One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  17 … Riding the Rails

  A freight train is chugging up the track and in a moment I’m going to climb on and ride it somewhere, where, I don’t really know. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself all afternoon, lying in this ditch at a railroad crossing west of Albany.

  “Two o’clock, sure as night follows day,” said the cockie who dropped me here, at Elleker, a few hours ago. “They don’t stop anymore, at least not to drop anything off. But they fiddle with something on the track.”

  I didn’t think anything of it and started hiking a few miles out of Elleker to catch a ride on the main road running west. Then, halfway there, I found myself turning around and hiking back. As traveling goes, hitchhiking is about as random as you can get. But hopping a freight train, on a line headed who-knows-where, that’s a different kind of random altogether.

  I poke my head out of the ditch and sure enough, there she is, rumbling up the track to meet me. I duck back in the ditch and wait for the long line of cars to pass and then hiss to a halt. I poke my head out again. The men working on the track are on the other side of the train, out of view. No guard on the back car. No one in sight. No excuses.

  I leap out of the ditch and run alongside the train looking for an open wagon. All sealed shut. I run to the back car to see if there’s a platform to sit on. There isn’t. I sprint back down to find a space between two of the wagons. It’s a tight squeeze, uncomfortable, maybe dangerous. There’s a ladder going up the side, but riding piggyback looks dodgy.

  “Hey, mate, what the hell are you doing?” It’s an engineer standing a little way down the track. “If you’re thinking of riding between those wagons, I wouldn’t. Unless you want to be the meat in a very messy sandwich.”

  “Got any room for me up front?” I blurt out.

  The question seems to catch the man off guard. “I’m just the assistant,” he says. “Ask the driver.”

  I run down the track and look up, way up, at the digits 1592 and the name Shire of Toodjay, and above that the driver’s window with a balding man in a plaid shirt looking out. I repeat my question. He looks at me through dark sunglasses, looks down the track, and gestures me aboard with a toss of his head.

  “Just remember, you didn’t hear me say that,” he says as I climb a ladder into the driver’s compartment. The assistant climbs in with us and we rumble down the track out of Elleker.

  “Where ya headed?” the driver asks.

  “Wherever you are.”

  “In it for the thrills, are ya?” He laughs. “Well, it’s no bloody adventure up here. But at least it’s safe.” Then he tells me why the assistant warned against squeezing between the wagons. Just a few weeks before, a train derailed in the Nullarbor and when they finally pulled the cars apart they found a man in his twenties “well and truly mashed.” He was a Yank, too. Probably had the same dumb fantasies about freight trains as me.

  My own fantasy is about to carry me north, where the twenty empty cars will load up with wheat. It’s not exactly the most direct route to Perth but at least it’s not back the way I came. So I settle on the floor by the driver’s seat and listen. Yesterday’s lesson was artificial insemination; today’s will be riding the rails.

  “Back in the forties, when I got started at this, there was plenty of blokes like you,” Gordon Link tells me. Swagmen usually. But also apple pickers and packers, trying to bum a ride to the next orchard. Officially, freight drivers weren’t allowed to carry human cargo. “But most of the time, if I saw someone climbing on in the back, I just looked the other way, unless they were drunk.” Or unless they were female. Then he might invite them to ride up front. Even so, they’d have to work for the privilege. “I’d make her swing a coal shovel, same as anyone else.”

  Then the fruit picking dwindled, and so did the freight traffic. The trains used to carry small goods to drop off at every little junction. But trucks and automobiles cut into that. Now most freighters are restricted to long-distance hauls with coal or wheat or iron ore. Only spots like Elleker, where the track changes, merit any pause en route.

  The last hitchhiker Gordon saw was a drunk sailor who jumped ship in Fremantle, went to see his girlfriend in Albany, then hopped on the train to get back to port.

  “He reckoned this would be the quickest way back to Freeo. But he didn’t realize until too late that we were going the wrong way, and going there bloody slow.”

  So slow in fact that Gordon doesn’t have to do much but settle back and keep a lazy eye on the track ahead. There’s no coal to stoke on electric trains, and no real driving to be done. All Gordon monitors is the speed. “I’m just a throttle jockey,” he says. “Ease her down at the sidings and get her back up to speed in open country. Sometimes we get up to a tonne—that’s a hundred k’s an hour—but mostly we just cruise along at eighty.”

  He slouches in his seat, watching the woods and rolling farmland chug past. It looks as easy as steering toy engines around the Christmas tree. The train’s whistle isn’t even a whistle now that steam power’s gone; it’s just a glorified air horn. Gordon yanks it once to warn off a car that wants to scoot across the tracks before he rumbles through.

  “Must be a lot of Japs around here,” he says. “Always someone trying to do harry karry getting across the tracks.”

  I doubt there are many Japanese, but maybe a tribe or two of dyspeptic Aborigines. Every second town and river name seems to end with a hiccup: Narrikup, Porongurup, Bolganup, all the way from the Bight to the Indian Ocean. Gordon says it’s because “up” means water, which may explain all the hiccups.

  Gordon’s headed toward the dry interior where all the names end with “in”: Wagin, Wickepin, Corridin, Kellerberrin. And he’s a little concerned that some superintendent might spot an unauthorized passenger up front. So at a quiet junction a half-tonne north of Elleker he stops to let me out.

  “You should feel privileged,” he tells me, yanking the air horn a few times just for the hell of it. “This is the first wheat train to stop in Mount Barker for about a thousand years.”

  I spread out my map on a splintery bench by the tracks and plot my choice of hiccups. I can go north on the main road to Kojonup, northwest to Boyup or follow a little red squiggle of a road west to Manjimup and stay on the up and up to Perth. I foolishly choose the squiggle. The region seems so tame and settled after the outback that I’ve forgotten how much empty space there can be between blips of civilization.

  I remember when I hitch a ride as far as Rocky Gully. It is so blippy as to not even register on my map. Just a grocery, a petrol pump, a few dozen houses, and thick timber with a chainsaw mowing away in the middle distance. I keep thinking the noise is a car. But every time I look up, there’s nothing but a cloud in front of my face or, rather, coming from my face. That’s how cold it is.

  The proprietor at the grocery offers some advice. The good news is that there’s a hotel a little way down the road; the bad news is that it’s the closest you’ll ever come to a pub with no beer. “The publican’s got rooms but he doesn’t let them,” she explains. “But you can try. Knock back a few beers and sort of warm him up to the idea. And for Chrissake’s, whatever you do, don’t ask for tea. He hates cooking tea.”

  She offers this information with a matter-of-factness that suggests all business in Rocky Gully is run along eccentric lines. After all, why should a publican be expected to let rooms and sell food? But it’s dark and cold; I have no choice but to observe the local work rules.

  The Rural Hotel is plain brick on the outside and even plainer on the inside. Beside the bar there’s a pool table and then a big stretch of floorspace that would be occupied in any other pub by tables, chairs, a jukebox—something. Here, nothing. No people, either. Just me and a sour-faced, white-haired publican, studying a racing form at the bar. A few thousand losing ponies appear to have trotted across his face, leaving it raw and rutted and unhappy.

  I climb on a stool, drop a two-dollar note on the bar, and order an Emu.
The publican doesn’t move. I repeat the order. Still nothing. I wander over to study a few public notices pinned by the door. “Goats. Alive. Wanted to Buy.” “Quails for Sale.” “Sheep Shorn.” The usual stuff. When I return there’s a can of Emu and eighty cents change on the bar. The publican is just where I left him, face buried in the racing form.

  Four sawmill workers come in and order a round of beers. They are even more tentative than me, waiting patiently while the publican makes a phone call—to a bookie, I assume—then checks the paper again before serving them. The sawmill workers chat for half an hour, softly, as if in church, then order a round of pies. I take the chance to order one myself. The publican glares at us over his paper.

  Twenty minutes later, the pies are still sitting on a cool rack in the microwave, apparently forgotten. When the publican goes to the phone again, I ask one of the workers if we should remind the chef of our order.

  “Don’t rush him or you won’t get a bite,” he whispers. Ten minutes later a batch of half-warmed pies are tossed on the bar. The sawmill workers thank the publican so effusively that you’d think they’d just been served a roast dinner by their mother-in-law.

  “Mmmmmmmm.”

  “Great pie, real beauty.”

  At first I take this nonsense for sarcasm, then I realize it’s just diplomacy. With no other pub for fifty miles, they can’t afford to alienate their only source of grog.

  Two beers later, after the workers have left, I pop the big question.

  “Excuse me, sir? I was wondering whether you’d have a room for the night?” I don’t expect an answer and don’t receive one. I have learned enough protocol to wait five minutes before repeating the question. He doesn’t shift his eye from the television screen and waits a few more minutes before answering.

  “All booked out, mate,” he says.

  I gaze down the empty bar, read the notices on the wall for the fifteenth time, peek out the window at the cold, dark night. Then shuffle back to the bar and stare blankly at the television for another twenty minutes.

  “I reckon we might be able to squeeze you in,” he says, umprompted, during a commercial break. I nod. Ten minutes later, when the sitcom ends, he shows me into a back corridor. There are fourteen empty rooms, beds made, towels over backs of chairs. The bathroom is equally pristine. “Push Here for Soap” says the old-fashioned fixture above the sink, which looks as if it hasn’t been pushed since 1924. He shows me to a room at the end of the hall and holds out his hand—“Twenty dollars, ta”—and disappears. It is the most I’ve paid for a bed since Sydney.

  The room is as inhospitable as my host. No sooner am I undressed and in bed than a cold wind starts seeping through the walls and floorboards. There is only one blanket—a thin wisp of wool, almost transparent. The bed feels as if the springs have been yanked out and a slab of concrete poured where the mattress should be. I pillage the other rooms for extra blankets and manage to make my resting place about as comfortable as a medieval dungeon. I lie there awake for some time, wondering what quirk of fate has condemned this publican to Rocky Gully, in a role for which he is so obviously miscast, and all the quirks of fate—a love affair, an idea for a journey, a haphazard collection of rides—that have landed me in Rocky Gully, too, as his prisoner for the night.

  18 … The Cup Runneth Over

  The gloomy morning mist is too thick in Rocky Gully to see anything. So as I stand by the road at dawn, I have no choice but to listen and sniff at the air as the town comes awake, slowly, like a cat. A wind wafts in from the woods with the odor of pine, nudging the night mist aside. Birds chatter and chirp like noisy children at the breakfast table. Then, as the dawn breaks, a rooster crows the town awake. Dogs bark. There is the smell of a fire burning in someone’s hearth. And finally, an hour after sunrise, a human sound: the dull, persistent moan of a chainsaw followed by the heavy thud of timber meeting ground.

  A ute rumbles off a gravel side road and pauses to pick me up. Inside is a grizzled old man in woolen plaids. There are a chainsaw and an axe in the back of his truck. A nice start: a lumberjack on his way to the day’s first stand of timber. What’s it like, I ask him as soon as we rumble off, to be wandering through the woods and come across one of the centuries-old karri trees that tower in the forest hereabouts?

  “I reckon if she’s got two hundred dollars of lumber in her, I’ll cut the cunt down,” he says.

  Gazing out the window, I feel as if I’ve found my natural habitat—or at least the habitat I once enjoyed: rolling woodland and streams, like the Virginia countryside near my childhood home. Thus far in Australia, Tasmania is the only other place that’s had that whiff of home about it—initially at least. I went there with Geraldine a few months after migrating to Sydney, and the island’s hills and woods and old villages made me homesick. In the wild north of the state, we went for a hike up a secluded mountain trail that had been advertised by a friend as “a bit of a scramble.” We set off early, with only an apple as baggage, expecting to be back down the mountain by lunchtime. Just a bit of a scramble.

  A dimly blazed path led us through thick woods, then to a stony, treeless ridge that led to a stony, treeless cliff and then to another ridge. We struggled up to find another cliff, another ridge. When we finally reached the top, the flies were unbearable. So we retreated, picking our way like billygoats down the steep stony mountainside.

  The trail was nowhere in sight. We tried one direction and then another; each ended in sheer drops of several hundred yards. I looked out at the panoramic view, stretching for fifty miles or so in every direction, and couldn’t spot one sign of humanity: not a road, not a power line, not even a wisp of smoke. It would be days before anyone knew we had come this way, I decided; many weeks before they found our bodies.

  At sunset we found the trail again and made it to the bottom, scratched and bleeding. Not like Virginia at all.

  Geraldine still laughs about the hike and accuses me—and other Americans—of being anthropocentric. Unless a landscape has a person in it, I become anxious. Hardy Australians, of course, feel at home on desolate beaches and in untouched rain forest.

  The southwest corner of Western Australia is Tasmania without the wild edge. The woods are open, easy to walk through, and never too far from a weatherbeaten cottage or an old stone chimney where a homestead used to be. All the signs of a land gently settled, long ago, that never grew fat enough to attract less gentle development. Only the soft, unmistakable imprint of a rural counterculture: the Old Bakery Restaurant in one town, the Cheese Factory Craft Centre in another, and brightly colored cabins nestled in the valleys. A hard squint and it could be the Shenandoah.

  The hitchhiking also resembles my journeys through rural America. In the outback I have accustomed myself to marathon rides; the towns are so few and far between that your first ride of the day is often the only one. But here, on a weekday morning in the well-settled countryside, I bump along from town to town, climbing out before I’ve learned the most cursory details of the life I’ve brushed against. It’s a bit like hitching through the first fifty pages of a Russian novel, being introduced to a dozen different characters whose names and faces quickly begin blurring together.

  In order of appearance, the cast after Rocky Gully goes as follows:

  THE FARMER [Slows down truck, gestures at unkempt fields of a neighboring hobby farm.]: Now a good cockie, he’d be mowing that paddock. But you know what? You could knock on that door any hour of the day and some bloke would be there to answer it. Not too keen on work, them folks. Now a bloke that’s grown up in these parts, he’s keen as mustard. But them folks, they’d rather get the bloody dole.

  THE WEAVER [Sixties-style bug-eyed sunglasses covering most of her face.]: Perth just became a hassle. Hassle hassle hassle. You know what I mean? Like I was in a real suburban rut. Down here, there’s no hassle at all. Just the cockies. You know what I mean? But it’s funny, like I thought it would be more private down on the farm. But you know what? It�
�s worse than the city. Everyone knows who drives what car, who’s home, who’s at someone else’s home, whose missus is down at the pub. You know what I mean?

  THE FOOTIE PLAYER [Arms as big as my thighs, car littered like the locker room after a big game: shorts, T-shirts, jock straps, crushed tinnies.]: I’ve been lucky so far, all I’ve had is breaks. (Jaw. Nose. Wrist. Jaw again.) But breaks are all right. They’re clean. Snap and you’re done. It’s when you get into knees and elbows that you have to give the game away. [Pauses, flashes toothless smile, lifts arm to show off the scabs from last game.]. See that? Bark’s peeling off me all the time.

  THE APPLE-PICKER: We’ll be well into yellows now and then a spot of red. You’re Canadian, right? A Yank? I thought so. But it’s safer to ask if you’re Canadian. Canucks can’t stand being called a Yank. Do Yanks mind being called Canucks? No? That’s good. Here, try one of these reds, try a yellow, eat the bloody lot of ’em. If I look at any more apples, I think I’ll spew.

  THE SALES MANAGER [Car fragrance on dashboard, company sedan, company tape deck.]: When I was a kid, Perth was a cemetery—it was that dead. You think I’m joking? It was dead, really dead. Now? Now it’s a rat race. People will eat your eyes out if you give them half a chance. Bunbury’s the way Perth used to be. Dead. But it’s a nice sort of dead.

  The rides wind north from Manjimup to Nannup to Balingup to Boyanup. Then the ups give out in Bunbury, and so do the paddocks, the apples, the old stone buildings. Perth is more than sixty miles away but already there is the odor of an encroaching city. One-lane roads merge and swell to two, then four. The traffic is impatient and aggressive, pulling me toward the rat race and hassle everyone has come south to get away from.