Losing Cortina

I left more than my wallet in Australia that day...

After being confined on that boxy tour bus for 17 hours the only thing on my mind was that the person ahead of me really did not need to put their luggage under their seat. That’s why overhead compartments exist. My knees were tight and my eyes were bleary, but I was still excited.

As I saw the lights of Brisbane up ahead in the darkness, I jammed my book into my David Malouf book into my backpack and tensed on the edge of my seat, ready for the instant I could leave. When the bus finally stopped I should have been excited to see my erstwhile college roommate, Joe Monfort (who was after all the reason I’d taken this ungodly long trip) but honestly, right then, I was more excited to be standing up. My aching knees just needed to stretch out.

           When my roommate Joe and I had both chosen to study abroad in Australia, albeit in different cities, we had agreed to a rendezvous down under. In the months since I’d seen him, his hair had grown shaggier and for a few minutes it seemed as if I was talking to a stranger I half recognized. As our late-night banter ping-pong back and forth, Joe walked me toward a beat-up red car parked in an empty lot. It seemed like a scene from a mafia movie.

“Tada!” Joe smiled. “I’ve got wheels!”

           “Wait, you didn’t write that you had a car,” I said.

            “Well, it’s not mine exactly,” he said. “It’s a hunk of junk, a Ford Cortina. It’s gotta be older than I am as they stopped making them in the early 80’s.”

           “Yeah, it’s seen better days,” added Josh Bunger, who was waiting by the red Cortina. Josh was another American exchange student desperate for a ride, and so quickly we three became friends.

As Joe drove, he explained that some new friends from uni had lent him the Cortina while they visited New Zealand for spring break (which of course in Australia is in October). The Cortina, while ancient, was not without its little charms. Who needs a subwoofer when you have constant throbbing engine noise? Plus there was très chic faded red paint accentuating the amorphous brown rust patches. The first time the key turned, thankfully there was an ignition… but that was never a given.

Still the Cortina gave us three plenty to talk about, and after a little more conversation, it was as if we had never left our college dorm and we were back to the same jokes and jibes. Our old college relationship coalesced down under - Joe eager; me hesitant.

            We would have gone back to Joe’s dorm, but it was closed for the Spring break. So Josh suggested we all crash at one of his other friends’ apartments, where he was house sitting, as they too were absent on another exciting trip.

The only other resident of the apartment was an inflatable blue alien flopped on the couch.

Dirty clothes were scattered around the apartment in dozen of precise piles. Hung everywhere were pink frames with pictures of manic happiness were graced with words like “friends” and “good times”.

For our good times, we rented a stupid movie and bought some Victoria Bitter from the small corner market. This experience of legally buying alcohol was a new one for us three American twenty-year olds, and we possibly bought more than three people should responsibly enjoy. But once it was bought it really shouldn’t be wasted.

We didn’t watch much of the dumb movie, but we did fixate on the inflatable blue alien. We made it the fourth musketeer of our group, and officially christened it our mascot.

With so many friends on so many trips, Joe was itching to go somewhere as well. “We gotta see Australia and New Zealand while we’re down here. We need to figure out how. Who knows when we’ll ever get back here!”

I frowned and played my role as the negative one. “Nah, it’s too much cash, we’re already in enough loan debt back home. Besides there’s plenty to see around here.”

   “Yeah, I’m with Sam,” Josh said. “Besides, we’re only supposed drive the cortina around Brisbane.”

            The next morning, well, due to hangovers, it was very late the next morning, we woke up and the Cortina drove us to the Sir Thomas Brisbane Observatory. Of course the blue alien came along for the ride as well. But when we piled back into the rusty red Cortina to visit the center of Brisbane, there was surprise waiting for us. As the sun died behind the horizon, so too did the engine of the Cortina.

            We popped open the car’s bonnet and Josh, Joe and I pooled our collective knowledge about cars and found it to be a shallow puddle. Then we learned that remarkably, in Brisbane, car repair shops that advertise 24-7 car repair in the yellow pages don’t operate on Sundays.

So with no other options, we walked home.

            “That car is a piece of junk,” Joe said on our trek back.

            “I mean it makes sense,” Josh interrupted. “They said bought the Cortina off the street from some Aussies.”

            “How much?” I asked.

            “Three hundred dollars Australian,” Josh said.

            “One hundred fifty bucks won’t buy the kind of car it used to,” Joe said.

             The next day we paid eighty dollars Australian to a mechanic named Adam. Adam told us that a ball bearing in the alternator was stuck and so it wasn’t turning over. Bold in the knowledge that we knew all there was to know about our car’s engine and being restless, red-blooded youths, Joe convinced us that the best way to spend the next day would be to drive the Cortina to Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast.

            So we threw everything, including the inflatable blue alien, into the Cortina and turned the key. Thrumming along we turned onto the highway and drove an hour and a half down the coast toward sun and sand.

There is nothing more relaxing than a beach, especially in Australia. Something about Australia makes it entirely different from the rest of the world. Maybe it’s the light, the landscape or the unique animals, but sometimes it seems that Australia is not a separate continent but a separate world – an ancient planet. Eons of history and eras of the earth that have long since sped past in Eurasia; they find little nooks and crannies in Australia and they live here. The entire history of the world comes here to rest.

So too, I was content to rest on the beach, and just peacefully absorb this corner of the world.

            But Joe was far too much of a restless adventurer to leave well enough alone. “I saw a surf shack a few streets back,” he said. “It looks like they rent boards.”

           “No way,” I said. “Surfing is the last thing I want to do!”

I’d already told Joe that the first time I tried to surf was September 12^th, 2001. I had paid in advance for a lesson at Bondi Beach, but considering the tragic state of the world, I wasn’t really in the mood. The Australian teacher had no empathy. There was no refund. And so, I was irrationally leery of trying to surf again.

Somehow, Joe talked me into it. (Joe talked me into a lot of stuff.) So we three rented boards from a largish wooden shack a couple blocks from the beach. The small establishment demanded we leave one debit card for each board.  We were wary but did it anyway. Walking from the shack to the beach with the boards there was no way to cover the large painted letters advertising: “HIRE”. We might as well wear a sandwich board sign saying “G’DAY, WE’RE SEPO* TOURISTS!”

To not make us look even more like tourists, we decided that our giant inflatable blue alien ought to stay in the Cortina. With my natural paranoia, I locked all of my belongings in the Cortina’s boot at the same time. There was no way I was going to make any dumb tourist mistakes and leave all my belongings on a beach. It was then I realized that I had locked the car’s keys in the boot.

           “Why’d you even lock the car, Sam?” Joe snapped. “Who would want to steal this piece of junk? It wouldn’t even start for them!”            

I laughed. He had a point. But the trusty old Cortina came to our aid when we discovered that the back seats were unintentionally detachable. I still left my stuff in the boot.

            After walking down the white sands about a kilometer, Joe and Josh found a nook under scraggy dune weeds and stashed their backpacks. Like bold voyagers into the unknown, we strode toward the water. Like shipwrecked sailors, twenty minutes later, we struggled back to shore. I determined to be a landlubber forever. It was then Joe panicked. He couldn’t see his belongings, but I just laughed. I calmly explained to him that we had moved down the coast with the ocean current and that the real nook with all his stuff was right over in that direction. But when we found the actual nook, Joe still couldn’t see his belongings because they weren’t there.

            Joe saw the culprit with his stuff, so he impulsively chased down the beach to try to stop the thief. Josh and I were not nearly as fast, so when Joe had disappeared on the horizon, we somberly walked toward the Cortina for dry clothes. I was quite relieved that my stuff was still locked up inside the Cortina’s boot. There was only one problem…

            “It’s not there,” Josh said. “It’s gone.”

            “No, no,” I said. “Remember there were two parking lots. We’re just in the wrong lot. There were two, remember?”

            “Yes, and this is the right lot. It’s just not here,” Josh said. “Someone stole it.”

We stood in silence, as the truth slowly sank in. They must have followed us three “sepo” tourists, taken Joe’s stuff, grabbed the keys and driven the Cortina away. Of all the times for that damned Cortina and its damned alternator to start. We were eighty miles from home.

With no money, no dry clothes, and no wallets, we ought to have panicked, but as twenty-year old males we attempted to show how little we were bothered. We cracked jokes, and kept the panic inside. Josh and I did our best to show that we were just cynically amused as we leaned on our surf boards marked: HIRE.

Nearly an hour later, Joe walked back dejected. “Bad news,” he said. “When I caught up to the guy, I saw that he wasn’t the guy. Didn’t have my stuff.”

“We have bad news too.” Josh and I looked at each other, silently wondering who should break the news.

“Tell me later.” Joe sighed. “Let’s just drive home.”

“That’s it. That’s the bad news,” I said.

“What is?”

“We can’t drive home.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s gone.”

“The Cortina? No, no,” Joe laughed. “There were two parking lots remember?”

“We know. We checked both lots,” I said. “The Cortina’s gone. My camera, our wallets, our money, your gear, Josh’s gear – everything. Iy’s gone.”

“And it’s not even our car,” Josh noted helpfully.

We leaned silently on our surfboards, still emblazoned with: HIRE.

“What do we do?” Josh asked.

At that point it finally dawned on us that we were not just eighty miles from home, we three were actually thousands of miles from our real home, and we only had swim trunks and not much else. In fact, we quickly made a list of all we had in that hemisphere. There were two items on the list:

1)    swim trunks

2)    surfboards marked: HIRE.

But then we remembered. We’d left our debit cards as deposit!

We scrambled back to the surf shack, returned our surfboards and shared our sob story to the Aussies at the shack.

They shrugged, hardly sympathetic. “Tough luck, mate.” They smiled when we had to buy shirts and flip-flops with our credit cards.

            Hours later, in t-shirts, flip flops and swim-suits, we officially reported a stolen vehicle to the Burleigh Heads police. Even without mentioning the blue alien, the police seemed very amused by the three “sepo” boofheads. They said that things like this happen about a hundred times a day. They said they’d contact us if they ever found the lost Cortina.

            Waiting at the bus station, Joe still had an urge to travel. But between us, we only had one debit card, and one credit card and all the dirty laundry we’d left in our friends’ apartment. However, Joe talked me into going to travel anyway. We were here now, but we weren’t here forever, and we could still make this work.

Back in Brisbane, we laundromatted our dirty clothes, threw them into a backpack and got on a bus, then a train, hopping from hostel to hostel. Every minute I checked my pocket to make sure the card was still there. I was glad no one asked me for ID. I had no camera, no toothbrush, but I have never had a better time.

(For more on that trip, see my previous essay: Fraser Island.)

            A week later, I had to admit that Joe was right, and I was wrong. His headlong charge into adventure had definitely taken us to new and amazing locales. So as I returned to the University of New South Wales on another bus, again with no legroom, this time I wasn’t trying to force myself to study my David Malouf novel for class, instead I looked out the window at the wide sky filled with red clouds and the sun setting behind a mountain called “the-mountain-that-gathers-the-clouds-to-itself”. Sometimes, the safest choice is the most adventurous one. After all, I’d lost most everything I owned, but in return I’d found a continent.

Meanwhile, Joe walked into a dorm room somewhere on the University of Queensland campus and opened the conversation with, “Hey guys, remember that little, red Cortina you lent us?”

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            Postscript: Weeks later, the police located the stolen Cortina and, of course, it had been stripped of anything of value. But they reported that the car had evidentally been abandoned because its engine wouldn’t start.

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* “Sepo” is Australian rhyming slang for all Americans. It is not a complimentary term.