Roads Unknown

(Author’s note – Internet service is scattered and weak in most parts of Western Australia.  I’m posting when I can.  I am trying to update the two earlier pieces with some photos. – JM)

In the morning, we rode south to Cape Leeuwin, a long outcropping of rock that separates the Indian from the Southern Ocean.  (Only Aussies call it the Southern; the rest of the world knows it as the Pacific.)  A tall lighthouse stands up on the rock and broad rollers 10 to 15 feet high are breaking far off shore.  I cannot help looking off toward Africa and Asia.

We enter the Karri forests through what appears almost like a tunnel or a gate.  The wall of trees shows darkness in the sunny afternoon and as soon as we move past the first big trunks the road begins to course like a snake through the unusual stands and unrecognizable undergrowth.   The exit we make puts us back out on straight pavement through bright yellow fields and I roll the throttle back with joy.  The wind bounces against me and I am cruising through another countryside that is new to my eyes.

Camp is made that night along the King River outside Albany after we have dipped and rolled down the Southwestern Highway for several hours.  We find a spot with soft grass, put up our tents, and wander down to a pub where there is abundant drunkenness.  In the Bundaberg Tavern, set below an inexplicable rock mound and hard by a crook made by the highway and the river, we have a few cleansing ales.  On our way back to the tents we pass a broad, stout Aussie who is weaving across the floor.

“How ya doin’?” I ask.

“Better ‘n you, I ‘spec.”  I assumed he was commenting on my sad sobriety.

“You look to be having a good time.”

“I am.”

He walked off but immediately turned around and placed a hand on my shoulder.   His dark beard and flat nose were a bit menacing up close but he was ready to apologize, not confront.

“Sorry, mate.  Didn’t mean offend.  Just havin’ a good time.  Yer a fit lookin’ older fella, anyway.”

He reached down and patted my stomach.  Who does such a thing?

“You boys touring on the bikes?”

“Yeah, yeah, having a great time.”

“Whattre ya ridin’ then?”

“We’ve got hire bikes,” Jack told him.  “A couple of BMWs.”

“You fukkin’ pussies.”

His laugh was too loud not to be joined and we shook hands and agreed with him that Harleys were superior in style laden with much more manliness.  Out here, though, I gladly exchanged testosterone for boring German dependability.

By mid-afternoon the next day, we were moving across the Southern, a stretch of the continent that is fairly dry and reminiscent of the American High Plains.  The Aussies call this their wheat belt and attempt to grow cereal grains with only 13 inches of rain a year.  The harvest has already concluded this January and judging by the dryness of the ground, the brutal heat wiggling up off the tarmac, and the brittle stubble left in the fields, the results were not exactly bountiful.

Jack zipped past me with his blinker flashing and pulled over to stop.  My assumption was all was fine mechanically and if it was not we were a 100 plus kilometers from nowhere and it was named Ongerup.  We made it into town and took a couple of rooms while Jack slept away the strength of whatever demon bug had gotten into his food or water.  The accommodations were unusual, a room about 15 feet across and 40 feet long with a small bed, a mini-frig, a plastic stool, and a toilet and shower separated by a mirror.  A plastic stool wobbled underneath a counter that was supposed to pass for a desk.  Oddly, a new Samsung hi-def TV hung high in a corner on the wall and the ever-present cricket match was still unfolding.

“I’ll bring your breakfast trays over a bit later,” said the girl who had checked us in.  “The pub opens at four.”

I did not ask what a breakfast tray might be but it was not anything to prompt great excitement.  Before I went out to explore the little farm town, the young woman knocked on our doors holding a tray with two slices of white, withered bread wrapped in cellophane, a creamer, table service, and a coffee cup.  She opened the door of the min-frig to check that it had been turned on before she carefully put the creamer on a shelf.

“There ya go.”  She smiled and left, having performed her duties with the same élan as the staff at any five star hotel; except this really, really was not one of those.

There was still a lot of daylight so I wandered around the dusty village, hoping to meet people.  The trees in this part of Australia are fascinating and remind me of Africa.  Called Mallee, they have slender trunks that fork into several reedy branches far above the ground and then weave into a kind of feathery series of umbrella canopies.  I learned this at the Mallefowl Center, which, along with the grocery store passing itself off as a roadhouse, were the two most vibrant enterprises in town.  I, however, was the only person visiting the Mallefowl Center.

“How’d ya like our display?”  The question came from a man who had just gotten out of his truck and was walking into the building.

“Pretty interesting.  I have much to learn.”

“Yup, we all do.”

Fred was a wheat farmer, third generation, in the mallee country east of town.  In his mid forties, he had slightly graying blonde hair, wore flip-flops, cargo shorts, and a camp shirt.  A two day’s stubble of facial growth and a thick shock of dark brown hair made him look a bit more like L.A. than W.A.  He told me about the big Mallefowl birds that were diminishing in numbers and described them as large as turkeys.   I shared a different disappointment.

“I’ve been in your country over a week now and I haven’t seen a ‘roo,” I told him.

“Well, we can fix that straight up.  I’ve got some work to do but before sundown I’ll come by and spot you and you can follow me out to the farm on your bike.  We’ve got ‘em all over the place.”

“Man, that would be great.

Riding around Ongerup I saw no evidence that life was anything but challenging.  A modest caravan park sat at the edge of the town next to the open wheat country; the pub looked dim and old and the tables out front were worn and mismatched.  Ashtrays sitting on them were stuffed with weeks of butts.  The community felt like Arizona or West Texas with all that the world had to offer too distant from the lonely dirt playgrounds and fading buildings of this diminutive town.  I am not smart enough to know, however, what makes a life good or bad or one location more enjoyable than another because there are clearly happy people in Ongerup.

When Fred pulled up next to the pub, he introduced me to Nancy, and two of their children, Abby and Kimberly.  I followed them east of town to a dirt road that led off into dry wheat stubble.  When we got to their wood and brick house, I dismounted the bike and got in the front of Fred’s truck and he took me off for my first view of ‘roos in the lowering darkness.

“We’ve got ‘em all over this place,” he told me.  “They live down here in the paddocks.  They like me.  I keep a part of this farm as a preserve.  They come out and feed on the seed at dark.  There ya go.”

A dozen kangaroo were standing 50 yards in front of the truck, staring at us with defiance.  Two of them looked six feet tall and when Fred edged forward they were gone with a few leaps.

“Look there just, the joeys are off with them.”

Joeys are the babies and they float across the ground with smaller bounds than their mothers but they never greatly lag in speed.  We rolled around the 3000 acres of Fred’s farm and almost every time he wheeled his truck right or left we spotted a “mob” of ‘roos.  These are beautiful creatures even to those who live constantly in their presence.  The small upper arms are deceptively powerful and the claws will rip open the bellies of potential predators, human or dingo.  I watched their arcing leaps through the headlights now and wondered about a land that evolved such a creature but did not bother with the deer.  No deer roam this vast continent but they are raised for the monied folks of Melbourne and Sydney and Perth should they fancy a spot of venison.

“What’s it like being out here, Fred?  I mean, just living, far away, no towns, nothing?”

“Got no boss,” he said, turning in my direction from the driver’s side on the right.  “Well, just me ‘n the bank manager.  And look at all this land.  It feels good.  Just me and the girls.  We do fine.  It’s a good life.”

Fred was educated, a professional photographer, and he chose the farm.  The ground was sloping toward trees in all directions and the lines of wheat stubble were orderly and dusty.  We stopped and looked at the tank he had built for collecting the rare rain waters and then he raised the lights on a corral of alpacas he was raising for an investment before we turned back toward the house.

“So, care to come in and have a chat then?”  Fred had parked the truck and was holding another cold beer in his hand and I saw it in the light being cast from his house out in the emptiness of the Southern wheat belt.

“Yeah, I’d love to….”

Nancy spun the tops off of two beers and Fred sat across from me at the counter and she took a spot at the end.  As we talked, Abby came in frequently to hug her dad.  None of them had ever been to the states and they had questions.

“Texas is flat and a desert, is it?” Nancy asked.

“No, where I live, in Austin, it’s quite hilly.”

Like many women who love their children and their husbands, Nancy has trouble remaining still.  She boiled water on a stove beneath a brick exhaust.  Abby was hungry and Nancy was heating water for spaghetti.  Nancy was tall and dark-haired with a beauty unfettered by makeup and pretense.  She would have fit in well at a Sydney cocktail party with the prime minister or at an organizational meeting of environmentalists out on the Nullarbor or just farm wives planning a birthday party for one of their children.

“So, from Texas?  You know Jerry Jeff Walker?” Fred asked.

“Yep, love his music.”

“What about Lueckenbach?  What was that mayor’s name?  He was a poet.  I can’t remember his name.  But I know all of his poems by heart.”

“Oh yeah, I said.  The ‘imagineer.’”

“Right, that was his business card.”

“I can’t remember.”

“Me neither.  Oh it’s killing me.  I know I’ll remember when you leave.”

Instead, he went into the living room and pulled from his stack of long play albums from the 70s.  He found the recording with Jerry Jeff and Hondo Crouch reading poetry recorded live in Lueckenbach.

“Know the words to all his songs from back then,” Fred told me.  “I loved Jerry Jeff.  Still do, I suppose.”

“Yeah, I enjoy his music, too.  Especially Terlingua Sky and all the stuff he did with the Lost Gonzo Band.  I got to meet Jerry Jeff a couple of months ago.”

“You met him?  Really?”

“Yeah, it was a political event and I was introducing this writer friend of mine.  It was all at Jerry Jeff’s house.  It was pretty enjoyable for me to meet him.”

I thought for a second Fred was looking at me as if I had just landed out front in a space ship.  What I had just related appeared to strike him as unimaginable.  Nancy said nothing.

“You get back, do me a favor, and tell Jerry Jeff there’s a fella out here in Western Australia who loves him and loves his music.”

“I’ll try to do that, Fred.”

Nancy went to the cupboard and pulled out a bottle of scotch and poured herself a drink while Fred and I nursed beers and I told them how much I loved what I had seen of their country.  Australia, the size of the U.S., has only 22 million people.  California has 32 million.

“But California’s quite big, right?” Fred asked.

“Yeah but not that big.”

On the wall in a hallway, there was a map of the world and Fred walked over to space his hands along what he suspected were the borders of California.  His parameters covered much of the Pacific Northwest and from what I saw reached to New Mexico.

“No, it’s not that big.  I’m not sure but maybe 550 to 600 miles from Mexico to the Oregon line and I think it’s 300 to 350 miles across.  Not enough space for 32 million people and most of them live on the coast, almost of third of them in L.A.”

“Oh yeah, L.A.”  Fred strummed an air guitar.  “Tell me about the Santa Anna’s that Steely Dan sings about.  What are the Santa Anna winds?”

I explained about the hot, dry Santa Annas and the fire dangers they bring every season and I mentioned the blue northers that come to Texas and the warm Chinook winds that inexplicably brighten up winters in the Midwest.

“Oh, those are good words,” Nancy said.  “Get me a piece of paper.  I want to write those down.”  I watched her scribble them onto a scrap of note pad.

“Out here we have ‘the doctor’,” Fred told me.  “When it gets real hot and then the wind comes in off the Indian Ocean to cool it down that’s the doctor, lowering the fever, I reckon.”

“Ha, the doctor.  That’s pretty funny.”

After a while they asked me what I did and I told them about how I used to be a reporter and the hurricanes and floods and tornadoes and politicians that I chased and how they all eventually seemed like the same thing to me and they laughed at that idea.  Nancy encouraged me to ride up to the Kimberly, which every Australian speaks of with great pride, and visit her cousin’s cattle station.

“The Chinese have come and found natural resources on his land,” she explained.  “But they don’t want him to shut down the station.  They want it to stay a place for cattle.  They keep asking him how much money he needs for everything and they’ll pay for it all.”

Nancy graciously invited Jack and I to come out to dinner the next night, if we stay in town but I think I have already seen and done much of what Ongerup has to offer by visiting the Mallefowl Center and we have many more miles to cross the Nullarbor.

“We’ll trap some yabbies and have us a yabbie boil,” she said.  “I’ll make up some sauce.  We can put out the traps in the tank in the morning.”

“Yabbies?”

“I don’t know.  I think they are like a lobster, maybe?  But freshwater?”

“Ah, a crawfish or crayfish.”

“Probably that.  You can only eat the tail, not much else to it.  But I make them tasty.”

“Oh man, that’s tempting.  Let me see what my buddy says and how he feels in the morning.  Ya never know.”

Because the dirt road into their house was soft with sand and I felt that big motorcycle squirm as I rode in I ask Fred to guide me back out to the highway in case I dropped the bike and was unable to get it back upright.  At the highway, he jumped out of his truck and ran over to shake my hand.

“Fantastic meeting you,” he said.

“Same here, Fred.  I really enjoyed my time with you all and wish that I could stay longer.”

“Think about tomorrow.  I’m done around here for a while and have no intention to turn a wheel for some time.”

“I will.  So long.”

“Just ten k that way, mate.”

He pointed east toward town and as I rode off I saw the lights of his truck sitting motionless and fading in the great distance behind me.   We did not have the time to stay another day in Ongerup but, eventually, I am going back.

I swear I am going back.

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