Fool's Gold Testimony

- RM Williams Outback magazine - Australia

“I was in one of the strangest pieces of topography I’d ever seen, a place, until now, completely beyond my imaginings. What is it in man that for a long while lies unknown and unseen only one day to emerge and push him into a new land of the eye, a new region of the mind, a place he has never dreamed of? Maybe it’s like the force in spores lying quietly under asphalt until the day they push a soft, bulbous mushroom head right through the pavement. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.” – William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

The sun is setting over a mélange of salt-bush and heat-waves outside, and the flies are beginning to rise again. It was 50° today, which in my native parlay is 122°F. In that heat, you are slowly cooking, nevermind the sun’s glare. Your sweat evaporates before ever wetting the skin and it takes a constant input of water to keep from drying out like the dingo carcasses we pass periodically. We are barreling into the setting sun towards Kalgoorlie’s tin-shed brothels and gaping Super Pit on these blue rails, our own personal highway to Hell. As far as the eye can see in every direction there is only the broken pattern of orange earth and dirty-green bush, which, after a while, equates to a vast nothingness.

The rake of wagons behind us carry everything from processed sheet metal to automobiles to wheat and grain. In the small grainery towns the trackside is dotted with little girls and boys, their shirts and dresses pulled up around their chests, waving bashfully at the train while the driver pulls the air horn lever and smiles out the window. The freight train is the great rumbling heart of our economy, the pulsing plasma of the red country and the green. 80% of east-west freight travels by train, on a single jugular line running across the belt-line of this vast, dry continent.

Leaving Melbourne I’m still fresh and energetic, eager to see the country from another perspective, and find out just who the hell drives these iron snakes for a living. Sarah sits beside me at the freight terminal and watches John Armstrong lope down the track long-bearded with his gear, his billy can dangling from one side, and whispers to me that he is exactly what a train driver should look like. John is old-school. He started out as a fireman on the old steam locomotives, shoveling coal into the fire-box in the open-air heat of the Wimmera plains. Another old-timer, Jimmy North, describes the job, “If you got a full and free engine that burned good, your job was easy. If the quality of the coal was poor though…” and he just nods his head in silent anguish. “You could rub coal in your hands and it would be powdery, but the good stuff felt lighter, was shinier and didn’t come off on your hands like the bad stuff.”

John and Brian Head take me halfway to Adelaide, an eight-hour leg, before jumping off and letting two guys from Dimboola take the controls. It will be sixteen hours before my jangled kidneys and addled brain can stop moving again in Adelaide.
Jimmy and Rob Hall will make the night run through the Adelaide hills, a harrowing, screeching journey where the sound of the locomotive echoes into the cab from the deep-cut swath through the mountainsides. Rob once circumnavigated Australia on his motorbike in sixteen days flat. He says the world record is just over fourteen days, but they had road support. Rob likes life in the country. “I grew up in the bush, I like the bush,” he ponders matter-of-factly.

Certain times of the year, legions of millipedes swarm these hills towards some unknown destination, perhaps impelled by the same drive that makes a man drive a bike around the continent in two weeks flat. As they cross the tracks and the train wheels crush them, the viscous fluid they release stops the trains dead; there is not enough friction. To combat this, there is a little switch in the cab marked ‘Millipede Removal’. Two fine jets of air can be sprayed on the tracks to clear any offending insects. How strange that it might take a couple dozen gum trees to slow down one locomotive off the tracks, but a few thousand millipedes can stop a whole train…or make for a knuckle-whitening downhill run. Neither of which we encounter, thankfully. Jimmy once rode a locomotive off a bridge into the water below after a derailing. I want to ask him about it, but as one driver put it, “You don’t mention the ‘D’ word at work.”

After the smoke and pollution of Adelaide and Pt Augusta, the trees begin to thin at first, before ending altogether in a sudden line. Here is the ancient ocean, the vast limestone meringue we call the Nullarbor, or Null- [no] –arbor [tree] in Latin. By now I’ve changed drivers and trains again, and I’ll be riding in a ‘crew car’ to Cook. An old converted sleeper, here we can sit around and stare at each other’s feet, or bunk up in a room the size of your average Indonesian toilet cubicle. Even the sink folds into the wall. It is still so hot after sunset that you can’t touch the inside walls of the car…and the windows seem ready to melt. I’ll get into Cook around midnight after a strange, rumbling sleep.

Out here in the wastes, there isn't much to do on a Saturday night but get drunk, and the local bar long since closed down. When it's too early to start drinking out of the bottle, and late enough that the work's been done, some of these men-of-the-long-horizon spend their hours pacing the desert deliberately, head down, sun roasting their purple necks, hands in overall pockets, squinting their eyes into crow's feet and shiny gleam. In an old roll-your-own tobacco wrapper, the scent still pungent as he hands it over, lie a handful of buff black pebbles, wind-washed. Meteoric glass, he tells me. Black, but if you hold them up to the sun, an ancient green translucence. Combined with the old tobacco smell, they seem to capture the space, scale and methods for coping with boredom that these guys have come to cope with. Grant is a track worker now, but he used to live here in Cook. Between looking for meteors, he works hard in the sun fixing rails, sleepers and switches. Now he only stays here for three weeks of the month. The only way to tell the story of Cook is an obituary. As we pull away in the morning on yet another train, with two Kalgoorlie drivers, I can just picture fifty words of mourning on page eight of the Kalgoorlie Miner.

Kal might just be the last wild-west city in the world. Men here dig through limestone, quartz and clay for gold and nickel which they won’t be able to afford after spending most of their pay on drink and women, the only things to spend your money on here. Something about the false promises in this hard piece of ground seem to capture the essence of Kalgoorlie, and the half-broke, half-drunk, half-crazed vagabonds, pass-throughs, prostitutes and skimpy barmaids chasing something they don't understand, can't ever get a grasp on, and will ultimately die ignorant of. Harley behind the counter of the Exchange Bar is our savior, in her diaphanous underwear and cork heels. She bends over to pick up a bill off the floor and a man feels like ordering one more beer. Why not, I'm only passing through.

I can settle down and be doin’ just fine
Til I hear an old train rollin’ down the line
Then I hurry straight home and pack
And if I didn’t go, I believe I’d blow my stack
I love you baby, but you gotta understand
When the lord made me
He made a ramblin’man.

Some folks might say that I’m no good
That I wouldn’t settle down if I could
But when that open road starts to callin’ me
There’s somethin’ o’er the hill that I gotta see
Sometimes it’s hard but you gotta understand
When the lord made me, he made a ramblin’ man.

I love to see the towns a-passin’ by
And to ride these rails ’neath god’s blue sky
Let me travel this land from the mountains to the sea
’ cause that’s the life I believe he meant for me
And when I’m gone and at my grave you stand
Just say God called home your ramblin’ man. – Hank Williams, Sr