Into Thick Air (2 page)

Because of my desire to go down rather than up, I didn't bother looking for money from the sort of sponsors that offer financial encouragement to people with more lofty aspirations, willing to hang from a cliff on an alloy claw the size of a cricket. For the next few years I kept taking freelance work as a journalist or botanist. My plan languished on a back burner, where it did not seem so absurd. I was not alone in this regard. “On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts,” wrote the Irish cyclist Dervla Murphy in
Full Tilt
, “and a few days later I decided to cycle to India. . . . However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.”

But, unlike Murphy, I didn't grow up aiming for the bottom. As a boy I'd looked up—to big people, big machines, big mountains. I'd become a fairly regular guy, married to the opposite sex and settled in a brick house a mile from my high school. I lacked the usual excuses for wandering the globe.

“I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts,” mused Paul Theroux while taking the choo-choo out of the “gray sodden city” of London, bound for
The Great Railway Bazaar
. Theroux fled bad weather, or
the end of his marriage. The weather in Tucson was fine and my wife had not left me. I wasn't battling addiction, and my parents had failed to abuse me as a child. My exceedingly ordinary life might have depressed me if I suffered from depression, but I didn't. I just wasn't a quest kind of guy.

And then the phone rang with an unusual proposal. It was the year the Internet began gobbling up print magazines, much to my disgust. Yet I listened carefully when an editor I knew well from the Discovery Channel's computer venue, Discovery Online, tossed out her idea of a trip for an intrepid reporter.

“We' ll equip you with a laptop, digital camera, and satellite phone, then send you far away, to some undisclosed destination that not even you know.” The story would be in my efforts to find my way home over the course of a month. The electronics would allow me to transmit dispatches and pictures from the road for posting to their website. “We' ll call it
One-Way Ticket to Nowhere
,” she said with guarded enthusiasm. “Think about it.”

I thought about it. I thought that if I were on the road for a month, I'd rather be freewheeling with my bicycle than hoping for the goodwill of whatever tribe Discovery decided to drop me into. There would still be dangers, including the chronic threat to a bicycle traveler of being mistaken for a Mormon missionary, but I came up with a counteroffer: I'd gladly go to an obscure locale, so long as I chose it. How about Lake Eyre, the lowest point in Australia? I'd ride my bicycle, which guaranteed that I'd meet the locals—I'd just be able to escape if necessary. If all works out to everyone's pleasure, I added hopefully, I' ll take a pit trip every year, one to each continent.

She bought it—not the whole menu, just Australia for a start. Success there, she hastened to point out, may or may not lead to the other depressions; six years was a very long time in the publishing business. I agreed: I would travel in my archaic mode, and the computer would relentlessly connect me to my editor. The burden of technology was lamentable but bearable. I'd written for years on a computer and I thought it merely an ambitious typewriter, probably radioactive. I'd risked the Internet at the public library, diligently checking on the claims of rampant pornography.
And I guessed I wouldn't need to lug a satellite phone—surely there were phones everywhere in Australia.

Or were there? My notions of Australia were a grab bag of hard fact and harebrained rumor. So far as I knew, it was a gigantic and lonesome island that long ago had wandered far away from the other continents. Fate had dragged it to the southern hemisphere, where everything is backward—sun in the north, constellations upended, New Year's in the dead heat of summer.

I was reasonably sure that two sorts of people lived there: sunburned Brits, guzzling immense cans of Foster's beer, and grub-eating Aborigines playing classical tunes on a kind of bassoon. The British had taken over the places most like Britain and the natives got the good parts, where they hunted with boomerangs the Tasmanian devils and wallabies and other creatures pouched and hopping weird. There were crocodiles too, I recalled, long and quiet, like canoes with teeth and hunger.

Most of Australia, however, wasn't right for crocodiles. It was a desert, a bloody red desert with a huge rock stuck in the middle.

I may have had a few details wrong, but that was my Australia. It was an image based solidly if not proudly on
National Geographic
specials and Saturday morning cartoons, a memory buttressed by
National Lampoon
satires and the
World Book Encyclopedia
. Such visions were tough to dislodge by truth alone.

Yet even the most elementary research revealed that there would be no oasis of grapes and canals at the bottom of Australia. The
World Book
described Lake Eyre as a “strange lake,” roughly in midcontinent, that had recently covered 6,000 square miles, but because it was in “an extremely hot region” it was currently “just a vast salt pan.” Nobody lived there.

If Lake Eyre was dry and lonely, it seemed proper to start my ride at a place that was wet and busy. That would be the city of Darwin, on the tropical northern coast. I guessed it was sweating with jungles and swimming with crocodiles, and although this sounded awful I wanted to see for myself. From Darwin to Lake Eyre it was a straight shot south into the arid heart of Australia. Heading south was no small bonus: the sun would be at my back, not in my face.

It was around fifteen hundred miles from the wetlands to the salt pan, the last two hundred miles along a dirt road with its own name, the Oodnadatta Track. This was likely too far to cover in the thirty days Discovery had given me, but I figured I could hitch if needed—if anyone ever came along.

Seeking fresh information on my route, I wrote to a Margaret Day of the Bicycle Federation of Australia. Within a month I'd received Ms. Day's kind reply, in an envelope plastered with kangaroo and pygmy possum stamps. “Water supplies are essential as you already know. Small towns/petrol station outlets are about 100 to 120 kilometers apart along the road so supplies are not too much of a problem if you can eat basic food. Flies could be a worry so a net for your face is a possible solution. Road trains travel hard and fast so just get off the road when they are around. If you camp, be sure to get well off the road in an invisible place, as there can be an odd character in the bush. You will see the most beautiful stars at night.”

That was enough. No mention of Lake Eyre, but I figured I would see for myself. I bought a ticket across the sea and the equator. I began to hoard Australian lore, concentrating on the presumably true stuff. After two months I recklessly considered myself a regular Aussie expert. I felt sorry for the nineteenth-century explorers who failed in a fatal way. I read Robert Hughes's
The Fatal Shore
, the story of the British flotillas of convicts and their wardens who founded the “thief-colony” that became today's Australia.

The Fatal Shore
was a gift from my neighbor, Mr. Rodgers, whose only obvious connection to the southern hemisphere was a tremendous Australian eucalyptus in his front yard. It gave welcome shade from the early sun on the morning I hollered for Sonya to come and help heave-ho the bicycle box into the back of our station wagon.

It was a lousy time to leave my wife behind, a spring day with bees wobbling in the orange blossoms. But I had Australian questions without proper Australian answers. I wanted to know why there were no Australian restaurants in Tucson. I wanted to know who lived in Oodnadatta, a dot on the map where I imagined a single waterhole and one man kicking and swearing at forlorn livestock. And I wondered what was beyond the smallest town, out in the desert, under the big sun.

—Jens Holtman, Big Red Tours

 

MY MOTHER could not bear to see me off at the Tucson airport. She worried, and those worries would become flesh and blood if she saw me vanish into the sky. The best I could do was a farewell phone call.

“Mom, it's only Australia. It's like England, but drier. Tea time in the desert. The police don't carry guns—they just say,
Please behave
.”

“I don't want to cry in the airport, Jimmy.”

I reminded her that I'd avoided death all of my life—but it was no use. I took a little jet to Los Angeles International, where I switched planes for a whopper, a flying village. Less than a mile west was the edge of the continent and the challenge of not drinking myself silly with complimentary booze during a fifteen-hour night flight over the Pacific Ocean.

I lost the challenge and woke to the sun pouring in the north windows. Yesterday the sun had been in the south, and the switch was incandescent proof that the earth was round and we'd crossed the equator in the night. The big jet tilted and the island nation appeared. Banks of clouds politely parted, opening like louvered blinds, and sunlight striped the surf bashing the shore of prime Sydney real estate. The city was shiny wet after a night storm, and it pressed up to a narrow bay with blue inlets tucked into low hills.

The customs man at the Sydney airport wore stiff shorts and black socks. I thought:
If that's his uniform, I must be in Australia
. The bike box I left at the airport for the next day's flight to Darwin. In Sydney I was to rendezvous with a man who was critical to the success of my trip. He was not a desert survivalist or a crack shot or a crocodile hunter. He knew how to connect my computer to Australian telephones.

I caught a ride into the city, found a hotel, and walked downtown under a milky sky. On a Monday morning in the financial district the women wore freckles and cell phones, and the men were buttoned into gray flannel suits. I happily crunched through the fallen sycamore leaves—it was autumn here, not spring—past a newspaper stand with headlines announcing “ENGLAND ON BRINK OF MAD COW SLAUGHTER!”

On the fifteenth floor of a building modeled after an ice-cube tray, I found Andrew Hobbs at a steel desk connected by data and electrical cords to a hole in the plasterboard wall. After the perfunctory mutual inspection of our hardware, he handed me a discreet black nylon sack and said, “You'll be needing these.” This had the effect of making me want to call him Agent Hobbs; surely it was a very important bag.

Inside were the assorted hookups for various species of telephones I might find in the Australian hinterlands. As with the genitalia of insects, there had to be a precise plug for each socket, or the connection would fail.

I thanked Hobbs and hiked over to the Australian Museum. As a curious and cautious tourist soon to be set loose in the outback, I was drawn to a desk near a sign reading “Search and Discover,” and at that desk sat the master of biological advice, Michael Harvey. I told him my camping plans.

Mr. Harvey stated the facts: “If you pick up a snake in Australia, chances are it's a venomous snake. Most are elapids—front-fanged—and only twenty to twenty-five species will kill you. Of course, if you get the antivenin you should survive. If not, you're dead.”

Mr. Harvey was twenty-six, looked younger, and made me wonder if the older naturalists had expired. In particular, herpetologists are famous for ignoring their own advice: don't touch the snakes. Like gun collectors, herpetologists feel the urge to occasionally handle the deadly object of their desire.

“The elapids you might worry about include taipans, brown snakes, tiger snakes, death adders, copperheads, and black snakes. Death adders have a habit of sitting very still and not getting out of your way. Please watch where you put your feet.”

Mr. Harvey opened an atlas that showed I'd be out of the range of the northern death adder after a week or so on the road. Unfortunately, I'd then enter the range of the desert death adder.

 

MOST OF AUSTRALIA is desert and most of the desert is without Australians. They cling to the southeastern coast and the island of Tasmania, where the climate is agreeable to rose gardens and tea cozies and the long-term survival of very white people. A minority bask in the Indian Ocean glow of the southwest coast and the city of Perth, but between Perth and other Australians is the Nullarbor Plain. Valiantly searching for a kind word to say about this featureless tableland, one guide to “Outback Tourism” wrote, “Once a seabed, now home to the hairy-nose wombat, the Nullarbor (no trees) Plain is the world's largest continuous limestone area.”