“In youth we learn, in age we understand.” – Marie Van Ebner Eschenbach

In my teens, my younger brother bought a motorcycle.  The bike was nothing remarkable.  I recall a Kawasaki 250 with on outsized tank, gray with some red trim.  Lord, though, it felt fast after I finally learned to ride.  Tim let me take spins when he wasn’t riding.  I found I loved the feel and smell of the world as it whirled past and there was an unbelievable sense of power when I rolled back on the throttle.  I thought every horizon was at my disposal.

In fact, they were.  We wore out that bike and I bought a used Honda 450 during my college years and was convinced I had been given a blank check to finance my travels.  The payments were as small as the engine on that bike but I never missed them for fear that a door might close on adventure.  The 450cc engine took me across the Great Plains, over the Divide, down the Great Basin, through the Arches, down Monument Valley, across the Mojave, up the Pacific Coast Highway, and all the way back down through Dixie.  The engine never missed a stroke and puttered me to every one of the lower 48 states, often in the slipstream of a tractor-trailer chasing after that “long, thin dawn.”

The Bike

I graduated to a Honda 750 café racer and then a Harley Sportster and they both gave good service and delivered the optimism of America’s blue highways.  In my hometown up in Michigan, as I frequently disappeared, people often asked of my whereabouts.

“Nobody’s seen him in a few weeks,” was the general response.

“Ah,” a knowing friend answered.  “He must have managed to scrape together five bucks.  He’s gone.”

This was true.

I’ve never gotten over motorcycles and how it feels to sit on one and roll through the scenery and feel the wind and smell the flowers and the musk of the earth.  Lately, I’ve purchased a big Yamahawg 1700cc and have plans to point it westward across the Chihuahuan Desert in Texas and the Great Sonoran Desert in Arizona and coordainates westward toward the Pacific.  West is the only direction I know.  But I am now about to embark on a ride that excites me with the same rush of blood I felt when I first strapped a sleeping bag to the handle bars of that little Honda back in 1970.

My friend Jack Holt and I are off to Perth, Australia to pick up big BMW sport touring bikes and ride across that continent.  We plan to head south out of Perth, on the west coast of Oz, and run down through Bunburry and the wine country of the Margaret River.  The first night we will be looking for a campsite at Cape Leeuwin on the southwestern most point of Australia.  The route is planned to follow the coast to a small town named Esperance and then turn north toward the Great Victorian Desert and the Nullarbor Plain.  We’ll point eastward across the Nullarbor where day time temperatures are presently running at 120 degrees plus, eventually turn south to Adelaide and Melbourne, roll along the Great Ocean Road, cross the Snowy River and the Snowy Mountains along with the Victorian Alps and drop back down into Sydney.  I still cannot imagine the glories of what will be along every curve of the tarmac.  The charts, paper and digital, put us at just over 4000 miles.  Australia has the longest stretch of straight railroad track on the planet, covering 1200 miles across the Nullarbor along with the ten deadliest snakes and the three nastiest spiders nature has evolved.

Jack and I plan to go old school.  There will be no GPS, just a nice paper map and stops in the Outback towns to ask about the best roads and most compelling sites.   I intend to have an outdoors experience, camp in the endless national parks, and meet strangers in their strange land.  I’ve got a small one-man tent, a sleeping bag, motorcycle helmet, gloves, an armored jacket, and a happy visage of how this is all to transpire.

I’ve been dreaming about Australia since I was a kid and have never made the trip.  My interest is such that I’ve read the nation’s great authors and historians and have stared at the roads and the terrain on Google Earth.  Oz has given rise to Tim Winton, in my estimation, one of the finest writers in English letters.  Read his books Cloudstreet, The Riders, Dirt Music, Blueback, or any other and you will realize he is a writer with a touch of immortality in his work.  Of course, Australia, the Outback, and life on a cattle station cannot be completely understood without reading Colleen McCullough’s majestic The Thorn Birds. Robert Hughes, a great art critic who made the work of the masters accessible to those of us with a public school education, wrote the definitive history of his homeland in The Fatal Shore.

The stories of Australia have engaged me, perhaps, because the continent, which is the size of America, seems to exist in a kind of parallel that lags American history.  Oz has its great shame in the treatment of aboriginals just as we have a distinct cultural humiliation in our racial failings.  Australia is, however, similar to America in that all indications are that the culture is driven by a kind of ethic of independence.  There are 22 million people on a continent the size of United States and a certain self-reliance is critical.  Perhaps, though, I romanticize a bit.  I think, however, the reason I fell in love with Texas was because of the frontier ethic of work hard, make it on your own, and help your neighbor.  There seems to be little hope for Australia without that kind of ideology.  The land is too vast and hard to be a gentle friend.

I intend to learn much and return often to Australia with the people I love and even a few whose company I only enjoy.  We “collect” the big Beemers on January 22^nd, load the panniers, strap down the tents, and make for the starry skies of the southwestern coast.  I will look up and see the Southern Cross for the first time.

And, as always, I will wonder how I got here.

1 Comment for this entry:

• 

  Ara & Spirit
  January 18th, 2010 on 7:58 pm

  That is such great news!!!
  We will follow up on you for sure. Never been to Australia. Let us know if they really have a lot of sidecars. I hear they do.
  Stay safe.
  Ara & Spirit