One for the Road (14 page)

I squint at the horizon. It looks as if the night wind has blown away all the trees, hills, and scrub. The landscape is so flat and bare that I feel as if I might be able to see all the way to Alice. All I can pick out is a tiny speck,
coming toward me at a pained, slow crawl. A few minutes later, the ute limps to a halt beside me. There are four Aboriginal men staring sullenly out from the cab and a dozen jerry cans of petrol vibrating in the back.

“Where ya headed?” I shout at the driver, a very black man with a massive bush of hair. He looks at me blankly. I point at the southern horizon and bob my head up and down.

“Pedy,” he mumbles. I point at the back of the truck, then at myself and bob my head again.

“Hey, mate. Okay,” he mumbles. I scramble into the back and squeeze myself between two petrol drums, like a stowaway on an oil tanker. We rumble off at twelve miles an hour and a hideous noise starts. BBBRRRRRRRRRRR! I have gone from the eye of a hurricane to the belly of a sick, screaming whale. BBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRR! I toss the blanket over my head again and the noise goes down a decibel or two. BBBbbbbbrrrrrrrr. It’s beginning to look like another underwear job.

It’s also beginning to look like a very slow drive to Coober Pedy. Ten minutes down the road, the driver stops and feeds the monster a drum of petrol. Then he rolls the empty barrel into the scrub and hops in beside me, letting someone else take the wheel. I offer the three words of Pitjantjatjara I picked up at Ayers rock—
Uluru, paya
(thank you), and
rama-rama
(crazy). He offers his sum total of English—okay, hey, mate, yes. We shout our three words in every possible combination, then smile and nod at each other for 125 miles.

Actually, it’s hard not to nod when you’re swerving and bumping over a road that’s like gravel laid over choppy surf. Only the oil drums keep me from going overboard. And there’s nothing to look at except a cloud of dust shooting out behind the truck, with glimpses to either side of baked and empty desert. By mid-morning, the heat becomes staggering; even in the windblown rear of the ute, I can feel the sun burning every inch of exposed flesh. Nothing to do but huddle beneath my blanket, wedge some of it under my bum as a shock absorber, and tough it out.

A few hours later my companion squeezes up front again with his mates. Then something strange happens. The ute veers off the main road (such as it is) and onto what looks like a dingo trail. I clutch the side of the truck as we bounce between bushes and churn through deep sand. I have a hitchhiker’s distrust of detours, particularly when the main road is itself a detour from any habitable territory.

I bang on the back window and get no response; apparently, there’s some kind of domestic squabble going on up front. The ute lurches to a halt behind a clump of mulga and the four men pile out, talking loudly in Pitjantjatjara and gesturing at me. All I know is that something ugly is about to happen, and whatever it is, I’m along for the ride.

One thing’s for sure; I’m not going to talk my way out of this one, whatever it is. All I can do is listen to their chatter and let my paranoia run riot in translation. (“How much money do you think he has?” “Do we kill him or just leave him here to bake?”) Nor can I sort of mosey off into the scrub—“Some other time, fellas”—and run for it. Not here, at the center of the bottomless dustbowl that is outback South Australia. I’d make it three hours at the most before collapsing of heat exhaustion, dehydration or worse.

“Hey, mate!” It is the driver speaking. He is walking toward me, sweating nervously, with one hand clutching something in his pocket.

“Hey, mate!” He pulls his hand out and thrusts it toward me. I freeze. Then his fist uncurls to reveal a pile of crumpled two-dollar notes.

“Okay, yes!” he shouts.

I look at him blankly. Yes, what? He’s exhausted his English and his body language isn’t helping. Nor does my extensive Pitjantjatjara vocabulary seem appropriate. Rama-rama? Uluru?

“Grog, mate,” says one of his companions. “Black fellas can’t buy us grog.”

We move to dust language now and he draws a map headed back the way we came. South of the spot where we turned off, he sketches a square, and what looks like a bottle. “Black fellas can’t buy us grog,” he repeats, handing me the money and the key to the ute. “Two, mate.”

Slowly I get the picture. They want me to take their money, and their truck, and drive to the roadhouse to buy two cases of beer. For some reason—a racist publican, I assume—they can’t buy it themselves. They’ll wait here until I return.

The request says a lot about their trust and my lack of it. All I have done to win their confidence is utter three words of pidgin Pitjantjatjara. All they have done to lose my trust is talk loudly in a language I don’t understand. Paranoia took care of the rest.

My first reaction is relief that nothing sinister is afoot and that I can
atone for my suspicions by helping them out. For the first time on my journey, I feel as if I’ve violated the unwritten contract of trust between hitchhiker and hitchhikee. But they don’t know that, and anyway, I can make up for it by buying a few beers.

But as I dodge sand traps on my way back to the main road, another dilemma surfaces. We are still two hundred miles of rough empty road from Coober Pedy. With a case or two of beer on board, it could be a long, even futile journey.

Or is this prejudice again, welling up in the background as it threatened to do a moment ago, when I began hearing the racist chorus of Territory voices I’ve managed to ignore until now? … “Don’t turn your back on a black fella.” … “An Abo will cut your throat faster than you can say boomerang.” … “Whatever you do, mate, don’t take a ride with boongs.”

My contact with Aborigines has consistently contradicted these dire warnings. From Cunnamulla to Tennant Creek to Ayers Rock, I’ve been treated by blacks with an openness and generosity not always evident among whites. This last incident is further proof of Aboriginal goodwill. How many white drivers would entrust a scruffy hitchhiker with their piggy bank and sole means of transportation?

That’s what makes me nervous; there is a whiff of desperation about the request. But the real problem is, I have no way of knowing if this will lead to a blowout, and no way of coping if it does. North of Alice, there was the occasional roadhouse at which to abandon ship. Here, nothing; we haven’t even seen another car in four hours. The barrier between us isn’t racial, it’s linguistic. If things get sloppy, which they easily can after two cases of beer, we’ll need more than dust drawings to sort the situation out.

As the roadhouse comes into view, I am leaning toward a compromise. My instinct is confirmed by a huge sign above the bar, which announces that it’s illegal to buy alcohol before heading into Aboriginal territory. Two cases of beer might make me conspicuous. Two six-packs won’t, and it also won’t be enough to leave me on a walkabout in the South Australian desert.

The publican is the only person in the pub and he doesn’t ask any questions. So I load up the beer, and fill my tucker box with stale bread and overpriced cheese. My companions appear unsurprised when I
return with most of their money unspent and only a dozen beers. And the speed with which the tinnies are drained, crushed, and tossed into the scrub quiets any qualms I had about disobeying orders.

I am about to pass around my bread and cheese when two of the men begin helping themselves. Their offhand manner makes me realize that the gesture is neither rude nor ravenous. Rather, it seems that food and drink are assumed to be public domain. Every twenty minutes or so through the morning, a waterbag and a lit cigarette were passed to me in the back of the truck. This was my ration, my right as an occupant of the ute. It would be inappropriate—even insulting—to suggest that my food was anything but part of the collective. We eat a few slices each, share the waterbag and cigarette pack, and climb aboard for the long drive to Coober Pedy.

This time my companion in the back is Joe, he of the “black fellas can’t buy us grog.” His English is good enough for a halting dialogue interspersed with sign language and sketches on the dusty side of an oil drum. As far as I can make out, the men are traveling from their home on a reserve in the Northern Territory to spend a few weeks “noodling” for opal around Coober Pedy. Noodling, as Joe describes it, is a leisurely sort of look-see through the piles of rubble left by white miners and white machines.

“White fellas always go, go go,” Joe says, pantomiming men driving drills and pickaxes into the ground. “They miss so much riches that way.” Noodling, it seems, is not a bad metaphor for the difference between our cultures.

Indeed, Joe doesn’t miss a beat along the sixty miles of unpaved road we travel after stopping for beer. Every ten minutes or so he touches me on the arm and points off toward an empty horizon. Each time there is an emu or kangaroo, almost invisible to me, but obvious as a skyscraper to Joe. The foreground is clear enough, though; long lines of abandoned automobiles stretching beside both sides of the road, like parallel queues to a scrapyard just over the horizon. Burnt cars, stripped cars, overturned cars. The place looks like a training camp for terrorist car bombers.

“Black fellas bad with cars,” Joe explains. “No buy fixing out here.” At least there are plenty of dead cows to keep the car bodies company. But otherwise, nothing. It is as bare and bleak a landscape as I’ve ever clapped eyes on.

For several thousand miles, I’ve been struggling for un-superlatives to communicate the un-ness of outback scenery. The towns and people are easy enough; they have faces, buildings, features. But what can you say about a landscape that is utterly featureless? A landscape whose most distinguishing quality is that it has no distinguishing qualities whatsoever? Flat, bare, dry. Bleak, empty, arid. Barren, wretched, bleached. You can reshuffle the adjectives but the total is still the sum of its parts. And the total is still zero. Zot. Nought. Ayers Rock has a lot of blank space to answer for.

To the early explorers, this arid region north of Adelaide was simply Australia’s “Ghastly Blank.” Charles Sturt set off into the desert east of here in 1844 to find the inland sea, and so sure was he of success that his party included two sailors and a boat (as well as eleven horses, two hundred sheep, thirty bullocks, and four drays). “I shall envy that man who shall first place the flag of our native country in the center of our adopted land,” he declared. But after staggering for some months through the desert, Sturt reached neither sea nor center—just the dry expanse of Lake Torrens. “The desolate barrenness, the dreary monotony, the denuded aspect of this spot is beyond description,” he wrote in his journal, having described it rather well. Daniel Brock, a member of Sturt’s party added, “This scene is the Climax of Desolation…. Miserable! Horrible!” Not long after, Sturt launched his boat on the Darling River and then retreated to Adelaide.

Looking out the back of the ute I am amazed that Sturt made it as far as he did. Desert to the right of me, desert to the left of me, a plume of car dust shooting down the middle, I claim this spot as the landing pad for the alien probe I imagined my first day in Australia. The alien probe that drops down, declares “No life,” and heads back to outer space. The probe people could sniff around here for a few hundred miles in every direction and come to the same conclusion. No life. No bloody way.

Just the sort of place you’d never want to break down in; just the thought that comes to me as the engine coughs and goes silent, leaving the ute half on and half off the highway. It seems the moaning beast under the bonnet has finally been put out of its misery.

The four men pile out and take turns staring through the steam rising out from under the bonnet. They study the ute’s Japanese repair manual, upside down. Then they begin staring vacantly off into space. It is the
noodling school of car repair. We are about to join the long queue of automobile corpses. Looking out at the empty desert, I don’t like our chances either.

I am an automotive moron. But desperation makes for marvelous self-improvement. Studying the manual, and then the tangle of metal under the bonnet, it becomes obvious to me that we no longer possess a fanbelt, if indeed we ever had. Also, whatever water the radiator once held is now evaporating on the ground at the rate of about fifty quarts per second.

Joe fashions a fanbelt by knotting the spare rubber flapping around under the bonnet. But feeding our meager supply of water to the radiator seems a little risky. If we do, and the ute still doesn’t move, we’ll be fashioning straws to drink from the radiator within a few hours.

So once again I am called into service for the purpose of liquids procurement. While the four men huddle out of sight—or as out of sight as you can get in a desert, which means behind the ute—I wait for a passing car to beg some water from. It seems that for black fellas in this stretch of outback, water is as difficult to come by as beer.

The first car to pass is driven by a Romanian refugee named Milos. He’s headed north from Adelaide to “see some bush” and is happy to give me his entire water supply, all two quarts of it. I explain to him that there’s no Danube running through South Australia and hand him his water back, along with the tourist guide the New Zealander gave me yesterday.

A short while later, two Aborigines pull up in a battered truck. When my companions hear the familiar, accented English of fellow blacks, they pop out from behind the ute like guests at a surprise party. The six men chat away for half an hour, then conversation is followed by a pirate raid on the newcomers’ water, tucker, and cigarettes. Then everyone begins chatting again. I assume that I’m witnessing a chance reunion of long-lost friends or relations. In actual fact, one of the newcomers tell me, they’ve met only once, on an earlier noodling expedition to Coober Pedy. The color of one’s skin can be as powerful a bond in the outback as it can be a barrier.

An hour later, the party gets around to fixing the radiator. Water doesn’t revive the ute. But with the truck pushing us from behind, the engine kicks into life again, or a tubercular version of it. We cough and wheeze down the highway for a hundred yards or so—before everyone decides this is cause for further celebration. So we pile out, chat, and smoke for
another half hour, then get kick-started again down the road toward Coober Pedy.