One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  Unfortunately, the desire to escape a place is usually in inverse proportion to one’s luck in catching a ride. It’s as if drivers can read the distaste beneath your insincere smile and return the favor by letting you stand there and suffer.

  So I wait outside Coober Pedy all morning, with nothing for company but blinding sun and swarms of blowflies. Since I gave up on insect repellent back in New South Wales, drivers have offered me about a hundred home remedies for the Great Australian Fly Plague. Gum leaves rubbed all over my body. Garlic. Mint. Prayer. Not one has worked. Mute tolerance is the only defense. Close-mouthed silence, that is; otherwise, the flies might crawl down my throat.

  It is midday before I’m finally picked up—by a ute that looks as if it was rescued from the same junkyard as the one I rode in yesterday. The muffler and shock absorbers have been surgically removed. And of course there’s not a spot of room in the cab, which is occupied this time by three young whites. No choice but to spread my fly-bitten limbs like strips of bacon across the hot metal surface of the ute’s open rear.

  At least there’s no oil to fry in this time. Instead, I am accompanied in the back by a huge wood-and-Styrofoam coffin with three eskies of beer entombed inside on a bed of ice. Every twenty minutes or so, the driver pulls off the road, unlatches the coffin and pulls out four bottles of beer (one for me, of course). In between beer stops, the driver pulls off the road, and the three men pile out to urinate on the hard, baked ground.

  “Watch where ya piss, goddammit,” a drunk named Barry yells at a drunk named Darryl, who is urinating somewhat recklessly against one of the ute’s tires.

  “Aw, get stuffed,” slurs Darryl, wetting his own leg, then laughing. “This little piggie is gonna go wee wee wee all the way home.”

  Home is the wheat-farming country near Kimba, on the Great Australian Bight. The three cockies are in their late twenties but look older, with the rugged, sunburnt faces of men who make their living from the land. Barry, a brawny, solid-looking sort of bloke, and Reg, the half-sober and sarcastic driver, wear visored caps that announce what kind of tractor they use. Darryl is boyish, too big for his singlet, with eyes so blue that they pop out of his sunburnt face. He is also the butt of the jokes, most of them scatological.

  “Goddammit, Darryl, one more fart out of you and you’re walking the rest of the way.”

  “Whaddya want me to do?”

  “Put a lid on it. Keep your mouth shut.”

  I pick up bits and snatches of this dialogue as we irrigate the dry road running south from Coober Pedy. At piss stop number eleven, I learn that the three men have spent the past few weeks scratching for opal in Mintabie, which they do during every slack season to earn a little extra cash. The opal fields seem to be South Australia’s answer to Las Vegas: a casino off in the desert where ordinary people can come toss their money on the ground and hope their number will come up. Like every other opal digger I’ve met, Reg and Barry and Darryl have crapped out. But they got their money’s worth of fun, just hanging out with one another, drinking and farting and swearing, a day’s drive away from the humdrum of life on the farm.

  “You put your crops in, you take them off, you fix a fence or two, then you put your crops in again,” says Reg. “Sometimes it’s good to get on the piss and piss off to the opal fields for a while.”

  The drive home, it seems, is the final grand piss-up before returning to the family, the farm, the fertilizer. When the coffin of stubbies empties out, we pull into a roadhouse for a few glasses of beer to add a bit of variety. Then we load up again and head off the main highway onto a dirt track that runs all the way to Kimba.

  “Hard to find good navigators these days,” Reg complains as Barry and Darryl fall out of the truck, giggling. “Just piss wrecks.” He hands me a topographical map. “Keep an eye on it and let me know if it looks like we’re getting off course.”

  It is my first real venture down Australia’s unbeaten track. Instead of plotting a course from town to town, or even station to station, we hop from “Haggard Hill” to “Numerous Small Claypans” to “No. 19 Bore” to “Skull Camp Tanks.” Picturesque as these landmarks sound, they aren’t exactly jumping off the horizon. For one thing, the dust is so thick that I could be in sub-Saharan Africa for all I know. When it clears, and a sandhill comes into view, it’s hard to tell whether I’m looking at “Hunger Hill” or “Dingo Hill” or some other hill altogether.

  I can’t even use the location of the sun as a reliable guide. One moment it’s straight in my face, the next moment it’s burning the left side of my face, the next moment it’s throwing the shadow of my hat onto the truck.

  Then we make a 90-degree turn at the top of a sandhill, and a shimmering plain of salt spreads like a white quilt across the landscape. I look at the map, and nowhere between Kingoonya and Kimba do I see anything that looks or sounds salty. I begin banging on the back of the cab and Reg skids to a halt.

  “We’re lost, I think.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Look at that,” I say, pointing at the salt plain. “Tell me they’d leave that off the map.”

  Reg squints at one sandhill, then another, and then at the map.

  “That’s Lake Everard, ya mug,” he says with a laugh, climbing back in the cab. “We’re way out to buggery now.”

  Sure enough. A ghostlike patch on the map marked Lake Everard. The beer has obviously got to me. Why else would I be so stupid as to expect a body of water to actually have water in it? After all, the biggest lake in South Australia, Lake Eyre, is so hard and dry that a racing car driver set a land-speed record tearing across it. Land-speed record. On a lake. If you’re looking for permanent running water—or even standing water—in outback South Australia, forget it. There isn’t any.

  After that I stop worrying about the map and take in the scenery instead. Except for a few windmills and an abandoned sandstone outstation, I see no sign of human life for two hundred miles. What I do see is the wildlife that humans normally chase away. Not just a lone kangaroo or two, but herds of them hopping across the scrub. Emus too, and wild goats, wild horses, and even a pair of wild, humpless camels—descended, Reg says, from the camels that Afghan drivers once prodded across the scrub.

  The setting is so wild and unspoiled that even our lonely ute seems an intrusion of massive dimension, blaring fiddle music by the Bushwackers and trailing a plume of dust that obliterates the landscape for some minutes after we travel through it.

  At other times the intrusion is more violent than that. In late afternoon, Reg almost skids off the track for what I assume is an emergency piss stop. But turning around, I see that he’s swerved to avoid two men wrenching at the grillework of a truck, which is stalled in the middle of the narrow track.

  “Any damage?” Reg asks out the window.

  “Naw, just the grille,” one of the men says. Then, gesturing at a heap of flesh by the roadside, he adds: “Want some dog tucker?”

  The kangaroo, of course, is dead.

  By sunset, my three companions are almost incoherent. Round upon round of beer seems to have washed away the years in a kind of drunken regression. The conversation has winnowed to wanking.

  “For Chrissake’s, Darryl, stop playing with yourself.”

  “I’m not playing with myself, dickhead.”

  “Yeah? You’d do it with your grandmother if she gave you half a chance.”

  “You’d do it with an empty bottle. Bang it like a dunny door.”

  My own grip on sobriety is slipping away, as is my grip on reality, or at least my place in it. Here I am, drunk in the back of a ute with three drunk cockies racing from nowhere to nowhere in the South Australian scrub. If I bounced out the back at the next hairpin bend, what would they make of my body? A dusty, ragged hitchhiker with the smell of diesel fuel about him: no name, no known address, no occupation apparently. Does the fact that I have a name, an address, and a job make my other life real? Can I be both people at the same time?

&
nbsp; I am not the only one in the throes of an identity crisis. At sunset, after a pub stop at a place called Bungleboo, I squeeze up front to keep warm for the last hour to Kimba. And as home approaches, the gaiety of the daylong drive begins to sour. Reg and Darryl start arguing over the best way to control weeds: spraying or driving them out by tractor. Barry worries out loud that his wife will yell at him for coming home three days later than scheduled: broke, drunk, and filthy. And Reg wonders where he’s going to get the money for the next tractor payment.

  “It’s a good life, farming,” Reg says. Then he reconsiders. “Not really. Particularly not now. You can’t make a bloody quid out of it.”

  “Yeah, but what’s a bloke to do?” Barry says, taking up the yoke. “Get out now, or wait to see if it picks up again, pay your bills, and get out altogether?”

  It is Darryl, strangely sober now, who has the final word. “Problem is, mates, what the bloody hell else are we going to do?”

  The journey home is silent for the final half hour.

  At the Kimba pub we settle in for another round before calling it quits. There are a few wistful jokes about the opal fields, then a meditative quiet as we finish off our beers.

  “One for the road, mate,” Darryl says, hoisting his glass to me in the smoky saloon. “Wish I were you.” The four of us clink our glasses together, toss them back, and head off into the night.

  My way leads in a slow weave from the pub to a nearby camping ground, a five-star joint with trees and water and indoor toilets. The rumble of trains, wheat trains, serenades me as I roll out my swag. It is a romantic lullaby, full of yearning for distant places; the sound of freedom, a kind of locomotive counterpoint to the welcoming skid of a car hitting the gravel as it stops to pick me up.

  But I imagine the wheat trains have a different resonance for the piss-wrecked cockies. Tonight they are beyond hearing. But tomorrow, when they return to the fields, hungover, their vacation over for another year, how will the wagons of wheat sound to them?

  I will be well down the road by then, headed west with the trains.

  15 … Westward Ho

  I wake up on Sunday beneath a three-towered silo that rises like a cathedral over Kimba. No chiming of bells from this monolith—just the deep, digestive rumble of wheat traveling into the silo’s large intestine. Another doleful reveille for the cockies.

  The desert ended during the final hour of last night’s drive. In Kimba there’s even a whiff of the sea blowing up from the south. I feel like lingering, but it’s Sunday and all the world’s asleep. Might as well hit the road and get an early start.

  I have barely raised a finger toward the rising sun when a bloated sedan drags a trailer out of the caravan park. Experience tells me I needn’t bother to eyeball the driver; vacationing families are either overloaded or loath to let strangers into their domestic sanctum.

  The squeal of brake pads tells me I’m wrong. I wedge in the backseat between a pimply teenager and a two-year-old in a baby chair with a toy seal clutched to his breast. Unprecedented. I haven’t even showered or shaved to deserve this.

  I’ve landed in the lap of miners again. Not opal: gold. It used to be tin, explains the mother of the family, whom I will call Edna. That was back in Tasmania. Then Norm, that’s my husband, the one that’s driving, he got retrenched, so he got a job with a gold-mining company in Kalgoorlie. That’s where we’re headed now after a week’s vacation in Tassie.

  Such is the trickle-down lottery of international metal markets. The price of gold’s strong, the price of tin’s not, so another Tasmanian family loads up the car and migrates to Western Australia.

  Not that this family seems to care, at least not Edna, who does all the talking. Only too happy to put a few thousand miles between themselves and the “bloody greenies” who are “hung up” on Tasmania’s wilderness.

  “What’s the harm of a few little mines?” Edna bellows. Viewed from the backseat, she has the neck of a heavyweight boxer and the voice of a circus barker. “Do you want to drive up the whole coast of Tasmania and look at nothing but rain forest?”

  I offer the gentle suggestion that rain forest might be nicer to look at than the moonscape of overmined hills across much of western Tasmania. She throws me a quick expert glance that tells her I’m “one of them.” Then she returns to studying the map, as if she’s searching for a particularly desolate bit of the Nullarbor Plain at which to let me out of the car. I decide to keep my mouth shut after that.

  Not Edna. From greenies she moves on to bloody dole bludgers, bloody unions, and the Labor Prime Minister. She’d like to shoot the whole bloody lot of ’em. She even hates kangaroos: “The only good one is the one that jumps in front of your car.”

  No one else in the car dares to try and get in a word; they just tune her out. I try to adopt the same glazed manner and after an hour or so, Edna’s voice becomes monotonous, almost soothing, like the fur-lined backseat, which feels as therapeutic as a Swedish massage after two days in the back of utes.

  The scenery is pleasant but dull, rolling past like the vast midsection of America—plains of wheat and grass to be crossed en route to more exciting places. Even our frequent stops do not make so much as a ripple in this tide of blandness. At each town, Edna directs Norm past the pubs, past the coffee shops, past any spot that might offer some local color, and into the identikit tourist traps that sprout beside interstate highways. The family piles out to buy postcards at Penong, spoons at Ceduna, stubbie openers with opalized wombats at Nullarbor. Washed down with a steady stream of pies and pasties and chocolate-covered Cherry Ripes. Then back in the sedan, windows rolled up and air-conditioner booming until the next roadhouse, the next round of Cherry Ripes. Two hours west of Kimba, I assume the cool repose of a package of processed meat in the back of the refrigerator.

  I come out of the deep freeze at a sign announcing the start of the Nullarbor Plain. The most striking thing about the Nullarbor is how unstriking it is. Australia’s symbol of bleak despair is not even all that bleak—at least not compared with the forbidding desert I passed through to get here. In fact, it’s only something like twelve miles between trees at the Nullarbor’s most barren stretch.

  Not that a little greenery gets in the way of what is a numbingly monotonous journey. Just north of here, the rail line runs dead straight for almost three hundred miles—the longest such stretch in the world. And as Agatha Christie found when she pondered the mystery of the Australian bush in 1922, open spaces don’t have to be dry to be dull. “I had never imagined a green grassy desert—I had always thought of deserts as a sandy waste,” she wrote, “but there seem to be far more landmarks and protuberances by which you can find your way in the desert country than there are in the flat grasslands of Australia.”

  One landmark that is unmistakable—to my American eyes, at least—is a sign warning of camels, wombats, and kangaroos for the next sixty miles. It is one of those small but startling reminders of how far from home I am. America has only the occasional deer or cattle crossing, or maybe a “Beware of Falling Rock” sign to break up the monotony of interstate driving. Wombats never.

  My reverie is broken by Edna again. Wombats, it seems, are almost as verminous as kangaroos. “But the worst of all are Tassie devils,” she says, as if reading my mind to find my favorite of all Australian creatures. “They’ll eat anything. Bones, bolts, nails. If we had any sense we’d shoot the bloody lot of ’em into extinction.” I look at her closely to see if she’s joking. She isn’t. Her face is red with rage at the thought of the marsupial hordes crowding her out of all that empty space.

  We pull off at a lookout somewhere along the cliff-lined coast of the Great Australian Bight and Edna announces that we have twenty minutes, and twenty minutes only, to take in the view and a breath of sea air. Father and son lean against the car and smoke cigarettes rather than stroll fifty yards to peek over the cliff edge. But baby bounds out of the car like an animal freed from its cage, laughing and screaming and r
olling on the grass. Before he can so much as manage a somersault, Edna lassos him with a huge, knotted leash and ropes him in around the waist. “He’s too game,” she declares.

  On Edna’s orders, Norm has a listless go at the video camera, taping his wife and baby in a pose that looks like a drill sergeant walking a pet Chihuahua. Silent teenager stirs himself to urinate over the cliff edge, then spits overboard as well, watching the saliva drift down to sea. And chaperone stakes out a window seat until we reach Western Australia.

  Soon after crossing the state border we are joined by a legion of home movers, travelers, drifters. One car has two mattresses strapped precariously on the roof, another is towing a trailer with chairs and a refrigerator poking out the top. A third, with “Just Married!” scrawled above a Victoria license plate, has a vacuum cleaner sticking out a rear window. I feel as if I’m in a traffic jam of Okies, fleeing the dust bowl for the glittering dream of California.

  After dark there are kangaroos all over the road, so Norm decides to call it quits at a roadhouse named Cocklebiddy. I thank the family, tell them that I’ll try to hustle a ride from someone at the pub, and sprint off through drizzling rain.

  “Tell him to get a ’roo or two for Tassie,” Edna yells after me.

  I manage a ride as far as Caiguna, sixty miles farther on, but it’s still raining so I ask the roadhouse keeper about indoor accommodation. “I can give you a room for forty-nine dollars, a bus for ten dollars, and a car for five dollars,” he says. I opt for the coach, a gutted old school bus with beds set in where the seats used to be.

  As sleeping quarters go, it is comfortable enough. But the rain, and the long dozes through the Nullarbor, have left me wakeful, vaguely uneasy. I turn on my torch and study my reflection in the bus’s rearview mirror. It is the first good look I’ve had at myself in three or four days and already the sunburned, unshaven face in the mirror looks unfamiliar—as if it’s been placed in front of a fire and then had its red cheeks planted with scraggly, bleached-out grass.