist is modest to a fault. Like most danger-types, he’s ‘not an anecdote kind of guy.’ Dressed neat-casual with a chess-player’s brow, Liljeqvist resembles a tax clerk rather than the former skijumping champion of Sweden.
Liljeqvist excelled in the air during the early 80s, bagging trophies across the slopes of Europe. Sheila, his Australian wife, describes her man as ‘the one-time Ian Thorpe of jumping.’ He seemed fearless.
‘I wasn’t,’ said Gosta. ‘I had a few crashes. I’ve been on the hill in the tower when a friend of mine broke his neck and became a full quadriplegic, and I still went on.’
‘Scared?’
‘I’ve researched dangerous sports, people who work with danger. Only two kind of people say they aren’t scared – the liars and the psychopaths.’
In 1985, the day that Gosta snapped his stocks – a gesture of retirement – the photo was across every front page in Sweden. One danger down, he tried his hand at parachuting for a reconnaissance corps in the Swedish Army. He swotted emergency medicine. He moved to Germany to train the US Army 7th Corps in coping with Soviet interrogation (among other life skills) when he bumped in Sheila who was touring with Europe with a theatre troupe. ‘She brought me to Australia,’ grins Gosta. ‘I’m imported.’
The scenery has changed but the man’s appetite for danger has not. We’re here in Sydney bushland as part of a GRASP course – Gosta’s new danger angle – his own Global Risk Awareness and Safety Program. The course entails three days of minefield tiptoeing, riot survival, gasmask drills and – in case you haven’t guessed – kidnap awareness.
In fact Sheila Liljeqvist is the femme fatale with the ‘broken’ Ford. She moves away from the bonnet, slapping her palms with a simulation well done. I scrabble to my feet. Flick the twigs from my shirt. The guns have been replaced by cigarettes, the screams for a sober debrief.
Jimmy, the taller kidnapper, a former member of the London Riot Squad, is employed by GRASP to teach participants about civil unrest, as well as scaring the shit from people. Mr Baseball is Anton Kuruc, an ex-major in the Australian Army whose long suits are security and weapons. Together the men – plus two unloaded Glocks – can turn Terrey Hills into Golan Heights.
‘How’d you find it?’ they ask their recent hostages.
‘Real,’ is the consensus, even for Tim and Mark, the hardened ones.
Veterans of the ABC, Tim and Mark are household voices. To prove the point, add the hotspots to their surnames: Tim Palmer-Jerusalem and Mark Bowling-Djakarta. They speak every week from your kitchen radio. You know their speech patterns, their gumption, their gallows humour. With 20 years of foreign correspondence between them, Palmer and Bowling understand danger. For both the kidnap skit revives chilling memories.
Bowling: ‘I was in East Timor with a guy from Radio Australia. We came across a militia roadblock near the capital. A rock was thrown through the windscreen. One of the men put a pipe-gun in the driver’s face. I just put my hands between my knees, looking down. Before I knew it, our driver just floored it – he drove straight over the militia. Twenty minutes later I remember doing a Q-and-A with Radio PM on a beach somewhere and my heart must have been doing 140.’
Palmer: ‘I was driving with my fixer (the in-country ally) on the road to Ramallah (in the West Bank). It was night. Nobody else on the road. There’s an Israeli army post on the border and the car came under crossfire from Palestinian gunmen. We dived out, lay face down on the roadside. We crawled across to some boulders. I called the army post on my mobile to ask for assistance. We’re a little beeezy, they said.’
++
In danger, the body changes. Pupils widen. Sweat breaks out. Your muscles can seize – like some of the girls the Engadine surfers tried to body-lift from Bali’s Sari Club. Your pulse climbs, breathing accelerates. Your voice may coarsen, or shrill to a pitch. Shakes can kick in. Your brain stem releases hormones that help to trigger conrtisone and adrenalin into the body. Combined, the signs betray acute distress.
Stress is part of the daily menu. Defined as ‘any change or demand the human organism (mind, body or spirit) has to respond to’, stress is the air we breathe, the ground we walk on. Distress on the other hand is best rationed to a rarer dosage. The loss of a loved one. A car accident. Acute violence. Each shock is capable of ‘kidnapping’ the body, severely altering our physiology. Things we might call worst-case scenarios, and paramedics label ‘critical incidents’.
Anton Kuruc, our shorter abductor, describes the danger syndrome as the four F’s. Trapped into a corner, we are likely to lapse into primaeval urges: to flee, to fight, to f**k and to feed. Less some army doggerel than the scary truth of succumbing to raw adrenalin. Strength, thirst, libido kick into overdrive. We are as animals, reduced even more so in order to survive.
When people in terror lose hold of their bowels it is nature’s way of ditching all redundancies. Ridding the ballast, as Kuruc put it. (Female bodies have been to known to scrap their menstral cycle.) That way, nerves and muscles can focus on the singular task of seeking safety. Under combat stress, soldiers might lose their sense of hearing temporarily, as if to maximise their vision. In darkness, in danger, the opposite can be true, with sight lapsing, allowing hearing to seize the brain’s input.
Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, describes the terror that lurks in ‘battlefield silence’. Close to the front line in Afghanistan, what Junger calls the dead zone, the author makes a discovery. ‘Absolute stillness can be more frightening than the heaviest gunfire.’
First the calm, then the sniper fire. As he writes in Fire, ‘There was nothing exciting about (being shot at), not even abstractly interesting. It was purely, exclusively bad.’
Fear is the crux of the GRASP course. All eight participants are news staff bound for conflict zones. (Seven from the ABC, one a ‘super-stringer’ from England’s Financial Times.) In a climate of liability, the three-day ordeal can be factored as an Occupational Health and Safety expense, equipping workers with street smarts in dangerous places.
We tackle tear gas, snakebite, grenades, anarchy. We get to wear flak jackets, anti-radiation suits, kevlar helmets, tourniquets. Liljeqvist aims to customise the course for any worker prone to danger, from police to oil-riggers, from diplomats to offshore executives. Danger, alas, is a growth industry.
++
Maggie Cooper handles snakes for a living. She grew up in western Sydney, drooling over serpents in a Cabramatta petshop. ‘Joining WIRES (Wildlife Information and Rescue Service) I found I had a real love of them – and I still do! Even the snakes that bite me.’
The fated day came in October, 1998. Cooper was schooling a fire-crew in the Grafton hinterland. ‘One thing we constantly tell people is never take your eye off the snake, and I did. I was careless. I was holding an Eastern brown, waiting from the crew to come back from morning tea. I didn’t even feel a thing. I saw the crew’s faces and thought ‘Oh’. I looked down and there was the snake chewing on my finger. I didn’t feel the weight change or anything. They are so quick.’
Trained to the risk, Cooper oversaw her own first aid. Friends wound a compression bandage around her arm. A police car on the scene drove her straight to hospital. From there, the nightmare started.
‘The doctor didn’t know about snakebite. He removed the whole bandage, not just at the site. He let the venom flow through to my body. I fainted. I don’t remember a lot. I stopped breathing. An hour later I had a cardiac arrest. About three hours later I was stable as could be hoped. I was sent to Lismore. They called for my next of kin. On Sunday night I bit my tongue so hard it blocked my whole mouth. My lungs were filling with blood. I had an emergency tracheotomy. For five days I don’t remember a damn thing.’
Doubtless her son will. Fifteen at the time, Mark had never seen his Mum so brutalised. In Lismore he hardly recognised her. He wanted her to quit her dangerous job and when Maggie said no, Mark did the next best thing, joining WIRES a few years later. Now the two work together, extracting pythons from crawlspaces, taipans from banana crates, red-bellies from gardens. Both Coopers call the danger fun. ‘It keeps you alive.’
++
Sheila Lileqvist looks for the mark on her finger but the scar has sunk into the flesh. She remembers the day well – July 2, 1997. Gosta was still with the NSW Ambulance Service, working on site at the Thredbo landslide, and Sheila was home in Terrey Hills, weeding the rockery. Man in danger; woman in garden. She felt the bite and took it for harmless. The spider had vanished. She weeded on.
That night, while Gosta saved a Thredbo rescuer from cardiac arrest, his wife sweated bullets in the marital bed. She went into spasms. Delirium. The atraxotoxin attacked her nervous system, numbing her mouth, upping her heartrate. Skin peeled off like garlic husk. Surviving into morning, Sheila told her two sons that Mummy felt sick. She lasted the next day when Gosta came home. He spotted the funnel-web symptoms immediately. He oversaw her rest and recovery. Thanks to a spider in Sydney, Thredbo taught Gosta another danger of working a dangerous job – the risk of losing those whom you love.
Mark Bowling knows those consequences too. When first posted in Indonesia Bowling, his wife and three small kids lived in the ABC’s own bungalow, flush beside Suharto’s residence. Riots took place every second night on the street. Amok, he explains, derives from Indonesian. ‘My four-year-old would say ‘The naughty men are out again.’’ In the student rebellion of November 1999, Bowling was nabbed by police and pinned down in a garden. They fired four shots around his head. Back in the bungalow, he didn’t want to stop holding his children.
Thanks to stress, a three-year stint in Jerusalem, Tim Palmer has seen his blood pressure climb 20 point. And he’s gone from non-smoker to 30 a day. ‘During intifada my wife and I had this fantastic flat in Beirut but none of our friends from Australia came to visit us. Nobody.’
Roxane, his wife, is an interior decorator who works with danger – she went to Jordan to stylise some décor for the Australian embassy, when the missiles hit Ramallah. When baby Nicholas was due, Roxie and Tim tried to book a bed in Bethlehem – to distinguish the boy – but the Reuters feed said the town had been stormed by Israeli tanks. They made other plans. (And now, post-Bali, they live in Djakarta…)
But somehow life and work and birth persevere in the warzone and the trouble spot: those same no-go places of childhood magnified on a grander scale. Places where hurt and worse are lurking. Areas that sanity would tell us to avoid, but strangely we humans seem drawn to that danger. Some humans.
[Sunday Life, November 2002]