Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  My room had a TV and I watched CNN for a while. Bork would not be confirmed for the Supreme Court, the Minnesota Twins had won the American League pennant, there was a hurricane approaching Florida. I lay there in bed and the same news kept happening: Bork, Twins, hurricane.

  Garry called from his room, which was next to mine.

  “Wouldn’t it be terrible,” he said, “to be in jail?”

  Bork, Twins, hurricane, Bork, Twins …

  Our rooms were on the third floor. Across the street was a three-story pink apartment building badly in need of paint. There were no windows in the building: balconies, which could be closed off by a curtain, opened up into a combination kitchen and living room. I could see women cooking dinner and men sitting shirtless on the balconies, drinking beer. The walls of the building were covered with graffiti: CHANGE NOW, the words read, and ENOUGH!

  I assumed that these messages had reference to General Manuel Noriega, head of the Panamanian Defense Forces, the man who ran the country.

  Just outside my room, sitting on the sill of the hallway window, were two men in their thirties wearing white polo shirts with alligators on them. They had been there all day, sitting beside the kind of white suitcase used to carry a computer. The suitcase was open, and some sort of electronic listening gear was arranged to pick up conversations from the “change now” apartments. The men were sitting out in the open, in a public hallway, and didn’t seem to care who saw them.

  Sure, we listen in on the conversations of private citizens. So what?

  IT WAS A HOLIDAY, and there wouldn’t even be a riot. Riots only happen on workdays. This is a rule.

  On our last trip to Panama, there had been the electric threat of riots in the streets. The middle class wanted badly to get rid of Noriega who they saw as increasingly bad for business. The fact that he had had political opponents murdered and dismembered did not endear him to the people I met, and his reputation as a drug profiteer was an embarrassment.

  “He makes fifty thousand dollars a year as head of the Defense Forces,” one executive told me. We were having lunch at an exclusive club overlooking the Pacific. “So how come he owns at least three houses worth a million dollars each?”

  The executive had picked us up at our hotel in an expensive four-wheel-drive vehicle. He apologized for being late, but he felt there would be a riot that afternoon—perhaps the government would fall—and he thought that it would be wise to take his money out of the bank. Just in case. The cash was stashed in the back of the vehicle, in a large leather suitcase.

  As we drove to the club, past the row of banks, I saw hundreds of people standing in line to make similar withdrawals. Workers were putting plywood boards over the plate-glass windows of the banks in preparation for the afternoon’s riot.

  Did the executive expect to participate?

  Sure. He’d stand behind barricades and wave a white flag, the symbol of opposition. He’d pound pots and pans like everyone else. That is, if a riot developed.

  Were there a lot of wealthy executives rioting in the street?

  Yes.

  That afternoon, there had been a heavy tropical downpour and the riot was postponed. It was to erupt several days later, after I left. There had been a sense, then, that the general could not survive.

  Now, two months later, the opposition seemed dispirited. Noriega was too cunning, too clever. He was entrenched.

  FOR WANT OF ANYTHING BETTER to do, Garry and I went to the hotel restaurant for an early dinner. It had been an excruciating afternoon.

  “This,” Garry said, “is the worst day of my life.”

  We discussed the possibility of going out. There were any number of enterprising nightclubs all over the city. On our last trip, we had been to an art deco bar where women on stage, dressed in crossed bandoliers and little else, did a close-order drill with toy rifles to the music of the “Colonel Bogey March.” All the customers in the place were men in suits who seemed to consider the drill the apogee of classy eroticism. Forever afterward, whenever I wanted to make Garry laugh, all I had to do was whistle the opening bars to the “Colonel Bogie March.”

  Which is what I did at dinner. Da-da, da da da dat dat dada.

  “We can’t,” Garry said.

  “I know.”

  “I can’t stand this,” Garry said. He was actually suffering.

  Which is the final irony of the adventure-driving business: on a down day, it is wise to sit in the hotel room, alone—Bork, Twins, hurricane—on the off chance that you could get into some kind of unexpected trouble just walking around. The essence of our adventure was to avoid adventure at all costs.

  Garry called from his room.

  “I just threw up,” he said.

  ON THE MOUNTAIN

  OF DEATH

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  October 13–14, 1987

  THE PHONES in Panama City worked just fine. You could dial an international call from the hotel room. At five-thirty the next morning, Garry was speaking to Jane in Moncton. Could she please get in touch with the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica? Find out if there was any word from Honduras? The director-general of the Institute of Tourism there, Melissa Valenzuela-Treffot, had promised us a letter of recommendation to smooth our passage through customs. It had been three months since we talked to her. Where was the letter?

  We were waiting on another letter from Mayda Denueda, the director of international promotion for the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism, called Intourismo. (Yes, the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism.) Another woman, Chistita Caldera, who worked for Intourismo, had made a vague promise to meet us at the southern border of that country. Could that be confirmed?

  Jane had been working on these matters but there had been no one at the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica yesterday. It had been a national holiday there as well: Columbus Day.

  One other thing: Jane said that GMC expected us in Dallas at nine next Monday morning for a press conference. The public-relations firm organizing the event was adamant. If there were a bunch of reporters waiting for us and we didn’t arrive on time, or at all, it would look very bad indeed. Our absence could be blamed on the truck and not on the fact that, for instance, we were enjoying a few carefree days in some Central American jail. Or that we had been shot and were hiding in the jungle, bleeding and without food.

  No, the public-relations firm’s thought was that our absence at the press conference might be attributed to mechanical failings in the Sierra. “In its first real-world test,” the nightmare AP wire copy might read, “a GMC Sierra driven by a team seeking a world speed record on the Pan-American Highway failed to appear as scheduled today in Dallas. Spokesmen for the automotive giant could not explain why the Sierra, newly redesigned at a cost of 2.8 billion dollars, could not be present at the press conference that had been scheduled for almost a week. ‘We don’t know where the truck is,’ one obviously bitter executive said, ‘but one of the drivers has kids, and we know where they are.’ ”

  Jane was being pressured: could we promise, absolutely, to be in Dallas six days from now?

  Well, let’s see: all we had to do was endure an unspecified amount of time in Panama City’s document hell getting the truck out of a locked metal box in the port. Once on the road, we had to whip through six borders and twelve sets of formalities. One of those borders—the one between Nicaragua and Honduras—was a war zone.

  The public-relations firm wanted a definite yes or no, today.

  Hey, no problem. We’d be there, nine Monday morning, sharp.

  Jane said she’d call the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica and tell them we’d be there sometime in the middle of the night. Garry said he would call her back from the hotel once the truck had cleared customs.

  LUIS PAZ CÁRDENAS, the director of Industrial Equipment and Motors in Panama, took us on our tour of document hell in Panama. He was a calm, dignified man who expected to retire in nine months. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary
on the dashboard of his car, and he drove slowly, carefully, to the various buildings housing various officials who needed to stamp, initial, and restamp our documents. Luis did everything slowly and carefully: there was not a germ of Zippy’s disease in the man and he may have been the most cheerfully efficient individual we met on the whole trip.

  The document that we had to have attesting to our good character? Could we have that now, on the spot?

  Ahh, no, never, señor. It was an important and complex document that generally took two days to validate.

  Two days?

  With the help of Luis, we got the document in two hours.

  “You know,” Luis told us as we drove through Panama City at about fifteen miles an hour, “I once went to Japan on business. I had never been out of Panama, not even to the United States. I arrived in Tokyo on a Sunday morning, and my Japanese associates were supposed to pick me up that afternoon.

  “I wanted to go to Mass. I looked in the phone book in my hotel room and found something that looked like a Catholic church. Then I checked the address against a subway map of the city. I took the subway, then asked a policeman to direct me to the church. I used sign language. I folded my hands in prayer, and the policeman thought I was looking for a temple, so I made the sign of the cross. He understood that. I asked how long it would take to walk there. I made a walking motion with my fingers and pointed to my watch. The policeman took my arm and indicated a fifteen-minute segment on the face of my watch.

  “When the Japanese picked me up at the hotel that afternoon, they were amazed that I had traveled halfway across the city, gone to Mass, and gotten back to the hotel without any help at all. That was the one big foreign adventure of my life.”

  He paused and said, “Of course, it’s nothing like what you’re doing.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s exactly like what we’re doing.”

  “Anyway,” Luis said, “I understand what it means to have someone help you in a foreign country.”

  WITH THE SEEMINGLY UNHURRIED HELP of Luis, we cleared customs and assembled a Russian novel’s worth of paperwork in the hours between six in the morning and noon. Six hours to write War and Peace.

  Back at the hotel there was good news from Moncton. Chistita Caldera would be waiting for us at the southern border of Nicaragua. The letters from Nicaragua and Honduras had arrived at the Canadian embassy in San José, Costa Rica.

  Garry said that it looked like we’d arrive at the embassy in Costa Rica sometime between midnight and four in the morning. How would we pick up the letter? Jane had thought of that. There was a night guard at the embassy gate. He would have the documents in hand.

  WE PULLED OUT of the port and I stopped at a large North American-style supermarket to buy more bottled water. Then we drove over the bridge across the Panama Canal and headed for the border, 220 miles to the north.

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

  “Part two.”

  * * *

  PANAMA, for all its trouble, is not a dirt-poor country. Along with Costa Rica, it shares one of the highest standards of living in Central America. This was reflected in the roads, which were straight, well graded, and very fast. Panama’s population is comparatively small and there was very little traffic, which was good for us because it was now one in the afternoon and our information was that the border closed at five. Either that or eight. No one knew for sure. It seemed a good idea to get there before five. If the border was closed and we had to stay overnight, we’d lose our escort through Nicaraguan customs. Chistita would be waiting for us there at eight the next morning.

  Our information was that customs formalities at the southern border of Nicaragua could take up to ten hours. Some people had waited two days to enter the country. Others had simply been turned back with no explanation. We needed Chistita and there was no way to contact her at the border. Telephones in Nicaragua most often don’t work.

  Garry pushed the Sierra to eighty and eighty-five. He was sweating profusely, flushed with heat and concentration. The road rose over some low green mountains and a cooling rain began to fall. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees, and the air was thick with the fragrance of tropical grasses and flowers. There was a roadside shrine to some forgotten bus plunge, but the drop below was only a few hundred feet. If the road through the Darien Gap were ever completed, Colombians would view this shrine as a tourist attraction: the world’s shallowest, most laughable bus plunge.

  The grasses alongside the road were knee- and thigh-high. Rocky spires, spaced at odd intervals, rose several hundred feet above the lower, more rounded green hillsides. The ridges above us held trees that grew in groves of twenty or thirty along the drainages. The trees had thin trunks and they only branched out at the top, like parasols.

  Russell Chatham, the great landscape painter, once said that painting such land was like painting nudes. He would, I thought, love the mountains of Panama. From a distance, the hillsides seemed smooth, like rich green velvet, and the rounded rolling shapes were explicitly erotic. Trees only grew in the folds and pocketed groins of these mountains.

  We dropped out of the mountains and a stupendous rainbow formed behind us. Wet pavement ahead steamed in the sudden sun. A roadside billboard informed us that SAN JUAN BEER IS FOR MEN. Garry slowed for a small town that a large sign identified as COCA-COLA. Further study showed that, under the corporate logo, in letters only a quarter as high, there was another name: SAN LORENZO.

  Panamanians—the white population, the black, the mestizo—are enterprising people. Every mountain village, it seemed, was either a Pepsi or a Coke town. I envisioned hardworking salesmen dealing with shrewd village officials. Say there were three Pepsi towns in a row; the Coke salesman is going to have to cut the next village in line a very good deal. Some towns, the bigger ones, were both Coke and Pepsi towns.

  In the large northern town of David we asked a policeman when the border closed. Five, he said. We were thirty miles from the border. Garry pushed it hard and we arrived at 4:50.

  The formalities took until well after five, but people still seemed to be passing. Okay. But maybe what people meant was that the Costa Rican border, across the way, closed at five. This uncertainty made the usual stamping and initialing process infuriating. The last soldier was very young and it was clearly his first day on the job. He wanted to do everything right and had to fill out a short form, then sign his name to it. He drew every letter, one at a time, concentrating fiercely and biting his lip. It was physically painful to watch him.

  He handed us the completed form and said we should take it to another official in a building a quarter of a mile back into Panama. That gentleman, an efficient older man, said the document was in order. We took it back to the soldier. He stared at it for some time, turning it this way and that. His face was crumpled in cheerless concentration and he was squinting in the manner of a man staring into a very bright light. Would we take it back one more time and get an informal note from the older man? Just to be sure that everything had been done correctly?

  Oh hell, sure.

  The older man said that no such note was necessary and that we should tell the young soldier to stop being such a blockhead and let us through. Everything was in order. He did not want to see us again, he said.

  The soldier still wasn’t sure. We argued for fifteen minutes and were interrupted now and again by other people who rolled through the border with no trouble at all.

  “Let’s just go,” I told Garry.

  We got into the truck and drove very slowly past the guardstand where the soldier stood. He yelled something and we smiled happily. “Thank you,” we called back, “thanks very much. Thank you for your help.…”

  THE COSTA RICAN border was open. A crowd of young children gathered around us at the parking lot fronting the customs building. They were not beggars, but reasonably polite, rambunctious children curious about foreigners. When the word got out on the kid hotline that we were giving out lapel pins
, dozens more of the children materialized. We were mobbed and Garry blew up.

  “No more!” he shouted in Spanish and pushed his way into the customs building.

  It was the first time I had ever seen Garry lose his temper with any of the children who constantly surrounded us whenever we stopped. True, he had just spent four tense hours driving at top speed in what we had assumed was a make-or-break run for the border. But we had endured some tough drives in South America, and Garry was just never short with children. Never.

  He was sweating out of proportion to the heat, and his skin was flushed. There was something wrong. Something, I thought, that had to do with Nicaragua. Garry had always hated Nicaragua.

  AS BORDERS GO, Costa Rica was almost pleasant. All the officials were young, most of them no more than thirty years old, and they dressed like students. In one room, dozens of officials crowded around a black-and-white television set: it had just been announced that Costa Rican president Oscar Arias would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Arias and five other Central American leaders had signed a peace plan two months ago. It called for regional cease-fire, amnesty, an end to foreign support for insurgents, and government dialogues with the armed opposition.

  Arias, at forty-five, was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency in Costa Rica. A lawyer and economist, with degrees from the University of Essex and the London School of Economics, Arias pointed out that in six years of armed strife, the region’s trade had declined from about a billion dollars a year to $400 million. There had been a corresponding decline in investments. Not only would peace save lives, Arias seemed to be saying, it was also good for business.

  The Arias plan was well received. On the television, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega was saying that he was willing to meet with the contras fighting his government.

  Before we got the final stamp, we were treated to the televised comments of Ronald Reagan. President Arias, Reagan said, was a world leader of great stature who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan did not say that he approved of the Arias plan, but that detail was lost on the Costa Rican customs officials who broke into cheers at various times during the broadcast.