Free Into Thick Air by Jim Malusa Page B

and my spirit cracks like the skin on my hands.

    To the cyclist, and the sailor, there is never simply a “wind.” It’s either a headwind, crosswind, or tailwind. A headwind is worse than any mountain. The mountain delivers tangible rewards: a view at the summit and a downhill on the other side. A stiff headwind drains you out of spite, simply to show you who’s boss.
    A truck pulls alongside. After the dust blows back, the driver cranks down the window and asks how I’m doing. Miserable, I say—ten kilometers per hour, max.
    â€œNeed a lift to Coward Springs?”
    I’m not sure where Coward Springs is, but I remember the lesson of the sole survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition: never refuse help from the natives. My rescuers are a wheat farmer and a nurse on holiday. At the spring they’re meeting the nurse’s son, a herpetologist. When we arrive twenty minutes later, I’m treated to some freshly captured reptiles, including a barking gecko with blinking shining eyes and skin as soft as a peach. With a single croak it wrecks my notion that Australian reptiles are deadly silent.
    From Coward Springs it’s twenty-five miles to Lake Eyre, which I figure will be a good four-hour battle into the wind. I’m no longer cursing the elements, because nothing is going to stop me now. My knees are aching, but I pedal on and without stopping reach into my shirt pocket for the aspirin bottle and toss back three tablets.
    Five miles from Lake Eyre is Curdimurka, an abandoned railroad siding on an abandoned railway. The well still functions, and I stop to fill my water bottles and to snoop inside the stone building. The wind is gusting and the door slams shut behind me.
    No more wind. I sit in a chair and rub my thighs and realize how living outside for a month has made me appreciate being inside, out of the sun, sheltered from the blowing dust. One lick of comfort is all it takes to make me consider spending the night inside, but I’m not quite where I want to be.
    A half hour before sundown I crest a rise and there’s Lake Eyre. It extends beyond the horizon, just like the sea, if the sea were white and silent and you could ride your bike on it. I push and drag my machine through
the dunes fringing the shore, bump over a scatter of gibbers to reach the salt crust, then pedal onto the lake. There are a few snags of driftwood to avoid, locked in the salt as if frozen in ice. Beyond, it’s clear sailing. I could pop open my tent, strap it to the bike, and in this wind set a land speed record.
    Turning back into the wind, my speed drops and I break through the salt and sink two inches into a damp black clay. No matter: I stop and take a picture before pushing the bike back to shore. Like a sand creature, I find a hollow between the dunes and hunker down out of the wind. I dig through my panniers and find my meager reserve of brandy, just in time for a bloody sunset over Lake Eyre.
    The problem with Mount Everest is that you can’t spend the night on top. Tonight my noodle dinner is ready extra-fast because water boils hotter at forty-nine feet below sea level. Tonight the wind fades and the quiet settles in and comforts me. I fall asleep, all alone at the edge of a salt lake in the desert. In the night I wake to find the moon down and the stars zinging bright, and although I’m at the very bottom of Australia, I’m feeling pretty high.

ASIA
    I remember the maps of the Holy
Land. Colored they were. Very pretty.
The Dead Sea was pale blue. The
very look of it made me thirsty.
    â€”Estragon, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

CHAPTER 3
    Tucson to Cairo
    We Cannot Guarantee
Your Safety
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DEPRESSIONS BECAME my destiny. Shortly after my return from Australia, Discovery Online sent a gift basket of fruit to my door. Nobody had ever sent me a fruit basket. It seemed that Lake Eyre was a test pit, and the results were positive. The editors