One for the Road (2 page)

At least that’s how I explained myself to Geraldine one hot night in early January. It was an uncomfortable proposition. She was a journalist too; we were used to separation. But this was different. Three years before,
she’d promised to show me an older land. Now I was heading off to see it without her.

“We could drive out there together,” she said.

“We could.” More pacing. “But there’d be no unplanned adventures.”

For a long time the two of us just sat there at the kitchen table, waiting for a breeze to pass through the house.

“I saw a curious message printed on a T-shirt yesterday,” she said with a crooked grin.

“What’d it say?”

“If you love something, set it free. If it doesn’t come back to you, hunt it down and kill it.”

In the morning I packed my rucksack and caught a ride with Geraldine to the end of my known Australian world: a patch of grass at the fringe of Sydney’s red-brick western suburbs.

      
T
he wing-tipped Ford swoops across two lanes of traffic and skids to a halt at my feet. A door swings open and I lunge inside as the car weaves back on the road out of Sydney.

“I’m Skip. She’s Trish,” the driver says, thrusting an oil-stained palm in my direction. I shake with one hand and flail with the other for the passenger door, which is swinging open onto blurry space.

“Tony. Thanks for stopping.”

Or slowing at least. Skip says he’s headed to a drag race in Lithgow, on the other side of the Blue Mountains. He seems to be doing his warm-up laps en route. The city skyline dips behind a hill and suburbia stops sprawling. Then, as we plunge into rolling farmland, a chorus of carnivorous voices starts wailing from beside the road.

“Fresh Dressed Chickens!” squawks one sign.

“Country Killed Meat!” cries another.

“Pig 4 Sale. Corn and Mash Fed. Good Size 4 the Spit!”

Skip shoves a cassette in the tape deck and the car begins throbbing to the beat of heavy metal. Apparently, this is the cue for further conversation.

“Where ya headed?” he shouts.

“Alice Springs, I guess.”

“Yer joking.”

“No, really. I’m going to hitch through the outback, maybe write something about it.”

“Could be a very long book, mate.”

Not if I stay in Skip’s Ford: a short story, say, or a tombstone epitaph (Fresh Dressed! Country Killed!). We hit mach I at the base of the Blue Mountains; mach II on the windy ascent.

“I work as a carpenter all week,” Skip says. “Pay’s okay but anyone can bang a bloody nail. Racing’s different. It’s dangerous business and not every bloke makes it.”

He jerks the Ford across double yellow lines to pass a truck on a blind mountain curve. Trish digs her fingernails into Skip’s bare thigh. I close my eyes and hear the dull thud of rubber hitting rabbit flesh. And I decide that Skip isn’t going to be one of the blokes that make it.

I abandon ship at the first pit stop, a thirty-second pause for gas about sixty miles west of Sydney. “You staying or what, mate?” Skip yells as I scurry across the highway. Before I can answer, he climbs back in the cockpit and plummets down the mountain.

I drop my pack to the ground and catch my breath. In one great leap, I’ve pole-vaulted out of the city and onto the western slope of the Blue Mountains. From where I stand the foreground is green, but the more distant furrows of the Great Dividing Range are washed in a hazy aquamarine. And they share the gentle beauty of their American cousins, the Blue Ridge Mountains: old and soft and familiar, like well-worn denim jeans.

Very nice. I find a well-shaded spot, suck in the clear mountain air, and inhale a dozen flies. Another dozen divebomb my eyes. And a phalanx of mosquitoes start gnawing at my ears and neck. I grope inside my pack for the tube of insect repellent that I purchased yesterday after a long, technical conversation with a camping goods salesman. I locate it near the bottom of the pack, bleeding onto my clothes and leaving acid burns on my fingers. “An insect killer that doesn’t sting is like good-tasting toothpaste,” the salesman assured me. “It can’t have any guts.”

The flies aren’t so stupid. They swarm on twice as strong now that the flesh has been basted (Corn and Mash Fed! Good Size 4 the Spit!). I am blind and wretched, wondering which way to run, when a dilapidated Holden putters to a halt.

“Just going a little way up the road,” the driver says through the passenger window. I would have settled for a ride in a parked car.

We have traveled only ten minutes when my host, an amiable teenager named Trevor, pulls up at a roadside picnic ground. “Picnic stop,” he announces. “I’m shouting.”
^*
Inside the car’s boot is a pile of jagged metal that looks like leftover hardware from the Spanish Inquisition. Trevor walks about fifty yards into the trees, digs a shallow trench, then drops in one of the irons and covers it with dirt.

“Toss my cigarette on that,” he says. I do. The trap leaps from its grave like a missile from an underground silo. The cigarette is shredded between metal teeth.

“Bloody ripper, eh?” Trevor says proudly, resetting the trap. “Rabbit’s a good feed, except for the head. Want to stick around for supper?”

I decline, and pick my way carefully back to the road. Just two rides and already it’s coming back to me—the helpless feeling of climbing into cars with total strangers.

Two rides and already I’ve crossed a mountain range that the colonists spent twenty-five years struggling to conquer after settling the coast around Sydney. Charles Wentworth, who was only twenty when he joined the successful expedition in 1813, wrote a poem about how the party “gain’d with toilsome step the topmost heath,” to behold the western lands, opening before them like “boundless champagne.”

Apparently, this vision led to an immediate hangover. Gregory Blaxland, who was no poet, recorded that the party beat a hasty retreat to Sydney, “their clothes and shoes in particular worn out and all of them ill with Bowel Complaints.”

No mention of flies. I make my eyes and nostrils into narrow slits, hold out my finger—Australians hitch by extending their left index finger rather than their right thumb—and stand perfectly still until I finally snag a car. The driver is a farmer, clad in shorts and singlet, with a faint whiff of manure drifting up from his workboots.

“I only take her out for church and trips to the city,” he says, patting the dashboard of the shiny sedan. This is a city trip, to pick up seeds in Orange, a small town 125 miles northwest of my starting point. “Been
to a real city once,” he adds, apparently referring to Sydney. “Didn’t like it.”

He doesn’t say a word for the rest of the hour-long drive. I stare out the window at a weed called Patterson’s Curse heaving its purple breath across the orchards and paddocks. Occasionally there is a town, but only of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety: a pub, a grocery store, a few houses. Blink. Orchards and paddocks again.

Orange is a major metropolis by comparison. And it has the broad main street I’ve seen in a hundred news photos of country towns: false-front shops, angle parking, and a wide awning shading the footpath. What the photos don’t show is that the grand facade of Main Street, New South Wales, is designed like an Old West movie set to mask the nothingness behind. Even in a town with thirty thousand people, the side streets fade quickly into a thin layer of housing before dwindling back into the bush.

The shops are silent on Sunday, but there’s plenty of traffic. Unfortunately, none of it is moving. Parking on the main street with the radio on is what passes for a Sunday outing in Orange.

I lean my pack against a ten-cent parking meter and watch a storefront thermometer creep toward eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Much worse lies ahead, I know, so I face the sun, purposefully. When I was a child, I used to take off my shoes in early summer and sprint back and forth across the stony driveway, hoping to toughen up my soles for the barefoot months ahead. Maybe I can do the same now and train for the withering heat of the outback.

My first workout lasts ten minutes. I retreat into the shade and take a swig from my waterbag to clear my head. An hour later, a car finally unglues itself from the curb and swings around to pick me up. It’s one of those souped-up dragsters with the back wheels raised so high that the grillework is pushed down in front, as if to inhale any loose gravel. The driver, a sullen-looking teenager in black jeans and a black sleeveless vest, moves his arm like a minesweeper across the passenger seat, sending three dozen Coke cans clattering to the floor.

“Hop in, mate. I can get you as far as Molong.”

“Thanks for the ride!” I tell him, threading my legs between the can heap and a tangle of fuse wires. It is the one and only obligation of the hitchhiker to seem eternally grateful—and to keep up the chat. Hitchhiking
is a big leap of faith for both parties. The driver has no way of knowing if you’ve just climbed the wall of a maximum-security prison. You have no way of knowing if he’s a mugger, rapist, or worse. Chat, however mindless, is the best way to break down any lingering suspicions.

I try again: “So what’s to do in Orange on a Sunday?”

“Nothing.”

“How about Molong?”

“Dead, mate. Laid out like a stiff.”

“So what takes you there?”

“Testing my transmission.”

Silence. Transmission isn’t one of my conversational strong suits. “Actually,” he adds, unprompted, “that’s a lie. There was a cricket match on Channel Two and reruns of
Bonanza
on Nine. And nothing happening on the street. I reckoned there might be something more bloody exciting between here and Molong.”

Perhaps he means me. Boredom is, after all, the main reason why people pick up hitchhikers; if not boredom, then to stave off sleep. Occasionally, the sight of a hitchhiker actually pricks at someone’s conscience, like one of those African kids staring off the magazine page: “You can stop for this poor bastard, or look the other way.” Usually, they turn the page.

Anyway, this teenager from Orange is bored, but he’s after something more exciting than my idle chatter. “Look at that,” he says, slowing beside a heap of car-squashed flesh. It is the first kangaroo of my Australian journey.

I stare hard at the shapeless corpse and try to conjure up the animal described in the journals of explorer William Dampier, who was the first white person to record seeing a kangaroo. “The land animals were only a sort of raccoon,” he wrote of his visit to the Australian coast in 1699. Unlike the American raccoons he’d seen, they “have very short forelegs, but go jumping upon them as the others do, and, like them, are very good meat.”

Good roadside meat, too, like raccoons. But not good enough for my companion.

“I thought it might be a big wombat, or maybe an echidna,” he says, picking up speed again.

I’ve never seen an echidna, but I’ve read that they’re the only mammals in the world that don’t dream. Conscious and subconscious are rolled
together in the wakeful world; just life as it is, experienced through their snout and spiny body. Until they wander into the road and end up, like this kangaroo, in a deep echidna sleep.

In Molong, there are two pubs but both of them are closed. Even the parked cars have gone elsewhere for the afternoon. My host decides not to push his luck; he turns around to Orange in time for
High Chaparral
on Channel 7.

The day is still young when he leaves me at the northern edge of town. It creeps through middle age and into retirement as I wait for a car to pass. There is a paranoid clarity that comes to those who stand alone by the road, for hours. In this case, it’s directed at a garden statuette of a kangaroo in the yard behind me. I can feel its beady plaster eyes on my neck, hexing me for having ridden with animal killers all day.

I beg forgiveness and pray to the ’roo to bring me a ride. I get another hitchhiker instead.

“How long you been on the road, lad?” A disheveled man with two bloated duffel bags studies me from across the road.

“First day out. How about you?

“Thirty-three years, lad. And them boots are still not tired of walking.”

Phil “Boots” Harris, cook by trade, card shark and con man by preference, kicks his bags into the shape of a chaise longue and stretches out on top. He spotted me from a ditch beside the road where he spent most of the day sleeping off an all-night card game. “Drunk, see.”

The boots are high patent-leather pumps—night shoes, not for walking. Mid-shin, the boots give way to a tattered pair of tuxedo pants that must have once belonged to a stouter, shorter man. A massive beer gut droops above the man’s narrow waist, protruding from a T-shirt that reads: “My wife has a drinking problem. Me.” Alcoholism is written across his face as well: it is red, lumpy and deflated, like a day-old birthday balloon.

“Landed these threads at a church in Orange,” Boots says, hooking his thumbs on an imaginary waistcoat. “Spun a real hard-luck yarn. Lost my job. Started drinking too much plonk. Wife showed me the door. Blah blah, boo hoo hoo.”

He opens one of the bags and a few potatoes roll out. “Landed some tucker too. Blankets in the other bag. I’ll sell the bloody lot of it in Dubbo.”

I ask to hear his story.

“Information costs in the bush,” he says, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Have you got a beer?” I haven’t, so I toss him a dollar coin instead.

“Anyone can have a home and an honest job,” he says, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “But if a man lives by his wits, he can get by without all that. And stay free as a bird, like me.”

Free to roam the continent, which is what Boots has done since running away from Kalgoorlie in West Australia as a teenager. The first stop in every town is the pub, where he hustles card tricks for schooners of beer. When the tricks play out, he hustles poker. On a good night he makes enough to walk on down the road a little farther. On a bad night he sleeps off the beer and starts all over the following day. “Fresh as a goose. Only poorer,” he says.

“If there aren’t any mugs at the pub, there’s always one at the church,” he goes on. “Convents are the best. You can tell a nun any bloody nonsense and get everything but a place in her cot.”