Dr Karl’s trip home for Christmas became a cautionary tale about partying too hard
Beloved celebrity scientist Dr Karl shared his extraordinary life story in recent memoirA Periodic Tale. In this extract, he tells how a trip home for Christmas almost ended in disaster – and offers a timely warning for those partying too hard this season.
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In 1970 I got a job as a physics tutor at the Lae Institute of Higher Technical Education, a tertiary college in New Guinea. I knew nothing about New Guinea, but it sounded exotic and I wanted to get as far away from my life in Wollongong as possible.
Come the Christmas holidays I headed back to Australia. Just for fun, I decided to fly from Lae to Cairns, then train or hitchhike some 2500 kilometres down to Sydney. The trip ended up totally out of control – luckily, I survived.
I started at the Cairns waterfront, but I hadn’t realised it was mangroves, not pristine sand. (Back then I did not at all appreciate how important mangroves are in supporting biodiversity, being a fish nursery and protecting the coastline. I just saw them as mud.) I was imagining sparkling yellow sand beaches, and this was a let-down.
I quickly gravitated to the local ‘heads’ – dope-smokers – to improve my experience, as in New Guinea I had grown to enjoy a smoke. A friendly local and his girlfriend took me around Cairns. We smoked some dope, and they invited me to swim with them across a lake, but with my head all fuzzy, I completely forgot that I was a very weak swimmer. I got about 50 metres across the lake before I was exhausted. Luckily for me, they were excellent swimmers, and they calmed me down and managed to swim me to safety. That was a close call.
Then things just got messier and messier!
As part of the holiday, I wanted to take the train south to Townsville. I planned to get some dope for the trip but had no luck. Some of the ‘heads’ told me about their back-up high, which involved mixing certain over-the-counter medications.
It sure didn’t turn out as I hoped.
The train took all night to travel a lousy 350 kilometres. (If only we had fast trains in Oz … though if we did then maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get off later!)
I had boarded the train in the late afternoon, foolishly swallowing the tablets and giving no thought to potential side effects.
I didn’t even realise that some of the medications I took could give you stomach ulcers and bleeding from the gut, or that others in high doses could cause drowsiness, agitation and confusion. I did get really intoxicated, but it was no fun – for starters I had gaps in my memory, and also had massive muscle cramps in my arms. In retrospect, I was really stupid to take the medications like that!
The carriage had a long skinny corridor down one side and compartments with facing bench seats on the other. Afternoon turned into night, and random fellow travellers flickered in and out of my troubled consciousness.
I vaguely remember walking up and down the corridor visiting people in the other compartments, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t thrilled by my company! I had intense conversations with several different people while having to stop to bend and straighten my arms continuously.
My next memory was of lying comfortably on a bench seat in the daylight. I felt normal and unexpectedly well rested. Very cautiously, I opened one eye a fraction. Oh no – there was a Queensland cop sitting directly opposite me! He was wearing the old drab olive uniform and was armed with a gun, strapped in its holster. I immediately assumed that my drug-crazed behaviour the previous night had annoyed my fellow passengers, and somehow the cops had got involved.
I lay very still, breathing quietly and trying to work out a plan. After about half an hour he got up, I guess to go to the toilet. Through a single narrowed eyelid I saw him turn right into the corridor. I immediately grabbed my backpack, turned left and ran to the other end of the corridor, opened the door and, without thinking at all, jumped straight off the train!
Luckily the train was moving slowly. Jumping off a moving train was another very stupid idea (guess what – don’t take drugs!), but amazingly, I was not hurt (much). I jumped the railway fence, ran to the road, stuck my thumb out and a car stopped almost immediately. Desperate to get away from the train, I blurted out, ‘Sorry, I’ve just had a family emergency and have to get to Sydney. Where’s the nearest airport?’
Once again, luck was with me.
The reason the train was slowing down was because we were coming into Townsville. It had an airport that did single-hop flights directly to Sydney, which meant I could avoid landing in Brisbane (just in case the Queensland cops had rung ahead to bust me). The driver went out of their way to take me all the way to the airport. I arrived with enough cash in my wallet to buy a ticket and perfectly on time to catch a direct plane to Sydney. I ran to the gate, boarded the plane and finally breathed out as we lifted off.
Things could easily have turned nasty. I could have been arrested by the cop and my life would have been headed down a very different road. But ridiculously good luck saved the day and me.
***
Paracelsus, the father of pharmacology, some five hundred years ago said something along the lines of, ‘All drugs are poisons, what matters is the dose.’ My father told me that when he enrolled at university in his teens, he started drinking very heavily. He stopped when he realised his memory was failing him. He reckoned it didn’t get any worse once he stopped drinking regularly, but it never recovered to its previous excellent levels either.
Through plain dumb luck, I got through lots of dope smoking with no real damage. My guess is that the luck was mostly that I started smoking in my twenties after my brain was fully developed. Now, as a boring grown-up, I think that having significant quantities of any drug (alcohol, dope, etc.) before your brain has matured can lead to permanent harm. In general, I would recommend not taking any drugs, especially before the brain is fully developed (say, twenty-five years of age) – and even more so if that drug is illegal where you live.
This is an edited extract from A Periodic Tale by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: available now, published by ABC Books.
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