One for the Road (20 page)

“Their Eyelids are always half-closed, to keep the Flies out of their Eyes,” he wrote. “From their Infancy being thus annoyed with these Insects, they do never open Eyes as other People: And therefore cannot see far, unless they hold up their Heads.”

Dampier went back to being a pirate. He also wrote a bestseller called
A New Voyage Around the World
, which did a lot to spread the bad word
about New-Holland. It wasn’t until Captain Cook arrived in 1770 that an Englishman gave the continent another serious look.

To these flyblown, half-closed American eyes, the landscape doesn’t look too promising either. Just north of Perth the highway heads into territory that offers nothing but sheep and wheat, wheat and sheep, forever. So fifty miles out of the city I hitch west until the road meets the Indian Ocean again at Geraldton.

It’s easy to see why there were so many shipwrecks up here. Wind buffets traffic across the highway, and roadside trees are so bent by the breeze that their boughs reach all the way over, as if trying to touch their toes.

Geraldton, a day’s drive north of Perth, is a town that rides on the crayfish claw. The day begins well before dawn, when the lobster boats start collecting their pots from the rich beds that lie an hour or so offshore. By noon, the crays are landing on the pier, and that’s when the processors begin their day: “killers” twisting off the heads, “stringers” pulling out the guts, “horners” scraping the shells for paste. By nightfall, about twelve hours after being plucked from the sea, the crays are on ice aboard ships bound for the U.S. and Japan. Then the cycle begins all over again.

“Dirty, rotten, smelly bloody business,” declares a nineteen-year-old named Rob, who has just finished ten hours of disemboweling crays. He is sitting now in the Tarcoola Tavern, trying to wash the day away with beer. He keeps looking at his hands between sips, as if checking for any lingering lobster gut. “I have to bloody drown myself with Brut to get the stink off. Bloody awful.”

I ask him if the smell ever turns off girls.

“Sometimes. But the guy in the backseat smells just as bad, so you just fuck and don’t worry about it.”

Rob and his two mates, Adrian and Steve, are on an abbreviated pub crawl through Geraldton. In other small towns, Friday night is usually the big night out—men’s night, when mates drink with mates, and behave like boys. At about eight o’clock, they pick up some fish and chips for the missus and stagger on home.

But in Geraldton the working men’s pubs are quiet soon after dusk.
The cray season only lasts half the year, and for those six months the town is like a university during exams.

“When you start work at four in the morning, it gets to be a late night by nine o’clock,” says Adrian, a part-time deckhand. The three teenagers drain their beers and head home to catch some shut-eye before another shift at sea or at the lobster plant. I decide to do the same. That way I can get out to the wharf before dawn and hitch a ride on a lobster boat. I have crossed the continent by air, by car, by ute, by road train, by freight train, by foot. Why not have a look at it from the water?

Three
A.M
. is not man’s most generous hour. I thought the boatsmen would be so impressed by my early rising that they’d welcome me aboard. But they don’t want to know about it.

“Busy day, mate,” the first skipper says when I ask if I can come along for the ride. “Can’t afford any extra cargo.”

“You’ll see the crays better at the restaurant,” says the next. “They don’t squirm so much on the plate.”

A third skipper thinks I’m joking. “This isn’t a yacht race, mate, this is hard yakka. Go home and go to bed.”

These are working men with work to do; they’ve got no time for dilettantes. So when I spot a sandy-haired skipper struggling with his mooring, I come over to offer a hand.

“Need a deckhand?” I ask. He gives me the once-over and doesn’t look overwhelmed.

“Been doing this long?”

“Not really, I mean, I’ve been on boats—”

“But never on a cray boat.”

“Well, strictly speaking, no. First day out.”

He laughs. “Probably the last.”

“I come cheap—free, in fact. If I’m in the way just toss me overboard.”

He laughs again. “I’m short a man. Hop on.” Then he tosses a bag full of fish heads into my arms and I follow him aboard. Nothing frivolous on this craft, just a broad-beamed thirty-foot workhorse. We load the rest of the bait—cowhides and cow hooves—then shove off into the dark water.

The skipper is a second-generation lobsterman named Kim. He has
two deckhands: Gary, who is twenty-five, and a fifteen-year-old named Justin, who is spending his first season at sea.

“I puked my first day out,” Justin tells me by way of introduction. “Since then it’s been okay.”

As we ride out of the harbor it is still dark enough to navigate by the stars. But Kim turns instead to a bank of machines that glow like video games in the dark corner of a pub. There’s a mass of green and red dots that shows the coastline, and a blip that shows us moving away from it. Alongside the radar is a gray tangle of lines that tells Kim how many fathoms deep the water is. And another screen, with marks like cardiac tracings, which shows whether the bottom of the sea is hard or soft and how much vegetation there is for the crayfish to hide in.

“Catching crays used to be trial and error,” Kim says. “Now it’s electronic warfare. I couldn’t see what’s down there better if I was in a submarine.”

Fifteen minutes from the harbor, the boat begins to roll and pitch. Ten minutes farther into the Indian Ocean, she becomes a washing machine on spin cycle, then rinse. Water pours across the open back of the boat, forcing me out of the air and into the claustrophobic cabin.

“I hope you’re not the seasick type,” Kim says, yawning. “It got so rough yesterday that we had to turn around.” With that, he and Justin retire below for a snooze while Gary navigates out to the crayfish beds.

I can no sooner sleep—or even close my eyes—than jump overboard. I’ve never ridden a small fishing boat into open sea. As one wave after another crashes into us, I begin clinging like a mollusk to the cabin doorway. This leaves me at the mercy of Gary, one of those conversationalists for whom every second word is a sexual organ.

“Do you know the one about the bloke who goes down on a whore in Las Vegas? You don’t? Well, he goes down, you know, and there’s all this gross stuff that looks like food coming out of her. So he says to this sheila, ‘What’s up? You sick or something?’ And she says: ‘No, but the last guy down there was.’”

He lets go with a loud, wheezing laugh, then starts in again. “Do you know the one about the guy who’s having his cock sucked by a nun? You don’t?…”

Waves are crashing over the side and washing into the cabin. It’s so
dark that I can’t even anchor my eyes on the horizon. Just the glow of the radar, tossing around in the black like a drunken firefly. My equilibrium is fading fast.

Gary isn’t helping. When he notices I’ve gone silent and crumpled on the cabin floor, clutching a table leg, he says, “If you’re feeling crook, the best thing to do is stick one finger down your throat and the other one up your bum. If that doesn’t work, switch fingers.”

The dawn light is making things worse, not better. Now I can see what’s coming—giant walls of ocean that roll the boat over, then drop it into a trough on the other side, just in time for another wall to tilt it up again.

“You know, it’s interesting how many words we have for vomiting,” Gary continues. “Spew, chuck, toss, toss your cookies, barf, Technicolor yawn. Talking to the floor. Are there that many in America? Or don’t you blokes puke so much?”

I consider the matter. “Whenever a guy threw up in grade school, we’d say he was ‘calling Earl.’” (Why in God’s name am I telling him this?) “You know, ERRRRRL! If Earl wasn’t home, you’d call Ralph. RAAAAAAAALF!”

Gary can’t get over that one. As soon as Kim and Justin come up from below, yawning and stretching, he starts telling them all about Earl and Ralph. “You know what Yanks call spewing? Calling Earl. Get it? ERRRRRRRRL!” Gary would have been a big hit on my playground.

Kim cuts off the engine and for a moment my head and stomach stop spinning. “Let’s see what the world has for us today,” he says, steering around to a buoy marking the first lobster pot of the day. Crayfishing is underwater mining. Each morning the seabed may disgorge paydirt, or a pile of loose sand and starfish. And since deckhands are paid a proportion of every one-hundred-pound bag of crayfish they deliver, Gary and Justin are as anxious as Kim to see what comes over the rail. The wooden crate surfaces, and a lonely pink cray flaps onto the floor of the boat. “Bloody cacker,” Gary says, measuring the lobster and tossing it back in the sea. A cacker is a crayfish that’s below the legal limit.

We motor slowly from pot to pot and at each one the story is much the same—maybe one or two decent-sized lobsters, but mostly cackers and starfish, or nothing at all. Machines do most of the work, pulling in the crayfish pots and automatically coiling the rope. While Gary empties the
crays into a water tank, Justin and I reload the pots with cowhide, cow hocks, and fish heads.

An hour after dawn, Kim decides to head farther out to sea, and the horrible bucking and swelling begins again. The waves come at us sideways, rolling us up and back, up and back. For the first time in my life I realize how horrible it must be to get seasick. There’s no surprise element; just the unending roll of the sea, wave upon wave, with no relief in sight.

For the first time in my life I realize I am going to be seasick. A strange, involuntary moan begins somewhere deep inside my throat. “Unhhhhh.” Another wave hits. “Unhhhhhhhhhhhh.” I feel as if someone’s put me on one of those carnival rides that go round and round and round, and no one’s there to turn the machine off. I can smell the cow hocks and fish heads smeared on my shirtfront. I can feel the beer I drank last night, sloshing around in my stomach. I can hear Gary coming up behind me to offer some advice.

“You look awful, mate,” he says, leaning close so he can see just how awful I look. “Eat some bread. Then at least you’ll have something solid to spew.” He smiles. “Do you want me to get Earl on the line?”

A huge wave shoves us both against the starboard rail. I’ve got my head over the side and a voice in my belly gives the order: Let go. The next wave carries up portside. Let go. I am letting go over the rail, inside the rail, on the rail. The boat’s lurching and I’m letting go again, all over myself this time. I am collapsing in a heap now, wondering what will possibly be left of me by the end of the day.

The engine shuts off and the fishermen go about their fishy business without me. I crawl to the center of the boat, where the swell’s not so strong, and just lie there on my side, trying to keep my stomach down. All I can see down here at sea level are bare feet sprinting past, with the occasional cray scampering by as well. Then the engine starts up, we move to the next set of buoys, and I roll over to call Earl again.

By mid-morning Kim and company have filled only one bag. The tense excitement at reeling in the first pot has turned to outright despair. I hear the crackle of a radio as Kim tries to tune in his brother a little farther up the reef.

“This is Kim, mate. Bugger all down here. What about you?”

“Bugger all. But Jimbo hauled in four bags yesterday at 21,22. Must be a good patch up there.” Kim checks the coordinates on a nautical map.
Apparently, it’s open slather on the cray beds; the boats spy on one another and if somebody gets lucky, the others are sure to follow.

Kim spins the boat around and I stagger from the floor. My trips to the rail become buoys marking our progress along the reef. “Bill’s Lump.” “Cleo Reef.” “Ground 240.” I mark them all. Then, finally, I have nothing more to call Earl about. Just an open mouth and nothing at all coming out.

Gary’s impressed.

“Good thing we’re not on a hot patch today,” he says. “Anyone could trail us by just following the yellow brick road. Good effort, mate. Really.”

At point 21,22, there is already a cluster of boats. My companions manage to bag 180 crays, worth about eleven hundred dollars, before heading for shore. Kim and Justin go below for another nap. I make a few more trips to the rail, then slump on the floor to endure Gary’s jokes for another two hours.

“And so one bloke says to another, ‘put it up my butt, willya.’ And then the other bloke, he says, ‘How can I get it in your butt hole when you’re talking?’ So the other bloke, he says—”

“Gary,” I moan, “put a lid on it. Please.”

He smiles. “Didn’t I tell you what to do if you’re feeling crook? Stick one finger down your throat, and the other one up your bum.” I want to hear the punch line again about as much as I want to feel the next wave.

As soon as we reach shore I lunge out of the boat and flop onto the wooden pier like a lump of seaweed. Off with the trousers, sea-soaked, spew-soaked. Off with the shirt, which is even worse. There is nothing like illness to make a man unself-conscious and unashamed. All I can do is lie here half-naked on the dock, kissing terra firma while Kim and Gary and Justin unload their catch.

“Nice-looking snapper you got there, Kim.” I open one eye and look straight at the toe of a fisherman’s gumboot. Then the boot starts nudging me gently in the ribs. “Want me to head it and gut it for tea?”

I want to tell the man that there’s no head and guts left. But I seem to have coughed up my vocal cords as well. “We’ll keep him for bait,” Gary says. “Bloody crays will eat anything. Stick your dick in a lobster pot and they’ll eat that too.”

I am feeling better already. Not the conversation, just the firm ground. In fact, the sickness is passing almost as quickly as it came on. I can even
stand up, get dressed, and unload a bag or two—about the first useful thing I’ve done all day. Kim is good-natured about it, even flattered. Nothing like a rookie getting sick to provide a little entertainment, and to make you feel like a veteran salt again.

We all shake hands. “Great day, Justin…” “Anytime I can help you out, Kim, anytime…” “Gary, I’d like you to meet my sister.” Then I stagger into town, weak but more or less well. The sun is setting on the ocean behind me. It has been the longest day of my life, not to mention the most revolting. I check into the first pub I come to, wash up, and walk past a half-dozen seafood restaurants until I find a place with chopsticks and phony Chinese lettering on the window.