by Jim Malusa
I hang my clothes from the blades of the ceiling fan and hit the switch. It wobbles dramatically, but spins on. Sitting naked on the bed, I record my misery on the folding computer. After a photo of my clothes spinning overhead, I’m ready to send off a dispatch.
A search for a plug on the phone or the wall reveals only a single seamless line. Lacking a wire cutter and soldering iron, I go to Plan B: the acoustic crumpler. Or sonic scrambler. Something. It’s a device that converts silent data to audible sounds. It straps on the phone’s mouthpiece and talks to another computer. It takes hours to send photographs that have been transformed to hisses and squeals. The only other sound is the groaning ceiling fan.
Rain again in the morning, and only three miles out of Mataranka it turns from a sprinkle to a shower to a tree-bending blur. That makes up my mind: I’m hitching a ride south until I reach the land of dry underwear.
Three hours and twenty miles later I’m still pedaling in the rain, acutely aware of a flaw in my hitching plan. Although this is the only paved road across central Australia, there’s only one car or truck every half hour. The Northern Territory is twice the size of Texas, as big as France, Spain, and Italy combined, but with a more reasonable population—only 160,000. Most live in or near Darwin and Katherine, long behind me. I neatly button my shirt, but who will stop for a fanatic on a bicycle festooned with garbage bags?
Dave Hawcroft. He’s only going to the next town, Larrimah, but I’m confident we’ ll make it in his rotting yellow Datsun with a hole where the radio should be. He’s returning from a hundred-mile grocery run to his bachelor hut, and I can hardly do better than a friendly man with a car full of food. “Computers used to be my business. That’s what I did in the Solomon Islands before I came back to Australia.” I tell him what I’m doing, and then he tells me what I’m doing, literally, since I didn’t understand how I was sending my stories and pictures on something called FTP.
“File transfer protocol,” says Dave. “Allows you to hook up your computer directly with another. We can do it at my place.”
Dave’s place in Larrimah, population 7, is a trailer set a comfortable distance from the charred ruins of his former neighbor’s trailer. Dave’s “caravan” escaped the fire, but the inside appears to have been struck by a miniature cyclone that scattered books and mustard jars and two clarinets.
I connect on his fiber-optic hookup, wow him with my 24 megachomps of rambunctious memory, and show him my story on the Aborigines at Kakadu. He kindly feeds me Polish sausage and tells me a thing or two about the natives.
“We’ve got to face up to the fact that the Aborigines are not a museum exhibit that should be kept on lands they really don’t own. They’re twentieth-century Australians who’ve been psychologically baffled and buggered by our prevailing social attitudes and systems. Would you like some mustard on that sausage? There’s more orange juice. Watch their children sometime, listen to them, see what they paint—it’s just like kids all round the world, and they want and need the same things as other kids. But we want the blackfellas to stay in their old ways, to paint snakes and dots—a million snakes and dots, over and over.”
On other matters Dave is an optimist. “It’s either hot and wet and miserable or hot and dry and miserable. So things can only get better in Larrimah.”
Still raining at 4:30 when a bus pulls into Larrimah and takes me two hours down the road to Elliot. It’s hell on wheels. Twelve inches from my head is a speaker carrying the sound track to the video True Lies. The racket of Schwarzenegger dispatching bad guys drills into my brain like a jungle parasite, and I vow not to ride a bus again.
And I don’t. After a night in a “demountable”—a roadhouse hotel whose rooms are steel boxes with bed, light, shelf, and air-conditioning—I hitch a ride with Carl and Tess in a doorless Jeep. I must share space with bedrolls, five fuel cans, sheepskins, soot-blackened camp pots, a 12-gauge pump shotgun, a 30-30 rifle, and Sonny the border collie. Carl, with his fantastic beard and dreadlocks, looks as safe as a cannibal, so I strap my bike on the front and wiggle into the back. Once we get moving, Sonny drools on my leg, but he’s better looking than Schwarzenegger.
More worrisome is a large bloodstained towel down by my feet, wrapped around something bigger than Sonny. Part of my brain alerts me to the possibility of a Northern Territory News headline reading “BLOODY BICYCLIST IN BITE-SIZED BITS!” But the rest of me is happy to be delivered from the tropics and Olivia. Already the land is sandier and the trees sparser.
“We work on the Aboriginal lands in western Australia,” Carl yells over the rush of wind. “Helping them get grants and such. Tess and I are moving from Cotton Creek to a place near the Giles Meteorological Station, so we took the long way around to make a little holiday of it. A shame it’s rained every day—but look, there’s a bit of blue ahead.”
Tess shows me photos from their last job. “And here’s Carl cutting up a camel we shot for meat.”
Is that a chainsaw he’s using?
“Camel’s a big animal, but a chainsaw makes quick work of it.”
Carl and Tess are into natural foods. “Whenever we’re on the road, whatever we hit, we eat.”
Happiness is the discovery that I’m sitting next to a dead kangaroo. My benefactors peeled the roo off the road just yesterday, and what a waste it would be to let it rot. “Tea time!” announces Carl as we swerve into a roadside picnic area. Australians call lunch “tea time,” and I know what’s cooking. I collect the firewood while Carl hacks away at the kangaroo.
Roo tail is elegantly simple to prepare. Cut off the tail and toss it on the fire to burn off the hair. Remove it and with a large dangerous knife scrape off the charred bits. Throw it back on the coals for ten or fifteen minutes. Voilà! Carl gags with his first bite, but he claims it’s only because he swallowed one of the bush flies that orbit our heads in plasmatic swarms. I have trouble eating around the tendons, but Carl points out that they’re useful for sewing up leather goods.
They’re generous folk, not only sharing their roadkill but taking me to Tennant Creek. Three hundred miles of Jeep and bus have had the desired effect: the lip of the storm is directly overhead, with muddled gray behind me and unfettered blue ahead. Wonderful. Balanced between the wet and the dry, I choose the dry and ride off into the desert.
TWO WEEKS AGO in Darwin a man recommended that I carry at least forty liters of water when traveling in the desert. “But that’s forty kilos!” I said. Eighty-eight pounds. “I’ll die not of thirst, but exhaustion.” He leaned close and said, “Look, mate—there’s nothing in the center—nothing at all.”
The wetlander’s throat-clutching dread of deserts isn’t so different from my claustrophobia when hemmed in by trees. It’s a matter of what feels like home, and for me home is where the bulb of the sun pops up and the fine yellow dawn slides over the world and, without even getting out of my sleeping bag, I can see the true horizon, land’s end.
That’s what it’s like my first morning in the desert, a cool and dry morning camped near a heap of granite boulders called the Devil’s Marbles. Between the rocks are sandy watercourses with an occasional ghost gum—a eucalyptus that appears to have not bark but skin as white as a Nordic princess’s. Out on the flats beyond the rocks are the narrow-leaf mulgas, each as forlorn as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.
They suit me and the birds fine. This isn’t a he-man death desert, like the truly waterless Atacama of Chile, but a relatively sissy desert getting some ten inches of rain yearly, similar to my Tucson home. One difference from home, however, is Musca vetustissima, the bush fly. It’s just a wee thing that doesn’t bite, which is more than you can say for some human toddlers. On the other hand, a child doesn’t walk across your eyeballs.
The female bush fly is merely in search of protein, says Jim Heath in his delightful little book The Fly in Your Eye. She needs proper nutrition from your mucus, tears, sweat, or saliva. Only then can she muster the energy to lay a clutch of eggs in
her favored nursery, a fresh piece of dung. The bigger the dung, the better. Sadly for the bush fly, Australia’s largest animals vanished during the last ice age, perhaps on the menu of the Aborigines. Without gold-medal dung producers like the one-ton Diprotodon optatum, which looked like the offspring of a rhino and a grizzly bear, the bush flies of arid Australia eked out a living on teeny kangaroo turds.
If those long-ago bush flies could dream, it would surely be of a thousand-pound slobbering herbivore with big moist eyes and bigger moister dung. The dream came ashore in 1788 with the British First Fleet. Half of the 1,500 passengers were convicts, most simple thieves like cheese snatchers and laundry grabbers, and the others were seamen and penal colony administrators hoping to survive beyond the fringe of the known world. Sensibly, they brought livestock, including two bulls and three cows.
As Heath puts it, “The bush flies watching the scene must have felt a dawning sense of unbelievable good luck.” Within twenty years there were over a thousand cows, and “there was plenty of dung. Huge, splashy cow pads.” Today there are over 20 million cows in Australia, and about twelve times a day each cow lets loose a dung heap capable of supporting two thousand baby flies. Don’t bother with the math, unless you wish to be truly frightened.
Top-notch Australian entomologists have imported dung beetles to compete with bush flies. Things are getting better wherever the beetles can win the thrilling race to the fresh dung. The Devil’s Marbles doesn’t seem to be one of those places. I try my repellent, but they eagerly lap it up. I’ve been told that a powerful spray called Rid is the only thing that works, but it’s like Agent Orange in a can, and difficult to apply to eyeballs.
So I ride off toward Alice Springs. The flies chase me, but mostly they ride on the back of my shirt. Keep moving and all is well. I find I can scribble, on the roll, shaky notes of whatever catches my eye. Big gourds on vines crawling across the sands. Zebra finches opening their orange bills to lick the leaky spigot on a cattle tank. The purple blooms of a deadly nightshade, seducing pollinators with sexy yellow stigmas.
The spaces between tourist stops are not empty—they just seem that way if you’re in a car. Although we can move between points quicker than ever, the places between still exist, so the world is not shrinking after all.
It’s a hot day, silencing the birds, everything waiting. The road is hypnotically straight for twenty miles, then doglegs though a pass in a long, low ridge of shattered rock. Late in the day I cross an actual creek and strip to wash in water that looks as though it came from a very rusty radiator. It’s better than sweat.
Evening is the sweetest time in a hot place, because although dawn is the coolest moment of the day you know it’s just going to get hotter. With dusk comes the promise of the night. The wind quits, the leaves relax, and I keep riding. With the road to myself I ride as the stars blink on and Venus becomes queen of the sky. Birds in the dark whistle laconically, and I ride, all alone, approaching the center of Australia.
WITH EVERY DAY CLOSER to Alice Springs the trees shrink and my skin dries and the sun’s lower on the northern horizon. But the roadhouses stay much the same: pit stops for most folk, but oases for a cyclist with sixty miles to the next café/motel/pub/gas station. Like Pavlov’s dog, I start salivating when I hear the growl of a power generator or see a crude sign painted on the hood of a wrecked car. I know that inside the screen door awaits a relatively fly-free dining room, a bathroom with a sliver of soap, and a counter where I’ ll order my road coffee and meal.
“Do you want that steak sandwich with the lot?” the counter woman will ask. Her name might be Bronwyn. The coffee will be instant. “The lot” is a processed cheese slice, carrot curls, fried egg and onions, and a slice each of pineapple and sugar beet heaped atop the slab of meat, all on white bread that soon regresses into dough. One bite and the sugar beet oozes what any biologist would recognize as “warning coloration,” the sort of hue that animals and plants use to say: Eat me and you’re in for a potentially unpleasant surprise.
It’s no longer a surprise and it’s no worse than the usual alternatives: toast with a can of baked beans poured on top, or toast with a can of spaghetti poured on top, or toast with Vegemite, a spread served in the ubiquitous little plastic cup with a tear-off lid. I’ve tried them all, even the Vegemite, smearing a dark blob across my toast and immediately recognizing its smell and texture. It’s really nothing new, being widely available in the United States. It’s marketed under the name Form-a-Gasket, an adhesive I once used to install a fuel pump in my car.
The Vegemite package claims it’s “concentrated yeast extract.” That’s odd. In Vegemite-less societies I’d never heard the complaint, “I’d love to eat more yeast, if only it were concentrated into something a bit smaller.” So it was no shock when a waitress told me that Vegemite wasn’t invented by intelligent life—Vegemite just happened.
“I believe it was discovered by accident. They found it while making beer, the stuff that had settled to the bottom of the vat.”
When was that?
“Huh—long, long ago. I can’t remember when there wasn’t Vegemite. It’s a part of regular life.”
Timeless food, reminding me of the truth in Cervantes’s words: The road is always better than the inn. He wrote that four hundred years ago, and it doesn’t appear that roadhouse food will be changing soon. The people in charge are generally too busy trying to attract more than the usual truck drivers. The signs out front proclaim a Wildlife Sanctuary, but it’s just a big cage with a pair of emus or a talking cockatoo. Anything is better than nothing, including mildlife like a goat or a burro. Inside, above the cash register, the parade of animals continues with a display of pickled death adders and scorpions in murky jars. Yesterday’s newspaper is for sale, as is this month’s issue of People magazine, which apparently enjoys different ownership in Australia, with the current cover promising “Rudest Nude Wives.”
Any newspaper article mentioning that particular roadhouse joins the yellowed archives tacked on the wall. One roadhouse also enshrines every newspaper account of UFOs reported over the desert. I ask a waitress about my chances of seeing one. “The owner sees them all the time,” she says while taking a break and a smoke beside a stuffed lizard. She adds wistfully, “But I wish I’d see something more than little lights in the night sky. Lots of pretty stars, but . . . ”
Later that evening I’m lying on my back, smoking my pipe under the pretty stars before the moon rises. Of course they see things out here, I’m thinking—it’s the Vegemite and the glow-in-the-dark sugar beets. But when I take off my glasses and look up at the blaze of constellations I see for the first time in my life what appears to be a fried egg sizzling in the Milky Way.
NEAR THE TOWN OF ALICE SPRINGS, I stop to pick up a little road-killed lizard and place it in my handlebar bag alongside pipe and sunglasses. Collecting dead reptiles isn’t a hobby, but I can’t resist a better look at what appears to be a knot of barbed wire. It’s called a thorny devil, and its armored skin of deep reds and russets—precisely the colors of central Australia—make it even more handsome than America’s horned lizard. Otherwise, the two look so similar that it’s reasonable to guess that they’re related.
They’re not. Separated by an ocean and millions of years, the thorny devil and the horned lizard look the same because they do the same thing for a living. You would not be surprised to find that steelworkers in Australia and Arizona wear hardhats and gloves. Thorny devils and horned lizards wear spikes and camouflage. The outfit is a lovely example of convergent evolution, the power of time and natural selection to find the right tool for the job—a job that, in the case of the lizards, consists of crouching by an ant trail and flicking their tongues out to snag, one at a time, over a thousand ants a day. They must take their meals wherever they find them, which is often in the open and exposed to whatever predator happens by. That’s why the thorny devil and the horned lizard are disguised as dirt and rock (call it Plan A) and are as pl
easant to swallow as a pincushion (Plan B).
Even in death the thorny devil is bizarrely beautiful. At least until decomposition forces me to place him back in the desert, just as I reach Alice Springs.
Only sixteen days since Darwin, and I’m dazzled by the superabundance of material goods in a town of only 25,000, over nine hundred miles from the nearest city. There’s everything an intercontinental athlete could desire. After a heady splurge at a donut shop, I huff over to the SmokeMart to buy real pipe tobacco, then join the other tourists at the Midland Hotel.
Two young Swiss men are lounging at the pool in swimsuits and earphones, grimacing in primal satisfaction to the music. Mark politely removes his earphones to say hello, and I ask what he’s listening to.
“Slayer.”
Sounds like metal, I say, thinking of a piston engine critically low on oil.
“It is metal,” says friend Christopher.
“But it’s no good saying that Slayer is just a metal band,” says Mark, “because there is speed metal and doom metal, thrash metal and slow metal.”
“And white metal and heavy metal,” adds Christopher, “and death metal and black metal.”
So . . . what’s Slayer?
“Black metal,” says Mark.
“Doom metal,” says Christopher, beginning some deep introspection on the role of Satan in Slayer’s music. It’s too bad I can’t pull out the dead lizard and entertain them. Look, boys: Thorny Devil. Death Metal. Roadkill.
I waltz around my hotel room, inspecting the mini-bar and marveling at the ingenious Aussie two-button toilet. One button delivers a petite flush and the other lets loose a heroic flush. It’s entirely up to the user to decide which is appropriate. I sit in the shower for thirty minutes, paralyzed by pleasure. As for the rest of Alice Springs, it’s a very nice town in which to sleep, to wake, and to leave on a April morning.