I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes.
“The Alice” refers to Alice Springs, a town situated almost exactly in the middle of Australia. One often hears stories about things like immigrants arriving in the United States with five dollars in their pocket and the clothes on their who went on to become billionaires. Maybe those stories are true and maybe they are merely apocryphal. The author presents a variation that is, by all accounts, very much true. A variation to the Horatio Alger mythos young boys going west to make their fortune through hard work. In this story, a young woman goes west to discover heard-earned truths about herself with no visions of dancing dollars signs in her eyes.
Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.
In a way, this line from the narrative prose can be extracted as the guiding thematic principle of the story. Davidson does survive that titular that trek across the outback, but the vision of what that might entail is only half the story. The centerpiece of the narrative is her account of survival in the isolation of the desert often no company other than her camels and dog, but, as the saying goes, getting there is half the fun. While fun is not quite the operative term here, long before she ever gets to the loneliness of the desert, the narrator must demonstrate a capacity to survive the alien environment she finds in Alice Springs.
The Kurts of this world would always win—there was no standing up to them—no protection from them. With this realization came a collapse. Everything I had been doing or thinking was meaningless, trivial, in the face of the existence of Kurt.
Kurt is the man who teaches the author how to train camels. He is also a nemesis whose dialogue is always written to approximate his deep German accent, bringing to mind those very famous Germans heavily into exploitation and torture and uniforms. It is an odd relationship as at times she writes almost fondly of him while more often she attributes to his basic character a personality such described here. What makes all the difference in the world is that even during those moments when Kurt shows great generosity to her, he also makes it know that he is in control. He is the figure not just of authority and knowledge, but dominance. And that is what meant by “the Kurts of this world.”
I had sold a great swatch of my freedom and most of the trip's integrity for four thousand dollars. That's the breaks.
The decision to head west, learn to train camels and cross the desert of the outback was not conceived in an environment of transactional consequences. This was to be a journey of self-discovery, kept very personal and not constructed as the origin story of celebrity. That is what it becomes, however, almost from the moment she meets a young photographer named Rick. He is the corrupting agent who one night shares both too many drinks and too many suggestions about contacting National Geographic about underwriting her journey of self-discovery. She does, indeed, write a letter of interest to magazine, but almost as a joke and content in the knowledge that she’ll never heard back. She turns out to be wrong about that. The money was a necessity without which the trip might never have been made at all, yet as the passage above indicates, the author seems destined to spend the rest of her life confessing to being, ultimately, a sell-out.
