Barbarian Days

by William Finnegan

  • • •

  THE SUMMER TOURIST SEASON was winding down at the Patch. Bryan and I had saved enough money to push on. We were keen to take a big drive around Australia. Our car, however, was not. The water pump was on the blink, causing the car to overheat. Bryan found a spare pump in a junkyard. We installed it, quit our jobs, said our good-byes, and, in half an hour, moved out of the Bonnie View Flats. Bryan paused as he shut the door, and said, with studied casualness, “Let’s call it an era.” Ten miles down the road, the Falcon’s temperature gauge swung back to Hot. I stuck a piece of masking tape over the gauge, blocking out the bad news. Then I wrote on the tape, “She’ll be right.” It was the unofficial Australian national motto.

  In Sydney we met up with Alias. Mick and Jane and their Fiji-born baby boy were moored in a quiet corner of the harbor, near Castlecrag. Graham and his girlfriend were off working. Over shrimp and beer, Mick described a moneymaking scheme they had cooked up. There were lots of rich yuppie surfers in Sydney, he said. The plan was to persuade a small group of them to pay thousands for a surf safari to Magic Island on Alias. They would not be told where they were going—only that it was “the world’s most perfect wave.” If the first trip was a success, the passengers would tell their wealthy friends, and the charter business would take off by word of mouth. The secret would be kept, basically. The trick would be to persuade the first group to cough up the brass and get on a plane to Nadi. Photos would be a big help. He and Graham had been too busy surfing Tavarua to get any decent photos. Did we by chance have any good ones?

  Bryan and I mumbled that we too had been busy surfing, and had few photos, none of them good, which was true. It was also true that we had no wish to see this scheme succeed.

  We headed south, surf-camping our way around southeast Australia to Melbourne, where we found Sue and her kids (her husband seemed to be firmly out of the picture now) living with Sue’s mother. They had a full house, so we stayed with Sue’s younger sister. She was a university student, living with a group of punk rockers in a burned-out squat in a bad part of town. By night, we drank and danced with the punks and watched old movies (Sergeant York) on a clapped-out black-and-white TV they had scavenged. By day, we went to a marathon international cricket match, Australia versus Pakistan, with Sue’s mother, eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping Pimm’s Cup. Bryan, in a moment of late-night why-not, let the punks shave his head. They wore his dark curls as adornment, hanging off their much-pierced ears, and he, after sobering up, announced ruefully that his new stage name was Sid Temperate.

  We headed west, toward the Great Australian Bight, which has the world’s longest line of seacliffs, and the Nullarbor Plain, which is the world’s largest hunk of limestone. It was hot, bright, treeless, unpeopled. We drove through salt flats and sand dunes on dirt roads and camped at a remote, flyblown surf spot known as Cactus, where the water was cold and a deep Southern Ocean blue. There were two long lefts, one called Cactus, one called Castles, breaking off a rocky headland, and a heavy right a few hundred yards west called Caves. The swell was solid, day after day. Some days it was more than solid. The wind was hot, full of dust, and offshore, blowing out of the great central desert. Bryan rode the lefts. I was riding a new board now, a pale blue 6'9" rounded pintail that I had bought in Torquay, a beach town in Victoria. I had left my South Pacific board, not without regret, for sale on consignment at the shop where I found the pintail. I hoped the pintail, which was built in New Zealand, might work as my new all-around board. It was light and fast and on bigger days at Caves seemed able to handle a serious drop without sideslipping.

  The other surfers at Cactus were a hardy mix of travelers and transplants. The transplants were all from other, more populated parts of Australia—blokes who knew a great, uncrowded wave when they saw it and didn’t mind living in the back of beyond. They surfed and scraped by on the dole, or fished, or found something to do in Penong, a truck stop up on the paved highway thirteen miles inland. Some lived in scrap-built shacks in the desert. These characters ruled the lineup, naturally, but it was still uncrowded, and we found them surprisingly generous with waves. Some could even be garrulous. One told me a cautionary tale featuring his mate, Moose, who one day found himself faded into a wipeout by a visiting camper. Moose came up smiling, but then paddled in, got in his truck, and drove several times back and forth over the tent of the offending visitor before returning to the lineup, still all smiles. I was careful not to drop in on Moose.

  There was another local known as Madman. He had a crew cut and an unusual amount of energy, churning back and forth in search of the gnarliest takeoff spots in the broad, boil-filled expanse of heaving, eight-foot Caves. My informant said that Madman had once broken a leash on a big day out here, but, too rabid to go in and repair it, had kept surfing, simply clamping the broken cord in his teeth and holding on to his board that way. Then a bad wipeout tore the leash out of his mouth, along with his two front teeth. Madman later grinned at me, for no apparent reason, confirming that the teeth in question were gone.

  Cactus, like the rest of the Nullarbor coast, is known for great white sharks—people called them white pointers. I met a guy in the water who said that he had been attacked by a white pointer five years before in the exact spot where we were sitting. He was a mild person—no Madman or Moose—and I was inclined to believe him. He said that the shark had really only bitten his board, but that he had been injured in the thrashing, sliced up mainly by the broken bits, the sharp fiberglass edges, of the board. It had happened in midwinter and his wetsuit, he said, had saved his life. Even so, he had needed 150 stitches and had been out of the water for eighteen months. He reckoned that lightning never struck in the same place twice, so he surfed here without fear now. Try as I might, after hearing his tale, I couldn’t feel the same karmic safety zone.

  Cactus didn’t tempt me as a place to live, but it reminded me of other surf-exile scenes I had run across, in Hawaii and Oregon and Big Sur and rural southwest Victoria. People came for the waves and stayed. They learned the place, and found ways to survive. Some became, over time, members in good standing of the local community; others stayed on the margins. I had surfed a few spots, notably Honolua Bay, where the wave commanded such devotion that I could see renouncing all other ambition than to surf it, every time it broke, forever. There were other beauty spots with good, uncrowded waves, places where the living was cheap and, at a glance, looked easy. I might end up, I guessed, in one of those. Then there was Tavarua. Bryan and I still never spoke the name. It existed out of time. I never thought about going back to live in Fiji.

  • • •

  BUT I DID WONDER what I was doing with my life. We had been gone so long now that I felt unmoored from all possible explanations for this trip. It was certainly no longer a vacation. What was I vacationing from? I had wangled a one-year leave of absence from the railroad, which had run out while we were in Kirra. Officially resigning my job as a trainman, and my precious seniority date—June 8, 1974—had been unexpectedly difficult emotionally. I still believed I would never find another job so satisfying and well paid. But it was done. I panicked sometimes, convinced I was wasting my youth, aimlessly wandering on the dark side of the moon while old friends, classmates, my peers, were building lives, careers, becoming adults back in America. I had wanted to be useful, somehow, to work, to write, to teach, to accomplish great things—what had happened to that? Yes, I had felt compelled, almost required, to take a big surf trip. But did it really need to last this long?

  Our plan was to go to Bali next. Great waves, dirt cheap. Sharon had written that she could probably meet us in Asia in a few months’ time. Maybe she knew what it was that I was supposed to be doing out here. But she didn’t surf. In fact, she was terrified of the ocean. Was “surfing” even what I was doing? I chased waves instinctively, got appropriately stoked when it was good, got thoroughly immersed in working out the puzzle of a new spot. Still, peak moments wer
e, by definition, few and far between. Most sessions were unremarkable. What was consistent was a certain serenity that followed a rigorous session. It was physical, this postsurf mood, but it had a distinct emotionality too. Sometimes it was mild elation. Often it was a pleasant melancholy. After particularly intense tubes or wipeouts, I felt a charged and wild inclination to weep, which could last for hours. It was like the gamut of powerful feelings that can follow heartfelt sex.

  On good days, I still thought I was doing the right thing. The particulars of new places grabbed me and held me, the sweep of new coasts, cold, lovely dawns. The world was incomprehensibly large, and there was still so much to see. Yes, I got sick sometimes of being an expatriate, always ignorant, on the outside of things, but I didn’t feel ready for domestic life, for seeing the same people, the same places, thinking more or less the same thoughts, each day. I liked surrendering to the onrush, the uncertainty, the serendipity of the road. And I generally liked being a stranger, an observer, often surprised. On the day we crossed from Victoria into South Australia, passing between tall rows of Norfolk pines, deep green under low clouds, we spotted a country racetrack, parked, slipped into the grandstand, and watched from the rail a terrific horse race, then watched the jockeys in their bright silks holding their saddles on the scales. Behind the racecourse pub, we found a rugby ball and started running old football pass patterns, throwing funky spirals and snagging them at full stretch while a group of barefoot kids hooted. Our Australian visas were running out and I, at least, would be sorry to leave.

  Bryan and I had our own domesticity, of course, and it was often strained. Being friends as in writing letters was so much easier than being friends as in living together. We bickered and, every few months, fought bitterly. I resented the fact that it felt dangerous to do anything out of the ordinary, anything outside the rut of habit. One morning at Cactus, when the wind was sideshore and the waves poor, I rose early and took a walk along the waterline, westward. The limestone tidepools were shiny in the rising light. The ubiquitous outback flies were absent, perhaps because of the hour, perhaps because of the wind. I ended up walking a long way, and saw not a soul. By the time I made it back to camp, it was midmorning and Bryan was pissed. Where had I gone? He had cooked and eaten breakfast without me. My oatmeal was stiff and curdled. I didn’t feel like accounting for myself. I was munching an apple. He continued to grouse. I exploded. How dare he tell me when I could go where? Unfortunately, I spat a mouthful of half-chewed apple onto our tent, more or less deliberately. Bryan stalked away in disgust. Thankfully, he never mentioned the Apple Spat (or Spat Apple) again. It was almost as bad as a similar row we had in Western Samoa, when I shouted at him to never again tell me what to do, and he seriously considered, he later told me, pulling the plug on our South Pacific trip, which was then barely two weeks old.

  • • •

  WE SET OFF for the Never Never—the Northern Territory. Australians had been warning us not to try to cross the Center since we first started muttering about doing so, back on the Gold Coast. We should especially not try it in an unreliable car. “Bush rangers” lay in wait for unwary travelers. It was many days’ drive between way stations. That, we could see from the map, was an exaggeration, but we did buy a jerry can to carry extra gasoline, and a water bag, and a few extra hoses, and our car was undeniably unreliable. It overheated daily, and often wouldn’t start. We had taken to parking it only on inclines, however slight, for the jump starts it frequently needed. When we pulled into gas stations, radiator steaming and hissing, attendants usually wanted to check the temperature gauge. They’d stick their heads in the driver’s window. “She’ll be right” always got a laugh.

  We headed northeast from Cactus on a dirt road so obscure that we saw just one vehicle—a cattle truck—in two hundred miles. The washboard road caused the car’s back window to rattle so hard that it fell down into the door. We tried to raise it and fix it in place, but no fix we attempted lasted more than ten minutes. We drove on, with white saltdust, and later red bulldust, pouring in through the open back window. We wrapped bandanas around mouths and noses, and were thankful we’d filled the “esky”—a cheap styrofoam cooler—with Crown Lager in Penong. Distances between outback towns are sometimes measured in “tinnies”—how many cans of beer it takes to traverse them. It was at least a dozen tinnies to the main road north, also dirt, which we met in a village called Kingoonya, where a tumbledown roadhouse offered the world’s most welcome steak burgers, served by Australia’s most beautiful waitress.

  Even the main road through the Center was rough. We saw no pavement for six hundred miles. We did see an unnerving number of burned-out vehicles lying on their sides in the saltbush, and decided to heed much-heard advice that without a “roo bar”—a cowcatcher for kangaroos—driving at night was inviting disaster. We saw enough kangaroos by day, both in the road and bounding along in the desert. So we camped at night. A huge flock of galahs, pink-and-gray parrotlike birds, wheeled above us one morning while we struggled to jump-start the Falcon.

  We picked up a swagman, Joe, who was marching along with a knapsack fifty miles from a building. Joe was tiny, as if shrunken by the sun, deeply wizened, not young, and I would not have called him jolly, but he talked volubly all day about boreholes, billabongs, and sheep stations he had worked on. And he methodically guzzled our beers. I asked him about the crazy flies. He said you never got used to them. Even the blackfellas didn’t get used to them, he said. Then he asked to be dropped at a faint track that ran off to the east. We filled his water bottle and gave him five dollars.

  We crossed into the Northern Territory. At a dust-choked hamlet called Ghan, I peeked inside a filthy board bag strapped to the car’s roof. My new pintail was in there. Shiny, pale blue, the board was a vision, so cool and sleek. It conjured another world, an unimaginable freshness. Our plan was to drive to Darwin, a town on the north coast, sell the car, and find a way to Indonesia from there.

  Bryan had not finished reading his entire stack of New Yorkers before we left Kirra, and the fifty or so remaining had been stuffed under the front seat. We sometimes pulled them out and read from them aloud—short stories, poems, reviews, humor pieces, essays, long reported pieces. Many of these, one or both of us had read before, but hearing them in the outback was different. It was a test. How would the stuff hold up in the harsh, no-bullshit desert light? Some of it did fine. The writing was still strong, the stories still funny. But pretension and flab came up fluorescent in this merciless scan, and certain writers suddenly seemed like hothouse poseurs. They became unintentionally hilarious.

  We were feeling pretty full of ourselves. This was like long road trips we had taken in the West back home, but with less pavement and more beer. Mailer’s A Fire on the Moon failed the outback test, which distressed me, since he was one of my heroes. It didn’t help that he was up against Patrick White’s Voss, an utterly convincing novel about a Prussian naturalist on a nineteenth-century expedition across the middle of Australia. We bantered and read and took potshots at wombats with cheap green plastic water pistols. I liked the way Bryan drove. He did it with a long-distance trucker’s posture, upright. On straightaways, he left one hand on his leg. He read with a similar relaxed, long-haul attentiveness. We rarely ran out of things to discuss. Mick and Jane had laughed at us on our way out of Sydney. We had driven in convoy with them down to Wollongong to look for waves. When we got there, they said that they had been watching us for an hour straight, both gesticulating, particularly me, nonstop. I had been developing, on that drive, an early version of a theory about Patrick White, having just read The Eye of the Storm. It had been the same on Alias, they said, the two of us constantly ear-bashing one another, privately amusing the Aussies.

  On the north side of Alice Springs, we picked up two hitchhikers, Tess and Manja (pronounced mun-yuh). They were graduate students, they said, from Adelaide, going to a women’s conference in Darwin. They said they didn’t m
ind the deep bulldust drifts that now filled every corner of the Falcon. They put on bandanas, and we traveled with them for five days. Tess was a bantam lass, wearing a man’s plaid shirt. She was slight, pale, butch, incisive, with short dark hair and a wicked dry wit, which she deployed at the expense of the hearty, unsuspecting fellows whom we met at petrol stations and in the far-flung pubs where we hid from the midday heat, which was now too much for the struggling Falcon. Tess was relatively easy on Bryan and me and our water pistols, even after we insisted we were Vietnam vets, unrepentant but mentally damaged. “Poor boys,” she cooed. We said our surf scars were war wounds. “Blimey, that must have hurt. Buy us a pint.”