Lost Worlds (33 page)

Finally I found a can. The sneezy-wheezy pop of the flip-top was reassuring. The geyser of warm brown carbonated syrup that shot straight up to the roof and then immediately cascaded down again, drenching me in sticky fluid, was not. But at least it allowed me to hurl epithets by the dozen at the mud and the goo and the black, sodden night outside.

I felt a little calmer until I realized the car was tilted at a rather peculiar angle.

Of course. I was in mud. Hopefully still on the road, but certainly in mud.

I crawled out of the door onto the—thank God—slick but hard surface of the track.

It was cooler outside than I’d expected, unless my body was playing odd tricks with my senses. In fact it was decidedly chilly—that strange chill of the desert night that follows blazing hot days. There were stars too. The rainstorm must have passed over. Unfamiliar patternings of stars. Everything seemed upside down. Southern Hemisphere, dummy, said the quietest part of my brain. Right. I kept forgetting I was now at the bottom of the globe. And a moon. Low and scimitared, just above the horizon. And light. Enough lacy light to see the tracks left by the road train. I traced them a ways over the brow of the hill and noticed that they hadn’t veered an inch to avoid me. Road train drivers just expect all other puny gas-pedal-pushers to pull over far enough to avoid being pulped while they continue their endless odysseys, straight down the middle of these wild, empty roads.

I turned to look at my car. The shiny black Australian Holden (the rental agent had been so proud of it: “Only a thousand on the clock; we saved a brand-new one for you”) was now the same color as the road, a sort of tired earthy red, decorated in streaks and globs and meandering mud trickles.

And leaning at this very odd angle.

Shit! I’d never make Halls Creek unless I got the thing out of the mire.

It looked hopeless but I had to try. So—back into the driver’s seat, start her up, down into first gear. Gentle steady revs at first…then accelerate gradually as the wheels gain traction…only they never gained traction. The more they spun, the more the car eased itself over into the mud. Much more of this and the driver-side wheels would be off the track and spinning uselessly in the chilly night air.

What happens if another road train comes and doesn’t see me stuck on the brow of the hill? I turned on the headlights and the flashers, which seemed a little redundant on this deserted highway…but I wasn’t in the mood to take chances.

An hour passed. A long, slow, cold hour. I’d decided not to use the heater in case I drained the battery. So I sat in the passenger seat, lonely, dejected, and scared.

Another thirty minutes. Not a single vehicle had passed. Not a light or a sign of civilization anywhere. Hardly surprising at three-thirty
A.M.
in one of the emptiest regions of Australia.

I must have dozed off. The next thing I heard was a rasping voice off to my right.

“You got y’self in a right fuckin’ mess, mate!”

I awoke to find a pair of wild, laughing eyes staring into mine from a car drawn up alongside.

“What happened?”

“Bloody road train,” I mumbled, and then smiled. At least I had company now.

“Yeah—I saw him too. Y’don’t mess with those buggers. Y’pull over and hope the hell they see you in time.”

“This one missed me by inches. Crazy sod.”

The young man with long, straggly hair seemed to consider the whole thing highly amusing. I could smell the booze in his laughter. He’d obviously enjoyed a big binge night in town. But which town? Surely not Kununurra? That was well over a hundred miles to the north—the last sign of human habitation I’d seen.

“Don’t think I can help you with this.” He gestured at his own small, battered car. “You’ll need a four-wheel to get you out of that.”

“Yes—I know.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Listen. Lock this thing up and come on with me. I’m at a cattle station few
k
down the road. We’ll get the truck. Leave your flashers on.”

We drove together in his rattletrap car for a “few miles” (actually twenty-seven), then suddenly pulled off the road through a patch of wild scrub and parked by a ramshackle tin shack.

“Hold on a second,” he said, and vanished.

Dogs barked. Doors slammed. Lights went on and then off. He was back.

“Okay, mate. Get in the truck and let’s get that bloody machine of yours moving before you lose it. Wanna beer?”

“Sure.”

We drank and talked on the twenty-seven-mile return journey. His name was Dan Peebles and his checkered career since school had run the gamut from shrimp fisherman to garage mechanic to stock hand to truck driver to gold prospector and back to stock hand. Two marriages, three children, a bout of detox in a Wyndham clinic for alcoholics, girlfriends galore, a brief stint in jail (“th’ got the wrong bugger, but it took ’em two months to find out….”), and now a lonely spouseless life with his dog at this cattle station in the middle of nowhere, with weekend bottle bouts in Kununurra or Halls Creek. (I was to hear this kind of life profile many times from “bush bums” I met in the northwest outback.)

The car was where we’d left it, flashing weakly in the night.

“Okay—hop in. This your own car?”

“No—it’s rented.”

“Fine. Coupla dints won’t matter, then.”

Back in the sloping driving seat, I felt Dan nudge the rear of my Holden with his enormous steel-grille fender. He revved hard. There was a crunching of metal and the splinter of broken plastic (my metal and my plastic), then I was shot forward like a cannonball out of the mire and sent skidding down the track. I drifted down the hill, away from the dangerous brow, and then got out to inspect the damage.

“She’s okay now. One of your rear lights gone, but y’should be fine. Where y’ going?”

“Halls Creek.”

“Still a way to go, mate.”

“I’ve got to get there by nine.”

He whistled. “Might just make it if you thump her. Here…” he reached down and picked up a couple of beers from the floor of his truck, “take these.”

I thanked him and tried to offer a fistful of rainbow-hued Australian dollars for his timely assistance.

“Naw—tha’s fine. Happens all the time, this kinda mess. You’d do the same for me.”

“I’m glad I met you, Dan. Very glad.”

“No worries, mate. Say hello to Halls Creek. I’ll be down there next week. May see you. Have a few beers, right?”

“Right.”

“Good on yer. An’ mind them road trains. Nasty buggers.”

And he was gone. Tearing off into the night, back to his tin shack and his dog and his life among the cattle.

Dawn eased in strips of mauve and lemon over a line of brittle-edged mountains. What had previously been a dark mystery now became a landscape—a most unusual landscape—of scattered, shaggy clumps of eucalyptus trees and low bush stretching endlessly across a golding desert plain. Bulbously fat boab trees rose from the cracked earth. Their bloated trunks, textured like elephant hide, exploded in a profusion of stubby branches, and white cockatoos swooped between them or perched on the top of man-high mounds of red mud—hundreds, thousands of mounds—scattered as far as I could see across the desert floor and up the dry foothills of the ranges. Termite mounds.

A young botanist in Darwin, a fellow passenger on the flight to Kununurra, had described the amazing ecosystems of these mounds as we’d sat during the interminable flight delay, swapping travel tales. Each one apparently is an infinitely complex honeycombed structure containing millions of tiny termite ants whose primary functions in life consisted of constantly expanding the mounds and guarding the vital fungus gardens inside to feed their queens—those portly, four-inch-long sluglike creatures, thick as a thumb and discharging eggs at a rate of thirty thousand per day for up to fifty years! Perfect breeding machines.

“I’ve seen them higher than twenty feet in the northern outback,” he told me. “Given your average termite size, that’s the equivalent of a building two and a half miles high. Frank Lloyd Wright would’ve been envious—he chickened out at a mile. And it’s fully air-conditioned. Air holes near the base and ventilation tubes that stretch up from the nurseries and fungus gardens and open up near the top of the mounds. Problem is these tubes are also nice places for lizards and snakes—sometimes birds—so they keep having to carve out new ones through the mud. If that doesn’t work they go off and build another mound.”

“It still must get pretty hot inside.”

“In the outback they’re real nifty. It gets hot as hell, as you know—sometimes up to a hundred and thirty degrees in summer—so they build the long axis of the mound in a north-south alignment to cut down the direct burn of the sun. The fungus only grows well in a narrow temperature range, so they close off or open up the vent tubes to suit the season.”

“The fungus just grows on the dried mud inside?”

“Oh, no—it’s much more complex. The workers’ job is to gather grass and stalks—anything with cellulose in it—chew it up for food for themselves and the soldiers who defend the mound, and then construct slabs of the stuff, coat it with their droppings, and cultivate the gardens for more food. They also use a similar mix of wood fragments, cellulose, and fecal droppings to make ‘carton’—a bit like cardboard—to build all the internal galleries.”

“What happens when the mound reaches maximum size?”

“Well—that can take a while, sometimes up to sixty years. But as it fills up and the colony gets established, the queen suddenly breeds a new kind of termite—the alates—they’ve got wings and they fly off at set times of the year to breed and establish new colonies. I’ve only seen it a couple of times. Usually at night. They come out up the tubes and cover the outside of the mound in this sheen of bodies. Thousands of them. Then they fly off, usually not very far—their wings only last for a day or so. They mix and match fast into couples, dig small holes, seal themselves in, and mate. Eventually the females become full-blown queens, pumping out the eggs every day like a conveyor belt, and the mound grows. Somehow she knows just the right balance of workers and soldiers to produce. If some of the soldiers get massacred in a battle, she lays a new mass of soldier eggs; if the workers aren’t producing enough carton and fungus, she produces more workers. They’re all carried to the nurseries above the royal chamber and in around three weeks or so you’ve got enough of each to keep the whole colony balanced and healthy. It’s a fantastic system. I’ve been photgraphing mounds for years—they’re really beautiful pieces of desert architecture.”

I paused to photograph them too. Some were thin, spirelike constructions, their outer red surfaces eroded by sudden rains to form towers and pinnacles; others were fat, ungainly edifices with rotund protrusions, rather like gigantic scoops of melting strawberry ice cream.

And then—at last—came Turkey Creek, a ramshackle roadside rest stop offering a sun-bleached straggle of motel rooms, a gas station, store, and restaurant selling strong coffee, sandwiches, and a droopy selection of Australia’s deep-fried delights—potato and bacon croquettes, fried dim sum, shrimp toasties, battered sausages, meat rissoles, and battered “veggies.” Oh—and meat pies (“dead ’orse”)—the ubiquitous Aussie snack of finely ground meat and other indistinguishable items wrapped in a pale pastry crust. Filling, fattening—but otherwise a flop as a tasty snack. Altogether not a particularly enticing collection of edibles but fine for a weary traveler who had escaped a messy demise under the wheels of a road train.

And there they were. Two of those enormous creatures, parked by the gas station and taking up most of the dusty forecourt with their mud-splattered and awesome bulks. A driver was dismounting from the cab of one of them, a Mack truck monolith. Somehow I had imagined such men to be Mad-Max demonic crazy-eyed giants, rippling with Schwarzenegger muscles and clad in tight rivet-studded leather outfits trimmed with the token scalps and bones of decimated occupants crushed in puny little passenger automobiles.

Eddie Simpson was nothing like that. Under a floppy baseball cap printed with small gold letters that read
GASCOYNE TRANSPORT
, a pair of smiling blue eyes peered up from a skinny five-foot frame clad in a grubby tartan shirt, jeans, and a pair of torn sneakers.