Noodling 101
Almost two years ago now I visited a small South Australian opal mining town called Coober Pedy. I have just now recovered enough from the experience to write about it. You see, it’s one of those things that stays with a person for a very long time, a grown woman on an eight-hour drive with her mother in a car their friend’s children have named “the Beaver”. It’s a long story, the short version of it is that evidently small hatchbacks resemble beavers in the eyes of a seven-year-old.
The journey started, as all of my journeys seem to start, at the crack of dawn. Granted dawn to me is around 9 am, but it still seemed awfully early. At the time I was working at a supermarket, finishing around half past nine most nights. The supermarket is a story in and of itself. Perhaps another time. Anyway, where was I? Oh, at the crack of dawn.
Mum and I packed up the car and headed off on our merry way. I decided to take the first leg of driving for various reasons, most of which I chose not to express at the time revolving around my awareness of the difference between driving in Thames and driving in Adelaide. By the time we got to Port Augusta I was definitely ready for a break though.
Figuring that she couldn’t do much harm now we were out in the middle of nowhere I (magnanimously, I thought) allowed her to take over the driving once we’d had lunch. Lunch, by the way, was a banquet furnished by our good friends at Hungry Jacks. Gotta love that flame-grilled feeling. I proceeded to express my newfound faith in my mother’s driving and navigational skills by having a brief nap. By the time I awoke mum was cheerfully announcing that we were a mere 50 kilometres from Port Lincoln. Now despite my general lack of knowledge in the field of geography (shocking, I know, being so knowledgeable otherwise) I had a sneaking suspicion that Port Lincoln was nowhere near anywhere we wanted to be that day. Before expressing my dismay (truly it’s no better an idea to be wrong around my mother than it is to be wrong around me, we’re both masters of the art of I-told-you-so) I decided to check the map and lo and behold, Port Lincoln was in the exact opposite direction to the one in which we wanted to be heading.
Now to be fair I’d only just woken up so not noticing the distinct lack of the required water for a port to be named a port can be forgiven.
Of course rather than expressing said dismay in a polite fashion, for example saying, “Are you certain that you interpreted the sign correctly?” I instead blurted, “How in the hell did you manage to get us that far off course? I’ve only been asleep for an hour. Are you sure it was an L?” You see, to compliment our matching pair of I-told-you-sos, we also have a set of Of-course-I’m-sures. Which was what she pulled out. When I suggested that the nearest “p” town on the map went by the name of Pimba, and perhaps she mistook an upper-case I for a lower-case L, she vowed and declared it was an L. We were heading for somewhere that would be abbreviated to PL and that was that. Of course we shortly came across another road marker, which, to my delight, read PI 45. That translates from SA Transport-speak to “45 kilometres until you reach Pimba”. For once, again magnanimously, I decided to allow my mother to have her moment of victory. “Pimba.” I informed her, gently but firmly, before kindly adding. “Perhaps the L is silent.”
The potential disowning averted we carried on merrily until we reached PLimba. Pimba, as it turned out, was a single building by the name of Spud’s Roadhouse. We got out of the car to fill up the petrol tank (you do that whenever you can in the outback apparently) and mum was delighted to experience a true outback phenomenon. Billions of flies descended upon us, like a biblical swarm. My mother discovered the likely cause for all of those flies, her bladder weakened by both age and the birthing of four children. I took a moment to quietly thank every God mankind has ever worshipped that I have a young, healthy bladder and we carried on without any need for dry retching on my part.
Coober Pedy itself was a joy. The driest town in the driest state on the driest continent… The residents hadn’t seen rain for eight years. Funny thing that, we saw rain all three days we were there. It didn’t stop my illustrious mother on her eternal quest for rocks. An avid grubber-in-the-dirt-for-shiny-things she had me out there by her side, in the howling wind and pouring rain. Still, at least we were in Coober Pedy not Oodnadatta. We would have been flooded in for a week there. A week of grubbing, or as the locals claim to call it, “noodling”. I still maintain that “noodling” is a term which the opal miners made up to make tourists sound like idiots.
It all just goes to show, life really is a journey, not a destination.
Tagged: Parental Trauma, Travel.