We’ve arrived at Mount Carbine and don’t want to drive any further.
We’ve been driving for four days. Dharman says that if we were to take the
Peninsula Development all the way to Cooktown, to the very top of the cape,
which we’re not, there would be another three solid days of road left to roll
our twenty-four inch tires along. Solid days of dirt road, that
is – the road here is still bitumen. Mirages look better on bitumen, I think.
More lucid, wetter, if it makes any sense to describe a mirage in those terms.
Like iridescent parachute pants moonwalking away, on the polished floor of a
room that’s narrow and empty and endless.
We won’t drive far enough North to hit the dirt and that’s all
right. That’s more than all right.
Anyway, for now we aren’t in a hurry to drive anywhere, or do anything
except sit and drink beer, which I’m not enjoying much either. It’s almost
forty degrees. There’s water left in some of the creeks running under the road,
and the vegetation around the dry creeks is green and abundant enough to
suggest that there was water in those ones too, not so long ago. There are two
dead kangaroos in my field of vision, little mucked up ones with burnished
eyes, on the road at either side of this township, Mount Carbine as I’ve already
said, which is really just a couple of houses, circumscribed by wooden
verandahs, built around the pub I’m currently sitting at, the whole lot situated
at a pretty remarkable point in the biosphere at which the Daintree gives over
to the red termite-ridden barrenness of the inland cattle stations. People miss
those transitional points in the Australian landscape, the ones that for four
days have stirred me like the beating of some gargantuan drums or something,
quite simply because they are few and far between and there is subsequently fuck
all reason to be anywhere near them. I also see a place called Mount Carbine
Preserves that sells jars and paraffin wax, but it looks closed.
An illusion: the craggy green mountains of the rainforest have clung
to the foreground of the horizon. They seem far closer to us than the GPS says
they are. But the tropical air – cloyed with sugarcane and banana and mango and
the sea – we breathed in so giddily yesterday is long gone. What has replaced
it is dry and hard to describe and equally hard to inhale. Across from where
I’m sitting – on the verandah of the pub – there is a wooden fence painted
green and then the road and then a fucking enormous tract of copper desert and
then the mountains, the loveliest I think I’ve ever laid eyes on, even lovelier
than the Rockies or the Andes that make brushy ant hills of them, and to my
right I can see the excavated ridge, like the lip of a fancy salad bowl, of one
of Queensland’s biggest open-cut coal mines.
The XXXX beer beside this notebook is probably warm by now. The boys
have gone inside where they serve counter meals and have a lot of
seventies-style ceiling fans going. But I hate the feeling of fanned hot air
more than I hate the hot air itself and so I have stayed out here. I’m not
hungry. The total absence of wind out here is almost disconcerting, but isn’t.
Trash spills from a wheelie bin resting against the lamppost our Landcruiser is
parked next to. What I know as stink bugs teem like a greenish shadow around
the trash. Then Dean blusters through the green plastic ribbons in the doorway
of the pub and looks at me. Then he looks at my notebook. Then he blusters back
through the ribbons; I think some were hanging onto him the whole time. I think
he was coming to ask what I was doing. He looked drunk, which I’m happy about
because I like it when the boys get drunk, especially Dean. It’s somewhere
between three and five o’clock in the afternoon. I notice that the sliding
door, also painted green, has come off its thread and is basically leaning
against the weatherboard side of the pub like rubbish awaiting the arrival of a
skip; does the pub ever close?
Instead of writing something summative, a diary entry or epic
narrative poem that catches everything up and then some, which was what I’d originally
planned to do, I’m going to use this stopover to tell the story of a single
incident that has happened to us on the road and that strikes me in this first
moment of proper contemplation as being special. Maybe it’s cowardly occlusion
to say so, or fatigue, or self-sabotage, but I reckon that this will be the
only writing do until I get back to Melbourne. I’ve never set down anything
like that before. I’ve also never kept a travelogue and finally understand why:
writing about experiences in detail inevitably eats into the time allotted to experiencing. Now the publican is on the veranda and I’m looking
at her deferentially, as if she were a kind of outback goddess. Her hair is
dyed blonde, she has on faded blue jeans and high heels, and is either an
old-looking forty or a youthful fifty. She asks me how I am. Good, I tell her.
She asks me if I’m finished with my beer. Yes, I tell her. When she asks me if
I’d like another beer, I tell her no. As she is walking towards the ribbons and
I’m vaguely and unfeelingly attentive to the way her arse moves, the thought of
those hundred millilitres of flat beer drizzling down the drain suddenly
becomes very clear and very affecting; the feeling it arouses is closer to
disgust than fear, but not much closer. My skin catches the sunshine and I
shiver. Then the green ribbons go still and I shake my head, mime something I
instantly forget, and turn back to my notebook.
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