One for the Road (19 page)

      
T
he gloomy morning mist is too thick in Rocky Gully to see anything. So as I stand by the road at dawn, I have no choice but to listen and sniff at the air as the town comes awake, slowly, like a cat. A wind wafts in from the woods with the odor of pine, nudging the night mist aside. Birds chatter and chirp like noisy children at the breakfast table. Then, as the dawn breaks, a rooster crows the town awake. Dogs bark. There is the smell of a fire burning in someone’s hearth. And finally, an hour after sunrise, a human sound: the dull, persistent moan of a chainsaw followed by the heavy thud of timber meeting ground.

A ute rumbles off a gravel side road and pauses to pick me up. Inside is a grizzled old man in woolen plaids. There are a chainsaw and an axe in the back of his truck. A nice start: a lumberjack on his way to the day’s first stand of timber. What’s it like, I ask him as soon as we rumble off, to be wandering through the woods and come across one of the centuries-old karri trees that tower in the forest hereabouts?

“I reckon if she’s got two hundred dollars of lumber in her, I’ll cut the cunt down,” he says.

Gazing out the window, I feel as if I’ve found my natural habitat—or at least the habitat I once enjoyed: rolling woodland and streams, like the Virginia countryside near my childhood home. Thus far in Australia, Tasmania is the only other place that’s had that whiff of home about it—initially
at least. I went there with Geraldine a few months after migrating to Sydney, and the island’s hills and woods and old villages made me homesick. In the wild north of the state, we went for a hike up a secluded mountain trail that had been advertised by a friend as “a bit of a scramble.” We set off early, with only an apple as baggage, expecting to be back down the mountain by lunchtime. Just a bit of a scramble.

A dimly blazed path led us through thick woods, then to a stony, treeless ridge that led to a stony, treeless cliff and then to another ridge. We struggled up to find another cliff, another ridge. When we finally reached the top, the flies were unbearable. So we retreated, picking our way like billygoats down the steep stony mountainside.

The trail was nowhere in sight. We tried one direction and then another; each ended in sheer drops of several hundred yards. I looked out at the panoramic view, stretching for fifty miles or so in every direction, and couldn’t spot one sign of humanity: not a road, not a power line, not even a wisp of smoke. It would be days before anyone knew we had come this way, I decided; many weeks before they found our bodies.

At sunset we found the trail again and made it to the bottom, scratched and bleeding. Not like Virginia at all.

Geraldine still laughs about the hike and accuses me—and other Americans—of being anthropocentric. Unless a landscape has a person in it, I become anxious. Hardy Australians, of course, feel at home on desolate beaches and in untouched rain forest.

The southwest corner of Western Australia is Tasmania without the wild edge. The woods are open, easy to walk through, and never too far from a weatherbeaten cottage or an old stone chimney where a homestead used to be. All the signs of a land gently settled, long ago, that never grew fat enough to attract less gentle development. Only the soft, unmistakable imprint of a rural counterculture: the Old Bakery Restaurant in one town, the Cheese Factory Craft Centre in another, and brightly colored cabins nestled in the valleys. A hard squint and it could be the Shenandoah.

The hitchhiking also resembles my journeys through rural America. In the outback I have accustomed myself to marathon rides; the towns are so few and far between that your first ride of the day is often the only one. But here, on a weekday morning in the well-settled countryside, I bump along
from town to town, climbing out before I’ve learned the most cursory details of the life I’ve brushed against. It’s a bit like hitching through the first fifty pages of a Russian novel, being introduced to a dozen different characters whose names and faces quickly begin blurring together.

In order of appearance, the cast after Rocky Gully goes as follows:

THE FARMER
[
Slows down truck, gestures at unkempt fields of a neighboring hobby farm.
]: Now a good cockie, he’d be mowing that paddock. But you know what? You could knock on that door any hour of the day and some bloke would be there to answer it. Not too keen on work, them folks. Now a bloke that’s grown up in these parts, he’s keen as mustard. But them folks, they’d rather get the bloody dole.

THE WEAVER
[
Sixties-style bug-eyed sunglasses covering most of her face.
]: Perth just became a hassle. Hassle hassle hassle. You know what I mean? Like I was in a real suburban rut. Down here, there’s no hassle at all. Just the cockies. You know what I mean? But it’s funny, like I thought it would be more private down on the farm. But you know what? It’s worse than the city. Everyone knows who drives what car, who’s home, who’s at someone else’s home, whose missus is down at the pub. You know what I mean?

THE FOOTIE PLAYER
[
Arms as big as my thighs, car littered like the locker room after a big game: shorts, T-shirts, jock straps, crushed tinnies
.]: I’ve been lucky so far, all I’ve had is breaks. (Jaw. Nose. Wrist. Jaw again.) But breaks are all right. They’re clean. Snap and you’re done. It’s when you get into knees and elbows that you have to give the game away. [
Pauses, flashes toothless smile, lifts arm to show off the scabs from last game
.]. See that? Bark’s peeling off me all the time.

THE APPLE-PICKER
: We’ll be well into yellows now and then a spot of red. You’re Canadian, right? A Yank? I thought so. But it’s safer to ask if you’re Canadian. Canucks can’t stand being called a Yank. Do Yanks mind being called Canucks? No? That’s good. Here, try one of these reds, try a yellow, eat the bloody lot of ’em. If I look at any more apples, I think I’ll spew.

THE SALES MANAGER
[
Car fragrance on dashboard, company sedan, company tape deck.
]: When I was a kid, Perth was a cemetery—it was that
dead. You think I’m joking? It was dead, really dead. Now? Now it’s a rat race. People will eat your eyes out if you give them half a chance. Bunbury’s the way Perth used to be. Dead. But it’s a nice sort of dead.

The rides wind north from Manjimup to Nannup to Balingup to Boyanup. Then the ups give out in Bunbury, and so do the paddocks, the apples, the old stone buildings. Perth is more than sixty miles away but already there is the odor of an encroaching city. One-lane roads merge and swell to two, then four. The traffic is impatient and aggressive, pulling me toward the rat race and hassle everyone has come south to get away from.

Major cities are a nightmare for the hitchhiker. If possible, you find a ring road and plot a bypass around the thumping aorta of urban life. But more often you end up circulating through every capillary before being pumped out at the other end. En route you are likely to be hustled, hassled, robbed, or arrested as a vagrant.

Perth’s sprawl is puny compared with most American cities, but it is still big enough to threaten half a day of moving in and moving out. So I decide to berth south of the city at Fremantle, then set off for the bush with a full day in front of me. Fremantle quickly cures me of the lingering homesickness I felt in the countryside farther south. America—or the America’s Cup, at least—is branded on the former fishing village like a pair of McDonald’s Golden Arches. I head straight for the water only to find that the Indian Ocean has been imprisoned behind a wall of high-security fences. “America’s Cup Defence Headquarters,” says an imposing sign on one locked gate, beneath a huge banner with the ubiquitous boxing kangaroo.

Fremantle has spent 150 years collecting flotsam and jetsam from the Northern Hemisphere. In the 1850s, convicts were so numerous that soldiers walked the streets at night asking “Bond or free?” Then, as the first stop for ships arriving from the West, Fremantle became Australia’s “front door to Europe.” A lot of the immigrants who poured off here never got past the foyer; there are still something like seventy-five languages spoken in the town.

But in the run-up to the Cup, Fremantle has undergone an unfortunate facelift. Snip and staple the Commercial Hotel, pull out the urine-yellow carpet, put in coachlights where the naked bulbs used to be, and
turn it into the New Orleans Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. Reduce and contour Clarrie Miniciullo’s panel-beating shop and implant the Harbour Mill Garden Restaurant. Enlarge the old Papa Luigi’s café and reshape it into the new Papa Luigi’s café. And when the stitches are out, the old, ethnic town will have magically become a tarted-up clone, like the “international” villages they build overnight for the Olympic Games.

Fortunately, the graft has been uneven, at least up to now, six months before the races. You can redo a Victorian façade in a month but it takes a bit longer to change the people who live behind it. So Fremantle still shows an essentially Mediterranean face to the world: old Italian men sipping cappuccino at open-air trattorias, Greek sailors weaving through the narrow streets with duffel bags slung over their shoulders, Portuguese fishermen slapping their catch on the dock. The same westerly wind that remedies the morning heat and powers the twelve-meter’s spinnaker—Fremantle’s famed “Doctor”—picks up the odor of fish from the docks and blows it through the dolled-up streets.

Of course, a bit of ethnic color enhances Fremantle’s tourist trade, which is one reason the traditional scene hasn’t been erased, just tidied a bit. And Fremantle has made a career of integrating newcomers; its character can survive where a younger, less worldly town, such as Alice Springs, has its personality trampled by the tourist crush. I find myself hoping that the Yanqui invaders will recapture their Cup and take it home, leaving Fremantle to become a sleepy little seaport again.

Perth, twelve miles up the coast, is different: crisp skyscrapers, clean streets, and suburbs that sprawl so far that it’s hard to find the city for all the brick-and-tile houses. While much of Fremantle is working-class and bohemian, Perth’s dominant theme appears middle-class and provincial. My first and strongest impression is of a kind of seaside Denver: a cow town grown fat and smug, disdainful of the oversophisticated hordes “out East.”

“New South Wales is bilge,” a good-humored young clerk tells me on the twenty-minute rail trip from Fremantle to Perth. “Victoria’s even less than that.”

I ask him if he’s ever been to the eastern states. “Why bother?” he says. “We’ve got it all here. Anyway, the big nobs don’t want to know about us.”

This isolationism is firmly rooted in geographical fact. Bali and Singapore are closer and cheaper to reach than the cities back East. (Due west
there isn’t another landfall until the island of Mauritius, off the African coast, about four thousand miles away.) No wonder Perth has become a bit inward-looking, even jingoistic. “It’s WESTern Australia,” a button-down bureaucrat intones at a downtown pub, correcting my pronunciation. Then he adds with a smile: “And don’t you forget it.” When I ask him how long his family’s been in Perth, he answers without irony: “For yonks—sixty years at least.”

Perth flashes me the same brash amiability as Dallas. In fact, Western Australia is a lot like Texas, only bigger—three times as big, as I’m informed on about five separate occasions. WESTern Australia even has its own little version of the Lone Star state. A wealthy grazier, dubbing himself “Prince Leonard,” has seceded from the Commonwealth and declared his property north of Geraldton a free territory.

Nicknames, when pinned to a place and its people, are usually just exercises in public relations. There is nothing in the concrete megalopolis of New York that suggests a “Big Apple,” and there is even less sense in its grimy neighbor New Jersey being dubbed “The Garden State.” Industrial plants strike me as a rather broad definition of horticulture.

But “Sandgropers” is a peculiarly apt nickname for Western Australians. It conveys the image of a society moving in a kind of sun-dazed, self-satisfied crawl across the beach. “We’re doing just fine out here without you,” the place seems to say to “t’othersiders” from the East. “There’s an empty banana bed by the pool if you want to lie around for a while. If you don’t, well that’s okay too.”

And it is a pleasant enough place to grope about for a spell. I meet a dozen or so people—on trains, waiting for trains, drinking beer—and they are as friendly and laid-back a sample as I’ve taken anywhere in Australia. One amiable fellow even suggests he might have a job for me at what is probably the quintessential Perth occupation—installing custom-made swimming pools.

“Perth’s perfect because it’s so suburban and cliquish,” he says. “You put in one pool and it runs down the block like wildfire—everyone’s got to have one.”

I ride back to Fremantle wondering about all those exiles I met farther south, who insisted they could no longer stand the pace of life in Perth. They must have a pretty low hassle threshold; the only rat race I encounter
is the real thing, between two rodents scampering down the hotel corridor when I go to brush my teeth.

But I have a very short while to take the pulse of the place. A more experienced and appropriate student of sandgroping is Swami Anand Haridas, also known as Harry Aveling, a local university professor. “Perth’s a great place,” he once declared, “for the neck down.”

      
T
he first white people to visit the coast north of Perth weren’t all that impressed. One of the earliest was Francois Pelsaert, whose Dutch East India Company ship,
Batavia
, ran aground on an island near Geraldton in 1629. When he sailed to the mainland for water, he discovered a “bare and cursed country devoid of green or grass.” The flies, anthills, and “black savages” also came in for a few unkind words.

There were more shipwrecks in the following decades but no true exploration of the coast until the Englishman William Dampier came along. Dampier was a well-born sailor who spent his youth as a buccaneer in the West Indies. After glimpsing Australia in 1688 he returned on a government-sponsored voyage in 1699. He didn’t find anything to loot. New-Holland, as it was then known, struck him as the “barrenest spot upon the globe.” He added: “the Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the World.