The Queensland Home At The Middle Of The Road-- The Biggest Croc I Ever Saw -5

I spent over four and a half months either in Weipa or Arakun or driving on this road in between. Everyday seemed like a story book day in comparison to my quiet life these days. It has been awhile since I have been woken up by feral pigs running through my yard chased by thirty or so feral dogs and a fox hound. It has been quite sometime since I’ve seen kids walking down the middle of dirt streets with a salt water crocodile held on several home made leashes. I don’t remember the last time I had to wait in line with thirty aboriginals, trying to decipher their peculiar manner of speech and accent, to use a pay phone.

Heck, I can’t even remember the last time I chased around someone with a pair of scissors stabbed through her neck as she ran around chasing and cursing her drunk boyfriend.

Ahh well...

Life in the pleasant lane can be just as fulfilling as life in the rather absurdly hard-to-believe lane, believe you me...

I wanted to finish up part of my Arakun and Weipa stories with this last little bit. I may get back to them- there is much to tell- but I also wanted to move on and look back on other periods of my goofy existence before I forget about them or get conked in the head.

The ending to my very first day as an adventuring outback driver was spent sitting in dried mud and trying not to slide off the crown of a red/brown dirt road, my lights on and my windshield wipers knocking back the mud and rain. Like many tropical places, the Far North Queensland propensity that time of year was for hot and muggy days. About four or five in the afternoon, you would feel the barometer drop precipitously, and then a build-up of clouds, and then down would pour warm walls of water.

Penny had fallen asleep and I just kept driving. We had lost a lot of time and were supposed to be spending the night in an outback road-hotel called Musgrave Station, and I had no idea how far away that was. My vision was impaired by all the rain, and the road was slick and snotty. I slowed right down and leaned forward and did my best to squint up tight against the glass.

The rain was tropical and warm, and lightening flashed in the distance. When I needed to pee, I just stopped on the road, got out, and let the rain wash all over me. This made me soak up more mud from the inside of the cab as I got back in to drive.

Penny and I were about 20 percent absolutely covered in mud. The rest of our bodies were just ten percent covered in mud More pink than red/brown. A diluted mud. But we weren’t clean. No, far from it. We were due a shower and a bed.

But first I had to get us there.

Penny’s snoring made me giggle and kept me thinking about things that kept me awake. The windshield wipers were metronomes and kept me mesmerized. Awake and mesmerized. Something I’d gotten used to. My life is filled with roads and journeys and uncountable hours spent simply awake and mesmerized. The mind in dream-and-think mode. Just enough of me left around to keep the vehicle tracking down the center of the pavement or dirt, just enough wits about me to keep from having an accident.

Driving for long hours can induce a kind of dreaming that I love. Like being able to fly and in control of where you fly to. Problems get solved in this mind-mode quite readily. I love this way of thinking. It is why I sometimes don’t want to get out of bed in the mornings.

It was probably midnight when we pulled into Musgrave Station. I shook Penny awake, and she staggered out of the truck like a mud-covered child on her way home from grandma’s farm.

There was no electricity after the generator was turned off. They turned the generator off when everybody went to bed. Everyone went to bed early so our arrival was our own affair. I don’t even think a dog barked. We were just a vehicle pulling into an abandoned Queensland Ranch home late at night, in the rain, partially drunk, exhausted, and covered in mud. Mud collected on the bottom of our shoes as we followed one weak flashlight beam into the underside of the very large home.

At some point, the underside of this home had been converted into a station-hand pub. There was a bar, there were tables and chairs. The beams that held up the house above ran along at about four foot intervals. They must have been about six foot off the floor. I’m over six-three.

“OW!” I clobbered the first one about as hard as one could hit it without snapping your head off your neck and my feet flew up in front of me.

I was now sitting on my butt and Penny was giggling...

“You OK Scotty?” she asked.

“Fuck that hurts.”

“The beds are in the back.”

“I might just stay right here.”

“Oh, come on, Scotty...”

When cattle station hands come into Musgrave to drink beer and party, they often get too blind (drunk) to drive back out into the dirt and the night. The proprietors were thoughtful to put sheets on six cot-like beds back in the back of the pub. Penny knew about these and was trying to steer me there, her flashlight pointing the way for her feet but not looking after my noggin.

“OW!” I hit my damn head on the same spot on another beam. I was still standing this time so I just kept trying to keep up. We found the beds. There was someone snoring away in three of them. Penny fell on an empty one, mud and all, shoes still on, and I agreed with her plan. I fell on a bed and passed out, my muddy flip flops kicked off onto the floor...

“He’s having trouble breathing. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“What’s his complexion like?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is he much paler than usual? Is there a difference in skin color?”

“Uh... A little. Mostly he’s just holding his chest and having trouble getting a breath.”

“Is he known to have asthma?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“When did this start?”

“He woke me up holding his chest. He kept saying how he couldn’t breathe...”

I was having some pretty good dreams. In them, I was witnessing a doctor do his doctor magic. He had a patient who couldn’t breath. The doctor was concerned and trying to come to terms with what was going on. I was floating around the scene like a scene floater in a dream, and the woman who was talking to the doctor was as beautiful as Rachel Welch to me. She was a distressed heroine. I felt sorry for her (and not the poor sucker who couldn’t breath) and I wanted to rescue her. My heart went out to her. You poor thing...

When I woke, I realized that I was listening to the radio. Someone had put a radio next to Penny and I, and had turned the volume way up. Evidently, they weren’t happy with us sleeping in their beds after six am, and I am sure the muddy mess we presented didn’t help our cause...

I lay there for another fifteen minutes, engrossed in what I was hearing. It was the Outback doctor on the radio. There was a plane flying out to try and rescue this man. The doctor on the radio was trying to keep my Rachel Welch calm. The poor man was scared to death and about three hundred miles from the nearest hospital.

The conversation got personal and fell to reassurances and small talk, and Penny finally rolled her eyes open and sat up and looked like bloody hell, like she had been dragged by a man and screwed by a horse. Or... uh... never mind...

We had seven or so hours of muddy driving left to go before we got to pavement.