POLAR CHOOK

The territory wasn’t getting any smaller. The map didn’t have many dots on it yet. There were bicycles available on some of the farms where we worked, but we weren’t going to get from Melbourne to Perth by bicycle.

I’d heard the exchange of vehicles in Australia could be a promiscuous trade. You could walk into a bar in Fitzroy and find someone who needed to sell their van before their flight tomorrow. If you went to long-term parking at the airport, you might see ‘Take Me’ scrawled in soap on a windshield. But so far we hadn’t made inquiries. Maybe a car would come to us. 

The puppet man lived at the edge of the nearest sheep pasture to the farmhouse. He’d heard we’d been to )’( and I think he liked that. The weird find the weird. He later admitted to me that he had a rare kind of face-blindness. He found this out while watching a movie as a kid: he couldn’t believe that the guy at the end was the same guy as at the beginning. I guess he could tell he was talking to me and L by the sizes and shapes of our bodies. 

He had a custom van that he used to take his puppet shows on tour. But L and I had also noticed another vehicle parked beside it: a 1999 Toyota Corolla in a particular hatchback variety I haven’t seen in the states. The car was white. White is the most popular color for an Australian car. At first I believed it was on account of the heat, but in fact a popular insurer of vehicles used to give discounts for white cars. So everyone bought white cars. 

Standing in our way of acquiring the 1999 Toyota Corolla in white was the fact that neither L nor I could drive a vehicle with a manual transmission. We got up the nerve to ask the sheep farmer whether he might show us how. He agreed, but decided to combine our tutelage with the more  necessary task of feeding the sheep. And so we learned to drive with a trailer full of sheep feed behind us. The sheep knew what was up; they began to pursue as soon as they heard the engine. While L and I took turns figuring out the clutch, the farmer sat in the passenger seat, patiently offered pointers, and released, via a rope in his hand, fibrous pellets for the crowd.  

Thus assured that we were on our way to being able to drive, the puppet man made us a deal. We’d pay him a nominal fee to borrow his car for an indefinite term. If we brought it back, that’d be that; if we sold it while out in, say, Western Australia, we’d pay him the difference. It was an exceedingly generous arrangement. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s read the previous entries of this journal; generosity is a common theme. 

L didn’t have an American license, let alone an Australian one, so she had to get her learner’s permit. I drove her over to sit for the exam. I’ll admit my first time driving outside of a sheep paddock was not a smooth journey, but we made it home with a valid learner’s permit for one of us and counted it a win for the day. When L was driving we had to affix “L” stickers in the front and back windows. L for learner. I usually left them on while I was driving. 

Having completed the practicalities of learning to drive and acquiring an Australian car, we set about to matters of mythology. The first thing the car needed was a name. L suggested the Ice Chook. But I didn’t love the collision of C-sounds in the mouth. I countered with Polar Chook. It rhymed with L’s last name. Which facilitated songwriting. 

A chook is a chicken. 

There was something homely and plump in the vehicle’s character. Flightless, she yearned like any raptor to fly. And when you turned off the engine she made a mechanical sound that sounded a lot like clucking to us. The mechanic who gave her a checkup in Broome seemed to agree with our characterization. Hey, did you notice that clucking sound she makes? Yeah, mate, dunno what to tell you there.  

For her first test, the Chook made it across the Nullarboor, a desolate plain various Australians warned us about. The road there is so empty you’ll see what look like stretched out crosswalks painted on it; these markings are landing strips for any small aircraft that feels like landing. Nullarbor means no trees. Because she saw a few trees there, L doubts that the Nullarbor is really such a big deal, just a long straight road, but you have to be careful not to run out of gas; there are signs everywhere urging you to carry some of your own. We got in the habit of doing so, which meant we had to buy a gas tank and tie-down straps for the roof. Sometimes the gas tank slipped down and threatened to fall. It could be harrowing to hear a clunk on the roof in hour seven of an eight hour stretch of driving. But slippy as it was, the roof tank also saved us from stranding ourselves more than once. 

The Chook struggled to make it up hills, but other than that, she was game. She kept her composure when L clunked over a berm of rock-hard dirt, badly scraping the Chook’s undercarriage. The Chook didn’t seem to mind a sudden stop for a kangaroo. But there were some places she would not go. The station was four hours off a paved road, three if you took a shortcut, but the shortcut included a river no one told us about. A ute could probably make it through a few feet of water; the Chook could not. We camped beside the car that night and I like to think we parked her facing away from the river she would never cross. 

We debilitated her only once. It was on a beach in Western Australia somewhere. L had wisely suggested that we stop and make camp before the track got too sandy. I thought the track might grow firmer again. The Chook spun her wheels in deep sand and stayed where she was. Under the wheels we wadded up whatever we could find — seaweed, driftwood, the floor mats from inside the car — but gained no traction for our efforts. In the end we had to hoof it back to find some guys tending a barbecue beside a supplies depot. They guessed we’d been bogged in sand without us having to say anything. They yanked the Chook out of the sand on a rope tied to their ute. The only thing we had on hand to give them was the wine we’d bought while working in the Barossa Valley. They chose the bottle we wished they wouldn’t choose, but it was a small price to pay to get our Chook rolling again.  

If you look at Australia like a clock, we drove from six to six, clockwise. It came out to about 10,000 kilometers. You may notice in L’s video the various shades of dust we drove through. In the mountains of Victoria we introduced the Chook to snow. I remember one barroom conversation with a rancher who was amazed we’d made it as far as we did “in that shitty little car.” He pissed us off. How dare he speak of our Chook that way?  

I won’t digress into an inventory of all the things the Chook fit inside her, but it was a massive amount of stuff, enough for L and me to live on for weeks of camping at the roadside. Someone, probably a child, gave us some plastic bug toys. No, actually they were a garnish for some tiki drinks we got in Perth. Anyway, we couldn’t find a good place for them until we discovered a panel below the stereo. This became known as the Bug Hutch. It housed some actual bugs, too, dried corpses we found too pretty to throw away. Also my knife. The point is, the Chook had a way of holding our lives until we were ready to use them. 

When we took everything out, the Chook stood a lot taller. We realized how we’d weighed her down, and agreed she deserved a good rest. On a grey afternoon when we probably should have been pulling up weeds, we scrubbed the Chook clean. With rags we wiped off the red dust that got in every crevice, inside and out; we vacuumed up the pistachio shells, cigarette filters, and pocket change. 

The puppet man was off puppeteering, so he wasn’t around to receive his vehicle again, which is probably for the best; we needed privacy for our goodbyes. We drove the Chook back to her true home, past the paddocks where we’d learned to make her go. We ran our hands along her. L gave her a hug.   

I hold out hope the puppet man has not pursued the idea of selling her too aggressively. What we should have done was leave something behind to sabotage a sale — an unlikely odor only L and I enjoy or, better yet, a ghost of some kind. That way if ever we return we could make her ours again. Until then, Polar Chook.  

Video by L. Song: “Treaty” by Yothu Yindi.