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The Aussie Howler

The Source

Australians are crazy. Yes, I know it’s wrong to generalize about an entire nationality but I’ve watched them too often and have seen the same strange traits pop up again and again. Aussies are loony. Maybe my perception of these folks from the land down under is skewed by the fact that I keep running into them. For some reason Australians are among the most traveled vacationers on the globe. This is especially strange considering the fact that living in Australia is much like taking up residence in Arenzville: you’ve got go a long way to get anywhere. For example, I can’t make any broad judgments about Tasmanians because I’ve never met anyone from Tasmania. The same goes for Lichtenstein. But Aussies….man, they cover the globe. There’s hardly a month that goes by on my riverboat gig when we’re not blessed with the presence of a least a couple of Australians. Perhaps it’s their hot, dry topography that attracts them to America’s rivers and this spring there’s been plenty of river to observe. Last week’s travelers were a rangy little man and his twenty-something son who had flown to Los Angeles, spent four weeks traveling up and down the coast then drove to Las Vegas before flying to Denver, St. Louis, then motoring up to catch our boat in Peoria. They’d been vacationing in the U.S. for two months and were heading next to Detroit for a week before exploring the East Coast. Last summer they’d toured Russia and England after a month in Africa. He said he had to hurry back home since he’d booked a cruise to Antarctica. I wanted to ask him which half of Australia he owned. He walked down our gangplank with a white capsule sticking up his nose. This isn’t the usual boat attire and it’s certainly not recommended in any of our promotional literature so I asked him about it. “Allergies!” he shouted, then pulled out the capsule to give me a closer look. I really hadn’t asked for this. He explained, “We use ‘em back home to plug up our noses. Been sufferin’ with the things ever since I stepped off the plane. Got lots of pollen in America!” He seemed happy enough and not in any way inconvenienced or embarrassed by what looked like a small white drone missile stuck up his nostril. He and his son were the perfect guests on our little showboat, always giving way to our more ambulatory passengers, politely clapping and even cheering at our musical offerings, and making a special effort to compliment the boat’s chef. Neither touched liquor that I noticed, and until they spoke in that wild hybrid of British English and excited kangaroo, you’d have thought they were from Murrayville. We stayed at Starved Rock Lodge and it was my fate to share an adjoining cabin with the two Aussies. It had been a long day so I turned in around 10 p.m. and that’s when their singing began. Actually, it would be a stretch to call it singing and at first mistook them for coyotes. There was a full moon that night and perhaps it reminded them of their days back in the Bush. Our two rooms were separated by huge, hand-hewn logs but no log worth its bark could have muffled the noise of a father and son Australian baying at the Starved Rock sky. When I saw them at breakfast the next morning I asked them what song they were singing. The father seemed surprised that anyone had heard them, and said, “Oh. Sorry. Hope we didn’t disturb!” I lied and insisted that I’d enjoyed the moonlight concert. He said, “We don’t know the names of the songs…just somethin’ we like to do.” Australians are loony. Last summer we hosted an Aussie man and wife. The wife was an attractive lady who’d obviously had a few surgeries to keep her koalas in place and Big Bob, her long, lanky husband looked like Crocodile Dundee on steroids. Whenever our boat approaches a barge our captain toots his whistle to indicate on which side we’ll be passing. This is an old custom that predates the obvious convenience of radios, but it’s still a law so perhaps right in the middle of the prime rib dinner the boat will rumble with the sound of our full-throated toot. For reasons known only to the Australian embassy and Big Bob, he’d run to the back of the ship and howl whenever the Spirit of Peoria began tooting. In fact, Big Bob was a much louder howler than this season’s father and son howlers so I was glad that he and his repurposed wife were lodged in a cabin far across the park. Bottom line: if you vacation this summer, do your best to travel with Australians. If the scenery’s a disappointment or the weather rains you out, you’ll still have all the entertainment you need.