by Tony Horwitz
“Where ya headed, mate?”
I turn around to face an elderly man who is trim and fit, with a wide-brimmed Akubra pushed back on his brow. There’s a bit of egg still lingering on his lip, staining the side of the day’s first cigarette. The man squints a bit as he inhales, smiling, as if he’s never tasted anything so good in his life.
“Where ya headed?” he asks again, exhaling. Actually, I was headed to the toilet block, but I flash him my Kununurra sign instead.
“It’s your lucky day, mate. That’s where I’m headed. Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll ship out.”
I am momentarily suspicious. “How’d you know I was hitching?”
He smiles and takes another long pull at his cigarette. “When you’ve been at this game as long as I have, you develop an eye for these things.”
The game is nonstop travel, and Jack Pearton is a professional at it. For starters, he’s got professional equipment: a spanking new station wagon hauling the latest and finest in caravan technology.
“Hydraulic,” he says, pressing a button that makes the trailer rise up like a loaf of bread. He presses the button and the trailer goes flat again. “Here, give it a try yourself. Amazing, eh?”
The inside of the caravan looks like a department store display of recreational gear. Fishing poles, deck chairs, eskies with power points, eskies without power points, a television, wires, hoses, a magnum .22 repeater rifle, tents, hunting knives. Jack picks up each article, recites its price, place of origin and utility, then returns it with military precision to the exact spot. Apparently, every item in the trailer has a well-defined place and purpose in furthering the grand strategy of the road trip.
The same discipline reigns in the control room, up front. An enamel St. Christopher, patron saint of travel, stares down from the dashboard. A line of hats covers the backseat for Jack to choose from, depending on what state he’s traveling through: a Stetson for Queensland, a leather bushman’s hat for the Northern Territory, the flat-brimmed Akubra he wears in Western Australia, and a fishing cap for “general travel.”
Jack orders me to open the glove box as soon as we’re underway. “Check the log, mate,” he says officiously, pilot to copilot. The log is a thick spiral notebook, stuffed with receipts and penciled notes on every detail of the voyage. One column lists where Jack has stayed each night; another tells where he stopped for gas, how much it cost him, and how many miles he averaged per gallon since the last stop. There’s even an estimate of how much gas he has lost by driving into a headwind since Broome: sixty dollars in three days.
“You lose as much again if you don’t take the curves right,” he says, demonstrating how to steer straight through a bend so as to minimize the distance covered. “Simple geometry.”
Another column in the log book lists Jack’s tea breaks, every ninety minutes, with “cigarettes” in parentheses beside alternating stops. Then, in the back pages under “Notes,” Jack records his impressions of the places he’s traveled through, and brief footnotes for future journeys. “Adelaide to Melb. much better than Melb. to Adelaide, because cliff’s on the left, the water’s on the right, so it’s easier to look at scenery while driving.”
Jack lets me browse for a while, then nudges my shoulder.
“I haven’t been to the middle of the Simpson Desert yet, but I reckon I’ll get there,” he says. “Two hundred and forty thousand kilometers”—140,000 miles—“in six years. Not bad for an old-timer, eh?”
Just last night I was congratulating myself on having covered seven thousand miles of Australian roads. It is a mere sprint compared to Jack’s marathon tour.
Jack Pearton’s life story is as precise and well ordered as his log books. “When I was twelve, I decided to make a list of my priorities and read it every day,” he says. “I stray, but eventually I always get back on course.” His list included joining the navy, which he did at fourteen (“lied to buggery, of course”), which promotions he wanted and when (“started at fifteen cents a week and made it to lieutenant commander”), and getting his kids along in life (“six of ’em, all well established”).
Since retiring six years ago, he’s mapped out his travels just as carefully, navigating rambles through places he’s never seen or wants to see again. Route 1 from Tasmania to northern Queensland and back again. A fishing trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria. A visit to a friend in Exmouth at the northwest tip of Australia.
He’s done this trip through the Nor’west before, but the timing is important; his departure coincided precisely with the arrival of in-laws at his “home” in Perth.
“My wife doesn’t like traveling quite as much as me,” he says. “So when I get itchy feet—which is most of the year—I hit the road and she meets up with me somewhere along the way.” It is an odd model for retirement and an even odder model for a marriage. But then, Jack is obviously content with the arrangement; perhaps his wife is too.
“Eventually, when my reflexes go, I’ll have to take myself off the road,” he says dispassionately, as if inspecting the wear on a tire tread. “But I reckon I’ve got some miles left.” I suspect he’s written down exactly how many somewhere in his log.
Jack keeps me so busy checking mileage markers, comparing them to the log, and making new entries, that it is some hours before I notice the scenery. And scenery there is, for the first time since leaving Broome. The land rolls and heaves in rocky outcroppings, dark brown and layered, like a chocolate cake. They are the first real mountains I’ve passed through since Alice. To the east lies the Bungle Bungle range, hidden away from all but the most intrepid of bushwalkers. To the west are the mountains and high plateau country of the Kimberleys. And in the foreground loom giant anthills, interspersed with bloated boab trees that stand by the road, like black women reaching out their arms for a bear hug. They are even fatter than the bottle trees I saw in Queensland.
“One boab in Derby is so big that it was used as a jail,” Jack tells me. He can see from my smile that I’m not convinced. “Fair dinkum. Check the log.”
Sure enough, an entry marked “Derby: sightseeing” and a short note beside it: “hollow boab with metal grille, once used to house prisoners overnight. Remarkable.”
Every ninety minutes, on the dot, we pull off the road and have a drink of sugary tea from Jack’s Thermos. The only movements that Jack doesn’t regulate are his trips to the toilet; apparently, old age has made chaos of that. “I’ve leaked all over this country,” he says, running to pee behind a boab tree between tea stops. “Fair dinkum. Check the log.” This time he is joking.
The lectures and log entries make for slow driving, which is fine as far as Jack is concerned: “Better mileage that way,” he says, “and anyway, what’s the rush?” But I use my own haste as an excuse for declining his invitation to drink a beer when we finally reach Kununurra.
“I always have one beer, same time every day,” he tells me, checking his watch. Then he slaps his forehead; it seems he’s made a rare miscalculation. “Oh my God, I forgot it’s Sunday. I have no idea what pub session we’re up to.”
Nor does anyone else in Kununurra. It is a town that launches Nor’west time into a whole new dimension of vagueness. After Jack drops me off, I wander down a commercial street to find some food and a fresh piece of cardboard before hitching into the Northern Territory. One shop is closed, despite a sign on the front saying “open.” The next store lists its hours as 9–12 on Sundays, but it’s still open at mid-afternoon. At a takeaway (which lists no hours at all), I chat with a truckie headed to Katherine, three hundred miles east. He offers me a ride, if I don’t mind waiting while he meets a mate for a quick one at the pub. When he hasn’t returned an hour later, I wander over to the pub as well.
“Sorry, mate,” he slurs, still at the bar. “How ’bout tomorrow?”
I hike back out to the highway through ugly, suburban-style subdivisions, pausing every five minutes to keep from overheating in the afternoon sun. Incredibly, this is the Nor�
�west’s temperate time, just after the end of the wet season. But the thermometer at a gas station registers 105 degrees. The humidity makes it feel twice that.
Sometimes it gets so hot in Kununurra that a local plant, called the kerosene tree, spontaneously bursts into flames. At least that’s what the woman at the gas station says (I’d like to have Jack’s log to check on it). What needs little confirmation, though, is that the Wet in Kununurra, from October to February, is so oppressive that locals call it the “suicide season.”
“The people that don’t suicide just hole up at home by the air-conditioner,” she says. “They might as well be dead.”
No one comes to Kununurra for the weather, of course, though it could be said that they come for the waters. The damming of the Ord River and the dream of a rich irrigation valley brought farmers here in the 1960s. Many of the farms failed, but Kununurra grew nonetheless: an artificial town perched by an artificial lake, servicing the farms and the Argyle diamond mines. Tourists started using Kununurra as a jumping-off point for the Kimberley and Lake Argyle. And then it became a public service center as well: an outpost for young bureaucrats to cut their teeth on before moving up the ladder to Perth.
It’s also a place where hitchhikers can swelter for a few days before escaping east to Darwin or west to Broome. A small party is already there to greet me when I finally make it to the eastern edge of town. First in line is a young couple from Paris, standing at rigid attention, like French Legionnaires in the North African desert. Huge sweat stains spread across their backs and under their arms.
I ask in broken French how long they’ve been there.
“Deux jours,” the man says wearily.
“Trois,” his girlfriend interjects.
“Deux ou trois. Trop long.”
They bicker over whether it’s been two days or three as I make my way to the end of the queue. Nor’west time is apparently an infectious disease, even for foreigners.
The next two places in line are occupied by ragged-looking men on their way to Darwin. They are too hot and tired to mumble more than a few words. Apparently, 90 percent of the road traffic is made up of locals going back and forth to the lake. The other 10 percent is parked at a pub down the street. “One bloke got so tired of waiting that he started walking,” hitchhiker number three informs me. He gestures vaguely down the road toward the Northern Territory, as if he’ll be forced to do the same in a few hours.
I hike a mile out of town, hoping that maybe some driver will reach the first line of hitchhikers, and, fearful that they’ll all try to cram inside, drive past and stop for me instead. It is wishful thinking. Four hours later I am still sitting by the road, holding my cardboard sign—“Katherine Pls!”—as a visor against the setting sun. I hike back toward town to find the French couple standing just where I left them, and the other two prone beside their rucksacks.
I sit on my pack and study the map. Almost three hundred miles of road to Katherine, and another two hundred to Darwin. The highway looks good, but even so, that’s ten to twelve hours of driving. Assuming I can find a driver. And there’s only fourteen hours or so of daylight between now and when my plane leaves from Darwin.
Clearly, I’ll have to travel through the dark. But the gas station is closed and there’s no truck stop in sight. Slowly, as I hike to the pub through the twilight, I ponder a contingency I have dreaded, and thus far avoided: catching a bus.
If there’s a bus tonight, I’ll take it as far as Katherine and hitch the last leg to Darwin. If there’s no bus until tomorrow, and I still haven’t caught a ride by then, I’ll hide my face in shame and ride it straight through to the Top End. If there’s no bus at all, I’ll just have to hijack a car.
The good news when I go inside the pub is that there is a bus; in fact, it stops in front of an adjoining restaurant later tonight. The bad news is that no one can tell me when it arrives. A schedule on the wall says eight-thirty, the publican says it comes at ten, and the drinker at the bar swears that it never pulls out of Kununurra before eleven. “Unless she’s hit a kangaroo or something between here and Broome,” he says. “Then maybe she won’t get out till morning.”
Exasperated, I finally lose my patience with Nor’west time.
“Goddammit!” I hear myself shouting. “What the fuck’s wrong with this place?”
The bar goes silent. Then the publican flashes me a smile that I recognize from my first few months in Australia, when I lost my patience frequently. “She’ll be right, mate,” he says, in a laconic rendition of the Australian national anthem. “Settle down and have a drink.”
I order a beer and slump in the corner of the pub, which is still open three hours after its session was supposed to have ended.
Two hours later, at nine o’clock, the pub’s still open but there’s no sign of a bus. The schedule on the wall, which I’d judged the most reliable of my three sources, is now proven wrong. I pace the street outside, always staying within eyeshot of the supposed depot in front of the restaurant (“I didn’t think the bus came at all on Sunday,” was the intelligence I received there).
Then, just after ten, the bus to Darwin pulls in. Twenty people pile out of the bus and go straight into the pub. I follow them, find the driver eating a meat pie at the bar, and pay him for a ticket to Katherine. It is another hour before the coach sets off again.
Just as the man at the bar said: Never leaves before eleven. I make a quick logistical calculation: Katherine by dawn, on the road again soon after, and, with any luck, into Darwin with six hours of sunlight to spare.
She will, in fact, be right.
25 … One for the Road
There is a gentle apartheid on buses separating the sleeps from the sleep-nots.
A lucky few—the same lucky few who can sleep on New York subways or in battlefield trenches—fall immediately into deep unconsciousness, as if struck over the head. The rest toss and turn in the vain hope of achieving so much as a doze. This gives them plenty of time to contemplate the unique engineering that makes coach seats sleep-proof.
Consider the options:
Slump straight back or slightly to one side, with the knees crammed against the seat in front, and the head pushed forward upon the chest, as if in preparation for the executioner’s axe.
Curl up in a pained fetal position, with the head shoved against the armrest and the feet pushing off against the wall of the bus, compressing the knees upward into the chin.
If the seat beside is empty: Recline across two seats, trying to curl around the armrest, the point of which inevitably lodges like a tomahawk between the shoulder blades. Alternately, roll over and take the hatchet directly in the chest.
After an hour of fidgeting, Misery sits up and searches the bus for Company. Most of the seats in the back are occupied by flaked-out mothers and children, sound asleep. But up front an American voice, a doesn’t-want-to-sleep, is quizzing the driver as we race through the night.
“Sir,” says the woman’s voice, “what would we be seeing if it weren’t dark?”
“Bugger all. Empty scrub.”
“What’d he say?” It is a male voice, tired and irritable. A sleep-not. “He says ‘not much,’ dear. Like what we saw between Perth and Broome.”
“Oh.”
Back to fidgeting—and wondering, perhaps, about the acrobatic nature of buggery: the word, that is. It can be a verb, as in “bugger it”; an adjective, as in “buggered”; a noun, “bugger all”; a place, “out to buggery”; and an insult: “bugger yourself,” “get buggered,” or the less offensive “bug off.” You can even be “buggered,” which means worn out, with none of the sexual overtones it carries in America.
Sort of like “crook,” another word that means everything in Australian except what it means in American, or better yet, the ever-flexible “knock”: to knock (criticize), knockerism (the art of criticizing), knocked up (pregnant). Alternatively, to knock back (say no to, or to drink, as in knock back a beer).
Inven
tive buggers, these Aussies.
But as buggered, knocked around, and crook as I feel, sleep is still an impossibility. Across the aisle from me, a young woman opens her eyes and reaches blearily for a cigarette. We make sympathetic eye contact, like neighbors in a hospital ward.
“Where ya headed?” she asks.
“Katherine. Darwin eventually. How about you?”
“Darwin,” she says. “If I don’t go nuts and climb off before then. I can’t even remember how long it’s been since we left Perth.”
I ask her what she does back home.
“Been waitressing for three years, and just got fed up with it,” she says. “Reckon I needed to take a break and head off somewhere.”
“So why’d you pick Darwin?”
“A mate told me there’s a great pub at some suburb called Humpty Doo. That’s where they have the World Championship Darwin stubbie drinking contest.”
“What’s that?”
“A race to see who can drink fastest. You get a two-liter stubbie and a plastic garbage bin, and the crowd stands around yelling ‘Spew! Spew! Spew!’” She pauses. “I reckon Humpty Doo will be a good place to start.”
She stubs out her cigarette and closes her eyes, leaving me to wonder what it is she’s about to start. A new life? A pub crawl? Is there a difference in Darwin?
It is my first reminder that the Northern Territory—a.k.a. the Top End—is only a six-pack away. The second reminder comes an hour later, when the bus pulls in at a roadhouse called Timber Creek. I gaze out the bus window and through the open door of a pub, which is crowded with drinkers. A clock above the bar says 2:30 A.M. No Sunday session I know of goes on that long.
“We’re in the Northern Territory, mate,” the driver explains. “This isn’t kiddie land anymore.”
Indeed it isn’t. When the driver climbs out to unload some luggage for a departing passenger, a drunken man weaves aboard.
