One for the Road (11 page)

My tutor at Uluru is a Pitjantjatjara man named Tony Tjamiwa. As Grant explained to me at Tennant Creek, there is no textbook of Aboriginal belief. But because Aborigines lack well-defined hierarchies as well, it is hard to find anyone who will speak for the community as a whole. Tjamiwa is one of those rare spokesmen, pressed into service by the crush of curious whites at the Rock.

Even so, it is very slow going. We meet at Mutitjulu, a community of several hundred blacks near the base of the Rock. He understands little of my language and I not a word of his; Pitjantjatjara seems impossibly cluttered with the letters j, g, and k, and delivered in a high-pitched singsong that mushes the words together.

“Ananguku ngura nyangatja Tjukurpa.” He points at the Rock and sketches a serpentlike creature in the dust. “Tjuta tjuku-tjuku.” More scraping in the dust. Our “talks” have almost broken down when a white ranger arrives to provide a rough translation from Pitjantjatjara to English to Pitjantjatjara again.

The concepts Tjamiwa is trying to explain are as foreign as his dialect, which is one reason Aboriginal belief is so poorly understood by whites. Take the central concept of Tjukurpa. Our clumsy translation of it—Dreamtime—suggests a kind of Old Testament fable with Freudian overtones. But to Tjamiwa, the Dreamtime is past and present and future rolled into one. It is not only his history, but also his law, a seamless fabric of knowledge and belief.

Aboriginal art is also opaque to Western eyes. Even the fanciful Giles found little to say about the cave paintings he discovered at the Rock; they were “ornamented in the usual aboriginal fashion,” he wrote, with “parallel lines with spots between them.” Tjamiwa shows me a bush tucker bowl, used to collect berries and nuts. It has an abstract design burned into
the quandong wood—at least it looks abstract to me: swirling lines and circles, much like the lines and circles on other bowls he shows me. But to Tjamiwa it tells a particular and whimsical Dreamtime tale about two women who chase a goanna deep inside a cave. At the bottom of the pit the women meet two snake men, whom they eventually marry.

Uluru dominates Tjamiwa’s visual and spiritual landscape. He built a hut recently, making sure that the doorway opened directly on to a view of his “Dreaming Trail”—the creased north face of the Rock to which his people are connected. “I do not own this thing,” he says of Uluru. “It owns me.”

I envy Tjamiwa the security of having his history, his law, his roots all preserved in a massive piece of stone. But this strength of Aboriginal belief is also its greatest vulnerability. Lose the land, or become alienated from it, and Aboriginal culture loses its very soul.

Even as Tjamiwa speaks, Uluru’s face is covered by tourists: “minga juta,” he calls them, which translates as “lots of ants.” Greater armies still—advertisers, developers, promoters of every stripe—are clamoring like Visigoths at the gate. A New Wave band wants to set up a stage, using Uluru as a backdrop for a televised concert. A film crew asks permission to crash an airplane into the Olgas. Another wants to roll boulders down the Rock. And a self-promoting hang glider doesn’t even ask: he just jumps from the summit and floats to earth again.

Somehow, though, Tjamiwa and his kinsmen remain calm in the face of this onslaught. Perhaps it is because the magic of the place seems to rub off on all but the thickest-skinned of visitors. Australians may litter beaches and bush trails but here the land is unspoiled. Tourists, particularly Americans, often display an odd impulse to shrink even the grandest of natural wonders to human size. “Majestic doesn’t appeal to us,” writes Garrison Keillor in his gentle satire of Midwestern America,
Lake Wobegon Days
. “We like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.”

But Uluru seems to humble and inspire respect, even from the Clarences and Arlenes. I meet a few of them—“Idaho potatoes!” they exclaim—armed with Instamatics and Budweiser caps, clustered at the base of the Rock. When I tell them about the stories Tjamiwa has shared with me, they ask if it’s blasphemous to climb onto Uluru’s face. I sense
that it is, and as we follow the dashes of white paint marking the beginning of the climb, something feels awkward. With a few of the others I retreat to the base and circumnavigate the mountain instead.

At sunset, the tourists gather to watch the Rock begin its dance through the spectrum, from red to orange to pink to purple to red again, then brown and black. An expectant hush falls over the audience, like the quiet at first dark in a theater. Only the sound of camera shutters breaks the silence. And when the show is done, the audience drifts away, leaving the great desert beast to bed down in peace for the night.

It is morning and the rented Ford speeds toward Alice. I touch my foot to the accelerator and seven hundred horses of power pound off through the scrub … sixty … sixty-five … seventy…. Nothing but empty road and empty space to measure myself against … seventy-five … eighty … eighty-five….

I reach for the radio dial, catch a wheel in the road’s soft shoulder, swerve once, and spin off the bitumen backward.

The Ford swan dives off an embankment. Then it begins to roll. There is an instant when I realize that the car is going over and in that instant I wait for the vertebrae to crack, the skull to cave in. I do not wonder if I will die, just when. The last thing I see is a blur of sand and stone, upside down, rushing up to meet me. Fade to black.

I regain consciousness, suspended by the seat belt, hanging upside down, with my head pressed against the car’s crushed rooftop. Blood drips slowly past my face and onto the ceiling. Outside, the wheels still spin, the engine still spits and groans. And inside, the radio drones along: “After nine overs of play, Australia is none for thirty….”

I was trying to find something other than the cricket when I reached for the radio and skidded off the road.

Slowly, I start taking stock of the damage. There is broken glass in my nose and under my tongue. I lick my front teeth; having chipped them twice before, I assume they will be the first thing to go. But the enamel is intact. I try to wiggle my toes. They wiggle. I feel gingerly for the leak that is still draining blood down my chest and onto the ceiling. A deep gash in my thigh, a bloody nose, a sliced arm. I am bumped and bruised, badly shaken, but otherwise fine.

I undo the seat belt and scramble through the space where the windshield used to be. My leg hurts, so I crawl on hands and knees to the road. Here I am again, lying in the hot sun by an empty highway, waiting for a ride to carry me on.

My fortune knows no bounds. On this lonely stretch of road, a car happens to be just a few minutes behind me, and not just that: the driver is an off-duty cop from Alice. Immediately he takes control. Two strong hands plant themselves under my armpits and pull me onto the backseat. Two strong legs disappear over the embankment to collect my possessions, which have been thrown from the boot of the Ford. Then the man stands by the highway staring at the car and nodding in disbelief.

“Don’t know how you walked away from that one, mate,” he says.

Only then do I take my first look back. The rented Ford has become what is known in insurance circles as a “write-off.” It looks like a tinnie that someone has stomped on with steel-toed boots. The only bit of uncrushed metal is a small cocoon around the steering wheel. The rest is a steel and chrome coffin. In a way, I had it coming. “Mr. Leadfoot,” my father used to call me, as I sped through suburban streets as a teenager. They say the last words of airplane pilots, picked up from black boxes in downed planes, are usually “oh shit” or “dammit”—more an expression of annoyance than of terror. A black box in the Ford would have picked up a kind of mournful sigh: an unreformed speed demon wishing he could hit the rewind button to tape that part over again.

Now, slumped in the backseat of the policeman’s car, I feel like I’m lying in a bathtub with the water draining out. This is what shock is, I guess. Not fear or hurt, just a huge, gaping emptiness, like one of those bottomless pits in television cartoons. There is nothing to do but try and fill the hole, which I do by chattering at the policeman for the hour-long drive to Alice. If he gets in a word, I don’t hear it, so busily am I shoveling noise into the void.

In Alice my mind goes on automatic pilot. There are police forms to fill out, car-rental papers to sign. At the police station I sheepishly confess to driving over seventy-five miles an hour. “No worries,” the officer says, “most people burn down the Track at ninety.” It is all as straightforward and painless as paying a parking fine.

The officer asks if I want to go to the hospital. Suddenly, all I want to do is be home. The image of nursing my wounds in Alice, with nothing but
my own thoughts for company, fills me with a strange sort of terror. The officer seems relieved. He calls a tow truck to collect the Ford for transportation to a metal grave. Then he rings a taxi for me and goes back to watching cricket. “Matthews has faced eighty-eight balls on this wicket….”

It is on the way to the airport that the numbness finally wears off. My leg feels as if someone’s planted a kitchen knife just above the knee. And my head spins every time I think how much worse it could have been. I feel light-headed, short of breath, panicky.

Then absurdity intervenes. I rush onto the plane forgetting that my nose, shirt, and trousers are still caked with blood. I go to claim my assigned seat, which is in between two other passengers. The man to my left throws on his headphones and presses his entire torso against the plane window. The woman to my right tries to squeeze into the ashtray on her armrest.

As soon as we’re aloft, a stewardess rushes up to ask if I “require assistance.” A moment later I am in the galley sipping Scotch while she examines the gash in my thigh.

“Well, that’s one sure way to get a girl to take off your pants,” she says, bandaging the wound. I start laughing and can’t stop. The stewardess thinks I’m crazy, which temporarily I am.

      
T
he leg heals quickly but there’s a hole in my head where the road keeps winding in.

Usually it’s the highway south of Alice and I’m speeding down it in the big rented Ford. I reach for the radio dial, the car flips up on two wheels and begins to roll. And there’s the scrub again, upside down, rushing up to meet me. I reach for the radio dial, the car flips up on two wheels and begins to roll….

My mind keeps replaying the moment like a needle reaching for a scratch in a record over and over again.

But there’s another image as well, less haunting, more familiar. It’s a clear blue outback morning with a hitchhiker leaning against his pack, a map spread on his knees, imagining what the next stretch of highway will bring. He folds the map as a car approaches and sticks out his finger.
Cummon, baby. Don’t say maybe
.

The car slows and the hitchhiker climbs inside. Then the phone rings and I am back in the tall gray building where I work downtown. No windows in this office, just the fluorescent glow of letters moving across a computer screen. A reporter at the next desk flicks his cigarette into a half-empty cup of coffee. It sizzles for a second and a small stream of smoke lifts off the gray-brown liquid.

Deadline, mates. Where’s that copy? Horwitz, where’s that copy? Horwitz? HorWITZ!

It is a month before the crash begins to fade, and another month before there is a chance to return to the road once again.

I have changed my habits with the hemispheres, but there is still some internal rhythm that comes alive in April. Eliot’s month, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” That’s what “spring fever” in the Northern Hemisphere is all about. Here, of course, April carries the melancholy of summer ending and winter closing in. But why let Australian weather patterns get in the way of good poetry? Can’t my dull roots be stirred in autumn as well?

Dull is how I’m feeling in the slipstream of the morning, when the first rush of caffeine has rippled through my nervous system, leaving me an hour short of lunchtime, tired, irritable, restless. I wade listlessly through the mail on my desk. Is this how Ernest Giles felt, his journeys ended, pushing paper at some clerk’s desk in Western Australia?

I plod through the hate mail (“Dear Sir, it has recently come to my attention that in your misleading article of…”), the press releases (“Did you know that Matchbox Toys Pty Ltd, one of the most respected names in the Toy World…”), the announcements of boring events (“The Brick-makers Association of New South Wales will hold its annual…”).

All the usual stuff. Then, a wrist flick away from the rubbish, one envelope marked “Northern Territory Government” wins a last-second reprieve.

“Alice Springs has been named by leading astronomers as the best point for viewing Halley’s Comet,” it says. “Has your newspaper given thought to sending a correspondent to Central Australia for this once-in-a-76-year-special-guest-star appearance?”

If it hasn’t, it will now. I fold the press release in my shirt pocket, straighten the knot on my tie, and stride off to the glass boxes where the editors reside. The script is ready by the time the secretary waves me in. A few stories on the “guest-star appearance,” a feature or two on the outback, then a story of my own to finish, on my own time. Half a continent, still unexplored.