One for the Road Read Free

Sunday outing in Orange.
    I lean my pack against a ten-cent parking meter and watch a storefront thermometer creep toward eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Much worse lies ahead, I know, so I face the sun, purposefully. When I was a child, I used to take off my shoes in early summer and sprint back and forth across the stony driveway, hoping to toughen up my soles for the barefoot months ahead. Maybe I can do the same now and train for the withering heat of the outback.
    My first workout lasts ten minutes. I retreat into the shade and take a swig from my waterbag to clear my head. An hour later, a car finally unglues itself from the curb and swings around to pick me up. It’s one of those souped-up dragsters with the back wheels raised so high that the grillework is pushed down in front, as if to inhale any loose gravel. The driver, a sullen-looking teenager in black jeans and a black sleeveless vest, moves his arm like a minesweeper across the passenger seat, sending three dozen Coke cans clattering to the floor.
    “Hop in, mate. I can get you as far as Molong.”
    “Thanks for the ride!” I tell him, threading my legs between the can heap and a tangle of fuse wires. It is the one and only obligation of the hitchhiker to seem eternally grateful—and to keep up the chat. Hitchhikingis a big leap of faith for both parties. The driver has no way of knowing if you’ve just climbed the wall of a maximum-security prison. You have no way of knowing if he’s a mugger, rapist, or worse. Chat, however mindless, is the best way to break down any lingering suspicions.
    I try again: “So what’s to do in Orange on a Sunday?”
    “Nothing.”
    “How about Molong?”
    “Dead, mate. Laid out like a stiff.”
    “So what takes you there?”
    “Testing my transmission.”
    Silence. Transmission isn’t one of my conversational strong suits. “Actually,” he adds, unprompted, “that’s a lie. There was a cricket match on Channel Two and reruns of
Bonanza
on Nine. And nothing happening on the street. I reckoned there might be something more bloody exciting between here and Molong.”
    Perhaps he means me. Boredom is, after all, the main reason why people pick up hitchhikers; if not boredom, then to stave off sleep. Occasionally, the sight of a hitchhiker actually pricks at someone’s conscience, like one of those African kids staring off the magazine page: “You can stop for this poor bastard, or look the other way.” Usually, they turn the page.
    Anyway, this teenager from Orange is bored, but he’s after something more exciting than my idle chatter. “Look at that,” he says, slowing beside a heap of car-squashed flesh. It is the first kangaroo of my Australian journey.
    I stare hard at the shapeless corpse and try to conjure up the animal described in the journals of explorer William Dampier, who was the first white person to record seeing a kangaroo. “The land animals were only a sort of raccoon,” he wrote of his visit to the Australian coast in 1699. Unlike the American raccoons he’d seen, they “have very short forelegs, but go jumping upon them as the others do, and, like them, are very good meat.”
    Good roadside meat, too, like raccoons. But not good enough for my companion.
    “I thought it might be a big wombat, or maybe an echidna,” he says, picking up speed again.
    I’ve never seen an echidna, but I’ve read that they’re the only mammals in the world that don’t dream. Conscious and subconscious are rolledtogether in the wakeful world; just life as it is, experienced through their snout and spiny body. Until they wander into the road and end up, like this kangaroo, in a deep echidna sleep.
    In Molong, there are two pubs but both of them are closed. Even the parked cars have gone elsewhere for the afternoon. My host decides not to push his luck; he turns around to Orange in time for
High Chaparral
on Channel 7.
    The day is still young when he leaves me at the northern edge of town. It creeps