Should I Drive By Again?

Two steep rocky cliffs face each other, forming a narrow passageway between them. The waves are angry and slap hard against the cliffs, raising foam. There’s nobody but the four of us at Loch Ard Gorge.

In this moment, it’s not difficult to imagine the shipwreck that happened nearby.

It was 1878. A cargo ship that had been sailing for three months cruised into Port Campbell near Mutton Bird Island. The fog was heavy, and Captain Gibb couldn’t see the lighthouse. The ship struck jagged rock.

We read the signs posted around the area, getting the story in pieces. It took ten minutes for the ship to sink. Fifty-two passengers and the ship’s commander, dead.

The signs only hold statistics. They leave it to the imagination to fill in the rest. I picture the chaos of fifty-two panicked passengers being swallowed by the sea.

Though there is no scientific evidence to support our theory, we came to the collective conclusion that Captain Gibb’s ghost haunts the Loch Ard Gorge.

According to the signs, two teenagers survived the wreck. Tom Pearce had already made it to the shore when he heard Eva crying out. In a heroic act straight out of a movie, he jumped back into the water to save her.

Jana suggests we re-enact the shipwreck when we get back to the cottage we are renting for the night.

“I’ll be Tom Pearce!” both she and our friend say at almost the same time. Nobody wants to be Captain Gibb.

***

Earlier that morning, we met our two friends from France at Jucy, the car rental place in the beachy inner suburb of Melbourne, St. Kilda. They were packing a bright purple and green campervan that had a caption on the side in big letters: Believe in love at first sight? Or should I drive by again?

The two of them were preparing to journey up the coast and had asked us to join them on a mini, pre-road-trip road-trip: a two-day excursion on the Great Ocean Road.

Jana and I had already driven along the 243-kilometre scenic stretch of road back in March. And though we didn’t need to drive by again to fall in love with the views, we jumped on the invitation.

***

Day is fading by the time we make it to the cemetery on the cliffs where some of the shipwreck’s casualties are buried.

Maybe there would be a crowd here if it wasn’t for the virus, if it wasn’t winter in Australia, if it was earlier in the day. But there isn’t. As far as we look, we see just sand, rock, sea, grass, and sky.

If a graveyard at night isn’t enough to spook us, we discover something on the memorial plaque that does. The shipwreck happened on June 1st, 1878. Today is June 1st.

We joke as we head back to the parking lot, but we noticeably pick up the pace.

Approaching the van, we spot a beam of light piercing the pitch-black night…

No. It’s nothing supernatural. Although that might have been better.

The glow illuminating the otherwise abandoned parking lot is coming from the headlights of our friends’ purple and green Jucy van.

***

Sitting in the dark in the van that won’t start, we work on three fronts:

1. One of our friends is on hold with Jucy.

2. The other is calling a taxi to take us back to our cottage—not an easy feat considering the closest cab company is half an hour away in a town called Timboon.

3. Jana and I are messaging our Airbnb host, hoping she might be able to lend us some jumper cables, or at least direct us to someone who can.

The cab company comes through first, and within an hour, we’re back in the cottage, warming up by the fire.

But before we get out the playing cards, we need to make a plan for how to fix the car.

Jana calls RACV, the local roadside assistance service whose number our Airbnb host gave us. “Small world!” she says into the phone, her eyes growing wide.

It appears the RACV guy had just been driving to Loch Ard Gorge to revive a stuck car when the call was cancelled.

Who had called him to fix our car? Who cancelled? Could it have been the ghost of Captain Gibb?

I picture the haggard ghost with sunken eyes, a haunted soul haunting the site of the shipwreck.

A vague recollection of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, fuels my vision. In the poem, an old sailor brings a curse upon his crew and his ship when he shoots an albatross. Surrounded by supernatural spirits and the dead bodies of his crewmates, he learns his lesson. As penance for shooting the bird, the grizzled sailor is compelled by a painful desperation to repeat his story to anyone who will listen.

I imagine Captain Gibb’s ghost, cursed to relive the moment he realized he couldn’t save his passengers, now trapped in a loop of trying and failing to save troubled Loch Ard Gorge visitors.

The RACV guy is not impressed with how small of a world it is. When Jana asks him if he can meet us tomorrow morning at the parking lot, he spitefully refuses. “Call me tomorrow,” he says, “and I’ll tell you then if I’m available to help.”

But we get a better idea. We arrange with the friendly cab driver from Timboon to drive us back to the parking lot in the morning, and he promises to bring jumper cables this time.

***

Other than our friends’ purple and green campervan, the only other vehicle in the parking lot in the morning is the taxi that drove us there.

The cab driver is holding the red and black cables, about to clamp them to the dead battery, when a truck pulls up, crunching gravel in the parking lot of Loch Ard Gorge.

The truck’s window rolls down dramatically, revealing a hook-nosed man with a scowl.

Across the truck’s side are the letters RACV.

For a moment, nobody else seems to notice the man or the truck, and I wonder, could the RACV guy BE the ghost of Captain Gibb?

“What’s going on here?” the man barks, destroying the illusion.

Oblivious to the hostility, our cab driver strolls up to the window to explain how he’s just lending us a hand. He leans on the truck, trying to make light conversation, but, to our eyes, it’s a standoff tenser than that between two cowboys in an old Western.

Hero versus villain, eyes narrowed in intense glares and fingers twitching towards their holsters. Of course, our hero prevails. The RACV truck makes a sharp turn and squeals back out onto the road.

***

The first stretch of our journey back towards Melbourne takes us through a rainforest. We fill up on stunning views while the battery refills with energy.

After that, there are no more problems with the van.

Thanks to the thoughtful planning of our friends, the itinerary involves stops at several locations that Jana and I did not see up close the first time we made the trip.

We have lunch in the coastal town of Apollo Bay, where we immediately work off the food with a long walk on the beach.

At Bell’s Beach, we’re impressed by a crowd of surfers catching waves.

And we even explore the area around Cape Otway Lightstation, the lighthouse that weather conditions prevented Captain Gibb from seeing exactly 142 years and 1 day ago.