Australians like to shorten words, like uni for university or amblo for ambulance driver. On the other hand, there are longer things, like the big rigs on the roads. On the Stuart Highway, which runs a couple thousand miles north and south, from Darwin at the top to Adelaide at the bottom, they call them road trains--massive trucks hauling four or five long trailers or tanks strung together, charging along the two-lane road at eighty and ninety miles per hour (there was no speed limit at all out here until recently). These behemoths don't hesitate, don't flinch at the night-time kangaroos.
After three frenetic days of hiking and driving, I spent my first morning in Alice Springs lazing about the house, while Rachael went off to run errands. I hung my laundry on the line in the backyard, then sat outside in a worn and faded wicker chair and finished reading Honolulu Hotel by Paul Theroux. The sun was up and warm, the sky blue above the red lands. Beyond the back fence rusty rock hills rolled away, bits of the MacDonnell Range, which runs east and west through this region. These ancient mountains were once as high as the Himalayas, though at that time the continent was up around the North Pole. The whole moving continents things is hard to get my head around, but okay. The flatlands south of here are made up of what once was the mighty MacMonnell Range, now a vast plain of hundreds and hundreds of miles of red sand. Uluru and Kata Tjuta are reportedly younger, remnant big chunks torn off and carried away from a distant mountain range by unimaginably huge and violent floods. This happened when Australia was up around the equator. Geology is interesting, but I relate more to the life experiences and spans of flora and fauna.
In the evening we had dinner at the house of friends of Rachael's, Tiff and Annie. When I was introduced to Annie, she ignored my extended hand and came in for a firm and affectionate hug and a kiss on the cheek. Both women work with Rachael in aboriginal health services; Tiff is a midwife, Annie the youth services coordinator. Rachael is their boss.
I was also introduced to a couple in their thirties, friends of Tiff's, Jeff and Wendy, visiting from Melbourne. They are in the midst of a three-month trip around the country. Wendy was a small earnest woman who works for an environmental organization called Oz Green. She helps people change how they live, she said. Not just habits but values; the way she talked of her work it sounded more like counseling than advocacy (when I suggested her work was political she resisted). We talked of the long-term drought in the state of Victoria (where they live), and she said that they, she and Jeff, re-use their waste water, for example keeping buckets in the shower to catch the run-off. I asked if such efforts were common, and she nodded vigorously and insisted people were changing. "On a train not long ago I heard two teen-age girls talking, and one was complaining about the low-flow showerhead and how she had a hard time rinsing her shampoo out, and she had to take a seven-minute shower. The other girl got mad at her, said, what, you're only supposed to take a three minute shower." Wendy figured if teenage girls are embracing conservation, there's good reason to hope.
Jeff, who's been in Australia for five years and plans to stay, has a PhD in ecology, but has recently re-trained to work as a psychologist. He told me about a woman, Joanna Macey, who's doing work to help people with environmental concerns or careers overcome their despair (as in, things are too far gone, we're already screwed, it doesn't matter what you do, that sort of thing). He did post-doc work at Iowa State, and told me a joke: "What happened when the dumbest person in Minnesota moved to Iowa?." I said I didn't know. "Both states became twice as smart." I smiled politely, then said, "so I guess that's an Iowa joke," which, after the words came out of my mouth, made me think I had just contradicted the joke.
Jeff had made what Rachael called "pasta bake," but he, more knowing of the Upper Midwest said, "so you've come all the way to Australia for some hot dish?" Yes, and I had been missing it. He made a big salad with everything in it, too. Very nice.
After dinner we all drove to nearby Alice Springs Desert Park, where Wendy had signed us up for a night walk with two young ranger-naturalists, Lisa and Carolyn. They handed us each a headlamp, explained the walk protocols, then took us out into the moonlit night.
We soon came to a Jurassic Park-style fence, an elaborate affair surrounding four hectares of sloping land (I can do some of the metric conversions but not hectares). The eight-foot mesh fence was electrificed, topped with a small wire canopy, with similar wire panels buried in the dirt at its foot. The precautions were more to keep animals out than in. Those within the enclosure are mostly endangered, and particularly vulnerable to feral cats, which apparently lurk all about.
The two young woman both carried red spotlights, and they scanned the grounds, the spinifex grasses, the open spaces between shrubs and small mulgas trees, trying to suss out wildlife for us. Occasionally they stopped and told us stuff. We kept close together, scuffling along quietly, hoping to sneak up on nocturnal creatures minding their own business. We heard the loud and plaintive cry of some bird--a bush stone-curlew, Lisa said, largish (bigger than a crow) but very difficult to spot during the day, due to camouflage and stealth.
For a time we saw no animals, and I had begun to think that the fence was overkill. But then Carolyn spotted a mala for us, also known as a wallaby hare--a marsupial the size of a small raccoon, and cute enough to make people coo. We watched it eating grass. This animal is extinct in the wild now, too soft and easily killable to survive the invasion of a new people and their new animals. It's a totem animal for some aboriginal woman, and a cave-like hole in the side of Uluru is one of the sacred spots you're not supposed to photograph, as it's considered akin to the mala's pouch. A few minutes later Lisa found a brushy-tailed bettong, similar in size and coloring to the mala but a little less chubby. This is a digging animal, and the opening of its pouch faces down so it doesn't get dirt inside. It keeps the baby in through muscle control.
Later we also saw a bilby, a funny looking (to me) animal with long, rabbit-like ears and a long, pointy snout. We watched it eat, greedily shoveling chunks of fruit from a ceramic bowl. The enclosure has the sorts of plants all the animals need, but the park puts out fruit all the same.
Back at the park building, we sat on benches outside and Lisa and Carolyn pulled a small night-time picnic from two big plastic containers. We had the choice of tea or hot chocolate, and then were each handed a piece of cake in separate containers. Ceramic mugs, metal forks, none of that plastic, throwaway bullshit (well, except for the cake containers--which Wendy saved to re-use). Lisa got out her iPod so Wendy could hear the call of a particular owlet. I asked Lisa a series of bird questions, being almost entirely ignorant of the Australian avian scene. She had an amazing breadth of knowledge, Carolyn too, about not only the birds, but all animal and plant life in Central Australia. They were full of stories as well as facts. Clearly they had not just studied but lived the region's natural history.
Walk and after-party lasted together two hours, and and I was loathe to see it end. Ambling voyeuristically through the moony desert, whispering to new people with shared fascination for other creatures, hearing about birds and marsupials from smart, appealing women--this was a great pleasure.
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