Читать книгу Ricochet - Robyn Neilson - Страница 3

“Go west young man, and grow up with the country.” John B Lane Soule, the Terre Haute Indiana Express,1851.

“The sea is where the sun goes at the end of the day, where it lives while you sleep. I have a fix on things when I know where west is.” Tim Winton, Land’s Edge.

It is October 1998. The afternoon sun sears my eyes; sweat drips into them, adding insult to injury. The flesh between my legs feels permanently damaged. This is why you came here, I remind myself, for the western sun and the pain.

Push pedal pump push pedal pump push pedal pump.

I welcome the physical pain; its straightforwardness is refreshing, obliterating every sordid panic that I had previously endured. I am in love with the stark simplicity of my ride. Every morning I crawl out from my tent, light my little stove for my first majestic cuppa, hoe into fruitcake or dates and nuts, and then pack up my city, my roving planet. Everything that is important to me must be carried by me. I remember when I was younger, returning from my inaugural solo backpacking tour, declaring piously, ‘From now on, I am getting rid of all unnecessary stuff. From this day forward, I am acquiring only what I can carry on my back.’ Such fabulous idealism lasted a week in the real world.

Now, eight days into my ride from Adelaide to Perth, via as many coastal and desert detours as possible, I have already posted excess things home. First to go was my helmet. Second was my bulky K-Mart sleeping bag. How is a puny plastic bike helmet going to save me from a monster road train that needs a whole kilometre in which to brake?

I am haunted by the tragedy of a Japanese cyclist freshly killed by one such goliath. Not the driver’s fault. Nor the cyclist’s. How can one assign blame in this devastation? As it was told to me, the cyclist was turning in from a side road, just before sunrise, with no headlamp on. It appears he was sucked into the slipstream between two road trains travelling in tandem. The first driver radioed his colleague behind to say watch out for the crazy cyclist, but the response, ‘What cyclist?’ spelled the horror of what had just happened. Gone in a split second, pulverised under the 50-metres long, 200-ton leviathan. The woman behind the counter in the roadhouse recounts this to me as a cautionary tale; scalding and adding rhetorically ‘Don’t you have family?’

I could understand her disapproval, given that she and her husband and neighbouring farmers were the small group that had to meet and greet the disconsolate Japanese family. Friends of hers were down on their knees upon the tar; scraping up bits and pieces of flesh, cradling what might have been a hand, a heart, a smile. ‘And the driver,’ she admonishes, ‘spare a thought for the road train driver whose life has been scarred forever’. As I pedal slowly past the memorial site…. flowers still fresh… a mute Japanese flag fluttering…. the wound in the road still blood stained…. I momentarily doubt the rightness of what I am attempting. If I never see my daughters again, that would be the most wrong thing I had ever done.

Still, I posted the helmet home. Its absence may even teach me to ride with more caution. Although, riding until 11 o’clock at night just to get to Iron Knob, a forgotten mining town as gritty as its name suggests, was close to the most wrong thing. I refused to stay put in Port Augusta, a big town. But too late, it became evident that the highway was under reconstruction. All along its tacky-tar edge, I careened into dark ditches to avoid forcing a road train to swerve. Experience taught me that these drivers, although they thought me hare-brained, were kind and respectful. It was important to keep them on my side.

Arriving in Iron Knob, shaking with exhaustion, cold and fear…what was this god-forsaken place, where ghosts linger behind boarded-up windows, dogs growl, and the smouldering end of a lone cigarette glowers through a cyclone fence? The only place to stay is the desolate motel beside the highway, but its bell is unresponsive. I push my bike up a dim lane, looking for a likely door to knock upon. Thinking this itself might outweigh the stupidity of riding at night or posting home those things that were supposed to save me.

Instead, I am greeted by a man with radial-tyre skin wearing short pyjamas, who willingly sends his wife back down the lane with me to open up the motel. My room for the night is a shipping container; cast aside in orbit from the main hangar. This separation pleases me.

‘I am sorry, I can’t offer you any food, do you have enough to eat tonight?’ says the tanned, Scandinavian-boned woman.

‘Oh yes thank you, I’ll be fine.’ Despairing of my remaining rations: two chocolate bars, some peanuts and a solitary orange.

Betraying my goal of simplicity, I revelled that night in a heater, a bar fridge, a hot shower and a TV. I remember watching the barbaric end of Silent Witness and ringing my ex-husband and waking up my daughters. Words and love tumbled out; we laughed, I strained to hear each hushed breath of my girls. Finally, we cried a little. Their voices carried the wisdom of children; the courage I needed to keep going.

I then watched a late night movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. I couldn’t think of any greater symmetry than watching this parable here, where I was, on the edge of something big. Something as indefinable as the vast deserts to my north, the Southern Ocean to my south, and the Nullarbor to my west. An absence of sense in my life had compelled me here, to this random place. But it was an abundance of sensibility, which would see me through. Awaking late and stocking up at the motel kiosk, kindness followed me into the day and as I explored the town in daylight, I could sense Iron Knob softening under her eerie mantle. People were restrained, but friendly. Dogs were happy. Sprinklers were watering the civic lawns and filigree peppercorn trees shaded picnic tables. It was the kind of place I would like to go back to.

The long straight stretches of the Eyre Highway are, I discovered, simply long straight stretches of highway. Until I reach the Nullarbor Plain and then what motorists call ‘boredom’ becomes my euphoria. Rhythmic silence…. or sprinting rapture… as Iggy Pop’s The Passenger propels me on an endorphin high…. then settling into the bush for the night…. humping my bike on my shoulder… the distant drone of the road trains…. the manifesto of stars…. the hard red ground awake under my sleeping mat…. the regret of no sleeping bag…. water bottles frozen in the arid cold…. the immeasurable pleasure of gathering dry sticks and burning off my toilet paper in the morning. The intoxicating fear that this lump of land upon which I rest has a shark-bite out of its side. And that if you go too close to the edge, the desire for that blue will pull you under.

Scrub sky sand sun scrub sky sand sun scrub sky sand.

Smells became acute. Small things become big.

The road signs signalling ‘Five kilometres to Kimba’, for example, are an event of disproportionate importance in my days. Each town duly informs me when I only have five kilometres to go. In a car, that would barely give me time to ask and decide ‘A Magnum or an Iced Coffee?’ On a bike, I have time to savour the dark skin of chocolate; letting it first crack at random, not forcing the melt, high on the aroma of dark cacao and white creamy vanilla, before its edges give in to my tongue.

When I had first dreamed my trip, maps spread wide across the floor in our forest home, I was determined to follow in the seminal footsteps of Robyn Davidson, her troop of camels and Diggity dog. Determined to escape from tall trees and lush ferns; to seek open space, which I imagined teeming with the sound of emptiness. However, as I lapped up every step of Davidson’s ‘Tracks’, I had to concede that being a mother of two young daughters was more pressing than traversing the centre of the continent alone by mountain bike. That was an expedition that even I, irresponsible though I was, realized needed meticulous planning and most of all, time. Months of time, which I did not have.

So, as a compromise, I chose East to West, riding into the sun, into a headwind, into oblivion. I chanted the towns on the map in my head; my song lines, as I ran along the fern-dense trails of our valley town. Funnily enough, the first two towns after one daughter and her best friend…Clare and Laura, followed by Wilmington, Iron Knob, Kimba, Wudinna, Poochera, and then, Streaky Bay. One of my many detours; turning south off the endless Eyre, turning left towards the broken Bight. I could not have imagined a crescent of sea and sand more perfect. Even the buildings were perfect; history and charm and nature in honeymooners’ harmony.

But my trip was not supposed to be a joyride… I had left my bathers behind. Not a restriction I resented, rather the simple task that I had set myself. I must gain an average of 100 kilometres each day; otherwise I would miss my plane home. And as much as I fell for the beauty here by the sea, I knew there were more obscure places to discover. So I left Streaky Bay late in the afternoon, pushing on to its lesser neighbour, Smoky Bay. I thought covering seventy-five kilometres would be a pleasant ride before nightfall. I thought wrong. The first half was uneventful, simply more of the quiet, scrappy bush which had become my habitat. But then the bush thickened, the trees loomed larger, and the sun slid down behind them. In the shadows, the road itself grew cold and I stopped to put on my leggings, fleece and hooded vest. I removed my earphones, saving Nick Cave for a bad day, for when I needed him most. Now that the light was leaving, I needed to hear what might be coming behind.

I was not prepared for what I heard.

Out of nowhere, roared two hotted-up cars, weapons more than cars: screeching and wheeling and swerving up beside me, pushing me into the gravel. Young men leered out of the windows, yelling abuse and hurling things. Then, with a flash of operatic bravado, the cars burned-out; tore off on two wheels, bucking up over the hill, and I thought I was safe. But no, within minutes the hoons hurtled back down towards me, and then I thought I was dead.

Miraculously, I managed to not fall off my bike; I kept riding with my head down, eyes fixated on steering through the gravel. My tactic was to pretend I was a guy: I could not let them see my face, smell my fear, or give away that I had wet my pants and was about to vomit. But after their last onslaught of obscenities, the cars just as quickly vanished; their twin exhausts spewing out stink into the tea-tree, roaring back to where they had come from. Perhaps the boys realised I was in fact a girl, and their Lutheran farm upbringings reigned in their rampage.

Push pedal pray push pedal pray push pedal pray

An hour and a half later, when I arrived at Smoky Bay, I was a wreck. All of my implicit belief in the rightness and therefore safety of my endeavour had eroded away with every lurch of those cars. I locked myself in an on-site van, until I realized I was being ridiculous, and so wandered around watching families gut the fish they’d spent all day catching.