One for the Road (12 page)

The three-hour flight from Sydney to Alice makes my earlier journey seem as tortured and slow as a drunken weave home from the pub. But just as flying shrinks all sense of distance, so too does it sharpen contrast. Before, the center of Australia seemed no more remarkable—or unremarkable—than the bleached and barren scrub I had hitchhiked through to get there. This time, climbing out of Sydney smog and easing down through the cloudless blue of an outback afternoon, the center seems as light and crisp as the celery in my Bloody Mary. I stare out the window at the squiggly ridges of sand, swimming like minnows across the surface of the desert, and feel as I did so many months ago, when I flew over Australia for the first time and imagined that I was descending onto an alien planet.

“The land is here, sky high and blue and new as if you’d never taken a breath out of it,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to an English friend in 1922, soon after arriving in Australia. “And the air is new, new, strong, fresh as silver…. The country has a fourth dimension and the white people float like shadows on the surface.”

Close to Alice there’s something else floating on the surface: the huge white domes of the Pine Gap satellite station, lying on the desert floor like giant golf balls caught in the world’s biggest sand-trap. If the goings-on inside are super-secret, the location of the CIA base is obviously not. And with skies this clear, you could photograph Pine Gap from the other end of the solar system.

For genuine mystery, one would do better to train his camera on Alice Springs, at least on the day I arrive. At the center of town, several hundred people are sprawled on a grassy bank, guzzling beer and staring into a dust storm. Then the dust clears for an instant, two canvas sails tack past each other, and the crowd begins to whoop and cheer.

“With winds like this it’s anybody’s race!” shouts a muffled, micro-phoned voice somewhere inside the maelstrom.

I have arrived during the early heats of the Henley-on-Todd, a bush parody of the annual regatta on the Thames in England. Parody begins with the Todd River, a dried-up channel of sand snaking through the heart of Alice. Then there are the “sailors”: teenagers mostly, in sneakers, with
their legs poking out from underneath bottomless boats. Standing inside the hollow crafts, holding the sides at waist height, they wait for an “admiral” to fire the starting gun, then sprint down the riverbed, around two oil drums, and back to the finish line, canvas sails flapping in the windless desert air. A thin stream of spilled beer is the only moisture in sight.

“Some fine sailing there!” the admiral shouts as two boats butt each other and capsize, like toddlers wrestling in a sandbox. “But I’m afraid both ships have been disqualified. The judges are waiting to see which one brings in the biggest bribe.”

It has the look of Page-One stuff to this reporter’s eyes. Better get some background information. At the beer tent I meet the regatta’s founder, a laconic, gray-bearded man in a sailor’s cap named Reg Smith. He dreamed up the regatta twenty-five years ago, while working in the weather tower at the Alice airport. The job was undemanding: Alice skies are almost always clear, and in those days there was only one airplane arrival each day. So Smith sat there, staring into space, until he was struck by one of those thunderbolts of outback inspiration—the same kind of vision, say, that spawned the first bush bank or Darwin’s Beer Can Regatta.

“Racing boats down a dry river just seemed like the logical, sensible thing to do out here,” Smith explains. Behind him, the sailors rest while two rowboat crews paddle through the Todd with sand shovels. “Of course when we started, the race was a little more primitive than now.”

So primitive that yachts snagged their sails on overhanging gum trees, or foundered on sandbars in the Todd. Then one year the riverbed had the temerity to fill up after a rare burst of rain; water had to be channeled off so the boats could “sail” undisturbed. The trees and sand have since been tamed, and the race sponsors now have an insurance policy against the Todd ever flowing again at race time.

But a certain primitive spirit has remained unevolved. The day’s final contest pits two boats, mounted atop four-wheel drives, in a gladiatorial duel to the death. In one corner a three-masted pirate ship called the HMAS
Nauteus
, and in the other a boat called
Bite Ya Bum
, which claims as its insignia a huge middle finger raised defiantly on the stern.

The crew members look like riot police on R and R. Wearing gas masks and crash helmets, they are heavily armed with water cannons,
gravel, paint, flour bombs, water bombs, smoke bombs, and anything else that makes a mess and is easy to throw.

The battle isn’t much of a spectator sport. A huge cloud of dust and smoke envelops the duel, and the crowd waits expectantly, trying to judge from the groans which ship has the upper hand. Then a broadside of water and paint clears the dust for a moment. There is a glimpse of the
Nauteus
crew clambering over the gunnels of
Bite Ya Bum
for hand-to-hand combat, and the battle is quickly done.

The victorious crew heads straight to the beer tent to sink a few more schooners. “We stole most of their ammo before the race,” the
Nauteus
skipper says, pulling back his gas mask to swallow a beer.

And down in the Todd, a group of Aborigines reclaim the polluted riverbed, bemused by this strange white fellas’ Water Dreaming.

Alice, meanwhile, has been transformed into a ten-ring comet circus. Even the Pine Gap spooks come out of the closet for this one, turning a small park called the “Space Base Picnic Ground” into the venue for a “Stargazers Bush Ball.” Hoping to learn a little more about the base, I travel down the well-paved but unmarked road to the satellite station, twelve miles out of Alice. The road dead-ends at a guard tower, flanked by high fences and surveillance cameras. An amiable, heavily armed guard points me to a grassy picnic area. And sure enough, there they are: CIA wives, disguised in aluminum foil space suits, barbecuing hot dogs and hamburgers just a few yards from Pine Gap’s barbed wire fences. That’s as close as anyone in Alice ever gets to the spy station.

Back in town, I sample celestial food—moon rock buns, flying saucer doughnuts, galactic gumbo, aspic aurora—and the celestial junk jettisoned into every bit of vacant space: Halley’s sweatshirts, comet beer coolers, computer-enhanced postcards of Halley’s streaking like a fireball over Alice in 1910.

“It’s like a super convention into all things cosmic!” exclaims a local tourist honcho, whom I interview for the “official viewpoint.” Outside, on the streets, it looks more like a United Nations meeting that has got freakishly out of control. There are stargazers from every corner of the globe, falling over themselves to confirm national stereotypes … Japanese with
enough camera gear to cover a coronation … English astronomers, flesh untouched by ultraviolet light, shielding themselves from the desert sun with umbrellas and masks of sunblock … and, of course, the Americans, thousands of them … “oll” men from Dallas wearing ten-gallon hats, and huge buttons declaring “Proud to be Texan!”… good ol’ boys from Florida in Bermuda shorts, football jerseys, and duckbill caps with cotton koalas climbing up the back … New Yorkers staggering through the wide streets, stunned by the open spaces … “Harry, willya look at that park? Empty, absolutely empty.”

As night falls over Alice, and everyone gathers around telescopes at a racecourse outside town, I find my cynicism slipping away. After all, I’ll be 103 the next time this comet whooshes by. My great-grandfather lived that long, but he had to read the newspaper with thick spectacles and a magnifying glass. Whatever shape I’m in, I certainly won’t be here, in Alice Springs, Australia, on a clear night at the planet’s best spot to take in the show.

I stare hard into the night sky. Nothing but stars. I edge over to eavesdrop on a group of Australians who are pointing into space and talking in stage whispers: “Go down from the Milky Way … See that tree? … Then go a little to the left.”

I follow their directions. Still nothing.

“Little further to the left, mate.”

And yes, a smudge of light flickers just above the horizon. A man offers me his binoculars. The smudge gets bigger, smudgier. I move to a telescope the size of howitzer: a smudge within a smudge, smudgier still. I look at my fellow stargazers. They look at me.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

We grope for the proper metaphor. A smudge. A blob. A blur. A headlight coming through the fog. A headlight with a weak bulb seeing through the fog. A faint star. A flop. A fraud. A bloody fraud. A bloody flop of a fraud.

Nearby, some proud-to-be Texans are splayed out on banana chairs, staring through telescopes at their first view of southern skies.

“Herb, where’s the comet’s tail?”

“You’re looking at it, hon.”

“Not
that?
That’s just a bunch of fuzz.”

“That’s right, hon.”

“We came all the way from Dallas to look at that?”

“Uh hunh.”

Silence. Quiet calculation of plane fares, hotel bills, banana chair rental. Herb has the dismayed expression of a man who has just sunk a dry well somewhere in west Texas.

A stockbroker named Arnie is more upbeat.

“Herb, it’s the concept that’s important,” he says in a bullish voice. “This guy named Halley makes these calculations and they turn out right. That’s what makes it so exciting. It’s not going to be a huge flash of fire in the sky, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

Silence again. Evidently, that’s what Herb and Hon were looking for. If they wanted to see a goddamn cotton ball they could have done that an hour from Dallas.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be as good as they said,” moans Hon. “But it’s a
whole lot
not as good.”

“Cummon,” says Herb. “Let’s go watch the astronomy movie they’re showing. Maybe we can find it in the film.”

So the pride of Texas march off, leaving Arnie and friends to discover an unsuspected interest in the Trifid Nebula, the Magellanic Clouds, globular clusters, and other deep-space phenomena.

“That’s the twenty-fifth dimmest object in Centaurus.”

“No kidding?”

I wander off after Herb and Hon and find them watching slides of the barren red surface of Mars. The pictures bear a distressing resemblance to central Australia. The central Australia I am about to hitchhike into.

      
T
hree deserts block my circumnavigation of the rest of the continent: the Gibson, the Great Sandy, and the Great Victoria. I choose the Gibson—Ernest Giles’s desert—and plot the following course:

1. Fly to Ayers Rock, thus bypassing the ill-fated patch of scrub where the rented Ford found its resting place a few months ago.
   

2. Hitch west along the unpaved Gunbarrel Highway, a desert track into six hundred miles of townless, empty desert. The most direct route to Western Australia and the most desolate. I want to get Way Out There.
   

3. Proceed via the goldfields all the way to Perth, where I will arrive in a week’s time, before moving up the coast to Broome and Darwin.
   

It’s all as clear and effortless as running my finger along the map. If I stick to this itinerary and don’t linger too long in any one place, I can cover the rest of the continent in the time I have before returning to work.

The only hitch, so to speak, is that I need permission to cross the Aboriginal lands west of Ayers Rock. One call and I’m there.

Ten days! A camel could hump it to Western Australia faster than that. But after three hours of burning roadside heat, the only thing that’s moved west all day is the angle of the sun. Now, instead of roasting my face and arms, it’s blowtorching the back of my neck. Another few hours and I’ll have a body coat as red as Ayers Rock.

The first sign of traffic is a cloud of dust on the western horizon, coming from the direction of Docker River, which is where I’m headed. It’s a four-wheel drive that looks like one of those mythical beasts I read about in outback motoring guides, equipped with two extra tires on the roof, a spare everything in the boot, and enough food and water to survive a nuclear holocaust. Or a three-day dust storm, which is what the driver appears to have just traveled through.

“The only cars I saw going your way were broken down.” The driver’s voice is muffled, as if someone’s shoveled sand into his lungs. “Anyway, the cars are so filled with jerry cans of petrol that they wouldn’t have room for an extra body.”

An hour later, I decide to start walking. If I don’t, I’ll melt right here on the road within view of the Rock. The problem is, which way? It’s six miles back to the Ayers Rock resort, and a bit further to the Olgas, on the way to Docker River. Which way? I’ll start walking back to the resort and stick out my finger at any car that passes, going east or west. If the rides so decree, I will retreat to the Stuart Highway and go south toward Adelaide, entering Western Australia by crossing the Nullarbor Plain. The long way around, but so be it. Let the rides decide.

An hour later, a van winds down from the Olgas, heading east. I run across the road and point my finger back toward Alice. The van slows, a side door swings open, and a hand pulls me into the tenth reunion of an astronomy class from Tokyo.

“How you do?” says a grinning young woman named Atsuko. She is the only member of the group who speaks any English. “We, how do you say, go bush? And you?”

“Bush. Great. Yeah, I go bush too.” And off we drive, east, back the way I came.