The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost (13 page)

“It's not going to pack itself, mate.”

“I know. It's just so small.” I put my hand inside and prod the fabric, gauging the empty space.

“She'll be right. What do you need other than a T-shirt, a pair of pants, and sunnies?”

“I don't know.” Forget that Carly is perfectly content with just one of each of these items for five days (and that she has failed to mention underwear). I've never been to the Australian desert; the closest I've come is Outback Steakhouse. Surely it's a place that requires options. Leaving Big Red behind makes me feel like I've already whittled my worldly possessions down to the absolute necessities. Imagining going somewhere new with less seems impossible, even if it's under a week. If my future self had revealed to the present self that soon I would be the proud owner of only a handful of possessions, traveling with a small pack for several months somewhere I had not yet imagined, I would have laughed in my own face. Right now I'm finding it difficult to let Carly convince me that, no, I don't need to bring four novels on a five-day trip. I don't need to cart along my full-size bottles of shampoo and moisturizer.

In the end, she packs for me: two short-sleeved T-shirts, one gray tank top, one long-sleeved tee, my favorite purple sweatshirt for cold desert nights, blue capri sweatpants (oh, how I wish someone had told me how hideous these looked, even for the Outback), a pair of gray socks, sneakers, green Tevas, six pairs of underwear, 50 SPF sunscreen, a small bag of toiletries, my camera, my journal, and a copy of
Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl
that Muriel lent me a few days ago.

Carly helps me hoist the pack up onto my shoulders, then buckles me in: one thin strap across my chest and another around my waist to prop the pack firmly atop my hips.

“Look at you!” She preens like a proud parent sending her child off to the first day of school.

Carly's parents pop their heads into the room. “Look at you!” they exclaim.

“One sec, Rach.” Pete sprints out of the room and returns a moment later with a floppy wide-brimmed blue hat. He drops it onto my head. “There you go, mate. That sun will give you a thrashing if you're not careful.”

After three hours on a bumpy flight, I land in Alice Springs, or the Alice, as it's familiarly known. At the baggage carousel, a man whose leathery skin looks like he's spent the last ten years directly under the central Australian sun walks straight up to me and greets me using my full name. I let this psychic lead me out to the parking lot, where he thankfully does not abduct me but instead deposits me at my white tour van and promptly disappears like a mirage. Nine other travelers are already belted in, slouched and overheated with eyes closed while the air-conditioning does its feeble best to combat the ninety-five-degree heat. My fellow travelers include Stomatos, a good-natured but bossy Greek guy who offers his expert opinion on everything from how long dinner should take to prepare (versus how long it's actually taking) to which branches work best as firewood. Stomatos is traveling with Mauricio, a Mexican guy he met on the road, and with whom he's decided to return to Mexico in a few months. Also on board is Tobias, a German who teaches primary-school art and is planning to propose to his girlfriend of eight years when he returns home in two weeks. Quiet Tobias, soft-spoken and reserved, shocks us all the second night when he gets drunk and uses a nearby tree to execute a pole dance (he's surprisingly limber) to a Britney Spears song. There are three Irish girls—Sinead, Aiofe, and Eva—two on working holiday in Australia and the third visiting them. Sandy is an American girl on her way to teach English for a year in China. She is visiting her Australian friend Miranda, a lobbyist in Canberra. Finally, there's Orly, an Israeli woman who pines constantly for her lost
New Zealand boyfriend, with whom she has broken up because her trip is nearly over. In a week, she will be back home.

We exchange all the usual getting-to-know-you travel questions. Where are you from? How long are you in Australia? Where have you been so far? What do you do back home? When I tell people I'm from New York, I get the familiar reaction. First they praise Manhattan. They marvel at the skyscrapers, the Broadway lights, the celebrities. Many of the people I meet traveling have been there, and others want to visit. Since that rainy day when Brian mistook my identity at the Hole in the Wall, I've tried countless times to clarify that I'm from upstate New York, a good five hours from Times Square. When I explain that New York is a rather large state, not just a city, I'm appraised warily. Or greeted with pity, like, “Sweetheart, even if you're
not
from Manhattan, wouldn't we all be better off if you pretended you were? Isn't it without a doubt better than wherever you grew up?”

I'd be happy to go along with this, absolutely thrilled to misrepresent myself as a sophisticated city girl, if doing so didn't mean laying claim to a tragedy that doesn't belong to me in the same way it does to true Manhattanites. Still, some backpackers seem determined to intimately attach me to that terrible morning. What usually happens immediately after the New York cooing is the uncomfortable onslaught of 9/11 sympathy. In Ireland, it was pure, unchecked empathy offered up with a slow, sad shake of the head. That was in 2002. Now it's 2003, and Bush has declared war on Iraq. Sympathy is still expressed, but after it come all the questions, none of which I can answer. All I can do is speak for myself, express my own regret and confusion, and feel the growing discomfort of that no longer being enough.

We reach our campsite just before sunset. Dinner our first night is a massive pot of stew into which our guide, Leah, tosses a variety of vegetables and an unidentifiable meat she claims is chicken. For dessert, I teach the Irish girls how to make s'mores.
No graham crackers or marshmallows are on hand, so we put pieces of a Flake (an Australian brand of chocolate bar) between two mini-chocolate-chip cookies and roast them in a pan over the fire.

Around nine, when all the various fireside conversations have petered out, we unroll our sleeping bags (I surreptitiously but violently shake mine free of any lurking desert creatures). Leah hands out the swags (a waterproof shell made of canvas, similar to a tarp) that will serve as an outer layer to keep us warm. The temperature has dropped drastically since the sun set. I hop inside and zip myself up, then flip over onto my back. The sky is a planetarium of stars, completely unimpeded by clouds, trees, lights, or smog. It is the starriest sky I have ever seen. Soon the only sound is the others breathing, all of us cozy in our swags with full bellies, enveloped by the vast quiet. All along I've thought the best way to keep out all the voices in my head directing my life this way and that was to stay busy, to distract my brain from itself, but it's this profound silence that releases me from worry. Only a single strain of thought runs through my head like a simple melody: this is exactly where I want to be, out here in the world. At some point I fall asleep, but I have no sense of exactly when, because I see that starry sky all night long in my dreams.

Leah wakes us up at four
A.M.
with determined perkiness. We pull together tea and coffee and toast, then stumble off to the ramshackle restroom, a tin structure housing two mirrors, two sinks, and two outhouse-style bathrooms. I am the last girl to finish getting ready, and although I take barely ten minutes, the campsite is eerily deserted when I emerge. No van, no swag, no backpacks, not even my own. It's happened. I have been left in the middle of the Australian Outback. Now I'll be bitten by a venomous snake and die a slow, painful death. As I am somewhat gleefully considering how sorry Carly will be for sending me out here alone, the van, an apparition out of nowhere, barrels toward
me. It slows down long enough for Tobias and Stomatos to yank me inside, like in those films when the hero sprints to catch a moving train, before we are off again, racing to beat the sunrise we want to witness from a lookout point half an hour away.

The next three days are an unconventional routine of hiking, driving, sunrises, and sunsets. Each morning Leah hurtles breakfast at us with the same willful cheeriness, then we race off somewhere to marvel at the various shades of lightening or darkening sky. Hands down the best sunrise/sunset presents itself at Ayers Rock, or Uluru, as native Australians call it, the monolithic sandstone rock that graces at least half of all Australian postcards. I take no fewer than thirty photos each of the sunrise and sunset at Uluru. The sky turns so many magnificent shades of red so swiftly that I'm never sure where the pinnacle of beauty is. So I snap away, we all do, witnessing nearly the entire event behind our lenses.

Uluru holds great spiritual significance for Aboriginals, and they don't want you climbing it. Our guide tells us this, as does everyone else who works at and around the rock. There are other reasons not to climb. It's steep, the sun is merciless, and more than thirty people have died so far attempting it, even though there is a clearly marked section with a rope to hold on the way up.

Despite these compelling reasons, people do climb. When we arrive, a steady stream of ants is marching single-file up the rock. Our group chooses instead to do a four-hour walk around the monolith's base, marveling again and again at its enormity and at such unforgiving heat when it's not even ten
A.M.
Not only are you discouraged from climbing Uluru, you are also reminded that it's not a souvenir. Yet people abscond with bits of red rock, stuffing them boldly in pockets and backpacks and returning home with them. Only something strange has been happening over the years. Tourists are returning the stolen sandstone in great numbers, posting pieces back, often at great expense, and begging the
site's employees to return them to their place of origin. The notes give detailed directions about where this or that rock was abducted, followed by profuse, shamed apologies. Since picking the forbidden fruit, terrible things have happened. One woman's note describes a sudden illness, another a series of pets' deaths. Trauma after trauma is related, each person convinced that these troublesome events are tied to the contraband.

It's a satisfying form of justice. The rock is where it's meant to be, where it's fated to be. Its resolve to remain is like a force field—after all, it cannot speak for itself, and though the Aboriginals do their best to protect it, their warnings too often go unheeded. Or maybe the rock is more like a magnet calling itself home, bringing back the various bits of its lost body at whatever cost.

When I return from the Outback, I renew my job search. Luck strikes again days later, when I'm hired at a café to work the cash register and assist the barista during the busy morning shifts. The café is the bottom level of a massive office building in downtown Sydney, tucked down the street from the Parliament House, whose colonnaded verandah reminds me more of an old-time saloon than a government building, and a few blocks east of the Domain, the city's large open space that hosts dozens of amateur rugby and soccer leagues, outdoor concerts, soapbox orators, and general lazing about.

My shift starts at seven
A.M.,
which means—and I can feel the exhaustion creeping over me even at the memory—I have to get up at five
A.M.
to shower and eat, then walk fifteen minutes to the bus stop at the end of the Dawsons' street to catch the six-twenty bus into the city. Getting up early for a spectacular sunrise is one thing, but this routine, well, it sucks. I must resemble a groggy noon-hour Patchi, but luckily, no one is awake to witness it—or have the unfortunate task of attempting conversation
with me. The bus drivers here wear white kneesocks. That surprising uniform choice is all I'm capable of comprehending at six
A.M.
The first few mornings, the promise of the heart-stopping Sydney Opera House, rising like a beacon to my left as we cross the Harbour Bridge, is enough to keep me awake. But soon even this becomes routine. I drift in and out of consciousness, willing my body to wake me at the right stop. The upside is that I finish work at one-thirty
P.M.,
giving me the afternoons free, and the pay is pretty good.

When I arrive at the café, I greet Joey, the barista, with a sleepy nod. He slips me two shots of espresso, which I throw back like tequila, visualizing the caffeine coursing through my veins. Even with the coffee, I'm never fully awake, just jittery. That doesn't help my performance, which is—and this is an understatement—woeful. It is so woeful, in fact, that I wonder if I have imagined being a good waitress up until now.

My current position is not technically waiting tables. There is a restaurant section, hard white plastic tables with sleek, aerodynamically curved wooden chairs, where businesspeople gather in their summer suits for a quick lunch—a chicken sandwich with basil mayo, say, or a light salad Niçoise. But I'm working the breakfast shift, and the customers are in a rush to get upstairs to their law or tech or architecture firm, where they might order toast with Vegemite or muesli with yogurt, banana, and honey, but where they always line up in front of our shiny rectangular counter, with two hulking coffee machines at one end, and order a coffee of some kind. Their choices: cappuccino, flat white, latte, long black, double espresso, espresso, macchiato, piccolo, long macchiato, or Vienna coffee. Simple enough, except that it's not, for several reasons. The first is that Joey has been working at this café for several years, and his brain is a hive of customer names and orders. Like any self-respecting Aussie barista, he knows them all, and he knows what they drink.

Joey moves with robotic precision, first running both hands
from his temples to the back of his skull, matting down his loose shoulder-length curls, a lion coiffing his mane. He smoothes his long white apron, then places his hands on his hips and stares meaningfully at the coffee machine for a few intimate moments, two athletes in a huddle. Finally, ready for battle, he begins to make coffee. One right after another, they fly from his graceful hands, hissing steamed milk punctuated by the blunt knock of coffee grounds being dumped into the garbage can after two perfect espresso shots have been drained from them. All the while he calls out his g'days to the customers, asking them if they want the usual, which they always do. The regulars expect to have their coffee prepared and waiting for them by the time they reach me at the cash register.