Joey rescue

In Alice Springs there's a number you can call for Joey Rescue (joeys are baby kangaroos). A man will give you advice about how to treat the small orphan. You can hold and cuddle the young creature, and mostly they will happily accept the attention, resting calmly in your arms. But at the age of four months all contact should stop. Otherwise the grown kangaroo might later approach other humans, with possibly bad results. So at four months you put the adolescent out in your yard, and the Joey Rescue man comes around and collects it, and eventually releases it into the wild.

Most of the orphans are taken from roadkill. According to Rachael, you're supposed to stop and check new victims, even if they're cut in half. If the baby is really tiny--think pink and an inch long--then you just have to leave it, there's no hope. But often the joeys are older and alive. You pull it out of the dead mother's pouch and take it home with you.

In the morning Rachael went off to work, and eventually I walked the mile or so into town. At the top of Anzac Hill, which overlooks Alice, I ran into Wendy and Jeff. They were in their loaded small pick-up, ready to leave town; they plan to camp in the MacDonnells for the next week. We read the interpretive signs together, and Wendy told me how Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century had walked hundreds of miles overland from Bendigo to Adelaide, when the Australian government wouldn't let them in by sea. I read that there'd been a massacre of aborigines near Alice in 1928, but mostly the central Australian natives had avoided the pogroms common in the early settlement period along the coasts; they weren't discovered until late.

Alice Springs has been occupied by aboriginal people for 30,000 years. In 1860, explorer John McDouall Stuart was the first westerner to reach the site, on the first of his three attmepts to cross Australia from south to north. A telegraph station was established in 1871, but never more than a couple hundred whites populated the town until after World War II. From the 1870s till 1929 the town was supplied by camel trains; then the railroad arrived. The highway in wasn't paved, or "bituminized" as they say here, until 1987. Several short-lived gold rushes have attracted new people periodically, but war and tourism mostly account for Alice's contemporary growth. A U.S. base, Pine Gap, was established nearby in 1955, to monitor Soviet atomic test patterns; today it's home to 2,000 Americans. Twenty-eight thousand people live in the town, which serves as the gateway for Outback tourism, in particular the stepping off point for Uluru, the single most visited site in Australia.

At the top of Anzac Hill stands a tall white-washed stone memorial commemorating local dead from World War I (Anzac=Australia and New Zealand Army Corps). The aborgines call the hill Corkwood Dreaming, and associate it with a giant caterpillar in some way that was sign-explained in typically and purposely vague fashion. I gazed out over the rather ugly town and lovely hills. Gosse Mountain stood just beyond town, the highest point nearby. Down to my left ran the Todd River, but "ran" is a misleading word. Big red river gum trees grow in the wide sandy wash, but water is a rare feature; the last time it was wet was January 2007. Only when floods flash down from some distant mountain range does water reach Alice. According to Rachael, you qualify as a local only after you've seen the Todd running three times.

At the bottom of the hill I stepped breifly into a fast food chain restaurant called Hungry Jack's to check a hunch. The big sign outside reminded me of Burger King typography and colors, and indeed Whoppers were on the menu. There's also a McDonald's in town, as well as KFC and Subway.

In a string of small stores making up the Alice Springs Shopping Centre, I found Express Cuts and went inside to inquire. I was told the wait would be short. A table was piled with magazines, but the titles were limited to Just Trucks, Just Dirt Bikes, New Zealand Woman's Day, and celebrity gossip types. I picked up the local weekly paper. The front page story was about an Italian man who after riding from Europe, 27,000 kilometers in 420 days, had had his bicycle stolen outside the information center; he'd owned the bike for seventeen years. The cover photo showed him looking disconsolate, his chin in his hands. Later I read in this week's issue that someone had turned in the bike, but by that time the Italian had spent $1000 on another bike, and the local bike shop wouldn't take it back.

Three hairstylists were at work in the shop. One finished up a woman with spiky brown hair, who afterewards left with a woman with spiky blond hair. Rachael says there's a substantial lesbian community in town. Another chair was occupied by a young American guy, military probably. The stylist, a young and ample woman with assymetrical blonde hair, shaved the sides of his head close but left a slightly longer patch on top. Is that regulation, or do some people just like it that way?

She took me next, and we settled on a 1/8 inch attachment for the shears. I told her this was the first time in over a decade that someone other than myself had cut my hair. She smiled but clearly didn't see the moment as profound--as I did. It took her about two minutes, hardly time for us to chat, although I did learn that she had been in the bush for four years, and she quite liked it, I didn't get to why. Afterwards I kept feeling my head for missed patches, but that's my experience, she was a professional. I paid $15 and asked about tipping; she said it wasn't a mandatory thing, but how could I not after I'd asked. I put a five on the counter.

Rachael had insisted I do the grocery shopping for the first three days of our hike, as she had done the rest and delivered the food to three drop spots. Not that I minded, especially since she had to work all day, but she wouldn't discuss what I should get. So I walked down every aisle, scanning every shelf in Coles, a large grocery store, sussing out what was available. I settled on apples and oranges and trail mix and muesli and chocolate bars and nut bars and cheese and peanut butter and jam, and decided to get bread later Rachael had already secured freze-dried dinnrs for the first stretch). I bought extra batteries for my headlamp, an extra tube of lip stuff, a pencil.... I'd spent the early morning going through my gear, trying to figure out what else I might want over the course of twenty days.

I walked back to the house and watched Tour de France highlights. Rachael returned at sunset, and soon left again for a work dinner with a colleague. She dropped me in town, and I wandered around looking for a reasonably priced dinner, which wasn't easy to find outside of the fast food chains. There were a number of nice-looking restaurants, but the entrees (actually a word they use for appetizers) were twenty and thirty dollars. I almost went to Hungry Jack's, but after walking up and down the streets, back and forth on Todd Mall (a pedestrian-only section), I chose La Casalinga, a pizza and Italian food place with dark wood tables and walls.

When I stepped up to the counter to order, a German woman crowded in clsoe behind me. I turned and said, politely and just checking, "I was here first, right?" She said, "okay," and stepped around me and gave her order.

I had a small vegetarian pizza with two types of olives, green peppers, onions, and mushrooms. A modest, thin crusted pizza, with excellent ingredients and flavor. Along with a can of coke, it ran me $12. I read a V.S Pritchett novel as I ate, and watched the German woman and her husband across the room eating their own pizza. I had found a small amount of juveniule satisfaction when my food arrived before theirs did.