Keys to the Outback

“I can’t believe you left them there,” Jim muttered as I squeezed the handle and pulled hard for a third time.

“What do you mean, you can’t believe it? You can see them as well as I can. You’re not going blind, are you?” The keys were clearly visible in the ignition. People were beginning to stare.

He walked around to my side of the car. “I knew this would happen if I let you drive.”

“It has nothing to do with my driving.” I circled to the passenger side to try that handle again. “My driving was fine. It’s not as though you’ve never locked keys in the car.” I wasn’t entirely certain he ever had, but was willing to gamble on it to make my point. I wanted desperately to defend myself, because I suspected my mistake would have serious consequences.

We had rented our Holden wagon in Darwin, 300 miles away. At first, the man at the A1 Car Rental company tried to give us an old beater: no radio, one broken window, lots of dents, the whole thing covered in powdery red dust. ‘Yir goin’ tuh Katherine? This’s yir car, mate!”

The salesman looked at us incredulously when we complained. After some verbal wrangling, my husband, who is large and can be quite persuasive, managed to get us a late model station wagon with intact windows and a weak-but-functioning air conditioner.

Knowing we were in for long expanses of empty highway, we stopped at the edge of town to top off the fuel tank. “What’s the speed limit, anyway?” Jim asked the attendant.

“What kin ya do, mate?”

‘I said, ‘What’s the speed limit on the highway to Katherine?”’ Jim repeated himself cheerfully. He meets strangers easily.

“What kin ya do?”

We hadn’t anticipated any troubles communicating with the locals on our trip Down Under, but that had been naive. Their accents were difficult to understand, the rhyming slang was impossible to decipher, and the wry Aussie sense of humor kept me off balance. I had become resigned to the fact that I was clueless much of the time, but Jim liked to maintain a sense of control.

About an hour out of Darwin we stopped to take each other’s picture standing next to what the Aussies call “anthills.” These aren’t mere bumps of soft dirt, like American anthills. They are towering structures, sometimes as much as twenty feet high, built by termites out of their own saliva and feces. The resulting substance is so hard that the anthills were ground up and used instead of concrete to make airplane runways during World War II. Or so the Aussies said, and I believed them. 

The instant we climbed out of the car, flies covered us both. Flies! Making themselves at home on my bare arms, crawling up my legs, doing their best to creep into my eyes and mouth. I tried desperately to shoo them away, but the flies were not deterred; they crawled over us with impunity. Billions of them live there; maybe trillions. I read that there are more than 650 separate species in Australia. The air was hot—easily 105 F—and the land stretched out flat and dusty, with sparse vegetation and even fewer animals. I couldn’t imagine how such a lifeless expanse could possibly support those buzzing hordes. What did they eat, anyway, when there were no tourists around?

We snapped our anthill photos fast and hopped back into the car. Hundreds of flies came with us. After some frantic experimentation, involving swatting, speeding, swerving, and swearing, we discovered that the best way to get rid of flies was to open all the windows and drive slowly. Of course this rendered the air conditioner useless, and we were soon dripping with perspiration, which caused the red Outback dust to cake onto our bodies in a most unattractive way.

When I had exterminated all the flies but three, I climbed into the back seat and smashed the last survivors with our A1 rental papers. They left dry, brown smears across the part where we had signed up for extra insurance. Then we rolled up the windows and drove in silence, waiting for the car to cool off. It was too hot to talk.

As it turned out, there was, indeed, no official speed limit on the road to Katherine. Hundreds of miles of open road, dead straight, no highway patrol. The speed limit was whatever you could coax your car to do. I say “coax” because only a fool would take a high performance car on this road.

When we stopped to get the camera, I discovered that the inside of the trunk was covered with fine red dust. The dust was also sucked into our luggage, and, inside that, into the plastic bag I use to protect the camera from dust. It gets into the engine, too, and the brakes. That was why the rental company had at first provided us with a beater for the trip. I began to feel guilty that we were ruining this A1 car for anything but Outback travel.

There were “speed limit” signs on the road: white rectangles with a big black zero in the center, and a slanted black bar crossing the zero. (“What kin ya do?”) Jim took full advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and opened it up on the open road. When the speedometer hit 130 kilometers, I looked away. Mostly the trip was OK, and even seemed fairly safe, because there were no other vehicles on the road. A couple of times we hit potholes and bounced hard. Once there was a really loud noise, and when I looked in the mirror I thought I saw something fall off the bottom of the car. It was getting late, and we kept driving until we got to Katherine.

The next morning, the car seemed fine, and we took a dirt road out to Glen Helen, which is an outpost in the middle of nowhere. It consists of one gasoline pump, two camels in a small corral, a permanent-looking “No Vacancy” sign, and a small motel-and-bar combination called the All Seasons Glen Helen Homestead.