Desperate Breaths

Desperate Breaths Into The Mouth Of A Dead Movement And A Rather Sterile Tribute to Jack

It’s been over fifty years since the publishing of Kerouac’s seminal On The Road, having played as much a part of the Beat Movement as it’s legacy forms a piece of legend for anyone who idolises the past and present of what’s hip and cool today. About three weeks ago I set about myself to undertake a spontaneous and poorly planned road trip to the most foreign regions of the great and often barren nation that is Australia, my peers likening it to the journeys travelled by Kerouac in the post war era across America. The plan was to hitch hike to the Northern city of Darwin, over 3000km by road from my home in Brisbane, I brought with me just over $150, an overnight bag and a satchel filled with journals. Whilst I did not seriously consider myself a modern day Jack Kerouac, the parallels between his adventure and mine were becoming very clear, oh but how the roads had changed in half a century- and they were soon to bare their glaring differences.

It all started upon waking up in the sweltering Summer heat of my inner-city workers cottage after another wasted night of binge drinking on the university down time, the only real souvenir from the night before being a crippling hangover, half a cask of wine and a Swedish backpacker lying next to me. I looked over to her and had a rather powerful thought as she lay there with a pillow covering her face to block out the sun. This girl, in the month or so of travel she’s had, has probably seen more of this island continent than I have. Without wanting to spend another minute in that airless bedroom I collected myself and headed into my lounge dialing the numbers of contacts I thought might want to take a bit of a road trip to the furthest corners of the nation on this beautiful November day. As it turned out, in this day and age nobody had the keen adventurous spirit of myself, so I thought “fuck it” and embarked on the expedition alone, hitching a ride about two hours north to the coastal community of Coolum with an old friend of mine who lived up there. Coolum, being a bit of a bohemian seaside paradise was my home for the night, but not wanting to dwell too long, I scored myself a bag of strong hydroponic marijuana from a group of hipsters and hit the road again. This time, my intentions were to blindly head north with the first person to offer a ride.

Either people are less welcoming to the wandering stranger these days or Mr. Kerouac let on that getting people to trust you enough to ride shotgun in their car was a lot easier than it actually was. I suppose in this age of car jacking and chilling backpacker murders the former probably holds some truth. I ended up sitting on the shoulder of a highway for most of the morning and if it weren’t for the cool coastal breezes I could have easily perished then and there having brought no water with myself and baring another killer hangover. Eventually, a man in a white utility stopped and offered me a ride with him, he was taken aback that I had no idea where I was headed and in response to my wild aspirations of nation wide travel, suggested I ride with him up to Hervey Bay on the glorious Fraser Coast.

“Mate, you’re fucken crazy. I’m not gonna drive you up to bloody Darwin but I live at Hervey Bay, I’ll drop you at Centro.”

Hervey Bay isn’t exactly a holiday destination and I had no idea what ‘Centro’ was but whatever. I was game.

As it turns out, ‘Centro’ is a shrine to the suburban dream. An enormous shopping mall complete with attached tavern and transit centre. Even a days drive out of the city and into the world of coastal fishing towns and surfer communities is not enough to escape the grasp of suburbia and everything that propagates its continuation in this contemporary existence. Devastated, I circled the carpark, realising I’d allocated more money to drugs than I had to food and without a bed to sleep in I prepared myself for the first of many rough nights. After scraping together seven dollars, I hit the local Super IGA and bought myself some bread, tabouleh and ham. This was a bit of a lavish but it provided both dinner and breakfast to the point where I couldn’t eat any more, the ham kept fresh under the cool of night.

(This is just a tip for those of you who don’t know. Home made sandwiches are fucking cheap and filling. Deli meals can be made for under a couple of dollars and it’s usually enough to feed two. Get involved.)

It was about here that I realised there was no turning back for a while. I had committed myself to the road and I was no doubt in it for the long haul. The cost of heading back prematurely would set me back in rent for a week, something I simply could not afford to do. I waited until sunset before moving to find a bed, the shame of being judged by all these middle class suburban people was a new experience for me and a perspective I had never imagined I’d view. For I truly was what the majority of them thought and from that there was no escape; I was lost and with nowhere to go. I rugged up underneath some plastic packaging in a cardboard box that once held a refrigerator behind a TV studio housed in a warehouse, fulfilling every homeless person cliché along the way.

At this point my adventure had already taken a turn for the worst. Where Kerouac had the thriving culture associated with the Beat scene in post-war America, I was stuck in the heartland of the unremarkable. The towns not big enough to have something going on, whilst Capitalism and the spread of mass consumerism meant that they were no longer quaint enough to be interesting. I was just barely surviving in a place that held all the character of a wasteland, however at the same time, the very fact that I had to struggle to survive at all in the middle of suburbia is what made it mentally bearable- you could say it kept me sane.

The next morning at five I was out of that place. In a classic case of being at the right place at the right time I sighted a van with detailing indicating it was from Rockhampton- a small city another full days drive north of where I was. I waited around for the driver and sure enough he was heading home and kindly offered me a lift. If I had learned anything from my previous experience of hitching a ride it would have been that knowing where you are going is important if you don’t want to be berated for being a foolhardy idiot. Thinking that I wasn’t really interested in another lecture, I made up a string of lies claiming that I was a Rocky local and had found myself down the coast after a weekend camping. Pretty weak story and he probably thought I was a weirdo but it was enough to keep him quiet.

I landed on the streets of Rockhampton with all the expectations in the world. Two days driving from home and I was a free man. The truth is that Rockhampton is a cruel and unforgiving place for a man with no car and no money, I may have been free from commitments back home but my dire situation with regards to money and transport left me with little options. With no map easily available I figured I had a fifty percent chance of finding the right road to get me out of this town and keep me going up the north coast- it was either left or right. The trouble was that these days Rockhampton is an urban sprawl of single story factories and arterial roads that seem to go nowhere in particular, the place is unnavigable on foot. Completely disheartened, I decided to check out the town but ended up sleeping on the streets of Rocky for three nights in a row. Taking left overs from bakeries around the city became the norm, I felt like I had been doing this my whole life and with each heist I’d get a little thrill and sense of satisfaction. It’s weird how you change when you’ve seemingly got nothing to lose. After the third night I got the opportunity to shower at a roadhouse which I jumped at and soon found myself in a fresh set of clothes ready to take on whatever the road could throw at me.

Again, a long day waiting for a ride on the shoulder of what I figured was the road north and I was back in the midst of the world of a hitch hiker. Deep and meaningful conversations with people I would never see again. It’s like they become my best friend for the time that we were together and then just as easily as we’d met, we were separated, a polite wave goodbye and they’re gone. I’m gone. I found myself in the quiet seaside town of Mackay. Picturesque, quaint and for the first time in my adventure I felt like the trip was worth my while. There’s something a little more wild about Mackay, it’s this ‘wildness’ that gets preserved because there exists here a certain quality that not even the developers of sprawling shopping malls and chain hotels can capitalise on. It didn’t even bother me that I had no bed, the charm of sleeping on a real beach, under the stars is often unmatched. Money was not an issue either, earlier in my journey I had purchased some salt which I had been saving for a moment like this, for in the wet sand live small shellfish called Pipis. You can dig them up with your foot and cook them on an open fire, they taste like a tough mussel. Add a bit of salt and there’s no fresher taste. The idea of sustainable living outside of the law and society has always excited me and for the next leg of the trip I felt like a true modern day proponent of the themes behind On The Road. Spontaneity, creativity and the blatant rejection of a mainstream lifestyle. To top it off I was seeing a side of the country I had never seen before.

For the next week or so I floated slowly up the coastline of what is known here as the Whitsunday’s with whoever would take me, smoking joints, eating shellfish, sleeping under the stars and avoiding all the tourists leading normal lives. I had never felt more content. I had truly made it. This is what the road is about, I thought to myself. Airlie Beach, Bowen, Home Hill, Ayr and finally Townsville. All of these towns with the same pristine beaches, some more beautiful than others but all possessing their own distinct charm. It was this part of Australia and my adventure, that inspired me to write anything at all and now, here I sit in an internet café in Townsville spending the last of my dollars whilst frantically tapping out a story from a collection of scattered journal entries and drug muddled memories. At this stage, I feel like I needn’t continue anywhere. I’m out of money and I think I’ve seen enough. There’s plenty more of this life of mine and just the beginning of what you could call my life on the road. Extra points for getting the reference.

On the whole you could say that although the road has since been sterilised by all that we find sickeningly comfortable and normal in this modern world, there remain parts of this planet that are untouched- or preserved. The Beats may be long gone but the basic principles visited in their most famous literature still remain relevant. At least to some.

PEACE.

by my good friend and bigtime cool guy from Brisvegas Australia, James Gemmell.