Our gear lies heaped in huge colorful piles beside the road, and my arms and shoulders feel like they’ve been through a shredder. The fuel was brutal to unload. Back in Perth, we filled the steel drums after we loaded them onto the truck, so none of us quite realized how unmanageable they were. Turns out that forty-four Australian gallons is actually almost fifty-five American gallons and heavy as all hell. We finally managed to unload them by turning our folding table into a makeshift ramp. Gravity did half the work, but it just about killed me all the same. Pushing the truck is the last thing I feel like doing. I rub my shoulders. “Let’s do it,” I say. “I’m going to lower the tire pressure first,” Nat says. “That’ll help.” I watch as she squats beside one tire after another, tongue poking out between her teeth in concentration as she unscrews the valves. She looks like she does this for a living. When Nat gives us the thumbs-up, Mel gets back in the driver’s seat and starts the engine.
