Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  “Sir,” the ticket agent said, “we could leave in two hours. We could leave in five. There is no such thing as ‘exactly’ in the airline business.”

  It’s the kind of attitude you expect from bureaucrats in failing countries all over the earth, and the nicest thing I can say about the airline corpocracy in the United States is that it is not precisely evil. Odd that mismanagement and inefficiency should breed such arrogance.

  NEW BRUNSWICK, bounded by the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lies on Canada’s eastern seaboard, just north and a bit east of Maine. It is one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces along with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

  Prior to the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ceded the region to Great Britain, the area was known as Acadia and was French. During the American revolutionary war, British Loyalists settled the Maritimes. The Acadians, a French-speaking minority, however, have preserved their identity and have increased in population. The sense of struggle that Acadians live with has toughened them, and Acadian men, especially the younger ones, are regarded as tough monkeys: “Hey, Bobby Choquette, he can scrap, eh?”

  Many of the Acadians live on the Atlantic coast and are fishermen. You meet men of forty who recall the shame of going to school every day with a bag lunch that was the mark of their poverty. The rich kids had peanut butter and jelly. Sons and daughters of Acadian fishermen had to make do with lobster sandwiches.

  New Brunswick was once famous for the quality of its ships and the men who sailed them. Today, it is the eighth most populous of Canada’s ten provinces, and per-capita income lags behind Canada as a whole. The best and the brightest of New Brunswick’s young people often see little opportunity, and there has been an exodus to the more dynamic provinces to the west. On the other hand, forest covers over 80 percent of the province, and the moose population is increasing.

  Maritimers who stay in the provinces are often great travelers, adventurers of a sort, the kind of people who venture out to see the big world, absorb all they can, and return to commune with the moose in what they consider to be the finest place on earth in which to live.

  Maritimers, and Canadians in general, generally suffer a beneficent affliction that the Canadian writer Marian Botsford Fraser has forth-rightly and fearlessly labeled “niceness.” An American who spends too much time engaged in a corrosive harangue about a bad airline flight falls into line soon enough. Persist in your ill temper and people begin looking at you as if you’re wearing a leather mask and carrying a chain saw.

  Garry Sowerby picked the two of us up at the airport in his family car, and older-model Oldsmobile 98 with ninety thousand miles on it. On the way into Moncton from the airport I believe I said that the land was inspiring and the people seemed, well, nice.

  “It’s a national trait,” Garry said sorrowfully. “We can’t help it. It’s like, well, you know why Canadians say ‘eh?’ at the end of the sentence?”

  “I thought it was a lingering French habit, like saying, ‘n’est-ce pas?’ ”

  “No. It’s this niceness. This Canadian niceness. You say, ‘piss off!’ and then add ‘eh?’ What does that mean? It means piss off but, uh, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, look at your national symbol. You’ve got a bald eagle. Fierce eyes, a snake in its talons. What do we have?” Garry bit down on his lower lip, thrust his face into mine, and widened his eyes so that he looked moronically eager. “Beaver, eh?”

  Sowerby, who had the slightest of Canadian accents—“aboot” for about—was a connoisseur of great “ehs?” but he himself never eh-ed except in jest. “Remember when we came back from Panama?” he asked. “We flew out just before the riots. And then you got back to the States, what were the big headlines there?”

  “Iran-contra,” I said.

  “The big scandal here, front page across the country, somebody found out the prime minister owned forty pairs of shoes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was it. That was the scandal.” Apparently, Canadians felt that the prime minister was about thirty-five pairs of shoes to the dark side of nicety. Garry, like any man who deeply loves his country, purely enjoyed complaining about it.

  “You know who our prime minister is?” he asked.

  “Uh, used to be Trudeau. Now it’s, who, Mulroney?”

  Niceness doesn’t make headlines. Americans don’t know anything about Canada. We read about Noriega, or Qaddafi, or Khomeini. We respect Canadians, we like them, but the great mass of ordinary Americans somehow missed the big northern footwear exposé. Virtually any Canadian could tell you the name of the American secretary of state. I didn’t even know what you called his Canadian counterpart.

  The two-lane road ran through the forest and into Moncton where Garry Sowerby was born and raised. It is a town of sixty thousand, an old railroad center where the streets run parallel to the tracks and the homes are generally well maintained and newly painted. The nearby Bay of Fundy, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, surges with the highest tides in the world—up to seventy feet—and at their highest, these tides produce a kind of tidal wave that runs up the Petitcodiac River, so that, in Moncton, the river runs backward twice a day. I think this is called the tidal bore.

  “We’ve got the biggest tidal bore in the world,” the nice people of Moncton will tell you. Or they say that the finest eating lobster in the world is processed at a nearby plant at Cape Bimet. Research on my part reveals that this brag is, in fact, an indisputable fact. Or they tell you about a rise outside of Moncton where a car in neutral appears to roll uphill. “I’ll take you out to Magnetic Hill,” Garry said, full of false portent, “and you will be sore afraid.” Research on my part reveals the mystic powers of Magnetic Hill are an optical illusion.

  The railroad has recently pulled out of Moncton in a big way, so the housing market is depressed, and Garry’s $35,000 (American) home is a large two-story affair, neatly painted, like all the other houses on the street. There are a backyard, alive with flowers, a garage, and two vehicles parked in the driveway. One was our truck. The other was a GMC Suburban, riddled with bullet holes.

  I KNEW that bullet-ridden truck. I had driven it a couple of thousand miles through Canada and Alaska with Garry. That was in 1985 when he was competing in a five-thousand-mile road race—a rally actually—through Alaska and Canada. The event was called the ALCAN 5000 and I had been assigned to cover it and Garry for a magazine.

  There were three of us in the big truck—Garry, myself, and Glen Turner, from Moncton, Garry’s codriver. Sowerby explained that he made his living as an “adventure driver,” and I thought, as we barreled down the Alaska Highway, that if I could learn all there was to know about the bullet holes in the Suburban, I would begin to understand this rather unique occupation. I had never heard of a professional adventure driver before.

  So, start at the beginning:

  In 1977, Garry Sowerby and his friend Ken Langley began working on a project they conceived in college, nearly a decade earlier. The boys were Maritimers, they liked road trips, and the idea, as originally hatched, was posed as a question: Wouldn’t it be great to drive around the world? What began as a lark took almost three years to organize and cost $300,000 in money raised from various sponsors.

  Sowerby and Langley formed a corporation, Odyssey International, Limited (“We’re in OIL”) and borrowed $25,000 from friends and relatives to launch the project. They studied bus schedules from various countries to estimate the driving time from point to point. They produced a slick professional proposal, and spent years pitching the project, called Odyssey 77, to various companies.

  Garry is always a little amused when people, noticing his success—he is something of a Canadian national hero—suppose they can simply approach a sponsor with an intriguing proposal.

  “Nothing’s easy,” Garry likes to say. “Nothing’s free.”

  Of the three years the round-the-world project took, the vast majority of the time was s
pent raising money.

  “You have to understand,” Sowerby told me, “we weren’t kids. We were twenty-nine when we started this. Ken was a lawyer. A great organizer and planner. I had a lot of experience with vehicles.”

  Garry, in fact, had a degree in physics, had flown jets in the Canadian air force, and had sailed as an officer on destroyers. In the service at Camp Borden, Ontario, Sowerby had taken an extensive automobile engineering course and was posted to a five-hundred-acre vehicle-testing ground. He designed tests devised to take vehicles to their failure limits. He drove armored personnel carriers over swampy tundra and frozen muskeg, and rolled more than his share of Jeeps. On purpose.

  This background was invaluable in the struggle to fund the project. “Kenny and I,” said Sowerby, “had some credibility.”

  The trip would take them through four continents and twenty-three countries in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. At every coast, they had to have planes waiting to airfreight the vehicle to the next country or continent. Guinness, at that time, required that the circumnavigation entail “an equator’s length of driving (24,901.47 road miles).” Sowerby drove; Langley navigated. (The previous record for the fastest trip around the world by land had been 102 days.) The Canadians completed the drive (26,738 actual miles) in seventy-four days one hour and eleven minutes.

  THE ADVENTURE had left them deeply in debt. The thought of paying off $80,000 on their income—the pair were each driving taxis in Toronto until they settled on a plan—was intensely disturbing. The only way to avoid personal and corporate bankruptcy was to launch another project, financed by more generous corporate donations. It was this financial problem that forced the two into the adventure-driving business. Unfortunately, projects kept falling through. In 1983, desperate, the partners traveled to England and met with Norris McWhirter, the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records.

  “We were looking for a new record,” Sowerby said, “but we couldn’t think of anything, so here we were, two adventurers without an adventure. We met with Norris McWhirter in this typically British boardroom with big oak tables, lots of books and maps on the wall. Norris was wearing a blue pinstriped suit and drinking a mug of stout.”

  It took only an hour and a half and three mugs of stout apiece to come up with the project: a two-driver automobile traverse of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the world’s largest landmass. Sowerby and Langley would drive from the southern tip of Africa to North Cape, Norway, over four hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. “The rules were that we both could drive,” Sowerby said. “Norris told us, ‘The clock starts when you leave and stops when you get there. Everything in between is your problem.’ ”

  So: a new project. Now the partners had to secure a proper vehicle, convince some giant automotive corporation that the adventure would be both successful and a good promotion, then recruit enough other sponsors to foot part of the bill, pay back their debts, and give them some margin of profit. GMC was a major sponsor, and John Rock was especially enthusiastic about seeing one of his tanklike Suburbans set a world record. Other subsidiary sponsors included companies that manufactured mobile telephones, one that made tires, and one that issued traveler’s checks. Because of the success of the around-the-world trip, and the partners’ growing sophistication in pitching their ideas, all major sponsors fell into line in about a year’s time.

  “The effort that went into planning the trip was enormous,” Sowerby told me. “We spent fifty thousand dollars on telephone and telex bills alone. I mean, it took a year or so to set up. We started in January with the idea and signed the last contract in November. Then Kenny and I went on a reconnaissance to meet with people on the way: meet the auto-club people, the sponsors; meet with people from the Canadian government and the host governments; meet with the press people in various countries. There were two separate six-week recces. We wanted to make friends all along the route. Because time is the enemy, you have to make sure you’re expected when you arrive. You don’t want to have to spend two days at some remote border outpost.

  “The diciest bit of politics had to do with the fact that we were starting in South Africa. No African country is going to let you in if you’ve been to South Africa. We figured the straightest approach was to tell the governments in the countries above South Africa exactly what we were doing. We made a deal: no press conferences at the start of the trip. No mention at all of South Africa. The first press conference would be in Nairobi, Kenya.” Press conferences in the midst of a record attempt were a financial necessity: the sponsors wanted maximum exposure for their products.

  Sowerby had planned to drive through the Sudan, north and east of Kenya. The timing was critical. “The road in the Sudan,” Sowerby said, “floods out, and they close it about mid-March. That meant we had to start from South Africa on the first of March. But if we went any earlier, the road to North Cape, in Norway, would still be snowed in when we got there.”

  A week before the trip was to start, Sowerby and Langley learned that the Sudan road was closed because of an outbreak of civil violence in the southern part of the country. With a year’s work and several hundred thousand dollars hanging in the balance, Sowerby and Langley began working feverishly on an alternate plan.

  It turned out that there was a road that led due north, from Nairobi into Ethiopia. “Nobody had used that border in ten years,” Sowerby said. “Well, we contacted the Canadian ambassador in Kenya who went to the president’s office and asked if we could use that road. He was told that the Kenyans had had problems there for the last twenty-five years. Problems with ambushes and bandits. The Kenyan officials said we could use the road only if they could provide a military escort.”

  Meanwhile, the Canadian ambassador to Ethiopia was securing clearance in that country. “This was before the famine broke,” Sowerby said. “Our ambassador convinced the Ethiopian administrator of tourism that what we were doing was a goodwill trip and that it would be good for tourism.” In order to stress the point that Ethiopia was a terrific travel destination, Sowerby agreed to hold a press conference in the capital, Addis Ababa.

  With permissions secured and a new route mapped out, Sowerby and Langley left Nairobi in the Suburban. “We picked up the military escort about three hundred miles south of the Ethiopian border,” Sowerby said. “Four guys with machine guns. They told us there hadn’t been an attack in six months. We get out on this road, this rough washboard road, and there is no traffic at all. It’s all desert out there: all this burning rock and scrub. That’s where we got shot up.

  “Kenny was driving, and there were two soldiers sitting beside him, another one in the jump seat, and one in the bunk in the back. I was dozing in the alleyway between the two front seats. Kenny was playing a tape: Eddy Grant singing “Killer on the Rampage,” honest to God. We came around this tight turn, and one of the soldiers flipped his gun from lock to automatic. It must have been a famous ambush corner.

  “All of a sudden I hear pop-pop-pop. Then all hell broke loose. Two of the soldiers had their machine guns out the window and they were just spraying the area. I could see them hiding behind the door pillar, not aiming, just firing for effect. And all of them were yelling at Kenny: ‘Faster, faster, faster!’

  “There were six bandits out there firing single-shot bolt-action rifles. They had been hiding behind some scrub on the right-hand side of the road. Kenya is a former British colony, and they have right-hand drive there. The bandits must have thought they would be firing at the driver, but our truck was equipped for left-hand drive. That single fact may have saved our lives. Instead of firing at someone who was trying to drive and dodge bullets at the same time—which would have been pretty much a piece of cake for them—they were encountering automatic-weapons fire.

  “I’m lying there, and these thoughts are going through my head. I have a new daughter. I brought her home from the hospital in the Suburban. We named the vehicle after her. Lucy. We thought it was such a tank that we added a last name: Lucy Pa
nzer. But it wasn’t a tank, and I could hear the bullets tearing through it. And in a way, I felt like they were firing at Lucy. At my daughter. Because if I was gone, what would her life be like? And my wife, Jane? You think it will never happen to you, and then it does. There’s a moment of complete disbelief.

  “Anyway, they shot out one of the back tires, and they hit the front fender and the roofline in a couple of places. Kenny had it floored and we were doing seventy with a flat tire, over this bad, rutted road.”

  Garry lay on the floor, between the seats. They had warned him about this road. Told him this could happen. Now he was going to die because he couldn’t listen.

  It occurred to him that it was going to be a particularly nasty death. He was fairly well protected from the bullets and would survive the initial stages of the attack. What would happen, he figured, was that everyone else would be shot dead. The vehicle would go careening off into the desert and bog down in sand. The bandits would find him there, the only living witness. Garry figured they’d cut his throat. What did Shiftas do to people? Why didn’t he know that? His mind was filled with visions of Lucy and Jane.

  Jane—Garry had heard it often enough—was beautiful. Tall and slender, with long flowing hair and a model’s fine high-cheekboned face. Smart. Organized. And she had guts: Garry figured that anyone who married him—a guy who made his living as an adventure driver—would have to have guts. She had talents that sometimes seemed at odds with her beauty. She was, for instance, a licensed commercial helicopter pilot. And now she was going to have a corpse for a husband. Just some bones bleaching in the desert.

  That didn’t seem entirely right. Garry’s mind began to function practically. He realized that if the truck broke an axle they’d be out in the desert for days, at the mercy of Shiftas.

  “We gotta change the tire,” he shouted.

  The soldiers said, “No. Faster!”