One for the Road (4 page)

The Eskimos, I’m told, have fourteen words for snow. No wonder then that Australians have so many names for the emptiness of their own bleak continent.

This thought occupies five minutes or so. Hoisting my groundsheet as a shield against the heat occupies another five. Then nothing. There’s no traffic in sight, and I can see for miles in either direction. Even the blowflies have more sense than to come out on a day like this.

A slug of water clears my head long enough for me to begin panicking. For the first time I realize that I’m woefully ill-prepared for this journey, despite all the warnings. My waterbag holds enough to wash down a few aspirin; at the moment I could drain an entire radiator and still feel parched. My hat has already gone AWOL, probably back at the Nevertire pub. And the sunscreen is swimming inside the toxic waste dump that is my rucksack’s side pocket—the one where I stashed the bug repellent yesterday.

The other contents of my pack are better suited to a week in Bali than to an outback journey of unknown duration. Besides a small supply of clothes and camping gear, there’s a camera, a poetry book, two novels, and assorted tourist pamphlets, road maps, magazines, and unread newspapers. I feared boredom by the road when I should have feared frying.

An hour passes. Time to start searching for cattle patties? Not yet, not yet. I reach for the poetry book.
The Waste Land and Other Poems
. Hardly an uplifting bit of verse for a traveler stranded in the bush, but all part of the hitchhiker’s plan for self-improvement. On previous hitching trips, I carried a harmonica under the delusion that I would become Bob Dylan during the long waits between rides. This time I will be T. S. Eliot instead.

I have found a new charm. A car engine rumbles in the distance before I reach the third stanza. Staring through the heat waves curling off the bitumen, I can see a speck way off, where the road meets the sky. Then the speck becomes a dot and the dot becomes a car and the car comes slowly up to greet me. Now all I have to do is make sure it doesn’t pass me by. I hold out my finger, then think better of it and step partway onto the road, with the authority of a border patrol. The car slows and I rush to the driver’s window, jabbering like the madman I must appear to be.

The driver smiles. “You’re the crazy Yank we heard about at Nevertire,” he says, stepping out and offering me a swig of his beer. “Mate, what you need is a camel. Anyway, hop in.”

It seems my fame precedes me, or trails me, rather, by a few miles. But as a celebrity I am a disappointment. A minute after collapsing in the backseat I am helping myself to a drink from the cooler, or “esky” (short for Eskimo?). A few minutes after that, I’m dozing in beer sweat. This is just as well. Each time I open my eyes, the driver is in the oncoming lane.

“Road’s so dull that a bloke’s got to do something to keep awake,” he explains. Indeed, the road is so straight that with a good alignment, a driver can go from Nyngan to Bourke without ever touching the steering
wheel. Except for the wide S-bends at the entrance to each town, designed to jolt drivers from their road-induced trance.

The towns aren’t much to wake for. Nyngan could be Coolabah could be Girilambone—a broad main street, a pub, a railroad crossing, then more straight road shooting through blank space. Town is too grand a title for these places, as it is for most of the settlements beyond the Dividing Range. But Australian English has failed its landscape in this respect; there are few linguistic gradations between the “big smoke” of Sydney and the “one horse” villages of the rural plain.

From a distance, Bourke looks as welcoming as a desert oasis. Trees! Water towers! Motels! Up close it’s something different. The town was founded in 1835 as a frontier stockade and it still has the feeling of a well-armed garrison. There are iron bars on the shop windows and broken glass in the streets. One storekeeper hasn’t bothered to replace the smashed glass, filling in the window with bricks instead.

I’ve been warned that Bourke is a tense and racially divided town, a kind of bush Soweto. Just a week ago, there was a news item about blacks burning down a pub in Bourke because the bartender wouldn’t serve them. Once before, I’d read about police beating up Aboriginal prisoners. Apparently, the town is famous for such incidents.

But I didn’t expect shutters and iron grilles. That’s city battlements, I thought—not the sort of stuff you put in the windows of quiet country stores.

Nor do I anticipate the response of the three Aboriginal girls I approach for directions to the campground. They stare at me, wide-eyed and mute, before scattering into the night like small birds.

The reporter in me wants to know how things could possibly have got so bad. But the only way to find out is to enter the pub traffic, which is divided like a two-lane highway: whites streaming into one hotel and blacks to another. I don’t want to join this apartheid, so I hike to a Chinese restaurant instead.

It is the day’s second logistical error. The “special soup” is special for its careful blending: one part soggy noddles, two parts soy sauce, and twelve parts monosodium glutamate. I ask the waitress if the cook could hold the MSG on the second course. She looks at me as if I’ve asked her to take off her blouse.

Half an hour later, I crawl into my sleeping sack, clinging to my water bag as if to an intravenous drip. I am too tired to mind the day’s collection of dirt and grime. But an alarming thought keeps me awake. If it is this hot and dry and barren in semisettled New South Wales, what torment of hell awaits me in the genuine outback?

      
T
hirty miles from the Queensland border, the car I’m riding in skids onto the shoulder, swerves sickeningly, then skids onto the bitumen again. The driver, an off-duty Navy man named Rod, bolts upright in his seat and pulls a small pill from the pocket of his jeans.

“Almost caught a nap back there,” he says with a high-pitched laugh. He jerks his hand forward, pops the pill in his mouth, then jerks his hand down for a swig from the tinnie of beer between his legs. “Too many clicks, I reckon, and not enough blue tabs.”

Rod traveled four hundred clicks on his mileage gauge and popped about as many uppers before stopping for me outside Bourke in the early morning. “Had to go bush to get my head together,” he said, offering me a wake-up pill soon after I climbed aboard. “Someplace quieter than Sydney. Like someplace where there’s no static, nothing to cloud things up.”

The road north of Bourke has about as much static as deep space. It is even bleaker than yesterday’s stretch—as dry and dusty and dull as muesli without milk. A strange urge to surrender takes over. Turn off the engine. Burrow into the hot red earth. Go to sleep. Forever … That’s when a tire catches the shoulder, the steering wheel swerves and the car spins into the scrub.

“That Ford was out there in ’78—last time I was up this way,” Rod says, pointing at a rusted chassis lying upside down by the road. It is the first bit
of scenery for over an hour. “Just think, if we’d run off the road back there, we’d be the same. Like in a time warp, lying out there for drivers to look at, like for years.”

Another off-key peal of laughter. Another beer. I scan the horizon for signs of a town, a petrol pump—anything. Those who have never hitchhiked imagine roads filled with cutpurses, panderers, and psychopathic killers. My mother once sent me a cautionary news clipping about two hitchhikers who were actually killed and eaten by the driver who picked them up. I’ve never caught a ride with a thief or a cannibal, but I’ve ridden with enough drunk or drug-crazed drivers to fill the average city rehab center. Usually you don’t know they’re high until you’re inside the car. And even when you suspect something, the urge to take a ride usually wins out. If things get weird, well, you can always hop out at the next stoplight or crossroads.

That’s in America. In the Australian bush there’s no place to jump ship, except into empty scrub. So I keep searching the horizon for signs of civilization while Rod downs another beer, another blue tab.

A clump of trees and the outline of a rickety wooden building form on the horizon. It is the beginning of my love affair with the bush pub. For the traveler thirsty for drink, diversion, or in my case, escape, the backwoods hotel leaps off the horizon like a St. Bernard pounding across the snowfields. Salvation, liquid and otherwise, is only an S-bend away.

So is my first taste of the odd society of these remote watering holes. It is 11
A.M.
on Tuesday when I follow Rod into the Tattersall’s Hotel at Barringun, just shy of the Queensland border. It might as well be Friday night. The bar is crowded with pool sharks, drinkers, dart throwers; your average country pub, you might say—except that the darts are two-dollar notes, skewered on tacks. The dart board is the wooden ceiling above the bar. A tapestry of bills already hangs from the rafters.

“Once a month I take the pins out and send the money to a spastic society in Melbourne,” the publican explains. I wonder what the charity makes of these pricked and beer-stained contributions. I leave Rod hurling paper missiles at the ceiling and laughing as the dollars float to earth again.

Outside, I hitch a ride with two boar shooters from Bankstown, near Sydney. “Only headed to the next pub, mate,” the driver tells me, emptying a carton of beers into an ice-filled esky. I squeeze between the cooler
and the window as the utility truck weaves onto the highway. The driver opens a beer and foam spurts onto his shirt and face. The ute swerves into the right-hand lane. It seems that alcoholism is an occupational hazard of outback driving.

The driver’s companion is an enormous factory worker with a T-shirt that reads “I Only Sleep with the Best.” He passes the time by loading, unloading, and reloading his shotgun. I reach for a beer and stare the other way, at the “scenery.” Soon after leaving the pub, we pass a bullet-ridden sign marking the border of Queensland. The factory worker aims his rifle across my chest and out the window but doesn’t fire.

“Set your watch back an hour—and then another twenty-five years,” he mumbles over the gun’s muzzle. Other than the time zone, the only change is that the stock grids rise up in the road instead of dipping down, as they do in New South Wales. You notice these sort of things when there’s nothing else to look at.

The pig shooters plan to settle in at another pub until dark, when the boars will be running and the hunters will be drunk enough to fire high-powered rifles at anything that moves. But there isn’t another settlement, much less a pub, for over an hour.

When we do reach civilization, it is a grazing and shearing town called Cunnamulla, whose eighteen hundred inhabitants somehow support seven bars. This should make for a reasonable pub crawl before the shooting of pigs. I buy the two men a round of beer but decline their invitation to “kick on” to the next pub; the tyranny of the Australian “shout”—everyone must buy a round before the drinking’s done—will doom me to midday collapse if I accept.

I opt for indigestion instead. The counter lunch sounds harmless enough. For three dollars or so, I will be served a meat pie, some chips, gravy, vegetables, and salad. No MSG. The meal that arrives has three veg (cooked to perfection, then left on the stove for another hour). Also a pie the size of my head, floating across a gray-brown sea of gravy. And a salad that has more spuds than greens. Then bread and butter, just in case. Just in case I never want to eat again. And beer of course, measured now, Queensland-style, in middie-sized “pots” and tiny glasses called “ponies.”

In any other setting, the five-ounce pony would seem unmanly. But in the semitropical heat of a Queensland’s summer day, it is a good way to get down a swallow before the beer turns to molten lava.

“With this cuisine the appetite dies quickly,” a Frenchman, Oscar Commettant, wrote of Australian hotel food in 1888. “The shilling meal consists of one of those soups that are neither soup nor sauce, a plate of tasteless meat accompanied by even more tasteless vegetables boiled in saltless water, and a pudding that you swallow while reminding yourself that you must eat to live, not live to eat.”

Bloated and belching, I walk slowly through the blinding midday heat. I am beginning to understand the low blood pressure of the bush. Slow down. Go troppo. It’s too hot to take a siesta and too early in the day to pack it in for good. So I head for the OTB parlor, where, I am told, the best “egg nishner” in town can be found.

It is under the cooling wind of a Kelvinator that the slow transit of the day takes an unexpected twist. I have just dropped my pack on the floor, and my body on top of it, when an oddly accented voice beckons from beneath the air-conditioner.

“Come over here where it’s nice and cold.”

I look up to find a potato-shaped, potato-colored Aboriginal woman of about sixty years of age. The sight startles me. After my awkward debut in Bourke, I don’t expect any black person to approach me, much less ask me to come closer.

The woman senses my discomfort. “I won’t bite,” she says, smiling. “Promise.” She shifts her bare feet and yellow cotton frock to make room by the air-conditioner. I look at her ample breasts and dark eyes, magnified by thick lenses like a fairy-tale grandmother’s, and feel a momentary urge to put my head in her lap. Instead, I slump down beside her and tell of my experience in Bourke the evening before.

“Cunnamulla is a friendlier town,” she says. Indeed, there is a small circle of women in the cool corner of the OTB parlor, half of them black and half of them white. Apparently, this is quite the social spot on a hot summer’s day in Cunnamulla.

“Have you seen the sights?” my new friend asks.

“I’ve been to the pub, if that’s what you mean.”

She laughs. “There’s more to it than that. Cummon, if you’ve got a few hours I’ll show you around.”