by Tim Cahill
And the effects, I found, were somewhat similar. Unrefined coca leaves are not a particularly strong drug. I first chewed some with a Peruvian police officer. He had been dispatched from a frontier town to check on my party. We had been asking around about ruins; the word was that we were trekking the ridges, making maps. It was possible that we were grave robbers, that we were in the business of stealing priceless pre-Columbian artifacts.
The officer had trekked two days, over three sets of five-thousand-foot ridges to find us. He found no digging at our campsites, but offered to “accompany” us for a few days. The man wore a poncho and a .38 revolver on his belt. He also carried a woven shoulder bag full of coca leaves.
At the base of every ridge, the officer would tell us that the walk ahead was “very easy.” Sometimes the hills were steep and endless. It was wiser not to listen to the officer regarding the relative difficulty of climbing the hills. Better to simply see how many coca leaves he wadded into his mouth at the base of the ridge. Lots of coca meant a long hard climb.
The officer offered my party some of the leaves—people always find it difficult to believe that I was offered my first taste of raw coca by a police officer—and I found the effect not entirely negligible. Still—this was 1977, remember—I didn’t think you’d be able to sell a single leaf outside a disco in Queens. Coca leaves turn your teeth and lips green. Chewing them involves a lot of gloppy spitting.
It helped on the long climbs, though. Most people have felt something of what coca leaves do. Imagine that you have had a hard day: up before dawn, no time for breakfast, errands all morning, nothing for lunch, and now it’s two in the afternoon. You stop at a diner, exhausted, and order coffee and a piece of pie. Half an hour later you’re ready to go again: that’s pretty much the lift you get from a mouthful of coca leaves.
In the decade since I had been to Peru, the government, responding to pressure from the United States, has been raiding the coca producers. The plantations—I saw one on the banks of the Marañón—are now heavily defended. It is worth your life, these days, to stumble into the wrong sector of the eyebrow.
My experience in 1977 was somewhat happier. The Indian people, I found, took me into their homes and fed me eggs and the meat of guinea pigs they raise as a source of protein. They sat with me around a fire and offered their sugarcane beer. One man introduced me to his family and friends, and to their friends’ families until I was surrounded by hundreds of polite, curious people, anxious to see a real gringo. They wanted to hear me sing (poor fools), see me dance (they were disappointed), but my talentless audition was, finally, a roaring success. One by one people dropped off the homemade wooden benches and fell onto the dirt floor where they rolled about, men and women alike, all of them laughing helplessly. I have, I told myself at the time, this gift for comedy.
The Peru I visited a decade ago, I told Joe and Garry, was a land of mystery and hospitality and discovery. It had nothing to do with the filth and despair and astoundingly bad driving we were seeing along the Pan-American.
ABOUT TWO THAT AFTERNOON, in an agricultural valley, a truck driver began blasting his air horn at us. Garry let him pass and the driver pointed urgently toward the back of the Sierra. We stopped and didn’t have to examine the truck for leaks. Diesel was literally pouring out of the back. It was dripping thickly from both sides and out of the tailgate. The auxiliary tank, we discovered, had ruptured at a seam.
We pulled off the highway, into some tall grasses beside fields of fernlike young palms. An elderly woman, dressed in black, tended a flock of sheep. A dozen children, who seemed to have simply erupted out of the ground, watched us unload gear and curse the tank. Since the boxes were already out on the ground, the kids all got several milk shakes. They stood watching with big curious eyes above the straws in their mouths.
We had a full tank, ninety gallons, about seven hundred pounds of diesel, and it took an hour for it to drain. I was sitting in the shade, contemplating the future. The big tank fed into the factory tank. Okay. We would just have to use the thirty-five-gallon factory tank, buy some jerricans for extra diesel, and be careful about filling up frequently.
Garry, mindful of his sponsors, explained to Joe that the auxiliary tank was not GMC equipment. It was an after-market addition to the truck.
“One good thing,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about the pump shorting out anymore.”
Garry did not see this as a blessing. He was examining the welds, trying to find where the worst ruptures were, and he shouted at me to “go clean up the cab or something.” I didn’t like his tone of voice, and I didn’t like being ordered around in front of a reporter. No reason to lose my temper, though. I had the formula for dealing with this situation. Although I knew it would never happen, not now, not after the roto run below Lima, I envisioned myself slapping Garry Sowerby in Alaska. Or maybe I’d just knee him in the groin.
I DROVE THROUGH A HAZY SUNSET doing seventy-five on a new road over the desert. There was a fierce wind from the west that drove a sandstorm before it. The sand was heavy and the wind lifted it no more than a foot off the ground, but it swirled over the pavement in odd serpentine tongues that sometimes created dunes two or three feet high.
There was a small hut ahead, the first we had seen in this northern desert. Three big trucks were parked nearby, and, as we passed, a man and a woman stood in the doorway, kissing passionately. The western sky was a reddish bruise. The lovers were silhouetted in the warm light of a kerosene lantern.
“Cathouse,” I said.
But we didn’t stop.
We were not men.
We were roto.
TRUJILLO is an oasis town of 750,000 and, on this Sunday evening, everyone in the world was going to a party somewhere in Trujillo. There were trees lining the outlying highway, but no streetlights, so it was dark and dangerous. I was driving, following a truck with no taillights, going about twenty miles an hour. Young men on small motorcycles were screaming out of town, on their way, I supposed, to pick up their dates.
Joe Skorupa was charmed by the vitality of the people, their evident good humor, but wondered about my driving.
“You could,” he suggested, “probably pass this guy.”
I would have at any other time in my life.
“Too many people,” I said. There were all over the road, standing on the shoulder and chatting with friends, walking, yelling for rides. The people on the roadside were shadows under the trees, and any little miscalculation—a swerve to avoid a motorbike without a light—would send the five-ton Sierra crunching over some laughing innocent. I pictured a little girl in a rhinestone witch’s hat holding a wand that ended in a tin-foil star.
The irony of adventure driving is that it is the least adventurous driving anyone will ever do. There is absolutely no room for error.
I felt Joe was disappointed in my skills. Garry, on the other hand, was sleeping peacefully. I was doing the job.
There was a central plaza arranged around an immense traffic circle where delivery bicycles, motorcycles, overloaded pickups, and semis bound for Ecuador or Lima all whirled around to pounding Latin rhythms booming out of every portable sound system on the face of the earth. I took the circle twice, slowly, then guessed on the proper turnoff.
The road seemed to end in a pile of sand. Garry was awake, and a couple of flat-out rotos holding bottles of liquor shouted to us. They stumbled toward the truck, yelling and offering us drinks. Their faces were shiny with perspiration, and between the two of them they had enough teeth to fill a single human mouth. One man had large yellow eyes, like a pair of fried eggs.
“Let’s get out of here,” Garry said. We sensed that we were in gasoline-bandit city.
I asked another group on another corner for the Pan-American north, and their directions led to another dead end. I needed to back up, then pull forward in order to turn around, and now dozens of people surrounded the truck.
“Move,” Garry said. We were both very tense
.
Several more sets of directions given by several more friendly people, both drunk and sober, resulted in disappointment. Mostly we found ourselves on dirt side streets facing some adobe wall that featured a faded advertisement for Inca Kola. Directions, in South America, are not meant to be taken seriously.
Perhaps local people feel it is rude to simply say, “I don’t know.” It is possible they may concoct false directions out of a sense of hospitality rather than any desire to mislead. Or it may be a macho trait: how embarrassing to have to admit to a stranger that you do not know your way in your own hometown. Then again, it may be the Gonzalo Pizarro effect. It was almost two hundred years after the ill-fated Pizarro expedition until the Indians of the eyebrow felt the lash of the Spanish.
At any rate, in South America, it is always best to ask directions several times, then triangulate a route based on what appears to be the best information tendered. We stopped half a dozen times until we found the road north out of town.
Garry took the wheel. This was bandit country and he had the evasive driving skills. The road ran straight through the sand and darkness.
No lights, no traffic.…
And there they were, half a dozen men with guns, waving us over. They didn’t seem to be wearing uniforms. On the other hand—and these calculations were made in the space of about twenty seconds—there were two buildings on either side of the road and both were lit. It was close to the border with Ecuador and hence a good spot for a military or customs checkpoint.
“What do you think?” Garry asked.
“Military. I think.”
It was, in fact, a military checkpoint. The tallest of the men, the officer who seemed to be in charge, wore a khaki safari suit and a foot-long knife in a leather sheath on his belt. He had a Spanish face, a crew cut, and pockmarked skin. The men serving under him were mestizos and looked like teenagers. They wore the black silky T-shirts of the Peruvian military which are emblazoned with the motto HONOR, DISCIPLINE, LOYALTY. We were motioned out of the truck, and one of the teenagers held an automatic rifle at my neck. I could see that he had been trying, without much success, to grow a moustache. The safety on the rifle appeared to be off, and he had his finger on the trigger.
I smiled brilliantly, as if happy to see new friends and exchange stories. I thought: put your safety on, bozo.
Our papers were in order, and the soldiers lowered their guns, cautiously. We began handing out the flyers in Spanish, but the man with the knife simply dropped his on the ground, unread. It was a contemptuous gesture. He had the knife out of the sheath, and motioned at Garry to open the tailgate for a search.
The lights across the street came from a small bar that had apparently sprung up to serve the checkpoint. Several drunken men wandered over to watch the fun. Two of them held communal bottles of the fiery pale brandy called Pisco. They looked into the cab of the truck and muttered solemnly among themselves as Garry unlocked the camper shell. There was an anticipatory hush among the assembled drunks.
Garry fiddled with the twin padlocks, then pulled both doors open at once. A fetid smell of bad sour milk and diesel flooded out of the truck in a cloud that was almost visible. There was a loud murmuring among the drunks.
The officer thought about climbing into the back, looked at the diesel-smeared tailgate he’d have to kneel upon, regarded his spiffy safari suit, and pointed the knife at a box that, for once, did not contain milk shakes. Garry opened it for him. It was filled with cans of Argentine hashed beef.
“Bad food,” I told a soldier. “I wouldn’t feed Argentine hash to a dog.” Peruvian food was much better, I said. Especially the seafood. And a Pisco sour was the best drink in the world.
The teenaged soldiers were warming up a bit, and several of them came over to listen to me blather on about the virtues of Peru and Peruvians. Our trip would take us through thirteen countries. We would always remember Peru. It was so beautiful. Did they want to see some letters of recommendation from the Peruvian auto club? In Spanish? Look here where it says that our trip perfectly expresses the ideal of Pan-American unity. Hey, did anyone want to ride with us to Alaska? Huh? How about you?
Meanwhile, Garry was dealing with the officer who, having decided against a search of the reeking camper shell, now wanted us to drive the truck back behind the building. Garry looked at me. We didn’t like the idea of being pulled off the road, out of sight, where anything could happen. I motioned for Joe to follow me as I walked behind the truck. We didn’t want them to split us up.
The drunks followed in a merry band. I hated them.
In back there was a narrow pit dug into the ground and Garry, as instructed, drove the truck over it. The officer lowered himself under the truck, and Garry followed him down so no contraband could be planted. The pit, it seemed, wasn’t used much. It was filled, calf-deep, with garbage. Using a flashlight and flexible file, the officer poked around for ten minutes.
I was in full joke mode with the drunks and teenagers. What a pleasure it was to talk with such honorable and witty men. Would anyone like a lapel pin? This is a maple leaf; this one is a replica of the truck. Well, yes, the truck is very dirty now, so it’s hard to see the markings, and the pin isn’t exactly the same, but who would want a very dirty lapel pin? Ho ho, it was to laugh, such a joke of humor.
Oh, and had anyone ever drunk sweet milk from a box? Here, try a couple of these. Take a dozen for the wife and kids.
The officer came out of the pit and walked into the ramshackle checkpoint shack without a word. One of the teenagers followed him in, then came out a second later and said we could pass.
It had all taken an hour and had been a very bad search, a Psalm-91 stop all the way.
Joe Skorupa was impressed. “It was grim at first,” he said, “but by the time you left, they were all laughing.”
“What we try to do,” Garry said, “is sell them on the trip itself. Make them feel that they’re part of it, that they’re helping set the record. We’re dream merchants. And these guys were a hard sell.”
“Tim,” Joe said, “was going back and forth with this guy, and I don’t know Spanish, but all of a sudden he says, ‘You need to wear a jacket,’ in English. It sounded funny.”
“And you laughed out loud there,” I said, “which was good, because we want them to see us as funny, happy guys. I think I was trying to tell the guy what the weather was like on Tierra del Fuego, and I kept looking down and seeing that he had the safety off on his rifle. It affected my ability to speak Spanish.”
The road ahead was mostly gravel, but other roads, equally well traveled, led out into the black desert night where praying mantis–type oil rigs bobbed moronically. These distant rigs were illuminated with security lights and looked like ships afloat on a dark sea.
It was ambush country, according to the Lima papers. Garry wondered if the military might be in league with bandits. Stop us for an hour, let a bunch of civilians from the bar across the way case the truck, then delay us until the ambush party could get into position, probably under one of the washed-out bridges over a dry riverbed.
“They were drinking Pisco,” I said.
Garry had noticed. Pisco is expensive. Where would a desert drunk get the money to buy Pisco?
It was a long dark drive through Psalm-91 country.
BUS-PLUNGE
FOLLIES
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
October 5–8, 1987
THE BORDER with Ecuador was closed and we slept for six hours in a hotel at Tumbes, the most northerly Peruvian town. We were the first in line at the customs shed at Aguas Verde, a squalid, bustling border town with a bad reputation for thievery. A handsome man with curly blond hair saw the truck and introduced himself. Alejandro Peñaherrera, who worked with service and repairs for General Motors Ecuador, had been sent to meet us, help us through customs, and would escort us to the capital of Quito, where the truck would be serviced.
Aguas Verde was jammed with people
. There were makeshift wooden stands lining the street and people sold Capris vegetable oil, sunglasses, canned milk, and T-shirts. One man sold nothing but spoons of all sizes. An Indian woman presided over a pile of men’s jockey sorts, all of which had a banana stenciled over the fly. People sold watermelons, shoes, chickens, and guinea pigs.
Men wore sunglasses and baseball-type hats with HONDA or FIAT written on them, and they carried sacks of oranges on their backs. A fat man, very drunk at eight in the morning, pedaled a bicycle unsteadily through the throng of vendors and shoppers. His shirt was too short and his belly bulged over his pants. When he passed the church (Our Lady of Everlasting Customs?), he tried to cross himself, lost control of the bicycle, and crashed into an umbrella stand. There was much yelling and confusion.
The Peruvian customs building featured a large poster that read, SAY NO TO DRUGS, SAY YES TO LIFE. Below the poster, a cloud of flies was buzzing around a large burlap sack full of confiscated bananas. The Ecuadorian side had a poster of a young man taken through a series of about ten pictures. In the first, the man looks clean-cut and eager. He becomes sad. Then depressed. His hair gets longer. Then it gets messy and dirty. Finally he’s unwashed, there are great dark circles around his eyes, and it’s plain that his life is consigned to the scrap heap of society.
The caption read, DRUGS DESTROY YOUR MIND.
Garry and I stared at that last picture and said, in unison: “Roto.”
THE ECUADORIAN MAPS were different than the Peruvian ones. In 1942, after a short war, the Rio de Janeiro Protocol of Peace, Friendship, and Boundaries awarded Peru a fifty-mile stretch of land which consisted mostly of Amazon forest and certain areas of the eastern foothills of the Andes. One of Ecuador’s essential foreign policy objectives is to redraw the border and obtain possession of the Marañón River.