Into Thick Air (8 page)

The Oodnadatta Track is not a happening place. At dusk, the only vehicle of the day passes me. I could camp in the road if I like, but prefer the clean sand of a dry creek bed. The land smells vaguely of broccoli. Night comes without a sound, without a puff of wind. Sixty miles of dirt road and I collapse into sleep.

Sixty more miles of dirt to the town of Oodnadatta. The next day I bleed air from my tires, to soften the ride and help float through the sands. It works, but it also allows an unnoticed rock in the road to pinch my tube and give me the first flat of the trip. I pull out my pump and find it perhaps fatally bent. I get thirsty just looking at it and, beginning my descent into lunacy, give my pump a pep talk. “You better work, buddy.”

It does. The road curves north into the sun, and the glare off the rocks has me searching for my sunscreen. The goop makes a nice base for the dust. Late in the day, my skin and everything else turns rosy, including the town of Oodnadatta. There's a pink phone booth. And a pink canoe—no, two pink canoes—parked in the dirt outside the Pink Roadhouse. I roll to
a stop and a kid sitting in a pink canoe greets me with, “I say, old chap.” Tilly is her name. She says I can get a shower at this, the best roadhouse yet. It's 120 miles from the pavement, yet there's real coffee, not instant. Oodnaburgers, too, which a sign claims are “The choice of the discerning palate—and they taste good, too.”

Owner Lynnie Plate, a mother lode of brains and charm, leaves the office open for my exclusive use. I try to get the phone to connect, working into the night. I can't get a line out of the country. Failure, and there's nothing to do but yawn and rub my eyes and see taped to the wall a poem whose final stanza reads:

Then Lynnie comes by and offers me a bloody bed for the night.

 

MORE ROCKS, MORE SAND. Ten miles out of Oodnadatta and the headwind is drying my eyeballs. Ten miles and two hours farther, I bog down in the sand. When I stop pushing there is only the sound of the wind and the possibility that I may not make it to Lake Eyre. I'm not going to die out here, a picturesque sprawl of bones. But if by midday no vehicle has passed and I'm not halfway to the water cache arranged by the Pink Roadhouse, I'll have to turn back.

No trees, no clouds. This is the gibber desert, a pavement of varnished wind-sculpted stones. When the sun is low and behind me, the gibbers glow like burnished copper, but now they're black as charcoal briquettes. Poking up through the gibbers are skeletons of saltbush, quivering in the wind. I push on, chattering across the rocks, plowing through the sand, crossing a basin of dried mud aglitter with half-buried gypsum crystals.

It's the sand that kills me. When I'm stuck again I lay the bike down and take a quick and furious inventory of my stores. The harmonica I deem essential, but I sincerely want to fling the blasted computer onto the gibbers. That I wouldn't have a job without it makes no difference at
the moment. I can't eat it, wear it, drink it. An appropriate term comes to mind:
dead weight
.

Dead weight cursed the earliest effort to cross this desert, the 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition. They aimed to be the first non-Aborigines to cross the arid heart of the continent. Alan Moorehead tells the story, in
Cooper's Creek
, of how they set out from Melbourne with a “fatal luxury of supplies.” Twenty-one tons of equipment for fifteen men, distributed over twenty-three horses and twenty-five camels. Thirty-seven firearms and, inexplicably, twenty camp beds. And, in event of flood, life preservers for the camels. They fretted over the camels, but an expert from India promised that “all would be well if a certain amount of rum was added to their rations.” They brought sixty gallons.

The rum proved popular. Soon the male camels were fighting over the females. The camp cook was hitting the bottle. When others joined in, Burke ordered the rum abandoned.

Sobriety didn't help. The creaking wagons fell apart. Overloaded, addled by bad weather and worse organization, they trudged into the desert east of Lake Eyre and set up a base camp on Cooper's Creek.

Four men, now traveling light, pushed on to the northern coast. When they shambled back into base camp four months later, having eaten every morsel of food including their horses, they discovered that the others had given up hope and left that very morning. The explorers couldn't follow—they were little more than a tatter of clothes hung over skin like parchment. The sole survivor, John King, had wits enough to realize that only the Aborigines could save him, for they knew what to eat.

Yes, things could be far worse. My fig bars are still edible, and I have an emergency box of Coco-Pops. I mount my bike and creep ahead in low gear. The wind ebbs and I'm able to shift up a gear or two. Landforms that seemed impossibly far ahead—long low dunes and the dead glare of salt pans—eventually fall behind. Fifty miles out of Oodnadatta I reach my water cache, arranged by Lynnie and kindly put out by the Williams family, of the nearby Nilpinna Cattle Station. At the same time a truck rumbles up and a federal range ecologist gets out for a chat. Awful nice of the Williamses, he says—let's return the water jug. I hop in for a little detour off the track.

Before I see it, I imagine the Williamses' place—a dust bowl shack with whip snakes in the outhouse and a pedal radio for communications. The pedal radio was another clever Australian invention born of the fantastic isolation of the outback, a shortwave that generated its own electricity so long as you were willing to crank away.

But that was in the 1930s, and it seems things have changed. Within minutes of my arrival at the Williamses', their eleven-year old, Nick, is checking out my laptop computer. He stops singing “Waltzing Matilda” long enough to express his amazement: “What sort of computer doesn't have games?” He drags me over to their home computer and shows me how to play Star Trek.

Paul and Krystal Williams immediately adopt me. Here's the shower, here's the phone, and here's dinner: pan-fried steak (“schnitzel”), heaps of veggies, mashed potatoes, and strawberries. After dinner the young girls, Katrina and Renee, show me their outstanding at-home school, then play a kind of tug-of-war with a large and apparently boneless tabby cat. Nick confesses to me: “We drove our last governess
mad
!”

Mum and Dad offer me a bed. Tempting, but I had one last night and now prefer the comfortable sand of a dry creek. I haven't used a tent since the tropics. Under stars like sequins, I sleep the sleep of a man whose fortunes seem to have changed for the better.

But the road hasn't improved. The next day it's still a mess of pointed rocks and sand traps. At least the wind is sleeping, and by midafternoon I arrive in William Creek, population 9. No creek, naturally. The William Creek Hotel is the sole business, a sun-warped, wind-stripped hovel with flies zipping through the holes in the lopsided screen door. It looks like paradise to me; I wobble in, find a chair, and order an orange juice. It costs the same as water in a place where it hasn't rained in thirteen months.

Meanwhile, the local ranchers with blood-spattered hands (“Been branding, mate”) drop in for a bottle of “VB.” After my juice is gone I figure I might as well have a Victoria Bitter myself so long as the men are dropping coins into the jukebox. The 45-rpm record sticks until somebody whomps the machine on its side. Then the music gets scratching and the joint is grooving to Rolf Harris's hiccupping, accordion-based, acid-outback
version of “Stairway to Heaven.” Nothing else like it, I'm thinking as my gaze is drawn upwards to a frighteningly large bra hanging from the rafters. It's big enough to carry twin bowling balls, but is loaded with coins. I don't ask why. Might be something tragically personal.

The men drink and ramble in a cheerful crude lingo. It's plenty entertaining, but can complicate otherwise simple tasks like finding the bathroom.

“That way, up a chain.”

Thanks . . . but how far is “up a chain”?

“Length of a cricket pitch.”

I'm the only tourist in town until a gang of Japanese motorcyclists roar in and clear out the local cola supplies. They're sweating madly in head-to-toe articulated plastic body armor, looking like lobsters with video cameras instead of claws. They film the coin bra, my bicycle, and the Operation Anti-Rabbit bumper stickers on the trucks (“Eradication through Cooperation”) featuring a devious slit-eyed bunny with killer incisors.

After they tear off, with a vicious blat of exhaust, a mail delivery brings a just-in-time General Delivery letter from my wife, Sonya. It's full of glowing reveries of spring in Arizona, of mourning doves and sweet acacias and baby tomatoes. I'm mortally homesick, and the man at the bar wants to know where I'm heading “with that push bike.”

Lake Eyre, I say—and now I feel stupid as well as melancholy. He doesn't want to know why, and instead asks, “Then what?” That's it, I say. After Lake Eyre I'll ride another day to the next town down the track, Roxby Downs, and catch a little plane out of the desert.

“Lake Eyre,” he says, “is a bloody big stretch of salt. Salt far as you see. There's only one reason to go out there.” He pauses, for dramatic purposes, and to lick the paper on his hand-rolled smoke. “It's the only place where it takes the flies five minutes to find you.”

I'm easily pleased, and this is blessed news for me. Winds willing, sixty miles and one more day to Lake Eyre.

 

CROWS WAKE ME in the predawn cool. They're taunting each other, or me, but it's still a nice alarm clock. I open my eyes and watch color seep back
into the world. Small clouds above the warming horizon are lined up like pink commas. The usual splendid workings of earth and sky—but I worry over the wind-swept curve of the clouds.

Last night the dingoes moaned and cried. When the explorer Charles Sturt came this way in 1845–46, he wrote that the dingoes' “emaciated bodies standing between us and the full moon were the most wretched objects in creation.” Sturt was one of the first to systematically explore the center of the continent, prodded by his dream of an inland sea. He even brought a boat into the desert, “for it will be a joyous day for us to launch on an unknown sea and run away towards the tropics.”

Sturt wasn't crazy. About 500,000 square miles of Australia—a sixth of the continent—slopes not to the sea but instead into the closed basin that is Lake Eyre. The Volga River, Europe's largest, drains a similar expanse, and also flows to a closed basin—the Caspian Sea, watery proof that Europe is wetter than present-day Australia.

Sturt was ten thousand years too late to discover Australia's equivalent of the Caspian, Lake Dieri. After the Pleistocene it literally evaporated, and its ghost is Lake Eyre. Blurts of runoff from rains up to five hundred miles away can flood one corner or another of Eyre. Once every twenty or thirty years the lake can be sixty miles wide and fifteen feet deep.

This isn't one of those years. Like the man at William Creek said: lots of salt out there. Fortunately, that's all I'm expecting. A little bird they call Willie wagtail keeps me company, snapping up flies as I pack my bags. Feathered in formal black-over-white, Willie inspires me to jazz myself up for the special occasion. A fine-looking shrub with cotton puff flowers, ready for the craft fair, supplies a nice boutonniere for my shirt.

When the sun appears and only the solitary can hear the daybreak angels sing and toot their long horns, I set off like a bloodhound, hot on the scent of Lake Eyre. It's a fine start, wheeling along with my shadow in pursuit, the desert air as clear and intoxicating as gin, everything reminding me of why I ride: to be outside. The bicycle amplifies life, making good times better.

And bad times worse. After one hour the headwind revs up and my spirit cracks like the skin on my hands.

To the cyclist, and the sailor, there is never simply a “wind.” It's either a headwind, crosswind, or tailwind. A headwind is worse than any mountain. The mountain delivers tangible rewards: a view at the summit and a downhill on the other side. A stiff headwind drains you out of spite, simply to show you who's boss.

A truck pulls alongside. After the dust blows back, the driver cranks down the window and asks how I'm doing. Miserable, I say—ten kilometers per hour, max.

“Need a lift to Coward Springs?”

I'm not sure where Coward Springs is, but I remember the lesson of the sole survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition: never refuse help from the natives. My rescuers are a wheat farmer and a nurse on holiday. At the spring they're meeting the nurse's son, a herpetologist. When we arrive twenty minutes later, I'm treated to some freshly captured reptiles, including a barking gecko with blinking shining eyes and skin as soft as a peach. With a single croak it wrecks my notion that Australian reptiles are deadly silent.

From Coward Springs it's twenty-five miles to Lake Eyre, which I figure will be a good four-hour battle into the wind. I'm no longer cursing the elements, because nothing is going to stop me now. My knees are aching, but I pedal on and without stopping reach into my shirt pocket for the aspirin bottle and toss back three tablets.

Five miles from Lake Eyre is Curdimurka, an abandoned railroad siding on an abandoned railway. The well still functions, and I stop to fill my water bottles and to snoop inside the stone building. The wind is gusting and the door slams shut behind me.

No more wind. I sit in a chair and rub my thighs and realize how living outside for a month has made me appreciate being inside, out of the sun, sheltered from the blowing dust. One lick of comfort is all it takes to make me consider spending the night inside, but I'm not quite where I want to be.