Into Thick Air (4 page)

There are plenty of wetlands on the ride into Kakadu National Park. Three wide slow rivers slide north to the sea. Bordering each river is an immensity of puddled floodplains, head-high grasses hiding carmine flowers shaped like bells, and silty channels leading to mud bogs and animals I don't want to meet. Not just crocodiles and mossies, but a predatory invader.

It came in 1935, when Aussie farmers in tropical Queensland believed they'd found a way to control a species of beetle that was munching their sugarcane. They hoped to take the cane beetle by surprise by importing a killer from South America, a wonder-toad that grew as big as a two-slice toaster. It seemed a terrific plan, and it's easy to imagine the farmers eagerly watching the first immigrant toads loosed in their fields. The cane toads spotted their quarry, their big trap-door mouths opened wide—and the cane beetles simply flew away.

Cane toads can't fly, but they have the can-do spirit of successful pioneers. That first batch of 101 toads gulped everything from frogs to dog food, from bees to still-glowing cigarette butts (they think they're fireflies). They reproduced with pope-pleasing speed, because a four-pound female can lay thousands of very special eggs. Poison eggs. They grow into poison tadpoles and poison toads.

Crows and college students are among the few animals that dare to mess with a cane toad and occasionally survive to pass on their genes to the next generation. The brilliant crows have learned to flip the toads over and eviscerate them, avoiding the poison glands and eating only the guts. Less brilliant college students in search of a buzz have tossed back an egg or two. Back at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Michael Harvey had told me the tale of “a fellow a year below me at university. He didn't believe me, ate two or three eggs. His heart stopped three or four times that night. He survived, but most other animals don't. Usually you find the dead with the
toad halfway down its throat.” Every year the cane toad brigade marches another dozen miles west into the tropical savannah, and now Kakadu is in their sights. Nothing but aridity can stop them, and I see nothing but water around these parts.

All that water makes a desert man wonder, keeping my mind off a miserable head wind. I churn along in a low gear, legs pumping fast and bike moving slow. Little lemon butterflies flutter by, into the same wind, like tissue paper defying the laws of aerodynamics. The lucky bastards. Alone on my bike, every two bits seems a marvel. The butterflies go where they please, and when they catch the sunlight just so, they shine with iridescence.

I gleam with sweat. Toward the late afternoon the eastern horizon dulls to gray. The wind quits. Thankful for the shade, I pedal on blithely. A half hour later the gray deepens to black and the low-flying cumulus look like they're sending down roots, long tendrils of mist that come down at odd angles. It will be the second storm of the day, and although I found cover during the first, this time there is no place to hide. When the wind suddenly returns I stop and cover my bike panniers with plastic shopping bags, discovering my hidden crocodile chicken. I toss it aside and ride on under the bowling-alley rumble of thunder. The temperature drops as if a refrigerator door has been opened, and hysterical flocks of parrots and cockatoos fly in a panic from tree to tree.

The sodden heat and wrong-way wind—it was all worth it to be here when the storm hits. Dead ahead it comes barreling down the road, a white whirlwind flecked with leaves. I ride off the shoulder, take off my shirt, and hunker down, pleasantly terrified as the leading edge bullies over me with the glitter-bang of lightning. When it lets up, twenty minutes later, the big stems of spear grass are busted and flattened, and I see why the Aborigines call this season Banggereng. It means “Knock 'em down.”

 

KAKADU NATIONAL PARK isn't very popular with tourists during the wet season, for at least a thousand good reasons. That's how many species of fly call Kakadu home, and over the next three days of riding it seems most species form a buzzing banner in my slipstream. Whenever I stop to rest,
the flies take their cue and creep into my nose and ears. I blink and swat and remember that the flies have nothing against me personally—they probably just feel an urge to lay eggs in somebody's brain, and here I am.

Kakadu, like most wet and warm places that have yet to be transformed by people, seethes with life. Anyone fond of diversity can sit in the shade of a beach hibiscus and take in the scent of their enormous yellow blossoms while keeping one eye open for rocket frogs and the fish with the unhappy name of Black-Blotched Anal-Fin Grunter.

Not that I tried to. A few days on the floodplain taught me that sniffing flowers meant snorting flies. I hurt my shoulder throwing a rock at an appealing bird that wouldn't turn for a picture. The blue kingfisher ignored the rock; it wouldn't even give me a cackle. Crocodiles either don't move at all, in which case they're as lively as stones, or they move very quickly out of sight. The one I passed today—it was basking within ten feet of the road—swapped ends in a flash and was gone in a splash.

Kakadu is mostly woodlands of languid eucalyptus with drowsy leaves and streamside galleries of paperbark melaleucas. To the east is the sandstone escarpment of Arnhem Land, but much of the park is too flat for a visitor to be able to see more than a few hundred feet.

But it's what I can't see that makes Kakadu alluring. Most of the park's 7,700 square miles are inaccessible to vehicles, a raw and hectic stronghold of the nonhuman world. From the road's edge you can merely look in and wonder, or you can stop for an hour or a night and poke around. At least until the flies and the crocodiles show up and the sensible action is to run away. Try to zigzag.

A few hours after the last fly attack, a bit of a climb brings me out of the floodplain glop, up to the foot of the escarpment. Runoff from the day's storm is sheeting down an alcove in the rock, collecting in a clear pool too small for crocodiles but big enough for me to palm up some water and splash off the sweat. The trees have sent a spaghetti bowl of roots spreading over the stone walls. A sound like a whimpering baby comes from a colony of flying foxes hanging upside down in the branches. They look like oversized bats but lack echolocation and rely instead on big saucer eyes that reflect redly in my light. Some biologists think they're not bats, but
primates. Nobody's sure, and the flying foxes don't care. They drop out of the trees and beat wings into the night with the heavy flap of somebody shaking out a rug.

The rain resumes, but it's just a sneeze, not another great bawling blowout. I find a broad and spacious shelter under the brow of the cliff. Wetlands are for the birds. I'll take a rock camp, perfumed by flowers I have no name for, serenaded by a bird I do recognize, the “poor-will” call of a nightjar.

I'm not the first to be drawn to this open-air room with walls varnished by water-lain strips of manganese and iron. It's a fine surface for painting, and everywhere are figures of muscular kangaroos and fish and see-through humans with skeletons revealed, X-ray style. Kakadu is home to about five hundred of the original Australians. Some call themselves Bininj, others Mungguy. The rock is called Nourlangie, and one of the paintings features a man with a fish for a head and a serpent for a penis. A sign says it was done by a man, in 1964, painting over a similar, older piece that was, in turn, painted over the same work.

Why the paintings? More signs explain the mythical significance of each work in clinical language, but the interpretation comes off like Freud explaining the virgin birth of Christ. I find a better explanation of the paintings the next day, in an oral history exhibit down the road at the Warradjan Aboriginal Culture Center.

Why the paintings? A quote from Bill Neidjie:

That sounds about right. And it is a big story, reaching back 50,000 years. The oldest paintings show arid-adapted trees and animals, because an ice-age Kakadu wasn't a coastal wetland but nearly two hundred miles inland. That's how far the sea level dropped with so much water captured in the ice caps. I try to imagine Gramps telling me a story that his
grandfather told him, and so forth, a story that extends back in time to when Australia was connected by land to New Guinea. I can't imagine it. In my town you're an old-timer if you've been around for more than twenty years.

But what better way to learn how it might feel to be someone else than to go where they would go? Because no sensible Aborigine would be hanging out during the Wet at Fogg Dam, I aim my bike to the sort of place they might favor: Gubarra Pools.

The way there is six miles of corrugated dirt road plus a two-mile walk, but the reward is the perfect croc-proof pool, guarded top and bottom by waterfalls. The water is stained by leaf tannins to the color of bourbon. One swim changes my mind: Kakadu
is
fit for humans. Gubarra is the sort of place that extravagant hotels try to emulate, but always fall short. Tree frogs and rose-crowned fruit doves don't thrive in the atrium of the Grand Posh Lodge.

I keep my eyes peeled for the archerfish. It's been thirty years since I first found its picture in the
World Book Encyclopedia
(see
Fish, Unusual
) but there's no forgetting its method of capturing dinner. The archerfish spies an unsuspecting insect perched on overhanging greenery, takes aim, and drops it into the drink with a jet of water from its perfectly formed mouth. Anything within five feet is fair game. As a boy I was delighted by the discovery of a fish born to spit, and as a man I'm content to sit and wait for a single squirt.

The canyon funnels in a breeze that keeps the flies down and carries away the blue curl of smoke from my pipe. I dig my toes into the sand and wish most of the world was like Gubarra and Kakadu—say, 90 percent wilderness, 10 percent people and roads. My eco-fascist urges are excited by the setting, but ultimately silenced by no archerfish and the prospect of hunger unless I head to the park hotel. Besides, I must attach my computer to the World Wide Web.

If I lived here, really lived here, I might follow the animal tracks that lead away from the pool and into the palms. With luck I'd find the beast. Kill it and cook it and eat it. But I never was a hunter. With the sun fading and the mossies waking, I flip through my notebook and find the words of
someone who might have lasted a while longer at the pools: Sarah Flora of the Girrimbitjba.

That's what it takes.

Later, I bag dinner with my credit card at the Barra Bar and Bistro. I feel like celebrating after my phone plug collection allowed me to slip my data into the mysterious network that links the computers of the world. If I had a “Sober Driver Card,” I could show it to the barkeep for a free soda pop.

On the jukebox is Van Morrison, and on the bar is a copy of the
Northern Territory News
(“PYTHON POPS OUT OF PRINTER!”). A quick read of the paper and I know my Kakadu honeymoon is over. Cyclone Olivia is coming. The eye of the storm is stuck out at sea, so it's not lethal. Just wet.

Not so long ago I was very fond of clouds, but now they remind me of only one thing: tomorrow, I've got to get out of the tropics.

 

AS I LEAVE KAKADU, the woodland opens and the polished trunks of the eucalyptus are salmon against the black-bellied clouds. The view spreads as the road climbs, and there's that feeling, that good one, of beginning to know a place. At the Jim-Jim bridge a pair of Aborigine kids with faultless teeth want me to join their stone tossing. I make sure to hit the river and miss Mom and Dad squatting on the shore, stoking a fire. Lunch will be two short-necked turtles, big ones, the size of turkeys. Each is a meal that comes in its own bowl.

The only traffic is an occasional four-wheel-drive Toyota outfitted like a submarine, with a snorkel for the engine to ford streams. Invisible lizards
rustle the tall grasses. Gangs of big pink-and-white parrots called galahs yuk it up while hopping indecisively from branch to branch. Some swing upside down, probably just for kicks.

It rains in brief fits all day, then gives up with the dusk. Lucky me finds the perfect camp, overlooking flat-topped hills and the indefinite floodplain beyond. I set up the tent and lie outside on my belly with a book on extinct marsupials and a beer, a Melbourne Bitter, extracted from my sleeping bag. There's lightning, far away I think, then the storm breaks so fast I scarcely have time to grab my bike bags and throw them into the tent. By the time I follow, cursing and stumbling under the stroboscopic bolts, I'm slicked with rain. The storm's a thrasher, but I'm comfortable on my inflatable air pad. Too comfortable, perhaps—almost as if I were floating.

My waterbed rises as a pool forms under the tent. I tear through my gear, pull out the electronics, and heap the stuff in the tent vestibule. Higher and drier there, but when I unzip the screen a tree frog jumps in and adheres to my arm. Its black eyes are lidded with gold and the wings of an insect protrude from its thin lips. I fling it out and search for my spare garbage bags to spread out as an extra floor. Another frog leaps in, translucent green with bones visible under my headlamp. Then another frog, or perhaps the return of frog number one. While you're floating in your tent and reeling under the flash-crash of a storm, they're not easy to catch. I give up and spend the night on my artificial lily pad.

In the morning I'm pleased to find a roadhouse for breakfast just five miles down the road. I say, G'day, I'd like a steak sandwich, but before I eat I would like to hang my tent out to dry. Caught in last night's storm.