Ernie Harwell

If America had a voice, it would sound like Ernie Harwell.  He was resonant and reassuring without being intrusive. Listeners heard confidence and kindliness as a subtext to his descriptions of baseball games. We thought we knew Mr. Harwell but he definitely knew us.  Harwell understood that there was an almost sacred connection between fans and their teams and he always gave us reason to believe in happy outcomes.  If only we got one more runner on and the tying run came to the plate, who knew what might happen?  This was the optimism with which he lived his life and it is narrative he told so well in Michigan, a place where hope can be a transient thing.  He spoke the story of America in the metaphor of baseball.  Learn to lose with grace and win with humility and never stop trying.

Mostly, though, the Tiger’s legendary broadcaster sounded like summer and when I heard him describe a bounding ball to second there were visions of watermelons and picnics and the lake in front of my eyes, almost dancing over the melting Michigan snow banks.  Mr. Harwell’s voice on the radio meant that the sun was moving northward across the equator and all the rhythms of the world were swinging sweetly to a song of vacation and ninth inning walk off homeruns. As soon as I heard him broadcasting each spring, I became convinced I had seen my last snowfall of the winter.  Mr. Harwell was the boy eternal who never quit loving his childhood game and refused to think there was anything more important than being a kid excited about stolen bases and strikeouts and the beautiful line made by a well-struck ball.  Who can say he was wrong?

We lived among the southern families come up from Dixie to work in Michigan’s car plants and there was an overgrown field on the edge of our neighborhood we turned into a diamond.  Our worn out baseball was covered with electrician’s tape and our wooden bats were usually taped and tacked where the handles had been broken. We shared a few gloves and when we played the game we dreamed of making the clutch hit or the diving catch in the big leagues, usually for the Tigers, and always with Ernie Harwell describing our great achievements.  On days that there were little league games, we would play catch near the radio, which had been placed next to a back door, and we listened to Mr. Harwell call the Tiger games until it was time to leave for our own contest.

Ernie Harwell’s voice was the mood music to those lovely Michigan days when cottony clouds drifted overhead, dandelions bloomed on lawns, and almost anyone who wanted to work had a job.  He was the texture to a world where cars were coming off of assembly lines and families were buying homes and people from California were trying to get to the Midwest to be a part of Motown.  The jobs and the technology and the music were all being made in that magical place and the Tigers were leading the Yankees in the chase for the pennant.  Al Kaline and Norm Cash were giants but Ernie Harwell sent them out to live in our houses and cars and made us feel a part of a rush to greatness.

I do not recall a summer day of my youth where I did not hear the voice of that good and gentle man.  I never knew Mr. Harwell but I had heard that he was moral and humble and always had time for the fans that loved him as much as they loved the players.  On my visits back to Michigan as an adult, when I heard him on the radio, I was able to close my eyes and go back instantly to the days when I dreamed of replacing Rocky Colavito in left field for Detroit.  I believed in the place that was implicit in the sound of Ernie Harwell’s voice and it was hopeful and responded to effort and led to success.  As a homesick professional broadcaster living on the Texas border, I once wrote a letter to Mr. Harwell and told him how I aspired to become the Tiger play-by-play man when he retired.  Predictably, he sent back a gracious note wishing me well and thanking me for being an unfaltering fan.

The year Detroit caught fire with race and riots the only voice that I thought was informed by reason was Mr. Harwell’s.  In 1967, when Americans were fighting with each other over differences in skin pigmentation, I hid in baseball and was comforted by the constancy of the game.  Tiger baseball brought us back together and Mr. Harwell’s voice stitched us into a single city.  The next year we triumphed when the hometown team won the pennant and the World Series in the last year of division play.  I was beside a radio and can still recall the description by Mr. Harwell.  “Swung on and there’s a line drive base hit to left field.  Wert is rounding third; he’ll score and the Tigers will win the pennant.  Let’s listen to the bedlam in Tiger Stadium.”

I choose to believe there is a place where baseball is always being played; the sun shines perpetually, there is a gentle breeze to left field, and the players are eternally young and strong.  The stadium is filled with fans and excitement and there is a gentle voice on the radio telling everyone who is not there to, “Come on out to the ballpark.  There’s still a lot of great baseball to be enjoyed.” Those of us who have not made it to the game yet can still hear Ernie Harwell describing how wondrous things will be as soon as we arrive and look out on that perfect green diamond.

We are still listening, Mr. Harwell.  We always will.

The oil flowing out from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico may be under such great pressure that we do not possess technology to stop the tragedy.  Chances are quite good we have no true sense of the dire nature of the situation.  The facts that have been ascertained, however, lead to a dark scenario.

We know that the blowout preventers did not work but we do not know why.  There are theories, though.  The Deepwater Horizon rig was floating on pontoons about 5000 feet above the floor of the Gulf.  When drillers struck an oil deposit, the bit was reported to be at about 18,000 feet, which is approximately three and a half miles beneath the platform.  Does science even know what kind of pressure can be encountered at that depth, under almost a mile of water and two and half miles of rock?

BP and Transocean, which owns the rig, has said there was a maximum working pressure of 20,000 PSI but the system was able to handle a kickback pressure from gasses of about 60,000 PSI.  The breakdown of the blowout preventers can be interpreted to mean the pressure coming up from the hole exceeded 60,000 PSI.  Generally, various mixtures of mud circulate up and down the drill pipe to act as lubricants and equalize pressures encountered at great depth, and this process was said to be working at the time of the accident.  Does this mean it’s possible, even likely, that the Deepwater Horizon encountered pressures current technology are not equipped to handle?

Although BP and Washington are trying very hard to convince the public that everything possible is being done to stem the flow of crude, there is seemingly little that might be accomplished.  5000 feet below the surface of the water with oil blasting out at tens of thousands of PSI, and wreckage from the giant rig scattered about, fixes are not easy to find.  The latest plan is for a special funnel to be placed over the spout, which will then force the flow into a pumping channel.  But how does a funnel get placed over the top of anything pushing at that kind of pressure?  Consider that story to be an unrealistic solution.

A well blowout in 1979 offers a bit of context; except the Deepwater Horizon horror show is already about to transcend what happened in the Bay of Campeche off the coast of Mexico.  The Ixtoc 1 rig blew and began to spew crude that flowed uninterrupted for nine months.  Before the well was capped, 3,000,000 barrels of crude had drifted north to Texas and the northern coast of Mexico.  The endangered Kemps-Ridley turtle, which nests along the border beaches, had to be airlifted to safety and has only begun in recent years to recover in population.

The Ixtoc disaster, however, is spit in the ocean compared to the potential damage of the British Petroleum apocalypse.  If estimates are correct and the current blowout is putting 200,000 gallons or 5000 barrels of crude per day into the waters of the Gulf.  Ixtoc’s blowout was not capped until two relief wells were drilled and completed at the end of those nine months, and regardless of optimistic scenarios from the federal government or BP, relieving the pressure on the current flow is probably the only way to stop the polluting release of oil. The only way to relieve that pressure is with additional wells. No one is going to honestly say how much time is needed to drill such wells but consider the scope of environmental damage we are confronting if it requires at least as long as Ixtoc?  Nine months of 5000 barrels of crude per day ought to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a lifeless spill pond and set toxins on currents that will carry them to deadly business around the globe. And there is no way to know with any certainty if nine months will be sufficient time for capping.

Nor are there guarantees relief wells are the fix. What do we do, in that case?  Humans cannot function at 5000 feet of ocean depth and the mitigation efforts currently are being handled by robotic remotes.  What is left to us as a solution other than an explosive device, which is often what is deployed during above ground blowouts.  Given the pressures reported and the amount of flow, we may need a bunker-buster nuke to be placed over the wellhead.  We can then begin to talk about the water pressures caused by burst at detonation and residual radiation.  Is that a better or worse situation?  Certainly, aquatic life in the Gulf of Mexico is doomed unless there is a reclusive genius to step forward and save us from our great failure.

The attorney general of Texas, Greg Abbot, informed reporters that it appears Texas will escape harm.  Abbot’s visionary powers must exceed his legal skills since there is no way to know when and even if the well will ever be capped.  In fact, if there is no plug placed in the hole, it is not inconceivable that no part of the planet’s oceans will escape harm.  According to the non-profit, non-partisan, Air and Waste Management Association, a quart of crude oil will make 150,000 gallons of water toxic to aquatic life.  BP, which has been marketing itself as an energy company “beyond petroleum,” is setting loose upon the planet what is quickly turning into humankind’s worst environmental disaster.

Tone-deaf politicians, especially from Texas, are trying to manage public fears, which is exactly what the state’s former governor attempted in 1979.  Bill Clements, who was one of the founders of SEDCO and owned the Ixtoc platform, originally described concerns as “much ado about nothing.”  As oil moved toward the pristine beaches of the Padre Island National Seashore, his advice was to “pray for a hurricane.”  I confronted Clements on his lack of concern and he stuck his finger in my chest and told me the state was not hurt.  Thirty years later the tar balls still roll in with shifts of tide and wind and oil was everywhere on the beach for years.

Anyone who thinks this tragedy is not going to result in massive kills of marine life is either blind, ignorant, or in denial.  The one scenario that we all refuse to confront is the possibility that it is beyond our capabilities to stop this undersea blast of oil.  If that is the case, the flow continues until the pressure eases, which might be years.  How much ecological injury will that cause our planet?

Nobody knows.

The governor of Texas is a weinie.  I can’t reach any other conclusion after reading the report about him shooting a coyote that threatened his daughter’s puppy.  Rick Perry said that he was jogging on a hill country trail near where he lives in a rented home and the animal came out and threatened his little dawgie.  Governor Gun pulled out a Ruger and sent the coyote to the big lonesome and empty prairie coyotes go to when governors gun them down.

But I’ve got some questions, your governorship.

First, I can say I’ve run thousands of miles on trails in Texas and I have never once thought of carrying a gun.  Well, yeah, a squirt gun.  I used to have a Doberman that came after me on a dirt road and I solved that by mixing some ammonia into water and putting it into a little squirt gun.  Got the big dog in the eyeballs next time he came barking after me and when he saw me pass by a few days later he ran away more like a chicken than a dog.  No shot fired in anger.

Perry said he carried the gun because he was afraid of snakes and that a number of people living in that area have lost pets to wild animals.  Well, Governor Gun, that’s the way nature is ordered.  Big fish eat little fish.  Wild animal eat domestic animal.  You don’t want your cat turned into a coyote hairball, keep it in the house.  But afraid of snakes and you carry a gun?  I don’t know any trail runner under the Lone Star sky that hasn’t come across a rattler or seven.  And not one of them ever said, “Hey, I think I’ll carry a gun and kill rattlers the next time.”  Unless you surprise a rattler, it’s going to slither away real danged fast.  And governor, I’ve seen you run; you aren’t going to surprise a snake or a turtle.

A Texas rattler to be fearful of.....

Too much of yer yarn just doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.  Whenever I see you plodding around Lady Bird Lake, you generally have two DPS guys, but always at least one trailing you. Sometimes they run.  Often they are on bikes.  And they have guns.  What the hell do you need a gun on a running trail for when you’ve got, according to the AP story, two DPS security guys running with you?  Three guns and one coyote?  That’s just not an honorable way to handle these things governor, and not the way we do it in Texas.

And, although I’ve never done it, seems to me like running and carrying a gun has to be kind of uncomfortable.  I read you were packing your pistol in a holster.  I just find it odd that you put on the running shorts, the Nike shoes, a tee shirt, and a ball cap, and then strapped on your coyote widow maker.  Who the hell does such a thing? And not just a regular ol’ 380 Ruger.  This baby has a laser sight.  You’re really scared, aren’t you?  Those nasty slithering, phallic things on the ground don’t have a chance, do they? Seriously, you are so afraid of snakes that you armed yourself to go for a run?  Aren’t there some other unsettled issues that you aren’t talking about here?  Let me also add that you ought to be thankful for your Anglo-Saxon heritage.  Being ethnic and running with a gun in Texas, on a trail or a road, might end up with a different living creature other than an animal being shot.

There’s something else.  If this happened in February, why are you just now sharing this?  It seems to me that you would have been a little excited the day you turned coyote killer and you might have mentioned it to a reporter or a political pal that could have let it slip to someone, somewhere.  But nothing until two months later?  Sorry, sounds a little too neat.  And if you were trying for the tough guy image, whacking a coyote isn’t really gonna do that for you.  Nor is packin’ heat cuz you are afraid of things that go slither in the sun.  I guess I have to say I don’t believe your story.  I need testimony or signed witness statements from your two backup gunmen in the DPS.  That might convince me.

Or let’s just do this by the books.  The law books.  If you were accused of being a coyote killer, the law would have to respond to habeas corpus and bring up the body to prove someone had been killed.  Or you’d have to be cut loose to deal with more snakes.  But let me turn that around on you.  Prove you killed a coyote.  Habeas coyote corpus.  Ah, but you can’t produce a body because the critter has been gone for two months.  You said he’s “mulch.”

So’s your story, governor gun.

Time wrinkles a man’s memory as much as it does his skin.  There is also a chance that a few dozen electroshock sessions had ruined my father’s recall.  In his final years Daddy was unable to remember ever striking his wife or children or how his whirling fists had terrorized the people he had said he loved.  His children saw this loss of memory as a kind of grace, though Ma’s anger had not greatly lessened and she thought Daddy needed to be reminded of the pain he had wrought on his family.  Instead, his hazy reminiscences carried him back to when he was a boy in the South and they created for him a pair of attentive loving parents and a bountiful farm he shared with his siblings.  Often, I saw him staring into a blank distance and smiling and I thought I knew what he was seeing.

Although I had not been responsible for the breakage, I wanted to fix what might be repaired between my father and me.  I was never going to be the son who hunted and fished and took joy from the sound of a gun in the woods but there was a chance we might be comfortable with each other, if not close, and maybe he could come to understand his eldest son.  We were given some extra time when Daddy’s broad chest was split for a heart bypass and his life extended after he had retired to Mississippi.  All his years of hard work on the assembly line and the exercise he did on a weight bench in the back yard did not much reduce the damage caused by the decades he spent loving fried eggs, ham, bacon, steak, butter, ice cream; or anything he might eat that could be deep-fried, grilled, buttered, or sugared.

Living on the Line

On one of my last visits to Mississippi, I sat on the steps of Daddy’s back porch as he sipped a tumbler of whiskey flavored by a peppermint candy he had dropped into the bottom of the glass.  When he was young he rarely drank but a friend from the factory had told him that a spot of whiskey now and then had the power to soften the arthritic pain in his joints.  He put the glass between his feet on the porch and then looked at me as if he were going to make a profound confession.

“You know, when I was a boy, horses could still fly, Jimmy.”

I do not know if he thought I had an education that might confirm what he had just said but he looked at me in anticipation of my response.

“Daddy, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Hell, I mean what I said, that’s what I mean.  Horses could still fly.”

He ground his lower teeth against his uppers and pursed his lips like he was expecting me to provide evidence he was wrong.

“Daddy, horses could never fly.  That’s silly and you know it.”

“Aw hell, Jimmy, don’t tell me.  Horses could fly when I was boy.”

“Why in the world would you say such a thing?  Can you imagine a horse flying””

“I don’t have to imagine it,” he growled.  “I done seen it, buddy boy.  And so did Poppa.  He seen it all the time when he was a boy, too.  They was just getting’ to where they couldn’t fly no more when I was little.  They did what you call evolve a way from it, is what you call it.  But we saw ‘em flying every mornin’ when we went to chop cotton.”

“You saw a horse fly?”

“I done told you that already, damnit.”

Daddy reached for his tumbler of whiskey and ice and turned his head away, disgusted by my unwillingness to accept such an idea.

“Well, I’m telling you, horses can’t fly,” I said, softly.  “They never could, Daddy.  There are horses in mythology that have wings and flew but there has never been any such animal that has lived on earth.”

“Aw, go to the devil; you don’t know what in the hell you’re talkin’ about.  What do you think Poppa and I saw then?  He seen ‘em before 1900 and I seen ‘em when I was comin’ up in the 20s.”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I have no idea.”

“You damn sure don’t have no idea,” Daddy told me.  “’Cause I know what I know and I know horses used to be able to fly.  Cain’t nobody tell me what I seen with my own two damned eyes.”

He threw back his head and swallowed a gulp of whiskey and looked at me again.  He knew who I was but my father never understood what I was.  Often, he referred to my career in television journalism as “that TV doin’s’.”  The business left him unimpressed because, while visiting a broadcast newsroom where I was working, he had been able to read as quickly as the AP wire clicked out copy onto a paper spool.

“You know, maybe you are right,” I told my father.  “I guess I need to do some more research.  I never heard of horses flying but I suppose that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  I’ll check it out.”

“You do that, buddy boy,” Daddy said, victorious in his persuasion.  “You’ll find out what I already know.”

The pecans were falling from the trees early that year and we went out behind Daddy’s house and gathered a large bag.  He walked me through his garden and explained what he grew in each crop row that summer and told me about the boy who came and chopped the weeds because Daddy was no longer able to swing a hoe.  A healthy garden with good tomatoes and corn was always a matter of pride to my father and to be able to grow things well was an important measure of a man.

“You shoulda tasted my tamaters, buddy boy,” he said.  “They was as big as my fist and the sweetest you ever did see.  I had more corn than I could put back.  I got a freezer full of it and gave the rest to some colored folks.”

Back inside, we cracked the pecans and spread their fruit across a cookie tin.  Daddy got out a stick of butter and sliced thin pats to place on each pecan half and then he used a shaker to sprinkle salt across the top.  As they heated in his oven, we shared the whiskey and he told me more stories of being a boy during the Great Depression.  The one he had been repeating since I was little was about a headless horseman my grandfather and he had come across one morning while taking a buckboard wagon loaded with hay into town.

“He had his hands up just like this,” Daddy said, holding his arms out.  “But they wasn’t no hands and the reins was just floatin’ in the air at the ends of his sleeves.  And right where his neck shoulda started and his head oughta been there wasn’t nothin’ but space and a big ole top hat was ridin’ in the air above the empty place where his head was supposed to be and he was ridin’ a big, ole painted mare in circles around a oak tree in front of a farmhouse.  Poppa said, ‘Son, do you see what I see?’  And I told him, ‘I sure do, Poppa.’  He told me, ‘Don’t you ever talk about this to no one, son, ‘cause all they’ll do is think you’re crazy.’  I never did tell a soul until Poppa died and then I told all y’all kids.”

After eating the pecans, Daddy asked me to draw him bathwater and pour into it a bottle of vinegar and a half box of Epsom salts.  Hot water and vinegar when combined with the salts, he had heard from someone in Starkville, was a cure for arthritis.  His bones and all their connective tissue had grown creaky and aching from the uncountable hours he spent lifting bumpers out of a General Motors metal press and stacking them on wooden pallets.  While he soaked, I wandered around Daddy’s cluttered and disorganized house and wondered how he made it alone, what value or purpose did he see in his isolated existence in the far woods, a thousand miles from his children.

The next morning, he drove me around in his used Lincoln Town Car and showed me where my grandparents were buried.  I had never met my grandfather and have only a vague early childhood memory of a brief encounter with my grandmother.   Daddy went past a high school and pointed out the window.

“That’s where I ‘quituated,’” he said.  “Poppa needed me to help on the farm during the Depression.”

As hard as I tried while staring at his old school, I was unable to imagine my father sitting at a desk and learning from teachers and books. During the course of his entire life, I had never seen Daddy with an open book in his hands and that seems to have had much to do with his economic destiny.  In over three decades of working the line and the metal presses, his gross annual income had rarely topped $10,000.

Because most of his children and grandchildren were living around Flint, Daddy gave up on Mississippi and moved back to Michigan for his final years.  He had hoped to have constant visitors to his little house in Sturgis, Mississippi but his children had busy lives and were inclined to spend vacation time in locations slightly more appealing than rural Mississippi.  Daddy lived frugally when he returned to Michigan, as he always had, in a house less than a mile from Ma’s old restaurant up by the Chevrolet plant, Joyce’s Coffee Shop, and he was only a few more miles from the assembly lines where he had bent his back to the hard work he had endured to provide for his family.  When he needed clothes, he often went to the Goodwill Store and bought brown paper bags full of unidentified articles of clothing for $1.50 and then took them home and picked through them for anything that might fit.

Before I left him that last time in Mississippi, I asked my father what he thought of the way his life had turned out.

“I just never had me a chaynch, Jimmy,” he answered.  “The crops was never good enough down here to be a farmer and I never did make enough money on the line up north.  I never got me a chaynch to do what I wanted.”

“I guess that was to be farmer?”

“That’s what I wanted when I come home from the war.  But when I was up north if I’d of had me some money I’d a bought some land around them factories and gotten rich.  I wanted to buy that lot on the corner of Hill and Fenton Roads years before they’s anything there and now they’s a big ol’ McDonald’s and grocery store there.  I’d a made a million dollars, buddy boy.”

“Did you hate working in the factory and building cars you couldn’t afford to own?”

“I hated a lot of stuff.  But in them days we did what we had to do.  The Buick job made the house payment and fed you kids.  But that’s about all it ever did.”

“Do you regret going up there, Daddy?”

“Naw.  I don’t think about it much.  Wasn’t no point.  I did what I had to do to provide.  I had yer mumma and three of y’all kids and it was all the work I could get so I took it.  That’s all.  When there was six of y’all, I had more kids than I could afford.  I never had time to look up and think about anything else.  Besides, I didn’t have nothing to sell but my arms and my back.”

“You think things might have been different for you if you would’ve stayed in Mississippi and married a girl from down home?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think I was ever gonna have too much just ‘cuz a the way I come up, Jimmy.  We was raised to grow crops and take care a animals and they just wasn’t much use for that after a while.  I reckon I was lucky I got one a them factory jobs in Michigan.  I know it wudn’t a hell of a lot a money but I did what I could, that’s all.  I don’t know that I’d of had me any better chaynch.”

While his heart began marking its final beats, Daddy lay in the hospital and accorded me a kind of acknowledgement that would have meant nothing to most sons.  My brother Tim, who was handling Daddy’s finances, had also been asked to take care of our father’s old Lincoln.  While I was visiting Michigan from Texas, Daddy urged Tim to let me into his automotive fraternity.

“Why don’t you give Jim the keys to my car so he can take it for a drive and see the kinda ride I like?” Daddy asked.

Tim smiled and we later drove the aging brown Lincoln around Flint.  This seemed to be as close as my father was able to draw me until his failing heart required that his leg be amputated.  I was at his bedside while the drugs were still massaging his nerves and he reached up and pulled me down toward his chest.

“I love you, son,” he whispered.

The words seemed so simple to say.  I wish I had heard them frequently as a boy but here they were, and no matter how much wrong he had done, I loved the sound of that sentence from my father.  What son would not?

“I love you, buddy boy.”

In his dreams as he tilted slowly toward his end, Daddy had begun to be visited by his Uncle Horace, who had taken him hunting and fishing as a boy and who he had loved the way he would have liked to have loved his father.  Horace was constantly gliding through Daddy’s sleep and telling him he was waiting for him and where they were going to find abundant deer and catfish and bass and the kinds of horses they were going to ride across eternity.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna see Momma and Poppa after I’m gone,” Daddy told me.  “I hope I do.  But I’m damned sure gonna be with Uncle Horace.  Ain’t no doubt in my mind, buddy boy.  He’s waitin’ on me right now.”

Before he was transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation after the removal of his leg, Daddy pleaded with doctors to freeze the excised limb so it could be buried with him when he died.  He was insistent that he go to the next place with all of his limbs, the whole and robust man he had been when he walked through the world.  The doctors convinced him they were not allowed to preserve severed limbs and that God would make him complete again after he was gone.

Leaving the nursing home, Daddy was transferred to a group housing facility where he lived in a private residence with other people dealing with infirmities.  My sister Becky visited him often and he asked her to order him an inflatable raft because he intended to go fishing as soon as he recovered his health.  Daddy had focused his contemporary dreams on an area north of Las Vegas, which he had decided was crossed by streams overcrowded with fish and there was rich soil to grow all the crops he needed to feed himself.  No one was able to convince him that this spot on the map was a desert.  Becky asked him how he might get himself into the blow up raft with just one leg and he said that he would “damn sure figure it out by himself and he didn’t need nobody, no way, no how to tell him how to do nothin’.”

Exasperated by what he viewed as near imprisonment, Daddy managed to slip away from the care facility in his wheelchair.  No one knew where he had gone but Daddy had always had strength and independence and he was having difficulty relying on other people.  He was discovered many hours later a few miles distant from where he was living when someone had called to inquire about his identity.  Not too long after he was returned to his group home, a caregiver found my father lying motionless on his side.  His angry heart had stopped and all of the fierce blood that had flowed through him for so long had pooled along one side of his body.

The muscles of Daddy’s arms had atrophied and shriveled and when he died he had the same skinny bird-like appendages that he had carried around as a teenager.  I still thought he looked large, though, even in his final repose, just as he did when he was standing upright and daring the world to test him with whatever it wanted.  The part of his life that I was proudest of was his time serving his country during World War II and I arranged for his casket to be draped in a United States flag.  Daddy was buried off of Hill Road not far from the factory where he had worked and the house that he and Ma had purchased when they were young and hopeful.  Becky and her husband Skip take a blanket to lay upon his grave once each year and I have Daddy’s flag in a triangle box above my writing desk down in Austin.  He belongs to the soil of Mississippi but even in death he wanted to be near his children in Michigan because he had at last come to know and love them and he wanted whatever there was to have of us even after he was gone.  Daddy kept an empty space in the graveyard beside him for Ma, just in case the girl he never stopped loving chooses, in the end, to come back to him.

“I don’t have no regrets about nothin’,” was one of the last things my father had said to me.  “I lived in the best times they was to live in.  I seen human bein’s go from ridin’ in buckboard wagons to walkin’ on the moon.  You cain’t see much more ‘n that, buddy boy.”

I think of him that way now, as a man who did not waste time second guessing himself, and who did not see the Buick car plant as a place that killed him but as the source of his livelihood and the method he used to care for his family.  Daddy and Ma scraped by on small collections of ten dollar bills to make their 62 dollar a month mortgage payment but I once had a new bike and a baseball glove and a bed to sleep in and fairly regular meals.  We were not privileged but the rise of the automotive industry almost certainly saved us from dirt poor farms down in Dixie.  There was more to our lives than there would have ever been if Daddy had stayed in the South busting the soil with his muscled back.

I hope he knows he made a good choice.

.

He started off toward the political precipice exactly a year ago; Perry turned down $556 million in federal funds for extended unemployment benefits for 45,000 Texans still looking for work.  He said there were too many strings attached.  What were these horrible requirements Texas had to abide by in order to bring back to the state some of the hard-earned tax dollars that had already been paid by the employed of Texas?  Horrendous, socialist demands like extending benefits for laid-off workers in retraining programs and increasing benefits for individuals who had lost their jobs and had dependents.

In an almost incomprehensible turn of hypocrisy, a few months later the longest serving governor in Texas history asked the federal government for a loan of $170 million to cover its existing unemployment benefits.  Because that was only a stopgap amount, the total is expected to reach $650 million in federal loans, which is about $100 million more than he rejected in stimulus money.

As they used to say in the Vega-Matic commercials: but wait!  There’s more!

When the stimulus package was passed by congress in January, the man from Paint Rock said he was not going to apply for the money Texas was eligible to receive for improvements in public school performance.  By some accounts, Texas could have gotten up to $700 million.  Our governor said he did not want to tie his great state to federal performance standards.  Of course, when his predecessor became president and forced the fatuousness of No Child Left Behind down America’s education throat, Perry made not a chirp.  And hell, there wasn’t even any money attached to that invasive piece of nonsense.  If Perry were protecting an exemplary education system by turning down stimulus money, his decision might have been logical.  Unfortunately, the Lone Star State is number 50 in our republic in percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and we are near the bottom in SAT scores.  According to the National Education Association, our current expenditures per student rank 44^th among states.  So, yeah, we’re in good shape.  Thanks for the offer of $700 million, Mr. President, but we’ve got no problems.

Peace like a Plane?

The convolutions of Mr. Perry’s gray matter must be a sight to behold because he’s now got another contradiction he is pursuing that is flat dangerous.  On the right side of his mouth, he speaks about secession and keeping Washington out of our lives but on the left side of his barbecue pit he’s now demanding the federal government deploy unmanned aerial drones along the US-Mexico border.  How does one secede while also using federal troops to militarize a border?  The recent killing of US Foreign Service workers in Ciudad Juarez has prompted the new round fear mongering.  Even if the assassinations were not a case of mistaken identities, as has been reported, putting drones into the air is a permutation of a declaration of war.  The war between the drug cartels has resulted in killings north of the Rio Grande but that is not a recent development and it is unclear how having the intrusiveness of big brother’s eye-in-the-sky floating overhead might do anything to prevent that bloodshed.  Perhaps, the governor ought to ask for enough spy planes to patrol the suburbs of Dallas and Houston and San Antonio and Austin and every other major city in America where those Mexican drugs are consumed.  There would be no fighting and dying over the lucrative supply lines in Mexico if there were not a burgeoning demand for narcotics in the land of the free.

The US-Mexico border region is an enchanting and mysterious place.  I lived near the big river for many years and I return on a regular basis.  Building walls and sending drones and radar blimps into the air will continue the transformation of a once-friendly frontier into a kind of war zone.  Nothing will be solved and the stakes will only get higher. I wonder what it will be like to be camping in the splendid Chisos Mountains on the South Rim, looking out at sunset from 8000 feet about the desert floor, and hear the distant drone of a drone.

A friend of mine, who spends most of his time in the ghost town of Terlingua just west of Big Bend National Park, fears the drones will be secretly armed and that one night when he is driving home from the Boat House Bar or Long Draw Pizza in the blackness of a western night, he might get lost on those bladed desert roads, look suspicious, and get lit up by a trigger happy twenty something staring at a remote screen in Dallas.                                  

The Lost Boy

In a way, that has already happened.  In 1997, the US deployed Joint Task Force 6, a military patrol of combined armed services, along the remote stretches of the border east of El Paso.  They wore camouflage and sunglasses and hid in the creosote and cactus.  A Marine saw what he thought was a drug smuggler in the distance and then he convinced himself the criminal had pulled a gun.  He aimed down range, shot, and killed an 18 year-old goat herder named Ezequiel Hernandez, Jr.  The boy was bringing the family’s goats up from the river where they had been drinking water.  He is buried on a lonely mesa with a view of the mountains to the west and Mexico to the south.  The house where he lived his entire life and the spot where he died are all visible standing next to his grave.  His impoverished family had little more than stones and a wooden cross his to mark the place where he lies.

An Unlived Life

And anyone who thinks that drones and guns and walls and soldiers will solve the problems on the border ought to stop by and visit Ezequiel’s grave.

Louis Rove’s personal life was nobody’s business until his adopted son decided to make gay rights a wedge issue in the campaigns of George W. Bush.  Rove, who recently pleaded for privacy during the divorce from his wife Darby, pushed policies in campaigns that were designed to interfere in the private lives of gays, lesbians, and transgender people.  Rove has no right to demand privacy when he refuses to respect it in the lives of other individuals and families.  His relationship with his father is context for his politics and interest in his father is a consequence of those politics.

When he was interviewed by Matt Lauer on The Today Show, Rove said he had no idea if his father was gay.  If this is the case, Karl was one of the few people who knew Louis Rove that was not aware of his sexual orientation.  In our book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power, (I disagreed with the publisher’s hyperbolic subtitle), I interviewed several people in Palm Springs, California about Louis Rove and his politically ambitious son.  Joseph Koons, who was Louis Rove’s best friend for 13 years, told me, “Louie didn’t hide the fact that he was gay. But he didn’t play it up either.  We had lots of gay and straight friends.  I was never the effeminate type and neither was Louie.  We didn’t play it up that way, either.  But he was gay.  And so am I.”

Although Joe Koons, a retired insurance company executive, was the only one of Louis Rove’s gay friends to go on the record for our book, two other neighbors were quoted and confirmed that Rove had lived openly as a gay man.  Koons took Rove to numerous social gatherings with other older gay men but Louis preferred to spend his time at home in his Palm Springs neighborhood.  Koons said he was not romantically involved with Louis but was as “close as a brother” and that Karl was completely aware of his father’s sexual orientation.

During an interview for our first book on Rove, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, we asked the president’s political guru about the causes for the breakup of his parent’s marriage and what might have driven his mother, Reba Wood Rove, to commit suicide.  At the time, we were not aware of Louis Rove’s sexual orientation and were simply asking Karl to speculate because he remembered so vividly his father coming home on Christmas Eve, an ensuing argument, and then the end of the marriage without any real explanation from his mother.  An astute observer even at 19 when the marriage failed, Rove continues to claim 40 years later that he had no clue then or now that his dad way gay.  When I went to Palm Springs in 2005 prior to the publication of The Architect, one of Louis Rove’s neighbors literally laughed when I told him Karl claimed he didn’t know what happened to his parents’ marriage.

“He [Karl] was obviously hurt by the divorce.  It’s just absurd when he says, ‘I had no idea what the problems were with my parents and their marriage.’  He knew damned good and well what was going on.  His father had decided to come out of the closet.”

In fact, according to Louis Rove’s friend Koons, Rove not only knew his father’s sexual orientation but also was comfortable with it and had accepted his father’s honesty.

“I don’t recall that there was any great tension over it,” Koons told me during the 2005 interview.  “I don’t know how much impact that plays in the family and when they did find out about it.  Karl is certainly not dumb.  I am sure he knows more than anyone about his father’s position.  The times I spent with Karl and Louie were wonderful and Karl was always just very, very nice.”

Karl, in fact, according to Koons and Louie Rove’s neighbors, was a frequent visitor to Palm Springs beginning in the 80s and vacationed almost annually with his father in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  It would have been difficult for Rove to not know this fundamental fact about his father.

Rove does get one thing correct in his book.  He said that we wrote his father, “after living openly as a gay man,” died quietly at home while his son was in the midst of launching the anti-gay issues campaign that was to lead to the re-election of George W. Bush.”  In his TV interviews, Rove twisted this around to make it sound like we were portraying him as a man who had denied his father, which was not the case.  The chapter in our book regarding Louis and Karl Rove repeatedly makes it clear that Bush’s Brain honored and loved Louis.

Lastly, I want to say bluntly I don’t give a damn about Louis or Karl Rove’s personal lives.  But when Karl decided that the private and personal lives of other consenting adults needed to be corrected to suit the moral imperatives of his party’s political desires, well, then Karl turned his family into a part of the narrative.  As he promotes his revisionist paperweight around the country, he is allowed to take an aggrieved stand of someone whose privacy has been invaded by amoral journalists.  What about the lives harmed or ruined by the sexual politics of Rove’s mean-spirited campaigning?  How is that measured?

Originally, I had told friends I did not want to be drawn into discussions about Rove’s book.  I’ve come to resent the poisonous nature of the discourse in our national politics.  The notion, however, that silence is consent is more than a little unsettling.  Rove started his political ascension with lies and he has now published a book that is filled with a new set of lies that attempt to convince the entirety of America that during the Bush administration everybody got everything wrong; except for Karl and President Bush.  This, too, is another Rove lie.  And it’s criminal for myself or anyone else to allow his lies to continue to live.

Man of the Moment

Tiger’s advisers have him convinced that he is different from other fallen public figures.  Maybe they know he doesn’t want to answer questions and because he pays them so well they aren’t going to force the issue.  Who wants to lose a gig working with Tiger Woods? Tiger has done things greater than most mortals and even other astounding athletes and his counselors appear to be testing a notion that he can play by different rules.  He can’t.  Just because he took golf away from the plaid pants and martini crowd and turned it into a disciplined endeavor doesn’t mean he’s going to get a pass on his behavior.

The idea that he only has to read a written statement to a solitary live camera, a room full of friends and colleagues, and a few wire service reporters that have agreed not to ask questions, is certain to anger journalists and the public that has adored Tiger but still wants answers.  Nobody wants to know how many women and how long this went on and whether his wife is considering taking him back into her life.  But Tiger has to respond to reasonable inquiries from practicing journalists before he can expect to get another clean start with the public.  He doesn’t have to provide details but he does need to deliver honesty.  He isn’t likely to be given a second chance unless he gives some answers.

The first question to be asked, however, is about journalism.  What kind of wire service goes to a “news conference” where no questions are allowed?  Are they present simply to write about Tiger’s facial expressions and how much he sweats?  There probably aren’t many reporters at Bloomberg, Reuters, or the Associated Press that want to attend this event and be ridiculed for sitting silently and playing by Tiger’s rules.  And if they don’t ask questions, they are likely to endure a bit of their own ridicule from peers.

This appearance has the potential for Tiger’s friends and colleagues gathered in the room to turn into a bit of a Greek chorus as he reads his statement.  Politicians often try this public relations scam when they are beleaguered.  Dealing with a controversy or a faux pas, the pol doesn’t want to face journalists alone so he or she invites supporters to encircle the podium and populate the audience and applaud at responses and hiss at questions.  It never works and only further angers reporters and they redouble their efforts to do critical reporting on the politician.  Tiger risks cranking up the tabloids and TMZs of the world to go out and find more of his paramours.

Tiger is likely to endure the same treatment as the evasive politician.  If he isn’t going to answer questions, why not just videotape his statement and stream it on his web site?  A cutaway camera could show all of the supporters in the room with him as he read and he wouldn’t risk angering sports reporters.  Regardless of how much contrition is in Tiger’s statement Friday, it will not be enough unless he takes a few questions and provides honest, difficult answers.  Someone ought to ask, first, why do this at the Accenture Match Play Tournament and distract from the golf?  Is it because they were the first major sponsor to drop you?  Are you being petty?  Isn’t there a better time and location?

The statement he will read, unfortunately, is fairly predictable.

“First, I want to apologize to the public and the fans and supporters of golf.  I’ve been dishonest with my fans, myself, and most importantly, my family.  I didn’t know I had an addiction.  I’ve entered treatment and believe I’m recovering.  I am also trying to work things out with my family.  I love my children and I am also working to save my marriage.   This has been, and continues to be, a difficult time for my family and me.  I realize I’ve dishonored all of the things I claimed were important.  But I want to try again.  I deserve a chance to try again.  I ask for your forgiveness and understanding.  But I am also a golfer.  Golf is my life.  It is who I am.  And I cannot fully regain my life unless I am playing golf.  So, I want to announce today that I am returning to the tour.  Thank you.”

Does that cover everything?  Does the public have a right to know more?  Should Tiger Woods answer the question of whether he was having extra-marital sex while his wife was pregnant?  How long has he behaved this way?  Where did he get the idea this way okay?  If he didn’t have that idea, why was he cheating when he knew he was one of the most high profile people on the planet?  Where in the hell does the fan’s right to know end and Tiger’s privacy begin?  He might need to denounce some of the stories about porn stars and having sex with someone other than his wife on the night his dad died. Don’t these issues go to the heart of a man’s character and help golf fans decide whether they can separate the man from his game, his life from his swing?  Who the hell knows?  But a five-minute statement in a completely controlled environment isn’t going to end Tiger’s woes.

And it may even make matters worse.

A road train at rest

Road trains are Australia’s solution to dealing with unpopulated regions and distant cities in need of life’s essentials.  They are tractor-trailers, (semi-trucks in the U.S.), pulling anywhere from three to six 44 foot trailers.  The larger versions tend to travel the Stuart Highway up through the continent’s empty middle from Melbourne to Alice Springs and Darwin.  They also carry cattle and ore along the Great Northern Highway, which borders the Kimberly, a region known for natural resources and cattle stations.  The trucks are banned from population centers but they thrive like ancient creatures in the open spaces of the Outback, carrying products from the port cities on the coast to inland communities thousands of miles from the contemporary world.

We began to see a few of the road trains entering the highways from mining sites in Western Australia as we made our way eastward across the continent on motorcycles.  I did not get to closely scrutinize one of these rigs until our first stop on the Eyre Highway at Balladonia, a roadhouse that once became an international dateline when a piece of Sky Lab fell to earth not far from where the diesel pumps are located.  Inside the roadhouse, the proprietor has set up a small museum to commemorate the moment obscurity dissipated for his little spot of the universe.  The centerpiece of the exhibition is a mockup of the Sky Lab debris with U.S. and NASA insignia and a satellite dish on the side of the panel that looked like it was placed there by DirectTV.

Fake Sky Lab debris at the Balladonia Road House

“I think the dish looks a little too real to have made it through a burning re-entry,” I told Jack.

“Yeah, probably not real.  But then neither is the camel.”

I went over and looked at a mockup of a camel that used a low-grade carpeting for fake fur.  If the camels roaming the Outback ever stumble into the Balladonia roadhouse to see how they have been caricatured, there will likely be an ocean of humped warriors bound for the nation’s civic centers to seek their revenge.

“So, the Sky Lab chunk’s real, eh?” Jack smirked at the proprietor as I paid for our gas.

“Oh sure it is,” he laughed.  “And if you believe that there’s a bridge in Sydney I’d like to sell you for scrap iron.”

“NASA came and grabbed the real deal, I reckon?”

“You wouldn’t believe how fast they got here,” he said.

As he rang me up, I noticed a sign in front of the register that said, “Yes, we sell bread.”  I thought it was odd that such a proclamation had to be made but my guess is there are issues with freshness as bread is transported thousands of kilometers.  In a later stop that day, I discovered an entire freezer devoted to loaves of white bread.

“Do you sell bread?”  Jack, making another one of his easily misinterpreted attempts at humor, asked the cashier.

“Yes, we do.  You need a loaf?”

“No.  I guess not.  Just wondered.”

Crossing the Outback, however, a question that does not occur to anyone is where can I find a loaf of bread.  I assume, though, if you live in the wide out yonder that does become an issue.

Back out on the highway, I ducked behind the low windscreen every time one of the multi-wheeled monsters peeled past and then kept a wary eye on the tarmac for kangaroo carcasses.  Before renting the BMW 1300, the agent had warned me several times not to ride at early dawn or dusk because the ‘roos are about and hitting one on a motorcycle is inconvenient.  Road trains, however, roll all night with huge bumpers and do not slow down for the animals that are drawn to the warmth of the pavement that is heated by the sun.  Riding during the day, we were compelled to watch for dead ‘roos and the great birds feeding on the carrion.

We fought the summer time easterly wind and ended our ride that day at Nundroo on the eastern edge of the Nullarbor.  We appeared to have found another tough spot where more people passed than stopped and a bit of paint and some updated furniture could have changed the world.  As tired as we were, we asked the proprietress to show us rooms and give us prices.  She grabbed a key and walked us toward a low structure with one car parked in front of a faded door and a broad, window with no drapes.

“This is one of our better rooms,” she said as she opened the door.  “It’s 90 dollars a night.”

I did not want to see one of the “lesser” accommodations.  A bureau with edges scraped bare from years of use was along one wall in front of two sagging single beds.  A portable TV with about a 10 inch screen that appeared to be early 80s technology was poised on the edge of the bureau and was either gray when it left the factory or colored by time.  I did not cast my eyes to the carpeting.

“I think we’ll save our money for dinner in your restaurant and just camp in the caravan park,” I said.

“Yeah, I don’t blame you,” she said.

Rooey II at a roadhouse

We had a decent meal in the restaurant and spoke with a few of the backpackers working at the Nundroo Roadhouse.  Because employees are difficult to keep in the rural parts of Australia, the country offers extended visas to traveling students that agree to remain on a job at a tough location for a longer period of time.  The two working the evening shift were a charming girl with a Scottish brogue and a whip-thin boy of about 6 feet 5 inches, who clearly had a crush on the only girl within a two-day’s drive.  I saw him in the morning as he was opening doors to mop the restroom floors.  He looked crestfallen but there was no way to know if it was because of the task before him in this marginalized existence or if his dreams had been busted during the previous night.

Just before nightfall, we got our tents up and watched the rising cloud tops a hundred miles south along the Southern Ocean.  Darkness highlighted the lightning flashing in the storm as it raged along the Great Australian Bight.  The stars directly above wheeled in a brilliant clarity against the light of a gibbous moon.  Australia’s sky is close and familiar to people living beneath it and at times it can feel almost tangible and within human grasp.  But it is not; it is only more darkly beautiful and mystifying.

The few campers nearby went quiet early, tired from the endless road, and I watched electricity brighten the clouds as the storm drifted closer.  Another band of showers began to illuminate the horizon to the west and I envisioned our little tents being borne off on mighty winds.  When I finally surrendered the night to nature, I fell asleep without effort.  There was utter silence outside in a perfect spot between two storms, until I was awakened by the first of the night’s road trains.

The sound was initially recognizable as being distant and I thought of the stories I had heard through the years about tornadoes.  Australia does not have tornadoes, I am told, and when I stuck my head out the tent door I saw a light glimmering just above the bush line to the east as a road train approached in full throttle.  The noise made an increasing crescendo, a blaring and unhesitating waaaahhhhh with a decibel level that could only leave the dead undisturbed….or Jack.  In about 90 seconds, the Doppler drop off of the rolling thunder was barely audible as the road train moved toward Perth or Kalgoorlie or Port Hedland or Broome or some other distant town in need of 21^st century fundamentals.

I could not keep myself from wishing I was going along for the ride.

The Endless Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor

As we sat at a picnic table and ate nuts and bad Aussie jerky, I asked him about the Nullarbor.

“Can’t be quite as intimidating as it’s made out to be, can it?”

“No, but it’s not a minor thing,” he said.  “I can tell you this, there isn’t any cell service for a long, long time.  I carry a satellite phone.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to being out there for Australia Day,” I told him.  “I think it could be a great experience.”

Jeff ran his hand through his dark and graying hair and looked at me with narrowed eyes without speaking.  I ought to have realized he knew better from his years of travel in Oz.

I had romanticized the Nullarbor and timed the motorcycle trip to leave Jack and me in a roadhouse on Australia Day.  In my vision, I figured we’d be drinking beer and singing Waltzing Matilda with “truckies,” wandering backpackers, and a few well heeled travelers out for adventure.

The Nullarbor, geographically, is a limestone shelf that rises up from the bottom of the Australian continent.  Essentially, it is a treeless plain but not quite a desert.  Salt scrub and brush are the predominant forms of plant life.  Snakes, kangaroos, camels, and wombats are the animals in abundance.  Along the coast, where the Nullarbor meets the Southern Ocean, the Great Australian Bight is formed by eons of crustal upthrust and the working of giant waves against the limestone cliffs.  A visitor can look directly down on the sea below from more than a thousand feet above the water.  There are no railings to protect you from your own stupidity.

Where the camel, the wombat, and kangaroo play

Depending on the traveler offering the description, the Nullarbor ranges from 500 to 1200 miles across just below the Great Victorian Desert.  The region is also known for an inordinate number of meteor strikes.  The beginning is in the town of Norseman and, fundamentally, it terminates at Port Augusta.  It is, in either case, a long and dramatic road.  The Eyre Highway, which crosses the arid plain, is named after the first Englishman to traverse the expanse with an aboriginal during the mid-eighteenth century.  The sealed road was not finally and completely paved until 1976.

As we left Cape Le Grand, I regretted again the speed with which we had to make this journey.  The cape is a grand sweep of beach with sugary white sand curving around until it meets the spot where Frenchman’s Peak climbs up out of the aqua sea.  No one was on the beach.  A few campers wandered over and at night in the tent I heard the relentless sounding of the sea.  There is no better way to enter sleep.

Less than an hour onto the Nullarbor, we encounter a roadblock.  Fire fighters are stopping traffic, which is only our two motorcycles at the moment, because they are concerned about a brush fire jumping the Eyre Highway and endangering motorists.  Rescue vehicles and a tractor-trailer with a giant bulldozer are parked on the edge of the tarmac, waiting to be summoned to duty.  A dark gray cloud of smoke wavers a few miles to the east.

The Great Australian Bight

“How are you fixed for water out here?”  The question came from one of the fire fighters.

“I think we’re good,” I answered.  “Got some bottles and not too far to Balladonia if we can get cleared through here.”

“Yep, yep.  We’ll see quick enough.  If the stay gets long, come on back to the truck and we’ve got ice water.  We’ll fix you up.”

“So, what happens next?”

“We’ll hear on the radio in a bit, mate.  If it jumps, I’ll get in the dozer there and cut a line in front of the fire and me mates will follow in the water truck and put out any little fires that might make it across my line.  No worries.  No worries at all.”

Within minutes, though, we were released to ride and rolled through a short smoky patch of air and saw the flames a hundred yards to the south of the road.  The fire did not yet seem contained.  Bush fires are a great danger annually in Australia and have begun to kill people and destroy homes where the wild land meets urban development.

As we motored eastward, I began to think about the mystique attached to the Nullarbor.  Most Australians have not crossed the odd expanse and likely never will even consider such an endeavor.  A kind of mythology manifested itself in association with the locale and people either fear the great plain or they wish not to have the dramatic stories be proven apocryphal.  Oz becomes more interesting if the stories have a germ of truth.

The most compelling one I heard was from Chris and Christina.  Political refugees from Poland and naturalized Aussie citizens, they were traveling from Perth to Melbourne after purchasing a used car.  About 100 kilometers from any phone or gas or humans, the vehicle shut down and would not restart because of electrical problems.

Caiguna - a grim little spot

“We sit there in the dark,” Chris said in his broken English.  “I stop five cars.  Give them my insurance number and ask them to call it for roadside service.  But no one comes.”

The temperature dropped and their only light was the flickering overhead in the cabin of the car.  Unfortunately, Chris, Christina, and their 22 year-old son, who was also traveling, had made the irrational decision of watching a movie called “Wolf Creek” prior to venturing out onto the Nullarbor.

“You see this movie?” the animated Christine kept asking.  “You see this movie?  Oh my god.  I wish we no watch.  But we did.”

“Wolf Creek” is about two lovely backpackers, stranded in the Nullarbor Outback, who are befriended by a man determined to assist travelers on the lonely Eyre Highway.  Unfortunately, he turns out to be a bit of a serial killer that preys the needy and unsuspecting out on the Nullarbor.  Several Aussies mentioned the movie to me, unsolicited, as we crossed the Nullarbor.  There is no doubt it had engaged the audience of three sitting in their broken down 1980 BMW in the dead of an Aussie night.

“I see a ‘fice’,” Chris excitedly tells me.  “Right at the window.  In just a second, it is gone.  But I see a ‘fice.’”

After a second, I realize he is saying “face.”

“But first I see orange ball,” his wife explains.  “I see orange ball move out in sky, very low, come close to us, and then, poof, it go away.”

“And then I see fice,” Chris adds.

“What did it look like?” I ask.

“I don’t know.  Not human.  Big eyes.  Little mouth.  Can’t see nose.  But it gone very fast.”

Oh well.  I realize I have traveled half way around the globe to one of its most remote locales to discover yet another UFO story?

“We were afraid,” Christina told me.  “But nothing happen and 13 hours later Shane come from Caiguna and pick us up.  Nothing bad happen.”

Waiting for the bush fire to cross the road

Shane is the operator of the road house in Caiguna, a grim little spot on the Nullarbor where truckies and motorists stop for fuel and food and a cold, cleansing ale.  Caiguna’s caravan park, which is more like a patch of dirt across from a moldy laundry and rest room, is highlighted by a sign on each door warning that “all snakes in the area are poisonous and should be reported to the ‘mangerment.’ “ You are warned to keep the doors closed so deadly reptiles don’t slither in while you shower or do your laundry.   Inside, there is a dim bar, a few Formica tables surrounded by plastic chairs, faded beer posters, and a plastic poster of the numerous spiders that might be crawling into your tent while you sit inside and drink your 7 dollar bottle of beer.

Sadly, there was no drunken revelry to celebrate Australia Day in Caiguna.  I had a bad steak sandwich on dry toast and a cold beer and I headed for the hard ground beneath my tent.  On the way to the rest room to brush my teeth I ran into a camper from Esperance.  I had been talking to him earlier about the beautiful coastal city where he lived.  He was coming out of the rest room showers, shirtless, and walking to his camper as the cool evening wind rose up.

“Getting a bit nippy,” I said.

He looked quickly at me with some fright and put his hands up to cover his nipples.

Regardless of your problems, always contact the "mangerment."

“Oops.  Sorry.  I’ll just be puttin’ me shirt on then.”

Even in English, things can be lost in translation.

I laughed and headed off to a restive night contemplating spiders and snakes and listening to the great road trains roar past on the lonely Nullarbor.

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.

Stirling Ranges at dawn

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.”

Cape Leeuwin, Southwesternmost Point of Australian Continent, Indian Ocean

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.

A long way there.....

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.