One for the Road Read online

  Praise for TONY HORWITZ’s

  ONE FOR THE ROAD

  “One for the Road is a delight…. Tony Horwitz is a fine, witty, perceptive and … elegant writer who, I’d say, acquired in the span of a year or so more knowledge about Australia than most Australians will ever have…. A true and loving portrait painted from the outside.”

  —The Newcastle Herald

  “The people and places he encountered off the beaten path are recorded with a freewheeling sense of journalistic fun and flair. … Armchair adventurers will delight in the series of colorful literary snapshots Horwitz took during his odyssey.”

  —Knight-Ridder News Service

  “Horwitz has a delightfully wry style and an eye for absurdity.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Three cheers for Tony Horwitz…. Perhaps it takes a foreigner to properly show us our own land…. Horwitz brings a new eye to an old landscape.”

  —The Sydney Morning Herald

  To all the people who gave me rides.

  And to Geraldine, who picked me up for good.

  Let any man lay the map of Australia before him, and regard the blank upon its surface, and then let me ask him if it would not be an honourable achievement to be the first to place foot in its centre.

  (Explorer Charles Sturt in an address

  to the South Australian colonists in 1843)

  Good Heavens, did ever man see such country!

  (Explorer Charles Sturt, in his journal, after trying,

  and failing, to reach the center in 1845)

  … CONTENTS

  Go Bush, Young Man

  My First Kangaroo

  Woop Woop and Other Places

  Queensland in Black and White

  The Sheep’s Back

  Beyond the Black Dot

  Snort of Blue

  Getting Man

  The Alice Is Only Beers Away

  Centered

  Halley’s Comet

  On the Road, Again

  Noodling

  The Unbeaten Track

  Westward Ho

  A Certain Sire and a Certain Dame

  Riding the Rails

  The Cup Runneth Over

  Calling Earl

  Nor’west Time

  The Ghost of Cossack

  Going Troppo

  Pearls Before Matzo Balls

  She’ll Be Right

  One for the Road

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  If a hitchhiker falls in the outback and no one hears him, does he make a sound?

  Nothing moves in this landscape, not even the sun. It has been in the same spot for hours, poking a hot skewer into my skull and all the way down to my heels.

  The air smells burnt, like a bushfire. But there is nothing to burn out here, just a flat plain of dust and stone. The road cuts across it, a line on blank paper: paper without edges, line without end. And I am the only coordinate, pinned by the sun, waiting for a ride to carry me farther along.

  1 … Go Bush, Young Man

  Even aimless journeys have a purpose I suppose. The seed for an outback ramble was planted a year before the trip actually began, when I awoke in the final hours of a daylong flight to Sydney. The moment seemed important—a desert dawn, a new year, a new country—so I unstuck my kidneys from the armrest, opened a virgin journal, and recorded my first impression of the continent on which I was soon to land.

  Jan 1. Australian airspace

  It looks like a massive vacant lot down there. Ridge upon ridge of sand and stone, splashed with saltpans, stretching to a thin strip of red on the horizon. If an alien probe landed here it would say “no life” and go home.

  For a few dreamy months I was that alien probe, albeit in Sydney. I bolted awake at dawn to the sound of kookaburras laughing like madwomen outside my window. I went to the pub and ordered beer—“Tooth’s Old” or “schooner of New”—just to hear the strange silly words spill from my lips. I listed like a twelve-meter yacht under the weight of Australian coins.

  And I wrote endless letters to America about the curious customs of my adopted land. “Lawn care is very big here,” my parents learned a few days after my arrival in Sydney. “On weekends all the ‘blokes’ are out in the yard with hoses and ‘tinnies’ of beer. They dress like little boys in shorts called stubbles (?).”

  Before long, I too wore stubbies and lolled in the sun, acquiring the native color. I found a newspaper job my first week in Sydney and that made the conversion even quicker. “Dogs shit on footpaths, not sidewalks!” the editor yelled when I filed my first story, a back-page item on filthy Sydney streets. “And ‘trash’ is an Americanism, mate. We toss out rubbish.”

  The next week a press release from the town of Wagga Wagga landed on my desk. I thought it was a misprint; one Wagga seemed improbable enough. “Check the map next time,” the copy editor suggested rather coolly. Sure enough, there was Wagga Wagga, not to mention Bong Bong and Woy Woy, or the one-word names that sounded like the fanciful inventions of a four-year-old: Mullumbimby, Bibbenluke, Woolloomooloo.

  Those first few months at the newspaper were like my inaugural plunge in the rough Sydney surf: sink or swim. Before long I’d mastered a passable Australian crawl, in and out of the water.

  But I was just stroking the surface of things; urban landscapes bear a family resemblance, whatever the hemisphere. And part of me was disappointed. “I wish I could show you a younger people and an older land,” Geraldine had written me on a postcard from Australia, three years before. It arrived a few weeks after our first embrace on a grimy sidewalk beside Broadway in New York. The next day we finished graduate school and she flew home to Sydney. I read and reread the card, studied the strange red desert on the other side, and wondered how I’d fallen in love with a woman who lived a hemisphere away.

  Then she returned to work in America, and for eighteen months I showed her my land instead—or a frozen, industrial corner of it where we both found jobs, known in those recession days as “the rust bowl.” In fact, you couldn’t see the rust for all the snow. “Cleveland,” a friend wrote to her in the midst of a blizzard, “is a place I have visited only in jokes.”

  Moving together to Sydney was like a beach party after that. But ten thousand miles from home, I felt as though I’d entered a mirror image of America. If the words were often different, the world to which they referred was much the same. TV was “telly” but the show was still Dallas. The eucalyptus-shaded sprawl of suburban Sydney could have been lifted from Los Angeles. There were even the familiar neon monoliths of McDonald’s, or Pizza Hut, or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  The outback I’d glimpsed from the airplane window was foreign enough, but it seemed impossibly remote from urban Australia; my friends in Sydney traveled more readily to Bali than to Alice Springs. They’d titillate me with snatches about the weird outback life: farms as big as European countries, Aborigines on walkabouts, dingoes eating babies, pubs that never closed. But as a journalist I could sniff out hearsay information. I wanted to see the real thing. I wanted to see it firsthand.

  The plan itself wafted in with the westerly winds, almost a year after my arrival in Sydney. It was a December day, the first real stinker of summer. Inside the office it was cool, but unnaturally cool, like the vegetable drawer of a refrigerator.

  I hit the “kill” button on my keyboard and turned to the reporter at the next desk. I feel like hitchhiking off, I told him, with no route and no timetable, toward the hot red center of the continent. The rides would decide where I went and how long I took to get there.

  “In summer? Mate, your brains will fry.” His voice was flat and his eyes didn’t budg
e from the computer screen. “That’s if you’re lucky. Dying of thirst is worse.”

  The maps I stared at were even less encouraging. I’d imagined a spiderweb of highways through the outback. Instead, I found a spindly thread connecting one coast to the other. The literature from the motorists’ association was bleaker still. Not only was an “extra spare wheel” required for outback driving, but also “a fan-belt, top and bottom radiator hoses, coil, condenser, spare fuse, light bulbs, puncture repair outfit, tin of brake fluid, roll of plastic insulation tape, 6.35 mm. plastic tubing and a troublelight or torch.”

  That was just for mechanical emergencies.

  “A well-equipped first-aid kit and fire-extinguisher could also be invaluable, while a reserve drum of petrol, food, and 4.55 litres of drinking water per person are necessities.” Remembering, of course, that “radiator water, although containing impurities, is a valuable emergency water supply.”

  With all that gear, how would anyone have room to pick me up? And with that kind of warning, what sort of maniac would venture out there in the first place?

  “In addition,” the motorists’ association cautioned, just in case you hadn’t got the point, “your proposed itinerary should be made known in case of mechanical breakdown or even becoming lost, so that a search for you can be more easily and quickly instituted.”

  Not even mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the desert sun. Certainly not sensible Australians. But there was still a margin of madness for a road-stricken Yankee. I slipped out of the office one restless afternoon and drove my car toward the hills, just to feel the rubber reaching out for open road. Broadway, the congested street outside my office, eventually becomes the Great Western Highway, shooting straight across the Great Dividing Range.

  Romantic names, I thought; Australia’s answer to Route 66 and the Appalachians. Instead I found myself crawling along a scar of used-car lots—Petrol Wowser! Low Kilo! Priced to Sell!—connecting one smoggy suburb to another. The mountains were an elusive blur in the distance. I crept back through rush-hour traffic, wondering if it was worth all the bother. I could hitchhike for days and never penetrate the brick veneer skin of suburban Sydney.

  This time I sought advice from a workmate who had actually hitchhiked in the bush.

  “I was stuck for three days and finally took a Greyhound bus,” he told me. Then his eyes narrowed. “Anyway, I was nineteen. Aren’t you a little old for this game?”

  My ticket was paid for, so to speak, before he finished speaking. I was too old. Not physically, though sleeping in roadside ditches didn’t hold the romance for me at twenty-seven that it once had at seventeen. It was the outward shape of things that seemed prematurely aged: marriage, mortgage, a bank manager who knew me on a first-name basis. Sometimes I felt like a teenager who gets a jacket with “growing space” then waits and waits for his shoulders to broaden, his chest to expand. Mine hadn’t. Surely there was still room for boyish adventures. And if not now, then when?

  At least that’s how I explained myself to Geraldine one hot night in early January. It was an uncomfortable proposition. She was a journalist too; we were used to separation. But this was different. Three years before, she’d promised to show me an older land. Now I was heading off to see it without her.

  “We could drive out there together,” she said.

  “We could.” More pacing. “But there’d be no unplanned adventures.”

  For a long time the two of us just sat there at the kitchen table, waiting for a breeze to pass through the house.

  “I saw a curious message printed on a T-shirt yesterday,” she said with a crooked grin.

  “What’d it say?”

  “If you love something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back to you, hunt it down and kill it.”

  In the morning I packed my rucksack and caught a ride with Geraldine to the end of my known Australian world: a patch of grass at the fringe of Sydney’s red-brick western suburbs.

  2 … My First Kangaroo

  The wing-tipped Ford swoops across two lanes of traffic and skids to a halt at my feet. A door swings open and I lunge inside as the car weaves back on the road out of Sydney.

  “I’m Skip. She’s Trish,” the driver says, thrusting an oil-stained palm in my direction. I shake with one hand and flail with the other for the passenger door, which is swinging open onto blurry space.

  “Tony. Thanks for stopping.”

  Or slowing at least. Skip says he’s headed to a drag race in Lithgow, on the other side of the Blue Mountains. He seems to be doing his warm-up laps en route. The city skyline dips behind a hill and suburbia stops sprawling. Then, as we plunge into rolling farmland, a chorus of carnivorous voices starts wailing from beside the road.

  “Fresh Dressed Chickens!” squawks one sign.

  “Country Killed Meat!” cries another.

  “Pig 4 Sale. Corn and Mash Fed. Good Size 4 the Spit!”

  Skip shoves a cassette in the tape deck and the car begins throbbing to the beat of heavy metal. Apparently, this is the cue for further conversation.

  “Where ya headed?” he shouts.

  “Alice Springs, I guess.”

  “Yer joking.”

  “No, really. I’m going to hitch through the outback, maybe write something about it.”

  “Could be a very long book, mate.”

  Not if I stay in Skip’s Ford: a short story, say, or a tombstone epitaph (Fresh Dressed! Country Killed!). We hit mach I at the base of the Blue Mountains; mach II on the windy ascent.

  “I work as a carpenter all week,” Skip says. “Pay’s okay but anyone can bang a bloody nail. Racing’s different. It’s dangerous business and not every bloke makes it.”

  He jerks the Ford across double yellow lines to pass a truck on a blind mountain curve. Trish digs her fingernails into Skip’s bare thigh. I close my eyes and hear the dull thud of rubber hitting rabbit flesh. And I decide that Skip isn’t going to be one of the blokes that make it.

  I abandon ship at the first pit stop, a thirty-second pause for gas about sixty miles west of Sydney. “You staying or what, mate?” Skip yells as I scurry across the highway. Before I can answer, he climbs back in the cockpit and plummets down the mountain.

  I drop my pack to the ground and catch my breath. In one great leap, I’ve pole-vaulted out of the city and onto the western slope of the Blue Mountains. From where I stand the foreground is green, but the more distant furrows of the Great Dividing Range are washed in a hazy aquamarine. And they share the gentle beauty of their American cousins, the Blue Ridge Mountains: old and soft and familiar, like well-worn denim jeans.

  Very nice. I find a well-shaded spot, suck in the clear mountain air, and inhale a dozen flies. Another dozen divebomb my eyes. And a phalanx of mosquitoes start gnawing at my ears and neck. I grope inside my pack for the tube of insect repellent that I purchased yesterday after a long, technical conversation with a camping goods salesman. I locate it near the bottom of the pack, bleeding onto my clothes and leaving acid burns on my fingers. “An insect killer that doesn’t sting is like good-tasting toothpaste,” the salesman assured me. “It can’t have any guts.”

  The flies aren’t so stupid. They swarm on twice as strong now that the flesh has been basted (Corn and Mash Fed! Good Size 4 the Spit!). I am blind and wretched, wondering which way to run, when a dilapidated Holden putters to a halt.

  “Just going a little way up the road,” the driver says through the passenger window. I would have settled for a ride in a parked car.

  We have traveled only ten minutes when my host, an amiable teenager named Trevor, pulls up at a roadside picnic ground. “Picnic stop,” he announces. “I’m shouting.”* Inside the car’s boot is a pile of jagged metal that looks like leftover hardware from the Spanish Inquisition. Trevor walks about fifty yards into the trees, digs a shallow trench, then drops in one of the irons and covers it with dirt.

  “Toss my cigarette on that,” he says. I do. The trap leaps from its grave li
ke a missile from an underground silo. The cigarette is shredded between metal teeth.

  “Bloody ripper, eh?” Trevor says proudly, resetting the trap. “Rabbit’s a good feed, except for the head. Want to stick around for supper?”

  I decline, and pick my way carefully back to the road. Just two rides and already it’s coming back to me—the helpless feeling of climbing into cars with total strangers.

  Two rides and already I’ve crossed a mountain range that the colonists spent twenty-five years struggling to conquer after settling the coast around Sydney. Charles Wentworth, who was only twenty when he joined the successful expedition in 1813, wrote a poem about how the party “gain’d with toilsome step the topmost heath,” to behold the western lands, opening before them like “boundless champagne.”

  Apparently, this vision led to an immediate hangover. Gregory Blaxland, who was no poet, recorded that the party beat a hasty retreat to Sydney, “their clothes and shoes in particular worn out and all of them ill with Bowel Complaints.”

  No mention of flies. I make my eyes and nostrils into narrow slits, hold out my finger—Australians hitch by extending their left index finger rather than their right thumb—and stand perfectly still until I finally snag a car. The driver is a farmer, clad in shorts and singlet, with a faint whiff of manure drifting up from his workboots.

  “I only take her out for church and trips to the city,” he says, patting the dashboard of the shiny sedan. This is a city trip, to pick up seeds in Orange, a small town 125 miles northwest of my starting point. “Been to a real city once,” he adds, apparently referring to Sydney. “Didn’t like it.”

  He doesn’t say a word for the rest of the hour-long drive. I stare out the window at a weed called Patterson’s Curse heaving its purple breath across the orchards and paddocks. Occasionally there is a town, but only of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety: a pub, a grocery store, a few houses. Blink. Orchards and paddocks again.