One for the Road (27 page)

Each Aboriginal community I’ve encountered has been locked in some form of battle with alcohol. At Mutitjulu, near Ayers Rock, opposition to alcohol is so intense that booze is barred from the community altogether. In other places, such as the Beagle Bay Mission north of Broome, a truce has been worked out. Alcohol is permitted in designated quantities at designated times. Someone might drive into Broome and pick up a few cases of beer for a Friday-night celebration, but anything more than that is
verboten
.

Fitzroy Crossing appears to have fought the same battle and retreated in abject surrender. Even the elderly women I pass in the street are red-eyed and wobbly. And the area around the petrol station, where I stand
watch for another ride, resembles a downtown street at 2
A.M.
on Saturday. Dozens of drinkers mill around with no apparent activity or destination, on the verge of collapse.

Standing alone by the road, I become a natural target for their stumbling, imperfect English.

“Hey, mate. Hey. Where you going, mate?”

“Hey, mate, got a smoke, mate?”

“Mate, got me a dollar, mate?”

I empty my pockets of change then pull the insides out, to show that I have nothing left. But conversation is difficult. The men aren’t unfriendly or aggressive, just out of it. One man urinates in full view of a busload of kids at the gas station. Another lies down for a snooze a few yards from where I stand. And as the heat and glare drain from the sky, the abandoned tinnies go from white to orange to red in the fading sun.

I am about to look for a camping spot when a truckie pulls in at the gas station and offers me a ride to Hall’s Creek, 185 miles to the east. “You’re lucky,” he says, driving off quickly. “Most people avoid stopping at Fitzroy altogether, unless they run out of petrol. It gives them the creeps.”

An hour out of Fitzroy, the bitumen turns to gravel and the driving becomes slow and silent, so slow that it is after midnight when I climb out at a camping ground on the edge of Hall’s Creek. It’s drizzling, so I crawl under my tarp for what promises to be another brief and uncomfortable sleep. Shining my torch at the map, I calculate how far I’ve come: 450 miles since Broome, about 7,000 since Sydney. Only 750 or so to go. I make a sign to the next town—“Kununurra Pls!”—and return to the same lullaby I hummed last night.

Sunday morning I don’t even make it out to the road. I am seated on my pack at dawn, trying to muster the energy to roll my swag, when a voice beckons from the morning mist.

“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.