One for the Road Read online

  “The comet my grandmother see in 1910, she say it was a fire in the sky,” Atsuko tells me. So bright and close, in fact, that the Japanese worried that the comet’s vapors might poison them. Atsuko’s family filled up bicycle tubes with spare oxygen, just in case.

  “But this time, the comet, it is all head and no tail,” Atsuko says. “We think if we go bush, maybe the comet grow some tail.”

  Atsuko puts a hand on my arm as the van skids to a halt. There, a hundred yards into the scrub, a big red kangaroo is sniffing at the ochre-colored earth. Within seconds the van’s arsenal of photographic gear is wheeled into action. High-powered lenses poke out the windows. Click. Wind. Click. Wind. Reload, Click. Click. The van fires off a few dozen rounds of film before the kangaroo hops out of range. Everyone is smiling now and chatting with excitement. Proof of their Australian journey is well in hand.

  At a roadhouse by the Stuart Highway, two hours east of Ayers Rock, their path leads north to Alice; mine south toward Adelaide. But not before we’ve climbed out of the van and lined up so a camera on a tripod can snap a time-release photograph: four Japanese and one American, standing against a backdrop of empty scrub. We shake hands and they drive away, leaving me to imagine myself a few weeks hence, projected onto a living room wall in Tokyo between three dozen slides of the big red kangaroo and one slide of a dim, blurry fuzzball called Halley’s Comet. “This hitchhiker, he go bush…”

  The chronicle of my own journey is in a holding pattern over the center. I had planned to be chugging into the sunset west of Docker River by now, or firing up a billy of tea with Afghan camel drivers (who, I fantasized, still roam the desert out there). Instead, I’ve retreated 125 miles east, in time to watch the sunset turn the Desert Oasis Roadhouse from gray to brown to black.

  Even more distressing is a message flashing by the roadside like so many dots and dashes on the Overland Telegraph. Scratched, painstakingly, onto fifteen separate rocks, it reads: C-O-O-B-E-R P-E-D-Y P-L-E-A-S. Decoded into hitch-speak, that means “God help me, I’ve been sitting here for days and I think I’ll spend a few hours scratching my destination onto stones so I don’t go crazy or worse.”

  It seems the poor bastard couldn’t spell, unless he got a ride before completing the “pleas.” Either that or the heat finished him off and a pack of dingoes picked his corpse clean before I got here.

  I have just begun scratching an “e” onto a nearby stone when another messenger of doom appears, this time in person. Emerging from the Desert Oasis is a scruffy-looking man about my own age, with a rucksack over his shoulder and a cardboard sign under his arm. He is the first hitchhiker I’ve seen in the three months since Phil “Boots” Harris hustled me at cards in rural New South Wales.

  Fortunately, he’s headed the other way, toward Alice. Unfortunately, he’s just come from South Australia and he can’t wait to tell me all about it.

  “Mate,” he says, crossing the highway to greet me, “mate, if you have any sense, you’ll turn around. I spent sux days getting from Adelaide to here. Worst sux days of my life.”

  The hitchhiker’s accent tells me he’s from New Zilind. The hitchhiker’s stench—and the battalion of flies buzzing around his head—tells me he knows of what he speaks.

  “Mate,” he says, sitting down on his pack now, “it was horrible, let me tell you.” And he does. Two days in Port Augusta, in burning sun, with no one stopping to pick him up. A ride finally to Coober Pedy—“hell on earth, mate, hell on earth.” Stuck there for another two days. Then a ride with two Aborigines who broke an axle in the middle of nowhere, and just abandoned the car—and him—to wander off into the scrub. He finally flagged down a car for the last stretch, which was the worst of all. “Mate, imagine a bedspread that’s all crumpled, except that it’s made of rock, and you’re driving over it. That’s what the road is like. I needed back surgery by the time we reached the Northern Territory.”

  There’s more (“plenty of it, mate”), but a car is coming the other way. So he crosses the highway and sticks his finger out. When the car stops, he chats with the driver a minute, then comes over and asks if I want to go to Alice. No thanks, I tell him. He shakes his head as if seeing me off to the front line of some distant battlefield.

  “Take this,” he says solemnly, handing me a road map and tourist guide to outback South Australia. “And take care, mate. I hope you make it.”

  With that he vanishes toward Alice, leaving me with his flies, which busily begin crawling into my eyes and up my nose.

  As twilight descends, C-O-O-B-E-R P-E-D-Y P-L-E-A-S takes on the eerie aspect of a headstone. I retreat to the roadhouse, but no one’s there to ask for a ride. So I settle in over a beer and begin a crash course on South Australia, which I hadn’t planned to travel through at all. The fine print of the Kiwi’s road guide makes for a grim introduction: “Coober Pedy to Kulgera: 465 kms—100 kms bitumen and 344 kms gravel and earth road in fair condition only, with bad corrugations, thick bulldust, loose sand and stony surface a hazard.”

  Dislocated vertebrae. Bruised coccyx. Emphysema from the dust. No wonder there’s no traffic on this road.

  I’m interrupted by two girls, aged about seventeen, coming in for a cup of coffee. They flash me friendly smiles so I wander over and inquire which way they’re headed.

  “Darwin,” they answer in unison. “How about you?”

  “Darwin, but I’m going the long way around.”

  They look at each other and shrug. Crazy Yank.

  When I ask about their plans, I get a bubbly report about how they just left Tasmania and are on their way to work on a cattle station near Darwin. Jo likes to cook. Maryanne does laundry, but she wants to be a “jillaroo,” which seems to be the female equivalent of a cowboy, or “jackeroo.” Except that on this particular station, there are a whole lot of jacks and no other jills.

  “Three hundred and sixty blokes, and just the two of us.” Jo giggles. “Can you imagine?”

  “I’m just hoping to find one guy to go out with,” Maryanne says, her mouth wrinkling into a serious, meditative knot. “What do you think?”

  I think I would vote this comely Tasmanian most likely to succeed of any woman in Australia, and I tell her so.

  Jo, the flirt of the pair, breaks into a toothy smile. “Sure you don’t want to go to Darwin the direct way? We’ve got plenty of room.”

  Bloke number three hundred and sixty-one. No thank you. I just wish my own prospects were that good: car upon car, headed south, and I the only hitchhiker to choose from a zillion empty seats.

  The seat I finally get, two hours later, consists of a few inches of vinyl, wedged between five hundred pounds of baby food and a lifetime’s supply of diapers. And Ken and Anna and baby in the front seat, driving home to South Australia from a shopping expedition to Alice.

  “The stores aren’t much in our town,” Ken explains, shouldering aside a mountain of shopping bags to make room for me in the back. “So once or twice a month we go for a big splurge in the city.”

  The city being Alice, being only an eight-hundred-mile round-trip from their home in Mintabie, South Australia. Not much worse than popping around to the corner deli, once you get used to it.

  Shopping isn’t the only thing that’s a bit limited in Mintabie. Strapped to the car roof is a pile of timber, fresh from an Alice lumberyard. “That’s for our walls,” Ken says. “Right now all we’ve got is corrugated iron.” Apparently, the few hundred inhabitants of Mintabie are too busy mining opal to worry much about what their houses are made of. Anyway, they’ll strike it rich any day now, which means they can move out of Mintabie. So why bother building a real home?

  Ken sold his farm near Adelaide a year ago to buy mining equipment for digging opal. “You don’t make a million dollars talking about it at the pub,” he says of the career change. You don’t make it digging for opal either, or at least Ken and Anna haven’t. But everyone they know seems to be hitting it big.

  “They don’t actually sa
y so, but you can kinda smell it on their trousers when they’ve found something,” Anna says. A new truck, maybe. An aerial sticking up from the corrugated iron. Then the final tip-off: they leave Mintabie altogether. That’s what keeps the rest of the miners scratching in the desert soil. Maybe one day they’ll get lucky and then they can leave Mintabie too. In the meantime, well, there’s always the fifteen-hour drive to Alice and back for entertainment.

  “We’ve got all our money sunk into the mining now anyway,” Ken says. “We couldn’t leave if we wanted to.”

  Around midnight, Ken pulls in at a roadhouse near the South Australian border to secure the rooftop cargo before plunging into 125 miles of gravel and bull dust. He tells me that the turn-off to Mintabie “is about as lonely a place as a man would ever want to see” and recommends I bed down here instead. “At least you can get some water at the roadhouse if you’re stuck.” Then, unable to resist adding one more blighted thought for me to sleep on, he says: “Anna and I will be back up this way in a week or so. If you’re still here, we’ll pick you up.”

  The roadhouse is shut; there’s not even a light in the back to hint at any humans about. Just me, a gas pump, and a night sky as unpolluted by smog and city lights as any I’ve ever gazed at. As soon as Ken’s headlights disappear, a brilliant tapestry of stars opens up overhead. Even the comet is a bit more of a smudge tonight—a piece of lint, say, instead of a speck of dust.

  Most travelers dream of rolling out their swag in unspoiled bush like this. Not me. Sleeping out has never been one of my talents; nor, for that matter, has sleeping in. Outdoors, my natural insomnia is compounded by a stunning ineptitude for the basics of camping. I’m hopeless at pitching a tent, unless there are floodlights and a civil engineer on hand. Nor do I have much hope of starting a fire without a quart or two of lighter fluid.

  I toss down my rubber mat and blanket, then lie on my back, gazing up at the brilliant night sky. Let’s see now … Halley’s … the Southern Cross … the Trifid Nebula. For the first time all day I am comfortable and contented. Back in the bush, a free bird, with only the constellations for company. The shooting stars become sheep, and counting them I begin to drift slowly off to sleep. Who knows, I wonder dreamily, an eye movement away from unconsciousness, maybe I’ll turn over a new leaf….

  A new leaf … a leaf … a leaf blowing in the wind … a wind blowing me like a leaf to South Australia….

  I jolt awake to discover huge clumps of roly-poly gusting past. My blanket is wrapped around my ankles, and a collection of clothes and books is scattered across the scrub downwind of me, like fuselage from an airplane crash. Only my rucksack, half emptied, is lying on its side where I left it a few hours before.

  I sit up and the blanket takes off after the rest of my gear. The foam pad rolls itself and blows up against my pack. I stand up and am blown back to the ground again. Half-naked and shivering, I start crawling around the scrub collecting my scattered possessions. A shirt is lying at anchor in a pile of cow dung. My blue jeans have thrown themselves against a barbed wire fence. T. S. Eliot is doing slow, awkward somersaults across the wasteland. “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

  On the other side of the barbed wire I find a shallow trench and throw myself in. The wind still gusts across my scalp but at least my torso is protected. I prop my pack against the fence as a windbreak. Huddled behind it, I pull on two pairs of pants, three shirts, four pairs of socks—my entire wardrobe in fact, except for the dung-covered shirt and five pairs of elastic-waisted underwear. No room for dignity here, at the center of a cyclone. I put the jockey shorts over my head, one pair at a time, fitting the fly over my nose to let a little oxygen in.

  A soothing calm envelops me with each added layer of cotton. I lie down, stop shivering, and listen to my own heavy breathing and the muffled gusts of the wind above. Much better than the hard ground, this trench. This underwear trick’s not bad either; I’ll have to give it a try on an insomniac night in Sydney.

  13 … Noodling

  There’s only one thing I dread more than setting up camp at night in the Great Outdoors, and that’s breaking camp at morning in the Great Outdoors. At least in the dark you can just curl up in your bag and be done with it—if there are no cyclones lurking about. But mornings are pure hell. I like to wake slowly, over a cup of coffee and the sports page, not scramble around in the dawn chill for socks and shoes, then hike off for a “dingo’s breakfast”—a pee and a good look around.

  Weathering a hurricane has one advantage. Since I’ve got my entire wardrobe on already, all I have to do is shed a few layers into my pack and hike out to the road. The night breeze has died down, from cyclone to mere gale-force winds, so I’m reasonably cozy, propped against my pack with a blanket around my shoulders.

  If I only had some food. There’s still no sign of a proprietor at the roadhouse. Maybe he’s asleep, as any sensible person would be at this hour. Maybe I should wake him up. Maybe he’s awake already, cooking me two dozen flapjacks with six fried eggs smiling on top, and coffee strong enough to kick-start a cadaver. Then again, maybe he’s off shopping in Alice.

  I squint at the horizon. It looks as if the night wind has blown away all the trees, hills, and scrub. The landscape is so flat and bare that I feel as if I might be able to see all the way to Alice. All I can pick out is a tiny speck, coming toward me at a pained, slow crawl. A few minutes later, the ute limps to a halt beside me. There are four Aboriginal men staring sullenly out from the cab and a dozen jerry cans of petrol vibrating in the back.

  “Where ya headed?” I shout at the driver, a very black man with a massive bush of hair. He looks at me blankly. I point at the southern horizon and bob my head up and down.

  “Pedy,” he mumbles. I point at the back of the truck, then at myself and bob my head again.

  “Hey, mate. Okay,” he mumbles. I scramble into the back and squeeze myself between two petrol drums, like a stowaway on an oil tanker. We rumble off at twelve miles an hour and a hideous noise starts. BBBRRRRRRRRRRR! I have gone from the eye of a hurricane to the belly of a sick, screaming whale. BBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRR! I toss the blanket over my head again and the noise goes down a decibel or two. BBBbbbbbrrrrrrrr. It’s beginning to look like another underwear job.

  It’s also beginning to look like a very slow drive to Coober Pedy. Ten minutes down the road, the driver stops and feeds the monster a drum of petrol. Then he rolls the empty barrel into the scrub and hops in beside me, letting someone else take the wheel. I offer the three words of Pitjantjatjara I picked up at Ayers rock—Uluru, paya (thank you), and rama-rama (crazy). He offers his sum total of English—okay, hey, mate, yes. We shout our three words in every possible combination, then smile and nod at each other for 125 miles.

  Actually, it’s hard not to nod when you’re swerving and bumping over a road that’s like gravel laid over choppy surf. Only the oil drums keep me from going overboard. And there’s nothing to look at except a cloud of dust shooting out behind the truck, with glimpses to either side of baked and empty desert. By mid-morning, the heat becomes staggering; even in the windblown rear of the ute, I can feel the sun burning every inch of exposed flesh. Nothing to do but huddle beneath my blanket, wedge some of it under my bum as a shock absorber, and tough it out.

  A few hours later my companion squeezes up front again with his mates. Then something strange happens. The ute veers off the main road (such as it is) and onto what looks like a dingo trail. I clutch the side of the truck as we bounce between bushes and churn through deep sand. I have a hitchhiker’s distrust of detours, particularly when the main road is itself a detour from any habitable territory.

  I bang on the back window and get no response; apparently, there’s some kind of domestic squabble going on up front. The ute lurches to a halt behind a clump of mulga and the four men pile out, talking loudly in Pitjantjatjara and gesturing at me. All I know is that something ugly is about to happen, and whatever it is
, I’m along for the ride.

  One thing’s for sure; I’m not going to talk my way out of this one, whatever it is. All I can do is listen to their chatter and let my paranoia run riot in translation. (“How much money do you think he has?” “Do we kill him or just leave him here to bake?”) Nor can I sort of mosey off into the scrub—“Some other time, fellas”—and run for it. Not here, at the center of the bottomless dustbowl that is outback South Australia. I’d make it three hours at the most before collapsing of heat exhaustion, dehydration or worse.

  “Hey, mate!” It is the driver speaking. He is walking toward me, sweating nervously, with one hand clutching something in his pocket.

  “Hey, mate!” He pulls his hand out and thrusts it toward me. I freeze. Then his fist uncurls to reveal a pile of crumpled two-dollar notes.

  “Okay, yes!” he shouts.

  I look at him blankly. Yes, what? He’s exhausted his English and his body language isn’t helping. Nor does my extensive Pitjantjatjara vocabulary seem appropriate. Rama-rama? Uluru?

  “Grog, mate,” says one of his companions. “Black fellas can’t buy us grog.”

  We move to dust language now and he draws a map headed back the way we came. South of the spot where we turned off, he sketches a square, and what looks like a bottle. “Black fellas can’t buy us grog,” he repeats, handing me the money and the key to the ute. “Two, mate.”

  Slowly I get the picture. They want me to take their money, and their truck, and drive to the roadhouse to buy two cases of beer. For some reason—a racist publican, I assume—they can’t buy it themselves. They’ll wait here until I return.

  The request says a lot about their trust and my lack of it. All I have done to win their confidence is utter three words of pidgin Pitjantjatjara. All they have done to lose my trust is talk loudly in a language I don’t understand. Paranoia took care of the rest.