I can’t help it, I have to ask. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like David Duchovny?”
The man smiles. “My nickname is Fox.”
It makes perfect sense that Agent Fox Mulder, a specialist in solving paranormal mysteries, is sitting across from me at a picnic table in Cape Range National Park, 800 miles north of Perth, the epitome of boonies. This place is ripe with supernatural potential.
I like this doppelganger from Queensland. For one, he has used the word “gobsmacked” three times in the past hour, which I find charming. He used to play pro soccer and now takes privileged teenagers to Europe to meet professional coaches. His wife is from a tiny fishing island in Japan and has glamour-length, rhinestone-encrusted, pastel pink nails and a contagious laugh.
My family and I are on a road trip. We are peeing in the dirt and playing Would You Rather. Beef jerky? Check. Gatorade? Check. Audio book? Goblet of Fire, Chapter 13. We drove to Cape Range today from Monkey Mia (pronounced “maya” because the toilets flush backwards).
I could tell you more about the soccer player and his exquisitely manicured wife, or kvetch about the mouse who ate right through the sunhat I’ve owned for eleven years – the only sunhat that fits my watermelon head and now it has a hole in it – or describe the sheer glee I felt snorkeling with my kids, but this is about the getting there part, the in-between, the road.
The North West Coastal Highway runs down the side of Western Australia like a jellyfish scar. Its two lanes go on forever. We spent eight hours on this road today and that’s the just the tip of the termite mound.
With the exception of the occasional dune, the outback is flat. And mostly quiet. An approaching vehicle (a south-going Zax) passed every two minutes or so – usually a camper van, a bus, or, god forbid, a road train. I had never heard the term “road train” before seeing the words in big capital letters on the front of one, but I recognized these massive rigs with multiple trailers from cross-country trips in the U.S. It is terrifying to see one of these beasts barreling towards you on a narrow two-lane road. As it passed, our car would shake from fear.
The color palette of the landscape is very Anthropologie catalog – various shades of brown and red, army greens and blue-grays. I kept expecting to see a beautiful, ethnically ambiguous woman wrapped in a monogrammed poncho clutching a ceramic mug, but then I decided this poor lady would either die from heat exhaustion or a dingo would chew through her braided rope anklet (Spring 2016).
Small shrubs are scattered about like discarded pom-poms in a cheerleader’s ghost town. Most of the bushes are green or gray. Some look charred, the unfortunate consequence of a spaceship landing. The occasional gum tree pokes out of the ground as a modest shade offering. Staring out the window, I wondered how anything could possibly grow in this hot red sand, but then I remembered the storms in this region are famous. We passed hundreds of Floodway signs. The six-feet-tall termite mounds (some more than 800 years old) are another indicator of occasional rain. A storm is approaching! Let’s all work together to build a sand igloo! Faster, Floyd, faster!
Of all the animals in the outback, the flies are the mightiest. They swarm and invade. I have never squat-peed with such haste and aggression. I curse you flies. May this acid waterfall drown you all. You’d think with their marsupial road kill buffet, the flies would be all pooped out, but they followed us like tiny paparazzi.
Signs announce the possibility of animal encounters. Most of the silhouettes were recognizable but we’d see an occasional warning for weird rat creatures with big ears or vague furry things. Crashing into an animal is a very real possibility on the North West Coastal Highway, and the evidence was bloody and everywhere. The kids were tasked with being spotters, which meant a lot of “goats on right,” or “freaky thing on left” coming from the backseat. We saw kangaroos, wild horses, wallabies, wallaroos, and countless lackadaisical goats. So many oddities of every shape and size. Did you know that goats and sheep are now having sex with each other? In Australia, their offspring are referred to as “halfsies.” What’s next? Equal pay for women? Crikey!
There are few places to fill the tank and buy more Arnott’s biscuits, and every stop felt like the scary bit before the opening credits – creaky screen door, flickering light bulb, an unusually warm and welcoming employee (alien in human form).
We made it to the national park without killing a single goatsheep blend. Now, the sun is setting over the Ningaloo Reef and we’re sipping Shiraz from Margaret River. The man who looks like David Duchovny is telling me about his recent kayaking adventure. I’d like to see an X-Files episode filmed out here. What do I know, maybe it was all filmed here as a docuseries. The truth is out there.