One for the Road (7 page)

A few beers do wonders for the scenery. Look at the jump-ups! Red rock! And emus everywhere! The road is a runway for the flightless birds
and they sprint down the bitumen like jumbo jets that never lift off the ground. Great rolls of uprooted scrub, or roly-poly, blow onto the road. Then high-rise anthills loom on both sides, each one marking a tree brought to earth by insects.

I am way out there now, beyond the black dot, beyond sheep country, and into the land of precious rocks. They are sprouting up all around in long ridges of iron ore, dotted with spinifex. The landscape is striking, even majestic; it reminds me of some of the weird, colorful formations in the Utah and Nevada deserts.

Is it possible that this journey is about to turn over a new leaf?

I consult my tourist brochure. A black dot, bigger than the others, labeled Cloncurry, lies just an hour ahead.

“We invite visitors to this rugged land of striking contrasts to take in its stark beauty under the midday sun,” the brochure announces. “If it is said ‘See Naples and Die,’ we say ‘See Cloncurry and Live.’” As a general rule of thumb, the more purple the prose in a tourist brochure, the more wretched the place described. Cloncurry promises to be a town of unparalleled blight.

I am not disappointed. In Cloncurry at mid-afternoon, the temperature is idling at 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Three hours later, still waiting for my next ride at the western edge of town, a dry wind has cooled things down to 105.

Finally, I abandon my pack and run into a nearby pub to guzzle a lemon squash and two beers. “This is nothing,” a facetious barmaid assures me. “You should be here when it’s really hot.”

January of 1889, for example. That’s when Cloncurry (nicknamed, appropriately, “the Curry”) earned a spot in the record book: 127 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, hottest in Australia and something like third best in the world after the Gobi and Sahara Deserts. Burke and Wills were obviously stunned by the heat when they trudged past the present site of the town in 1861. Why else would they have given this burnt patch of turf a lilting Irish name like Cloncurry?

I start questioning my own judgment as soon as I leave the pub. Or are those really penguins I see squatting at every street corner on Main Street?

Closer inspection reveals that the penguins are cleverly disguised rubbish bins. A little printed message encourages citizens to “Do the Right
Thing” and shove their rubbish in the penguin’s mouth instead of just letting go of their fish wrappings before they collapse in the street from sunstroke.

Unfortunately, no one does the right thing by me. I swelter beside the road until dark. Even after sunset the town holds the heat like a well-oiled wok; if I camp here tonight, I might wake up as tempura.

A neon motel sign beckons: “Vacancy! Air-Conditioned Units!” In fact, the rooms are so frozen that I scale a wall to shut the Kelvinator off. The television isn’t so efficient. “Only one channel,” says a sign beneath the screen. “You are in the bush now.” The TV has adapted to its polar climate; all I get on the screen is snow.

A good excuse to catch up on my reading.
The History of the Exciting Northwest
tells me that Cloncurry is the gateway to one of the richest mineral deposits on earth. Of course no one knew that at first. The big break came in 1923, when John Miles went searching the scrub for a runaway horse and found an odd chunk of rock instead. He lugged it back to the Assay Office at Cloncurry where, we are told, “it lay for several weeks on the floor used as a doorstep.” Finally someone cracked it open and found it was rich with silver and lead.

Mining towns seem to thrive on this kind of lore. I have read these tales—tall ones, I suspect—about the opal country of South Australia and the goldfields out West. Horses tripping over massive nuggets. Little boys falling into fabulous lodes. Rain sweeping slurries of gold dust into diggers’ tents. No one ever bothers to tell you that most of those who actually dig for the riches come home empty-handed.

My own luck is no better in the morning than it was in late afternoon. The reason, I suspect, is that mining towns attract a rather raffish breed of visitor. When the blow-throughs don’t find gold in the ground, they sometimes look in people’s pockets instead. So sensible drivers think twice before welcoming a scruffy wanderer into the passenger seat.

Predictably, then, it is a senseless driver who finally weaves over to pick me up. I glance through the passenger window at an unshaven youth with a cigar stuck in his mouth and a half-empty champagne bottle between his legs. Elsewhere I would turn this driver down rather than risk an intoxicated
voyage. (“Sorry, mate. Just realized I’m standing on the wrong side of the road. All turned around from my country.”) But I can’t bear another hour in Cloncurry, so I climb inside.

The driver smiles and hands me a fresh cigar. “Been a husband for twelve days and a father for one,” he says. Right now he’s on his way to the Mount Isa hospital to collect his new wife and child. “I guess it’s a big deal, having a kid. But except for the splitting headache from celebrating, the shock hasn’t set in.”

The shock sets in for me an hour later, as soon as we catch sight of Isa. In most of the settlements I’ve traveled through, the skyline is so stunted that you don’t know the town has started until you’re almost through it. But Isa’s mining complex is so big that its smokestacks and slurries can be seen from 6 miles out. And that’s just the visible part. Isa’s mine is an industrial iceberg, with only 3 miles showing above ground and another 235 miles lurking beneath. Needless to say, this Colossus of Lodes is one of the biggest silver, lead, and zinc mines in the world.

Usually, mines are hidden away from the communities that serve them. But in Isa, the mine squats right at the end of the main street, forming a kind of grayish-red shadow following you everywhere in town. The settlement huddled at its feet has the itinerant air of a glorified mining camp: there are barracks, single men’s apartments, and even a few tent houses from early in the century. But it is the mine itself that makes Isa seem so precarious: looming, always lit, always gouging, vast and close enough to run amok and devour the town in one mighty crunch.

The other shock in Isa is hearing accented English on the streets. Since leaving Sydney, I have seen nothing more exotic than chow mein at the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant; the towns are filled with blacks and whites and no shades in between. In Isa, the mine has lured Arabs, Greeks, Yugoslavs, and others into a rich ethnic mix of about thirty nationalities. The tourist literature even claims a few Eskimos.

But cultural differences melt quickly in the outback sun. A generation after the immigrant influx, Isa appears as monochromatic as the crusted red earth surrounding the town. Kmart, car dealerships, and fast-food joints clutter the wide, hot streets. There isn’t a piece of pita bread or plate of moussaka to be found.

I settle for a meat pie at the Phoenix Restaurant, and a chat with the Hungarian-born cook, named Marta Alpin. “If I served goulash, I’d be out
of business in a week,” she explains, frying fishburgers and chips for a group of miners at the counter beside me. “Australians, they don’t like strange food. And once in Isa, everybody they are Australians now.”

The woman-starved miners are more eclectic in their marriage tastes. In recent years about four hundred of them have vacationed in the Philippines and returned with local brides. Others don’t bother to make the trip. They just pick a face from one of the photo albums passed around by Filipinas already in Isa, then begin writing to their intended. If all goes well, the young woman is flown over, bethrothed, and clothed at the miner’s expense.

A miner named Alan explains this to me between bites of his Phoenix fishburger. His brother sent away for a “mail-order bride” and he’s thinking of doing the same. “An Australian woman isn’t worth two bob—unless she’s your mum,” he says. “And you can’t find one out here anyway.”

What you will find in Isa are pubs that cover entire city blocks. It’s almost as if they were built as an annex to the mine; workers can poke their noses out from underground and head straight for pubs that are as cool and cavernous as a Pharaoh’s tomb. At the multilevel Irish Club, I count five hundred chairs and stools on one floor. Every seat is filled by eight o’clock. At another pub, the bar is so long that counter meals are announced like numbers at a bingo game—via a crackly public address system. “Eighty-seven, number eighty-seven. Your dinner is now at the counter.”

The Wintons and Cloncurrys of Queensland have left me restless for a little nightlife. But at the entrance to an underground dance joint called The Cave, I’m told that my singlet and thongs are not appropriate attire. I need a shirt with a collar and “enclosed shoes” to get in.

Cold down there, I guess; better to stay on the ninety-degree street instead. That’s where I meet John Wright, a young man seated on a wall at the end of the main street, backlit by the candelabrum of lights from the mine.

“The dress code’s to keep the blacks out,” he explains. “Anyway, if you go inside you miss all the street brawls.” He gestures at the movie theater which offers
Rocky IV
on its marquee. “Who needs that when you can get it out here for free?”

On this night, though, the Wild West is tame. We watch the broad-faced, broad-shouldered miners pull in at the bottle shop (“thirst-aid
stops,” as they’re called in Isa). We watch their weedy offspring, squeezed into tight jeans and tighter skirts, going underground to dance beneath strobe lights at The Cave. And we see nothing more violent than a drunk spewing into the gutter.

“Sorry,” Wright says with genuine remorse, as the streets begin to empty at midnight. “Gonna be here next Saturday?”

Not if I can help it. But at this rate, who knows? In a day and a half I have moved seventy-five miles. Perhaps my darling scheme, like Ludwig Leichhardt’s, will fizzle out somewhere in northwest Queensland.

I rise before dawn, bolt down an indigestible breakfast called the “Mt. Isa Special” (sausage, onion, and egg, drowned in grayish-brown gravy), and hike out of town ahead of the morning heat. Past the car dealerships, past the cheap motels, I am swallowed up by the ancient red hills of the Selwyn Range. Ahead lie the Barkly Tablelands and days of travel through territory even more desolate than what I’ve just passed through. Back east, a lonely smokestack is all that is visible of Isa.

As I hike down the road, away from the rising sun, the shadow of a huge hunched figure is cast before me. But the unshadowed man appears small in the vast outback spaces. Even a sprawling mine—the most aggressive of human industries and the one most contemptuous of nature—seems but a blip on the horizon. And I am something less. Just a blip on a blip of bitumen, waiting for a ride to carry me on.

      
H
itchhiking can sometimes feel like lying on a riverbank with a line in the water.

With yourself as bait, and only the road and sky for company, you wait with the patience of an angler for a passing car to nibble at your fingertip. And like a fisherman, you pass the time with dreams of hooking something really good.

The best catch I know of was made by my friend Rich Ivry. He was hitchhiking through the hills of central Oregon when a firefighter named Annie pulled over to pick him up. As I write, Rich and Annie are being married in the mountains at Bend, not far from where she stopped for him. It is a union that has always been blessed, I suspect, by the magic of having begun so randomly on the road.

Hitchhiking is strange that way—at once the loneliest and most social of occupations. One moment you’re stranded by the highway, as rootless as a piece of driftwood. The next moment you’re thrust into someone else’s car, someone else’s life. Where the driver goes, you will follow. All the way to the altar in Rich’s case.

I’m not setting bait for a spouse the morning I hike out of Mount Isa. But after five uncomfortable days, I’m hungry for the Big Strike. An air-conditioned
station wagon, say, with room to stretch out and an ice-filled cooler to dunk my head in between snoozes. Anything to escape the heat and glare for half a day.

The fantasy goes through two hours of refinement—from station wagon to sports car to chauffeur-driven recreational vehicle—before the first car appears on the eastern horizon. The sun’s in my eyes so I can’t see what sort of vehicle it is, but I hold out my finger, steady as a fishing rod, and reel in the hitchhiking equivalent of a muddy old boot. The car is an overheated wreck from the Mesozoic era with no shock absorbers, even less transmission, and the bent remains of a muffler and tailpipe dangling like entrails from the chassis.

The interior looks as if it’s been worked over by vandals on the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Abandoned cassettes melt on the dashboard. A plastic skull dangles where the rear vision mirror would be. The seat vinyl is slashed and the windshield is so cracked that the driver presses his entire forearm against the glass whenever a truck passes in the other direction.

“A pebble could collapse that shield, no worries,” he shouts above the engine’s cough and grind. If his car had been a fish, I would have thrown it back.

The driver, named Steve, needs a tune-up as badly as his automobile. He is twenty-two, going on forty-five, with teeth and fingers yellow from nicotine. A 10
A.M.
shadow of whiskers and grime looks as if it’s been painted on his face. His breath smells like Bhopal.

There’s also some lethal gear in his car. A bow and quiver in the backseat, a 30.30 rifle in the front, and two dozen rounds of ammunition strapped to Steve’s belt, beside a hunting blade the size of a small machete.

I inquire gingerly about the bow and arrows.

“You never know what you’ll see by the road,” Steve says. I gaze out at the blank landscape and wonder what hazard could possibly require so much artillery.

Again my host is less than reassuring. “Got in trouble with the law back in Townsville,” he tells me. “Thought I’d head for the Northern Territory and get a fresh start.”