LAYING VENEER
In 1989 my wife and I took a couple of weeks and
drove from Brisbane, Australia, all the way up to Port
Douglas, eventually getting as far north as the Bloomfield
River. The euphemistically named Bruce “Highway” was
in actuality a narrow two-lane road, rarely flanked by
the comforting shoulders common to American roads.
For long stretches you’d drive for kilometers without
seeing another vehicle. Then a road-train, consisting of
an enormous diesel truck fronted with roo bars (to ward
off wayward kangaroos, lest by colliding with them they
somehow damage these moving mountains of steel) and
towing three or more trailers would come hurtling
toward you, taking up more than its narrow lane and
forcing you off the side of the road where you hoped the
wheels of your vehicle would find enough purchase to
get back on the pavement.
Ah, the pavement. Shimmering with heat, undulating
like a mild stomach upset, receding into the distance
among the dreaming gum trees and grass, ever in need of
upkeep and repair. We passed many road repair crews;
sometimes wiry, sometimes large, always muscular men
clad in light-gray shorts and white undershirts and
floppy-brimmed hats, leaning on shovels or picks or in
the seats of downsized backhoes and graders, cigarettes
dangling from their mouths or beers from their hands.
We rarely saw them working, and tut-tutted at their singular lack of energy.
Without wondering if there might be reasons for it beyond the obvious.
“Take it easy, mate. Have a beer.”
Harbison was not mollified. “National Highway, my ass! National disgrace is more like it.”
The foreman was not insulted. “You won’t get any argument from me. Maybe that’s why they decided to try bringing in some people from the States.” He proffered a cold can.
The engineer deliberately pushed it aside. “Frankly I’m not surprised. I’ve driven over a thousand miles this past week, and I didn’t see one road crew that wasn’t squatting on their butts guzzling that stuff. When they weren’t drinking beer, they were swilling wine for lunch and hard liquor for dinner and after. No wonder your so-called National Highway is falling apart.”
Kent glanced out the window. Moreton Bay was clear of clouds. That meant it would be calm out on the reef. Good fishing. With an effort he forced himself to turn back to the American engineer.
“Your first time Down Under, isn’t it?”
“So?”
Kent sipped brew. “Despite what you’ve seen and what you may think, we can build roads, Mr. Harbison. Look around Sydney or Melbourne.”
“I have. The roads there are fine. That’s not why I was sent for.” He stared unforgivingly at the foreman. “If you can build there, why not everyplace else?”
Kent looked away. “It’s this country. You get out away from the cities, there’s nothing. I mean, you’re talking five million people scattered over empty territory the size of the continental U.S. The Outback isn’t kind to men, machinery, or plans. It doesn’t matter who you put on a job; pretty soon things start to slow down. Work gets sloppy. Machinery starts to act up, break down. So do men, if they’re not careful. Why do you think most of our roads outside the cities are still dirt? Because we like it that way?”
“Because of lack of determination. Because somebody hasn’t been doing their job.”
“They do what they can,” Kent argued. “You don’t know what it’s like out there, what you have to deal with. But you’ll find out. The Outback gets to everyone. It’ll get to you, too.”
“Bullshit. I’ve built roads in the Amazon, in Africa, all over the world. There’s nothing special about the terrain here. I know. I’ve just driven a thousand miles of it. All I found was lousy work and excuses.” He smiled humorlessly. “That will change.”
Kent shrugged. “That’s what you’ve been hired for. Believe me, I wish you the best of luck. The best. I don’t like driving that road in the condition it’s in any more than you did. Neither does anyone else.”
“Then why haven’t you fixed it? Why go all the way to the States to find a supervisor?”
The foreman eyed him over his beer. “Mate, don’t you think we’ve tried?”
It was hot, but it had been hotter in Brazil. Harbison felt a stabbing pain in his leg, slapped fast, and saw the March fly tumble to the ground. He jammed it into the earth with the heel of his boot, looked up through his sunshades.
They were twenty kilometers north of Rockhampton, working on the middle of the highway. Not far to the east was the portion of the Pacific aptly named the Coral Sea. To the west lay the mountains of the coast range and beyond, nothing. Nothing all the way to the Indian Ocean save sand and dry plains and gravel.
It was bad enough here. Scattered gum trees (eucalyptus back home), a few bushes, desultory grasses, all bathed in sunlight that tinted everything beige.
Ahead the road stretched north to Townsville, the next community of any real size and the beginnings of the true tropics. Behind lay Rockhampton, an undistinguished, extraordinarily humid community built on cattle and commerce.
Harbison had three crews going: one south near Caboolture, one working down from Cairns, and this one, in the center. He’d chosen to spend most of his time here, where it would be easiest to deal with all three crews and any problems they might encounter. He watched the men work; good-natured, broad-shouldered, muscular. As competent as any road crew back home, but slow. It puzzled him. They seemed capable enough, but there was no enthusiasm, no desire. They shuffled through their work; the asphalt spreaders, the men on the heavy equipment, all of them.
The only time they showed any spirit was during their regular breaks, which were inevitably accompanied by the opening of coolers full of the ubiquitous, high-alcohol beer. He’d remonstrated with them personally about drinking so heavily on the job but to no avail. The breaks, and the beer, were sacrosanct.
He’d tried putting his foot down with the northern crew, only to have them go out on strike. When he threatened to fire the lot of them, they simply smiled and shrugged, as though it didn’t matter if he did or not. Any new men he hired would act exactly the same.
The road stretched northward, a black arrow piercing the baked landscape. The National Highway. He snorted. Back home it wouldn’t pass muster as a farm road. Two narrow lanes full of potholes, with no shoulders, crumbling into dust at the edges. How eighteen-wheelers and cross-country buses managed to navigate the disintegrating course without smashing into one another was nothing short of a miracle. Back home the entire thousand miles would’ve stood a good chance of being condemned.
It made no sense. Sure the conditions were harsh, but no more so than in Arizona or Florida. He’d ordered repeated checks of the materials, had the bitumen exhaustively analyzed. Standard paving asphalt. The road base had been properly prepared, packed and leveled. It ought not to be crumbling this fast. After several months of work he was beginning to think there might be something in the ground rather than in the asphalt that was failing.
So he’d had the earth itself analyzed, to no avail. It was neither unusually acidic nor alkaline. It should be holding up far better than it was. Kent had shown him stretches that had been repaved only the year before. Already the edges were cracking, breaking off in big chunks, turning to gravel and dirt.
He removed his wide-brimmed hat and wiped sweat from his forehead. Someone in the crew, sitting in the shade with his mates, waved a beer in his direction. Irritably he shook his head and looked away. Kent had been right. The beer wasn’t the problem. There was something else going on here, something he couldn’t put a finger on. But he would. It was what he was getting paid to do.
He looked sharply to his right. There were several aborigines on the road crew. They sat with their white mates, race relations having progressed farther out in the country than in the city. One of them was clapping a pair of sticks together, beating time to an ancient unknown rhythm. His companion was playing that long tube, what was it called? A didgeridoo. Except it wasn’t an actual didgeridoo he was playing. He was cycle-breathing on a four-foot-long section of plastic PVC pipe. Remarkably, the sound was the same as that produced by the traditional wooden native instrument.
The music hung like a fog above and around the gum trees, as if some massive fantastical creature lay sleeping just beneath the surface. Sometimes Harbison found himself hearing it at night, which bothered him. It did not sound quite like anything else he’d ever heard. It tickled his brain.
When he’d asked Kent about it, the foreman had smiled and explained that some of the men on the road crews, isolated in the Outback, believed that the music of the didgeridoo kept away the quinka, the evil spirits of the land that snatched men’s souls from the real world.
He stared. The white roadworkers seemed to be enjoying the music as much as their darker colleagues. It was the kind of camaraderie he’d rarely observed in the cities, where the only aborigines he’d encountered were aimless groups of drunken men and women who spent their time arguing in city centers or sprawled tiredly in public parks. Here, out in the country, on the fringes of civilization, it was different.
He’d seen that elsewhere. In rough country there was no time for such absurdities as racial prejudice. All of them were too dependent on one another, too busy trying to survive, to worry about inconsequentialities like the color of a neighbor’s skin. You were much more interested in what kind of a mechanic he was.
The break stretched on. Several of the blonder workers had shed their shirts in defiance of the tropical sun. They wore shorts and shoes only. Their bodies, Harbison mused. If they wanted to burn, let them burn, so long as they kept working.
He drove himself hard. He was the first one on site in the morning and the last to leave. He meant the two-kilometer section north of Rockhampton to be an example, a demonstration of what could be achieved with American know-how and determination. It would be a real highway: four lanes with divider and paved shoulders both directions. A proper piece of interstate.
It took longer than he’d anticipated, but once the last asphalt had been laid and smoothed, he was able to content himself with the look of it. Beautiful it was, like reflective obsidian under the relentless sunshine, a straight dark path through the gum forest. Only a dead kangaroo, hit by a car the previous night after the new section had been opened to the public, marred the ebony perfection.
Even Kent was impressed. He stared at the roadway and nodded. “Well, I have to admit, you did it. Didn’t think you could, but you did. She’s a beaut, that’s for sure.”
“Three years.” Harbison surveyed his work with satisfaction. “Three years and the whole highway from Brisbane to Mossman can look like this. All it needs is money and the right attitude.”
“Maybe so,” Kent agreed. He straightened. “Care for a beer?”
Harbison almost, but not quite, smiled. “I told you when I got here and I’ve been telling you all along, I don’t drink. Especially not that stuff you call beer. Too strong.”
“Suit yourself.” The foreman turned toward his car. “Need a ride?”
“No. I want to run a final check here. Then I’m moving up to Cairns. They’re still having trouble with their section up there.”
“So I heard. They need you, Harbison.” Kent smiled admiringly and climbed into his car.
Harbison lingered, not wanting to leave, enjoying the looks on the faces of motorists as they shot past him at a hundred kph plus. For a little while, for the first time in hundreds of kilometers, they could actually relax and enjoy driving.
The sun was going down. He slid behind the wheel of his big Holden, almost headed off down the right side of the road before remembering where he was and correcting. On the way south he passed the striping crew, knocking off early as usual. He shook his head. It was a wonder they ever finished anything. Without him driving them, they never would have.
The onset of evening brought with it only a slight break in the heat. The gum trees closed in tightly around him, separated only by the four-lane roadway. A brush fire burned unattended to the very edges of the road. It would be ignored, he knew, left to burn itself out. Valuable wood and forage left to burn, as though nobody cared. No doubt the members of the local fire department were already gathering at their favorite pub, he knew, and wouldn’t wish to be disturbed. Social activity in every little Outback town centered around its pubs, or the bottle shops where liquor could be purchased for takeout.
Near the southernmost part of the new section he slowed, pulling over onto the neat, wide-paved shoulder. Frowning as he climbed out, he walked around the front of the car and knelt by the side of the road. He pushed with a hand and stared as a section of asphalt the size of his fist broke free and crumbled into powder.
It was like that all along the shoulder, on both sides of the roadbed: big pieces breaking free, crumbling, the neatly laid edge already being taken over by eager grasses and weeds. It made no sense. This section was less than three months old. It should be solid, impervious, yet it was coming apart as though made of sand. The asphalt that had been used had been rigorously checked prior to application. The surface was designed to hold up without maintenance for a minimum of two years.
He straightened and stared into the forest. The gum trees stood silent, their pale slick bark peeling like his workers’ skin. It was dead quiet; no birds, no insects whining in the brush. Only there; a cluster of roos, traveling noiselessly in great leaping bounds at the limits of his vision.
He blinked. There were no roos. Quinka? Didgeridoo music drifted through his brain, hypnotic and unsettling. Suddenly conscious of the age of the land around him, of his isolation, he found himself backing toward the car, his eyes trying to focus on suspected movement in the brush. He tried to think of something else, anything else, except the inescapable fact of his aloneness in a vast and inhospitable land.