REQUIRES CROCODILES

Having crossed the tropic of Capricorn it occurred to us to see some crocodiles. An app we used to locate campsites showed us the way to a riverside site a bit off our route. We had to take it slow on the dirt track for the sake of the Chook’s undercarriage. Wallabies bounded alongside. 

We made up rules to ensure our safety. Stay ten feet from the water’s edge. Rules. But you know how that go, right?  

Around sunset we searched the river from the distance established. Our searching made crocodiles of dark shapes that were probably logs. We set up our tent on the packed dirt away from the deeper potholes and slept. 

I was awake at dawn and about to start packing up the outer portion of our tent (I did this sometimes while L continued snoozing) when two vehicles towing boats arrived. L robed it up and joined me in explaining why we had camped at this particular site. You want to see crocodiles? somebody said. We’re going to see plenty of those.

They had come to fish for barramundi. The party included two Australian men and three or four Brits affiliated to the Aussies by marriage. The Aussies captained the two boats: T-bone ours, Yoda the other. The British contingent included a 75-year-old man with a fedora. It was his birthday, I think. He kept saying, Hello, Ding-Dong. It must have been someone else’s catchphrase, but I haven’t been able to figure out whose.  

Most of us started drinking before the boats were fully in the water. T-bone explained that he had to abstain because he was on antibiotics. He’d brought along some nose-beers, though. And some weed. And eventually he drank, too. As with many Australians I met, excessive generosity was a fixture of T-bone’s character. He’d already offered me various substances and a place to stay for the night when he handed me a fishing rod in addition.

I snapped it near the handle on the first thing I reeled in.  T-bone had told me to reel hard if I felt a bite, so I’d obeyed. Barramundi are liable to fight. The thing I reeled in was not a barramundi, however. A crocodile: the first we’d seen. We got the animal in close to the boat so L and I could have a look, but I was distracted, feeling bad about having broken something on loan from a generous man. T-bone waved me off. His rod had had a good run. 

While disengaging the croc from the line, the birthday boy ran into some trouble. We’d tied up the boats in some mangroves, and in the process of returning from a trip to shore to pee, he fell into the boat, lost his fedora, and picked up a fishhook in his asscheek. He moaned and squirmed while his son-in-law fumbled through extracting the hook. T-bone, L, and I laughed ourselves breathless and tearful. It was 8 AM and the sun was growing stunningly bright.  

The birthday boy’s son-in-law didn’t take drugs because he worked for a large company that regularly tested him. This meant he drank the most out of any of us. It became a problem later. He felt like swimming and jumped from the boat. T-bone had to wrench him out of the water by his shirt collar. Either the swimmer had forgotten about crocodiles or no longer cared. He was hot. 

The rest of us relied on other methods for cooling off. Yoda raised the outboard motor and revved it to spray our boat with rooster tails of river water. T-bone reciprocated for their boat. We did this while moving on the river, weaving and swerving. People rarely give a lot of details when they say someone died in a boating accident. Stupidity is often assumed. 

We were racing our boats when Yoda hit a mangrove root or something. We saw his boat lurch, everyone in it hit the deck. Everyone cracked up, except for T-bone. The boat Yoda was captaining belonged to T-bone’s boss. 

I can share few insights about crocodiles. We got close, and up close it’s hard not to perceive an ancient power. But this was not a moving experience for me. There was a lot else going on. 

The last thing I remember from out on the river was when the birthday boy struggled to raise himself in the boat, stumbled down, and revealed himself as a user of racist epithets. The epithets were not directed at anyone in particular, which made their use confounding, and no less saddening for this. Before his outburst, I had liked this game old man. He’d been having a hell of a day. Tasting freedom, rubbing it in the face of his children who kept telling him to sit down; he’d had too much to drink, he’d taken drugs, he’d worn a hat his family advised him not to; there was talk of what his wife back in London would say/think/stand for. Hate-speech must have been a final taboo for him to break. That’s my best guess as to why he would say what he said. I was too stunned to ask at the time. 

T-bone heard the racist epithets and probably said something like, Not on my boat, or else stared the old man down unmercifully. After that he decided to take us all back to shore. The fishing party discussed waiting around until someone among them was sober enough to drive back to town, but no one really wanted to wait. Before they left, T-bone provided me and L with specific directions to his house in Kununurra. He said he’d be at a rodeo later that evening. 

As L and I packed up our tent we began to reconsider his invitation. T-bone had provided much. Could we reasonably take shelter from him, too? How could we ever set straight the karmic imbalance?

Under this line of thinking we rented a hotel room. There was other, sillier reasoning at work. We considered that if we stayed with T-bone we might never leave the town of Kununurra. Back in the Barossa Valley, we’d asked a waitress at a pizza restaurant where we should go in Australia. She named Kununurra. The pizza waitress came to see a waterfall and stayed for a year and a half. Apparently there was a waterfall. We never saw it. 

We didn’t see T-bone at the rodeo. The town was arrayed around the ring on grass patches divided into a families-only zone and another zone where you could drink and smoke. Most attendees brought blankets for sitting. For the second time that day people clowned around dangerous animals, this time as a public spectacle. I saw many generations there, whites and Aboriginals, a woman wearing a shirt that said ‘C U in the NT!,’ and a small group of men who appeared to have spent many hours spot-cleaning and assembling their immaculate cowboy outfits. No man nor beast seemed to get hurt on this night. But I was aware that on other nights they both had; getting hurt and being proximate to carnage was the talk around the beer stand, where a system of tokens made waiting and talking inevitable. It was my first rodeo.