Last fuel for...ever!

Running out of fuel in Australia, in the middle of nowhere, is no joke. However, as prepared as we thought we were for that eventuality, we still cut it close thanks to the vastness of the part of the country through which we were driving. We were on our way north up the east coast from Rockhampton to Airlie Beach, which is the base for touring the Whitsundays, and was around 500 km. It doesn’t sound a lot considering the size of Australia but for long stretches along the highway, there are no service stations and it is easy to get caught out. So we had to stop at a place called St Lawrence, a kind of place where tumbleweed blows across the road, animal carcasses decay in the heat, and locals get thrown out of the watering hole into the dust of the high street for having one too many. We had no choice but fill up at the only petrol pump in town, which, due to a missing cover, presented its oily mechanism in full glory. It still had one of those rickety, old manual ticker displays, the kind that makes you question its accuracy. Once I had pumped enough over-priced small-town fuel to get us to the next big town, I entered the store and awarded a twenty dollar bill to a large woman wearing a pair of thick-rimmed bins and behind which was a cross-eye so bad that it made me wonder if she could see round corners. It was the kind of store that receives a delivery once a month and out-of-date newspapers and magazines sit on the shelves amassing layers of dust and the refrigerated, processed food has long accepted its fate and given up being presentable. In the background leaning against a door frame was a weedy-looking man, in his mid-twenties sporting a wife-beater ribbed vest adorned with grease stains and looking on intimidatingly while a cocktail stick protruded from his mouth. I surmised that it must be her husband given that they were of a similar age, and couldn’t help but wonder if they were also related. If I had stood there for any length of time and pondered what went on behind the sparse dust-ridden shelves of the shop, my imagination took me to a place that envisaged this same guy carving a human body into pieces to put into the freezer while his gimp sat chained and terrified in the woodshed out back. Luckily, since I had told her to keep the change, I didn’t have to wait around for this image to fully reveal itself.

 

On the way out of town, the local radio station embodied such a place by giving out information on the regional beef expo and rattled out sheep scores in favour of football results. We had escaped and I got the feeling we should consider ourselves lucky. It was like Hotel California. And how was your day?