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.