Into Thick Air by Jim Malusa Read Free Book Online

living on teeny kangaroo turds.
    If those long-ago bush flies could dream, it would surely be of a thousand-pound slobbering herbivore with big moist eyes and bigger moister dung. The dream came ashore in 1788 with the British First Fleet. Half of the 1,500 passengers were convicts, most simple thieves like cheese snatchers and laundry grabbers, and the others were seamen and penal colony administrators hoping to survive beyond the fringe of the known world. Sensibly, they brought livestock, including two bulls and three cows.
    As Heath puts it, “The bush flies watching the scene must have felt a dawning sense of unbelievable good luck.” Within twenty years there were over a thousand cows, and “there was plenty of dung. Huge, splashy cow pads.” Today there are over 20 million cows in Australia, and about twelve times a day each cow lets loose a dung heap capable of supporting two thousand baby flies. Don’t bother with the math, unless you wish to be truly frightened.
    Top-notch Australian entomologists have imported dung beetles to compete with bush flies. Things are getting better wherever the beetles can win the thrilling race to the fresh dung. The Devil’s Marbles doesn’t seem to be one of those places. I try my repellent, but they eagerly lap it up. I’ve been told that a powerful spray called Rid is the only thing that works, but it’s like Agent Orange in a can, and difficult to apply to eyeballs.
    So I ride off toward Alice Springs. The flies chase me, but mostly they ride on the back of my shirt. Keep moving and all is well. I find I can scribble, on the roll, shaky notes of whatever catches my eye. Big gourds on vines crawling across the sands. Zebra finches opening their orange bills to lick the leaky spigot on a cattle tank. The purple blooms of a deadly nightshade, seducing pollinators with sexy yellow stigmas.

    The spaces between tourist stops are not empty—they just seem that way if you’re in a car. Although we can move between points quicker than ever, the places between still exist, so the world is not shrinking after all.
    It’s a hot day, silencing the birds, everything waiting. The road is hypnotically straight for twenty miles, then doglegs though a pass in a long, low ridge of shattered rock. Late in the day I cross an actual creek and strip to wash in water that looks as though it came from a very rusty radiator. It’s better than sweat.
    Evening is the sweetest time in a hot place, because although dawn is the coolest moment of the day you know it’s just going to get hotter. With dusk comes the promise of the night. The wind quits, the leaves relax, and I keep riding. With the road to myself I ride as the stars blink on and Venus becomes queen of the sky. Birds in the dark whistle laconically, and I ride, all alone, approaching the center of Australia.
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    WITH EVERY DAY CLOSER to Alice Springs the trees shrink and my skin dries and the sun’s lower on the northern horizon. But the roadhouses stay much the same: pit stops for most folk, but oases for a cyclist with sixty miles to the next café/motel/pub/gas station. Like Pavlov’s dog, I start salivating when I hear the growl of a power generator or see a crude sign painted on the hood of a wrecked car. I know that inside the screen door awaits a relatively fly-free dining room, a bathroom with a sliver of soap, and a counter where I’ ll order my road coffee and meal.
    â€œDo you want that steak sandwich with the lot?” the counter woman will ask. Her name might be Bronwyn. The coffee will be instant. “The lot” is a processed cheese slice, carrot curls, fried egg and onions, and a slice each of pineapple and sugar beet heaped atop the slab of meat, all on white bread that soon regresses into dough. One bite and the sugar beet oozes what any biologist would recognize as “warning coloration,” the sort of hue that animals and plants use to say: