Free Into Thick Air by Jim Malusa Page A

motorcyclists roar in and clear out the local cola supplies. They’re sweating madly in head-to-toe articulated plastic body armor, looking like lobsters with video cameras instead of claws. They film the coin bra, my bicycle, and the Operation Anti-Rabbit bumper stickers on the trucks (“Eradication through Cooperation”) featuring a devious slit-eyed bunny with killer incisors.
    After they tear off, with a vicious blat of exhaust, a mail delivery brings a just-in-time General Delivery letter from my wife, Sonya. It’s full of glowing reveries of spring in Arizona, of mourning doves and sweet acacias and baby tomatoes. I’m mortally homesick, and the man at the bar wants to know where I’m heading “with that push bike.”
    Lake Eyre, I say—and now I feel stupid as well as melancholy. He doesn’t want to know why, and instead asks, “Then what?” That’s it, I say. After Lake Eyre I’ll ride another day to the next town down the track, Roxby Downs, and catch a little plane out of the desert.
    â€œLake Eyre,” he says, “is a bloody big stretch of salt. Salt far as you see. There’s only one reason to go out there.” He pauses, for dramatic purposes, and to lick the paper on his hand-rolled smoke. “It’s the only place where it takes the flies five minutes to find you.”
    I’m easily pleased, and this is blessed news for me. Winds willing, sixty miles and one more day to Lake Eyre.
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    CROWS WAKE ME in the predawn cool. They’re taunting each other, or me, but it’s still a nice alarm clock. I open my eyes and watch color seep back
into the world. Small clouds above the warming horizon are lined up like pink commas. The usual splendid workings of earth and sky—but I worry over the wind-swept curve of the clouds.
    Last night the dingoes moaned and cried. When the explorer Charles Sturt came this way in 1845–46, he wrote that the dingoes’ “emaciated bodies standing between us and the full moon were the most wretched objects in creation.” Sturt was one of the first to systematically explore the center of the continent, prodded by his dream of an inland sea. He even brought a boat into the desert, “for it will be a joyous day for us to launch on an unknown sea and run away towards the tropics.”
    Sturt wasn’t crazy. About 500,000 square miles of Australia—a sixth of the continent—slopes not to the sea but instead into the closed basin that is Lake Eyre. The Volga River, Europe’s largest, drains a similar expanse, and also flows to a closed basin—the Caspian Sea, watery proof that Europe is wetter than present-day Australia.
    Sturt was ten thousand years too late to discover Australia’s equivalent of the Caspian, Lake Dieri. After the Pleistocene it literally evaporated, and its ghost is Lake Eyre. Blurts of runoff from rains up to five hundred miles away can flood one corner or another of Eyre. Once every twenty or thirty years the lake can be sixty miles wide and fifteen feet deep.
    This isn’t one of those years. Like the man at William Creek said: lots of salt out there. Fortunately, that’s all I’m expecting. A little bird they call Willie wagtail keeps me company, snapping up flies as I pack my bags. Feathered in formal black-over-white, Willie inspires me to jazz myself up for the special occasion. A fine-looking shrub with cotton puff flowers, ready for the craft fair, supplies a nice boutonniere for my shirt.
    When the sun appears and only the solitary can hear the daybreak angels sing and toot their long horns, I set off like a bloodhound, hot on the scent of Lake Eyre. It’s a fine start, wheeling along with my shadow in pursuit, the desert air as clear and intoxicating as gin, everything reminding me of why I ride: to be outside. The bicycle amplifies life, making good times better.
    And bad times worse. After one hour the headwind revs up