One for the Road (21 page)

The waitress is uncomprehending when I don’t order seafood. “Snapper, scallops, they very special in this town,” she says, even pointing them out on the menu. No, thanks. Just rice, plain and boiled, please. Enough for a small Cantonese village.

The world is still rolling and swaying when I close my eyes. But the bilge pump holds.

      
N
o one’s exactly sure where the “Nor’west” of Western Australia begins. Looking at a map, the Tropic of Capricorn seems a logical border, slicing off the sultry head of Western Australia from the temperate torso of the state (the navel, of course, being Perth). But it seems more accurate to treat Nor’West as an imprecise term, like “the bush” or “outback”—denoting a state of mind rather than a geographical fact. And given that, it makes no sense to try and locate the place at all. To do so would violate the essential character of the Nor’west, which is a vagueness and lassitude of narcotic dimensions.

Agriculturally at least, the tropical Nor’west begins in Carnarvon, a half-day’s drive north of Geraldton. The town is a miniature banana republic, subsisting on fish and prawns and plantations of pineapple, mango, banana. Carnarvon has local honchos to match. This is the home of the parliamentarian Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey, who earned his middle name by clubbing an Aborigine at the pub he ran before going to Canberra. In fact, he didn’t use an iron bar at all, just a rubber truncheon. Whether this distortion was intentional—to enhance Tuckey’s reputation for toughness—or simply the result of sloppy reporting, remains, like everything else in the Nor’west, a bit unclear.

But it is the sense of time—or lack of it—that is the distinguishing characteristic of the region.

“There’s Eastern Standard time, Central, Western, and then Nor’west time,” explains a traveling salesman as we drive past the banana plantations that separate Carnarvon from the arid interior. “Might as well set your watch back a couple of hours.”

“Haven’t got a watch.”

“Even better. You’ll fit in just fine.” He glances at his wrist. “In Perth four o’clock means four o’clock. Here, you make an appointment for four and no one’s fussed if you don’t front up until five-thirty.”

This carefree attitude meshes well with Nor’west drinking. Some years ago the Western Australian government struck a curious compromise between wowsers and boozers. Pubs were allowed to open on Sundays, but only in five-hour “sessions.” The idea, apparently, was to let people drink while still leaving time for church, a Sunday roast, and the other decent, God-fearing activities that get washed away by beer during the rest of the week.

The practical effect, in the Nor’west at least, has been entirely different. Carnarvon’s three pubs simply reached a gentleman’s agreement to stagger their sessions. The Port Hotel opens from midday until late afternoon; the Gascoyne, or “Gassy,” picks up the afternoon crowd and carries it into the evening; and the Carnarvon Hotel splits its session in two, with a few hours in the morning and a few more at night, after the Gassy closes. The hours, of course, are a little fluid but that is the basic schedule. And the result is an enforced pub crawl from the Carnarvon to the Port to the Gassy and back to the Carny again, with the appropriate “pig swill” of a few quick beers as each one closes. People like it so much that Sunday is now the biggest drinking day of the week.

Carnarvon has three thousand inhabitants, plus or minus a few thousand, and when I arrive late Sunday afternoon, fully half of them are attending the afternoon session at the Gassy. The ramshackle pub is so crowded that the street outside has become an extended beer garden, with drinkers sprawled across the grass and footpath on both sides. Inside, a mass of hot, moist bodies jostle to get a glimpse of three men sweating through their pearl-studded shirts as they pluck American country and western songs. “Now this little song made my good buddy Johnny Cash a
rich and famous man,” the lead singer says, in an ocker imitation of a Tennessee drawl. He tips back his ten-gallon hat and wails:

The image of a sunless Southern prison has about as much relevance to the Nor’west as a digital watch, but no one seems sober enough to take notice. Except perhaps the kids, who join their parents in barbecuing steaks near the bandstand. Roughneck fishermen crowd the bar, and a third group, somewhat outside the mainstream, gathers in the beer garden: young, shaggy and colorfully clad—the women in sarongs, the men in tropical shirts with earrings and bandannas.

Sweaty and sunburned and carrying a rucksack, my place is clearly with the Untouchables in the beer garden. Before I can so much as squeeze in at one of the picnic tables, a beer, a home-rolled cigarette, and five different conversations have been thrust in my direction.

“You’re a Yank? I thought you were German. Lot of Germans seem to hitch through here.”

“Get this man a beer—two beers. He’s come all the way from America to see us.”

“You want one too, Snow, or you still drinking water?”

“Dunno.”

“Cummon, Snow. Easy question. Easy answer.”

“Aw right. Too much water makes you rust.”

Then, to me again: “You passing through for long?”

In any other place, “passing through for long” would be a contradiction in terms. But here, that’s simply the way it goes. People wander in from Perth or Adelaide, or even Melbourne, plan on beachcombing for a few weeks, and then the rot sets in. Before long they’re working part-time at the prawn factory, line-fishing for snapper, cutting banana on a plantation. Or just hanging out at the Gassy.

“I came here for six months,” says a Melbourne woman named Jessie.
“That was six years ago.” Her smile reveals a tiny star-shaped filling set in the middle of her front tooth. “Nor’west time.”

And time to move on to the Carnarvon Hotel for the evening session. I climb in the back of Jessie’s ute and am joined, en route, by half a dozen stragglers weaving the few miles or so from the Gassy to the Carny. The journey has the air of a Napoleonic retreat, with half the army falling by the wayside as the others press on to the next pub.

The Carny’s society is more clearly delineated than the Gassy’s. Middle-aged men hold sway in the smoky public bar while the under-thirty crowd gravitates to a discotheque at the back, where they are instantly blinded by flashing colored bulbs laid into the dance floor. With only two hours until closing, and already well-oiled from stops at the Port and the Gassy, a few dozen people begin a languid sort of dancing.

My “passing through” compatriots take up their place on the fringes again, rolling cigarettes and gazing listlessly at the scene. None of the sarong set wants to dance, so I ask a black woman at the next table. Her eyes widen with surprise, and I wonder if I’ve violated an unwritten law against the races commingling on the dance floor.

Sure enough, as soon as we reach the floor, I feel a few hundred eyes upon us. But the attention is only indirectly related to the color of our skin.

“You must not be from around here,” my partner shouts over the music. “White fellas around here don’t dance.” She’s right. There is only one other man—a black—among the thirty women on the dance floor.

“Why not?”

She laughs and dances us over to two white girlfriends who are doing drunken twirls. “Hey, this guy wants to know why the blokes don’t dance.”

“Dancing’s not macho,” one of them answers, raising her arm to let the other pass underneath.

“They’re scared they’ll spew,” adds her partner. “If you’d been drinking for the past eight hours, you would be too.” Then they collapse on the floor, giggling.

I go for a beer after a few songs, leaving my partner twirling with her friends to the grinding beat of a band called Cold Chisel.

Two amiable-looking men are splayed against the bar. Some fair comment is called for; I tell them what the women said, and ask for their rebuttal.

“The problem’s not spewing, it’s staggering,” the first says without hesitation. “If most blokes got up there now, they’d stumble into someone else’s sheila and start a brawl without even trying.”

His mate sees it in aesthetic terms. “I like watching the girls better. Why would I ruin the show by getting up there?”

The two men unbolt themselves from the bar to claim a partner as the dance floor empties. It’s last call at the last pub of the day, so if propositions are to be made, it’s now or never. I reclaim my pack from Jessie’s ute and wander down the wide main street of Carnarvon. According to my tourist guide, the street was designed at the beginning of the century to be wide enough for camel trains to turn around. The camels are gone but the street’s girth has found a modern function: to contain the legions of drunk citizens who would otherwise collapse in front yards or doorsteps on their way home from the pub.

At dawn I begin a journey north that promises to rate about an eight on the dullness scale (with the Rock checking in at one and the Nullarbor representing the Tropic of Boredom, at ten). There’s nothing on the map except roadhouses, dry riverbeds, and a vermin fence. The traveling salesman I rode with yesterday advertised this stretch as “about as exciting as watching a fly crawl across the windscreen.” After a thousand or so trips he should know.

Not that anyone in Carnarvon is in any rush to give me a tour. There’s traffic, plenty of it. Smiles, plenty of those too—even a sandwich handed through the passenger window. “My mum saw you standing there sweating,” the driver says. “it’s one of her chicken specials.” He also hands me a Sunday newspaper with a front-page story of yet another driver being bashed by hitchhikers. Inside, an editorial warns against showing any charity to roadside strays.

Three hours of waiting confirms that the story has been widely read. It seems I may join Jessie and company “just passing through”—and staying forever. I scrawl my name on a roadside post (“M.L. from Edmonton” holds the record with a five-hour wait on 26-3-86), then settle in by a plantation to watch baby bananas grow to cereal bowlhood.

I finally decide to abandon my position and begin a slow, forced march to a truck stop at the other end of town. Hitching rides with truckies has
always been a last resort for me. Contrary to popular belief, truckies don’t often stop to pick you up. Most trucking companies forbid passengers, and anyway, stopping a road train at short notice is dangerous and petrol-consuming. So I usually don’t bother sticking my finger out as trucks approach; it makes more sense to scramble off the road and turn your back against the shower of gravel the seventy wheels inevitably kick up.

The only sure way to catch rides with truckies is to frequent my least favorite places: the highway truck stop, full of sullen men sipping overpriced coffee and chatting up waitresses who have been chatted up a thousand times before.

Truckies have always seemed like hard, lonely men to me. Nor are they travelers in the true sense of the word. “The truckers cruise over the surface of the nation without being a part of it,” John Steinbeck writes in
Travels with Charley
. “Except for the truck stops they had no contact with it.”

But prejudices are made to be broken down; that is, after all, what hitchhiking is all about. The first man to set me straight is Jim Duff, whom I find changing a tire outside the Carnarvon truck stop. I flash him my cardboard sign (“Pilbara Pls”) and the plaintive smile of a man who has just hiked five miles through midday heat to catch a ride. He flashes me the plaintive smile of a man who has spent too much of his working life at roadhouses like this, pulling off truck tires and putting them on again.

“I can get you there,” he says, straightening his back with a pained wince, then crouching again to struggle with the tire. “But as you can see, I’m not breaking any speed records.”

Nor am I. We take turns yanking at the tire jack, then climb aboard, sweaty and exhausted, for the long slow drive to the Pilbara. Jim’s load is seismographic gear for an oil-drilling company on the North-west Shelf, but his chariot is strictly low-tech: a ten-year-old rig rolling down the road at forty miles an hour on fourteen bald or receding tires. It is said that dog owners come to resemble their pets. The same might be said of truckies and their trucks. Jim is a forty-seven-year-old workhorse with a spare tire strapped around his waist and a few too many miles clocked under the bonnet. He also has the deeply tanned right arm of all truckies, who spend most of their working lives with one hand on the wheel and the other one hanging out the window.

“Big trucks means big commitments,” Jim yells over the grinding engine. He has to use both hands to move the gearstick, which is vibrating like a jackhammer in the space between us. “This truck works for me, I don’t work for it.”

Jim aligns himself with the old school of truckies—the ones who drive small rigs and keep their runs to a manageable distance and frequency. He leaves the big trucks to a new and younger breed who lease huge rigs—sometimes costing a quarter of a million dollars—and make “hot shots,” or emergency runs, to earn extra dollars. A lot of them go broke or just burn out from the pressure.

They also pop pills and sip a spiked drink called “rocket fuel” to stay awake. Jim used to do the same. “But the pills blow your bloody brains out,” he says. “Slow and steady wins the race.” All he stokes himself with is Coca-Cola and hand-rolled cigarettes.

Jim also avoids the legendary refuge of lonely truckies: roadhouse waitresses who moonlight as call girls. “This guy was telling me over the CB radio yesterday that he went fifth and ninth with some bird up at the Fortescue Roadhouse,” he says, chuckling. “I told him he’d better bloody well watch who went first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. I reckon AIDS will make an honest man out of a lot of those blokes. That’d be a hell of a thing to bring home to the missus.”

All Jim’s brought home for twenty-seven years is “tucker money”—enough to raise three children he rarely saw. “Most of the time I’d be yelling at them to keep quiet so I could catch some sleep before my next run,” he says. “Now I wish I’d taken a little more time to get to know them.”