“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” – Lewis Carroll.
Road trains rumble through the Seussian towns of Bungeworgori, Womblebank, Cooladie and Quilpie. We give them a wide berth, these giant shipping containers on wheels soaring across the Great Sandy and the Simpson Deserts. Kangaroo carcasses litter the roadside, hit and run victims of the trains, and while we mourn their loss, the grief is overshadowed by the sheer joy of having just rendezvoused in this nation of convicts and straight shooters and desert dwellers for, of all things, an academic conference (the sleepy details of which shall not be recounted here).
We leave the conference and drive past the multitude of eucalyptus and acacia trees and then West-West-West we rocket across the corpulent continent of Australia in the hopes of reaching the legendary loner that is Uluru. There is no word to describe the elation we feel being here at the end of the Earth in this place of lazy fan palms and blue gums and marsupials and noxious snakes with benign names like brown in a rented car not authorized to leave leafy Brisbane.
En route.
At a roadside artesian spa we meet back-country guide Peter who for a living shows wealthy tourists the glittering night skies of the southern hemisphere. He is sitting in the steamy pool arms wide in the shape of a T, his skin all wooly and radiating an air of idleness akin to trouble. He is traveling down the road to Charleville and advises us to join him in this tiny town at a pub hotel and so we arrive and unbeknownst, take the last budget room with its tiled bathroom and worn lacy bedspreads. Hotel Corones is old school West Queensland, set on the street corner and full of creaky staircases and black and white framed photos and we want to marry here on this very spot. Across the street we walk to a small market where we procure our usual repast of bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate. Sunlit-dazed aboriginal women with eyes as white as savanna cranes crouch outside the market with tiny colored bags; the oldest living culture on Earth relegated to asphalt and plastic.
Back at Corones we run into Peter who is chatting up some robust retirees and we join them in Victorian chairs set around a friendly, smoldering fire. It’s clear he’s charmed them and we are young and inexperienced, so we listen with fascination to the stargazer and the old man and his bespectacled wife and to their tales of “ripping it up and down” the coast of Oz. To fall in love with Australia is to fall in love with America – two nations big in heart and people, stumbling their way across a map too big in which to avoid blunder.
The long night ends and we bid one another tentative farewells and exchange warm hand shakes with our new old friends. As the Engineer turns away the professional star guide reaches for my hand once again and steals an uncustomary-not-on-the-cheeks kind of kiss.
WTH?
Not a slap-in-your-face-why-did-you-kiss-me kind of smooch but a nonverbal unsolicited gaffe on the lips followed simply by a soft-spoken “good night”.
As we mount the stairs and stride past the museum display of freakishly lifelike Victorian dolls I tell my man the news of my brief affair and he’s shocked and maybe amused that he missed this incident. In the end we are just two bumbling American travel rookies playing way out of our league.
En route.
Whether we meet Helen and Robert in Toowoomba or Goombungee or Dalby I do not recall. They drive a boxy RV, ask us where we’re headed, and since our response is “anywhere” they quickly invite us to their campsite at Carnarvon way up top on the crinkly paper map. They have an unclaimed tent and it’s ours if we want it so we take directions and agree to a date.
We arrive late in the day and spot the RV next to a pitched tent, Helen and Robert gathering and chopping and mixing items for the late evening meal for which everyone seems to be invited. We meet our neighbors, too, a couple of young, scarily witty Canadians traveling around Oz and NZ in a white Holden for a year to see if they’ve got the pluck to get hitched for life upon their eventual return home.
We shower at dusk in the park’s facilities fed by icy spring water so cold it’s impossible to stifle a shriek. By nightfall big blankets of wind whip through the gorge and wacky kookaburras chatter while resident kangaroos begin their nocturnal forage near the trees. We sit together on benches sharing food, this accidental group of travelers; we listen to the old guard weave stories as the wind menaces the fire warming a Dutch oven full of fluffy homemade dessert.
Have you ever met your future self in a dream -- or at least the self you hope to be? I saw us there in wintry Queensland, aging unapologetically, without protest, solidly middle class, glassy wide eyes and short on sullenness and time, still gleefully thirsty for all the extant wonders of the world.
I like Future Us.
Road trains rumble through the Seussian towns of Bungeworgori, Womblebank, Cooladie and Quilpie. We give them a wide berth, these giant shipping containers on wheels soaring across the Great Sandy and the Simpson Deserts. Kangaroo carcasses litter the roadside, hit and run victims of the trains, and while we mourn their loss, the grief is overshadowed by the sheer joy of having just rendezvoused in this nation of convicts and straight shooters and desert dwellers for, of all things, an academic conference (the sleepy details of which shall not be recounted here).
We leave the conference and drive past the multitude of eucalyptus and acacia trees and then West-West-West we rocket across the corpulent continent of Australia in the hopes of reaching the legendary loner that is Uluru. There is no word to describe the elation we feel being here at the end of the Earth in this place of lazy fan palms and blue gums and marsupials and noxious snakes with benign names like brown in a rented car not authorized to leave leafy Brisbane.
En route.
At a roadside artesian spa we meet back-country guide Peter who for a living shows wealthy tourists the glittering night skies of the southern hemisphere. He is sitting in the steamy pool arms wide in the shape of a T, his skin all wooly and radiating an air of idleness akin to trouble. He is traveling down the road to Charleville and advises us to join him in this tiny town at a pub hotel and so we arrive and unbeknownst, take the last budget room with its tiled bathroom and worn lacy bedspreads. Hotel Corones is old school West Queensland, set on the street corner and full of creaky staircases and black and white framed photos and we want to marry here on this very spot. Across the street we walk to a small market where we procure our usual repast of bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate. Sunlit-dazed aboriginal women with eyes as white as savanna cranes crouch outside the market with tiny colored bags; the oldest living culture on Earth relegated to asphalt and plastic.
Back at Corones we run into Peter who is chatting up some robust retirees and we join them in Victorian chairs set around a friendly, smoldering fire. It’s clear he’s charmed them and we are young and inexperienced, so we listen with fascination to the stargazer and the old man and his bespectacled wife and to their tales of “ripping it up and down” the coast of Oz. To fall in love with Australia is to fall in love with America – two nations big in heart and people, stumbling their way across a map too big in which to avoid blunder.
The long night ends and we bid one another tentative farewells and exchange warm hand shakes with our new old friends. As the Engineer turns away the professional star guide reaches for my hand once again and steals an uncustomary-not-on-the-cheeks kind of kiss.
WTH?
Not a slap-in-your-face-why-did-you-kiss-me kind of smooch but a nonverbal unsolicited gaffe on the lips followed simply by a soft-spoken “good night”.
As we mount the stairs and stride past the museum display of freakishly lifelike Victorian dolls I tell my man the news of my brief affair and he’s shocked and maybe amused that he missed this incident. In the end we are just two bumbling American travel rookies playing way out of our league.
En route.
Whether we meet Helen and Robert in Toowoomba or Goombungee or Dalby I do not recall. They drive a boxy RV, ask us where we’re headed, and since our response is “anywhere” they quickly invite us to their campsite at Carnarvon way up top on the crinkly paper map. They have an unclaimed tent and it’s ours if we want it so we take directions and agree to a date.
We arrive late in the day and spot the RV next to a pitched tent, Helen and Robert gathering and chopping and mixing items for the late evening meal for which everyone seems to be invited. We meet our neighbors, too, a couple of young, scarily witty Canadians traveling around Oz and NZ in a white Holden for a year to see if they’ve got the pluck to get hitched for life upon their eventual return home.
We shower at dusk in the park’s facilities fed by icy spring water so cold it’s impossible to stifle a shriek. By nightfall big blankets of wind whip through the gorge and wacky kookaburras chatter while resident kangaroos begin their nocturnal forage near the trees. We sit together on benches sharing food, this accidental group of travelers; we listen to the old guard weave stories as the wind menaces the fire warming a Dutch oven full of fluffy homemade dessert.
Have you ever met your future self in a dream -- or at least the self you hope to be? I saw us there in wintry Queensland, aging unapologetically, without protest, solidly middle class, glassy wide eyes and short on sullenness and time, still gleefully thirsty for all the extant wonders of the world.
I like Future Us.
6 comments:
I will never again be able to look at a map of Australia without thinking "corpulent continent". Such a content, rotund island sitting mostly by itself with NZ keeping company. Incidentally, Peter was a cad.
Wait, did you shower together? I'm telling your Mom, especially since you weren't married. Who's the real cad? LOL.
Heard about your Red Room featured post. Congrats, Goobie!
I like Current You. Or at least Current Casey. ML.
If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there... maybe including staying where one is? :-) Put logic aside, I love the way you guide me to travel and to meet people and places, present, past, and future.
By the way, I wished that your karate (or the like) reflex had kicked in to cure Peter's behavior, for his own good if nothing else.
The Future You vision looks charming, except for those freezing cold showers.
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