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September 12, 2001
Overland Australia - Update 40
September 12
Day 51
From Git:
Red rubble alongside the road again. The bitumen stretches miles in the distance. Pricking thorns cover our campground. Thousands trapped under stone and steel in lower Manhattan.
The sun is setting broadly. It pinks the sky over gidgee branches undulating on a breeze. World Trade Center’s been bombed. It’s lying in a grey and sooty heap. The Pentagon’s half gone, too. Bel tells us she wants to write an educational piece on the Snappy Gum. The Snappy Gum! We have a bit of a laugh. How can I make sense of today’s events in the USA? How can I wake at five in the morning to news of violation and murder, and hear that it’s celebrated jovially in the streets of other countries? How can I get up, eat my porridge, get on a bike, and pedal a highway through Central Australia, when I don’t know where my friends and family in New York were at the time of the blasts?
How can I leave Alice Springs and head into the desert, where I’ll have no further link to telephone, television, or radio for six weeks? How can I be so irresponsible, so selfish, so insensitive, so simple as to think that my presence on the Expedition is of some importance, important enough for me to keep on with it, instead of catching the next plane home? What strange mix of arrogance and naïveté got me on that bike this morning, on the assumption that kids’ being shown the world and its citizens, might teach them to respect their environment and their neighbors? These are rhetorical questions. After several hours of following radio and television news, I did get on that bike. We five Americans in the group saddled up and rode with our international compatriots. We have to believe that what we’re doing makes some small dent in a larger unhappiness. So, around 11 a.m., after a last cup of tea and a final check of the route, we departed from Alice Springs. Onward!
Git
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Posted on September 12, 2001 1:14 PM