What do you think about at the end of the road?
Letter From the Road #61 - Melbourne
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife Katie and boys Henry and Oscar back in 2019.
I am telling this story in weekly-ish installments, and I feature the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the Letter.
This is letter number 61, the penultimate letter. Our circuit of the western half of Australia was destined to return to Melbourne at some point, and today we finally get there.
The next letter, the final one, will be an epilogue of sorts, an after party that I look forward to sending you soon.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 60 letters here, lying in the middle of the road.
All the best,
Luke
It was late afternoon when we pulled onto Bruce Street in a northern suburb of Melbourne. It’s a cozy street, Bruce is, lined with trees and tidy houses with little green yards. It’s also normally lined with a multitude of parked cars, meaning only one car can drive down the street at a time. I pulled up in front of the gray clapboard house that would be our temporary home for the next three weeks, and idled in the middle of the street.
Our last day on the road had been an uneventful drive, along roads we’d driven many times before and through towns we knew, four hours that was extended due to a stop at the Giant Koala outside the town of Dadswells Bridge. You might think that on our last day on the road and so close to home that we could not be bothered to stop at another Big Thing after having visited approximately 49 of them during the past three months, and you’d be right. But the Giant Koala is an obligatory stop.
Technically a Big Thing, the Koala calls itself ‘Giant’ probably because there are two other Big Koalas located elsewhere in Australia. All of the good Big Thing ideas - like hats, thongs, a backyard clothesline called a Hills Hoist, and a giant periodic table - were taken, I suppose. We always stop at the Giant Koala to admire how well someone has done at making one of the symbols of Australia, a cuddly, lovable animal, into something disagreeable and evil.
Perched in a parking lot, it has a look that is part scowl, part resigned pallor of a creature that knows it will be squatting in a parking lot for eternity. The normally fluffy koala ears are replaced with what looks like the angry wiry hair that protrudes from the ears of unlucky old men once they get past the age of 60. Instead of a pouch with the head of a cute baby koala poking out, there’s a gift shop. The koala’s reddish brown eyes seem to follow you around the parking lot.
The red eyes make me think that there may be a connection between the Giant Koala and the blue demon horse called Blucifer that greets visitors to the Denver International Airport (DIA) with similar glowing red eyes. Maybe the vast tunnels beneath DIA, in addition to housing humanoid lizards and meetings of the Illuminati, which might be conspiracy theories but also might be true, run all the way to Dadswells Bridge? And that the inscription “AU” found in the airport's Great Hall is proof of the connection to Australia?
My recommendation to you, if you’re ever in the area and interested in seeing the Giant Koala, is to go at night when the eyes are glowing red and the locals are hiding in their houses behind locked doors. Or go during the day, if you’re more into postcards and ice cream.
After the Giant Koala, there would be no more stopping until we got to Melbourne. No more of any of it, really. When you’re on a long journey, it is normal to start thinking about ‘last times’, like the last night camping or the last time yelling at the boys to clean up the plates after dinner. There are only so many last times you can have, and we’d almost ticked all of ours off the list. Melancholy thoughts, though ones I didn’t have time for at the moment, sitting there in the middle of the street.
There was no room on the street to park with the trailer, so we made the decision to back the trailer through a gate that was only slightly larger than the width of the trailer, into the small driveway in front of the house, and then put the car on the street.
Katie and the boys got out, opened the gates, and then stood around the yard, watching and waiting.
I remember back to the few days before we hit the road, when my friend Dan was showing Katie and I around his camper trailer, the one we’d be taking on the trip. He showed us how to open up the tent, secure the poles, and how to zip in the interior liner which made the tent impervious to the outside. Semi-impervious, anyways. We now knew that bugs can and would get in if they chose to, and usually, they did.
We learned how to use the electric air bags to level the trailer so that when you slept you weren’t rolling downhill all night. We learned how to charge the trailer’s battery using solar panels, how to use the gas grill, and how the stove could be used to make burnt toast. He showed us where to store the most important things like hot sauces and beer, and where to store the things we brought along but would never use during the entire three months, like a collapsible toilet and a canvas rain fly that weighs more than I do.
All of the bells and whistles caused some confusion and anxiety for the first week or two, but we soon grew comfortable with the knowledge that we’d have to try really hard to break something, that sleeping on an angle wasn’t that bad - after all, people pay a lot of money for electric adjustable beds that essentially do the same thing - and that bringing your rain fly to the desert is madness.
Amongst all this, though, we did not discuss one of the most practical and necessary things, that being the finer points of backing the trailer.
Backing a trailer is something that takes skill and practice, and truckers will say that it is one of the hardest skills to master, though masturbating while driving receives some mention. I’ve always admired truck drivers who can back a 70 foot trailer into a perfect spot at a loading dock amongst a long line of other trailers.
Australian truckies, especially the ones we encountered driving road trains along the lonely backroads of the country, deserve even more respect. Sometimes they would have up to three trailers strung together into what’s called an A-Triple that is up to 42-½ metres (139 feet) long. Can you imagine backing that up, with each of the three trailers trying fiendishly to go its own way?
There was a time before our trip when I struggled to back a riding lawnmower and tiny trailer full of grass clippings into a shed. So I was not surprised when I botched the alignment of the trailer on our first night of camping at a caravan park in Echuca, leading to some uncomfortable sleeping off kilter, especially for the boys who ended up along the edge of a concrete slab that sat several inches off the ground. I didn’t sleep anyways because I lay awake planning revenge on the old people in lawn chairs who sat around watching me struggle to get the trailer into a suitable position.
I spent an untold amount of time in Coober Pedy trying to align the trailer just so in accordance with Katie’s exacting specifications so that we could gain a tiny bit of privacy along a fence and possibly some shade from some scrubby trees. Oscar thanked me by saying that I would receive a participation certificate for my efforts.
Over time, my skills at backing had improved with repetition, though the masturbation could still use some work because I found it annoyingly impossible to practice, however it still caused me a small amount of anxiety. Even so, sitting there on a quiet Bruce Street on a weekday afternoon, with the benefit of time to muck around to get things just right, I was comfortable.
And then my heart sank, as I spied a car coming toward me. When I checked my rearview mirror, I realised that there was another coming from the opposite direction. Both cars now sat waiting. So this is how it ends, I thought, gritting my teeth and getting ready for a fight, like Butch Cassidy waiting on the Bolivian army.
Before hammering the car in gear and charging up the driveway, I paused to curse everyone involved.
We’d just driven 16,516 kilometres, some hard ones too, through dust storms and smoke, chased by road camels and facing down barrelling road trains, and a couple thousand of those K’s on some of the toughest outback tracks in the Australian bush. The Oodnadatta. The Tanami. And somehow it looked like the last few metres of suburban driveway was going to prove to be the biggest challenge of them all.
It’s probably true that most people don’t care about minor traffic impediments, and are happy enough to wait patiently for a few moments while some hapless bugger struggles to figure out his automobile. They might even enjoy watching some hapless bugger fighting with his trailer and shouting insults at himself, at a gate, and at his innocent family.
But I always imagine that the guy waiting behind me is racing to the hospital with his pregnant wife laid out screaming on the backseat, or that it is someone who comes from one of those places in the world where it is understood that a judicious use of the horn is an essential part of safe driving, and I was about to have honking rain down upon me like a gaggle of angry geese.
So in my mind, I had one chance to get this right.
Amongst all this, I became aware that the car suddenly felt very hot, though that wasn’t just because I was blocking Bruce Street.
3 January 2020 - Melbourne
The Melbourne we returned to is different from the one we left. It’s hotter, 37 degrees (99F) on the gauge as we pulled up. It’s hazy, from some bad bushfires burning far away to the southeast. When we left 94 days ago, as I remember it, the sky was clear blue, the temperature on the cool side but the sun pleasant.
The fires, which we’d encountered a few times during our trip, were now seemingly all around us. Two days after we crossed the Nullarbor, a grueling sprint instigated by a run in with a highway patrolman who’d warned us that if we didn’t hurry, the road was at risk of being overrun by fire, we found out that the highway had indeed been overrun by a bushfire and closed. This was no small matter, closing the main highway between most of Australia and Western Australia. The fires burned for nearly a week, stranding hundreds of truckers and travellers at roadhouses.
For those trying to drive west, there is no alternative route by road outside of bush tracks or a nearly 7,000 kilometre detour straight north and nearly to Darwin, and then around the north coast and back south again. So people just sat and waited until the fires were under control, or until they were evacuated.
It wasn’t just the Nullarbor either. Fires were burning all over Australia. Melbourne was hazy, and the air smelled of smoke. The Sydney CBD would be engulfed by smoke at different times during January, and all other states had fires burning as well. We were on the cusp of what’s now known as the Black Summer, and by the end of January more than 240,000 square kilometres had burned, an area nearly the size of New Zealand.
The sense that something like this could happen had followed us around on our entire journey. The constant heat, nary a drop of rain aside from dribbles and then some in the far southwest on Parry Beach. Australia’s a fickle land, hard to love sometimes. But we did, more so now than when we left.
In thinking about the great contradiction that is Australia, I think that Australian writer Ian Parkes put it well when he wrote, “How can mere red dirt and stones and scrubby trees and shrubs and rises and falls in the land and haze and a vast blue sky be so potent? Such was its power, even in the intense heat, even at night – sometimes, especially at night – the landscape seized you.”
It’s that last bit, about how the landscape seizes you, that I like the best, because in one sense ‘seize’ describes well the way you are grabbed with a strong attraction, but it can also describe being taken forcibly. Sometimes the Australia we visited was fetching, alluring, and magnetic. Other times, we felt like we were being held against our will.
But I think the magnetism is stronger, and infectious. The heat and the flies and the dirt, I’d do them all again… we’d do them all again, and as far as I can tell, the four of us would do them all again, together.
My family was still standing around watching me sitting in the road, and Katie had situated herself prominently in view of my mirrors, ready to guide me as she’d done so many other times. Looking back at them, I couldn’t help but think that just like Melbourne had transformed into a place with orange skies that tasted like burning, the four of us returned changed as well.
Obviously we were tired, tired in general and of each other, but we were also closer.
We’ve gone through the ringer together, not saying a year of doing nothing is like being in the trenches or something, but it has felt hard at times these last few months, not to mention at other times over the last year. It has required honesty, fighting, motivating, and some serious empathy in working together toward the end. There were many times when no one wanted to move on to that next place, and sometimes we didn’t. But just hit pause for a bit, then we moved.
There were times when no one wanted to do that walk or see that Big Thing, or God forbid stop at another scenic overlook. And sometimes we did and it was disappointing, other times they were great and encouraged us to keep it up. Sometimes it was as simple as seeing a beautiful bird flying overhead while hurtling down the highway, or like the dead quiet and sparkling stars like we saw the other night when sleeping on the side of the road near Eucla.
We learned to make the simple things enough, I guess, but the one constant has been being together. Experiences like this will be part of the tightly wound fabric of our family forever.
I looked into my rearview mirror to measure up the gate. I cursed Craig for being a man with a tiny driveway and an even smaller gate. Craig also had comfortable couches, air conditioning, and a well stocked liquor cabinet in the house where we were staying while he and his family were away, so I had to check myself. But I made a note to have a hard chat with him about his hateful gate the next time we spoke.
That next time turned out to be at a dinner that we had with him after he returned early from his holiday. Craig was glad to have us cooking for him, and we were happy for his company, him being one of the first of our old friends that we met up with after returning to Melbourne.
He brought up a story I had written at the start of 2019 about our time living in Buenos Aires, and something in it that he found relatable. In the story, there was a part about how Katie and I found joy in just wandering around the city exploring, stopping now and then for coffee and wine and to just look in windows. The boys, however, were having none of it. To them, all that city exploring is just walking. And walking is boring.
I wanted to pick up on what Craig was saying, by talking about how much I loved just poking around in supermarkets, but found that I couldn’t remember the names of any of our favourite places. This really bothered me, our year already beginning to become grey around the edges. Is this what will happen to the whole experience, that it’ll just become another grey spot in the mind?
That’s very disappointing, and it made me sad. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised?
Katie and I had talked at length before our trip about the drawbacks to taking Henry and Oscar on a long trip when they were 12 and 10, before they’d really come of age. There was no perfect answer, unfortunately. Younger is harder work, more kid management involved, and they’d probably remember less. Older and they might get more out of the experiences, but the complications of school and sport and other responsibilities start to intrude on their time and willingness to come along and participate.
We wanted it to be a seminal time for them, something they would remember forever, something that they’d tell their friends about, and maybe even their kids. But would they?
Would Henry remember bursting from the car while we were stopped on the side of the road, and attempting to walk home from the Pilbara? Would Oscar remember hiding from the girl throwing canned goods in the grocery store or anything from the 25 books that he read during the trip?
Would they remember our walks, through the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuta, or between the high walls of Echidna Chasm at Purnululu? What about the friends we made at Palm Valley, and the ghostly sounds of the dingoes howling in the night we heard when camping there?
Would they remember picking mangoes, eating flies, fighting, making up, or how to poop on the side of the road? The red rocks, the brown sand, the deep blue water, the tall trees?
And the bathtubs? Will they at least remember the bathtubs?
Whether they do or not, I take solace in something the author Neil Gaiman wrote in his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane: “Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”
So yeah, maybe like I did that night at dinner with Craig they’ll forget some things, like the name of the guy who helped them fish for hammerhead sharks off the pier in Derby, but the memories will be in there somewhere, like building blocks in the stuff that makes up who they are.
None of that was paramount just now, though, when they were all standing around waiting for me to back the trailer into the driveway, waiting for it to be over.
I took a deep breath, attempted to channel the calm and confidence of a road train trucker having a beer at a roadhouse, I put the car in gear and with a few cranks of the wheel, the trailer slid perfectly through the gate, and it was done.
