Into Thick Air (5 page)

“I' ll ask the boss lady.”

The boss lady: head flattened laterally, like an archerfish, ready to spit. “Don't hang nothing up on the tables or the picnic area. Use a gum tree.”

She doesn't seem pleased to see me. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be pleased to see me. My glasses are spattered with bugs and my wet bike seat has left a suspicious pervert stain on my shorts. Maybe that's why real cycle enthusiasts wear black tights. I stay seated, and ask if perhaps there's a line I could use.

“That's for the people who stay here. You didn't stay. Use a gum.”

I hang the dripping tent in a gum tree—a eucalyptus—and return to a piece of cow flesh on soggy white bread, wrapped in plastic wrap. A napkin would be nice. “None to be had.”

The ugly tourist versus the fish lady. Two children scamper out of the kitchen to sit at my side and watch the man who came on a bike. One is voraciously gnawing the ears off her chocolate Easter bunny, and the other is playing with a toy jet fighter, incessantly pushing the button that makes it roar. Sniffing my foot is a four-pound rat-dog with a fogged-over eye.

By the time I pull my tent out of the tree, the clouds are cutting loose with gray whippets of rain. They come and go, but come often enough that it's not easy getting out my little binoculars and spying on the birds. At least I can hear them. The kingfishers speak with voices variously described by field guides as “loud chuckling” or “extended maniac laughter” or a “harsh, cackling scream.” When it comes to parrots, the ubiquitous and sassy galah sounds like a bird in need of lubrication, and the bulky corella almost purrs before it squawks.

Not far from the roadhouse, one of my favorite birds is smacked by a speeding tour truck, right before my eyes. The red-winged parrot pinwheels through the air and makes his last landing only ten feet in front of me. I stop and pick him up, amazed he's still alive, blinking slowly, moving his tongue in and out of a thick red bill tipped with orange. It's the most beautiful bird I've ever seen, and its head lolls to a dead stop.

This road, I'm told, was paved only this month. The old road was gravel, and slow going. Now people can get to Kakadu as fast at they want.

That night I lie in my tent naked, with arms and legs splayed apart to maximize heat radiation. The night insects are going
cha-cha-cha,
like maracas in a hot salsa band. Come dawn, it's 78 degrees. Dew slides down the tent poles, hidden birds purr like cats, and Typhoon Olivia is moving in for the kill. I get up and ride like a maniac, determined to race ahead of the weather. Olivia moves faster, platoons of cumulus with cauliflower tops and bottoms planed flat by the wind. The clouds run in packs, dumping on me, then fleeing so quickly that the sun's out before the rain spatters my glasses. When I reach the town of Katherine I'm soaked from ten such cloudbursts, and I'm not surprised that today's
headline for the
Northern Territory News
is “I AM GOING TO KILL YOU.”

“Don't take it personal, mate,” says a grocery clerk. “The paper will print anything to get you to open it up. Last month the headline was ‘Family of five run over in hit-and-run,' but when I reads the story, it's not people that got run over, but a family of ducks.”

It's another sixty-five miles to Mataranka. If I'm desperate enough I can ride long and fast, and every time I look over my shoulder I see them coming: clouds like wet socks. They catch me, of course. I just ride faster, lashed on by the wind on my tail, all the way to town.

Salvation is a friendly hotel and a little watertight room. But I've only one spare change of clothes, and they're wet from the previous day's ride. Everyone has their private horrors, and for me the prospect of slipping into soggy underwear in the morning ranks right up there with putting my hands in dirty dishwater and encountering a mangle of mystery food.

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.