Authors: Tony Horwitz
If there’s a bus tonight, I’ll take it as far as Katherine and hitch the last leg to Darwin. If there’s no bus until tomorrow, and I still haven’t caught a ride by then, I’ll hide my face in shame and ride it straight through to the Top End. If there’s no bus at all, I’ll just have to hijack a car.
The good news when I go inside the pub is that there is a bus; in fact, it stops in front of an adjoining restaurant later tonight. The bad news is that no one can tell me when it arrives. A schedule on the wall says eight-thirty, the publican says it comes at ten, and the drinker at the bar swears that it never pulls out of Kununurra before eleven. “Unless she’s hit a kangaroo or something between here and Broome,” he says. “Then maybe she won’t get out till morning.”
Exasperated, I finally lose my patience with Nor’west time.
“Goddammit!” I hear myself shouting. “What the fuck’s wrong with this place?”
The bar goes silent. Then the publican flashes me a smile that I recognize from my first few months in Australia, when I lost my patience frequently. “She’ll be right, mate,” he says, in a laconic rendition of the Australian national anthem. “Settle down and have a drink.”
I order a beer and slump in the corner of the pub, which is still open three hours after its session was supposed to have ended.
Two hours later, at nine o’clock, the pub’s still open but there’s no sign of a bus. The schedule on the wall, which I’d judged the most reliable of my three sources, is now proven wrong. I pace the street outside, always staying within eyeshot of the supposed depot in front of the restaurant (“I didn’t think the bus came at all on Sunday,” was the intelligence I received there).
Then, just after ten, the bus to Darwin pulls in. Twenty people pile out of the bus and go straight into the pub. I follow them, find the driver eating a meat pie at the bar, and pay him for a ticket to Katherine. It is another hour before the coach sets off again.
Just as the man at the bar said: Never leaves before eleven. I make a quick logistical calculation: Katherine by dawn, on the road again soon after, and, with any luck, into Darwin with six hours of sunlight to spare.
She will, in fact, be right.
T
here is a gentle apartheid on buses separating the sleeps from the sleep-nots.
A lucky few—the same lucky few who can sleep on New York subways or in battlefield trenches—fall immediately into deep unconsciousness, as if struck over the head. The rest toss and turn in the vain hope of achieving so much as a doze. This gives them plenty of time to contemplate the unique engineering that makes coach seats sleep-proof.
Consider the options:
Slump straight back or slightly to one side, with the knees crammed against the seat in front, and the head pushed forward upon the chest, as if in preparation for the executioner’s axe.
Curl up in a pained fetal position, with the head shoved against the armrest and the feet pushing off against the wall of the bus, compressing the knees upward into the chin.
If the seat beside is empty: Recline across two seats, trying to curl around the armrest, the point of which inevitably lodges like a tomahawk between the shoulder blades. Alternately, roll over and take the hatchet directly in the chest.
After an hour of fidgeting, Misery sits up and searches the bus for Company. Most of the seats in the back are occupied by flaked-out mothers and children, sound asleep. But up front an American voice, a doesn’t-want-to-sleep, is quizzing the driver as we race through the night.
“Sir,” says the woman’s voice, “what would we be seeing if it weren’t dark?”
“Bugger all. Empty scrub.”
“What’d he say?” It is a male voice, tired and irritable. A sleep-not. “He says ‘not much,’ dear. Like what we saw between Perth and Broome.”
“Oh.”
Back to fidgeting—and wondering, perhaps, about the acrobatic nature of buggery: the word, that is. It can be a verb, as in “bugger it”; an adjective, as in “buggered”; a noun, “bugger all”; a place, “out to buggery”; and an insult: “bugger yourself,” “get buggered,” or the less offensive “bug off.” You can even be “buggered,” which means worn out, with none of the sexual overtones it carries in America.
Sort of like “crook,” another word that means everything in Australian except what it means in American, or better yet, the ever-flexible “knock”: to knock (criticize), knockerism (the art of criticizing), knocked up (pregnant). Alternatively, to knock back (say no to, or to drink, as in knock back a beer).
Inventive buggers, these Aussies.
But as buggered, knocked around, and crook as I feel, sleep is still an impossibility. Across the aisle from me, a young woman opens her eyes and reaches blearily for a cigarette. We make sympathetic eye contact, like neighbors in a hospital ward.
“Where ya headed?” she asks.
“Katherine. Darwin eventually. How about you?”
“Darwin,” she says. “If I don’t go nuts and climb off before then. I can’t even remember how long it’s been since we left Perth.”
I ask her what she does back home.
“Been waitressing for three years, and just got fed up with it,” she says. “Reckon I needed to take a break and head off somewhere.”
“So why’d you pick Darwin?”
“A mate told me there’s a great pub at some suburb called Humpty
Doo. That’s where they have the World Championship Darwin stubbie drinking contest.”
“What’s that?”
“A race to see who can drink fastest. You get a two-liter stubbie and a plastic garbage bin, and the crowd stands around yelling ‘Spew! Spew! Spew!’” She pauses. “I reckon Humpty Doo will be a good place to start.”
She stubs out her cigarette and closes her eyes, leaving me to wonder what it is she’s about to start. A new life? A pub crawl? Is there a difference in Darwin?
It is my first reminder that the Northern Territory—a.k.a. the Top End—is only a six-pack away. The second reminder comes an hour later, when the bus pulls in at a roadhouse called Timber Creek. I gaze out the bus window and through the open door of a pub, which is crowded with drinkers. A clock above the bar says 2:30
A.M.
No Sunday session I know of goes on that long.
“We’re in the Northern Territory, mate,” the driver explains. “This isn’t kiddie land anymore.”
Indeed it isn’t. When the driver climbs out to unload some luggage for a departing passenger, a drunken man weaves aboard.
“Zis is a stick-up,” he slurs, patting his hand against a lump beneath his shirt. It could be a few stubbies in a brown bag. Then again, it could be a gun. “Zis is a stick-up,” he says again. “Sheilas, take off your jewelry. Blokes, hand over the wallets.”
No one moves. Suddenly even the sleep-nots seem to have achieved deep and untroubled slumber. “For Chrissakes!” he shouts. “Izza stick up!” Still no one moves. Then the driver returns and shoulders the drunk out of the bus. “Get outta here!” the driver yells, vaguely irritated, as if he often deals with drunken highwaymen at this particular stop.
It is still two hours before sunrise when we arrive in Katherine. My plan, as much as I have one, is to hang out at the bus depot until morning, then try to hitch a ride from there. That way, if no rides materialize, I’ll be able to hop onto the next bus to Darwin. A half day by the road in Kununurra has shot my confidence in ever catching a ride again.
But five minutes at the station forces me to change my plan. Katherine’s
bus depot is like bus depots everywhere: dank and depressing, and smelling as if its floors have been swabbed with some evil mix of urine, stale coffee, and cigarette butts.
So once again I make the Long March from downtown to out of town. How many times have I done this, I wonder, hiking past a mile or two of silent shopfronts? Orange, Dubbo, Cloncurry, Tennant Creek, Kimba … I know the face of commerce in every outback town … Norseman, Albany, Geraldton, Carnarvon, Kununurra. And everywhere the same as this: an endless stretch of angle parking and footpaths shadowed by awnings.
Across a bridge, and finally out of town. I can dimly make out a grassy field on the left—a park maybe—and beyond it the empty road to Darwin. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I lie on the ground to wait out the night.
At first light it becomes apparent that this is quite a popular park. There are Aboriginal men everywhere, wrapped in blankets and strewn across the grass like Nubian mummies. No sleep-nots in this crowd. I make an imaginary entry in Jack Pearton’s log book, in a column labeled “Strange places I’ve spent the night”: in a ditch during a cyclone, in an abandoned bus in the Nullarbor, at a pub with no publican in Rocky Gully, and now in a makeshift Aboriginal camp.
Slowly, as the sun lifts its gaze across the park, the men come awake and wander off toward town. Then the truck traffic begins: huge, three-trailered road trains, strafing me with gravel and sending up clouds of dust as they shoot through to Darwin. An hour after that—rush hour in Katherine—the local traffic begins, headed toward an industrial park around the next bend. Brawny men in dusty four-wheel drives with Monday-morning faces: unsmiling, haggard, hung over. Then the housewives, headed in the opposite direction, to drop the kids off at school or to do some shopping. Then the housewives returning from town, with grocery bags in the passenger seat instead of kids. I know the face of commuter traffic in every outback town.
Nonetheless, I make the hopeless gesture of standing there with my finger out, grinning like a maniac. No one’s headed to Darwin, obviously, and even if they are, they aren’t about to let me into the family sedan.
By mid-morning I feel spent, which is how I’ve felt for the last few days, except now it’s acute: when the heat arrives in another hour or so I’ll just disappear into the dust. Even the hike back to the bus depot seems beyond
me, though the shame I feel about bus travel has long since departed. I’ll crawl to Darwin on my hands and knees if that’s what’s required.
I wander into the park to piss behind a tree, leaving my “Darwin Pls!!” propped against my pack, facing the northbound traffic. As soon as I unzip my fly, I hear the sound of rubber hitting gravel. Great, now I’ve not only been abandoned in Katherine, but I’m about to be ripped off as well. While taking a leak.
“Don’t rush yourself, mate,” the driver calls out, as I come running from behind the tree with the pained expression of pissus interruptus. “I’ve got to pee too,” he says.
It is the first ride I’ve ever caught by sticking out my dick instead of my finger.
My fellow pisser is a sympatico driver named Trevor. The fraternal recognition is instantaneous, at least for me. He is middle-aged, wearing stubbies, a T-shirt, and thongs. But a crumpled suit is falling off a coat hanger in the back. Beside it are half-folded shirts, a toiletries bag, and other signs of a man who makes his living on the road. Plus a stack of cheaply mimeographed flyers, some handmade posters, and a pile of small cards labeled “membership application.” Having once been a member of Trevor’s trade, I know what club it is he’s hawking.
“I did some labor organizing myself,” I tell him as we drive off toward Darwin. “A union of timber workers in a place called Meridian, Mississippi.”
Trevor laughs. “Mate, welcome to the Mississippi of Australia.”
Trevor is an abattoir slaughterman when he’s not organizing for the Meatworkers Union. And for the first hour of our drive, he educates me about boning buffalo and bargaining with the boss. The Northern Territory, like America’s Deep South, is hostile turf for union men.
Somewhere between Katherine and Darwin I fall asleep, then stir awake as we pass through a monotonous expanse of crowded freeways and suburban subdivisions. It is Darwin but it could be anywhere in urban Australia: arcades, high-rises, traffic.
I step out into the blinding light of a Top End afternoon. At first glance, Darwin resembles an oversized Alice Springs, hiding its face behind concrete-and-glass buildings and acres of suburban sprawl. Of course,
Cyclone Tracy blew away most of the original town in 1974, so at least Darwin has an excuse.
I don’t need a tourist guide to find the real Darwin. In a place that drinks more beer per capita than any other on earth, there’s little mystery about that. But I am not ready for the pubs, not yet.
Holding my cardboard sign overhead to ward off the sun, I hoist my pack and go in search of a bed. Five minutes and fifteen dollars later, I’m rewarded with a rabbit hole just off the bitumen: a chamber that is stark naked except for a bed, a drippy air-conditioner, and a broken refrigerator. Standing by the bed, I can almost reach out and touch all four walls. I open the fridge in the vain hope of finding something cold to drink. There is nothing but a cool pool of water on the bottom shelf.
I collapse on the motel bed with my pack still on, like a shell-shocked soldier falling into a foxhole. It has been about a month since I left Sydney, plus two weeks of travel from the city to the center, way back in January. Not a long time for a journey, really.
But hitchhiking time should be measured like the years of a dog’s life. Each day must be multiplied by a factor of seven to account for the intensity of climbing into strange cars with strange people headed to strange places. And there’s always the chance of encountering a homicidal maniac to stretch each moment by a few more factors than that.
My supply of small talk and my energy for new faces is depleted. I feel as I sometimes do at the end of a long week of newspaper reporting, when all I want to do is stop extracting information from people I’ve never met and will probably never speak to again.
Physically, I’m even more burned out. My legs and arms are covered in lumps; some from bug bites, some from scrambling through the scrub in the dark, some from the gravel lodged in my flesh by passing road trains. My head aches from sunburn, glare, and lack of sleep. And my stomach has become a Sargasso Sea of meat pies and beer. Another few weeks on a roadhouse diet and I’d succumb to scurvy, cirrhosis of the liver, or worse.
I am lying on the motel bed in Darwin, listening to the air-conditioner drip at 2
P.M.
on a Monday afternoon, when the recognition comes. It is a thought that has played at the fringes of my consciousness for the past seventy-two hours; now, with my defenses down, it congeals into
a simple declarative sentence. My career as a hitchhiker has come to an end.