August 2010 - A Thumbnail Dipped in Tar
So, as I mentioned last month, we're "home for the holidays". What follows are some notes from the road:
"Seeing red"
Laura's driving. Molly's asleep. Isobel's reading a picture book called ‘Too Much TV'. And here I am in the passenger seat, banging away at the laptop. We're 15 km south of Bourke, and just a couple of minutes ago I filled an ancient glass Coke-bottle with magnificently red Outback dirt.
Unless US Customs cans me, I'm souvenir-ing it and bringing it back to our home in Western New York. I want my girls to know the varying hues of outback soil. I want the desire and affection for it to run in their veins.
"Can I have a look at your bottle of pink sand, Daddy?" Isobel asks.
"It's red", I tell her.
A thought occurs to me as I type these words: Isobel getting the colour right seems more important to me than spelling the word ‘colour' (‘color'?) correctly. As much as I love words (and I do love words and their history, and I am fascinated by the stories and histories hidden inside their spellings), the spelling of the words we use in this case is of secondary importance.
I want Isobel to get the term right. The dirt is red. As in ‘red center'. Not that we are as out-back as a family in a four wheel drive can get, but we're a fair way from anywhere. Red is brutal and bloody and unforgiving. Red goes to war. Pink is pretty; pink is nice. But pink is just watered down red.
In my imagination the outback is many things. Nice and pink it is not.
* * *
"Outback legends"
We'd been here for three weeks and hadn't yet seen a kangaroo. When the girls claimed to have spotted one bouncing into the bush the other day, Laura and I didn't want to argue with them, but the sighting was unconfirmed, and little girls have wonderful imaginations.
Finally yesterday we saw one, then two, then four, and then it was dusk and the whole bloody world was full of them and we were dodging them in the dark. We lit ‘em up with the headlights, which revealed kangaroo corpses all over the road: a solid reminder that kangaroos were indeed a real threat and not just the stuff of outback legend and haunted up fears inspired by the roo bars on the fronts of stockmen's Toyotas.
Earlier that day in St. George (which is somewhere in rural south Queensland) we were distracted from perhaps our most important task in that town, which was to fill up on petrol before heading deeper into the sparse and nocturnal outback. Fifty k's out of town, I looked down to check if the highbeam was on - and noticed that we were on empty. Literally, as in dead-set on the "oh bugger, we're in trouble" white line.
Checking the SatNav, we saw that we had 48 k's until Dirranbandi, the next uncertain site of civilization. On this remote stretch of road, we were unsure what the next town would bring. We knew we needed either petrol or accommodation and preferably both, in order to avoid a cold and uncomfortable and embarrassing night in the car. We had reason to expect a petrol station in Dirranbandi, but the key in the Hema maps book suggested it might not be open late and it was now well after dark. The SatNav and Hema both marked the town as having no accommodation.
But it was a country town and country towns have to have pubs. And most of those pubs have accommodation, so we held out hope.
The thing that had distracted us in St. George was Laura's purchase of a new outback-signal-enabled phone since the one we had was hopeless. As we rolled south and away from relative civilization, even Telstra's reception grew spotty and soon we were faced with the very real threat of being stuck on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with no petrol, nowhere to sleep, and no way of communicating.
Laura was trying to activate the phone, and the task was proving difficult since the signal was going in and out as we drove on. After her third time talking to various outsourced customer service agents and being cut off mid-call, I decided to pull off the road when the signal was good to let her complete the activation. While she was having a tortured conversation that involved spelling and respelling our last name six or seven times, I had some moments to reflect on our short time in St. George, and another highlight of that visit which I almost forgot to mention.
The traffic cops. Yep - I got busted for leaving St. George a little fast. Really, I had been conservative in town, but it's difficult to stay slow when you've already got hundreds of speedy miles under the belt for the day. But they took one look at the Yankee license and let me go with a ‘formal warning'.
We drove on at a fuel-efficient though agonizing 80 kph and eventually made it to Dirranbandi. The petrol station was closed for the night but the Dirran Pub was open and they had a family room available. Good thing the beers were cold, ‘cause we needed one . . . or a few.
* * *
"So yeah, we've had some problems to solve . . . "
Sean:
How much am I willing to pay to take the family into an underground mine in Lightning Ridge?
Do you have a room for the night for me and my wife and two little kids?
Oh good. How much is that?
What year is it, and what's "Hey Hey" doing on the telly on a Wednesday night?
And why did I have to turn it off so my girls wouldn't have to see Kylie Minogue's twenty-five leather and bondage-gear-clad dancers writhing around on stage?
Laura:
Just how Jolly was that jumbuck the swagman shoved into his tuckerbag?
How big does yer tuckerbag have to be to shove a jumbuck in it?
How's the serenity?
Molly:
Can I have an ice cream?
Can I have a lolly please?
Can I have a meat pie please, Daddy?
We're going to another hotel? Another one?
Isobel:
Whose house we are staying at tonight?
What do we call napkins in Australia again, Momma? I forgot.
Molly:
I'm a baby koala.
Kookaburra