Into Thick Air by Jim Malusa Read Free Book Online Page A

Eat me and you’re in for a potentially unpleasant surprise.
    It’s no longer a surprise and it’s no worse than the usual alternatives: toast with a can of baked beans poured on top, or toast with a can of spaghetti poured on top, or toast with Vegemite, a spread served in the
ubiquitous little plastic cup with a tear-off lid. I’ve tried them all, even the Vegemite, smearing a dark blob across my toast and immediately recognizing its smell and texture. It’s really nothing new, being widely available in the United States. It’s marketed under the name Form-a-Gasket, an adhesive I once used to install a fuel pump in my car.
    The Vegemite package claims it’s “concentrated yeast extract.” That’s odd. In Vegemite-less societies I’d never heard the complaint, “I’d love to eat more yeast, if only it were concentrated into something a bit smaller.” So it was no shock when a waitress told me that Vegemite wasn’t invented by intelligent life— Vegemite just happened .
    â€œI believe it was discovered by accident. They found it while making beer, the stuff that had settled to the bottom of the vat.”
    When was that?
    â€œHuh—long, long ago. I can’t remember when there wasn’t Vegemite. It’s a part of regular life.”
    Timeless food, reminding me of the truth in Cervantes’s words: The road is always better than the inn. He wrote that four hundred years ago, and it doesn’t appear that roadhouse food will be changing soon. The people in charge are generally too busy trying to attract more than the usual truck drivers. The signs out front proclaim a Wildlife Sanctuary, but it’s just a big cage with a pair of emus or a talking cockatoo. Anything is better than nothing, including mildlife like a goat or a burro. Inside, above the cash register, the parade of animals continues with a display of pickled death adders and scorpions in murky jars. Yesterday’s newspaper is for sale, as is this month’s issue of People magazine, which apparently enjoys different ownership in Australia, with the current cover promising “Rudest Nude Wives.”
    Any newspaper article mentioning that particular roadhouse joins the yellowed archives tacked on the wall. One roadhouse also enshrines every newspaper account of UFOs reported over the desert. I ask a waitress about my chances of seeing one. “The owner sees them all the time,” she says while taking a break and a smoke beside a stuffed lizard. She adds wistfully, “But I wish I’d see something more than little lights in the night sky. Lots of pretty stars, but . . . ”

    Later that evening I’m lying on my back, smoking my pipe under the pretty stars before the moon rises. Of course they see things out here, I’m thinking—it’s the Vegemite and the glow-in-the-dark sugar beets. But when I take off my glasses and look up at the blaze of constellations I see for the first time in my life what appears to be a fried egg sizzling in the Milky Way.
    Â 
    NEAR THE TOWN OF ALICE SPRINGS, I stop to pick up a little road-killed lizard and place it in my handlebar bag alongside pipe and sunglasses. Collecting dead reptiles isn’t a hobby, but I can’t resist a better look at what appears to be a knot of barbed wire. It’s called a thorny devil, and its armored skin of deep reds and russets—precisely the colors of central Australia—make it even more handsome than America’s horned lizard. Otherwise, the two look so similar that it’s reasonable to guess that they’re related.
    They’re not. Separated by an ocean and millions of years, the thorny devil and the horned lizard look the same because they do the same thing for a living. You would not be surprised to find that steelworkers in Australia and Arizona wear hardhats and gloves. Thorny devils and horned lizards wear spikes and camouflage. The outfit is a