One for the Road (15 page)

Relieved, I let out an Indian war cry—Yihaaaa! YiHAAAAAAAAAAAA!—and Joe imitates me for the hour-long drive. “Do it one more,” he says, as if prompting a singer to repeat a favorite refrain. The two of us are roughly the same color from the waves of reddish-brown dust we’ve been swimming through all day. So there we sit, two red-skinned Apaches, belting out war cries all the way to the opal fields of South Australia.

Late in the day we reach Coober Pedy with the fanbelt still intact, the radiator cool. I climb out of the ute, shake each man’s hand … “Hey mate, okay” … “Yes” … “Okay, yes” … and hoist my pack over one shoulder. It feels like a bag full of wet fish is crawling down my back. I yank the pack off and discover that one of the cans of diesel fuel has been leaking onto it for the past ten hours or so. I think of all the lit cigarettes passed between Joe and the cab during the day, directly over the diesel-soaked pack. One stray ash and my clothes would have launched into outer space.

If they had, they might well have touched down in Coober Pedy. Lunar landscape is too generous a metaphor for this ugly, eerie place. Imagine, first of all, an endless plain of sand-colored cones, spreading like an abandoned tent camp all the way to the horizon. That’s the outskirts of town: a man-made—or man-ruined—expanse of dirt kicked up by the picks and bulldozers and explosives used to uncover opal.

The town itself is in perfect harmony with its surroundings, which is to say, as raw and ruined and forbidding a settlement as you’ll find anywhere in the outback. It looks like an inhabited vacant lot. Abandoned and burnt-out cars litter the streets and yards like so much rusty lawn furniture. Discarded timber and sheets of corrugated iron are strewn about as well. And the dust is so thick when I arrive, several hours before sunset, that cars motor through slowly with their headlights on, as if piloting through fog.

Getting your bearings in Coober Pedy requires a kind of twisted sixth sense. There are few street signs and few real streets to speak of; just a dusty tangle of unpaved trails cutting every which way between the burnt-out cars and litter of timber and iron. Finding the inhabitants is almost as difficult. According to the tourist guide, there are five thousand Coober Pedians, “give or take a thousand.” Many of them are underground, if not in
the mines, then in subterranean homes called “dugouts.” All you can see from outside is a doorway set into the ridge, like the entrance to a mine shaft. That’s home.

This molelike life-style began after World War I when miners rushed here to scratch for opal. Veterans mostly, fresh from the trenches of France, they got the bright idea of escaping the dust and blast-furnace temperatures by gouging underground. The habit survives today because it is cheaper to light a dugout than to air-condition an aboveground home through months of desert heat.

“This wing was started with pickaxes, then blown out with dynamite,” says Edward Radeka as nonchalantly as if he were showing off an addition to his split-level suburban home. In fact, he is leading me down a black tunnel to a room in Radeka’s Underground Motel. “Nice and quiet, don’t you think?” The room is a cave, literally, with a bed and a chair beneath a canopy of shot-out stone. No windows, no natural light, just a few drawings hung from the stone and a small airshaft winding up to the earth’s surface to let in a little oxygen.

Washing up isn’t easy. The name Coober Pedy is derived from an Aboriginal phrase meaning white man’s burrow, or boy’s waterhole, depending on which tourist brochure you look at. But whatever waterhole there once was has long since dried up. Now fluid comes in by truck or pipe and it costs about twenty dollars just to water the lawn. This explains why the only lawn in town belongs to the pub, which gets a helping hand from spilt beer. At the motel, Edward Radeka says I can have a bucketful of soapy water to wash with so long as I toss it on two of his stunted trees when I’m done.

The diesel fuel washes out well enough. But after an hour of drying on a clothesline above the motel—that is, at ground level—my clothes are coated with a dense layer of reddish-brown dust. At least now they’re color-coordinated, with one another and with the color of my skin.

At sunset I wander through town past underground homes, underground restaurants, underground bookshops. You can even pray underground in Coober Pedy at the Catacomb Church. About the only thing you can’t do underground is find much opal, at least not anymore. Apparently, the easy pickings are gone and most of the serious miners have moved off to Mintabie or other settlements. The only new work in the last
few years came during the filming of
The Road Warrior
, when about 120 locals were hired to loll around as extras. They didn’t really have to act, nor did the town require any modification; it is already a natural setting for a postnuclear fantasy.

After an hour of sightseeing—abandoned cars, humpies, broken glass—I stop to ask a man for directions to the nearest pub.

“You want to buy opal?” he answers in a strong Eastern European accent. I repeat my question and he repeats his. “You want to buy opal?” I shake my head and he points me to a pub up the street. I have just had my first sip of beer at the bar when a man at the next stool edges over and whispers hoarsely in my ear: “You want to buy opal?” Is this some kind of password or is every Coober Pedian a portable gem shop?

“Not many miners have a luck anymore,” the man explains. “But you can’t sell small bits of opal so easy. So we make our tucker money by selling this way.”

Stief (“No last names, please. I not pay tax in nineteen years”) is a Yugoslav by birth, as are many of the miners in Coober Pedy. The town is so isolated that ethnic differences have been preserved in a kind of Southern European aspic. Croats gather at one end of the bar; Serbs at the other. And Italians and Greeks go to a different club altogether. “Every nation in this place, except fair dinkum Aussies,” Stief says, wandering off to hustle another tourist at the bar. The phrase “Want to buy opal?” is the Esperanto that joins all the different cultures together.

I leave in search of a souvlaki to fortify myself against the procession of pies and pasties on the road ahead. At nine o’clock the streets are almost silent. It seems that all the life has been coaxed out of Coober Pedy, along with the opal. Except for the gem sellers, of course. I am propositioned three times between the takeaway and the motel, twice by the “Want to buy opal?” set and once by a tall, painted lady, whispering from the doorway of an opal shop.

“You have money I give you a sex.”

No, thank you, I have a sex. I have a souvlaki. All I want to do is get to my cave and go to sleep.

But there is one more voice in the night.

“Hey mate, okay!” It is Joe and company, greeting me from the ute, which is parked on the main street. Their eyes are glazed over with beer.

“Rama-rama,” I say, casting my arms around the town. Crazy.

Joe smiles. “Say it one more time, Tony. One more time.” I shake my head, exhausted. So he does it for me, letting loose with a bloodcurdling war cry into the desert air over Coober Pedy.

“YiiiiHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

      
I
n the morning I enjoy the leisurely wake-up of the Motel Man. Or in this case, Cro-Magnon Man, crawling from his cave, squinting once at the sun, then sloping off into the cool gloom of Radeka’s Underground Restaurant for a cup of coffee and a look at the morning newspaper.

The opal fields seem even stranger in the matter-of-fact newsprint of the
Coober Pedy Times
. “SEALING CELEBRATION FOR STUART HIGHWAY,” screams one headline. “WATER AT INDULKANA,” shrieks another. And then, “WEATHER: NO RAIN FOR APRIL.” Elsewhere, paved roads and running water, from ground or sky, would be taken for granted; here, they’re lead stories. And the crime reports are written in a curious sort of Newspeak. One story tells of “a drastic increase in the number of cars taken and used without the consent of the owner”—car theft, I guess—and another of “night shifts in the opal fields,” which apparently refers to miners making midnight raids on other people’s claims.

The home improvement section is most primitive of all. “EXTEND YOUR DUGOUT!” says one advertisement, beneath a dimly lit photo of a man in a bulldozer, clawing at the rock wall of someone’s living room. “NO JOB TOO BIG OR TOO SMALL!”

All this underground action is making me claustrophobic. So I linger over the recipe page (Camel Stew, straight from the Goanna Grill in
Mintabie), then go out to face the day. By dusk, Coober Pedy had been homely enough. In the morning glare it is a wrecked and hideous hag. Staggering past burnt-out cars and dilapidated humpies, a piece of cardboard as shield against the blinding heat and light, I feel as if I’m touring Ground Zero after the bombs have hit. I have never wanted to get out of a town as much as I want to leave Coober Pedy.

Unfortunately, the desire to escape a place is usually in inverse proportion to one’s luck in catching a ride. It’s as if drivers can read the distaste beneath your insincere smile and return the favor by letting you stand there and suffer.

So I wait outside Coober Pedy all morning, with nothing for company but blinding sun and swarms of blowflies. Since I gave up on insect repellent back in New South Wales, drivers have offered me about a hundred home remedies for the Great Australian Fly Plague. Gum leaves rubbed all over my body. Garlic. Mint. Prayer. Not one has worked. Mute tolerance is the only defense. Close-mouthed silence, that is; otherwise, the flies might crawl down my throat.

It is midday before I’m finally picked up—by a ute that looks as if it was rescued from the same junkyard as the one I rode in yesterday. The muffler and shock absorbers have been surgically removed. And of course there’s not a spot of room in the cab, which is occupied this time by three young whites. No choice but to spread my fly-bitten limbs like strips of bacon across the hot metal surface of the ute’s open rear.

At least there’s no oil to fry in this time. Instead, I am accompanied in the back by a huge wood-and-Styrofoam coffin with three eskies of beer entombed inside on a bed of ice. Every twenty minutes or so, the driver pulls off the road, unlatches the coffin and pulls out four bottles of beer (one for me, of course). In between beer stops, the driver pulls off the road, and the three men pile out to urinate on the hard, baked ground.

“Watch where ya piss, goddammit,” a drunk named Barry yells at a drunk named Darryl, who is urinating somewhat recklessly against one of the ute’s tires.

“Aw, get stuffed,” slurs Darryl, wetting his own leg, then laughing. “This little piggie is gonna go wee wee wee all the way home.”

Home is the wheat-farming country near Kimba, on the Great Australian Bight. The three cockies are in their late twenties but look older, with the rugged, sunburnt faces of men who make their living from the
land. Barry, a brawny, solid-looking sort of bloke, and Reg, the half-sober and sarcastic driver, wear visored caps that announce what kind of tractor they use. Darryl is boyish, too big for his singlet, with eyes so blue that they pop out of his sunburnt face. He is also the butt of the jokes, most of them scatological.

“Goddammit, Darryl, one more fart out of you and you’re walking the rest of the way.”

“Whaddya want me to do?”

“Put a lid on it. Keep your mouth shut.”

I pick up bits and snatches of this dialogue as we irrigate the dry road running south from Coober Pedy. At piss stop number eleven, I learn that the three men have spent the past few weeks scratching for opal in Mintabie, which they do during every slack season to earn a little extra cash. The opal fields seem to be South Australia’s answer to Las Vegas: a casino off in the desert where ordinary people can come toss their money on the ground and hope their number will come up. Like every other opal digger I’ve met, Reg and Barry and Darryl have crapped out. But they got their money’s worth of fun, just hanging out with one another, drinking and farting and swearing, a day’s drive away from the humdrum of life on the farm.

“You put your crops in, you take them off, you fix a fence or two, then you put your crops in again,” says Reg. “Sometimes it’s good to get on the piss and piss off to the opal fields for a while.”

The drive home, it seems, is the final grand piss-up before returning to the family, the farm, the fertilizer. When the coffin of stubbies empties out, we pull into a roadhouse for a few glasses of beer to add a bit of variety. Then we load up again and head off the main highway onto a dirt track that runs all the way to Kimba.

“Hard to find good navigators these days,” Reg complains as Barry and Darryl fall out of the truck, giggling. “Just piss wrecks.” He hands me a topographical map. “Keep an eye on it and let me know if it looks like we’re getting off course.”

It is my first real venture down Australia’s unbeaten track. Instead of plotting a course from town to town, or even station to station, we hop from “Haggard Hill” to “Numerous Small Claypans” to “No. 19 Bore” to “Skull Camp Tanks.” Picturesque as these landmarks sound, they aren’t exactly jumping off the horizon. For one thing, the dust is so thick that I
could be in sub-Saharan Africa for all I know. When it clears, and a sandhill comes into view, it’s hard to tell whether I’m looking at “Hunger Hill” or “Dingo Hill” or some other hill altogether.

I can’t even use the location of the sun as a reliable guide. One moment it’s straight in my face, the next moment it’s burning the left side of my face, the next moment it’s throwing the shadow of my hat onto the truck.

Then we make a 90-degree turn at the top of a sandhill, and a shimmering plain of salt spreads like a white quilt across the landscape. I look at the map, and nowhere between Kingoonya and Kimba do I see anything that looks or sounds salty. I begin banging on the back of the cab and Reg skids to a halt.

“We’re lost, I think.”

“How’s that?”

“Look at that,” I say, pointing at the salt plain. “Tell me they’d leave that off the map.”

Reg squints at one sandhill, then another, and then at the map.