Crash
Dani Valent
Working for Lonely Planet has prevented Dani from sailing across the Atlantic on a dog trampoline, mapping the human genome and hosting her own cooking show (Oh Naughty Wok). Other than that, she doesn’t reckon it’s too bad. Dani supports native title for Australia’s Aborigines and the Carlton Football Club.
YOU know how this ends. I got home alive. But when the car stopped rolling, heaved, and then sat, dreadfully silent and tangled way off the road, I hadn’t known what was going to happen.
We were three days into an outback road trip. I’d borrowed a friend’s dinky four-wheel drive, loaded it up with stuff, my housemate Dave, his Dutch girlfriend Lotte, and her friend Linda, and driven west, skirting Adelaide, to spend the night in rough-as-guts Port Augusta. Next day we’d driven 500 kilometres or so north till we hit Coober Pedy. It’s a gem and gimmick town, so hot that a lot of houses are hacked into the ground. We spent a day there, listlessly looking at opals and being hassled by bored locals, before pondering our map and choosing a dirt track arrowing east into the desert. It was 120 kilometres to the next settlement, an Aboriginal outstation where we could camp and fill up on bore water. We were assured that the people there could point out the road onward to the Oodnadatta Track, which we thought we might follow up north to the Simpson Desert.
We filled up with petrol and Kool Mints. I was driving, and I was happy. This was the real journey – an empty rutted road, flat red desert left right in front and behind, and the wind pouring in the windows. Dave, in the front seat, talked expansively to the Dutch girls, explaining things I guessed he’d read on cereal boxes. I joined in – we were acting more Aussie than we’d ever been, breathing Vegemite and bush lore. We told them how kangaroos were born, and stories of explorers (mixing, if I recall, the adventures of Burke and Wills with the trials of Amundsen on his way to the South Pole). They probably knew better, having already told us at dinner the night before about the federation of Australia, but they let us waffle on, our accents getting broader by the kilometre. I think I even said ‘strewth’ and I’m sure Dave said ‘fair dinkum’, things we’d surely never heard anyone say in real life.
We were about an hour out of Coober Pedy, halfway to the outstation, taking a sandy hill at eighty kilometres an hour when it gave way to a bend, invisible till it was upon us. The car started skipping sideways, nothing to do with me. I felt I was righting it, working with the skid like a true-blue Aussie sheila, when the steering wheel dialled out of my hand, and in a blink, the car launched into a roll. A big skipping jaunty roll. A twisty airborne roll. A triple roll which went on for a long long time, and when it stopped we all breathed out and noticed that no-one had died.
Slowly we got out, very grateful, very scared. We picked ourselves out of the car limb by limb, counting to four and feeling lucky. We talked to one another gathering brief facts, getting assurances that we were all indeed OK. Dave was the only one with blood on him; a cut leg, not too bad. The roof rack was fifty metres along the road, debris and our gear strewn along the ground in between. We sat on the ground, flattened by shock and the gravity of our situation. We were about sixty kilometres from help in either direction. We hadn’t seen one other car on the road. We’d passed no water, no crossroad, no building and certainly no emergency phone. I felt badly guilty but was too scared to ask if the others all blamed me.
Lotte and Linda were all for taking a bottle of water and walking back to town, but Dave and I talked them out of it, juicing up news stories about people in exactly our position who’d been found dead of thirst just out of sight of their cars. We said it was essential that we all keep together.
We became organised, in a mechanical kind of way. An inventory was taken: we had food for three big camp-site meals (steaks and potatoes and corn and pumpkin and puddings in cans). A bag of oranges, ten litres of water, some biscuits, a wad of pot, Kool Mints.
Water was the most serious problem. What we had might stretch for a couple of hot, thirsty days, but it seemed quite likely we could wait a week for a rescue car. So we started pissing in bottles, building up an emergency reservoir. Dave and Lotte wanted to combine our piss; Linda and I were all for four separate stashes. But our cup never threatened to runneth over – Dave was the only one who was able to catch much of his flow in the narrow-necked litre bottle we’d recently emptied of lemonade.
I dug a hole in the lee of the car, scooping out hot sand and then cooler sand, almost wet. Could we wring out the sand somehow? Suck on it? I foresaw a dramatic death: having lost my mind, troubled and forsaken explorer-style, I sucked on sand and choked. I surveyed the shimmering red plain – there wasn’t even a tree on which I could carve my initials.
As I continued to dig, images from a school camp came to mind – a bushcraft lesson in collecting water with a plastic bag, a leaf . . . wasn’t there string involved somehow? Then I looked at my thighs – big Aussie hams compared to the Dutch girls’ pegs – and recalled a story about Antarctic explorers who’d eaten their dogs, saving the heads till last. Most nutritious, those vitamin-rich doggy brains. I should be eaten first – the guilty driver, the fleshiest.
The Dutch girls were looking at me, not looking hungry at all.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘we can collect water using leaves and string before we have to drink Dave’s piss.’
Lotte and Linda looked fairly impressed.
We put our food and drink into the hole and set about collecting some wood. There wasn’t much of it – just scratchy saltbush twigs and stray windborne grass – but we put it all in a pile which immediately blew away. We raced after it and chucked it into the car.
Oh the car. Georgie’s lovely little city four-wheel drive, generously lent to us, to me really. And now terribly terribly undeniably dead. Dave and Lotte had taped garbage bags to the shattered windows, and they thrashed in the wind. The car looked like a crippled metal bird, pathetically trying to fly away. Could we somehow make hot-air balloons out of garbage bags? I wondered idly, a desert Houdini with mush for brain. We cleared the glass from the car, making a pile like a midden on the edge of the road. Now one of us could at least sit on the back seat, as long as their head was cocked at forty-five degrees and they didn’t mind head-butting the splayed seat in front.
I kept sneaking glances at the car, the rude canned shell of it. We all kept saying how lucky we were, while peering hopefully and scared this way then that along the burning, empty road.
Dave and I levered the mashed bonnet open with the tyre iron and peered inside as if it were an attic inhabited by ghosts. Like the very worst of backyard, arse-up mechanics, we scratched our heads and muttered. I looked for the fan belt, because I knew – probably from an episode of Neighbours – that it could be replaced with a stocking. A Dutch girl could surely be relied upon to have pantyhose. Unfortunately, the fan belt was intact, though the fan was leering wildly at the fuel pump and everything else seemed pretty bent out of shape. And, as Linda pointed out, it didn’t much matter about the engine when anyone could see that the wheels on the left side of the car were flat to the ground while still being somehow attached to the axle.
Maddeningly, the radio worked.
‘Can’t we swap the wires over and broadcast our location?’ I asked Dave.
He looked at me witheringly. ‘Maybe I’ll just find the frequency and play an SOS on my guitar.’
All of us kept thinking we heard cars. The wind made shapes in the desert, rushing along corridors we couldn’t see, slamming doors and scurrying up lonely looking birds. It sounded like trucks, cars, whole motorcades of illusion coming to rescue us at our brave little crash site.
An orange was quartered and we ate it seriously, licking the juice that ran down our dusty arms. We’d crashed late morning and now it was late afternoon. Time, we decided, to get the tents up and think about dinner.
Our recipe was Dutch discipline blended with faux Australian bush skills. Linda divided the food into nine doll’s-house portions and thought about meals which could be prepared with limited cooking; Lotte chopped the vegies into small chunks and hacked a steak into four meagre portions. Dave started a fire and Lotte and Linda whacked the food onto it. I found a rock and put it into the fire, then mashed up balls of flour and water to make chapatis. I felt quite the tandoori master till I rolled the rock out of the fire and it crumbled into steaming mud and clay, extinguishing fingers of precious fire in the process. I gathered up my sad little flaky discs and rolled them back into one single mass.
‘Let’s have damper,’ I said brightly, dumping it in the flames, where the outside quickly charcoaled and the inside stayed resolutely gooey. Linda kindly decided this was dessert. We ate it sprinkled with sugar and soon all had stomach aches decent enough to distract us from our predicament.
After an ominous sunset, it became cold very quickly. As we’d decided not to use the torch except in necessity, there wasn’t much to do but lie with swollen stomachs in two tents. I hated myself, went to sleep and dreamt about when I was little and had a paper round, and was persecuted by girls from the private school on my route. All teeth and pigtails, they stole my newspapers, hid my trolley and pulled my hair. This night I felt well deserving of punishment and woke up shivering in the night, scared, sad and lonely, fearing alley cats in prim blue-and-white check.
My paper-round money had paid for a stereo which was still in my bedroom. I supposed my sister could have it if I died. I worried that I hadn’t made a will. I worried about my parents reading my diary. I wondered how long it would be before people started looking for us.
The morning dawned bleak and beautiful and hopeless. I got up, peeled off a sweaty layer, and launched into a few yoga moves with what I hoped was optimism.
Lotte and Linda were boiling up a billy for some tea and had laid out some cereal. Dave sat next to Lotte rolling a breakfast joint.
‘You look like a tangled emu,’ Dave said helpfully as I sat in a complicated side-twist which ensured sand lodged in my buttocks.
‘Quite the naturalist, aren’t you?’ I bit back, displaying a shameful lack of karmic alignment.
I couldn’t remember any more yoga, so I bowed in the general direction of the sun and went to sit with the others. I thought about making scones, but couldn’t find the flour and suspected it had been hidden from me, the Damper Villain. Fair enough.
In a way it was just like any camping trip with friends. We had camped in a stupid place, had all been bitten by things we couldn’t see, and had the inevitable discussion about whether ants got hurt when they fell. Last time I’d debated the matter I’d argued that ants could turn themselves into tiny parachutes, spreading their legs and touching down gently. This time, feeling death closer at hand, I leadenly insisted that many an ant suffered a broken back or a snapped leg in the tumble from human height to land level.
The teasing wind-car noises started up again after breakfast, and then, as ordinary as socks, a real van came at us from the right. First we watched it blinking, then we stood up and ran towards it, arms like windmills. It stopped and a tall Aboriginal priest with silver hair got out and folded his arms.
‘You all OK?’ he asked levelly.
‘Yes, yes, we’re fine.’
‘Not another one left in the car?’
‘No, no, just the four of us.’
‘Very lucky.’
Indeed. The rest of the day was all driving, cops, tow trucks and reconstructions. We booked a motel room for the night and bus tickets south for the morning. I practised a serious jaws-of-death tone of voice and planned my phone call to the suddenly car-less Georgie. Strewth.