The Biggest Croc I Ever Saw Part 4- Getting To Work

(Part of installments to a larger tale...)

Rosco had won the contract for two government funded jobs in the Far North Queensland, or FNQ. Six units in Weipa for Comalco to house their teachers, and ten units in Arakun to house aboriginals who lived in the "mission" there.

The first one I was exposed to, was the six units in Weipa. These were duplexes built on first story carports made from cinder blocks and concrete. Concrete slab. Cinder block walls. Concrete second-story floor. The idea was to create a cool zone to draw air from and circulate inside these houses. This was the tropics, after all. The really hot and humid tropics like maybe Key West in Florida, only upside down. Cyclones were big in these parts, and everything was anchored and bolted from top to bottom. The wood that was used in framing was harder and more brittle than I was used to, and nailing by hand was a bit of a joke.

By two weeks into my working with this motley crew, I was pretty much accepted as “as odd” as they were. I held my ground against all ribbing, stood up to any macho posturing, and pretty much fit into the motley, stinky scheme of life on a jobsite.

Most of the boys were confused by how I had managed to get on Rosco’s A-list so fast, which led to brown-nose jokes and jokes involving knee-pads, and I never told them about Rosco’s wife showing up on a late Saturday afternoon with three kids in tow, or about Penny’s letter-reading ultimatum. The boys all lived in the dongas supplied by Comalco, the mining company that pretty much WAS the town. They saw Rosco as their boss and not their friendly equal, and I let the division stand.

There was no use telling them all about the late night loud noises or the occasional fights they had over things like Penny wearing a bra. (Those had quickly become family issues, and you don’t squeal on family.)

Before Hiroko had come up to stay for good, Rosco and Penny often questioned me about her. Rosco decided a young man like me (and one who saved his ass already) needed to make conjugal forays back to civilization, and asked me if I wanted to drive the truck back and take Penny with me.

“Sure,” I said, like I always say, and Penny grew excited and optimistic and happily packed good stuff for our trip.

A couple of cases of beer. An esky full of food. Sleeping bags and flashlights (torches) and her big city make-up kit.

Rosco gave me the whole rundown on the road, what to do, what not to do. Apparently, this wasn’t an interstate I was going to be driving on, but an often washed out and horrendously corrugated dirt road that stretched out something like 400 kilometers. There was a big old Queensland home at a cattle ranch called Musgrave, and this is where I would fill up on diesel. There were beds there, and showers, and meals cooked by a woman. There was one pub after that in a place called Coen, but DO NOT stop there. Trouble lived there, and besides, you were being paid to drive, not pub crawl in the middle of nowhere.

Back then, the road was used to ship food up to the mining town and let the workers come and go. There was a budding tourism industry starting to develope, but the road hadn’t been swamped by tour buses and Japanese kids on motorcycles- yet.

The plan was for Penny and I to drive out, and then I’d go back to my home on the beach and hang out with Hiroko for a few days. Then Rosco would fly out and I’d meet up with him, we’d load the truck, and I’d drive it back up to Weipa on my own.

This was a fifteen hour non-stop drive I was talking about. In red dirt and dust and mud and in the middle of nowhere. You could get a flat tire and be stuck for days. You could get stuck in the mud, and you could throw a rock into your oil pan.

And I was a just a white kid from the white-bread suburbs of California.

Rosco made me promise I wouldn't let Penny drive. Penny had rolled a vehicle on that road and had hit a tree with another.

Now I don’t intend to sound sexist here- because my sister is a way better driver than I’ll ever be- but Rosco made it very plain and clear that Penny was not to drive under any circumstances. Her job was to drink beer and pass me beer and yak and yak and yak, smoking cigarettes with her window down and keeping us both entertained over the long and dirty road.

Penny was a city girl in the middle of nowhere. She was 100% a gamer she just didn’t understand the rules, and things like checking the oil before we left and making sure we had something to put under the tires if we got stuck in mud were not part of her repertoire. I was completely out of my experience, as well, but I had motorcycle forays in trucks under my belt, and this at least helped.

"Oh don't you worry about us!" Penny cheerfully exclaimed. "I've got Scotty driving! We'll be great!"

We left early in the morning and were out of Weipa in a short moment. It went from township to bush pretty fast around there. There was fencing for cattle for awhile, but that’s about it. Not long after we had said good-bye to Rosco, and Penny’s daughter Jessie, we were sipping foam off the top of beer cans and vibrating our way down orange and rutted roads leading out to scrub and more scrub, termite hills and wild horses and the occasional dingo slinking around a distance off the road.

We were driving this flat bed Toyota diesel Dyna you see here. I drove this thing on many, many trips. I slept under it on several occasions, and I spun it around 360 once, carrying a cement pump. I got it stuck a whole bunch and I almost rolled it once. Many times, I got out of it stuck in a creek crossing with water trying to lap in the fairly high door.

But this trip it was empty and light. It meant that the corrugated road made the truck chatter. If you drove at less than 80kph, you were riding in an out of balance washing machine.

Everything rattled. Even your brain. If you got over that speed, the chatters went away, but occasionally you came across mild “whoop dee doos” that made the front end of the truck hop off the ground. When the front wheels are in the air, you cannot steer.


All this played hell on our beers, but after awhile, I got so I didn’t mind the hopping wheels if we were going in a straight line, and the chatter if we were trying to turn. I just kept sipping the foam off of beer after beer, and Penny just kept asking me questions and telling me things about her and Rosco I didn't need to hear, and kept the conversation as lively as you’d ever want a conversation under the circumstances.

Penny made me stop every now and then for a squat. She'd hop out and humm some silly song from beneath the door frame. I’d hop out and pee myself. The world was nowhere to be found out there. Just a road coming and going. Lots of scrubby trees and the sound of insects and pissing.

Four hours out and we got ourselves stuck in mud. Penny was drunk and I was "warmed-up and happy", and we had come across a large low-lying field that the road had split in half. A large semi-tractor had been by recently, and, apparently, had liquified the mud by driving through with chains on. I gave it my best sideways try, but got rutted out in the middle of this field in the middle of the day, with nothing around but Penny's suggestions and some wire mesh panels I had thought to throw in the back of the truck in case something like this happened.

Crap! There was nothing to do but dig out around the dual back wheels, set down these panels and hope to drive up onto them. This took laying in the mud. Red mud. Not quite as bad as our local clay, but sticky nonetheless. By the time I had the wire mesh panels set I told Penny to carefully drive up on them. I had two other panels I was going to leap frog with these panels, and in so doing, I hoped to drive along the panels until we escaped the muddy stretch and got back up on the well crowned section I could see in the distance.

I explained all this to Penny. She said "OK Scotty!" and drove up on the wire mesh panels. I thought cool, the hard part was done. Trouble was, Penny got excited. She was moving! She hadn't been moving for almost forty minutes while I dug out both the wheels. But now she was!

"I'm moving, Scotty!" she yelled.

I yelled "STOP!!!"

Penny drove off of the end of my eight foot wire mesh panels and then about three more feet before she buried the two back wheels right back in the mud.

Crap!

I couldn't really yell and scream at her. She was, after all, the boss's girlfriend.

So in another forty five minutes, I had the wheels dug out again. I got the mesh in place and I asked her to drive slowly up on them. I told her this time, stop when I say stop.

She said "OK Scotty! I got it this time!"

She drove up onto the panels and then stopped. Cool. I took the other two panels and then laid these in the mud and I told her to go. She drove right onto these panels and then got excited becaause she was moving good and kept going.

"We're going. Scotty!"



Penny drove off the end of the panel and back into the mud where she traveled another ten feet or so before she got stuck.

Screw the boss's girlfriend connection. She heard an earful.

I made her get out and dig with me to get the mud out from around the tires. Another thirty minutes and we were both two red muddy creatures, completely unrecognizable. If you've ever seen those mud wrestling shows on cable, then you'd know what I mean. One of us, anyway, looked like that.

Penny finally understood my intentions. (I was using a large steel bar to lever the spinning set of wheels onto the wire, in case anyone wonders why I wasn't driving). We got up atop the wire mesh panels a final time, and managed to leap frog the panels until we drove off of them onto drier ground.

This all called for a beer.

"Oh don't you worry about us!" Penny cheerfully exclaimed. "I've got Scotty driving! We'll be great!"