The Todd.

Journal Entry: Wednesday, December 6, 2000

The Todd River wound through town like a dusty serpent fossil; once or twice each year it would attract enough rainwater to begin to flow, sometimes to swell, and sometimes to carry away garbage, animals, even people. On a particular summer night in 1992 it was as dry as ever, and as I approached its sandy banks I brought my bicycle to a halt and jumped off. I was returning from Alice Springs to our little home, a shy, lopsided wallflower on the outskirts of town. The warm air carried suggestions of drunkenness and discord among the tribes people whom resided among the wispy, brittle bush that dotted our Central Australian landscape: deep bellowing and shrieking from the torn numbed throats of a beaten, weathered people. It is tempting to trace the spaghetti schematic of my late 20's neuroses to my 17-year-old interpretations of the dangers lurking in the night along the banks of the Todd River. The idea of snakes haunted me terribly and with money I saved from stocking grocery store shelves I bought a small lamp to attach to my bicycle, anticipating better odds of survival lest I come across a king brown snake taking in the warmth of the Stuart Highway or one of many scabby three-legged dogs that were affixed to the "blackfella camps."


I could see our little porch light scratching through the tar of the moonless desert night: a comforting signifier that my cries for help might have the ability, if uttered during some grizzly scenario, to be carried by a hot breeze through an open window and into the ears of my sleeping parents. Our small tilted house lay at the end of a dirt track. The dirt track split from the Stuart Highway and ran about a half mile, corrugated and dusty, curvy and unforgiving and was cut in half by the Todd. My family owned a rusty Volkswagen bus that required a full-throttled preamble to a Todd River traverse. even then becoming mired, almost terminally, in the deep sandy basin but generally breaking free, as if from quicksand, to begin an overheated meander into town. Crossing by bicycle was impossible. I waded through the prehistoric sand, dragging my little machine behind, light flickering between white and yellow in a vain attempt to warn of miscellaneous evils via its dim composite of my immediate future.


At first I was confused by the hissing. To recall the prickling of skin and the welling of tears is effortless. The raw instinct of fear split through me like an axe and I froze waiting for teeth to pierce skin, for my spine to become poisoned, for venom to begin its journey to critical organs. I wondered about the breeze. Which direction was it blowing? Toward the house? Away from the house? Would the Aborigines hear me? Could I even bellow for help? I stared at the ground as I did once when confronted by a large dog while throwing newspapers on a dark winter morning. I hoped the serpent would sense my benevolence in the way the dog had as its snarls turned to growls and then throaty warnings until eventually he released me from his locked attention. I wondered if my jeans would help, or my boots. Where would it strike? Would it hurt? I then realized, with no lesser of a fear, that there was no snake.


____________

Watching the flickering oval of sand at my feet I realized the ground was becoming increasingly visible. illuminated with a green hue and the hissing was becoming louder. It's hard to describe how easily one can be frightened in the Central Australian desert at night. There are things there that kill people. There are spiders that can destroy a person's nervous system. There are dogs and snakes and scorpions. There are people, invisible and omnipresent: people half-understood. People kill people in the desert (the murder rate in Alice Springs is the highest per capita in the world). Loud hissing noises only serve to rattle a traveler's nerves. Bright green light on a dirt track miles from any appliance capable of producing bright green light only serves to cause a traveler to hastily review the details of his life and to try to revise his half-hearted religious pessimism.


I looked up. Falling from the sky was a green ball of flame, its descent clumsy and vital and mortal. An enormous rock was screaming through the sky over my head. It was on fire. It came from space. Never had I felt my eyes forced open so wide nor such a sustained chill throughout my body. My benevolence shifted skyward in its focus and I felt okay. No snake was biting me, no three-legged dog was tearing out my innards, nothing was infecting my spine with venom. I was watching a meteorite descend from the heavens. My body cut a sharp and shifting shadow on the ground as the rock rumbled through the sky just a few hundred feet above sizzling loudly and crisply. I started to cry.


The whole affair couldn't have lasted more than 45 seconds and ended with an almost subsonic impact several hundred feet to the north. It was the lowest of low sounds-- the kind you feel rather than hear. I felt as I did after sex with a stranger-- an odd post-coital awkwardness checked only by the validation of the sexual experience and the satisfaction obtained thereby. I stood spent and confused in the darkness that again swallowed my bicycle and me and I realized that my light was no longer flickering but shining steadfast. I started to laugh.


I covered the remaining distance to the house in record time, exhilarated and happy and humbled. I switched on the radio scanner in the living room and listened for any mention of the meteorite by air traffic controllers or policemen or truckers. Nothing. I stepped out onto the wide wooden porch and listened for sirens. I listened for shouting and I wondered if more celestial debris would assume broad sizzling arcs above the dark little house. But the desert was quiet. Even the specter that met the earth just minutes before had fallen deathly still and silent but I knew it was there on our neighbor's land. Melting the sand and rock it touched, pulsing, steaming, cooling and expanding, half buried. I climbed into bed wondering if the rock was still glowing, wondering where it came from. I wondered if I had not been out on the track, would it have gone unnoticed? Was I the only one on the planet who saw this shooting star touch the Earth? I slept beautifully and dreamlessly.