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

lovely example of convergent evolution, the power of time and natural selection to find the right tool for the job—a job that, in the case of the lizards, consists of crouching by an ant trail and flicking their tongues out to snag, one at a time, over a thousand ants a day. They must take their meals wherever they find them, which is often in the open and exposed to whatever predator happens by. That’s why the thorny devil and the horned lizard are disguised as dirt and rock (call it Plan A) and are as pleasant to swallow as a pincushion (Plan B).
    Even in death the thorny devil is bizarrely beautiful. At least until decomposition forces me to place him back in the desert, just as I reach Alice Springs.
    Only sixteen days since Darwin, and I’m dazzled by the superabundance of material goods in a town of only 25,000, over nine hundred miles from the nearest city. There’s everything an intercontinental athlete could desire. After a heady splurge at a donut shop, I huff over to the SmokeMart to buy real pipe tobacco, then join the other tourists at the Midland Hotel.

    Two young Swiss men are lounging at the pool in swimsuits and earphones, grimacing in primal satisfaction to the music. Mark politely removes his earphones to say hello, and I ask what he’s listening to.
    â€œSlayer.”
    Sounds like metal, I say, thinking of a piston engine critically low on oil.
    â€œIt is metal,” says friend Christopher.
    â€œBut it’s no good saying that Slayer is just a metal band,” says Mark, “because there is speed metal and doom metal, thrash metal and slow metal.”
    â€œAnd white metal and heavy metal,” adds Christopher, “and death metal and black metal.”
    So . . . what’s Slayer?
    â€œBlack metal,” says Mark.
    â€œDoom metal,” says Christopher, beginning some deep introspection on the role of Satan in Slayer’s music. It’s too bad I can’t pull out the dead lizard and entertain them. Look, boys: Thorny Devil. Death Metal. Roadkill.
    I waltz around my hotel room, inspecting the mini-bar and marveling at the ingenious Aussie two-button toilet. One button delivers a petite flush and the other lets loose a heroic flush. It’s entirely up to the user to decide which is appropriate. I sit in the shower for thirty minutes, paralyzed by pleasure. As for the rest of Alice Springs, it’s a very nice town in which to sleep, to wake, and to leave on a April morning.
    I’ve got sixty miles to the next water, but that should be no problem with a light and fresh wind on my tail. The flies are sluggish in the morning cool, and the road is extra-lovely—no power lines or poles, just a strip of pavement through a land that dries with every mile closer to Lake Eyre. Passing motorists pulling Kamperoo trailers are giving me the thumbs up. The drivers can tell: that bicyclist is happy. A simple rolling happiness, so light it leaves scarcely a memory.
    By my own reckoning, I am now a man of the Australian highway. Only occasionally will I be reaching down for my water bottle and then look up to see a car hurtling at me with its driver apparently reading the newspaper. My eyes will bug out, then I’ll remember: Australian steering wheels
are on the right side of the car, so that’s the passenger with the paper, not the driver.
    The car is often not really a car but an Australian hybrid, much like the now-extinct Chevy El Camino. In America, pickup trucks are evolving into something akin to a car; in Australia the cars are mutating into pickup trucks. The front half is a car, but the back is a truck bed to hold the spare, fuel cans, and a four-foot-tall jack known as a Hi-Lift. Up front there’s a roo-bar to protect the headlights and grill and a pair of auxiliary lights, so you know what you’re running over.
    The bigger the vehicle, the bigger the roo-bar, and the biggest of all are on the road trains, the triple-trailer