One for the Road Read online

  Orange is a major metropolis by comparison. And it has the broad main street I’ve seen in a hundred news photos of country towns: false-front shops, angle parking, and a wide awning shading the footpath. What the photos don’t show is that the grand facade of Main Street, New South Wales, is designed like an Old West movie set to mask the nothingness behind. Even in a town with thirty thousand people, the side streets fade quickly into a thin layer of housing before dwindling back into the bush.

  The shops are silent on Sunday, but there’s plenty of traffic. Unfortunately, none of it is moving. Parking on the main street with the radio on is what passes for a Sunday outing in Orange.

  I lean my pack against a ten-cent parking meter and watch a storefront thermometer creep toward eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Much worse lies ahead, I know, so I face the sun, purposefully. When I was a child, I used to take off my shoes in early summer and sprint back and forth across the stony driveway, hoping to toughen up my soles for the barefoot months ahead. Maybe I can do the same now and train for the withering heat of the outback.

  My first workout lasts ten minutes. I retreat into the shade and take a swig from my waterbag to clear my head. An hour later, a car finally unglues itself from the curb and swings around to pick me up. It’s one of those souped-up dragsters with the back wheels raised so high that the grillework is pushed down in front, as if to inhale any loose gravel. The driver, a sullen-looking teenager in black jeans and a black sleeveless vest, moves his arm like a minesweeper across the passenger seat, sending three dozen Coke cans clattering to the floor.

  “Hop in, mate. I can get you as far as Molong.”

  “Thanks for the ride!” I tell him, threading my legs between the can heap and a tangle of fuse wires. It is the one and only obligation of the hitchhiker to seem eternally grateful—and to keep up the chat. Hitchhiking is a big leap of faith for both parties. The driver has no way of knowing if you’ve just climbed the wall of a maximum-security prison. You have no way of knowing if he’s a mugger, rapist, or worse. Chat, however mindless, is the best way to break down any lingering suspicions.

  I try again: “So what’s to do in Orange on a Sunday?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How about Molong?”

  “Dead, mate. Laid out like a stiff.”

  “So what takes you there?”

  “Testing my transmission.”

  Silence. Transmission isn’t one of my conversational strong suits. “Actually,” he adds, unprompted, “that’s a lie. There was a cricket match on Channel Two and reruns of Bonanza on Nine. And nothing happening on the street. I reckoned there might be something more bloody exciting between here and Molong.”

  Perhaps he means me. Boredom is, after all, the main reason why people pick up hitchhikers; if not boredom, then to stave off sleep. Occasionally, the sight of a hitchhiker actually pricks at someone’s conscience, like one of those African kids staring off the magazine page: “You can stop for this poor bastard, or look the other way.” Usually, they turn the page.

  Anyway, this teenager from Orange is bored, but he’s after something more exciting than my idle chatter. “Look at that,” he says, slowing beside a heap of car-squashed flesh. It is the first kangaroo of my Australian journey.

  I stare hard at the shapeless corpse and try to conjure up the animal described in the journals of explorer William Dampier, who was the first white person to record seeing a kangaroo. “The land animals were only a sort of raccoon,” he wrote of his visit to the Australian coast in 1699. Unlike the American raccoons he’d seen, they “have very short forelegs, but go jumping upon them as the others do, and, like them, are very good meat.”

  Good roadside meat, too, like raccoons. But not good enough for my companion.

  “I thought it might be a big wombat, or maybe an echidna,” he says, picking up speed again.

  I’ve never seen an echidna, but I’ve read that they’re the only mammals in the world that don’t dream. Conscious and subconscious are rolled together in the wakeful world; just life as it is, experienced through their snout and spiny body. Until they wander into the road and end up, like this kangaroo, in a deep echidna sleep.

  In Molong, there are two pubs but both of them are closed. Even the parked cars have gone elsewhere for the afternoon. My host decides not to push his luck; he turns around to Orange in time for High Chaparral on Channel 7.

  The day is still young when he leaves me at the northern edge of town. It creeps through middle age and into retirement as I wait for a car to pass. There is a paranoid clarity that comes to those who stand alone by the road, for hours. In this case, it’s directed at a garden statuette of a kangaroo in the yard behind me. I can feel its beady plaster eyes on my neck, hexing me for having ridden with animal killers all day.

  I beg forgiveness and pray to the ’roo to bring me a ride. I get another hitchhiker instead.

  “How long you been on the road, lad?” A disheveled man with two bloated duffel bags studies me from across the road.

  “First day out. How about you?

  “Thirty-three years, lad. And them boots are still not tired of walking.”

  Phil “Boots” Harris, cook by trade, card shark and con man by preference, kicks his bags into the shape of a chaise longue and stretches out on top. He spotted me from a ditch beside the road where he spent most of the day sleeping off an all-night card game. “Drunk, see.”

  The boots are high patent-leather pumps—night shoes, not for walking. Mid-shin, the boots give way to a tattered pair of tuxedo pants that must have once belonged to a stouter, shorter man. A massive beer gut droops above the man’s narrow waist, protruding from a T-shirt that reads: “My wife has a drinking problem. Me.” Alcoholism is written across his face as well: it is red, lumpy and deflated, like a day-old birthday balloon.

  “Landed these threads at a church in Orange,” Boots says, hooking his thumbs on an imaginary waistcoat. “Spun a real hard-luck yarn. Lost my job. Started drinking too much plonk. Wife showed me the door. Blah blah, boo hoo hoo.”

  He opens one of the bags and a few potatoes roll out. “Landed some tucker too. Blankets in the other bag. I’ll sell the bloody lot of it in Dubbo.”

  I ask to hear his story.

  “Information costs in the bush,” he says, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Have you got a beer?” I haven’t, so I toss him a dollar coin instead.

  “Anyone can have a home and an honest job,” he says, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “But if a man lives by his wits, he can get by without all that. And stay free as a bird, like me.”

  Free to roam the continent, which is what Boots has done since running away from Kalgoorlie in West Australia as a teenager. The first stop in every town is the pub, where he hustles card tricks for schooners of beer. When the tricks play out, he hustles poker. On a good night he makes enough to walk on down the road a little farther. On a bad night he sleeps off the beer and starts all over the following day. “Fresh as a goose. Only poorer,” he says.

  “If there aren’t any mugs at the pub, there’s always one at the church,” he goes on. “Convents are the best. You can tell a nun any bloody nonsense and get everything but a place in her cot.”

  I interrupt his story as two cars approach, headed north. They pass. A few minutes later, several more drive by.

  “Still on city time, lad?” Boots asks, laughing. He hoists a bag over each shoulder and leads me up the road to a signpost that’s scratched with the names of hitchhikers who have languished here before us. There are memorials like this all across America, inscribed by legions of stranded travelers. Apparently Australia is the same.

  “Don’t ask me why, but Molong is bloody hard to get out of,” Boots says, locating his initials beside the years 1972, 1978, and 1981. He adds “P.H.” one more time for good measure. “Won’t be the last scratch, neither. Once I get to Dubbo I’ll probably just turn around. I get itchy feet if I stay in one place too long.�
�

  Hitchhiking etiquette seems to be universal as well. Since I arrived first on the road, Boots plants himself out of sight and juggles potatoes until I can coax a ride. There’s little traffic, though, and no one is interested in picking me up.

  Boots watches for half an hour before returning to the roadside. He sits on one bag and offers me the other. It is almost sunset: the hustling hour.

  “Pick a heart, any heart,” he says, drawing a well-worn deck of cards from the pocket of his tuxedo pants.

  “Six.”

  He opens the deck to a six.

  “Dollar says I can find the ace.” I nod. He cuts to the ace.

  “King?” The king it is. A two-dollar note trades hands.

  I ask for the deck and deal out a round of poker. Another note disappears into his pocket. We try euchre and I lose again. I am ten dollars down when a truck pulls up and offers a ride to Dubbo. There is only room in the back for one.

  “You take it, lad,” Boots says, folding up the deck. “Them boots are still not tired of walking.”

  I watch the moon rise from the back of the truck and take stock of my first day on the road. A meal offer, my first kangaroo, and a true Australian swagman, albeit at some cost.

  There will be much shared food and more kangaroos than I can count before this journey is done. But the travel is lonely from here on. Boots is the last hitchhiker I will see for three thousand miles.

  * A glossary of Australian usage appears on this page.

  3 … Woop Woop and Other Places

  It’s all Jon Hamilton’s fault, this thing I have about hitchhiking. We were best friends at sixteen when Jon thumbed his way across America over summer vacation. I stayed at home, in Washington, D.C., serving French fries at a Wild West version of McDonald’s.

  “I’m holed up at this flophouse filled with naked old winos,” Jon wrote from New Orleans. “They lie in bed all day with their doors wide open, so I walk down the hall and look at the bottoms of their feet. Too much. Jon.”

  I studied the card between customers on the fast-food assembly line. “Howdy, partner, want some fries?” I’d ask. They always did. So I’d scoop a pile of spuds between the milkshake and the cheeseburger, point them to a cowgirl at the cash register, and cry out, “Happy trails!” I lasted a week.

  Jon was halfway across the continent by then. “Hopped a freight train in Shreveport and rode it all the way to Santa Fe,” he wrote from New Mexico. A pair of Navajos galloped across an open plain on the other side of the card. It looked like cowboy country, only the real thing, not a French-fried version of it. “Got drunk on ripple wine with some hobos in a boxcar. The desert out here is unreal. Happy trails, Jon.”

  Jon showed up at school that September with a beret and an adolescent stubble sprouting across his cheeks. Between classes he’d sit alone under a tree and roll cigarettes, looking shell-shocked, only in a good way; like he’d seen something vast and important out there, in a New Orleans flophouse or a freightyard in Santa Fe.

  All through the school year, I studied the pages of the Rand McNally Road Atlas of America. I read and reread Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and pinned a poster from Easy Rider over my bed. Wanderlust mingled with other passions in my adolescent dreaming.

  And so it was that I found myself the following summer, a month of dishwasher’s pay in the pocket of my jeans, standing beside a highway headed west out of Washington. My destination was California, three thousand miles away. My route was to be as random as the drivers who took me in.

  In the two months that followed I found out just how boring the amber waves of grain can be. I threw up my first shot of tequila behind a Mexican bar in South Dakota. I landed in a Nevada jail for riding on a motorcycle without a helmet—behind a biker who was going a hundred miles per hour, with an ounce of grass in the pocket of his leather jacket.

  But misadventure was part of the appeal. Hitchhiking was a rite of passage, and a way to slum it across America like so many generations before. Go West, young man. Get your kicks on Route 66. At seventeen, there was nothing that compared to sprinting toward an open car door, half in terror and half in exhilaration, to climb in for another ride with a total stranger.

  I was hooked, and for several summers I hitchhiked whenever I could. Then full-time work intervened; the aimless rambling ended. But a part of me clung to the seventeen-year-old, holding out his thumb by an open road, not knowing where in the world he was headed. It was an image of myself that I liked and trusted.

  Now, ten years later, I’m trying the real thing on for size again, and so far it fits. Watching the dawn from a park outside Dubbo, I feel oddly at home. Roll up the sleeping bag. Poke around in the rubbish bin for a piece of cardboard to make a sign saying “Bourke.” Amble out to the highway to check the traffic. Who knows what’s just around the bend?

  A truck stop. It’s still early, so I go inside to sip coffee until the sun rises above the black soil plain. A radio over the grill beeps six times and the cook stops rearranging slabs of bacon to turn up the volume.

  “Mornin’ stock report,” he says. Two farmers at a nearby table stop talking. I make a mental note of this town called Dubbo where everyone follows the Dow Jones index. My folks will get a kick out of that.

  “In Gunnedah on Friday there was a good display of heavy steers,” the radio drones, “with prices starting firm then fetching two to three cents more than the previous week. Woolly lambs were also dearer, as were bullocks and pigs….”

  I listen carefully to this garble and realize that I heard similar broadcasts about a dozen times yesterday. Livestock reports and test cricket are the music to which country life is set.

  “Any sales on today?” I ask the cook.

  “Nyngan, I reckon. Maybe Wee Waa. Ask the cockies.”

  He gestures at the two men I’d noticed listening to the radio. They are lean and tanned, clad in what seems to be the uniform of New South Wales farmers: stubbies, singlet, and short, pull-on workboots. The brims of their work hats flop like tired lettuce leaves.

  I study the map for a moment. Nyngan is north and west, in the direction of Bourke. I can’t find Wee Waa anywhere. I hoist my pack over one shoulder and wander over to the cockies, who are counting out change on the laminex table.

  I ask if they’ve got room for a ride to the market, and one of them replies, “Where ya headed?”

  “Bourke, I guess, then farther. Just touring around.”

  “I wouldn’t tour too long in Bourke if I were you. Too many Abos. But I can get you to Nyngan.”

  We climb into his truck and head off through the early morning light. Like the farmer I rode with yesterday, this one’s not the talkative sort, so I stare out the window as the stunted skyline of Dubbo falls away behind us. From here on, I know, civilization dwindles rapidly. I imagine that in the typical bush settlement, the grain silo will be the biggest building in town.

  But in my mind’s map it is Bourke, not Dubbo, that marks the true beginning of an outback journey. All before is known and fertile ground: orchards, hobby farms, paddocks thick with sheep. But “back o’ Bourke,” as everyone calls the serious bush, there lie plains of nothing stretching all the way to Alice.

  Ten miles out of Dubbo, I realize it may be hard to tell back of Bourke from front. There’s a Kansas-like expanse of cotton and wheat, a few silos, then endless tracts of blank and untilled space. A telephone line and the occasional eucalyptus are all that rise above the dirt and scrub.

  “One seems to ride forever and to come to nothing,” Anthony Trollope wrote after touring the New South Wales bush in the 1870s, “and to relinquish at last the very idea of an object.”

  A century later, this landscape is still the scenic equivalent of Valium. I stir awake as the truck pulls off the road at a town called Nevertire. Not a town really—just fifty or so homes, a rail spur, a pub, and a store. Nevertire wasn’t always so inconsequential. If I had come this way a century ago, I might have been stampeded by livestock from re
mote grazing stations. There were only 134 people living here in 1891. But no fewer than 295,708 sheep, 6,998 cattle, and 710 pigs loaded on at the rail spur. That works out to about 2,300 hooved creatures for every head of human.

  A cyclone blew away two of the town’s three pubs in 1890. But the one that remains does a brisk trade in overheated cockies, and motorists thirsty for a beer and a yarn before plunging on to Bourke.

  Most of the blow-throughs want to know, as I do, how Nevertire acquired it stoic-sounding name.

  “There’s a few theories, all of ’em probably bull,” the publican says. He is polishing bottles behind the bar while the cockie and I cool off over lemon squash. One theory says a bullock driver was the first to plod across the muddy plain. He bogged down, yelled “Never tire! Never tire!” at his chattel and so gave the town its name.

  Another theory tells of a white settler who asked his Aboriginal guide to build a fire at the end of a long day’s slog. When the native refused, his companion said, “But I’m not tired.” To which the Aborigine replied: “White man never tired.”

  A revisionist version holds that it is the Aborigine who is never tired. But visitors to the pub are well advised to ally themselves with the original text.

  “You being a Yank, you probably don’t know why blacks are called boongs,” the cockie tells me. He strikes a match on the bottom of his boot and lights a cigarette for dramatic effect. “Boong! That’s the sound they make when they bounce off the ’roo bar.”

  Being a Yank, it takes me a moment to realize that a kangaroo bar is the metal guard I noticed on the front of his truck. I muster a polite smile.

  The cockie orders a beer, and then another, before I realize that this may be an extended stop. Other farmers are rolling in for lunch. There are fertilizers, fat lambs, the price of pigs, and other matters to mull over in the heat of the day. So I surrender my stool and scan the pub walls for entertainment. A Technicolor cotton plant blooms on one wall beneath an advertisement for the American company that owns much of the land hereabouts. “Cotton—now it’s a whole new boll game!” it cries with Yankee exuberance.