Jardine and Lanigan

"I feel vulnerable--and not the powerful kind." Phillip stands on the sidewalk, looks down the street both ways, puts his hands in his pockets. "We're driving."

I had forgotten winter meant darkness before 6pm, even in June, so I hadn't planned to arrive in Rockhampton after dark. We weren't downtown, in any nightlife district. There was fast food a few blocks down, a McDonald's, KFC, Subway. American stuff I said we weren't allowed to choose in a foreign country.

He drove to a BP to fill up. American was okay for that. Here, you fill and then pay. They trust you with it, I guess.

"I have gas on pump one," Phillip said at the counter, with his two Powerades. More American, more world.

"Huh?"

"Petrol. The white car." Phillip pointed.

"I don't like this place," he said when got in the car. "We're going to Hungry Jacks."

Because Hungry Jacks advertised the Whopper I knew it was Burger King-made-Aussie, but I didn't argue. The man in front of us said, "G'day, mate," when he got to the counter.

***

I feel a tension in me here in Rockhampton, though it's different than Phillip's. Mine is born of this tension between the small town on the range I envisioned my grandmother's hometown to be, and the generic town I find. McDonald's, KFC, Subway. It's too familiar to be true to my created history. True, it's not the 40's when she left it. Nothing is. Not her, not the husband she found waiting for her at the train station in Kansas.

The house may be, but we don't know how different it is inside. I thought I would feel connected when I stood in front of her childhood home, but it's just a pale green house on the corner of Jardine and Lanigan. I imagined the land flat, like Kansas, but instead it's hilly, mountainous, surrounded by the Berserkers and Athelstanes. It's hard to picture her in there, alive and young. It's hard to picture her with views of mountains. It's hard to picture her Aussie at all. Only the Kansan with an Aussie accent, a far off landscape I longed to know. I am disappointed in myself, this disconnection, when I've come so far to bridge our births. She is long gone. Am I?

***

Marge and Frank show us around. Her house is more what I'd imagined, tucked behind trees on what feels like the plains. She doesn't like the coast, she says. Frank lives everywhere, sometimes in Marge's side yard, sometimes far west, sometimes at an in between. Frank lives in a caravan he pulls with his Ford F250. He's done so since the early 2000s, and he doesn't think he'll stop.

Phillip asks them what they really think of Americans. "We like them when they're at home," Frank says, and laughs. Earlier on the radio we'd heard a woman call in, tell about her recent trip to America, and how the customs agent said, "Welcome to freedom." Every other person wants to talk about gun control, how we don't have it, how they do. They roll their eyes at their president. They make $600 a week, minimum wage.

The coal trains here can be two miles long. They are handsome, fresh, no graffiti. We pull over to watch one, follow its cars north.

All low ground floods from the Fitzroy River, from all of the mountain runoff in the wet season. Sometimes there is no way around. In one of the standing ponds, Marge says a crocodile lives. We learn later that 80% of saltwater crocodiles never enter saltwater in their life. This misnomer kills them.

Dimensions

The sea was the green you see in ads the first time we saw it at Hervey Bay. It was warm, too, sun baked and shallow. By Yeppoon it was brown, stirred up and loose from winds like Kansas. And by Cairns it was gray and cold, a reflection of the clouds. 

When you visit the sea, you must bury your feet in sand. You must stand in the surf to feel the pull. You must read the waves as low or high, natural breaks or manmade angles.

Our biggest adventure was supposed to be snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef. But our biggest adventure was the nearly two hour boat ride to the Great Barrier Reef. The day before, when we booked the tour, the girl said, "Tomorrow should be just like today (read: sunny, calm, warm), but it will get windy starting Tuesday." The morning of, when we checked in, a different girl said, "Wind is 20-25 knots. It will be choppy." What is a knot or twenty on the sea? Isn't choppy the natural state of open water? She suggested we take ginger tablets. 

Phillip vomited first, into one of the stacked bags on our table. I ignored it, focused on the "one meter waves" bouncing our boat like a carnival ride, like a goddamn pirate ship, like an inconvenience. I breathed out with each sinking. My hands shook as I gripped the table until the breathing wasn't enough, and the heaves and screams of those behind me caught up, and I went, too, into a white coated bag, and then handed it to a lifeguard in plastic gloves whose job on the boat is to protect the interior from puke. I hadn't eaten breakfast. I didn't want lunch. 

When you're seasick, and you get off the boat onto a pontoon, and you're still surrounded by water, and the only land you see are fogged-up mountains far on the horizon, you stay seasick until you get in the sea. Snorkeling is a game you play with yourself. You float on the surface, flap your flippers, and adjust to breathing through your mouth. You see common water around you, you feel common water around you. But you look down and all you see is color, coral, zebra fish just inches from your fingertips, movement in schools, another dimension. Phillip was out there for hours, bobbing in and out of color. He touched a sea turtle. He turned orange coral purple with the brush of his hand. He covered the roped-in geography edge to edge. I lasted maybe thirty minutes, most spent grasping a PVC square for stability in the small swells, unable to adjust to this different way of seeing. 

The way back was smoother. Perhaps because we bought the $3 seasickness medication. Perhaps because we traveled with the wind. Perhaps because we were too tired to notice. 

Expectations

I was not too jet-lagged to pay $20 to hold a koala, soft and solid like a stunted baby. We arrived on the Queen's birthday, and most attractions, businesses, and restaurants were closed. But not the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. Koalas don't rest for the Queen of England. Koalas rest because that's what they do, bunched up in the crook of a tree. They're just as adorable as you'd imagine. They look unreal even in person, but perhaps that's because I've only ever had a stuffed koala. They're not bears. They're only safe in eucalyptus trees.

A kookaburra stole fresh meat from a Tasmanian Devil. A sheepdog herded sheep down the hill. A platypus, full grown the size of my forearm, swam laps in a tank. Dingos--just Scooters with pointy ears and mean appetites--lounged on cots. Kangaroos spread out their tails and let you pet them and prod them and photograph them but not sit down next to them to chill. One large male pulled a female in, his hulking upper body gripping her belly, and mated for minutes until she wiggled away. He hopped after her, through the amused tourists, for more. 

Arrive alive

We drove up the east coast, flanked by the Berserker Range and the Athelstane Range, and through the Great Green Way. Brisbane to Cairns, on the Bruce Highway, going 110 or 80 or 60 kilometers an hour. Keep left unless overtaking. Past ranches of cattle, past vast fields of pink-topped sugar cane, past kangaroo roadkill and billboards for resorts, island dreams. We drove a Hyundai i20 with no power. We named it Gemma. 

The first twenty minutes, in the center of Brisbane, felt like a video game. It was a test of your senses, keeping left while driving on the right. Carl, our Garmin, lagged, and we missed turns, missed one-way streets, missed the hotel twice before landing. Later, the reverse would become normal, I would stop flinching at right turns, and Phillip would merge seamlessly into roundabouts. Survive the drive. But day two, after leaving Hervey Bay, we weren't comfortable yet, and we'd question Carl's logic about turning right when we were naturally curving right, and we'd get waved into a lot by a police officer in neon yellow gloves, and we'd be asked if we knew we'd entered a school zone because we were going 58 in a 40, and we'd say no, and he'd tell us he'd give us a warning but that we could be prevented from leaving the country if we got a ticket and didn't pay up, and he'd give Phillip a breathalyzer test at two-thirty in the afternoon, and we'd drive off religious about speed limits toward Rockhampton. Free driver reviver ahead.