The car sped dangerously down the dark highway. Only the twin splashes of light cast from the car’s own lights broke the darkness casting a glimpse of the hidden world around us. Ghosts of trees, faded into and out of existence some distance away from the two lane highway hinting at a larger forest all around us. A sign loomed up and vanished as it passed through the small universe within our headlights.
The sign was rectangular and white, slightly taller that it was wide. There were no words on the sign, just a red slash across an equally red circle. I revved the engine and the little car whined and sped up. The white line of the speedometer arced clockwise into unfamiliar territory until it passed 160 km/hr and then settled somewhere near 180.
My traveling companion, Frank, was a pretty-boy manly-man ancestored by Nordic barbarians from long ago. He amuses himself by training high school wrestlers and riding his Harley Davidson. He paid for all of this by hacking software for the company I work for. Presently he was searching his Ipod for episodes of ‘John and Rich in the morning’. He found them, hit play, and we settled back for a fast paced uneventful four hour trip across the Australian Outback listenening to a couple of abusive radio DJs roasting young callers.
Our goal was Ayer’s Rock at sunrise. We devised this plan while squirreled away in a windowless room lost in a maze of bland corridors, monotonous signs, and small cubicals bleached to a stale yellow by uniform florescent lighting. The only signs of life being the hunched round-shoulder engineers peering into backlit LCD monitors like hypnotized moths worshiping an incandescent. Their faces and fingers illuminated by the soft radiant monitor glow with all else lost in the dim flicker of the 60 Hertz fluorescents.
There is nothing like consignment to a pit of darkness to inspire dreams of adventure, and so we were off. At 100 kilometers per hour the trip would take five hours, but when we had heard there was no speed limit in the Northwest Territory we both grinned. After escaping the brief suburbs of Alice Springs, we watched for the red circle and slash of speed freedom.
Another sign rushed toward us and vanished into the darkness behind us. This one was yellow with a black kangaroo. John and Rich mocked another angry and heartbroken teen. Ayer’s Rock was 100 kilometers closer.
Suddenly Frank pointed ahead and asked, ‘What is that?’ I squinted through the windshield at a large object blossomed into existence on the road ahead of us. I hopped my foot off the accelerator and pushed at the brake. The little car shuttered and slowed and the roadsigns behind us glowed an angry red. The faint object resolved quickly as we bore down upon it. I pushed at the brake harder realizing that if the object had been directly in the road we could not have slowed down fast enough. But it was not, the four foot tall Australian Gray Kangaroo was two hops away from a bad day, and wisely chose to keep it that way.
I was struck with the novelty of the encounter. I have seen kangaroos in zoos, in movies, and even when reading Whinney-the-Pooh books to my kids, but this was the first time I had seen a wild roo. A old memory from a visit to the San Diego Zoo flashed into being. I had sat upon the second level of a tour bus looking down into small artificial cells poorly attempting to emulate the living environment of the sequestered animals. There had been a small enclosement of roos with a few examples of Australian flora desperately trying to pretend they had green cards. The roos roamed across the concrete pen with looks of captive resignation. Here in the Outback, they returned a look of bored annoyance. Maybe we should have hit it after all.
We passed the kangaroo excitedly babbling about the Australian marsupial. My foot resumed it’s position and our little car eagerly accelerated and the Australian Outback once again passed rapidly beneath our wheels. In no time we were chuckling to the antics of the radio DJ. This time, however, we both kept a cautious eye on the road ahead of us and it’s a damn good thing we did.
Not five kilometers later a swarm of roos charged in from our right on an intercept course like a pride of lions after a prey. They announced themselves with a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. My heart leapt. Adrenaline spiked. Frank’s hand was synchronous with an exclamation as he pointed to the danger. My hands leapt to the 10-2 position on the steering wheel and my foot stomped on the brake. The wheels locked up and screamed agony as they fought desperately to grab and hold the aggregated asphalt.
The front of the car declined as the weight of the car was reminded of it’s own momentum. My own weight futily pushed harder on the brake doing little other than to illustrate the blossoming helplessness. Time slowed as I began to work though trajectory estimates and lines of intersection with the oncoming roo swarm. We were dead on.
I glanced at Frank who had placed both hands on the dash, mashed his foot to the floorboard, and discovered a new shade of white. I could feel the press of the steering wheel in my grip and the buzz of adrenaline flash through me as the car hummed with it’s own mortal fear as tires rapidly disintegrated.
The lead kangaroos reached the intercept point in the road ahead. For a moment I thought they might all across the road before I got there, leaving us in their empty wake, but the roos had other ideas. As they reached the flat hard asphalt a couple took note of our presence and, whether due to plain curiosity or rank stupidity or odd plan, stopped and turned it’s long thin head toward me and watched.
Iridescent eyes blinked in response to the flood of light rapidly descending on the roos. I gripped the wheel and turned to avoid collision, but the tires were held fixed by the brakes. The car did not respond to my request. I cursed and waved my arm futily trying to scrape the roos aside.
The Australian Gray just stared.
I hoped my insurance will cover this.
The roo grew geometrically in size becoming impossibly large as the tires of the car shaved layers of rubber from the steel belts. The marsupial’s fur became distinct and vivid, matted hairs of white and mandarin bunched together like long grass after a rainstorm. It’s skin was stretched tightly across it’s face and hung loosely from its haunches and belly like pizza dough draped across the knuckles of a chef. It’s eyes glazed with copper and blue and white glared back at me like egg-sized opals. It’s body rigid with fear or curiosity or stupidity.
I later learned that kangaroos become hypnotized by bright lights in the dark. Their bodies ignore the impulse to flee from impending danger. The ancient evolutionary branch that encoded their DNA with this paralyzing response left these natives of the outback critically flawed. Roo hunters often use bright spotlights to ‘stun’ a kangaroo before collecting their pelt. It was clear that this roo specifically had not had a chance to excise that particular peptide sequence from its DNA, and would not save itself from tea time with a ton of hurtling metal and plastic.
The advances in tire technology were another story. The decaying tires pulled the little car to a shuttering stop. I was whipped back into the firm seat. My fingers permanently deformed the polyurethane coated steering wheel. I sucked in a breath of air not realizing that breathing functions had shut down momentarily. I realized that somewhere on our approach my right hand had reattached itself to the two o’clock position. I could tell by the hammering of my pulse that my heart had skipped the play button and hit FF.
The roo still stood. For a moment I too did not move; we were locked into a synchronicity of stares as my mind grasped reality. He looked at me disinterested condescension as if knowing that danger was as far away as sea water and that I was foolish for trying to scare him. The pause lengthened and the frozen moment thawed with relief. I would not need that insurance policy after all.
A cloud of atomized tire rubber engulfed our little car and swallowed the rigid roos like a noxious ink cloud exhaled to scare off aquatic demons. Roo noses twitched with displeasure, and with a parting glance of lazy annoyance, they hopped away with lazy airs.
I detached my fingers from the molded polyurethane steering cover and breathed in a lump of zen. My head swiveled slowly from the location of the displaced roo to my traveling companion. He was slowly pulling his arms and legs from crash position to something nervous, tense, and artificially relaxed. He too was gulping air and trying to find his center.
As the roos left the road so did the tension. I chuckled ironically as I pulled my foot off the brake and ever so slightly pushed again at the accelerator. Our eyes scanned the little universe of our headlights for more invaders, as an accelerating staccato clap from flattened sides of shaved radials and Australian asphalt sent vibrations throughout the car. The many claps, each a celebration of tragedy avoided, grew rapidly into a wash of applause as the little car once again moved in search of the dawn light on the walls of uluru. Albiet this time a little slower.
The next few hours were spent dodging roos and chuckling to radio DJs. Our average speed had dropped to 100 kilometers per hour giving us plenty of time to react to large marsupial interlopers. And react we did. Every few miles there would be another troop of kangaroos. We would slow down,make our way through them and then resume our speed. The night passed on stretched nerves, but eventually we came to Uluru as the dawn’s light poured across the sunset walls.
Later that day Frank and I pulled into a restaurant and spoke with a waitress about about our little roo adventure. Much to our relief, the kangaroos are a nocturnal animal. So long as we kept our return trip to the daylight hours there would be little to no trouble.
Armed with new information the road back to Alice Springs raced beneath our wheels. But the road was not all that passed quickly. The road was littered with red and brown stains like malignant floral boquets where lively Australian kangaroos came to their sudden and violent end. Thousands of such remnant flowers blossomed across the black asphalt plain, and our only tribute was to think of the enormity of life that had passed from being into history.
The roo guards on the front of large 18+ wheeled trucks had an entirely new glint to them. The stories of busses touring through the Outback shuddering with repeated kinetic introductions to the native beasts lost thier irony to be replaced with somber reality.
