How bout you?
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 32. This one is about a road day, a hard 600 kilometres or so on the bitumen. The goal of the day was to get ourselves from one place to another, but it turned out to be a surprisingly eventful day and one to remember.
Welcome to those of you for whom this is your first letter! 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. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, but you want to get some letters coming to your postbox? One letter, one story, once a week. Too easy.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other 31 letters here. Ask for Hughie.
All the best,
Luke
“You always remember the good stuff” - Cal Fussman
This letter is about good stuff, and Cal knows a thing about it.
Cal is the former writer of a column called ‘What I’ve Learned’ at Esquire magazine. The column largely consisted of Cal interviewing a wide range of interesting people, from Mohammed Ali to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Many years ago now, Cal received an assignment from his editor to learn the craft of being a sommelier, and to do so at the famous restaurant Windows on the World that sat on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center in New York City. Cal did so, and at the end of his time there, he left with boxes of notes about the experience to prepare to write the article. Before Cal could finish his writing, however, September 11th, 2001 happened. The World Trade Center was gone. Windows on the World was gone. Worse still, Cal lost new friends and colleagues. He ended up paralyzed and unable to write. His notes stayed in the boxes, confined to his basement.
Cal moved on, kept writing, but the story of his time at Windows on the World was never far from his mind. But attempts at writing it all down proved futile.
A few years later, the home where Cal had been storing those boxes of notes flooded, and all were destroyed. It seemed that the story of Cal’s experience at Windows on the World would never be written
I don’t recall what it was that allowed Cal to escape from the writer’s block that had held him back from finally telling his story, but break free he did. ‘Cocktails Before the Collapse’ was published on September 11, 2011, ten years after the terrorist attack.
When asked how he was able to write the story, after so much time had passed and without any of the notes that he took during his experience, Cal said that he was surprised at how much came out of him when he actually started writing. ‘You always remember the good stuff,’ he said.
First off, I wrote all that from the memory of hearing Cal tell the story many years ago, so apologies to all involved if I bungled some of the details. Hopefully I too remembered the good stuff.
Secondly, and finally getting around to the point as it relates to this letter, I find what Cal said to be true in life, and in travel. The journal entries I use in your letters are little snippets of time, things I observed at the time about people, places, what we were doing. Kids fighting. Receiving the bad news of a friend with cancer. Being breathalyzed in the middle of the desert by a cop in a Hawaiian shirt. A toothless woman at a derelict roadhouse with an aversion to peanut butter sandwiches. All of them, photographs made of words.
Sometimes, though, the journals don’t capture the good stuff, they just capture stuff.
According to my journals, the 16th of November was an average day, one consumed by an all day drive from Karijini to the town of Exmouth, 648 monotonous kilometers (373 monotonous miles) west to the coast. It was another especially hot day, which made packing up camp a slog. More than just hot, it was 44C (111F). It seemed destined to be a day lost to memory, the highlight being time spent in the life giving air conditioning of the car.
But journals aside, I remember this day as being a good one, with good stuff worth remembering.
16 November 2019 - Exmouth
12.44 and 44 degrees.
Our travels today took us from Karijini to Exmouth, nearly 600k. Along the way we stopped in a town called Tom Price, an outback town of the lily white variety that was surprisingly pleasant, which I guess it had to be to cater to all the miners who have been forced to live in the middle of nowhere. We even found a place that served a decent $5 coffee called the Pickled Bean or some such fancy thing.
Not value for money, but it tasted ok.
Funny the difference between a place like this and a town like Halls Creek, which is not a mining town and occupied in the majority by Indigenous people.
Tom Price, population 4,182, is an anomaly. It’s on its own in the middle of the Pilbara. The closest town of any substance is Karratha, 344km (214 miles) away and all of 22,199 people. Tom’s clearly well-to-do, with fancy coffee shops and well paved roads. There’s an overabundance of green grassy lawns and swimming pools in the middle of the Pilbara, where normally the landscape is filled with plants that have stodgy names like Woollybutt grass, Bloodbush, and Kerosene grass. The Pilbara is anything but bucolic, but in Tom Price you’d hardly know you weren’t in a suburb of Melbourne.
After those expensive coffees, some diesel, and sandwiches while sitting next to a park, we drove on. Around 4 hours later, we pulled into the Nanutarra Roadhouse. We did our requisite loitering inside, then saw the wind picking up outside, kicking up to a howl. We went outside and stood in the shelter of the roadhouse’s giant canopy, watching in awe as the sun was blotted out and the sky turned an apocalyptic shade of burnt orange.
And then it rained.
Then we stopped at the roadhouse, and watched a storm roll in that brought gusty winds, lots of dust, and... rain. Rain! We didn’t get a lot, but it was enough to be well received.
When we’d arrived back in Australia seven weeks prior, we had been greeted with a rainstorm, to the extent that made the landing of our plane a bit lively. Since then, we've experienced a long line of hot and dry days, with temperatures regularly pushing 40 degrees C (104F). They came one after the next like a version of groundhog day, one where we kept waking up every day and going through the life of a baked potato.
I’d like to think baked potatoes have it pretty good, as far as potatoes go. You’re not being sliced up with a sharp knife into wedges, or being dunked into hot oil or revolting sweet chilli sauce. But spending your days in the oven, going in soft and coming out crispy, isn’t a great way to go either. It had a way of beating you down and at times made our trip skew into the realm of something we had to do, because we were in the thick of it and had no other choice, rather than something we wanted to do.
So while it didn’t rain a lot, the storm and the rain and the change in the weather had a noticeable effect. It felt like our spirits lifted. We were invigorated and excited to be moving forward again, toward the coast and a fresh start. We’d been given some juice by the rain god Hughie. ‘Send it down, Hughie!’ as they say in the bush at the end of a dry spell.
Hughie didn’t end up sending much more rain, but he did send more good stuff.
Interestingly, Henry asked me if he could use my computer in the car. To write something. This is not normal, a request by either boys to write something, and although part of me thought it was a trick to get my computer for some fucking around time, I let him. He spent all day in the car writing a fiction story. I haven’t read it yet.
Double interestingly, Oscar took Henry’s cue and spent his time writing as well. Tonight he let me read Chapter 1 of ‘Untitled’. It was great! Almost unbelievable that it was written by an 11 year old. Great description, crazy punctuation that any adult could strive to match, and some hilarious parts.
We’d outrun the storm, but the weather continued to threaten, the sky above us an unsettled mottled gray colour. We drove on for another two hours, the asphalt flat and empty, until we came upon a white station wagon on the side of the road. I pulled off to see if they needed any help.
Stopped after the roadhouse and changed a girl's tire. Lisa, from Germany, who had been traveling for nine months. She was a hippy chick, very slight, head buzzed short except for some dreads on top, a lip ring.
Lisa was driving a shitty old Holden Commodore wagon, and her rear tyre looked like it had exploded, parts of it turning to dust on the road. Luckily she had a spare that was a much better tyre than the one she’d been using, and I was able to make quick work of it once I figured out where the jack point was located.
To get at the spare, though, all her worldly belongings had to be removed from the car.
Lisa was desperate, not knowing how to change a tyre or even if she had a spare or the tools to fix it. But the newfound energy of our little road crew was apparent when trying to work together to get Lisa rolling again.
Katie helped her dump a surfboard, mattress, all forms of puka shells, incense burners and bongs onto the side of the road to be able to get the spare. I could have sworn there was a phone book in there as well. Oscar scrambled around assisting where he could, while I worked the jack to get the old tyre off, calling it a tyre being generous. It may have been a tyre in 1982, but now was more similar to the bottom of an old shoe.
This was all done while the storm we passed through at the Nanutarra Roadhouse gathered strength and bore down on us again. Lightning was striking nearby as I hooked up our air compressor and started filling Lisa’s tyres to an acceptable level of pressure.
It started raining again just as we hopped in the car to leave.
Feeling good, we drove on in the direction of Exmouth. It seemed like the sheer act of simply helping someone by the side of the road only seemed to add to the positive vibes, and boosted us up even further.
Eventually the clouds began to clear and the late afternoon sun began peaking through. About that time, Dolly Parton came on the radio and started singing ‘Light of a Clear Blue Morning’.
I’m not a fan of country, western, or Dolly. But just then, the words seemed right and we couldn’t help but sing along.
“It's been a long dark night
And I've been waiting for the morning
It's been a long hard fight
But I see a brand new day dawning
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
I can see the light of a brand new day
I can see the light of a clear blue morning
And everything's gonna be okay”
Thanks Dolly. Thanks Hughie.
I’ll send more good stuff in your next letter.