Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  “You sure?”

  “Do it,” I said. “We’re now”—I checked my watch—“fifteen minutes behind schedule.”

  There was a police car in front of us, with the lights flashing. The officers had decided against using their siren in deference to the sleeping citizens of Ushuaia.

  “All right.” Garry tapped the horn, and the car in front of us took off slowly down the street.

  “Let’s see what this baby’ll do,” Garry said.

  THE ROAD OVER THE MOUNTAINS had developed more ruts and bigger puddles over the past few days. Ten miles into our trip to the other end of the earth, snow began to fall in great wet flakes that splashed against the windscreen like the flabby kisses of fate.

  We made thirty miles the first hour. High in the mountains, in the slush and snow, we were startled by the sudden flash of strobes in the darkness. Pedro had driven Rich Cox up the hill in his cab. They had found a vantage point, and both were shooting pictures of the truck as we shot by. Flash, flash, and then we were alone in the somber snow and darkness, with only a month or so of driving ahead of us.

  * * *

  AN HOUR AND A HALF LATER, we were down out of the mountains on our way around the town of Río Grande. As we descended through a series of muddy turns, the snow stopped, and the sunrise at 6:20 was glorious: all shades of crimson and rose against a lowering sky full of low clouds without a break. In only a few minutes the sun was above those clouds and the sky seemed suddenly low and gray and glacial.

  The land on the north side of the mountains was a plain, perfectly flat, and it seemed to cower under the weight of the sky. In places, the sparse grasses were tufted against the hectoring wind. A stand of sage spread itself flat under the sky. There was an occasional bush, low, dusty, and whipped by the wind into some grotesque gnomish parody.

  There were no trees anywhere, as far as the eye could see, and it seemed as if the wind owned the land. A man on horseback, bundled in a coat and multiple scarves against the wind, drove a pack of horses across a field the color of suede.

  The road was dirt and gravel. For a time we ran parallel to the sea and the Bay of San Sebastián. The ocean was cobalt blue, bold against the muted palette of the land. A ruffle of penguins on a rocky beach near the road regarded the truck with mild curiosity. Guidebooks say there are no penguins on Tierra del Fuego, but there they were, rock-hopper penguins, all in a row on the low rocky headland. They dove into the sea in a line, one after the other, like bathing beauties in a Busby Berkeley musical.

  Farther north on the island, the tufted grass turned a deeper dusty-golden color. Rivers wove through the country in sinuous curves. Geese by the dozen flocked near one large stream, which, in the glacial early-morning light, seemed the color of dirty silver. A large gray Fuegan fox crept catlike through the sitting geese. A black-and-white goose rose against the fox, its wings spread in warning.

  Much of the land was fenced and, in some pastures, robust sheep grazed placidly. There were a few small lakes and ponds, widely separated, and occasionally the land humped up on itself and formed small hillocks. When we passed over one of these higher points, I could see the road to the north, winding on forever through the tufted grass and low sage.

  In places, the road branched and there were choices to be made. We saw no signs at the crossroads, but we generally chose the path more traveled. When that was impossible—when there was no discernible difference between branches—we drove for a time, checking our best maps against the compass mounted on our dash. I had always thought a compass on the dashboard was a moronic affectation. On the flat plain with strange roads stretching out in all directions, it was a necessity. Happily, we made no wrong turns and it usually took only fifteen or twenty miles to confirm our decision.

  A rancher’s house—the first we had seen—was set just below a knoll and out of the prevailing wind. It was the kind of place photographers win prizes shooting in the Plains States of the U.S.: a broken-down abandoned cabin low in the composition, with the sky and land rolling away in indifferent majesty so that it seems as if the land itself defeated the homesteaders. This rancher’s house, however, looked newly built and was freshly painted. It was like a child’s drawing of a house: a box with a door and one window on either side. It was dark blue with bright yellow trim—a child’s cheerful colors—and it stood out against the leathery-looking fields like an act of bravery.

  Where did the rancher get the wood for his house? Had the material come down from the north in one of those big semis? Did one of the big orange Scania trucks simply stop on the road and dump out a load of wood?

  Other houses—we could count those we saw on one hand—were similarly painted, but three out of the five were constructed of corrugated metal. The colors on the wooden homes and the corrugated homes were all fever bright: magenta, purple, fire-engine red. They seemed the colors of courage and cheer.

  The northwestern part of Tierra del Fuego is owned by Chile, and to catch the ferry we had to pass into that country. There were a series of weather-beaten wooden-frame customs buildings on both the Argentine and Chilean sides. We went from one building to the next, getting our passports stamped, our visitor’s cards validated. We filled out forms that asked about our marital status, and our mother’s maiden name. An officer on the Chilean side came out to search our truck. We had described ourselves as international rally drivers, and I suppose the Sierra looked enough like a vehicle that might be used in an international rally that the officer simply waved us through. We asked him if he wanted to come with us to Alaska. The comment struck him as a very good joke. Fellow officers encouraged him to go, as if they were tired of having him around, and the officer himself pretended to seriously consider our proposal, as if fed up with his colleagues.

  “Let’s remember that one,” Garry said later.

  “What?”

  “Asking them to come with us. Seems to soften them up.”

  As Garry explained it, it was wise to develop an act for policemen, customs officers, and other officials. The idea was to treat them with great respect initially, give them every paper they asked for without much comment, and then, once it was clear that our papers were in order, start barraging them with a blizzard of other papers, good fellowship, and bad jokes.

  “We give them,” Garry said, “all the required papers, then we start with the handout describing the trip, the Guinness Book in Spanish; we show them letters requesting assistance written by bigwigs in their own government. And we do it lightly. We don’t want them to think we consider ourselves big-deal guys. Don’t want to alienate them or challenge their authority in any way. The best thing, I think, is to start joking when we bring out our heaviest letters of introduction.”

  So we left the friendly Argentine officials laughing and wearing new maple-leaf lapel pins in their uniforms.

  On the Chilean side, we refined the act a bit, then went back into one of the offices where a man sitting behind an old manual typewriter stamped the documents we’d need to enter Chile.

  Garry said that I would come to love that sound: the solid thud, thud, thud of the last few stamps on the last few documents.

  The road to the north was little more than a cruel joke. It was a dry scar scraped across a monotonous plain and sometime, perhaps years ago, gravel had been dumped into the scar and spread. Now that gravel was compacted and hard as concrete. Large tooth-rattling ruts ran across the road itself, at right angles to our direction of travel. This truck route from the mainland was even more punishing, if less dangerous, than the road over the mountains.

  We seldom saw any cars, and the semi-trucks we did see came in small convoys of three and four, fresh off the ferry across the Strait of Magellan. They came barreling down the road, this most important artery of commerce on the island, and showers of gravel accompanied them. In Tierra del Fuego, wise drivers protect their windscreens with chicken wire stretched across a frame that can be raised or lowered depending on the condition of the road.


  Garry was checking the rearview mirrors. It seemed that the camper shell on the back of the truck was undulating to the rhythm of the ruts.

  “We’re going to lose that cap,” he said. “It’s going to start cracking. We can’t take much more of this.”

  It had always seemed to me that Garry was the star of this trip, the man who could drive any eventuality, and my job, as I saw it, was to keep his spirits high. Consequently, I said something about this being the worst and roughest road on the entire two-continent trip. The concept, as I presented it, was that if we could make it off Tierra del Fuego in one piece, everything else would fall into line.

  That was to be our goal for the next few hours: get off Tierra del Fuego in one piece. Garry grunted, preoccupied.

  A llamalike animal, a guanaco, stood in the road at the crest of a small hill with the dim sun behind him. The animal was pale-brown with a white belly. Unlike the llama and alpaca, guanaco are not domesticated. The animal’s head was silver-gray. It stood sideways to our oncoming truck, then easily leapt a five-foot-high barbed-wire fence.

  This route into and out of Tierra del Fuego was the fastest and most direct route from the mainland. The ferry from Punta Arenas, Chile, costs twice as much, takes five times as long, and runs only once a day. If there had been trouble in the mountains, we could have missed the ferry to Punta Arenas and lost a day. Research, I thought, reconnaissance, smart thinking.

  WE ARRIVED at a place called Bahía Azul, Blue Bay, on the Strait of Magellan, at eleven-thirty in the morning. The bay, however, was not blue, like the Atlantic near San Sebastián. It was a chill roiled gray carrying high whitecaps. The road to the strait simply ended in a muddy path that ran down to the water at a shallow angle. The wind was fierce.

  The ferry was just pulling out when we arrived. Garry and I watched it leave with something less than good cheer. A schedule nailed to a wooden post said that the ferry would be back from the mainland in two hours. As we waited, several of the big Scania trucks rolled up behind us.

  We got out in the mud and chill to examine the truck. Garry said that the camper shell, hammered badly on the rough Fuegan roads, was pulling away from the bolts that held it to the bed of the truck. He didn’t know if the shell would last and was talking about our options.

  GM officials in Santiago, Chile, had our schedule. They expected us at noon on October 1. We knew there was a GM plant in Santiago, and Garry thought they might be able to repair or replace the camper shell very quickly if we gave them a day or two’s notice. There was, we knew, a telex at a hotel just north of us in Río Gallegos. If the shell got any worse, we’d stop and contact GM Chile.

  “Every time,” Garry muttered bitterly, “and I mean every time I modify a vehicle, the after-market stuff craps out on me.”

  I looked at the camper shell. There were some small cracks around the bolts that held it to the cab. That was all. Garry was lying in the mud, under the truck, checking for fluid leaks. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to me.

  We hadn’t had any breakfast—nothing to eat for eight hours—but I couldn’t find the camp stove we had bought in Ushuaia. It was buried under the gear we had thrown into the truck so haphazardly. I finally decided to try the new heating coil. It took forty minutes to heat enough water to make lukewarm macaroni and cheese. There was simply no way we would be able to use the coil to heat food on our trip.

  It occurred to me that we were embarking upon what was likely to be a long, involuntary diet. The food had been my responsibility, and I had failed. I dug through the mess in the camper shell and brought out several bottles of water, a box of beef jerky, and another box of milk shakes. I wondered if we could exist on dried beef and warm milk shakes. Probably not: we would starve to death long before we reached the first drive through McDonald’s. Everything, in all directions, was dismal and gray.

  IN 1520, FERDINAND MAGELLAN sailed through the strait that bears his name, and everywhere, as far as he could see, there were fires burning. Local Indians, who paddled the sea in canoelike vessels, no doubt watched the alien vessel in the kind of alarmed awe Japanese actors reserve for Godzilla. The fires were signals to others: “It’s Godzilla.”

  Off to my east, not far away, an oil-fire flare was burning in a pit in the ground. The fire looked feeble against the brown land and cloudy water. There were oil facilities on the other side as well and we could see another flare burning on the mainland. No pure-blooded Indians survive on Tierra del Fuego, and these oil flares were the only fires we ever saw on the island Magellan called the land of fire.

  TWO HOURS LATER, the ferry coughed and spluttered up to shore. It was a small roll-on roll-off barge, which is to say, one end of the boat dropped down to form a ramp, like an amphibious landing device. It could take four large semi-trucks and several cars as well as a pickup or two. The ferry worked the narrowest section of the Strait of Magellan, called, locally, the First Narrows. Twenty minutes after departure, we landed on the mainland and drove off the ferry into Patagonia.

  THE AREA around the mainland oil patch was littered with garbage. Fifteen miles later, we were back into the dull brown-under-gray color scheme of northern Tierra del Fuego. Off to my left, in a plain of sage, there were four rhea, large flightless birds, like ostriches. The birds measured about four feet high, and they were standing with four grazing guanaco. As we drove past, the guanaco ran off and the birds waddled along with them, keeping pace.

  I told Garry that in Africa, ostriches sometimes run in herds with zebras. He said something about getting rid of the camper shell and maybe using a canvas cover over a stock rack.

  Not far into the mainland we passed from Chile back into Argentina and worked on our act at customs. Respect, papers, passports, carnet, forms, jokes, lapel pins. We were delayed by a bus that had just gotten in ahead of us. I found myself behind a tall thin American fellow wearing jeans and a professorial white beard. He was a scientist, he said, and he had been studying a big hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer that seemed to be centered over Antarctica. I asked him if the hole was very big. “It’s huge,” he said. The man seemed genuinely alarmed and described the situation as a potential global disaster. I decided not to tell him that we had a problem with our camper shell and that the heating coil I just bought two days before didn’t work very well at all.

  The road on the mainland was not much better than the one on the island. Garry fretted continually and without surcease about the camper shell. “We can,” he said, “jettison the shell. Figure a different way to pack the spare tires, and put a plywood board over the bed of the truck.”

  It had rained heavily the night before and the storm had softened the road a bit. After about fifty miles of somewhat less-punishing driving, Garry began talking about how long the shell might last. “We could get lucky, get it all the way to America,” he said.

  Just outside the town of Río Gallegos, I changed our first flat, while Garry tightened up the shock absorbers that had taken a bad beating over Tierra del Fuego. I don’t know: maybe you don’t tighten shock absorbers. All I know is that Garry went around the truck and fiddled with gadgets that I’m positive were shocks. Both of us were lying in the cold mud, working together.

  North of Río Gallegos, we knew, the road was paved, straight and very fast. Garry checked the camper shell. It was his momentary opinion that the thing might hold if we could hit the pavement without much more damage.

  Río Gallegos is a deep-water port, famous for its nearby colony of penguins and the fact that, in 1911, two famous outlaws on the lam from police in the United States successfully robbed the local bank. As we drove into town I wondered about that robbery. This part of Patagonia is infinitely, immensely, and criminally flat. You could see a man on horseback for about twenty miles. How did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ever make their escape?

  The night’s rain in Río Gallegos had been torrential. Wood-frame houses lined streets that ran with muddy water. Some citizens had dug earthen levees to p
rotect their homes, and they had gotten the dirt from the streets, so there were little lakes in the residential section, along with ten-foot-high piles of dirt to skirt. We passed lines of snarled traffic, cars stranded in puddles three feet deep, and helpful civilian volunteers at every corner pointing in every direction and gesturing urgently.

  People stared at us oddly as we passed, and it occurred to me that both of us were filthy from working under the truck in the mud. Garry had caked dirt in his hair.

  Out of Río Gallegos, we hit the paved two-lane highway, which was straight as an arrow. The compass was pegged on north, due north. I was driving and Garry was doing some calculating. We had come 330 miles from Ushuaia to Río Gallegos and had averaged twenty-nine miles an hour. That included two borders, four separate sets of formalities, a two-hour wait for the ferry, and thirteen lost minutes at the start. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well, but Garry was obsessed.

  “If we lose the camper shell,” he said, “and spend a day getting it fixed in Santiago, we’ll miss the boat in Colombia. So …”

  We had decided, after listening to enough horror stories, not to drive at night in Colombia. But if we lost a day in Santiago, we could make it up in a couple of Colombian night drives, which, I suspected, would be genuine nail biters. This was not a happy prospect and I wondered where in the back of the truck our bulletproof vests were. I had already lost my combat knife. It was probably lying in the mud where I had changed the tire outside of Río Gallegos.

  Psalm 91, Lord.

  GEOLOGISTS ARGUE about where Patagonia begins and ends. People on Tierra del Fuego, for instance, do not care to be called Patagonians. They are Fuegans. But there are some scientists who would include the monotonous plain of the northern part of the island in their definition of the great Patagonian desert. Geographers agree that the southern portion of Argentina, below the fertile pampas, is the largest desert in the Americas, with an area, by some definitions, of 260,000 square miles.