13 August Beaconsfield, Tasmania It was a coin flip between Tasmania and Darwin, perhaps even Cairns. In place of parasols, sunscreen and holidaymakers poolside, I have opted for drizzly, pastoral, and off the radar screen. I have to congratulate myself for choosing so wisely. It’s hard to put a finger on it, but I’ve hit my stride in Tasmania. Those familiar knots are back to signal the winter stages of my brief Australian excursion. Every now and then a bitter, liquid film smothers my tongue, another reminder that the days are waning and this is my last stop. I que [View Full Entry]

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6 August Launceston, Tasmania, Australia Angela cheerfully collected me from the bus station after I mistakenly told her to be there an hour-and-a-half earlier. I did not ask the fifty-three year-old much; she was already doing enough to help me. I was prepared to walk down the road for a while for dinner, a concern at such a late hour since restaurants in Australia close so early. She prepared me a hot meal of chicken, rice, and potatoes, which I hungrily gobbled up. “You’ll be sleeping in the den, out in the back. Follow me.” It was a dark, dreary, and [View Full Entry]

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3 August Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Every city in the world has “that” part of town. You know, where all the problems are. Longtime listeners to ABC Radio Sydney lament its downhill spiral into squalor and social breakdown. No one goes there anymore, they say. It’s not safe for children. Whatever you do, warns one caller, don’t go there after dark. There might be trouble. Fashionably dingy yet decomposing Kings Cross is the antidote to spic-and-span Darling Harbour and the Central Business District. It is where the populace prefers tie dyes ove [View Full Entry]

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29 July Adelaide, South Australia Never have I traveled so far and been so close to home. It is a country town of one million plus and a few skyscrapers. It would be unfair, even rude to say that this best thing anyone could do in Adelaide is leave. South Australia’s humdrum capital is in desperate need of the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s because I pulled into town in the middle of the winter. Perhaps it has more to do with being a nine-to-five city that rolls up its sidewalks to dismiss the workforce back to its lofty and [View Full Entry]

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23 July Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia Even the name evokes how the Outback can impact the psyche. Arrival in Broken Hill makes me grateful that I paid attention back in tenth grade chemistry class. The next oasis west of Wilcannia, it is a vibrant, eye-pleasing, if isolated community dependent on the price of the ore extracted from the nearby mines. Elements, compounds, and minerals abound. By the time I pulled over next to the police station on Argent (Latin for silver) Street, I had already passed street signs for perpendicular spurs such as Iodide, Oxide, and Chloride [View Full Entry]

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22 July Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia The fuel gauge read over two thirds. All I needed to do was get to the next town. According to my road map, there was a gas station one hundred ninety kilometers away. I started out and only cast a limited glance at the gas station. Soon enough it and Cobar was a disintegrating dot in my rearview mirror. Ahead of me lay four hundred sixty kilometers of hostile, arid, and stunted wilderness. Oncoming vehicles make their presence known every ten or fifteen minutes. And the only ones westbound are diesel trucks making [View Full Entry]

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21 July Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia “Whatever you do, watch out for the blacks.” The comment caught me off guard. I had been in town for less than two hours. The bartender was warning me about my next stop where I would do nothing more but fill up the tank. “Even when you go into pay, lock your car. They’re everywhere.” He unsettled me, although temporarily. I took another sip of Tooheys and deduced he was speaking of the Aborigines. My only contact with one prior was squeezing by the doorman at a nightspot in Sydney. I remember my [View Full Entry]

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15 July Sydney, New South Wales, Australia He finally got his wish. Even when I told him where I was going to spend the better part of the month, he found a way to inject an element of trepidation into my veins as though it might force me to reconsider. In years past, conversations between us with something to the effect of: “Why won’t you consider it? It’s a big place, lots to do, and the folks are very friendly.” My father would then squint in anticipation of the answers he knew were coming and did not want to hear. “No, [View Full Entry]

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11 July Los Angeles, California You’d think he’d done this a time or two before. But he had the same experience on a wakeboard that I do on a cello. Tim, whose prodigious house Zack helped build, had taken him out on his speedboat around Lake Holiday. It was Phillip’s moment and he knew it. The excitement he could hardly contain had him begging for the OK from Tim to jump off the boat and grab the line. The advantage to having Tim around is his instructive and soft pitch. “Now, you’ve been snowboarding, right?” He made an immediate connect [View Full Entry]

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5 July Crossville, Tennessee “Hey, Rich, wanna a Beerita?” A what? I deduced what Felicia had asked me, but I asked her about its contents anyway. Zack’s newly married twenty-two-year-old daughter put the transparent plastic pitcher down and rattled off the primitive recipe, perfectly suited for a tank-top-and-swimming-trunks crowd on a Fourth of July weekend. In order to count, her eyes shot up into the upper right of her sockets and she recalled, “Let’s see…three beers,” all out of a can and unquestionably awful, “one can of conc [View Full Entry]

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