One for the Road (18 page)

In the middle of his dissertation—“Am I boring you?” “No, not at all.” And he isn’t—he pauses to ponder the magic that unfolds every time chromosome X meets chromosome Y. “Use a certain sire with a certain dame and it comes up trumps,” he says, concluding the lecture. “Works almost every time. Isn’t that something?” Still as wondrous to him as his own success at engineering it.

Part of the appeal of newspaper reporting is that it gives you daily glimpses into the lives of people you’d otherwise never encounter. Hitchhiking
magnifies the same experience. Instead of calling ahead and arranging an appointment, you are thrust into the full stream of their working day. No time for them to fix the makeup or alter the normal pattern of events. Just raw and unedited life; as raw as a truck full of bulls, rumbling toward a “Beef Week” auction in Albany.

We drive slowly through the twilight, with Andrew pointing out the farm of one customer, then another; the road is as familiar as a milk run to him. And as dusk gives way to dark, we share the sandwiches his wife prepared—“home-grown veggies, not a chemical on the lot of them”—and talk about the future.

Driving at night seems to unlimber the soul. Eye contact ends and the cab becomes a confession box, with nothing but murmuring voices in the dark. The small distractions of the workday are shoved aside.

Andrew tells me about his marriage of thirty years and I ask him how to keep it strong for all that time (“Stay patient and keep your fingers crossed,” he says. “Let her window shop if she’s restless, so long as she doesn’t buy”). He tells me about his sons at university—“one in med sci, one in ag sci”—and asks for advice about keeping them away from drugs (I tell him that I experimented and came through all right—I think). I ask him about success and he tells me, “Trust your instincts and don’t listen to the next guy.”

And finally we talk about death, or our fears of it. Pushing fifty, Andrew looks as strong and well fed as his cattle. But still he worries. “When you’re young, you feel like Superman, like nothing can touch you,” he says. “Then some bloke you know, strong as an ox, keels over in the paddock one morning. So you slow down a bit, spend more time with the missus, try to enjoy things a little more.”

Andrew has one parting piece of advice. As I climb down from the truck to wander into town, he gives me a stock tip—not of the Hereford kind either. He tells me the names of several small companies that he’s “got a hunch will be worth a bloody fortune some day.” I want to ask how I can invest in him instead. As it is, he will be remembered in a private collection of all the memorable faces I’ve met on the road. Andrew Cabassi, the Happy Farmer in the Lucky Country. We shake hands and go our separate ways in the night.

      
A
freight train is chugging up the track and in a moment I’m going to climb on and ride it somewhere, where, I don’t really know. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself all afternoon, lying in this ditch at a railroad crossing west of Albany.

“Two o’clock, sure as night follows day,” said the cockie who dropped me here, at Elleker, a few hours ago. “They don’t stop anymore, at least not to drop anything off. But they fiddle with something on the track.”

I didn’t think anything of it and started hiking a few miles out of Elleker to catch a ride on the main road running west. Then, halfway there, I found myself turning around and hiking back. As traveling goes, hitchhiking is about as random as you can get. But hopping a freight train, on a line headed who-knows-where, that’s a different kind of random altogether.

I poke my head out of the ditch and sure enough, there she is, rumbling up the track to meet me. I duck back in the ditch and wait for the long line of cars to pass and then hiss to a halt. I poke my head out again. The men working on the track are on the other side of the train, out of view. No guard on the back car. No one in sight. No excuses.

I leap out of the ditch and run alongside the train looking for an open wagon. All sealed shut. I run to the back car to see if there’s a platform to sit on. There isn’t. I sprint back down to find a space between two of the
wagons. It’s a tight squeeze, uncomfortable, maybe dangerous. There’s a ladder going up the side, but riding piggyback looks dodgy.

“Hey, mate, what the hell are you doing?” It’s an engineer standing a little way down the track. “If you’re thinking of riding between those wagons, I wouldn’t. Unless you want to be the meat in a very messy sandwich.”

“Got any room for me up front?” I blurt out.

The question seems to catch the man off guard. “I’m just the assistant,” he says. “Ask the driver.”

I run down the track and look up, way up, at the digits 1592 and the name Shire of Toodjay, and above that the driver’s window with a balding man in a plaid shirt looking out. I repeat my question. He looks at me through dark sunglasses, looks down the track, and gestures me aboard with a toss of his head.

“Just remember, you didn’t hear me say that,” he says as I climb a ladder into the driver’s compartment. The assistant climbs in with us and we rumble down the track out of Elleker.

“Where ya headed?” the driver asks.

“Wherever you are.”

“In it for the thrills, are ya?” He laughs. “Well, it’s no bloody adventure up here. But at least it’s safe.” Then he tells me why the assistant warned against squeezing between the wagons. Just a few weeks before, a train derailed in the Nullarbor and when they finally pulled the cars apart they found a man in his twenties “well and truly mashed.” He was a Yank, too. Probably had the same dumb fantasies about freight trains as me.

My own fantasy is about to carry me north, where the twenty empty cars will load up with wheat. It’s not exactly the most direct route to Perth but at least it’s not back the way I came. So I settle on the floor by the driver’s seat and listen. Yesterday’s lesson was artificial insemination; today’s will be riding the rails.

“Back in the forties, when I got started at this, there was plenty of blokes like you,” Gordon Link tells me. Swagmen usually. But also apple pickers and packers, trying to bum a ride to the next orchard. Officially, freight drivers weren’t allowed to carry human cargo. “But most of the time, if I saw someone climbing on in the back, I just looked the other way, unless they were drunk.” Or unless they were female. Then he might
invite them to ride up front. Even so, they’d have to work for the privilege. “I’d make her swing a coal shovel, same as anyone else.”

Then the fruit picking dwindled, and so did the freight traffic. The trains used to carry small goods to drop off at every little junction. But trucks and automobiles cut into that. Now most freighters are restricted to long-distance hauls with coal or wheat or iron ore. Only spots like Elleker, where the track changes, merit any pause en route.

The last hitchhiker Gordon saw was a drunk sailor who jumped ship in Fremantle, went to see his girlfriend in Albany, then hopped on the train to get back to port.

“He reckoned this would be the quickest way back to Freeo. But he didn’t realize until too late that we were going the wrong way, and going there bloody slow.”

So slow in fact that Gordon doesn’t have to do much but settle back and keep a lazy eye on the track ahead. There’s no coal to stoke on electric trains, and no real driving to be done. All Gordon monitors is the speed. “I’m just a throttle jockey,” he says. “Ease her down at the sidings and get her back up to speed in open country. Sometimes we get up to a tonne—that’s a hundred k’s an hour—but mostly we just cruise along at eighty.”

He slouches in his seat, watching the woods and rolling farmland chug past. It looks as easy as steering toy engines around the Christmas tree. The train’s whistle isn’t even a whistle now that steam power’s gone; it’s just a glorified air horn. Gordon yanks it once to warn off a car that wants to scoot across the tracks before he rumbles through.

“Must be a lot of Japs around here,” he says. “Always someone trying to do harry karry getting across the tracks.”

I doubt there are many Japanese, but maybe a tribe or two of dyspeptic Aborigines. Every second town and river name seems to end with a hiccup: Narrikup, Porongurup, Bolganup, all the way from the Bight to the Indian Ocean. Gordon says it’s because “up” means water, which may explain all the hiccups.

Gordon’s headed toward the dry interior where all the names end with “in”: Wagin, Wickepin, Corridin, Kellerberrin. And he’s a little concerned that some superintendent might spot an unauthorized passenger up front. So at a quiet junction a half-tonne north of Elleker he stops to let me out.

“You should feel privileged,” he tells me, yanking the air horn a few times just for the hell of it. “This is the first wheat train to stop in Mount Barker for about a thousand years.”

I spread out my map on a splintery bench by the tracks and plot my choice of hiccups. I can go north on the main road to Kojonup, northwest to Boyup or follow a little red squiggle of a road west to Manjimup and stay on the up and up to Perth. I foolishly choose the squiggle. The region seems so tame and settled after the outback that I’ve forgotten how much empty space there can be between blips of civilization.

I remember when I hitch a ride as far as Rocky Gully. It is so blippy as to not even register on my map. Just a grocery, a petrol pump, a few dozen houses, and thick timber with a chainsaw mowing away in the middle distance. I keep thinking the noise is a car. But every time I look up, there’s nothing but a cloud in front of my face or, rather, coming from my face. That’s how cold it is.

The proprietor at the grocery offers some advice. The good news is that there’s a hotel a little way down the road; the bad news is that it’s the closest you’ll ever come to a pub with no beer. “The publican’s got rooms but he doesn’t let them,” she explains. “But you can try. Knock back a few beers and sort of warm him up to the idea. And for Chrissake’s, whatever you do, don’t ask for tea. He hates cooking tea.”

She offers this information with a matter-of-factness that suggests all business in Rocky Gully is run along eccentric lines. After all, why should a publican be expected to let rooms and sell food? But it’s dark and cold; I have no choice but to observe the local work rules.

The Rural Hotel is plain brick on the outside and even plainer on the inside. Beside the bar there’s a pool table and then a big stretch of floorspace that would be occupied in any other pub by tables, chairs, a jukebox—something. Here, nothing. No people, either. Just me and a sour-faced, white-haired publican, studying a racing form at the bar. A few thousand losing ponies appear to have trotted across his face, leaving it raw and rutted and unhappy.

I climb on a stool, drop a two-dollar note on the bar, and order an Emu. The publican doesn’t move. I repeat the order. Still nothing. I wander over to study a few public notices pinned by the door. “Goats. Alive. Wanted to Buy.” “Quails for Sale.” “Sheep Shorn.” The usual stuff. When
I return there’s a can of Emu and eighty cents change on the bar. The publican is just where I left him, face buried in the racing form.

Four sawmill workers come in and order a round of beers. They are even more tentative than me, waiting patiently while the publican makes a phone call—to a bookie, I assume—then checks the paper again before serving them. The sawmill workers chat for half an hour, softly, as if in church, then order a round of pies. I take the chance to order one myself. The publican glares at us over his paper.

Twenty minutes later, the pies are still sitting on a cool rack in the microwave, apparently forgotten. When the publican goes to the phone again, I ask one of the workers if we should remind the chef of our order.

“Don’t rush him or you won’t get a bite,” he whispers. Ten minutes later a batch of half-warmed pies are tossed on the bar. The sawmill workers thank the publican so effusively that you’d think they’d just been served a roast dinner by their mother-in-law.

“Mmmmmmmm.”

“Great pie, real beauty.”

At first I take this nonsense for sarcasm, then I realize it’s just diplomacy. With no other pub for fifty miles, they can’t afford to alienate their only source of grog.

Two beers later, after the workers have left, I pop the big question.

“Excuse me, sir? I was wondering whether you’d have a room for the night?” I don’t expect an answer and don’t receive one. I have learned enough protocol to wait five minutes before repeating the question. He doesn’t shift his eye from the television screen and waits a few more minutes before answering.

“All booked out, mate,” he says.

I gaze down the empty bar, read the notices on the wall for the fifteenth time, peek out the window at the cold, dark night. Then shuffle back to the bar and stare blankly at the television for another twenty minutes.

“I reckon we might be able to squeeze you in,” he says, umprompted, during a commercial break. I nod. Ten minutes later, when the sitcom ends, he shows me into a back corridor. There are fourteen empty rooms, beds made, towels over backs of chairs. The bathroom is equally pristine. “Push Here for Soap” says the old-fashioned fixture above the sink, which looks as if it hasn’t been pushed since 1924. He shows me to a room at the
end of the hall and holds out his hand—“Twenty dollars, ta”—and disappears. It is the most I’ve paid for a bed since Sydney.

The room is as inhospitable as my host. No sooner am I undressed and in bed than a cold wind starts seeping through the walls and floorboards. There is only one blanket—a thin wisp of wool, almost transparent. The bed feels as if the springs have been yanked out and a slab of concrete poured where the mattress should be. I pillage the other rooms for extra blankets and manage to make my resting place about as comfortable as a medieval dungeon. I lie there awake for some time, wondering what quirk of fate has condemned this publican to Rocky Gully, in a role for which he is so obviously miscast, and all the quirks of fate—a love affair, an idea for a journey, a haphazard collection of rides—that have landed me in Rocky Gully, too, as his prisoner for the night.