Into Thick Air (6 page)

So I ride off toward Alice Springs. The flies chase me, but mostly they ride on the back of my shirt. Keep moving and all is well. I find I can scribble, on the roll, shaky notes of whatever catches my eye. Big gourds on vines crawling across the sands. Zebra finches opening their orange bills to lick the leaky spigot on a cattle tank. The purple blooms of a deadly nightshade, seducing pollinators with sexy yellow stigmas.

The spaces between tourist stops are not empty—they just seem that way if you're in a car. Although we can move between points quicker than ever, the places between still exist, so the world is not shrinking after all.

It's a hot day, silencing the birds, everything waiting. The road is hypnotically straight for twenty miles, then doglegs though a pass in a long, low ridge of shattered rock. Late in the day I cross an actual creek and strip to wash in water that looks as though it came from a very rusty radiator. It's better than sweat.

Evening is the sweetest time in a hot place, because although dawn is the coolest moment of the day you know it's just going to get hotter. With dusk comes the promise of the night. The wind quits, the leaves relax, and I keep riding. With the road to myself I ride as the stars blink on and Venus becomes queen of the sky. Birds in the dark whistle laconically, and I ride, all alone, approaching the center of Australia.

 

WITH EVERY DAY CLOSER to Alice Springs the trees shrink and my skin dries and the sun's lower on the northern horizon. But the roadhouses stay much the same: pit stops for most folk, but oases for a cyclist with sixty miles to the next café/motel/pub/gas station. Like Pavlov's dog, I start salivating when I hear the growl of a power generator or see a crude sign painted on the hood of a wrecked car. I know that inside the screen door awaits a relatively fly-free dining room, a bathroom with a sliver of soap, and a counter where I' ll order my road coffee and meal.

“Do you want that steak sandwich with the lot?” the counter woman will ask. Her name might be Bronwyn. The coffee will be instant. “The lot” is a processed cheese slice, carrot curls, fried egg and onions, and a slice each of pineapple and sugar beet heaped atop the slab of meat, all on white bread that soon regresses into dough. One bite and the sugar beet oozes what any biologist would recognize as “warning coloration,” the sort of hue that animals and plants use to say: Eat me and you're in for a potentially unpleasant surprise.

It's no longer a surprise and it's no worse than the usual alternatives: toast with a can of baked beans poured on top, or toast with a can of spaghetti poured on top, or toast with Vegemite, a spread served in the
ubiquitous little plastic cup with a tear-off lid. I've tried them all, even the Vegemite, smearing a dark blob across my toast and immediately recognizing its smell and texture. It's really nothing new, being widely available in the United States. It's marketed under the name Form-a-Gasket, an adhesive I once used to install a fuel pump in my car.

The Vegemite package claims it's “concentrated yeast extract.” That's odd. In Vegemite-less societies I'd never heard the complaint, “I'd love to eat more yeast, if only it were concentrated into something a bit smaller.” So it was no shock when a waitress told me that Vegemite wasn't invented by intelligent life—
Vegemite just happened
.

“I believe it was discovered by accident. They found it while making beer, the stuff that had settled to the bottom of the vat.”

When was that?

“Huh—long, long ago. I can't remember when there wasn't Vegemite. It's a part of regular life.”

Timeless food, reminding me of the truth in Cervantes's words: The road is always better than the inn. He wrote that four hundred years ago, and it doesn't appear that roadhouse food will be changing soon. The people in charge are generally too busy trying to attract more than the usual truck drivers. The signs out front proclaim a Wildlife Sanctuary, but it's just a big cage with a pair of emus or a talking cockatoo. Anything is better than nothing, including mildlife like a goat or a burro. Inside, above the cash register, the parade of animals continues with a display of pickled death adders and scorpions in murky jars. Yesterday's newspaper is for sale, as is this month's issue of
People
magazine, which apparently enjoys different ownership in Australia, with the current cover promising “Rudest Nude Wives.”

Any newspaper article mentioning that particular roadhouse joins the yellowed archives tacked on the wall. One roadhouse also enshrines every newspaper account of UFOs reported over the desert. I ask a waitress about my chances of seeing one. “The owner sees them all the time,” she says while taking a break and a smoke beside a stuffed lizard. She adds wistfully, “But I wish I'd see something more than little lights in the night sky. Lots of pretty stars, but . . . ”

Later that evening I'm lying on my back, smoking my pipe under the pretty stars before the moon rises. Of course they see things out here, I'm thinking—it's the Vegemite and the glow-in-the-dark sugar beets. But when I take off my glasses and look up at the blaze of constellations I see for the first time in my life what appears to be a fried egg sizzling in the Milky Way.

 

NEAR THE TOWN OF ALICE SPRINGS, I stop to pick up a little road-killed lizard and place it in my handlebar bag alongside pipe and sunglasses. Collecting dead reptiles isn't a hobby, but I can't resist a better look at what appears to be a knot of barbed wire. It's called a thorny devil, and its armored skin of deep reds and russets—precisely the colors of central Australia—make it even more handsome than America's horned lizard. Otherwise, the two look so similar that it's reasonable to guess that they're related.

They're not. Separated by an ocean and millions of years, the thorny devil and the horned lizard
look
the same because they
do
the same thing for a living. You would not be surprised to find that steelworkers in Australia and Arizona wear hardhats and gloves. Thorny devils and horned lizards wear spikes and camouflage. The outfit is a lovely example of convergent evolution, the power of time and natural selection to find the right tool for the job—a job that, in the case of the lizards, consists of crouching by an ant trail and flicking their tongues out to snag, one at a time, over a thousand ants a day. They must take their meals wherever they find them, which is often in the open and exposed to whatever predator happens by. That's why the thorny devil and the horned lizard are disguised as dirt and rock (call it Plan A) and are as pleasant to swallow as a pincushion (Plan B).

Even in death the thorny devil is bizarrely beautiful. At least until decomposition forces me to place him back in the desert, just as I reach Alice Springs.

Only sixteen days since Darwin, and I'm dazzled by the superabundance of material goods in a town of only 25,000, over nine hundred miles from the nearest city. There's everything an intercontinental athlete could desire. After a heady splurge at a donut shop, I huff over to the SmokeMart to buy real pipe tobacco, then join the other tourists at the Midland Hotel.

Two young Swiss men are lounging at the pool in swimsuits and earphones, grimacing in primal satisfaction to the music. Mark politely removes his earphones to say hello, and I ask what he's listening to.

“Slayer.”

Sounds like metal, I say, thinking of a piston engine critically low on oil.

“It
is
metal,” says friend Christopher.

“But it's no good saying that Slayer is just a metal band,” says Mark, “because there is speed metal and doom metal, thrash metal and slow metal.”

“And white metal and heavy metal,” adds Christopher, “and death metal and black metal.”

So . . . what's Slayer?

“Black metal,” says Mark.

“Doom metal,” says Christopher, beginning some deep introspection on the role of Satan in Slayer's music. It's too bad I can't pull out the dead lizard and entertain them. Look, boys: Thorny Devil. Death Metal. Roadkill.

I waltz around my hotel room, inspecting the mini-bar and marveling at the ingenious Aussie two-button toilet. One button delivers a petite flush and the other lets loose a heroic flush. It's entirely up to the user to decide which is appropriate. I sit in the shower for thirty minutes, paralyzed by pleasure. As for the rest of Alice Springs, it's a very nice town in which to sleep, to wake, and to leave on a April morning.

I've got sixty miles to the next water, but that should be no problem with a light and fresh wind on my tail. The flies are sluggish in the morning cool, and the road is extra-lovely—no power lines or poles, just a strip of pavement through a land that dries with every mile closer to Lake Eyre. Passing motorists pulling Kamperoo trailers are giving me the thumbs up. The drivers can tell: that bicyclist is happy. A simple rolling happiness, so light it leaves scarcely a memory.

By my own reckoning, I am now a man of the Australian highway. Only occasionally will I be reaching down for my water bottle and then look up to see a car hurtling at me with its driver apparently reading the newspaper. My eyes will bug out, then I'll remember: Australian steering wheels
are on the right side of the car, so that's the passenger with the paper, not the driver.

The car is often not really a car but an Australian hybrid, much like the now-extinct Chevy El Camino. In America, pickup trucks are evolving into something akin to a car; in Australia the cars are mutating into pickup trucks. The front half is a car, but the back is a truck bed to hold the spare, fuel cans, and a four-foot-tall jack known as a Hi-Lift. Up front there's a roo-bar to protect the headlights and grill and a pair of auxiliary lights, so you know what you're running over.

The bigger the vehicle, the bigger the roo-bar, and the biggest of all are on the road trains, the triple-trailer tractor rigs up to 174 feet long and 230,000 pounds—roughly the bulk and volume of eight hundred pasta-fed Italian baritones. Since there's no speed limit outside of the towns in the Northern Territory, they drive as fast as they can manage. So do the cars. I hear them coming several miles off—like a jet they sound, shrieking through the desert at 100 mph. I've never seen cars driven so fast, and nobody at these speeds considers swerving for a mere kangaroo. Hence, the roo-bars and a road littered with roadkill. I've seen more species of mammal and reptile dead than I have alive.

If they're not too badly mutilated I pull their bodies off the road and lay them in the brush, as I do today with a fifty-pound kangaroo. It's still warm, and I find the little fur pouch where they nurse their joeys. A female. I move her for my sake; she no longer cares. She reminds me that this road is like a tunnel for our stoic machines, boring through a nonhuman landscape. The road is paved with asphalt and broken kangaroos, with decapitated skinks and puffs of feathers. Ten feet from the pavement, among the drifts of red sand, are skittering lizard tracks and the excited mumblings of quail. Late in the day I hear the seismic whomp of a kangaroo in flight—I've seen six so far, and scared every one.

The bicyclist pedals along the margin between these two worlds, trying to make the best of both. I like the smooth pavement and the oiled whir of my machine, and I like the green flash of mulga parrots and the slashing stride of sand goannas. Come dusk, when the dunes turn to cinnamon, I find a dirt track leading into the desert and spend my night with the survivors.

“THE COMMUNITY KNOWS NOT TO MESS WITH ME,” says the manager of the Mount Ebenezer Roadhouse. The community is the roadhouse and the scatter of Aborigines idling outside in the final light of day.

What's your method? A firm hand?

“Hard. It's a hard place.” He's thin and anxious and getting thinner. He glances outside. “There's sniffers out there, right in front, watching your bike.”

Sniffers?

“Petrol sniffers. Dangerous folk, I'm telling you. They's camped out all along the next ten or fifteen kilometers.”

I think:
Oh shit-a-roo
. And I ask: Maybe I should camp out in the other direction? Back towards Erldunda?

“Maybe you should camp out in back.”

I do, and I'm so beat that I sleep through the racket of the roadhouse generator. In the morning the manager is still in something of a panic, which appears to be his resting state; it just gets worse from there. “You should see his wife, mate,” says a man sweeping the grounds. “She keeps giving him letters of resignation.”

Resigning from what?

“From the lot—everything.”

It's hard not to be sympathetic. The ingredients for insanity vary from person to person, but one recipe might include an interminable stretch of time at Mount Ebenezer in the company of the manager, the sniffers, and the flies.

My personal psychosis currently involves telephones and the computer. At Mount Ebenezer I cannot send my story without resorting to Plan C: dictating the piece into my editor's answering machine. While he sleeps on the other side of the international date line, I leave a two-minute message before the machine cuts out. Then I dial the twenty-four-digit number and start where I left off. Until I, too, want to flee Mount Ebenezer and the lot.

It's a brilliant day, and the Aborigines have either vanished or linger unseen in the thick shade of the desert oaks (whose leaves and cones more resemble a desert pine). A glorious tailwind pushes me down the road, a
free ride until lunchtime, when I find a picnic ground and an amiable utility worker.

While we share lunch with each other and the zebra finches hopping across the bloody sands, he tells me of the efforts to civilize this desert with power and water. His is a good job, he confides. Yet something nags him.