One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  Major cities are a nightmare for the hitchhiker. If possible, you find a ring road and plot a bypass around the thumping aorta of urban life. But more often you end up circulating through every capillary before being pumped out at the other end. En route you are likely to be hustled, hassled, robbed, or arrested as a vagrant.

  Perth’s sprawl is puny compared with most American cities, but it is still big enough to threaten half a day of moving in and moving out. So I decide to berth south of the city at Fremantle, then set off for the bush with a full day in front of me. Fremantle quickly cures me of the lingering homesickness I felt in the countryside farther south. America—or the America’s Cup, at least—is branded on the former fishing village like a pair of McDonald’s Golden Arches. I head straight for the water only to find that the Indian Ocean has been imprisoned behind a wall of high-security fences. “America’s Cup Defence Headquarters,” says an imposing sign on one locked gate, beneath a huge banner with the ubiquitous boxing kangaroo.

  Fremantle has spent 150 years collecting flotsam and jetsam from the Northern Hemisphere. In the 1850s, convicts were so numerous that soldiers walked the streets at night asking “Bond or free?” Then, as the first stop for ships arriving from the West, Fremantle became Australia’s “front door to Europe.” A lot of the immigrants who poured off here never got past the foyer; there are still something like seventy-five languages spoken in the town.

  But in the run-up to the Cup, Fremantle has undergone an unfortunate facelift. Snip and staple the Commercial Hotel, pull out the urine-yellow carpet, put in coachlights where the naked bulbs used to be, and turn it into the New Orleans Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. Reduce and contour Clarrie Miniciullo’s panel-beating shop and implant the Harbour Mill Garden Restaurant. Enlarge the old Papa Luigi’s café and reshape it into the new Papa Luigi’s café. And when the stitches are out, the old, ethnic town will have magically become a tarted-up clone, like the “international” villages they build overnight for the Olympic Games.

  Fortunately, the graft has been uneven, at least up to now, six months before the races. You can redo a Victorian façade in a month but it takes a bit longer to change the people who live behind it. So Fremantle still shows an essentially Mediterranean face to the world: old Italian men sipping cappuccino at open-air trattorias, Greek sailors weaving through the narrow streets with duffel bags slung over their shoulders, Portuguese fishermen slapping their catch on the dock. The same westerly wind that remedies the morning heat and powers the twelve-meter’s spinnaker—Fremantle’s famed “Doctor”—picks up the odor of fish from the docks and blows it through the dolled-up streets.

  Of course, a bit of ethnic color enhances Fremantle’s tourist trade, which is one reason the traditional scene hasn’t been erased, just tidied a bit. And Fremantle has made a career of integrating newcomers; its character can survive where a younger, less worldly town, such as Alice Springs, has its personality trampled by the tourist crush. I find myself hoping that the Yanqui invaders will recapture their Cup and take it home, leaving Fremantle to become a sleepy little seaport again.

  Perth, twelve miles up the coast, is different: crisp skyscrapers, clean streets, and suburbs that sprawl so far that it’s hard to find the city for all the brick-and-tile houses. While much of Fremantle is working-class and bohemian, Perth’s dominant theme appears middle-class and provincial. My first and strongest impression is of a kind of seaside Denver: a cow town grown fat and smug, disdainful of the oversophisticated hordes “out East.”

  “New South Wales is bilge,” a good-humored young clerk tells me on the twenty-minute rail trip from Fremantle to Perth. “Victoria’s even less than that.”

  I ask him if he’s ever been to the eastern states. “Why bother?” he says. “We’ve got it all here. Anyway, the big nobs don’t want to know about us.”

  This isolationism is firmly rooted in geographical fact. Bali and Singapore are closer and cheaper to reach than the cities back East. (Due west there isn’t another landfall until the island of Mauritius, off the African coast, about four thousand miles away.) No wonder Perth has become a bit inward-looking, even jingoistic. “It’s WESTern Australia,” a button-down bureaucrat intones at a downtown pub, correcting my pronunciation. Then he adds with a smile: “And don’t you forget it.” When I ask him how long his family’s been in Perth, he answers without irony: “For yonks—sixty years at least.”

  Perth flashes me the same brash amiability as Dallas. In fact, Western Australia is a lot like Texas, only bigger—three times as big, as I’m informed on about five separate occasions. WESTern Australia even has its own little version of the Lone Star state. A wealthy grazier, dubbing himself “Prince Leonard,” has seceded from the Commonwealth and declared his property north of Geraldton a free territory.

  Nicknames, when pinned to a place and its people, are usually just exercises in public relations. There is nothing in the concrete megalopolis of New York that suggests a “Big Apple,” and there is even less sense in its grimy neighbor New Jersey being dubbed “The Garden State.” Industrial plants strike me as a rather broad definition of horticulture.

  But “Sandgropers” is a peculiarly apt nickname for Western Australians. It conveys the image of a society moving in a kind of sun-dazed, self-satisfied crawl across the beach. “We’re doing just fine out here without you,” the place seems to say to “t’othersiders” from the East. “There’s an empty banana bed by the pool if you want to lie around for a while. If you don’t, well that’s okay too.”

  And it is a pleasant enough place to grope about for a spell. I meet a dozen or so people—on trains, waiting for trains, drinking beer—and they are as friendly and laid-back a sample as I’ve taken anywhere in Australia. One amiable fellow even suggests he might have a job for me at what is probably the quintessential Perth occupation—installing custom-made swimming pools.

  “Perth’s perfect because it’s so suburban and cliquish,” he says. “You put in one pool and it runs down the block like wildfire—everyone’s got to have one.”

  I ride back to Fremantle wondering about all those exiles I met farther south, who insisted they could no longer stand the pace of life in Perth. They must have a pretty low hassle threshold; the only rat race I encounter is the real thing, between two rodents scampering down the hotel corridor when I go to brush my teeth.

  But I have a very short while to take the pulse of the place. A more experienced and appropriate student of sandgroping is Swami Anand Haridas, also known as Harry Aveling, a local university professor. “Perth’s a great place,” he once declared, “for the neck down.”

  19 … Calling Earl

  The first white people to visit the coast north of Perth weren’t all that impressed. One of the earliest was Francois Pelsaert, whose Dutch East India Company ship, Batavia, ran aground on an island near Geraldton in 1629. When he sailed to the mainland for water, he discovered a “bare and cursed country devoid of green or grass.” The flies, anthills, and “black savages” also came in for a few unkind words.

  There were more shipwrecks in the following decades but no true exploration of the coast until the Englishman William Dampier came along. Dampier was a well-born sailor who spent his youth as a buccaneer in the West Indies. After glimpsing Australia in 1688 he returned on a government-sponsored voyage in 1699. He didn’t find anything to loot. New-Holland, as it was then known, struck him as the “barrenest spot upon the globe.” He added: “the Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World.

  “Their Eyelids are always half-closed, to keep the Flies out of their Eyes,” he wrote. “From their Infancy being thus annoyed with these Insects, they do never open Eyes as other People: And therefore cannot see far, unless they hold up their Heads.”

  Dampier went back to being a pirate. He also wrote a bestseller called A New Voyage Around the World, which did a lot to spread the bad word about New-Holland. It wasn’t until Captain Cook arrived in 1770 that an Englishman g
ave the continent another serious look.

  To these flyblown, half-closed American eyes, the landscape doesn’t look too promising either. Just north of Perth the highway heads into territory that offers nothing but sheep and wheat, wheat and sheep, forever. So fifty miles out of the city I hitch west until the road meets the Indian Ocean again at Geraldton.

  It’s easy to see why there were so many shipwrecks up here. Wind buffets traffic across the highway, and roadside trees are so bent by the breeze that their boughs reach all the way over, as if trying to touch their toes.

  Geraldton, a day’s drive north of Perth, is a town that rides on the crayfish claw. The day begins well before dawn, when the lobster boats start collecting their pots from the rich beds that lie an hour or so offshore. By noon, the crays are landing on the pier, and that’s when the processors begin their day: “killers” twisting off the heads, “stringers” pulling out the guts, “horners” scraping the shells for paste. By nightfall, about twelve hours after being plucked from the sea, the crays are on ice aboard ships bound for the U.S. and Japan. Then the cycle begins all over again.

  “Dirty, rotten, smelly bloody business,” declares a nineteen-year-old named Rob, who has just finished ten hours of disemboweling crays. He is sitting now in the Tarcoola Tavern, trying to wash the day away with beer. He keeps looking at his hands between sips, as if checking for any lingering lobster gut. “I have to bloody drown myself with Brut to get the stink off. Bloody awful.”

  I ask him if the smell ever turns off girls.

  “Sometimes. But the guy in the backseat smells just as bad, so you just fuck and don’t worry about it.”

  Rob and his two mates, Adrian and Steve, are on an abbreviated pub crawl through Geraldton. In other small towns, Friday night is usually the big night out—men’s night, when mates drink with mates, and behave like boys. At about eight o’clock, they pick up some fish and chips for the missus and stagger on home.

  But in Geraldton the working men’s pubs are quiet soon after dusk. The cray season only lasts half the year, and for those six months the town is like a university during exams.

  “When you start work at four in the morning, it gets to be a late night by nine o’clock,” says Adrian, a part-time deckhand. The three teenagers drain their beers and head home to catch some shut-eye before another shift at sea or at the lobster plant. I decide to do the same. That way I can get out to the wharf before dawn and hitch a ride on a lobster boat. I have crossed the continent by air, by car, by ute, by road train, by freight train, by foot. Why not have a look at it from the water?

  Three A.M. is not man’s most generous hour. I thought the boatsmen would be so impressed by my early rising that they’d welcome me aboard. But they don’t want to know about it.

  “Busy day, mate,” the first skipper says when I ask if I can come along for the ride. “Can’t afford any extra cargo.”

  “You’ll see the crays better at the restaurant,” says the next. “They don’t squirm so much on the plate.”

  A third skipper thinks I’m joking. “This isn’t a yacht race, mate, this is hard yakka. Go home and go to bed.”

  These are working men with work to do; they’ve got no time for dilettantes. So when I spot a sandy-haired skipper struggling with his mooring, I come over to offer a hand.

  “Need a deckhand?” I ask. He gives me the once-over and doesn’t look overwhelmed.

  “Been doing this long?”

  “Not really, I mean, I’ve been on boats—”

  “But never on a cray boat.”

  “Well, strictly speaking, no. First day out.”

  He laughs. “Probably the last.”

  “I come cheap—free, in fact. If I’m in the way just toss me overboard.”

  He laughs again. “I’m short a man. Hop on.” Then he tosses a bag full of fish heads into my arms and I follow him aboard. Nothing frivolous on this craft, just a broad-beamed thirty-foot workhorse. We load the rest of the bait—cowhides and cow hooves—then shove off into the dark water.

  The skipper is a second-generation lobsterman named Kim. He has two deckhands: Gary, who is twenty-five, and a fifteen-year-old named Justin, who is spending his first season at sea.

  “I puked my first day out,” Justin tells me by way of introduction. “Since then it’s been okay.”

  As we ride out of the harbor it is still dark enough to navigate by the stars. But Kim turns instead to a bank of machines that glow like video games in the dark corner of a pub. There’s a mass of green and red dots that shows the coastline, and a blip that shows us moving away from it. Alongside the radar is a gray tangle of lines that tells Kim how many fathoms deep the water is. And another screen, with marks like cardiac tracings, which shows whether the bottom of the sea is hard or soft and how much vegetation there is for the crayfish to hide in.

  “Catching crays used to be trial and error,” Kim says. “Now it’s electronic warfare. I couldn’t see what’s down there better if I was in a submarine.”

  Fifteen minutes from the harbor, the boat begins to roll and pitch. Ten minutes farther into the Indian Ocean, she becomes a washing machine on spin cycle, then rinse. Water pours across the open back of the boat, forcing me out of the air and into the claustrophobic cabin.

  “I hope you’re not the seasick type,” Kim says, yawning. “It got so rough yesterday that we had to turn around.” With that, he and Justin retire below for a snooze while Gary navigates out to the crayfish beds.

  I can no sooner sleep—or even close my eyes—than jump overboard. I’ve never ridden a small fishing boat into open sea. As one wave after another crashes into us, I begin clinging like a mollusk to the cabin doorway. This leaves me at the mercy of Gary, one of those conversationalists for whom every second word is a sexual organ.

  “Do you know the one about the bloke who goes down on a whore in Las Vegas? You don’t? Well, he goes down, you know, and there’s all this gross stuff that looks like food coming out of her. So he says to this sheila, ‘What’s up? You sick or something?’ And she says: ‘No, but the last guy down there was.’”

  He lets go with a loud, wheezing laugh, then starts in again. “Do you know the one about the guy who’s having his cock sucked by a nun? You don’t?…”

  Waves are crashing over the side and washing into the cabin. It’s so dark that I can’t even anchor my eyes on the horizon. Just the glow of the radar, tossing around in the black like a drunken firefly. My equilibrium is fading fast.

  Gary isn’t helping. When he notices I’ve gone silent and crumpled on the cabin floor, clutching a table leg, he says, “If you’re feeling crook, the best thing to do is stick one finger down your throat and the other one up your bum. If that doesn’t work, switch fingers.”

  The dawn light is making things worse, not better. Now I can see what’s coming—giant walls of ocean that roll the boat over, then drop it into a trough on the other side, just in time for another wall to tilt it up again.

  “You know, it’s interesting how many words we have for vomiting,” Gary continues. “Spew, chuck, toss, toss your cookies, barf, Technicolor yawn. Talking to the floor. Are there that many in America? Or don’t you blokes puke so much?”

  I consider the matter. “Whenever a guy threw up in grade school, we’d say he was ‘calling Earl.’” (Why in God’s name am I telling him this?) “You know, ERRRRRL! If Earl wasn’t home, you’d call Ralph. RAAAAAAAALF!”

  Gary can’t get over that one. As soon as Kim and Justin come up from below, yawning and stretching, he starts telling them all about Earl and Ralph. “You know what Yanks call spewing? Calling Earl. Get it? ERRRRRRRRL!” Gary would have been a big hit on my playground.

  Kim cuts off the engine and for a moment my head and stomach stop spinning. “Let’s see what the world has for us today,” he says, steering around to a buoy marking the first lobster pot of the day. Crayfishing is underwater mining. Each morning the seabed may disgorge paydirt, or a pile of loose sand and starfi
sh. And since deckhands are paid a proportion of every one-hundred-pound bag of crayfish they deliver, Gary and Justin are as anxious as Kim to see what comes over the rail. The wooden crate surfaces, and a lonely pink cray flaps onto the floor of the boat. “Bloody cacker,” Gary says, measuring the lobster and tossing it back in the sea. A cacker is a crayfish that’s below the legal limit.

  We motor slowly from pot to pot and at each one the story is much the same—maybe one or two decent-sized lobsters, but mostly cackers and starfish, or nothing at all. Machines do most of the work, pulling in the crayfish pots and automatically coiling the rope. While Gary empties the crays into a water tank, Justin and I reload the pots with cowhide, cow hocks, and fish heads.

  An hour after dawn, Kim decides to head farther out to sea, and the horrible bucking and swelling begins again. The waves come at us sideways, rolling us up and back, up and back. For the first time in my life I realize how horrible it must be to get seasick. There’s no surprise element; just the unending roll of the sea, wave upon wave, with no relief in sight.

  For the first time in my life I realize I am going to be seasick. A strange, involuntary moan begins somewhere deep inside my throat. “Unhhhhh.” Another wave hits. “Unhhhhhhhhhhhh.” I feel as if someone’s put me on one of those carnival rides that go round and round and round, and no one’s there to turn the machine off. I can smell the cow hocks and fish heads smeared on my shirtfront. I can feel the beer I drank last night, sloshing around in my stomach. I can hear Gary coming up behind me to offer some advice.

  “You look awful, mate,” he says, leaning close so he can see just how awful I look. “Eat some bread. Then at least you’ll have something solid to spew.” He smiles. “Do you want me to get Earl on the line?”

  A huge wave shoves us both against the starboard rail. I’ve got my head over the side and a voice in my belly gives the order: Let go. The next wave carries up portside. Let go. I am letting go over the rail, inside the rail, on the rail. The boat’s lurching and I’m letting go again, all over myself this time. I am collapsing in a heap now, wondering what will possibly be left of me by the end of the day.