One for the Road

      
E
ven aimless journeys have a purpose I suppose. The seed for an outback ramble was planted a year before the trip actually began, when I awoke in the final hours of a daylong flight to Sydney. The moment seemed important—a desert dawn, a new year, a new country—so I unstuck my kidneys from the armrest, opened a virgin journal, and recorded my first impression of the continent on which I was soon to land.

Jan 1. Australian airspace

It looks like a massive vacant lot down there. Ridge upon ridge of sand and stone, splashed with saltpans, stretching to a thin strip of red on the horizon. If an alien probe landed here it would say “no life” and go home
.

For a few dreamy months I was that alien probe, albeit in Sydney. I bolted awake at dawn to the sound of kookaburras laughing like madwomen outside my window. I went to the pub and ordered beer—“Tooth’s Old” or “schooner of New”—just to hear the strange silly words spill from my lips. I listed like a twelve-meter yacht under the weight of Australian coins.

And I wrote endless letters to America about the curious customs of my adopted land. “Lawn care is very big here,” my parents learned a few days after my arrival in Sydney. “On weekends all the ‘blokes’ are out in the
yard with hoses and ‘tinnies’ of beer. They dress like little boys in shorts called stubbles (?).”

Before long, I too wore stubbies and lolled in the sun, acquiring the native color. I found a newspaper job my first week in Sydney and that made the conversion even quicker. “Dogs shit on footpaths, not sidewalks!” the editor yelled when I filed my first story, a back-page item on filthy Sydney streets. “And ‘trash’ is an Americanism, mate. We toss out rubbish.”

The next week a press release from the town of Wagga Wagga landed on my desk. I thought it was a misprint; one Wagga seemed improbable enough. “Check the map next time,” the copy editor suggested rather coolly. Sure enough, there was Wagga Wagga, not to mention Bong Bong and Woy Woy, or the one-word names that sounded like the fanciful inventions of a four-year-old: Mullumbimby, Bibbenluke, Woolloomooloo.

Those first few months at the newspaper were like my inaugural plunge in the rough Sydney surf: sink or swim. Before long I’d mastered a passable Australian crawl, in and out of the water.

But I was just stroking the surface of things; urban landscapes bear a family resemblance, whatever the hemisphere. And part of me was disappointed. “I wish I could show you a younger people and an older land,” Geraldine had written me on a postcard from Australia, three years before. It arrived a few weeks after our first embrace on a grimy sidewalk beside Broadway in New York. The next day we finished graduate school and she flew home to Sydney. I read and reread the card, studied the strange red desert on the other side, and wondered how I’d fallen in love with a woman who lived a hemisphere away.

Then she returned to work in America, and for eighteen months I showed her my land instead—or a frozen, industrial corner of it where we both found jobs, known in those recession days as “the rust bowl.” In fact, you couldn’t see the rust for all the snow. “Cleveland,” a friend wrote to her in the midst of a blizzard, “is a place I have visited only in jokes.”

Moving together to Sydney was like a beach party after that. But ten thousand miles from home, I felt as though I’d entered a mirror image of America. If the words were often different, the world to which they referred was much the same. TV was “telly” but the show was still
Dallas
. The eucalyptus-shaded sprawl of suburban Sydney could have been lifted
from Los Angeles. There were even the familiar neon monoliths of McDonald’s, or Pizza Hut, or Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The outback I’d glimpsed from the airplane window was foreign enough, but it seemed impossibly remote from urban Australia; my friends in Sydney traveled more readily to Bali than to Alice Springs. They’d titillate me with snatches about the weird outback life: farms as big as European countries, Aborigines on walkabouts, dingoes eating babies, pubs that never closed. But as a journalist I could sniff out hearsay information. I wanted to see the real thing. I wanted to see it firsthand.

The plan itself wafted in with the westerly winds, almost a year after my arrival in Sydney. It was a December day, the first real stinker of summer. Inside the office it was cool, but unnaturally cool, like the vegetable drawer of a refrigerator.

I hit the “kill” button on my keyboard and turned to the reporter at the next desk. I feel like hitchhiking off, I told him, with no route and no timetable, toward the hot red center of the continent. The rides would decide where I went and how long I took to get there.

“In summer? Mate, your brains will fry.” His voice was flat and his eyes didn’t budge from the computer screen. “That’s if you’re lucky. Dying of thirst is worse.”

The maps I stared at were even less encouraging. I’d imagined a spiderweb of highways through the outback. Instead, I found a spindly thread connecting one coast to the other. The literature from the motorists’ association was bleaker still. Not only was an “extra spare wheel” required for outback driving, but also “a fan-belt, top and bottom radiator hoses, coil, condenser, spare fuse, light bulbs, puncture repair outfit, tin of brake fluid, roll of plastic insulation tape, 6.35 mm. plastic tubing and a troublelight or torch.”

That was just for mechanical emergencies.

“A well-equipped first-aid kit and fire-extinguisher could also be invaluable, while a reserve drum of petrol, food, and 4.55 litres of drinking water per person are necessities.” Remembering, of course, that “radiator water, although containing impurities, is a valuable emergency water supply.”

With all that gear, how would anyone have room to pick me up? And
with that kind of warning, what sort of maniac would venture out there in the first place?

“In addition,” the motorists’ association cautioned, just in case you hadn’t got the point, “your proposed itinerary should be made known in case of mechanical breakdown or even becoming lost, so that a search for you can be more easily and quickly instituted.”

Not even mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the desert sun. Certainly not sensible Australians. But there was still a margin of madness for a road-stricken Yankee. I slipped out of the office one restless afternoon and drove my car toward the hills, just to feel the rubber reaching out for open road. Broadway, the congested street outside my office, eventually becomes the Great Western Highway, shooting straight across the Great Dividing Range.

Romantic names, I thought; Australia’s answer to Route 66 and the Appalachians. Instead I found myself crawling along a scar of used-car lots—Petrol Wowser! Low Kilo! Priced to Sell!—connecting one smoggy suburb to another. The mountains were an elusive blur in the distance. I crept back through rush-hour traffic, wondering if it was worth all the bother. I could hitchhike for days and never penetrate the brick veneer skin of suburban Sydney.

This time I sought advice from a workmate who had actually hitchhiked in the bush.

“I was stuck for three days and finally took a Greyhound bus,” he told me. Then his eyes narrowed. “Anyway, I was nineteen. Aren’t you a little old for this game?”

My ticket was paid for, so to speak, before he finished speaking. I
was
too old. Not physically, though sleeping in roadside ditches didn’t hold the romance for me at twenty-seven that it once had at seventeen. It was the outward shape of things that seemed prematurely aged: marriage, mortgage, a bank manager who knew me on a first-name basis. Sometimes I felt like a teenager who gets a jacket with “growing space” then waits and waits for his shoulders to broaden, his chest to expand. Mine hadn’t. Surely there was still room for boyish adventures. And if not now, then when?