One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  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.”

  Instead, Jim has got to know the same dull stretch of bitumen, from Perth to Carnarvon to Port Hedland and back to Perth again. There isn’t much to do but keep one eye on the road and one on the scrub. A moment’s inattention and a cow may wander onto the road to smash the truck’s grillework or send the cab rolling.

  To add to the monotony, a few hours north of Perth the radio can’t pick up anything except the offshore crackle of Indonesian fishermen. Jim twiddles the dial impatiently, then breaks into a high-pitched parody of Asian chatter. “Hoy hien hee hoy hi hee ho hoy. Bloody lot of good that does me. Hi hee hoy hien hi hee ho. They could be talking about me for all I know.” He hits the radio off and rolls another cigarette.

  The logistics of getting from here to there form the skeleton of each journey north. But Jim fleshes the trip out by working and reworking the homespun philosophy he’s developed over twenty-seven years of solitary travel. On work: “Lonely, that’s all. Got to bring the tucker money home.” On world affairs: “We’re all buggered in the long run. If the Yanks and Russians don’t blow us up, the bloody Indonesians will.” On Destiny: “Planned, isn’t it? I hope so, ’cause I could have done something better than this.”

  There’s little to contradict his cynical worldview on the lonely stretch of highway north of Carnarvon. There are no towns to speak of, just flat, empty scrub and a chain of roadhouses that resemble the cookie-cut Howard Johnson way stations that dot American interstates. Called “Swagman,” they are so sterile in their air-conditioned comfort that no self-respecting swagman would be seen dead in one. So when Jim decides to call it quits at twilight—“What’s the rush? When I get to Hedland all I’ll do is turn around”—I try my luck with a truckie pumping diesel fuel into his three-trailer road train. He waves me aboard.

  If Jim Duff is a philosopher of sorts, this truckie is strictly a dreamer. As soon as I’m on board, the fantasy begins unrolling, as if from a psychiatrist’s couch.

  “You know what I want to do? You know what I really want to do?” He pauses. “Ditch this truck in Karratha, drive it right into the bloody sea, and go home to Perth to start my own takeaway restaurant.”

  This man has the same problem as Jim; he provided for a wife and four kids well enough, but now, pushing forty, he feels as if he barely knows them. Twenty-eight days out of every thirty, he’s on the road, to Karratha or Hedland or Broome. The other two days he’s at home, paying bills and catching up with his children.

  “My oldest boy, he’s into computers, outer space, that sort of thing, at least he was the last time I was home. And you know, the other three, I couldn’t even tell you what they’re into.”

  The best he can do is provide. And now that his kids are in high school, he wants to be a kind of Catcher in the Rye—to shield them from the world by setting up a business where they can stay together, in a tight, protected circle. That’s where the takeaway comes in.

  “I don’t know the first thing about cooking and my missus isn’t too crash-hot either,” he says. “But a takeaway? I reckon anyone can fry a bag of chips.”

  He has the scheme mapped out to the very last spud. The corner in Perth where he’d like to set up shop. Two kids up front with him. The other two in the kitchen with the missus. And all of them together, one big, happy family, serving up spring rolls and fish sticks for the rest of their days.

  A modest dream, really. I ask him why he doesn’t go after it.

  “Any business is a gamble,” he says. “If I was free like you, I’d do it tomorrow. But you can’t gamble with a family on board.”

  Problem is, he gambles every day to bring the dream closer. The load we’re carrying is frozen fruit and vegetables. But in Karratha he’ll pick up his usual cargo—flammable chemicals. The risk earns him an extra $1.60 an hour. “On my last run, guys came out in spacesuits to unload the stuff,” he says. “Made me wonder what it was I had back there.” But the truck payments, repairs, and insurance keep piling up, so the chemical runs continue—and so does the dreaming.

  “You can sort of think a fantasy through on these empty roads. Then think it through the other way. Then you load the truck again and think it all through again.”

  We reach the turn-off to Karratha around midnight. I thank the truckie and wander off to find a camping spot. And as I walk down the moonlit highway I can hear him, jack iron in hand, testing for flats with a tap on each tire—all seventy-two of them. Somehow, the dull thwap of metal against rubber, seventy-two times, is an apt anthem to the loneliness and monotony of the truckie’s life.

  21 … The Ghost of Cossack

  Some travelers can’t drive past a pub. Others never miss a scenic turn-off. I’m the sort who skids onto the gravel whenever a row of weathered gravestones pokes up from the roadside. It’s not a morbid thing, just a fascination with the long dead and gone.

  So, when I wake up near Karratha and see a dot on the map ahead marked “Ghost Town,” my mission for the day is set. Except that the dot, labeled Cossack, sits at the dead end of a small road well off the highway. Hitching to a ghost town strikes me as a rather more ambitious effort than most.

  But I have allowed the tyranny of the Main Road to squash my sightseeing too many times already: except for Ayers Rock, Pink Lake, and a few lesser attractions, I’ve been an utter failure as a tourist. In fact, much of my expedition has been like Ernest Giles’s wretched tour of central Australia, distinguished by the discovery of vast stretches of territory to be avoided.

  So I hitch a ride to the Cossack turn-off, hide my pack in a bit of roadside brush and start hiking the three miles of dirt track into ghost land. The hike is hot and dusty, but very promising in a desolate sort of way. A tight formation of pink galahs flutters overhead. Kingfishers hop along a baked mudflat. Bats squawk and flutter above an island of mangrove trees. The only hint of human life is an iron signpost with no sign, standing like a gallows beside the road.

  The, just over a small rise, there’s a rail car on wooden tracks that disappear into the tall grass. A bit farther on loom the skeletons of ancient stone buildings, set against a backdrop of open water that is so turquoise as to seem phony—like the Mediterranean in bad Italian prints on the walls of pizzerias. One building, a post office apparently, has a well-preserved mail slot set in its crumbling façade. Peering inside, all I can see is a hollow shell with no roof and no windows.

  “No one home, mate.”

  The voice is behind me. I turn around—jump, really—and find myself about fifty yards from two Aboriginal men in green work clothes, painting a fence in front of another stone building

  “You live here?” I ask.

  “No way, mate. We’re prisoners.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Big prison just up the road.”

  I half expect Rod Serling to step out of the scrub and announce that I’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Instead, a truck pulls up with more black prisoners and a white guard with a beer gut and reflector sunglasses. Now the Twilight Zone looks a bit like Georgia, circa 1935. Until the guard opens his mouth.

  “Cripes, what in fuckin’ hell are you doing here?”

  I gesture at my camera. “Just having a look around.”

  “Fuck all to take pictures of here, unless you get a fuckin’ rise out of old stone buildings.”

  As a matter of fact, I do. But it’s gravestones I’m really after.

  “Is there a cemetery anywhere nearby?” I try to say it nonchalantly, as if I’m inquiring about the nearest gas pump. But the guard already has me pegged. Weirdo.

  “Cripes. Not any fuckin’ sight to write home about. But if you want a ride, hop in.”

  Hitching a ride with a chain gang wasn’t part o
f the day’s plan. But I climb inside and climb out a mile farther on, beside a dozen headstones staring out to sea from behind clumps of spinifex. There’s one to the memory of William Shakespeare Hall, of Shakespeare Manor, England, and another In Loving Memory of ZB Erikson, his wife Minnie, and their child, Pearl. Drowned in the Foam Passage, Jan 10, 1894. And beside them lie Little Alex and Our Baby Eric, God’s Will Be Done.

  Except for the drowned Erikson family, none of the headstones explain exactly how God’s Will Was Done. But whatever the scourge, it felled the town young; most of Cossack’s ghosts are four-month-old babies and thirty-year-old mums. An adjoining graveyard is even more mysterious. Instead of rounded headstones, it contains pointed obelisks with vertical Asian script. Only one has horizontal writing as well: “In memory of S. Murmats.” That’s it.

  As graveyards go, these two don’t offer many clues. A baby named Pearl and a family drowned at sea—some definite possibilities there. But Shakespeare? And S. Murmats? A kamikaze attack, perhaps? And how do Cossacks fit into the picture? And why are there prisoners painting fences?

  The guard can answer that. He stops for me again as I trudge back toward the stone buildings. “Some fuckin’ idiot thinks this place can be a fuckin’ tourist attraction. So they hire us for some cheap fuckin’ labor. That’s all I know.”

  I hop in the back with the prisoners this time, but don’t know exactly what to say when I disembark. Have a nice day? Or stop in and see me if you’re out Sydney way?

  “Thanks for the ride, I—”

  “Got a car anywhere close by?” The prisoner is speaking quickly, through lips that don’t seem to move at all. I’m not sure if he’s joking or not, but I don’t stick around to find out.

  There is a car—unlocked—sitting beside a well-preserved building labeled “art studio,” so I knock at the open door. A middle-aged woman comes to the screen as if she’s been expecting me all morning.

  “I’m the crazy artist you heard about,” she says. In fact, I hadn’t. “You’re just in time for a fresh pot of tea,” she adds, opening the screen. I am past the point of being surprised, so I follow her inside.

  Kathy Van Raak and her husband, Geoff, are the caretakers of Cossack and the first permanent residents the town has had in half a century. She’s a sculptor who specializes in “emotive human studies” (in a ghost town) and looks after Cossack’s restoration in her spare time. He works as an architect in Karratha.

  “We came here ten years ago from Perth to get a little money together and get out. But things didn’t work out that way and well, you know—”

  “I know. Nor’west time.”

  Kathy laughs. “Yeah. Except that Cossack’s different. It’s out of time altogether.”

  I have found the proper guide for Cossack and she is only too willing to oblige. We begin at the wharf, because that’s where Cossack began in the 1860s. It was called Tien Tsin in those days and founded as the principal port in the North-west, supplying inland towns like Marble Bar and Roeburne. The harbor filled with Malaysian and Timorese schooners and the mudflats outside town became a camping ground for the Afghan camel drivers who carried goods from the port to the interior.

  “What a motley crowd was there to receive us as we stepped ashore,” Kathy says theatrically, reciting the impression of a visitor named Charles Edward Flinders who landed here in 1887. There were “colored people” in sarongs, “wiley Japanese,” and Malays, “black hair plastered with coconut oil.”

  But the sight that most impressed Flinders was the dock itself—a land wharf that permitted boats to pull right up to the shoreside buildings, one of which happened to be a tavern. This gave Flinders what must have been the dream of every Australian traveler in the hot North-west: “the novel experience of being on a steamer which anchored almost at the door of the pub.”

  The pub is gone now, though there was supposed to be another. Prefabricated in England, the timber building was on a ship that blew off course in the late 1880s and landed farther east, where the hotel still stands, at a place called Whim Creek. All that’s left of Cossack’s wharf are a few stone steps descending into the Indian Ocean.

  By the time Flinders arrived, Tien Tsin had been renamed Cossack (after the boat that carried a West Australian governor here in 1871). And its inhabitants had done enough beachcombing to discover that the region was rich with pearl shell. By the 1890s, the town’s population had swelled to several thousand, many of them Japanese pearl divers like the mysterious S. Murmats I met in the graveyard. Scottish stonemasons were imported to cut the local diorite rock into solid civic structures to match the seaport’s growing wealth and influence: a jail, a bond store, a customs house, a courthouse, a tidemaster’s residence—even a Turkish bath.

  The buildings were cyclone-proof but Cossack’s fortunes were not. Several “big blows” in the 1890s silted the harbor, as well as filling the graves outside town. Port Sampson built a bigger wharf with better access to the interior; farther east, Broome took over the pearling trade. By World War I, Cossack was doomed. With the pearlers gone, there were only the sandflies, the mudflats, the fruit bats. Better left to ghosts, and so it was. Until Kathy Van Raak and her husband came along.

  “There aren’t many places like this, where you can live in a time warp,” Kathy says, poking her head into a solitary confinement cell at the old jail. When she and Geoff inquired about restoring the police barracks as a home, officials from the nearby town of Roebourne saw a chance to rebuild Cossack as a museum. And so a prisoner-led recovery began.

  Then last year, after several structures were returned to their original grandeur, a new visitor washed up at Cossack’s beach: Mastotermes darwiniensis, alias Darwinian termite. The insect set about accomplishing what successive cyclones had failed to do—knock down the town, from the inside out. Kathy’s art studio has been condemned and now the whole restoration of Cossack is in doubt. But the artist remains philosophical.

  “Maybe people never belonged here,” she says, shrugging. We are standing on Nanny Goat Hill, overlooking what remains of the town. From this vantage, the half-ruined buildings are but a pimple on the mudflats and mangrove swamps that stretch inland from the sea. Squinting, it looks to me the way Australia must have appeared to early European settlers. A harsh and hot and threatening land, to be settled tentatively and plundered for whatever riches could be easily gathered. No more than a beachhead, really. “Australia is a weird, big country,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to his sister-in-law in 1922, soon after landing in Australia. “It feels so empty and untrodden … as if life here really had never entered in, as if it were just sprinkled over and the land lay untouched.” Cossack is one of the places where life never really entered in.

  “Come back in ten years,” Kathy says, dropping me by the highway. “Maybe then we’ll have a museum, a son et lumiére show—the works. Then again, maybe the termites and the ghosts will win.” She gives me a loopy grin and drives back to the abandoned place she calls home.

  My reentry into twentieth-century Australia is abrupt and unpleasant. Max—“Mad Max” to his fellow bikers—is just the sort of character who stalks the nightmares of every hitchhiker’s mother. His black car looks like a hearse, except that the back wheels are jacked way up, shoving the nose of the car into the bitumen. Max himself appears dressed for a funeral. He wears a black leather vest over a black T-shirt, with a black headband to match his black sunglasses, long black hair, and stringy black beard. He is even listening to Black Sabbath on a boom box set against the dashboard, just beneath a bumper sticker that reads “Screw Helmet Laws.” The only mystery about Max is why he’s in a car instead of on a bike.

  “Left the Harley with me missus in Perth,” he explains, flipping the tape. “Port Hedland’s a shitty town for bikes.”

  “What takes you to Hedland?”

  “Work.”

  “What in?”

  “Don’t know. Whatever I find when I get there.”

  “So why’d you pick Hed
land?”

  “Felt like taking a ride.”

  He turns up the music. Our conversation proceeds in fitful bursts between songs.

  “You from Perth originally?” I ask.

  “Melbourne.”

  “Do you still have family back East?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “To get away from them.”

  Black Sabbath for another ten minutes. Then the cassette runs out. For some reason I resume our awkward conversation.

  “What’s your missus do?”

  “Looks after the kid.”

  “Yeah? How old’s the kid?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Really! What’s it like to be a dad?”

  “It’s not mine. The old man killed himself when the baby was born. The missus and me have only been going out since then.”

  I flip the tape. Max turns up the volume. And Black Sabbath serenades us through the burnt orange plains of the Pilbara.

  In Port Hedland the color scheme changes from orange to rust. The iron ore town is bordered by rust-colored rail cars on one side, and rust-colored ore boats on the other. Dust from the open heaps of iron ore blow through the streets and paint the buildings in a grimy, purplish wash. Even the sky seems rusted over.

  But the economy is booming. It reminds me of Mintabie in the opal fields of South Australia: a place geared around the fast buck and the fast exit. High pay, high rents, and hordes of single men searching vainly for single women. Single white women, that is.

  “Any blonde sheilas back in the kitchen?” a brawny man asks an Oriental waitress at the Chinese restaurant. She manages a smile and a quick shake of the head before retreating to the kitchen. The man and his six mates return to their beer and chop suey.

  “Did you see Kev’s sheila?”

  “Which one?”

  “The bitch with the harelip.”

  “Oh my fucking godfather. I wouldn’t take that fucking sheila to the shithouse.”

  “You don’t bang faces, mate. Just put a bag over her head and keep going.”