The Biggest Croc I Ever Saw 5-- The Bridge

(A LONG-ASS CONTINUING SAGA, so scroll with the punches...)
The road from Weipa back down the Cape to Cooketown, Port Douglas and Cairns had sections in it that were straight for as far as the eye could see. The undulant terrain allowed you to look out quite some distance and marvel at just how far a straight line could travel in the scrub. One day, long ago, I imagined a man jiggled on a bulldozer with a compass, knocking down trees, turning up roots, never veering from his heading.

This was not an animal track that evolved like some roads. Animals meander. This road had sections of meandering, but for the most part, it was a logical pathway cut through wild lands by man and machine. From here to there. A straight line. Flying over the road, you got the true idea. It looked drawn on the landscape below with red-brown chalk and a ruler.

But there were sections where the hills grew too tall, the terrain, too rough, for this type of road-making. In these places the road switched back and forth like a lazy snake, and often, crossed a large creek or river in the middle of it.

I googled around looking for pictures of the road. As you can see, I found some. But can you believe I found a picture of an outback bridge that almost ended my sorry butt’s life? I almost died twenty years ago in a land far from my own, driving too fast and over-confident all covered in dried mud and full of beer in the middle of nowhere, and somebody was thoughtful enough to get a photo of the exact spot!

And not only that, the person who took the picture got the angle right, so you could actually SEE the approach I am going to tell you about. Imagine that? That’s the kind of googling that makes me giggly. That’s the kind of new world order that will make the politicians quake in their shinolas...

Penny and I had commenced again after being stuck for over three hours in a big, flat, open meadow in a low-lying zone. The two of us had to crawl on our bellies in the mud and on our backs in the mud, and we were muddy. The mud was drying as we drove, turning from bright red-brown to a whitish red-brown. Chunks of dried mud fell off our noses, our elbows and out of our ears.

Penny kept the yakking at a premium. I was a happy young man on a driving adventure. I had never sucked foam off the top of beer cans for hours before, rattling along in a mid-sized diesel truck and learning to take dirt turns at high speeds, whooping it up when the front end made big bounces and basically having a really good time. Penny was one of those women who turned every moment into a party, and I was one of those young men who could appreciate the amusing novelty of it all. This was woohoohoo in its finest cloth. This was an adventure with good company and good beer and nobody around to spoil the feeling by dictating rules and regulations and common sense.

We rolled down shallow hills and were met with creeks that required some speed to cross. Water splashed to our sides and a small fresh water croc skedaddled away from us once to my utter amazement. If the opposite bank was steep, I gunned it and hoped to have momentum on our side as we slipped and sloshed our way up it. We were driving after a few days of heavy rain, which is why we had mud instead of dust, and there was always the chance we would not make the climb out of these creeks and back onto the flat road over the next few small hills.


I remember Penny was telling me something funny and I was driving pretty fast and I was heading down a hill and the trees that overhung the road were blocking my view of what may be ahead.

Penny interrupted her story and said something like-- “Oh, Scotty, I think there is a bridge... UP AHEAD!”

There was. I came down that far side of the road, there, at about 80kph (50mph) and discovered the last curve and the bridge all in one really short moment. My first reaction was to slam on the breaks, but all this did was make the truck start to drive in a straight line sideways, so I stopped that nonsense and just tried to point the truck around that last little turn and onto the bridge itself, going WAY TOO fast while Penny let out one of those screams that tells you you are heading toward death, and you ready yourself for it all by gripping the wheel tighter and squinting like a Chinaman staring at Bo Derek and trying to get the first word of a prayer out but “fuck” wasn’t supposed to be the first word...

Somehow the truck made the turn- probably by sticking inside of somebody else’s wheel tracks- and as I slammed up against my door I still kept the steering thing happening, and the bridge without a rail and only a few feet wider than we were clack-clacked like a railroad trestle as we thumped across it.

I braked to a stop once off the wooden bridge, then started shaking crazily as Penny and I both shared a “holy fuck” moment, uttering “holy fucks” to our own version of the big, bad mother of holy fuckers.

I crossed that bridge by pure dumb luck. Plain and simple.

My stupidity led me up to the gate and my pure dumb luck turned me back around.

The party was over.

No more beer for me. I needed some food. I needed to take a break from driving for awhile. I needed to wait until all of the “holy fucks” left my brain and I could resume being reasonable.

It took almost an hour.

We sat just beyond this bridge eating sammy’s and a jar of pickles. I went over the whole miraculous event in my mind many times. Penny decided the whole event was “really something”, and we went back and washed the mud off ourselves in the shallow river and climbed into the very muddy vinyl seat of the truck that almost killed us, and I dropped it into first gear and we headed off again, Penny promising me that a place lay ahead with clean sheets and a pillow...