Walkabout.(watching a movie in the summer)

Odd, in a way, that we should have something called "the summer movie." The temperature-controlled timelessness of movie theatres should argue against seasonal categories. Back in the days of drive-ins, with the car window down to admit the croaking speaker, it was possible to notice the humidity. Inevitably, too, an insect would crawl across the projector's lens and be magnified on the screen. A bug that big would remind you that it was summer.

But inside a theatre it could be any season at all. Maybe that's why, thinking about summer movies, I find myself returning not to a first-run cinema rumbling with some blockbuster's rigged detonations but to the ballroom of our old yacht club in Detroit. In that vast, velvet-draped space, whenever a boozy regatta party didn't intervene, movies were shown. One July evening, my mother and I ended up at an Australian film we knew nothing about beyond its mystifying title: "Walkabout."

Summer explained why we were alone together. My oldest brother, a folk musician, worked nights. My father and my other brother were racing our sailboat up to Mackinac. And so my mother and I got into her car––which used to be my father's until it got old and temperamental––and made the long drive into the city.

"The oil light's on," I said, as we were crossing the Belle Isle bridge.

"It does that," my mother said.

The film began unthreateningly. A father drives his children, a teen-age daughter and young son, into the outback. At first, all seems well. They picnic. The sister and brother go for a walk. Suddenly, the father fires a gun in their direction. Hiding behind a rock, the girl looks back to see her father dowsing the car with gasoline. In the next second, he immolates the vehicle, along with himself.

Lost in the wilderness, the girl and boy are doomed. But fate intervenes: they meet an Aborigine who is in the midst of the test of manhood known as the walkabout. He hunts game for them and teaches them how to siphon water from the ground. The parched, lizard-ridden landscape becomes lush as they journey. Soon the Aborigine and the girl are cavorting naked in an oasis. Later, as they near civilization, the Aborigine performs a mating dance, to which the girl doesn't respond, and the next morning she finds that he has ...