Robyn Davidson
Editors’ note: Robyn Davidson is one of the greatest adventurers Australia has produced. She grew up on a cattle station in southeastern Queensland. In the late 1970s she moved to Alice Springs for two years to work with camels for a trek she was planning—from Alice to the Indian Ocean, across some of the harshest terrain on earth. The subsequent nine-month journey via 1,700 miles of Australian outback captured the attention of the world and became a cover story for National Geographic. The worldwide interest in her adventure (she had never intended to write about her journey) prompted her to write Tracks (in Doris Lessing’s London home), which became an international bestseller. She later became a cultural anthropologist and studied nomadic cultures in India and Tibet. In 2013 a film about her outback adventure directed by John Curran and starring Mia Wasikowska was made. Her other books include Tracks, Australia: Beyond the Dreamtime, Ancestors, Desert Places, and The Picador Book of Journeys. This story, about traveling across the United States on a Harley-Davidson, is excerpted from her 1993 book Travelling Light.
There is no stretch of highway in the world more boring than Route 75 through Ohio. After hours of staring at soggy flat farmland, from the back of a Harley-Davidson, through billowing truck fumes and drizzle, my first glimpse of the truck stop cafe was a welcome, if surreal, relief. The American mid-west breakfast of two eggs, bacon, sausages, hominy grits, french fries, pancakes, carcinogens and sodium nitrite was to keep us alive until we reached California, where, miraculously, as soon as you crossed the border, you began eating beansprouts, whole-wheat bread and spinach salad with blue cheese dressing.
There were at least 200 trucks parked outside this three-acre extravaganza. Truck drivers who wore ten-gallon hats, T-shirts (“I’d rather push my Harley than ride a rice-burner”), turquoise and silver belt buckles, and snakeskin boots with toes so pointed they could open envelopes, jostled for position at the food counter, or crowded into the space-invader rooms, or riffled through back-copies of Easyriders in the reading rooms, or quaffed beer in the bars, or filled their tanks at the forest of gas pumps. Everything a truckie ever wanted or needed was there, including cowboy-booted squaw-tasselled truck-groupies hanging provocatively and vacantly around the doors. Our breakfast neighbour eyed us suspiciously until he found out we were from Australia. “What’s it like livin’ in one of them goddamn socialist countries? I hear tell you can’t even carry guns there. Man, I couldn’t live without mah guns.”
Since leaving New York, three weeks before, we’d been living out a “Leave it to Beaver” re-run. I don’t think I could have tackled it without my genuine, padded, press-studded, black leather Harley-Davidson motorcycle jacket. Not only did I walk taller when I had it on, and feel meaner and look tougher, but the human sea in the streets of Manhattan parted before me. It was, as a leftie journalist had said when the first space shuttle went up, “biblical, man.”
And after the torment of a three-week publicity tour, I needed any props I could get. When I wasn’t collapsing in Hyatt hotel rooms, or being powdered up for chat shows, or fearing for my life on aeroplanes, I was holed up in the cavernous splendour of a white, well-appointed loft in Soho, where chemically fed pot-plants watched my back; where subdued jazz played on the FM; where endless replays of Reagan getting shot (his theatrical piece de resistance), interspersed with doctors’ reports and static, played on the TV; where sirens played on the streets; where there were two phones with buttons and dials and red flashing lights, neither of which I knew how to work; where the taps required an IQ of 500 to be turned on; where rows of fumbly security locks on the front door, lift buttons, lift door and apartment door did nothing for my paranoia because any thug could climb up the fire escape and break a window; and where there were only frozen orange juice, Best Foods mayonnaise and fifty rolls of film in the fridge, because everyone ate out. Except me.
So I rang Steve, who joined me from London a week later. When he suggested we buy a motorcycle and ride from New York to California, where he was born and raised, but hadn’t seen for ten years, I barely put up a struggle. The thought of wind in my hair, the freedom of the open road, and dying instantly under the wheels of a Mack truck seemed almost appealing. The only things I had against the idea were the possibilities of either spending the rest of my life feeding mashed bananas to a quadriplegic or waking up in some mid-west hospital, unable to remember my own name. There was also in me a deep resistance to being second in command. If Isabelle Eberhardt—that eccentric Victorian wanderer—hit the nail on the head with “life on the open road is the essence of freedom,” she qualified that with “no one is free who is not alone.” Quite.
And I was ignorant of bikes. I didn’t like them. I had no intention of ever learning to ride one. I didn’t even understand bikie language. Riding to me has always meant a relationship with an animal—horse, donkey, camel even. You don’t ride a machine, you sit on it. Nor was I good “bikie moll” material. Good bikie molls sit on the back and keep their traps shut. They don’t whinge. They aren’t back-seat drivers. When the bike breaks down, they don’t blame the driver, er, rider. There was a lot I had to learn.
It was raining when we went to pick up the gleaming black and silver sin machine. It sat at the back of the shop like a poisonous insect. While Steve talked with the proprietors about teflon sprockets and eighty-cubic-inch shovelheads, I strolled around the accessories. Was this an S and M outfitters or what? I picked out the most expensive helmet (I like my brains where they are) and then my gaze alighted on the leather jackets. I took one out, tried it on and, hey presto, transmogrification. I placed my fag between my lips, squinted through the smoke, put my thumbs in my pockets and ambled back to the guys. They spoke to me! I now understood how the invisible man felt when he put his bandages on. “Great deeds and great thoughts,” as Camus said, “all have a ridiculous beginning.”
Ah, the intoxication of speed as we hurtled from beneath the broken teeth of Manhattan’s skyline and onto the freeway. After the first thirty miles, I started loosening up. Enjoying it even. There was, after all, some pleasure in not being the one in control. My limpet-like clutchings, the involuntary shutting of the eyes when we leaned into a corner, were being replaced by stunts: the standing up on the pegs to give fist salutes to other bikers, the leaning back on the sissy bar to roll a smoke, and the moving from cheek to cheek to relieve the growing numbness in my bottom. After a hundred miles the discomfort was intense, the grumbling loud. Harley-Davidsons are not designed for the comfort of the bit-of-rag on the back, they are designed for the comfort of the rider, and for style. I was hunched on a stylish vibrating fence-post and feeling resentful.
I tapped Stevie on the shoulder (he was singing “I just wanna ride on my motorcyyyyy-cle.” Could this regressed maniac be the man who had seen me through thick and thin in London?) and asked him to stop at the next sports shop. We were bound for Vermont, and there were no sports shops. There were drug stores, which sold invalid’s inflatable toilet seats. I had no shame; I bought one. I was willing to risk my credibility with the bike fraternity, but my buttocks, never. I grew very attached to that cushion over the next three months. If Flann O’Brien was right about molecular transference, then Steve was becoming more like a bike, and I was turning into . . .
We rode ten hours that day, across the Adirondacks, around the swooping bends of Lake Champlain, through the first sweet hints of spring—polluted only by those totems to the American Dream: the omnipresent cars and billboards, the gas stations, the baseball caps and the fast-food franchises. America is a car culture, constantly travelling to greener pastures. Americans do not see the horror, junk and pain littering the way. There is always a new frontier to head for, so how much you bugger up the one you’re on is irrelevant. This faith in the future at the expense of the present comes from moving fast with the windows wound up.
By the time we arrived at our friends’ country house just outside Hinesburg, we were exhausted. We couldn’t talk. We drooled. They put us to bed. I was too tired to attack Steve for bringing me on this torturous and pointless journey. But after three days with them, during which we gum-booted our way through Vermont’s mud season (apparently not its finest) and stuffed ourselves with home-made apple pies, and swapped vitriolic reminiscences of book tours and reviewers, the desire to be off hunting for new frontiers began to infect me too. The first burst of acceleration as you leave somewhere in the early morning is almost worth the increasing tedium of the following miles.
Our plan was to head for Canada, turn south, then follow the setting sun. But when the first flakes of jet-stream snow bit into my face, I knew it was a rotten idea. We put all our clothes on, till we looked like marshmallows, and wrapped scarves around our faces, but still we could travel no more than twenty miles without having to stop for coffee to thaw out. We decided to go due west to Ohio.
Now, all this time I had been pestering Steve about camping out. Motels were expensive and, anyway, I wanted to sleep next to the earth and watch the constellations and build warming fires and sing songs and communicate a little with Mother Nature, whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while. “I think you’ll find camping out in this country a little disappointing after what you’ve been used to,” was all Steve had said. I couldn’t imagine what he’d meant. Camping out is camping out. It’s driving off the road into the bush and looking for wood and boiling tea and giving in to pantheism. How could that be different anywhere?
After gasping and gagging through Detroit air, I insisted that we stop at a camping spot the map showed us on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, thirty miles outside that blighted city. It was getting dark, but still Mother Nature was nowhere in sight. Just more black slums and a nuclear power plant. Yes, our camping spot was a patch of mown grass, nestled beneath this glittering structure, and just off the freeway. There was no wood. There were no trees. Just rows of trucks and vans parked on the grass. The entrance fee was eight dollars. This barren patch of horror was second home to whites who could no longer find work in the city and were now employed by the plant. They saw their families on weekends. They were worried.
We rolled out our sleeping bag a little way from the edge of the lake. Decaying rubber thongs, used condoms and dead fish littered its putrescent shores. Vile garbage smells wafted into our puckered nostrils; repetitive clangings of nuclear reactor machinery sang us to sleep. We had entered the throbbing heart of the American nightmare.
By the time we reached Kentucky, the graffiti in the ladies’ toilets had changed. No longer the simple sexual references, or the diagrammatic genitalia. Even the “I love Bud” scribblings and the arrowed hearts gave way to purely religious references and fire and brimstone sentiments as the southern accents grew thicker. However, the blue grass country was indeed beautiful, the weather was warm, and my spirits were thawing. We stopped in at a diner for a BLT sandwich and a beer.
That tiny backwoods diner was the antithesis of the dreaded Ohio truck stop. It had the best jukebox I’ve ever come across: Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Mance Lipscomb, and some of the most obscure and brilliant country and western I’ve heard. When we told the waitress that we were taking the Harley to California, and thence to Australia, she looked wistful, then puzzled and uncertain. “Well, ain’t that somethin’. I always had the ah-dea there was some water twixt us and them.” By the time we reached Tennessee the graffiti was not only biblical but racist as well.
Everyone has been told horror stories about the south. Steve said that during the sixties he’d been run out of towns he’d had no intention of stopping in. But we not only had no trouble, we were treated with utmost courtesy. Even the Harley, an erstwhile symbol of the evils of northern degeneracy, got some appreciative comments.
Things had certainly changed. The south suffered such a whipping during the civil rights movement, so much bad press had taken the heat off the north, which was equally guilty of repression, and which was still ripping it off economically, that the southerners were now bending over backwards to prove, especially to foreigners, that they were just regular friendly folks. And if that friendliness never got beyond the “have a nice day” level, if that friendliness was only a millimetre thick, beneath which lay the stuff fanatics and Queenslanders are made of, we were never around long enough to worry about it. We spoke to very few blacks. They cast their eyes downwards, smiled apologetically and crossed the street before any contact could be made. Not here the cocky confidence of New York blacks.
One night, on the banks of the gurgling Mississippi, our appreciation of the southern mystique deepened. The campground was a gravel pit and, because the freeway was only a few yards away, we had difficulty sleeping. Eventually we unplugged our ears and listened to our neighbours—a plucky little Nashville crooner and his sad, monosyllabic wife. Spotlighted by the bulb that dangled outside the cement toilet block, they were singing Hank Williams born-again songs to the tinny accompaniment of a plug-in guitar, and passing the baseball cap around to the lumber-jack-shirted occupants of three Ford pick-ups, all of which had bibles and rifles in the back.
We learnt when to interject with “praise the Lords” and “hallelujahs” while a pretty fourteen-year-old girl, all painted up for her big night out, sat among the rifles, bibles and men, and did not move, speak or breathe as they cracked smutty sexual and nigger jokes and slurped Cokes and sang gospel songs. Even such inroads to an understanding of what lurks beneath southern hospitality could not tempt me into dallying. Truth and Consequence, New Mexico, was still a long way off, and anything might happen.
Something did: my first Oklahoma tornado.
I’d been sitting on my cushion, watching rainclouds gather, wondering if I was going to get wet as well as bored, and mulling over the difficulty of coming to grips with the meaning of life on the back of a bullet travelling through ever-changing visual stimulae.
It’s not that there isn’t ample time to think—it’s that it’s usually on the level of what you are going to eat for lunch. Persig or no Persig, here was no inward journey. When you ride a machine, you are always on your way to somewhere, you are never actually “there.” When you walk, you are always “there” and can never get away from “there.” It gives you time to ponder and be changed.
On a machine you are protected from change. That, after all, is potentially revolutionary, and there is little room left for that in America, where whole communities set off in roving bands of mobile homes with appropriate names like “The Invader,” taking not only their colour televisions and kitchen sinks with them, but also their neighbours. For all America’s reverence of individualism, it is of the strictly manipulable kind.
I was jolted from this reverie by a claw-like black cloud scudding across the plains. My, but that cloud is travelling fast, I thought. Suddenly there were swarms of clouds, boiling clouds, furious clouds. We were on a freeway—the next exit was a few miles on. Stevie revved the bike until we were zooming through the most electrifying spectacle I had ever witnessed. Until, that is, I spied the funnel.
For all those who have not turned off an American freeway on to a dirt road at 120 miles per hour, don’t try it. Unless, of course, you are being chased by a black, lightning-fringed finger of death. We escaped it—just—and spent the next few hours in a tiny village called Pink, sheltering from the hail and violent winds. Nothing like a bit of adrenalin to bring you back to reality. We stayed a couple of days with an oil-drilling friend in Norman, but I was anxious to get to the deserts, where I was sure a gnawing sense of displacement would be cured.
There are many good reasons for visiting the States, but, to my mind, the two that stand out like Manhattan’s twin towers are tasting, for the first time in your life—in a down-at-heel roadside restaurant on the outskirts of a ghost town whose name you will never remember—real Mexican food and real Margaritas, and seeing, also for the first time in your life, the astonishing wonder-land of the south-western deserts. Put them together, add a bike and good weather, a soupçon of snow-capped mountains in the distance, and you’ve a recipe for hedonistic joy.
Perhaps it was the sudden injection of chilli rellenos, tequila and vitamins, perhaps it was the high altitude, piney-woods country of Arizona, perhaps it was the sniff of the arid zone that made my spirits soar but, whatever it was, by the time we flew through those vistas of limitless forest, rolling green into grey into blue, I was feeling on top of the world. By now I had replaced my helmet with a scarf—had become a convert, in fact, to the anti-helmet-law lobby (because, let’s face it, if you do bounce off your bike at eighty miles per hour, no feat of engineering ever designed is going to keep your grey matter from spilling). You feel better with it off, you see more, you don’t suffer from neck strain, you can hear birdcalls distorted by Doppler effect, and if you’re going to be mad enough to ride a bike in the first place, you may as well go the whole hog.
Enough has been written about the marvels of the Grand Canyon, and all of it under-statement. The place is magnificent. But the tourists and the prices began to grate, so we headed for Monument Valley—John Ford country; home of what’s left of the Navajo. It was, if anything, even more awesome than the canyon, and to which no film or photograph could do justice. Mile after mile the endless flatness stretched on, interrupted only by towering monoliths of bare rock and the occasional eagle wheeling through the wall of silvery heat shimmer, rising up into blue-black sky. This was what I’d been looking for. This was where the heart was.
While Australian deserts have a more unearthly, prehistoric, mythological quality, while they demand more depth of feeling, the American deserts take the cake for sheer brazen grandiosity and impact. They don’t grow on you, they hit you in the back of the head like a mallet. Away from the reservation itself, where we were required to stay on the roads, I was able, for the first time, to sleep in the sand dunes, and to walk out into the desert as far as I could and not see a fence, or a path, or a soul.
Coming from Australia, I had considered this privilege a right. But in America nature was fenced in—under glass. For most people the pleasure of being alone in the wilderness was a thing of the past. The bush had become an alien, dangerous and distant thing. Control is the name of the game, and I wonder how Australia will deal with the same problem, which it eventually must, as all the wild places are taken over by multinationals and tourism. Our extraordinary freedom to move where we like will become the privilege of a select few. This recurring theme, of seeing Australia’s future in America’s present, was what disturbed me most. That Australia is learning nothing from American mistakes, that we are swallowing all the worst aspects of the dross and spillage of the American Dream.
We strolled along the well-graded National Park paths, and read plaques informing us in large print that some European explorer had discovered the place, and then in small print at the bottom that an unnamed Indian guide had taken him there.
Some things are the same the world over.
Two days later we were surrounded by the chintz and tinsel of Las Vegas. (If you can possibly wean yourself off the silly notion of including Las Vegas in your tour of the south-west, do so.) We drove down the main street and headed right on out of town. Death Valley was far more appealing.
The temperature on the road now was up to 130 degrees. We put wet clothes under our jackets and wrapped wet turbans around our heads. Driving for hours in such heat, even with interruptions for swims in tepid canyons, or for tinkering with a sick and overheated Harley, or for praying for your life as the bike lunges from side to side in the turbulent winds of mountain passes, has a debilitating effect on mind and body. It begins to bend you a little. It rakes at your flesh like claws. It passes out of the realms of mere scorching into some uncharted territory of pain. Camping out that night didn’t appeal; I wanted crispy sheets and air-conditioning.
We pulled into a motel on the shores of Lake Mead—a tin-pot joint with a bar and gaming room across the street which, like all bars in Nevada, contained perpetual night for the benefit of gamblers. We soaked for hours in hot water (high velocity grime takes weeks to shift), then turned the telly on to the local news. An atomic bomb had been tested 150 miles north that day. “What????” I was anxious enough about contracting cancer in this region, what with all the uranium tailings left on Indian reservations for the kids to play in, and what with actors dropping like flies because they’d been on location in this country, without having to contend with fallout.
After a sleepless night, during which I imagined I was being penetrated by deadly and invisible beams, we packed up at dawn. The cleaning lady arrived. I grabbed her arm and, with alarm in my voice, asked her if she’d heard the dreadful news. She smiled indulgently at this poor stupid foreigner and, with a certain pride, said, “Goodness, honey, there’s nothin’ to worry about. They go off all the time. Sometimes they’re so big the walls shake. I think it affects the pot-plants a little, you know, but we’re used to it around here . . . and it’s better than being overrun by them I-ranians.”
“Steve, get me out of here.”
Death Valley. Second lowest point in the world. Weird moon-scape mounds of borax, distorted by the heat mirage. (The temperature had climbed to 150.) Gold had been its original attraction, and the fever and madness that commodity has always inspired in the hearts of men led them to die in that desert in multitudes. Hence the name. There is nothing alive there.
The heat after 9 a.m. was impossible. The heat after 6 a.m. was impossible. We made a pact that we would travel on in the cooler hours, so when we called in at Furnace Springs—a truly glorious oasis with a pool and bar and groves of palms—we had several hours to fill in. Now, I had made certain rules at the beginning of this trip. One was never to travel over seventy miles per hour if it could possibly be avoided, another was never to drive after dark because Steve had next-to-no night vision, and the other was no booze. A cold beer here and there, okay, but no hard stuff. Steve found this one difficult, because his favourite hobby—after riding bikes—was getting drunk.
He had done well so far. But one drink led to another, and, while I swam in hot spring water, Stevie swam in cold beer. He didn’t get drunk, mind you, just a wee bit unreliable. By the time we were ready to leave, the gas station had closed. We had to siphon petrol from a car. Stevie siphoned, and he siphoned and he siphoned. There was a small hole in the hose. He looked ill. He nearly passed out. He got rid of the nasty taste with yet more beer. “Steve, don’t you think we’d better . . .” “I’m fine, Rob, jus’ fine,” he said, through a cheesy, cross-eyed grin. He chuckled and danced a perfectly straight line just to prove it.
It was dusk and down to 110 degrees. I didn’t particularly want to get on the bike with him, but I didn’t want to stay in Furnace Springs either. The first few miles were okay, then I noticed the white line doing curious twists under our wheels. Tap, tap, “Steve . . .” Tap, tap. “STEVE.” “Huh?” “Stop the fucking bike.” “What for?” as we narrowly missed the gravel at the side of the road. I began throttling him from the rear. A moon was rising over the nothingness. A scream was rising in my throat.
We camped that night beside the road, the hot wind moaning over us, the grit and borax sticking to our sweating bodies. It was nearly the Waterloo of a perfectly fine relationship. He wasn’t even conscious of the kicks and oaths I planted on his snoring form. However, it is impossible to maintain such a level of passion during a Death Valley dawn, especially when you can see ice-tipped granite mountains about to pierce a sinking desert moon, as you travel up into California.
The first indication that we had crossed the border, besides the spinach salads with blue cheese dressing, was a west-coast denizen decked out in flapping multi-coloured paraphernalia passing us at a hundred miles an hour on his bike, with his feet up on the handlebars (I don’t know how he managed it either), Walkman earphones clamped over his flying tresses, and a beer in his hand. Stevie’s spirits were rising. He was recognising his roots.
California has deserts, mountains, lakes, San Francisco, oceans, Redwoods and oysters. Unfortunately it also has Californians. We spent a month there during which time Steve, in his search for the past, looked up many old acquaintances—who, he discovered, were either dead from heroin overdose and violence, or had changed from rabid pig-hating People’s Park supporters to avid Ayn Rand aficionados. I think it almost broke him. Had we not stayed with his oldest friend Eric, I think he would have bitten more than one ghost from the past on the leg. But I shall come to Steve’s tequila sunrise in due course.
There was now a certain urgency in our travels, which even California’s lakes and mountain passes did little to pacify. By the time we reached Sacramento, tradesmen’s entrance to the west coast, Stevie was like a bloodhound, hot on the trail of home. Back in New York he had casually let drop that because we rode a Harley we might end up fraternising with members of various bike groups along the way, and that I shouldn’t worry, he would handle it. It wasn’t that I had anything against the Hell’s Angels or the Gypsy Jokers, but the thought of smiling wanly at forty toothless, tattooed, oil-soaked fourteen-stone brothers in the middle of nowhere and maybe blowing it was not my idea of fun. I had walked out of Mad Max. I knew about those guys. So when we called in at Sacramento to buy a new chain, and when the shopkeeper didn’t have the tools for putting it on the bike, and when a toothless tattooed oil-soaked fourteen-stone brother kindly invited us back to his place so we could use his gear, and when Steve said okay despite my daggered looks which stuck six inches out his back, I died. I died.
We spent the afternoon at a little suburban house—Steve in the garage with twenty or so members of the Sacramento chapter, tinkering and talking about bikes, and me in the kitchen with our new friend’s wife, talking about her kids, her husband and bikes. They completely dismantled my preconceptions about the Hell’s Angels, but I’m glad we weren’t black and riding a rice-burner.
On the crest of a windy hill that evening, we stopped to look at a finger of fog stretching across the Golden Gate Bridge into the bay, and rolling banks of it about to snuff out the lights of that lovely city: San Francisco—our destination. In Nevada we had bought the kinds of fireworks that were illegal in California, so we were warmly welcomed by Eric, a charming ex-pyromaniac who featured big in Steve’s tall tales of sixties’ insanity, who used to build cannons for a hobby and was now a jeweller, and who had mellowed a little with age and travel. Until we arrived. I noticed Eric’s eyes glaze over and memory stir as he fingered the bottle rockets. The city was kept awake until the wee hours by overgrown, giggling five-year-olds and deafening explosions.
Despite such promising beginnings, despite hearing some of the greatest musicians in the world playing in small, intimate bars, despite making forays to the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot or watching seals frolic amongst the seaweed and rocks, the next two weeks brought about a perceptible decline in Steve’s spirits.
Going home is traumatic enough after ten years, but when many of your old friends start quoting Reaganisms at you and saying “let ’em get a job” or “liberalism is dead,” it’s hard to remain cheerful, let alone diplomatic. It came to a head when we all headed north to a friend’s place on the coast.
Eric forewarned Steve he would find the man changed, so, when we sat down to dinner in his fabulous restaurant that night, and when the chap suddenly, pugnaciously and without warning leant across the table, pointed his bobbing fork at Steve and said, “I suppose you think I’ve sold out, just because I worked my butt off for this restaurant? Well, I’m sick of feeling guilty and it’s about time we Americans grew up and forgot all that crap about Vietnam and the welfare state—I mean, let ’em get a job. America has been the whipping boy for too long, and now it’s time for good ol’ American know-how to take us back to the top,” Steve merely said, “Let’s not argue; I think your restaurant’s wonderful and good luck to you. The food’s great.”
“No, come on, man, I can see it in your eyes. As Ayn Rand says . . .” The conversation was downhill from there on.
Back at his mansion it continued to plummet, as his wife chimed in with how the women’s movement had been and gone in America, how it had worked, and was now just a lot of screwed-up dykes causing trouble. We all drank too much, which never helps. I eventually went to bed, unable to bear the strain of smiling through clenched teeth. Stevie had that dangerously belligerent light in his eyes so, when he came in to say goodnight and told me that if his friend didn’t stop looking for an argument he’d have to worry him round the ankles like a bulldog, I knew there’d be trouble.
Eric carried him into the bedroom at seven in the morning—an incident with a crossbow, a run-in with a woodpile, and three bottles of tequila later. I lay next to his unconscious form as long as I decently could, but eventually had to get up and socialise with the offended couple. I had to, with the help of the wonderful Eric, smooth the troubled waters until three in the afternoon, when a sickly, cross-eyed, tequila-sodden wreck staggered out of the bedroom, farted, said thanks for the lovely evening, and left on his Harley with me on the back saying yes, lovely, do hope we see you again, do hope your ankles heal soon and sorry about the crossbow, ha ha. We nursed our hangovers in the giant Redwoods.
A week later I took a Harley and a shell-shocked friend back to Australia. Whatever lingering doubts he had had about wanting to live in his home-country were cured forever. As for me, the only permanent injuries I sustained from the journey are a small, numb patch on my bottom and a cemented trepidation about current American thinking.
I wanted to end this piece saying something positive, appreciative and lyrical about Australia’s Big Brother, wanted to convince myself that all the wonderful people we met there and all my expatriate Yank buddies and all the good thought that comes out of there make up for the born-again nuke ’em mentality that pervades the place. But for the life of me I couldn’t do it. Except, of course, that it’s a hell of a nice place to visit.