Two unforeseen road trip challenges: Bad coffee and dildos
Letter #53 - Parry Beach, Western Australia
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 53. In this letter, we’re watching our kids grow up, and being sorry that they do.
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife and two boys back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 52 letters here, being lit on fire, ground up, and sold as coffee.
Finally, you might notice a *new* button in your letter. I’ve cobbled together a tip jar, and if you enjoy Letters From the Road, drop in a $2 coin or something. I’d be rapped if you did. Much obliged!
Be well,
Luke
The experience of watching your kids grow up can be a conflicted one.
There are experiences that you have had and you see them going through in real time, and it pulls the feeling right out of you. The pain of a lost love. The loneliness of being left out, when all your friends are doing their thing and you’ve not been invited. The empty feeling of failure, mucking up that test or letting in the goal that loses your team the game.
Reliving those things is painful, unfair really, because you’ve gone through them once, you’ve put in your time.
But you also get to share in some of the upside of your children’s successes, the joys of winning and learning and finding a passion, and there are those times you could swear that you’re enjoying the feeling more than they are.
It’s not all serious, big ticket moments either. I remember the first time I realised that the shows on television didn’t stop when I turned the TV off, that I couldn’t come back to the TV, flick it on, and finish up that episode of Sesame Street where I’d left off. Of course these days you can watch all 55 seasons(!) of Sesame Street however and whenever you want, but back then you couldn’t, and my little mind was blown.
The smaller things are the ones we parents often miss, because they can happen at any time out of the blue. When you are together as a family for 80 straight days, however, as we’d been on our Australia road trip, you get to catch a few more of them than usual.
20th December 2019 - Parry Beach
The other day Henry asked me to make him coffee. I said no, but that I’d make him some Nescafé.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s instant coffee, you just add hot water,’ I told him.
We had some Nescafé locked away with our camping gear, though I am not sure why. Not just any Nescafe, mind you, this was Nescafé Blend 43. Why is it called Blend 43? Because every cup takes 43 minutes off your life. Because after trying to make instant coffee that tastes good, the good people at Nescafé tried 43 times and finally said ‘fuck it, this is never gonna work, just put it in tiny packets and let people give it away’.
You probably know those tiny packets, as they are indeed often given away for free at youth hostels and dodgy cafes or on disreputable airlines. I first came across them when I was 21 and had travelled to the UK for school. At that time the Brits didn’t brew coffee they made tea, and if you didn’t want tea, you were punished with instant coffee.
Not that I understood coffee when I was 21. My experience coming from small town Iowa consisted of the evil brew that my dad made in his Mr. Coffee machine and left to cook all day long until it turned into something that smelled and tasted like burnt toast steeped in diesel and tainted your palate until the following day.
It was further informed by the pale, lifeless liquid that they served at a chain diner called Country Kitchen where I hung out with my friends when I was 16. So I didn’t know coffee, but I knew that Nescafé Blend 43 was not it.
In retrospect, if Henry wanted an introduction to coffee, I should have obliged him with something respectable.
Henry called my bluff.
‘Ok!’ he said, happy with that option.
He doesn’t understand that it’s reprehensible to drink Nescafé and it’s little more than brown water.
So I brewed a cup, and Henry did not ask for me to make him coffee again.
I will not give up on him, though. Still only 13, there would be plenty of time for him to come around to the finer things in life, like paying $6 for a Ethiopian batch brew as I did the other day, a batch brew essentially being coffee made in a Mr. Coffee machine, just like my dad still does. Only they don’t let it fester there for 16 hours, and that’s worth 6 bucks*.
In any case, I may not have needed to make Henry a cup at all, considering the water quality at the Parry Beach campground.
The last two places we’ve stayed the water has actually been brown, so Henry could have just heated some up and put it in a cup. At Big Valley it was drinkable, here at Parry’s it’s not, and if you could see it you’d believe it. After you flush the toilet it looks like there’s still pee down there. Nasty stuff.
*Actually, it’s not.
Bored this morning and uninspired by coffee, Henry asked to go to the camp office to browse through their lending library. This was an excellent idea, we thought, picturing Henry returning with a good book, a classic maybe, and spending his day sitting in the sand by the beach, filling his head with prose.
Instead, he returned with rubbish, proving once again that kids cannot be trusted to live up to your ideals.
21st December 2019 - Parry’s Beach
Henry grabbed a magazine from the camp office called ‘What A Croc! Legendary front pages from the NT News’.
The NT News, by way of what Henry read, is a trashy tabloid that makes a living on writing about stupid people doing stupid stuff in the Northern Territory.
While it was not Hemingway or Steinbeck, Henry could not have been more excited. I, however, internally shook my fist in the direction of the old ladies at the camp office who let this come to pass.
Henry shared some of the highlights from ‘What a Croc!’ around the breakfast table.
The headlines ranged from ‘Man Stabbed With Fish’ to ‘Obama Gets Croc Insurance’ to ‘Man Injured By Flying Dildo’.
At this one, Oscar looked up from his book and asked, ‘What’s a dildo?’
I dodged the question, pretending not to hear it, but Katie eventually stepped up for an explanation. ‘Have you ever been to a shop that has straws with tiny penises on the end?’
‘No,’ said Oscar, looking embarrassed and bewildered by the image of penis straws.
This is the point in the courtroom drama shows where the lawyer says to the judge, ‘I withdraw my question.’ And I’m not sure where she thought Oscar went shopping that he would have come across penis straws.
Katie also may not have understood that boys have an instinctual, unlearned response of becoming discombobulated when they hear their mother say the word ‘penis’, like when you get knocked on the head or wake up after a hard sleep and forget where you are. While sometimes they are stunned only momentarily, sometimes it can last for hours.
I knew this from experience. I was about the boys’ age when our family took a trip to the zoo. I don’t remember exactly where it was, probably Chicago or St. Louis, or some other big city with a big city zoo that would have fancy animals like baboons.
I was standing at the rail watching the baboons with my mother as they did their monkey business: running around, climbing trees, sitting and scratching themselves while looking like they were planning for an escape.
One of the baboons was quite happily exposing himself while scratching, baboonspreading for the crowd.
My mother leaned close to me and whispered, ‘Wow, would you look at the colour of his penis.’
The baboon’s penis was plain enough for all to see, and it was a crazy colour. But that does not mean I wanted to chat about it, especially with my mother.
As you would suspect, I do not remember what happened after this, but can imagine I wandered away to see what was happening with some meerkats next door, or maybe went to find some inoffensive butterflies or birds, not able to shake the vision of the baboon’s old job from my mind for the rest of the day.
Before Oscar could wander away, Katie regrouped.
Katie was undeterred, choosing a more direct approach.
“It’s basically a giant fake penis,” she said.
Oscar said ‘Oh’ and then went back to reading his book, ‘Dog Man, Brawl of the Wild’.
I’m not sure if he was actually reading. He was probably just staring blankly at the page like a stunned mullet.
In the afternoon one day, when the weather was middling and the beach uninviting, we drove inland for an hour up into the forests of Mount Frankland National Park. Our plan was to walk to the top of Mount Frankland, and then check out something called the Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk.
Rounded up everyone and drove to the top of Mount Frankland. It was all dirt roads to get there - we took the back way - but they were nice, no Oodnadatta Track or any bullshit like that. You get to a car park and then hike a short trail through beautiful trees, then climb some stairs set into the mountain onto a big bald rock that is the top of Mount Frankland, towering 411 metres (1,350 feet) above the surrounding forests and pastures.
On top of the rock is a small hut festooned with antennas and solar panels, the Watcher’s Hut. A place for the guy who looks for fires.
411 metres is not an awe inspiring mountain trek - stairs and a railing were set into the side of the rock for use by the Watcher - but Mount Frankland is the highest point around, and standing on top you can was well worth it to see the landscape of trees roll off into the distance until it reaches the Southern Ocean.
We usually give a miss to touristy digs like the Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk, because they’re often crawling with people which, even if the thing is great, the experience takes a hit. And they’re expensive - we were operating on a tight budget after all.
This seemed like something unique, though, a 40 metre high metal walkway running for over half a kilometre amongst the tops of massive red tingle trees. Plus I have a soft spot for tall trees. They are impressive enough from the ground, as we’d seen during our walk at Mount Frankland, but maybe from 40 metres in the air, walking amongst the branches, we would gain some additional perspective.
Giant trees can be measured in many different ways, such as height, diameter, volume, and there’s even a point system. On most measures, the red tingle are not as large as others like the sequoia or redwood, or even the mountain ash found in eastern Australia and Tasmania, but they are nonetheless huge. They can reach heights of 50 metres, a circumference of over 20 metres, and can live for 400 years.
The red tingle, along with the karri, marri, yarri, jarrah and tuart, are six forest giants that are either native or endemic to the little corner of Southwest Australia. Imagine that, all six of them, found in one little corner of Australia.
What the red tingle lack in sheer size, they make up for in gnarl. This is an actual tree term - gnarl - which I love and means exactly what you would imagine: they have bruises and burls, holes and hollows. Their trunks are often buttressed, growing wide and looking like a skirt, as a way to reinforce themselves when they go hollow due to fire or rot. They often lose limbs at random, and while some simply fall to the ground, others remain in place, looking like skeletal appendages reaching for the sky.
After we were done with the walk, we returned to the parking lot and spotted two birds, flitting through the forest near our car. They were small and round, with sharp straight tails. One was a female, she being a drab and uninspiring tan colour. The other was a male, and he had us transfixed, standing and staring, scared to make a move lest they disappear into the brush.
In the parking lot we saw a pair of red-winged fairy wrens. The male was possibly the most beautiful bird I’ve ever seen, with a dark blue breast changing to white, an iridescent blue head, and wings of rich brown and red.
Watching your kids having experiences and going through something you’ve gone through before can be a mixed bag. But having experiences together, that never gets old.
More from rainy Parry Beach in your next letter!