Bungle Bungle beehives, interrupted
Letter #19 - Wolfe Creek Crater to Spring Creek Rest Area
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 19. Thanks for joining me and for keeping your postbox open.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time featuring my journal entries written during the trip. You’ll see the journal entries highlighted in the letter.
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And finally, if you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other 18 letters here, in bed next to Elvis.
Let’s get to your letter!
Luke
Life sometimes interrupts living.
Do you know what I mean? Like when you’re out having a great time catching up with friends, then have to leave early to go home and walk the dog. Or when you’re lying on a sunny beach somewhere, oblivous to the world, except for the fact that you fly home tomorrow.
Living is creating memories, and travel is excellent at that. Travel is living. People travel to escape, to recharge, to do different things than they normally do, like sitting and watching the sun set over the desert or swimming in secret water holes.
We’d been doing that - ‘living’ - in the Australian Outback for the past 27 days. Our version of living included being stranded in a creepy town called Coober Pedy for car repairs after challenging and losing to the Oodnadatta Track, and sleeping in a tent when it’s 36C (97F) outside.
Life is different. Life is the ticking of the clock, the realisation that a month has passed and you’re not sure where the time went. It’s routine, some people might call it the ‘daily grind’. Life had intruded upon our trip only a few times. I’d had to burn a day in a caravan park in Alice Springs to put together a job application because I was worried about having work once our trip ended. There was a $100 trip to the mechanic for an oil change that turned into $750 of work replacing suspension that was buggered. But mostly, we’d been able to continue moving ever forward in our overland journey across Australia, from experience to experience, National Park to meteorite crater to odd-ball country roadhouse, all while blissfully unbothered.
But then, just a third into our journey, life interrupted. It wasn’t an interruption like that guy calling during dinner to sell you solar panels, it was the type that makes the world stop for a moment, like when you’re told out of the blue that you’re losing your job, or when one of your kids walks in while you’re having sex, though instead of having a good laugh about it later on, by the end of this letter, we’ll be thinking of packing up and going home.
Before I can get to that, however, I have to take you back to where I left things at the end of my last letter. If you’ve got a keen memory, you would recall that we’d been camping next to a meteorite crater at a place called Wolfe Creek when we were hit by a sandstorm. It was attempting to blast Katie, myself, and our two agitated boys into the crater.
27 October 2019 - Spring Creek Rest Area, Western Australia
We awoke again to ‘No Sleep Till Brooklyn’ - Henry’s alarm - and silence. The wind finally stopped sometime in the night, but it raged until at least 1 am. My eyes are full of grit from last night and the boys and all their stuff down on the bottom level are covered in a layer of sand.
Outside the tent, you’d never know there was a windstorm of biblical proportions. It’s business as usual for the golden grasses which surround us, the stoic gum trees, the low mound of the crater off in the distance. The flies have returned with vigor.
Henry fought hard not wanting to walk up to the top of the crater, even trying the tactic of being quite rude to his mom to get out of walking. Katie, as she does, cut straight to the iPod. She cannot manage any insubordination from Henry without involving iPod threats or confiscations.
Finishing up the Tanami Track, and we only saw one car between Wolfe Creek and the highway. And a guy driving a van which had the word ‘NASA’ hand painted on the side, for which he invented an acronym that stood for something to do with driving around. He was by himself, unless there was someone he was holding in the back of the van against their will. We met him at the gate to Wolfe Creek, a place which he seemed to find particularly exciting based on his giddy facial expressions when he asked if we’d been to the crater.
What happened next is a strange mixture of something I cannot remember the specifics of, but also cannot forget. It’s more an array of feelings that mixed in amongst the memories of the next week and changed the tenor of this part of the trip. We heard news that, in my head, will forever be linked to our trip.
Katie gets a text from Kyla just as we’re finishing up the Tanami. Matt has a brain tumour. Found out yesterday that he’s got it, going in for surgery Sunday (I think). They don’t know yet what the prognosis is. Wow. Things change fast.
Why are we doing this?????
My stomach dropped into my lap.
I thought back to the time we spent in July. I thought of Matt, big stoic Matt, looking vulnerable in a hospital gown. Doesn’t sit well. Surely it’s not that bad and he’ll pull through. But what if he doesn’t? I cannot imagine that happening. Feels like a deep, nervous, pit down there.
When taking a several month long road trip, you can prepare for a lot of things. Take along enough tools to take your car apart and rebuild it. Bring an air compressor for adjusting your tyre pressures to suit the road conditions. Pack a jerry can of diesel, and a fly swatter. But nothing prepares you for news that a good friend has a brain tumour.
Katie and I had known Matt since 2002, when he was brought / dragged along to our wedding as the plus 1 to our friend Kyla. A relocation for work found Katie and I living a couple blocks away from Matt and Kyla in Denver, Colorado, and our friendship grew from there. They were people we would spend holidays with when we had no other plans, I’d borrow Matt’s tools, Katie and Kyla would craft together. Before we had kids, we’d barbecue in the backyard and Matt and I would play poker until the late hours in their garage, trying in vain to keep our laughter under control so as to not antagonise the neighbours. We shared the experience of having kids, as Katie and Kyla got pregnant with our first children at around the same time.
As often as we could, Matt and I would escape our pregnant wives and corporate day jobs for nights on the town. At the time, I was writing a blog called Denver Dives, a chronicle of my visits to the best / worst dive bars and restaurants in Denver that still exists in the dark, less visited back alleys of the internet, in case you are interested. Matt often accompanied me on these trips. Here’s how I described him in a piece from 2008 about a bar called Mr. A’s, which proudly touted itself as the ‘Friendliest Lounge in Denver.’
“Matt is my usual wing man for excursions to questionable establishments. He possesses an even temper, can drink extraordinary amounts of beer, is a strong hand at foosball and shuffleboard, and is not afraid to wear shorts in the middle of January. He's also about twice my size and has no hair, both characteristics that might come in handy in a pinch.”
To boil it down, Matt is the kind of guy you want to have as a friend, that you’d count yourself lucky to have as a friend. He’d pick you up at the airport when you’re stranded, help you install your wood floor because you’re hopeless with the tools, and laugh at your stupid jokes.
We’d seen Matt, Kyla, and their three boys in July when we were driving through Colorado. When we received that text from Kyla about Matt having a tumour, I recalled Matt being a bit flat in Colorado, and telling us that he’d not been sleeping well, and hadn’t been feeling himself. I still shake my head thinking about the turn of events leading from feeling a bit off, to a few months later being told you have a brain tumour. It makes me want to go to the doctor for every single sniffle and headache.
We were dazed for much of the rest of the afternoon. At some point we ran into the safe, smooth bitumen of the Great Northern Highway which marked the end of the Tanami Track and our 1,000 kilometre trek across the desert. There was barely an acknowledgement. No cheers of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi!’, no happy snaps by the side of the road.
The heat had really begun to assert itself over the past few days, becoming more oppressive as we moved further west. In the morning, I opened up my deodorant only to find that it had melted the day before.
This made the middle of the day a time for seeking refuge. Because we had a surplus of time after leaving Wolfe Creek - our next camping spot was only a short drive away - and because sitting around the campsite sounded miserable, an mixed bag of sweating and wondering and worrying about the text Katie just received from the other side of the world, we made a little detour.
We stopped off at a waterhole called Palm Springs. Henry refused to get involved again, electing to sit in the car. What he missed was amazing. It was a deep pool of cool water nestled in amongst lush greenery, rocks and large hills. A spring trickled down to the pool off to one side, giving the impression of the swimming pool at a tropical resort.
28 October 2019 - Spring Creek Rest Area, Western Australia
Night two in this 24-hour stopover.
Katie got word this morning that Matt had a cancerous tumor the size of your fist removed from his brain. It’s dominated our thoughts all day. Katie spoke to Kyla, then cried. Then asked, ‘Why does this happen?’
We are camped just outside the gate to a National Park, and I had no desire to go see it. What’s the point?
It was after hearing this update that I would picture Kyla and her three boys without a dad. I would think back to those good times we had together, and realise that they might not happen again, at least not like they used to. When faced with news like this, you feel like you should just stay in bed for a while. Unfortunately our bed was located in a canvas tent on top of a trailer, in the sweltering heat of our campsite, a gully next to the highway where the wind couldn’t seem to reach. But the bugs could.
I’m up in the ‘fantasy suite’, steaming. I just finished my second night in a row of mass destruction of a mass quantity of bugs. They swarm all around the light in the tent, which Henry was lovely enough to turn on for us at full brightness. I’m not positive how all the bugs are getting in, but they are by the boatloads. So here Elvis and I are, smashing the fuck out of all kinds of flying bugs, right on our bed. If you look close enough at our sheets, you’ll see little smear marks where a battle has gone down. Now I’m done and hot and it’s as still as a church on Wednesday in summer outside. Ugh.
Elvis, in this case, is not a new friend whom I was hanging out with in my bed, nor is it the presence of The King himself whom I call on to give me strength when needed. No, Elvis was our fly swatter, one of the key items we brought with us on the trip. This swatter was special. It was blue, not unlike the shade of a jumpsuit I could swear I’d seen The King wear before, and shaped like a guitar. The neck of the guitar made up the handle of the swatter. Where the hole in the centre of the guitar* would normally be is a picture of Elvis. Up the handle were the words “ELVIS PRESLEY - KING OF ROCK N’ ROLL”, in bold, black text. Elvis does live on, still occupying a spot in a bin we keep in our garage full of camping gear. If this sounds like your kind of pest control, you can find your own Elvis fly swatter for $40 on Ebay.
*Important side note: Did you know that the hole in the middle of a guitar is called the ‘sound hole’? It is, and it’s my new favourite thing.
In any case, heat and bugs in my tent and on my bed aside…
At least I don't have a brain tumour.
I guess I’ll be saying that a lot in the near future when life gets shitty. Because I don’t, and Matt does.
To some extent, something like cancer seems like a test. Think you’ve crossed all hurdles, slayed all the goblins, pieced together all of life’s puzzles thus far? That shit was only a warmup. Now the real games begin. My only question is, is this a challenge just for Matt, or is it a challenge for the rest of us as well? I think I know the answer. Next question: how do I succeed? How do I fail? This whole thing sucks so much, I don’t even know where to start.
Lost in all this is the fact that we finally crossed from the Northern Territory into Western Australia, somewhere back in the desert earlier that day, an accomplishment in its own right. Also lost is Purnululu, one of the most wonderful places we went during our entire trip, a place that didn’t even receive a mention in my journals.
Purnululu is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and one of the hardest National Parks to get to of any that I’ve come across. The turn off to the road into the park is 100km (62 miles) north of the nearest town of Halls Creek, and Halls Creek is a long way from anything as it is. The drive into the park is a 53 kilometre (33 miles) roller coaster dirt track of ups, downs, tight curves and steep grades. It’s a track that’s basically trying as hard as possible to make you crash and/or vomit. We came close to both, but accomplished neither.
But Purnululu is worth all the hard work, and it’s not even close. It is part of the wonderfully named Bungle Bungle Range, and these are like nothing I’d ever seen before. They’re not huge in the Rocky Mountain or Alps frame of reference, in fact they are nothing like the mountains you picture in your head. They’re rocky cliffs that have been rounded into giant beehives made of rock, made further interesting from the dark lines that run through them. Just look:
The hills invite you to wander amongst them, an experience that I’d liken to one I’ve had before in the slot canyons of Southwest Utah. If you’ve been to Utah and places like Zion and Bryce Canyon, you’ll know a little of the type of place I am talking about, and how it feels to wander through fissures in the rock so narrow that you can hold up your arms and touch the sides, and look up and see only a tiny sliver of blue, high above.
We spent only a day in Purnululu, and that day was blanketed by melancholy feelings about the news from our friends, and stifling heat that made the park and campgrounds completely empty. The visitor’s centre was locked up tight. We saw one other group of people, and I remember watching them driving tentatively like us, confused by the emptiness, wondering whether or not they should be there.
The hard drive out the park was made in the slanting light of the late afternoon sun, and as if the road thought our drive in was too easy, cows and dingoes were placed in our way, to up the difficulty level. We were lucky, in a way, to have been able to visit Purnululu at all, as the park would close for the season a few days later.
That night, we sat around our table at the campsite, the darkness so complete in the gully that I could only catch glimpses of everyone’s faces through the glow of the lights from the camper trailer. Buzzing from cars on the highway or beetles from the giant gum trees were the only things to disturb the quiet. We talked again as a group about what had happened. I tried to make some sense of it, even though I don’t think I was confident that any of it made sense.
I told the boys tonight that this is why we are doing what we’re doing. Finding a tumour on your brain tomorrow is why we cannot waste today. Matt went in for a doc appointment on Wednesday and by Sunday he’s having a tumour removed. I cannot figure out how to feel right now. I’m gutted for Matt and family, of course. Part of me is really happy and feeling lucky to be doing this year, but there’s another part of me, a crazy contrarian part, that simply wants to sit and do nothing. Sulk for a while. Be melancholy. But isn’t that opposite to not wasting a day? Seizing the day and all that?
And yet, it didn’t seem right to be out gallivanting around having a fine time. Who are we to be Living at a time like this - how is that fair?
A day earlier, we’d finished 2 days of driving on a track through the void of the Tanami Desert. You would think that when you get off the road, you would feel like you had accomplished something. That you had escaped the emptiness. But we could not have felt more empty. The emptiness of the Tanami was nothing. The emptiness of Punululu, was nothing.
But we couldn’t stay camped in the Spring Creek Rest Area forever. And so the next day we would pack up, and keep moving in the direction of home.
Thanks again for reading. I realise this letter may seem very dramatic, maybe overly so, but it’s hard to under estimate the push and pull of our feelings just then. At a time when you are supposed to be enjoying yourself and be charged up with the excitement of being in new places and seeing new things, the news from the outside was telling us not to, and that we shouldn’t disrespect others that may not be so lucky.
However you might see it, all the best to you and yours during these end of the year holidays. Make sure to hug your kids, call your family, and love them all as much as you can, while you can.
"There’s hot, and then there’s melt your deodorant hot." The two stories - your travels and Matt's life, makes for a powerful braided essay.