Into Thick Air (3 page)

The only Australian city more remote than Perth is the northern port of Darwin. Judging from the Northern Territory Holiday Guide, Darwin is the luckiest place on earth, where “at one time of the year soft balmy breezes rustle the ever present canopy of palm trees, while at another, Nature's light shows produce dramatic skies.” Enticing propaganda, and I went for the bait. I'd be going during the “dramatic skies,” not knowing that this includes hurricanes. Australians knew: the morning flight out of Sydney held maybe two dozen international suckers like myself, clutching our Holiday Guides. There were far fewer locals, and many empty seats.

That was OK. “All forms of velocity are forms of vitality,” wrote Nabokov, probably while on a train. Anything that moves will do the trick, from bicycle to jet. I had my maps, my camera, and a window, and this was a kind of bliss. The delightful surge of takeoff lifted me above the fungal haze of humidity and exhaust and the yak-yak of billboards. Below me, highways wiggled out of the city and into the Blue Mountains, to valleys stopped up by hydroelectric dams. Beyond the mountains the trees grew scarce and the land yellowed with wheat.

Onward, at nearly the speed of sound. The roads and the farms and all human geometries petered out and the color of the earth deepened to the red of clotted blood. It was sand, heaped in long low dunes, and between the dunes lay skinny clay pans, shining like minnows. The Simpson Desert. To the south was a sprawl of dry channels leading to the long-ago sea that became Lake Eyre. The lake was too distant to see anything but the glare off its skin of salt. It was more phantom than lake.

A thousand miles without a single town: Australia is like that. Even after we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and the trees returned, humanity did not. The creeks swelled into great loopy rivers. The trees became a forest fringing the rivers, and between the forests were smooth grassy flats ponded with floodwaters.

The engines shushed and the jet eased closer to earth. The road came into view, my road, the only paved highway through a 1,500-mile-wide swath of Australia. Imagine flying from Los Angeles to Memphis and passing over a single highway. In Australia, that highway runs coast to coast, from Adelaide to Darwin on the shore of the Timor Sea.

The northern coast is not a rainforest but a tropical savanna, seasonally soaked and, according to the
World Book
climate map, Always Hot. It wasn't hot in the profoundly air-conditioned terminal of Darwin International Airport, where I assembled my bicycle in ignorance of the heat fog outside. A minute after I pedaled out I knew why the sternest warning in the Holiday Guide was “Your skin needs a lighter moisturizer than usual.” You cannot apply moisturizers to sweat.

I rode out of the airport and into a traffic circle. No sign said: Darwin, that way. Worse, the traffic circle had by design no stop signs or signals, no chance to pause. I made several tours of the circle, leisurely pursued by cars brazenly driving on the wrong side of the road. They wanted me out of the traffic circle, but I was stuck in the spin cycle. So I simply rode off into the roadside shrubbery.

An embarrassing start, but riding alone means never having to say you're sorry. I mopped my brow and studied my free tourist map. A few miles later I rested at the Darwin Lawn Bowling Club, confident I was on course. Gentlemen in proper white outfits rolled midget bowling balls
without paying the least attention to the four-foot-long lizard in the adjacent field. “What's that? It's a goanna. Quite common, mate.”

By the time I reached my hotel, I understood that this tolerance of the native fauna extended only so far. Although Darwin is on the sea, nobody will get in the water. The beaches were deserted.

“Darwin's a wonderful place to bring your ex-wife,” a rugby-looking fellow told me. “Take her for a swim, and if the crocs don't get her the jellyfish will.” He sniffed and pulled at his mustache, which was the size of a rodent.

I met him at the Green Room, the lounge at the Hotel Darwin, where we swilled Victoria Bitter under the anemic breeze of a ceiling fan. He worked for the
Northern Territory News
, whose current headline declared, “UFO STUNS 14 AT DARWIN PARTY!”

Yet it was true: three weeks earlier, a girl had fallen from a fishing boat into the trailing tentacles of a box jellyfish. Mysteriously equipped with eyes but no brain, it kills like a drunk driver, by blunder, except the box jelly uses a neurotoxin capable of shutting down a life within a few minutes. By the time the girl was pulled aboard it was too late.

I stayed away from the sea. The Green Room would do for acclimating to the tropics. There was no air-conditioning. The hotel was one of the few buildings to survive both the Japanese bombardment of World War II and a 1974 cyclone that flattened Darwin. The new city was Valu-Lodges and Muffler Stops, and this made the Green Room's louvered windows and jungle garden irresistible. I settled into a chubby rattan chair and sampled an exotic item on the menu, “Nesting Crocodiles.” My waiter placed it before me with a polite bow and said, “The trick with crocodiles is to eat them before they eat you.”

The same sort of black gossip infects Arizona—rattlesnakes cozying up in your sleeping bag and tarantulas jumping like popcorn. Funny, but it's never happened to me. I remained an Australian skeptic. It was easy: I'd yet to spend a night outside.

And I'd never seen a crocodile. I'd only read
Crocodiles of Australia
, whose authors describe a 16-foot-long, 1,800-pound specimen named Sweetheart, “a cunning, patient, ruthless, fast and highly agile predatory killer.” He enjoyed a hearty and varied diet, taking an occasional cow or fishing boat.

Yet Sweetheart never snacked on the people inside the boat. Hardly anyone is eaten by crocodiles in Australia. They die the usual way, with seized hearts or corroded livers or busted in car smashes. According to my semiprofessional calculations, hungry crocs eat only 0.000018 percent of Australia's populace annually—about one person a year.

Trouble is, 100 percent of the victims go dreadfully. Before leaving town, it seemed wise to join the other tourists and visit Crocodylus Park. It was feeding time, when very large reptiles were suddenly transformed from inanimate logs into a blur of teeth. They snapped up chicken carcasses so quickly that the multinational audience was left gasping what sounded like “
Schneider mitzel!
” and “
Sacre la mamma mia!
” American alligators were compared to the native crocodiles, and the former were found lacking in grit and spunk, a “rather slow and dumb animal.” Both species have the winning physical characteristic of all crocodiles, alligators, gavials, and caymans: a trick nostril-to-lung passage that allows them to breathe when their mouth is open underwater.

If I'd been here during the last ice age (and the Aborigines were), I would have had more to worry about, namely
Quinkana fortirostrum
, a crocodile that was completely terrestrial. All I had to do was heed the abundant advice: Don't go in the water, don't approach a river from the same place twice, and camp at least two hundred meters from the water.

First I had to get out of Darwin. I introduced my American computer to the Australian telephone, a one-day courtship ultimately consummated with the help of the male-to-female plugs supplied by Hobbs. The next morning I bought a bird guide whose pictures looked as if a child had gone nuts with a sixty-four-color box of crayons. Back in my room I wrote a letter to my wife, enthusing over the Hotel Darwin and signing off with a simple yet touching, “Don't get pregnant until I get home.” I slipped my camping and computer equipment into my bike panniers and slapped on greasy sunscreen from head to toe, working around my sandals. Outside, under a sun like a glowing gong, the palms drooped and cicadas shrieked. There was nothing left to do but wheel out in the direction of Lake Eyre.

 

WITH THE FIRST TURN of the pedals I leave behind more than Darwin. Two months of preparations, of maps and letters, are now past. I ride in the present, and the first fifteen miles of Australia leave me feeling as if swaddled in wet laundry. “Tropical paradise” is a useful term only when sitting very still and clasping a chilled drink, so I stop for an iced coffee at the Palmerston Tavern.

After a review of the cryptic notices on a community bulletin board (“My Jenny wants a Jack. Any about?”), I take a seat beside a sociable motorcycle gang. Bikers spend a good deal of time roaring through the great outdoors, catching insects in their teeth, and swimming naked whenever possible—a solid background for any naturalist. I introduce myself and my plan.

“Heading towards Fogg Dam?” asks Craig, pulling a cigarette from the biggest box of smokes I've ever seen: Horizon 50's. “Better watch out for them mossies. Come dark they' ll find you fast.”

Mosquitoes. “And there's not just your regular mossie, but the Kamikaze, too. It doesn't bother to land before it bites—she flies in nose first and hits you straight away.”

“You mean the Zero, not Kamikaze,” says Wayne.

“Ain't no difference but the name,” says Dood. The words whistle around the slobbery stub of a cigar. “Like Yank and Rebel. That's you, a Yank or
a Rebel, same thing. Zero and Kamikaze are the same, and they's all bad mossies.”

What's more, Dood says I'll have to keep an eye out for the native Australians. “Abos—they's primitive people.”

After Dood shows me his immense tattoo of a Harley-Davidson engine, covering most of his back, I pedal another fifteen miles, feeling better as the sun sinks lower. At the last “bottleshop” and pub before Fogg Dam I buy some fried chicken for dinner and a beer to go with it. The beer I stuff into my sleeping bag, so it will still be cold two hours later.

“Fogg Dam,” says the clerk, “has the highest percentage of something in the world. Maybe it's snakes. Take your torch out on the dam and you'll see it crawling with snakes. But they're just water pythons and no problem, mate.”

This I remember: avoid the dam.

“And if a croc chases you, try to zigzag, because they can move out right well but don't turn the corners too good.”

The last ten miles are gorgeous and ominous: sun blurring behind the limp eucalyptus, backlighting the big termite mounds that, as Alan Moorehead wrote, “give the land the appearance of a graveyard.” I pass a disturbing roadkill—a goanna lizard as long as my bike—and reach the Fogg Dam turnoff at dusk.

The sun near the equator heads pretty much straight down for the horizon, and dusk is a brief affair. After only a few miles I realize I must find a camp soon. The first spot I try looks dandy, and I'm ready to scout out any nearby crocodile waters when I see a beehive nearby. I'm allergic to bees, swelling up like the Michelin Man within minutes, so I quickly move along to another potential camp. Before I can unpack I am attacked by ants. I press on in the muddy light to a fine open patch beneath the canopy of an immense tree. Suddenly the mossies and the kamikazes are on me, like blood bullets, and I fling up my tent and collapse inside.

Dark now, with spangles of moonlight on the mesh roof, but still hot. I read the
Northern Territory News
(“ROGUE CROW CHASES WOMEN!”) while I eat dinner, with sweat dripping from my forehead onto the pages. Something crackles through the leaves outside, but its silhouette looks to be
only that of a dingo, the Australian wild dog. I return to my chicken. While listening, of course.

There. There again. I shine my headlight outside, and at the same time realize that I've just made perhaps my last mistake: I don't know if I'm camped near water. The bees, the ants, and the mossies have all conspired to knock me off on my first night out. Worse, I realize with horror that I'm eating chicken—the croc's delight!

I'm sweating a wee bit more as I stuff the chicken into a plastic bag, that bag into another bag, then into another. Should I throw it outside, or will that just attract them? “The crocodile may have a very small brain,” said the tour guide in Crocodylus Park, “but he uses 80 percent of that brain. That's a very high percentage.” I hope the missing 20 percent is the sense of smell.

More sounds. I sweep the perimeter with my light. Nothing. Crocodiles are the biological and mythical equivalent of grizzly bears, but with this key difference: there's advice on how to deal with a bear. Play dead. Avoid eye contact. It may be bad advice, but you have a chance, however small, to fool them. There isn't a wisp of hope with the small-brained croc. They've been around since the dinosaurs, swallowing the unlucky. They are so good at it they've lazed away the last 200 million years without bothering to evolve hair or the ability to do crossword puzzles, and their smug ignorance makes them more terrible.

I debate the choices: stay and pray, or go outside and see if there's water nearby. The mosquitoes sound like an air raid siren; I'll be drilled within seconds. And what of the snakes? What if I'm near the dam? The poor dingo may already be just a tail sticking out of a knot of pythons.

A fruit drops off the tree above and pongs off the tent. More sweat. I listen closely, very closely, and realize how different the insects and birds and all the night sounds are from my Arizona home. I really am in Australia.

And when I notice that one sound is missing, I smile to myself and slump off into sleep. No frogs means no water.

 

IN THE MORNING the tent is dripping with dew, although the temperature never fell below 80 degrees. Early April is the end of the wet season, and the reservoir behind Fogg Dam—a failed rice farm taken over by the birds
and the bees—is brimming with water lilies. Each leaf has collected the dew into a shining drop that rolls like a ball bearing when the wind blows. My
Bush Tucker
guidebook claims that the seeds of the water lily are good eating. After a croc search, I snatch a plant out of the water and pull its pod apart. The prize tastes like sweet peas.