The Long Road
Added on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
The Long Road
Winton was a clean and tidy town. These settlements are really wide main streets with small suburbs and survive on a commercial diet of bottle shops, motels, cafes and garages. Here in North West Queensland the indigenous retailers are saddlers and stores selling stockman’s goods. On the outskirts of town there is always a garage strategically placed to capture the paranoid motorist and it was necessary once again to refuel the bike, eat a pie and drink more milk before setting off on another long haul. The journey is sometimes reduced to eating, sleeping and riding, with a sub section concerned with thinking, dreaming and the usual cognitive process required to physically link all these together. Bikers create their own self-contained world. They become the fantasy figures they have always wanted to be; the racer, the adventurer, a totem of freedom, a personality shift that real life crushes. Mad Max 2 used archetypal motifs of a besieged community of decent people who need protection against vicious bandits, a community which is rescued by a hardened man who rediscovers his humanity. As a concept, this has ‘biker’ stamped all over it.
In north-west Queensland there were lots of kangaroo kill. Every few hundred metres large bucks would lie with their bloodied bodies beside the road. When they migrate they cross everything at 40 mph, jumping 30 feet in a single hop. I have seen swarms at night crossing the road where it became impossible to ride. This time I didn’t see a single animal. The recent rains would have kept the herd by the water in the bush. In the dry they eat new shoots by the side of the road and become startled by lights and just jump, blinded. Hit a large roo and you’re dead. I missed a dead wombat by inches. Something had hit it, peeled off the skin and the bloody covering of its back was being gorged on by an eagle.
The planned route to Sydney should have turned south at Rockhampton on the coast, but local knowledge suggested the traffic would be a problem and I was advised to head south sooner on the Carnarvon and Castlereagh Highways to Dubbo. At Roma I found a Yamaha dealer who changed my tyres. The Road Attacks were beyond their legal limit but still performed after 11,750 miles. Tom at D & R Motorcycles was a stalwart Australian who couldn’t do enough to help me and effected a change in 45 minutes. It was now late in the afternoon and panic set in. I had elected to ride though the night and so turned to the coast where there would be less chance of an impact with an animal (truckers who disputed this and reckoned the area around Dalby was stiff with wildlife). On paper the coast was a good choice but nevertheless the wrong decision. If I had maintained my southern trajectory across country at 40 mph, Sydney would have come into my sights by noon the following day. The connection with the freight flight to Argentina would have happened, instead I lost two more days.
The coastal route was beautiful but twisty two lane and packed with trucks by night and cars by day. Overtaking was restricted to occasional areas of four lane and my average dropped to below 30. On the long straight four lane leading into Newcastle after Taree I was pulled by a cop for doing 90mph in a 70mph zone. The road was wide and straight without a car in sight. He stopped and came up to me.
“Where do you think you’re going?” He said.
“Around the world.”
“You’re not going anywhere now,” he said, “you’re 45kms over the speed limit and that’s an automatic ban,” and he asked for my documents and returned to his car to register the issue and call for a tow truck. He could have arrested me, it was that serious.
The sun was shining and the fields looked very green. After five minutes a car drove past and then the road was empty again. The waiting was interminable. I was beginning to think this was the end of the trip. I waited. It was so quiet. Funny how you remember things out of context. I remember a black beetle walking across the road in the Syrian Desert. As I stepped back I inadvertently stepped back onto it and crushed him. It was upsetting for me and for him. It was remarkable that we should meet under such circumstances. That of all the desert to cross with it’s thousands of square kilometres of barreness, he chose to walk under my boot at the precise moment I got off my bike to stand.
Still, there was hardly a sound, then another car passed. A butterfly flapped and rested on the bars of the bike which made me begin to think. This was my fault and not that of the policeman. This was a principle route, the Pacific Highway and traversed the most populated area in Australia. It had to have cops guarding it. Essential, but how do they suddenly appear in your mirror when for miles there has been nothing? Does light bend around their vehicle in the way radar is deflected around a Stealth Bomber? Why was a conversation in my head so absorbing that it became impossible for me to know how far I’d travelled without knowing how I’d got there? It was still quiet. The butterfly had flown away. Not a car for minutes. I closed my eyes and breathed in Australia. I liked the place. I liked the people. Yet I also believed in the importance of passionate individual action that decided my views on morality and truth. That only by acting on convictions based on personal experience can you stand a chance of gaining some insight at arriving at some truth. The understanding of a situation, this situation, where a cop can decide for me everything I hold dear, is suddenly drawn from my control by a detached objective observer hell bent on systematic reasoning. The speed was an oversight and not real intent. I was superbly trained never to have an accident in seven circumnavigations in the most complex motoring conditions on earth and here we were in a desert of a drive with a man who would serve me notice without listening to what I had to say.
If anything was an existential moment, it was this.
Spiritually I was feeling more than general apprehension but real dread. It was angst. It was an anxiety that existential philosophers would say ‘leads to the individuals confrontation with nothingness and dealing with situations where it is impossible to find any justification for the choices he or she must make’. Sartre used the word nausea for the individual’s recognition of the pure chaos of the universe and it being a contingent one. This cop represented my nothingness, not in a personal way but a result of a decision I made and one he had to react to, as a professional and also the space he occupied as an individual. This was that contingent I feared. Speeding for him was wrong. For him, systematic reasoning prevails over everything. My experience and my clean accident free history in the toughest motoring conditions on earth was not relevant to this man. In Syria, Kenya, Tanzania, riding fast on an empty road would have had the police beg you to go faster. Such recourse to this man would command a prison sentence. What is appropriate in other countries was unimportant to him, but technically and morally right to me.
This commitment to freedom of choice confronts every individual at every moment and it is this opposite morality that creates anguish. This person had the power to strip me of my freedom and when he stepped out of that car it would be a defining moment.
“What did you say you were doin?” He said, as he walked from the car.
“Going around the world. I’ve got to be in Alaska in 25 days.”
“Well you’re registered and legal and I can see that your paperwork is in order, but you’re not on the computer so I don’t know what to do.”
“Let me off?” I suggested hopefully, and gathering speed I asked him if he was a biker.
“Yep, I’ve got a Harley.” My heart sunk a bit. If he had a sports bike we would have a greater confluence of interest. “I suppose you’ve got the Long Way Round?”
“Yep, got the DVD, sits proudly on my mantelpiece.” We diverge again. Spit out the worst. “Yep, when are you leaving the country?”
“Tomorrow.”
“OK, I’ll give you a break. I’ll give you the maximum fine which you need to pay in 21 days.”
“Certainly officer,” I said like a crawly schoolboy.
“And then I’ll take away all your driving privileges in Australia for six months starting 23.59 tomorrow night. How about that?” He looked at me intently, thinking he was doing me a favour and in a way he was. Philosophically I wanted to berate him for this stupidity and for the nothingness that he was making me confront. For the waste of time this whole charade was but said instead, “thank you officer, I really appreciate that.” I wanted to ask him whether his one percent point of generosity was simply because he couldn’t locate me on the computer or was it really his good will. If it hadn’t been for that lovely lady at Driving Services in Perth, who couldn’t understand how to programme an imported motorcycle into Western Australia, she just might have pressed the wrong button allowing Officer Dibble be thwarted in his attempt to throttle this adventure. So after 30 hours on the bike, I took his bits of paper and he drove away leaving me staring blankly into an empty road.
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