One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  Nor do we now. I let the phone ring and ring, then call again to make sure I’ve dialed correctly. Still nothing. I stand there in the booth for a moment, feeling despondent, then phone my coordinates in to the newspaper office. After all, I secured my escape with the promise of writing some stories about the outback. Seems like a good time to “check in.”

  The phone call goes something like this:

  STD LINE: bleep bleep bleep.

  OFFICE: Chief of Staff’s desk.

  HITCHHIKER: G’day. It’s Horwitz. [Triumphant pause.] I’m in Alice.

  OFFICE: Good on you, mate. [Phones ringing, fingers clattering against keyboards.] Now how about some real work?

  HITCHHIKER:

  OFFICE: Right. I’ll transfer you to Saturday Review. They want something on the Rock.

  For once the office switchboard functions and another editor comes on. He wants to know if I can go to Uluru (formerly, Ayers Rock). Yes, I guess. Feature on tensions after the handover of the Rock to Aborigines? Sure, why not. Two thousand words? By Saturday? Well, okay. Click.

  The telephone wire has reeled me into shore like so much played-out tuna.

  Part of me is relieved to make contact again. Alice was my destination, as much as I had one. I’m not sure whether to go deeper into the scrub or begin making my way back to Sydney. Now, at least, I’ll have a few days to decompress before figuring out my next maneuver.

  And a few days to travel on the company budget, slamming down a desert track in a souped-up roadhog with the radio and air-conditioner blasting at full tilt. (“Top unit, mate,” the Hertz man said, slapping his palm on the bonnet. “A real ripper.”) The road is a thin line of bitumen and my rented Ford is sucking it up, five miles at a time … sixty … sixty-five … seventy…. I am moving too fast and I know it. But after days of trudging by the road, waiting for someone else to carry me on, I am intoxicated by horsepower, by my own control.

  A massive, flat-topped mountain tears my eye off the road and almost sends me flying into the scrub. There are skid marks all over the highway; obviously, I’m not the first to be fooled by this warm-up to the Rock, called Mount Conner. There is no mistaking the great red beast that struts onto the desert stage a short while later. William Gosse, the first white man to reach the Rock in 1873, called it “the biggest pebble in the world.” Rising 1,115 feet into the air, the Rock is remarkable because it is absolutely freestanding. The Olgas are only twelve miles away but too far to make the Rock part of any range. So there it sits, all alone on the desert plain, looking from a distance like an oversized loaf of bread: a huge, misshapen breadloaf, baked in the midday sun and left to petrify for a few million years.

  Up close, the loaf becomes animate, even sensual. From one angle it is a Rubens nude, all thighs and buttocks turning pink in the desert heat. A bit further on it is a stone fortress, or a castle of sand. Then curves and breaks appear and Uluru becomes many rocks, locked in an awkward polygamous embrace.

  It is this chameleon quality that has made Uluru one of the world’s most photographed lumps of stone. Like its weird, rounded neighbor, Mount Olga, the Rock is as ambiguous as eddies in a stream. Shift the light a bit, or move back a step, and the landscape takes on a whole new dimension.

  Ernest Giles understood that, although it was Mount Olga that obsessed him. William Gosse was the first to reach the Rock, but Giles was the first to see it, on an expedition to the center in 1872. He was so tantalized by the center that he staggered through the desert twice more to rediscover the spot. Giles’s first entry describing Mount Olga in 1872 is prosaic enough: “It is formed of several vast and solid, huge, and rounded blocks of bare red conglomerate stone,” he wrote, “being composed of untold masses of rounded stones of all kinds and sizes, mixed like plums in a pudding.”

  His second go at Mount Olga is more architectural: “It displayed to our astonished eyes rounded minarets, giant cupolas, and monstrous domes.” On a return visit in 1874, he becomes painterly, almost psychedelic. The Olgas suggest “five or six enormous pink haystacks leaning for support against one another.” Loosening up now, he sees “the back of several monstrous kneeling pink elephants … or [a] Chinese gong viewed edgeways.”

  Animal, vegetable, gong—whatever. Now for the Rock. “Mount Olga is the more wonderful and grotesque; Mount Ayers the more ancient and sublime.” Reminiscent, perhaps, of Shelley’s ode to Ozymandias. He writes without shame: “Round the decay of that colossal rock, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  Sadly, a Romantic imagination didn’t count for much in those days. To the land-hungry colonists, Giles’s expeditions did little more than demarcate vast tracts of arid territory to be avoided. He found neither an inland sea nor land of any pastoral value. And the landmark for which his journeys are best remembered is a desert—the Gibson Desert, named for the member of his party who died while trying to cross it. Giles published his journals and saw out his days as an unsung clerk at an office in the Western Australian goldfields.

  But it is to Giles that we owe the name of every second bump, claypan, and riverbed between Adelaide and the center. One mountain suggested Shakespeare to him and he named it Oberon. A salt plain evoked Spain and so became Lake Amadeus, after King Amadeo. And when he felt less inspired, or depressed by the hardships of desert travel, Giles reached for blunter labels: Mount Desolation, Thirsty Glen, Stinking Pit.

  Yet this prolific name dropper was struck dumb by his first view of the Rock. He came within eighteen miles of it in 1872, made notes in his journal about an unnamed range southeast of the Olgas, and turned back to Adelaide.

  So the Rock’s christening was left to William Gosse, a surveyor who journeyed to the center a year later with four white men, three Afghan camel drivers, and a “black boy” named Moses. If Giles carried all of English literature in his head, Gosse stuffed his brain with the name of every dignitary and benefactor in the young colony of South Australia. And compared to Giles, his journals read like notes from the least memorable of geography lessons:

  Saturday, July 19.

  Camp in Spinifex Sandhills, Barometer 28–12 in, wind south-east. Continued same course, in direction of hills, over the same wretched country. The hill, as I approached, presented a most peculiar appearance, the upper portion being covered with holes or caves…. I have named this Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers.

  That’s as lyrical as the story gets. Having named the Rock for the South Australian premier, he was of course obliged to climb it. After “scrambling two miles barefooted, over sharp rocks,” he “succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.” He busily set about naming the surrounding ranges—after the governor and the surveyor-general of South Australia—then scrambled down. One wonders what Ernest Giles would have splashed on the same canvas.

  As it is, we are left with a Rock named Ayers, and with the curious Western compulsion to scale every mountain, no matter how arduous the ascent. “The climbing of Ayers Rock was one of his lifelong ambitions,” declares a metal plaque at the mountain’s base, in memory of a Newcastle man who died of a heart attack on the way up. There are a dozen memorials beside it to fallen or coronary-stricken climbers, which makes for a grim caveat emptor to all who begin the ascent.

  To most whites the Rock remains what it was for Gosse: a kind of geological freak, an oversized pebble to be gawked at and conquered. But to Aborigines, it is Uluru, the place where totemic beasts met in a Dreamtime Battle of Hastings. Uluru is still etched with the lines of battle. Kuniya, the Carpet Snake, was victorious over another serpent named Liru, and the Kuniya still lives inside the Rock. The Devil Dingo won control of the summit, while the Hare Wallaby retreated from the field, leaving creases down the mountain’s face. The Aborigines who dwell beneath the Rock—Uluru’s traditional “owners”—still honor these ancient deeds and derive their kinships from them. Uluru is “a kind of continental navel,” writes Thomas Keneally, “the point at which the Abor
iginal demigods, the ancestor heroes, half human and half animal, cut the umbilical cord connecting earth to heaven.”

  My tutor at Uluru is a Pitjantjatjara man named Tony Tjamiwa. As Grant explained to me at Tennant Creek, there is no textbook of Aboriginal belief. But because Aborigines lack well-defined hierarchies as well, it is hard to find anyone who will speak for the community as a whole. Tjamiwa is one of those rare spokesmen, pressed into service by the crush of curious whites at the Rock.

  Even so, it is very slow going. We meet at Mutitjulu, a community of several hundred blacks near the base of the Rock. He understands little of my language and I not a word of his; Pitjantjatjara seems impossibly cluttered with the letters j, g, and k, and delivered in a high-pitched singsong that mushes the words together.

  “Ananguku ngura nyangatja Tjukurpa.” He points at the Rock and sketches a serpentlike creature in the dust. “Tjuta tjuku-tjuku.” More scraping in the dust. Our “talks” have almost broken down when a white ranger arrives to provide a rough translation from Pitjantjatjara to English to Pitjantjatjara again.

  The concepts Tjamiwa is trying to explain are as foreign as his dialect, which is one reason Aboriginal belief is so poorly understood by whites. Take the central concept of Tjukurpa. Our clumsy translation of it—Dreamtime—suggests a kind of Old Testament fable with Freudian overtones. But to Tjamiwa, the Dreamtime is past and present and future rolled into one. It is not only his history, but also his law, a seamless fabric of knowledge and belief.

  Aboriginal art is also opaque to Western eyes. Even the fanciful Giles found little to say about the cave paintings he discovered at the Rock; they were “ornamented in the usual aboriginal fashion,” he wrote, with “parallel lines with spots between them.” Tjamiwa shows me a bush tucker bowl, used to collect berries and nuts. It has an abstract design burned into the quandong wood—at least it looks abstract to me: swirling lines and circles, much like the lines and circles on other bowls he shows me. But to Tjamiwa it tells a particular and whimsical Dreamtime tale about two women who chase a goanna deep inside a cave. At the bottom of the pit the women meet two snake men, whom they eventually marry.

  Uluru dominates Tjamiwa’s visual and spiritual landscape. He built a hut recently, making sure that the doorway opened directly on to a view of his “Dreaming Trail”—the creased north face of the Rock to which his people are connected. “I do not own this thing,” he says of Uluru. “It owns me.”

  I envy Tjamiwa the security of having his history, his law, his roots all preserved in a massive piece of stone. But this strength of Aboriginal belief is also its greatest vulnerability. Lose the land, or become alienated from it, and Aboriginal culture loses its very soul.

  Even as Tjamiwa speaks, Uluru’s face is covered by tourists: “minga juta,” he calls them, which translates as “lots of ants.” Greater armies still—advertisers, developers, promoters of every stripe—are clamoring like Visigoths at the gate. A New Wave band wants to set up a stage, using Uluru as a backdrop for a televised concert. A film crew asks permission to crash an airplane into the Olgas. Another wants to roll boulders down the Rock. And a self-promoting hang glider doesn’t even ask: he just jumps from the summit and floats to earth again.

  Somehow, though, Tjamiwa and his kinsmen remain calm in the face of this onslaught. Perhaps it is because the magic of the place seems to rub off on all but the thickest-skinned of visitors. Australians may litter beaches and bush trails but here the land is unspoiled. Tourists, particularly Americans, often display an odd impulse to shrink even the grandest of natural wonders to human size. “Majestic doesn’t appeal to us,” writes Garrison Keillor in his gentle satire of Midwestern America, Lake Wobegon Days. “We like the Grand Canyon better with Clarence and Arlene parked in front of it, smiling.”

  But Uluru seems to humble and inspire respect, even from the Clarences and Arlenes. I meet a few of them—“Idaho potatoes!” they exclaim—armed with Instamatics and Budweiser caps, clustered at the base of the Rock. When I tell them about the stories Tjamiwa has shared with me, they ask if it’s blasphemous to climb onto Uluru’s face. I sense that it is, and as we follow the dashes of white paint marking the beginning of the climb, something feels awkward. With a few of the others I retreat to the base and circumnavigate the mountain instead.

  At sunset, the tourists gather to watch the Rock begin its dance through the spectrum, from red to orange to pink to purple to red again, then brown and black. An expectant hush falls over the audience, like the quiet at first dark in a theater. Only the sound of camera shutters breaks the silence. And when the show is done, the audience drifts away, leaving the great desert beast to bed down in peace for the night.

  It is morning and the rented Ford speeds toward Alice. I touch my foot to the accelerator and seven hundred horses of power pound off through the scrub … sixty … sixty-five … seventy…. Nothing but empty road and empty space to measure myself against … seventy-five … eighty … eighty-five….

  I reach for the radio dial, catch a wheel in the road’s soft shoulder, swerve once, and spin off the bitumen backward.

  The Ford swan dives off an embankment. Then it begins to roll. There is an instant when I realize that the car is going over and in that instant I wait for the vertebrae to crack, the skull to cave in. I do not wonder if I will die, just when. The last thing I see is a blur of sand and stone, upside down, rushing up to meet me. Fade to black.

  I regain consciousness, suspended by the seat belt, hanging upside down, with my head pressed against the car’s crushed rooftop. Blood drips slowly past my face and onto the ceiling. Outside, the wheels still spin, the engine still spits and groans. And inside, the radio drones along: “After nine overs of play, Australia is none for thirty….”

  I was trying to find something other than the cricket when I reached for the radio and skidded off the road.

  Slowly, I start taking stock of the damage. There is broken glass in my nose and under my tongue. I lick my front teeth; having chipped them twice before, I assume they will be the first thing to go. But the enamel is intact. I try to wiggle my toes. They wiggle. I feel gingerly for the leak that is still draining blood down my chest and onto the ceiling. A deep gash in my thigh, a bloody nose, a sliced arm. I am bumped and bruised, badly shaken, but otherwise fine.

  I undo the seat belt and scramble through the space where the windshield used to be. My leg hurts, so I crawl on hands and knees to the road. Here I am again, lying in the hot sun by an empty highway, waiting for a ride to carry me on.

  My fortune knows no bounds. On this lonely stretch of road, a car happens to be just a few minutes behind me, and not just that: the driver is an off-duty cop from Alice. Immediately he takes control. Two strong hands plant themselves under my armpits and pull me onto the backseat. Two strong legs disappear over the embankment to collect my possessions, which have been thrown from the boot of the Ford. Then the man stands by the highway staring at the car and nodding in disbelief.

  “Don’t know how you walked away from that one, mate,” he says.

  Only then do I take my first look back. The rented Ford has become what is known in insurance circles as a “write-off.” It looks like a tinnie that someone has stomped on with steel-toed boots. The only bit of uncrushed metal is a small cocoon around the steering wheel. The rest is a steel and chrome coffin. In a way, I had it coming. “Mr. Leadfoot,” my father used to call me, as I sped through suburban streets as a teenager. They say the last words of airplane pilots, picked up from black boxes in downed planes, are usually “oh shit” or “dammit”—more an expression of annoyance than of terror. A black box in the Ford would have picked up a kind of mournful sigh: an unreformed speed demon wishing he could hit the rewind button to tape that part over again.

  Now, slumped in the backseat of the policeman’s car, I feel like I’m lying in a bathtub with the water draining out. This is what shock is, I guess. Not fear or hurt, just a huge, gaping emptiness, like one of those bottoml
ess pits in television cartoons. There is nothing to do but try and fill the hole, which I do by chattering at the policeman for the hour-long drive to Alice. If he gets in a word, I don’t hear it, so busily am I shoveling noise into the void.

  In Alice my mind goes on automatic pilot. There are police forms to fill out, car-rental papers to sign. At the police station I sheepishly confess to driving over seventy-five miles an hour. “No worries,” the officer says, “most people burn down the Track at ninety.” It is all as straightforward and painless as paying a parking fine.

  The officer asks if I want to go to the hospital. Suddenly, all I want to do is be home. The image of nursing my wounds in Alice, with nothing but my own thoughts for company, fills me with a strange sort of terror. The officer seems relieved. He calls a tow truck to collect the Ford for transportation to a metal grave. Then he rings a taxi for me and goes back to watching cricket. “Matthews has faced eighty-eight balls on this wicket….”

  It is on the way to the airport that the numbness finally wears off. My leg feels as if someone’s planted a kitchen knife just above the knee. And my head spins every time I think how much worse it could have been. I feel light-headed, short of breath, panicky.

  Then absurdity intervenes. I rush onto the plane forgetting that my nose, shirt, and trousers are still caked with blood. I go to claim my assigned seat, which is in between two other passengers. The man to my left throws on his headphones and presses his entire torso against the plane window. The woman to my right tries to squeeze into the ashtray on her armrest.

  As soon as we’re aloft, a stewardess rushes up to ask if I “require assistance.” A moment later I am in the galley sipping Scotch while she examines the gash in my thigh.

  “Well, that’s one sure way to get a girl to take off your pants,” she says, bandaging the wound. I start laughing and can’t stop. The stewardess thinks I’m crazy, which temporarily I am.