“Oi! Carly! Get your mate up. There’s a kookaburra!” An excited, disembodied voice floats into my room.
“Dad, let her sleep. She’s jet-lagged.”
A soft knock.
“Hello?” I say.
For a second I think I am back in my dorm room, annoyed that Erica is making so much noise this early in the morning. And then I remember. Sydney. Carly. Houseful of people who I thanked for their hospitality by falling asleep before meeting them. I sit up with an embarrassed gasp, but the grinning man peeking into my room is unconcerned with formalities.
“Good on ya, Rach. You’re awake,” he says, as though I’ve accomplished a magnificent feat before even getting out of bed. He beams at me.
“Hi.” I’m not sure what to do next.
“Dad!” Carly bursts in. “Leave her alone.”
“No, it’s okay,” I say. “I was just getting up.” It’s sinking in: I’m in Sydney. I’m in Sydney. I’m in Sydney!
“Listen, Rach,” Pete rushes on, ignoring us. “There was a kookaburra outside. If you hurry, I might be able to get him back.”
“Oh, wow, a kookaburra!” I exclaim as he rushes back down the hall.
The fact that I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about must be obvious to Carly, who clarifies: “It’s a bird.”
Before I can ask how exactly her father plans to get this mysterious bird back, I hear my answer. “Koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-kaa-kaa-kaa!” reverberates throughout the first floor of the house. Instinctively, I cover my head in alarm. But the sound is coming from outside, where we soon discover Pete balanced on a lawn chair on the back porch, yodeling through cupped hands into the trees. “Koo-koo-koo-koo-koo-kaa-kaa-ka!” fills the air like maniacal laughter.
“Is he okay?” I turn around to ask Carly but instead come face-to-face with her fully clothed mother, Muriel. Carly is behind her, doubled over laughing.
“Oh, Pete,” Muriel says with a sigh, but she’s smiling, too. “Stop shouting into the bush.” She turns to me. “G’day, Rach! Don’t mind Carly’s dad. He’s just dying to show you the local wildlife. Come inside and have some brekkie.”
Previously only close family and friends called me Rach, and only when I was very young. In the way that Debbie Gibson became Deborah when her illustrious teen-idol career ended, I killed this truncated version of my name pretty much as soon as I was old enough to speak, along with my dad’s embarrassing pet name, Rachie Bachie. But here it’s immediately apparent that Rach is the unabashed property of an informal population who shorten anything and everything without ceremony or permission: afternoon is arvo, sunglasses are sunnies, chocolates are chocys. I could rail against it, but what’s the point? When twenty million people decide you’re Rach, you’re Rach. Besides, there is something about the Australian wink, nudge, and shrug of an accent—and the Dawsons themselves—that makes this immediate intimacy feel natural, comforting.
Muriel looks a little like my mother. They have the same chestnut-colored hair, my mother’s light or dark depending on the season. Neither wears much makeup, maybe a few strokes of blush or a little eyeliner, but nothing more. Each woman is slim and graceful, though Muriel’s figure, like Carly’s, is sturdy and athletic, whereas my mother and I have softer, more bookish physiques. It’s strange how you can see your own future in your mother’s body.
Carly has pulled herself together by this point. She follows us into the kitchen. Pete is close behind, making excuses for the kookaburra’s poor showing. “Next time, Rach. Next time. Now, then. What’s on the agenda for today, girls?”
“Come on, Pete. Let her have a chance to catch her breath,” Muriel admonishes.
“We are so thrilled that you’re here—just thrilled.” He opens an enormous newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald. “Here you go. That’ll help you get acclimatized.” Pete hands me the World section as if we’ve been sitting down to breakfast together for years, and in a just-entered-an-alternate-reality way, it kind of feels like we have.
[8]
Our heroine embarks on a brief journey to the Outback, wherein she meets a rock of indecent proportions and heat of insulting voracity. Locates gainful employment of coffee and curry, philosophizes and questions—questions and philosophizes.
Amazingly, I get a job on my third day in Australia. I’m hired at a restaurant in Manly, an upscale beach town southeast of Forestville. The trip out there will take me at least an hour (and two buses) each way, but I accept the position on the spot, afraid to test my luck. That night at dinner, I deliver the good news.
“Thank you so much for having me,” I say to Pete and Muriel for the fourteenth time. “Now that I have a job, I’ll start apartment hunting. I don’t want to inconvenience you for too long.”
I wait for their inevitable praise. What a responsible houseguest I am, how impressive it is I’ve already found a job, how thoughtful already to be considering finding an apartment while still in the capricious throes of jet lag.
“Apartment?” Pete says.
On the heels of his question is Muriel’s no-nonsense counsel: “Don’t be daft! You’re staying with us while you’re here. We have to show you around.”
“Well …” Surely they can’t want a visitor for four whole months. I was brought up to believe that anything over a long weekend verges on impolite, even if your hosts are too gracious to say so.
“Now, hang on a mo’, Rach.” Muriel again. Her expression is serious. “You’re only here for four months, and you have to travel the entire continent of Australia. You can’t afford to pay rent and save any money to travel. Your parents sent you all this way, and we wouldn’t dream of dropping you off in the middle of Sydney to fend for yourself.”
Well, sure, I’d considered a few weekend trips here and there, but traverse the entire continent of Australia? Yet now that Muriel has taken rent out of the equation, the possibility of traveling—really backpacking, as Carly was doing when we met, but I have never experienced—presents itself in all its alluring, terrifying splendor.
Muriel isn’t finished. “What’s more,” she says, “I think you should quit this job. How much are they paying you?”
“Nine dollars an hour.”
“Outrageous!” she declares. “In downtown Sydney, you’ll make double that. But that’s not the issue. You definitely do not want to miss seeing the Aussie Outback. In a few months it will be full-blown high season, and the tickets are going to get more expensive. You should go now if you have any hope of finding a good fare.”
“Plus, it’s only going to get hotter. You should definitely quit, mate,” Carly agrees.
The verb is a sore spot on my tongue. I’ve never quit a job. I’ve had jobs where the owners knew I was there only a certain time: the school year, the summer, a stint over winter break. But I’ve never left without warning, definitely never quit before I’ve even started. Plus, since leaving music school, I’ve developed a complex about being branded a quitter. I have incorrectly concluded that quitting is not a choice of one thing over the other but rather a comment on one’s character, no matter how trivial the commitment or how great the opportunity on the other side of quitting is. I’m also a die-hard people pleaser, and the idea of disappointing a restaurant manager I’ve spent a grand total of five minutes with sends shivers through me. Not to mention that it’s one thing for Carly to tell me to give up my job, but her parents want me to quit? Two adults are choosing travel over employment. Can they be serious?
“Quit?” I say.
All three of them nod emphatically.
“And go to the Outback … now?”
“I’d leave in the next few days, if possible,” Muriel says. “The sooner the better.”
“Now Carly, what are you going to show Rach while she’s here?” Pete asks, the previous topic nonchalantly discarded now that the Dawsons have stated their positions. “There’s the Opera House, Botanical Gardens, Powerhouse Museum, Hyde Park Barracks—”
“All right, Dad.”
Carly rolls her eyes. “I’ve lived here for almost twenty-two years, so I’m pretty sure I know where to take her.”
“Now, darling, come on. I’m just trying to help. What’s the plan?”
Aha! He wants us to have a plan. This is more like it. More parental.
“Tonight I’m taking her out for drinks to celebrate her liberation from the drudgery of employment.”
“Excellent!” Pete says, clinking my wineglass. “That’s the stuff.” And once again I lose my bearings in this strange new universe where none of the rules of my old life seem to apply.
My hands are shaking when I call the restaurant to tell them that I won’t be in tomorrow for my first shift. I expect no less than the earth to crack open and swallow me, such is the extent to which I’m defying my own natural laws. But of course no such thing happens. The manager sighs “All right, then,” and hangs up. As on that first day in Galway drinking Guinness with a stranger, I feel a twinge of excitment, like maybe I do have a say in my life after all.
“What should I have?” I ask Carly when we’re waiting in line at the bar.
“Do not get Foster’s. Everyone thinks that’s what Australians drink, but we don’t. It’s absolute shit. Victoria Bitter is the cheapest, but it tastes like cat piss. There’s Tooheys New or Carlton Cold, but I’m having a Malibu and pineapple. Why don’t you give that a go?”
Carly’s two closest friends, Jessica and Natarsha (Jess and Tarsh) meet up with us a few minutes later. They’re a year younger, in their last year of university, and both planning post-graduation trips abroad. Jess is headed to England. Tarsh is saving up for Nepal.
“So … how long are you going to travel?” I ask.
“A year or two,” Jess says.
“Not sure,” Tarsh says.
“Your parents are okay with this?”
“Okay with what?”
“Traveling indefinitely.”
“Sure. Everyone does it.”
“My parents did a gap year when they were my age.” This from Tarsh.
Though the gap year hasn’t caught on in the U.S., it’s typical in Australia and other countries. However, it’s one thing to digest an entire country of young people wandering the globe and altogether something else to picture my parents hoisting up backpacks, heading off toward unplanned adventure—toward anything unplanned.
“So you’re saving up right now to go traveling?” I ask.
“What else would we be saving for?”
“What about student loans? Won’t any of you have any student-loan payments?”
“Student loans? No. We’ve got HECS.”
HECS stands for Higher Education Contribution Scheme, which is a colorless appellation for a concept that totally blows my mind. Tarsh and Jess explain how the government fronts the bill for your education, which you then have the option of paying back through the tax system once your income reaches a certain level. The bill is taken right out of your paycheck a little at a time, week by week. University isn’t free here, but it’s light-years less expensive than many of our universities. And—get this—if you have to live away from home, the government gives you an allowance.
“The government pays you to go to university?” I marvel.
“Too right,” Carly says.
My parents struggled to pay for my education once I abandoned music and the hefty college scholarship that accompanied it. They had been saving since I was born, but still it wasn’t easy to shell out over thirty thousand dollars two years in a row. We were in that middle-income bracket—too well-off for financial aid but not wealthy enough to comfortably weather the ever bulging tuition. Still, they managed it. Not being saddled with student debt, the kind my mother was paying back for her late-in-life law degree, is a huge gift, one I do not fully appreciate at the time. After my loan-free bachelor’s degree, I am understandably on my own financially.
“We’re tapped out, kid,” my father summarizes.
My mom says, “Just keep in mind when you’re choosing a career—money doesn’t solve everything, but it sure makes life easier.”
I relay all this to the girls, concluding with “And if you don’t have a good job, you can’t get good healthcare.” It’s the Australians’ turn to express shock.
“Healthcare, massive student debt,” Carly muses. “No wonder Americans stress about starting careers right away. Bloody ridiculous.”
“No wonder they barely travel,” adds Jess.
I had never thought of it that way. During my summer in Ireland, I had encountered the widespread belief that most Americans don’t travel because they are uninterested in “anything beyond their own backyard.” It is often assumed that willful ignorance is our regional affliction, same as Parisians are rude and Germans scarily well organized, but in Australia I consider that maybe the whole U.S. system is somehow complicit in keeping us at home. In addition to the baggage of debt and healthcare, however, there does seem to be a nebulous cultural value American society is missing, though I don’t believe it’s lack of interest in the larger world. In Australia travel abroad is considered a key component of a well-rounded life, its own kind of necessary education, whereas I know many people back home feel my four months here are somehow shirking my responsibilities as an adult. These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road—they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.
I thought Carly might go with me to the Outback, she’s been there twice before. Even after I find a good Internet fare, it’s not a cheap jaunt, and she’s working heaps to save up for travel in addition to taking university classes, so she stays behind while I heed Muriel’s advice and fly out alone a week after arriving in Sydney. The night before my trip, Carly helps me pack. I pull my pristine backpack out of the closet, unzip it, and then proceed to stare intently at it, as if I’m attempting a Jedi mind trick.
“It’s not going to pack itself, mate.”
“I know. It’s just so small.” I put my hand inside and prod the fabric, gauging the empty space.
“She’ll be right. What do you need other than a T-shirt, a pair of pants, and sunnies?”
“I don’t know.” Forget that Carly is perfectly content with just one of each of these items for five days (and that she has failed to mention underwear). I’ve never been to the Australian desert; the closest I’ve come is Outback Steakhouse. Surely it’s a place that requires options. Leaving Big Red behind makes me feel like I’ve already whittled my worldly possessions down to the absolute necessities. Imagining going somewhere new with less seems impossible, even if it’s under a week. If my future self had revealed to the present self that soon I would be the proud owner of only a handful of possessions, traveling with a small pack for several months somewhere I had not yet imagined, I would have laughed in my own face. Right now I’m finding it difficult to let Carly convince me that, no, I don’t need to bring four novels on a five-day trip. I don’t need to cart along my full-size bottles of shampoo and moisturizer.
In the end, she packs for me: two short-sleeved T-shirts, one gray tank top, one long-sleeved tee, my favorite purple sweatshirt for cold desert nights, blue capri sweatpants (oh, how I wish someone had told me how hideous these looked, even for the Outback), a pair of gray socks, sneakers, green Tevas, six pairs of underwear, 50 SPF sunscreen, a small bag of toiletries, my camera, my journal, and a copy of Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl that Muriel lent me a few days ago.
Carly helps me hoist the pack up onto my shoulders, then buckles me in: one thin strap across my chest and another around my waist to prop the pack firmly atop my hips.
“Look at you!” She preens like a proud parent sending her child off to the first day of school.
Carly’s parents pop their heads into the room. “Look at you!” they exclaim.
“One sec, Rach.” Pete sprint
s out of the room and returns a moment later with a floppy wide-brimmed blue hat. He drops it onto my head. “There you go, mate. That sun will give you a thrashing if you’re not careful.”
After three hours on a bumpy flight, I land in Alice Springs, or the Alice, as it’s familiarly known. At the baggage carousel, a man whose leathery skin looks like he’s spent the last ten years directly under the central Australian sun walks straight up to me and greets me using my full name. I let this psychic lead me out to the parking lot, where he thankfully does not abduct me but instead deposits me at my white tour van and promptly disappears like a mirage. Nine other travelers are already belted in, slouched and overheated with eyes closed while the air-conditioning does its feeble best to combat the ninety-five-degree heat. My fellow travelers include Stomatos, a good-natured but bossy Greek guy who offers his expert opinion on everything from how long dinner should take to prepare (versus how long it’s actually taking) to which branches work best as firewood. Stomatos is traveling with Mauricio, a Mexican guy he met on the road, and with whom he’s decided to return to Mexico in a few months. Also on board is Tobias, a German who teaches primary-school art and is planning to propose to his girlfriend of eight years when he returns home in two weeks. Quiet Tobias, soft-spoken and reserved, shocks us all the second night when he gets drunk and uses a nearby tree to execute a pole dance (he’s surprisingly limber) to a Britney Spears song. There are three Irish girls—Sinead, Aiofe, and Eva—two on working holiday in Australia and the third visiting them. Sandy is an American girl on her way to teach English for a year in China. She is visiting her Australian friend Miranda, a lobbyist in Canberra. Finally, there’s Orly, an Israeli woman who pines constantly for her lost New Zealand boyfriend, with whom she has broken up because her trip is nearly over. In a week, she will be back home.
We exchange all the usual getting-to-know-you travel questions. Where are you from? How long are you in Australia? Where have you been so far? What do you do back home? When I tell people I’m from New York, I get the familiar reaction. First they praise Manhattan. They marvel at the skyscrapers, the Broadway lights, the celebrities. Many of the people I meet traveling have been there, and others want to visit. Since that rainy day when Brian mistook my identity at the Hole in the Wall, I’ve tried countless times to clarify that I’m from upstate New York, a good five hours from Times Square. When I explain that New York is a rather large state, not just a city, I’m appraised warily. Or greeted with pity, like, “Sweetheart, even if you’re not from Manhattan, wouldn’t we all be better off if you pretended you were? Isn’t it without a doubt better than wherever you grew up?”
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure Page 9
