Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

“So these are nice places to visit,” I had said. “But …”

  “Exactly,” the diplomat had replied.

  CHILE, as any U.S. grade-school teacher can tell you, is “the string-bean country.” It is 2,700 miles long and averages only 110 miles in width. “Chile,” Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said in assessing the country’s strategic significance, “is a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.”

  In the south, near Antarctica, the country is damp and cool, not much good for agriculture, but it possesses a kind of soaring beauty absolutely foreign to the rest of the world. In the south, tidewater glaciers formed on the coastal mountains flow down to the sea through dense rain forests. Seals share the beach with hummingbirds.

  Seventy percent of the population of Chile lives in the center of the country, around the capital of Santiago, where the climate is Mediterranean, rather like Southern California. The northern part of Chile is arid, and the Atacama Desert there is the driest desert on the face of the earth.

  The country’s physical diversity and beauty remain abiding mysteries above the Rio Grande. A story is told of a competition among New York Times correspondents: write the world’s most boring headline. The winning entry read, SMALL EARTHQUAKE IN CHILE; NOT MANY DEAD.

  It’s a reasonably good bet that not one in a hundred readers would find themselves reading that story. On the other hand, I was fascinated by a piece in my clip file: “Quake in Northern Chile Kills 6, Triggers Slides.” The quake in question had happened thirty-five days earlier. “A landslide and rock slides on the Pan-American Highway,” the piece in The Miami Herald read, “cut off Chile’s main north-south road.”

  Our road.

  AT OSORNO, we stopped at a clean gas station that might have been a truck stop in the United States. Garry phoned Santiago to tell them we’d be there at nine the next morning. The truck needed to be serviced, and Garry would require the use of the telex. I filled the fuel tanks, suffering a little pit-stop case of Zippy’s disease—get this done before Garry gets off the phone!—and managed to drench my left arm with diesel.

  The road ahead, Highway 5, was paved, in good condition, and the compass was pegged, once again, on north. I was driving, and Garry was working on the problems ahead. What were we going to do about the twenty-foot shipping container and our twenty-one-foot truck; where did we have any slack for emergencies; was it possible to get someone in Colombia to do the paperwork for the boat; did we really need to replace the camper shell; was it possible to get to Dallas on time for a press conference GMC wanted to schedule?

  Garry was thinking out loud: “So if we get out of Panama on Sunday night … let’s say we don’t get out until Monday morning. Okay. We’re in Costa Rica Tuesday, Managua Wednesday, Thursday Guatemala. We hit Texas on Sunday, and, oh shit, no one goes to press conferences on Sunday and GMC is going to have a fit. But, all right, let’s say we drive at night in Mexico …”

  The land was summer green, and large rivers, rushing down from the nearby Andes, screamed “trout.” Occasionally, we’d pass a man on horseback wearing a poncho made of a blanket. Men and women rode bicycles past fields where fat dairy cows grazed. There were people traveling the shoulder of the road in horse-drawn carriages. Chilean drivers were generally courteous. The sky was blue and clear.

  After sunset, large lumbering trucks seemed to own the Pan-American Highway. The fastest trucks were doing forty, the slowest twenty, and a man felt obliged to pass them. The trucks traveled in packs, like hungry wolves, and every time I’d manage to pass four or five in a row, I’d find myself behind another grouping. Our Sierra, with its weight and its diesel engine, was not particularly fast, and there was plenty of oncoming traffic, so that passing was an unpleasantly tense experience. Estimating our speed relative to the other vehicles was maddeningly difficult: a set of taillights ahead could be good lights half a mile in the distance, or very dim lights only four hundred feet ahead. Pulling out to pass in the face of oncoming lights was a gamble: to conclude that the dim lights meant distance could be deadly. It was one life-or-death judgment call after another.

  There was never a time to relax, to glory in having spent some anxiety and skill passing the last line of diesel belchers. It was seven straight hours of driving that consisted of nothing at all but passing trucks.

  I felt like Sisyphus, the mythological king who was punished in Hades by repeatedly having to roll a huge stone up a hill only to have it roll back down again. Sometimes, when I found myself out in the oncoming lane with headlights barreling out of the night at me, I felt I had pushed the tolerance a little. At those times, I had to edge back into my lane a little faster than I would have liked. Either that or die. Sisyphus, as I recalled, was punished for cheating Death.

  Every truck, without exception, featured a large sign on the back that said, FRENOS DE AIRE, air brakes, but I couldn’t help reading the first word as an English cognate: friends. Friends of the air? All of these trucks belched out diesel fumes in great choking clouds that were blacker than the night itself.

  “These trucks,” I told Garry, “are no friends of the air.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you smell the diesel? The whole highway stinks like diesel.”

  “That,” Garry said reasonably, “is because your left arm is soaking in it.”

  “Oh.”

  “How did that happen?” Garry asked.

  “Case of Zippy’s at the gas station.”

  * * *

  WE STOPPED THAT NIGHT at a motel on the highway about 130 miles south of Santiago. After forty mostly sleepless hours, I fell into bed, fully clothed, while Garry took a shower. My dreams smelled like diesel. Five hours later—and those five hours felt like a luxury—we were both up and I took a shower. The bed I had slept in was filthy with dirt and smelled like petroleum products. It looked like a pack of filthy rabid animals had gotten into a big dog pile and had sex on the sheets.

  The road to Santiago was not nearly as infested with trucks as it had been the night before. There was a low fog swirling across the highway, and the trees in the river bottoms, when we could see them, were in full leaf. There were houses two deep lining the road, and fields in the back. A man on horseback, wearing a sport coat and tie, rode along the black shoulder of the road.

  On the outskirts of Santiago, we stopped a taxi. I gave the driver the address of the GM facility and rode with him as Garry followed, so we never missed a turn and arrived at nine in the morning, exactly as we had said.

  Al Buchanan, GM’s executive vice president for overseas sales, happened to be in the office. Buchanan had arranged all the GM contacts on the reconnaissance trips, and the last time Garry had seen him was in his office in Detroit. Al seemed to feel as if he had a stake in our success and was exceedingly helpful. A quick call confirmed that the road in the north had been cleared of earthquake debris. There was a GM factory in Arica, Chile, twelve hundred miles north, up near the border with Peru, where there were some ingenious mechanics who could put in a superstructure under the camper shell.

  Garry called the Canadian embassy in Santiago and was told that packages had been hand-delivered to the tourism ministers in Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua, but there had been no reply from any of them as yet. He asked the embassy to send a telex to Joe Skorupa, of Popular Mechanics, who would ride with us from Lima to Colombia. Skorupa was supposed to be at the Gran Hotel Bolívar in Lima. We would pick him up at four in the morning, on Sunday, October 4.

  The truck was serviced, but we asked them not to wash it. A filthy truck was less attractive to potential gasoline bandits. We stocked up on tires so that we had three spares on rims and a fourth not on a rim.

  Daniel Buteler, an Argentine executive, called GM Colombia to see if they could have someone at the border to ease us through customs there. Buteler said that not only would they have a customs expediter, they’d also provide a chase vehicle to, as Garry put it, “baby-sit us straight through.”

  We had lunch at a
place that advertised itself as the House of Pork. Al Buchanan said that GM executives all over South America were feeling particularly good this week. The company had just broken all existing sales records, and a project like ours was something executives had time to think about. Something to add to the resounding glory of GM and all that.

  Al Buchanan had just come from Colombia. He liked the country and thought it generally got a bum rap in the international press, though night driving there was still not a good idea. There had a been a large mud slide just the other day in Medellín, but the road would probably be cleared by the time we got there. Thieves were another problem: they tended to hijack fully loaded trucks, though bandits seldom went after vehicles as small as ours. The biggest danger, Al Buchanan thought, would be ambush and kidnapping. The United States had just extradited drug lord Carlos Lehder. It was possible the drug traffickers might want to take revenge on United States citizens.

  We talked for a time about the courteous drivers of Chile as opposed to the Fangios of Argentina. Buchanan said that he had a special affection for Chilenos: they were less aggressive than Argentines, but honest in their business dealings. There was a kindness about Chilenos that moved him.

  “You know how they have days for everybody down here?” Buchanan asked.

  “Student’s Day,” I said, “Grandmother’s Day …”

  “Chilenos have a day of the rotos.”

  Rota is the Spanish word for “broken,” but the masculine form, roto, was a new one on me. I asked what the word meant.

  We were walking out of the restaurant, full of pork, which, for me, was a welcome change from jerky and shakes, when Al Buchanan pointed out a man lying in a street corner cradling a bottle. “Roto,” he said.

  “You mean,” I said, “they have a take-a-wino-to-lunch day?”

  “You have to love Chilenos,” Al Buchanan said.

  THE CENTRAL ROADWAY out of Santiago felt a little like Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A. There were a lot more church steeples, but the haze that shrouded the snow-capped Andes in the distance was depressing and familiar.

  Outside of the city, the traffic was bearable and the scenery splendid: we saw vineyards, orchards, small wooden houses, green pastures, and horses behind newly painted white fences. There was a sense of Mediterranean ease that lasted for over a hundred miles.

  It got drier and the trees began to disappear. The hillsides, though still green, supported small stands of cactus. Farmland was being worked in stone irrigation terraces. Occasionally, we passed a small town of weathered adobe huts with dirt floors and corrugated tin roofs.

  Late that afternoon, we drove through an area of sand dunes and saw the Pacific, glittering under a cloudless blue sky. The road turned back inland, and the desert began to close in on us.

  “We are,” I announced portentously, “even now rolling into the dreaded Atacama Desert.”

  We passed a man and his wife in a turbo Peugeot, and when they read the logos on the camper-shell window—ARGENTINA TO ALASKA IN 25 DAYS OR LESS—they sped up to keep pace with us. Garry was driving.

  “Fools,” he said. “We have two thousand miles worth of diesel. Try to keep up, Peugeot. You’ll exhaust your fuel and die in the desert.”

  Near the town of La Serena, just at sunset, we switched drivers, and the tourists in the Peugeot blew by us. I noticed that, for the first time on our trip, the sun was setting to the south of us. I had a piece of jerky for dinner and pushed the Sierra to ninety, running fast down a big hill toward La Serena, where I could see the festive lights on a Ferris wheel slowly turning in the purple desert twilight.

  La Serena, a town of about a hundred thousand, is a growing tourist destination. There are colonial homes, pretty gardens, and a forest of steeples. I caught up to the fools in the Peugeot at a traffic circle on the way out of town. The Peugeot seemed to know where he was going and veered off onto one of the side streets. I watched him, sure now that he wasn’t going to go on through the desert, and disappointed that I wouldn’t have someone to race through the desolation.

  But where was my turn? It occurred to me that I had come into the circle much too fast.

  Another car entered from a side street at normal speed. I nearly sideswiped him, and both of us turned away from each other, he to the outside of the circle, me to the inside. From behind, a driver I had cut off hit a long angry blast on his horn.

  “You want that turnoff,” Garry said, pointing the way.

  The street was lined with trees and clearly led out of town, but Garry wanted me to stop. He cleared his throat, tried manfully to speak in a calm voice, gave it up, and began shouting at the top of his lungs. What the hell was I doing? he wanted to know. “You were doing ninety down the hill into town!” he screamed. “Ninety!”

  It didn’t seem like a good time to tell Garry that I was trying to catch the Peugeot so I’d have someone to race through the Atacama Desert.

  “You’re doing ninety and you’re eating and we’ve got a thousand pounds of diesel in the back. Tim, goddamn it, you can’t drive like me. You don’t know the truck. You’re screwing up. You get lost, you drive over boards with nails in them, you drive over rocks in the road. You drove fifty miles on a flat tire.”

  Garry was brutally, almost hysterically angry.

  “If I fail on this project, my family doesn’t eat!” he shouted. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  I looked over at Garry and his face was lit from underneath by the dashboard lights. People in a fit of rage can look terrifyingly ugly. My own face felt as if it were on fire.

  I thought: Nobody talks to me in that tone of voice. I thought: I am going to punch the shit out of Garry Sowerby. Just get right out of the truck and do it right here, on the streets of La Serena. I thought about that for a while as Garry told me that I was driving like a drunken teenager.

  There was a little grass boulevard where we could duke it out. Garry said, “For Christ’s sake, Tim, you don’t even know how to back up.”

  I wondered, very seriously, how long it would take me to put Garry down. Did I want to do it with a couple of punches, or maybe just wrestle him down, not hurt him too much? Or … and this thought came as a sudden shock: what if he fought back? What if he fought back and won? I saw myself on my back, humiliated, in front of the cheering throngs of La Serena. No.

  My hands were shaking on the wheel, and I considered letting go with a swift, savage, backhanded slap. A warning.

  And then if he wanted to fight?

  Hell, I’d stomp him like a rat in the cheese box.

  But the explosion was over. Garry was still yelling a little, but no longer entirely enraged. “We are,” he said, “in a metal eggshell. You have to have respect for the vehicle and for your abilities. I wouldn’t try to write like you; don’t try to drive like me. You can’t do it.”

  Of course, if we fought out here on the street, someone might get hurt. The record run would be over. And it would be my fault because I screwed up and Garry got mad, and I let that madness fuel my own. Some comical sidekick.

  “Tim,” Garry said, “promise me you’ll take it safe.”

  I decided, in what seemed an enormous emotional sacrifice at the time, not to punch the hell out of Garry Sowerby on the spot. What I would do was wait until we hit Prudhoe Bay. We’d be standing in the snow at the edge of the Beaufort Sea talking about men and machines, time and the elements, and I’d just haul off and pop him a good one. Bam! That’s for La Serena, you shitball.

  “Tim, I want you to promise me.”

  He’d be lying there, bleeding in the snow in front of any reporters that might be on hand.

  “Tim?”

  I’d tell the reporters that sure, we got mad at each other during the trip and the only difference between us was that I was able to control my temper until the end. They’d take pictures of Garry on the ground, bleeding into the snow, WORLD RECORD HOLDER SMASHED AT FINISH LINE. The image amused me in a bloodthirsty and unworthy way.

>   “Tim,” Garry said, “I seriously want you to promise me that you’ll take it safe. Say those words.”

  “Garry,” I said in an earnest voice, “I am going to take it safe.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.” Oh, buddy, you have no idea what I promise for you.

  “Thank you,” Garry Sowerby said, and I saw him in an imaginary AP Wirephoto with a broken nose.

  “Let’s go on,” Garry said. “You drive.”

  I thought: another three weeks and you get yours, pal.

  ROTO

  - - - - - - - -

  October 2–4, 1987

  GARRY DROVE over a series of low passes that dropped into bare stony valleys dominated by dry riverbeds. The night was dark, and, at the summit of the passes, there was thick fog.

  Some people, I thought as I was lying in the cramped extended cab, might not think this is fun. That realization was either a sudden burst of clarity or a rush of self-pity, I wasn’t sure which. It was like being quietly insane. Sleep was the best idea.

  Sometime around midnight, I felt the truck stop and heard Garry talking with police. Another official checkpoint: show ’em the international driving license, the carnet, the Guinness Book, ask if they want to come to Alaska, hand out milk shakes and lapel pins. We had suffered through five such military checkpoints in Argentina, and this was our second in Chile. Garry’s checkpoint Spanish was improving.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Argentina,” Garry said, “and we go to Alaska.”

  There was some confusion then, a burst of Spanish that defeated Garry. I couldn’t hear well enough to make out the words, but the officers’ voices did not sound angry.

  “Tim,” Garry called, “maybe you better talk with these guys for a while.”

  Why not? I’d slept for almost two hours. Why not jump out of my nest in the extended cab and chat with five or six men carrying guns on a foggy mountaintop on an empty road in the middle of nowhere? Negotiate with them in my illiterate Spanish. Perfectly reasonable.