by Teresa Bruce
I’m in such a hurry that I yank my jeans up over still-wet, sticky thighs. I don’t even hear the splash. In my peripheral vision I spot a swarm of tilapia following my shiny silver watch as it sinks to the depths of Lago Yojoa. I would bawl, but then the fish shit would stream into my mouth. My heart stops as I remember the second piece of jewelry I shoved into my jeans for safekeeping: my wedding ring.
I’m scared to poke my fingers where the watch once was. I feel the metal rivet of the change pocket first, too studded and small. This can’t be happening. I dig around, my fingers clumsy and numb from the cold water. But finally I feel it, the thinnest ridge of everything-is-going-to-be-okay poking into my hip. I hold it there, pressed against my flesh, until my breathing returns to normal. I slide it onto the ring finger of my shaking left hand and clasp my fist against ever losing it again.
Someday a chef is going to slice a Honduran tilapia into filletts and discover an undigested Kenneth Cole watch. It may still tick, counting down the seconds and minutes of an overscheduled, stressed-out woman’s life. I haven’t seen Wipeout in three weeks. I don’t really have time for epiphanies but one seems to have caught up with me.
I am rushing through what should be the best year of my life, cramming the hours of every day with ambition and obligation. But it is my watch at the bottom of Lake Yojoa and not my wedding ring. If that isn’t a sign to slow down and reboot my priorities, then I don’t know what is.
I call Gary the minute I get back to the Intercontinental Hotel in San Pedro Sula, hair still crusty with fish poop but too desperate to hear his voice to shower first.
“You’ll never guess what happened,” he says, before I get a word in. “My dad found a 1968 Avion truck camper in the Milwaukee classifieds. He says it’s in pretty good shape and the guy only wants $1,200 for it.”
Without hesitation I tell him to send Joe a check and start looking for a truck big enough to handle it. We’ll need something dependable on the Pan-American Highway. As soon as this film is over we are going to find the camper of my childhood.
Chapter Five
THE JOURNAL
I’ve given notice at the agency, and it feels like I am balancing on a precipice. Or maybe the trip is an approaching avalanche. I will be unemployed for the first time since I was sixteen. My stomach muscles cramp with doubt, and in my dreams I am utterly incapable of controlling anything. Clearly, ditching a career plan requires a plan of its own.
I unwrap five packs of colored sticky notes and peel everything off the walls of Gary’s three-room office. We’ve been living here ever since selling my row house on Capitol Hill to an incoming congressional staffer.
Wipeout nervously paces around the boxes marked for storage, her nails clicking on unfamiliar hardwood floors. Her silky white fur is falling out in clumps, and her watery brown eyes stare up at me for answers. Gary and I have taken to whispering, late at night, as though she can overhear us debating the merits of every friend and relative who has offered to keep her until we come back.
But Wipeout’s arthritis is so bad she can’t jump into the backseat of the new four-wheel-drive, diesel-engine Ford F-350 we bought after Gary’s dad found the camper. She is almost sixteen years old, filled with cancerous lumps and bumps and steadily losing weight, but at seventy pounds still too cumbersome to lift. It takes both of us to coax her up a sturdy plastic ramp that slides between the seats; she has reached a state of anxiety that is soothed only by the comfort of having us both in sight at all times.
Everything but our nearness is about to change, and I am as nervous as Wipeout. I can’t imagine how life without our working partnership will work. I produce, Gary shoots: our interlocking parts fit so snugly you can hear the seal lock. Without that purpose, will we still be airtight? This trip isn’t a leave of absence; when we come back, nothing will be waiting. I’ve already hired the senior producer who will take over my job at the agency. Gary sold his camera to buy the new truck. When the trip is over we will have to reinvent ourselves, start over in a new city, make a new home, build new careers. We aren’t twenty-something backpackers; we have everything to lose if this goes wrong.
So many things could. We are newlyweds who will be forced to spend every day in the same vehicle, with no personal space to retreat into if it gets too stressful. What if Gary discovers I’m a better producer than I am an unemployed wife? What if I can’t handle a year without deadlines, assignments, and a steady paycheck? Everyone we tell about the trip professes to be wildly jealous. It sounds so spontaneous and artistic. Who hasn’t dreamed of throwing caution and logic to the wind and embarking on the ultimate road trip?
In all honesty, me. The slides in my father’s carousel have seared unsettling images into my memory. A huge, clunky camper created in the aftermath of a tragedy. The man who built it crouched beside the busted wheels of an old truck on the new Pan-American Highway. A skinny seven-year-old with choppy bangs and buck teeth standing beside a cherubic little sister. A mother with vacant, tired eyes.
“There isn’t a script to follow, Teresa,” Gary says when he finds his office transformed into a strategy room. “We don’t have to come up with a time line. We’ll take as long as we need to take, or at least until we run out of money. That’s the beauty of this.”
The thought of a life without alarm clocks and schedules thrills him, and he’s trying to make me think of this trip as a journey, not something to cross off a list of accomplishments. He loves to drive and can’t wait to leave behind congested city streets. For him this is a chance to exchange rush hours for the rush of hours and hours on the open road. But he’s wrong about me having no script to follow. I do have one. It belonged to my mother.
JANUARY 1, 1974—MEXICO
Took Dave’s wallet and all our money—told police. Went home. Some day
MARCH 29, 1974—COLOMBIA
Drove on bad road until we hit valley and got truck fixed. Camped by river
MAY 16, 1974—PERU
I was sick—back door trots. Got shot for cough, napped all day
My mother gave me her journal when she left for Nicaragua. It is a faded, pink, three-ring binder the size of a Harlequin romance. Every night for nearly a year, she documented what we ate, where we stopped, and who was sick. She also recorded sixty-one separate truck breakdowns along the Pan-American Highway. It is more like a ship’s log than a keepsake, and in it I find evidence of everything that could go wrong.
“Does she ever find a positive thing to say?” Gary asks when he thumbs through the delicate pages. “We should chuck this thing. It’s got to have bad karma.”
“Are you kidding? It’s perfect,” I answer. “I can cross-check all my lists against actual risks and proven mistakes.”
Under each mental picture of the journey that began when I was seven, I create a sticky-note storyboard of all the ways this trip will be different, better, safer. From the journal entry about my father’s stolen wallet I bullet-point our strategy: less reliance on cash (times have changed and there are ATMs everywhere), separate sets of credit cards in case either one of us is mugged, codes and passwords backed up on laptops and hard copies stashed with Gary’s parents, and a phone tree of embassy contact numbers taped to the case of a portable satellite phone—the kind favored by war correspondents.
“Should I start a column of sticky notes under ‘back door trots’?” Gary asks, still teasing me. But diarrhea was the least of it. My mother’s journal documents almost daily vomiting (mostly mine), chronic dental problems, broken bones, unexplained rashes, concussions from high-altitude blackouts, and worse.
FEBRUARY 5–11, 1974
Met local news publisher and enjoyed house facilities while there. 1st Teri sick, then I. Doctor said malaria?
I fill almost an entire sticky pad listing what will become our traveling pharmacy: prophylactic antibiotics, bandages, splints, gauze, syrup of ipecac, rubbing alcohol, laxatives, antidiarrheals, muscle relaxants, a year’s supply of birth control, antiseptic
creams, snake-bite kits, emergency iodine tablets, and expensive water bottles with microbial filters. Then I start on a list of medical tests and checkups to schedule before my company health insurance plan runs out.
“You do realize that most Latin American countries have doctors,” Gary reminds me. “They won’t turn you away. Nobody wants a gringo to die in their country.”
I keep writing notes to myself. Compare costs of emergency traveler’s insurance plans. Investigate helicopter evacuation policy. Gary raises a bushy eyebrow.
“What? I know a producer who had to get airlifted out of a country. It happens.”
In truth I am thinking of my mother and how lonely and scared she looks in all my father’s photographs. For her, the Pan-American Highway might as well have been a road to the moon. There was precious little any ordinary American knew of it back then; Latin America only made news when natural disasters struck or bloody coups erupted. This was the period when Moscow and Peking had more publicly acknowledged interest in Latin America than Washington did.
Word that Guatemala’s government was executing leftist challengers at children’s birthday parties did not make it to Banks, Oregon. Neither did the fact that El Salvador was in the beginning of two decades of bloody civil war, or that thousands of people died in the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende.
My mother prepared the best way she could, focusing on the needs she could imagine. I remember her filling Tupperware containers with oatmeal and peanut butter. She bought first-through third-grade books to homeschool Jenny and me along the way and took first aid classes, just in case. She sat in on some Spanish classes at the community college but dropped out when my father ridiculed her awkward pronunciation.
“I never did have his natural ear,” she says.
I scribble a new note, this one on the green pad denoting Gary’s to-dos: sign up for Berlitz course. Gary scratches it out and writes his own. Buy Spanish CDs and listen as we go.
Where I am obsessing over the dangers my parents faced on the original trip, Gary finds the journal’s descriptions of food more harrowing than stolen wallets and malaria. By the time we reached Ecuador, my mother was documenting what we ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it was dismal.
MAY 4TH: Oatmeal (L) banana sandwiches (D) toasted cheese sandwiches
MAY 5TH: Oatmeal and bread (L) bread and bananas (D) spaghetti
MAY 8TH: Pineapple, bread (L) bananas, leftover rice (D) spaghetti, bread, pop
“Is this considered camping food?” Gary asks. “Because you should know, my idea of camping is a bad Holiday Inn.”
“More like a combination of being broke and Mom not knowing what to do with anything from local produce markets.”
He picks up a stack of pink sticky notes. “Let’s call this color fuchsia. For food.”
He’s beginning to see the logic in my color-coded defense against feeling overwhelmed. Under the fuchsia food column he sticks reminders to pack cookbooks, a crème brûlée torch for blackening the skins of fresh peppers from markets, and a dish-drying rack that could double as a grilling surface for outdoor campfires.
“I thought you said you never camped?”
“I’m thinking of it as a mobile, backyard barbecue.”
The phone rings and we take a break while Alex interrogates his father about the new truck. I listen to one side of the conversation.
“Teresa’s dad had a piece-of-shit used truck that couldn’t handle the weight of the camper, and it broke down almost every day. I’m not planning on spending a year on the side of a road.”
There is a pause and Gary laughs. “We’ll see.” Alex wants the truck when we get back. Despite the banter, I know Gary aches with missing Alex, and this journey will lengthen the miles between them.
“Can’t Alex take a year off and come with us?” I say, only half-kidding. “There’s a kid bed in the camper. He’d fit if we just chop his legs off at the knees.”
Gary laughs but I know he’s wished it too. “If he was seven, like you were, that’d be one thing. But this is his moment. I could never give that back to him.” It is settled.
Chapter Six
THE DOG
Alex’s legs are safe, but there is still the issue of Wipeout. She was born in Mexico and I sneaked her into the United States illegally when she was a year old. She’s too big to sneak back. She has outlasted every job, every apartment, and every boyfriend in my life, but my standing in her world diminished when Gary joined our little pack. She lavishes on him a degree of adoration that would make a less balanced woman jealous.
Every so often I remind them both of the risks I’ve taken for her. There was the time in Mexico, when I was in my twenties, that I had to find a way to take her with me on a long-distance bus back to the border. I tried poking air holes in a duffle bag and singing the song that always soothes her—“How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—while I zippered her inside. Even when she stopped kicking and thrashing it was impossible to walk upright with sixty pounds biting into one shoulder. So I bought a bright-red leash for her and a white cane for me and pretended to be blind. Wipeout thought the cane was a stick I’d toss for her and bolted up the bus steps yanking me behind her. Even now, she can jerk my shoulder out of its socket if she sees a squirrel. It’s just that now her legs give out first. To take even a healthy dog on a yearlong road trip through Latin America is far from logical.
“Wipeout is too weak,” our friends say. “We’ll keep her until you get back.” This whole idea is crazy, they really mean.
“So this is what my parents went through,” I tell Gary. “Only they took even more flak. Instead of a sick old dog they were taking two little girls.”
I can’t bear to contemplate the absence of Wipeout. There is little likelihood she will hang on until the end of the Pan-American Highway, but I had to leave one family dog behind thirty years ago. Selfish though it may be, I cannot do it twice.
“Unwrap another stack of stick-its,” Gary says. “White, of course. For Wipeout.” She’s coming with us, he really means.
I am giddy with relief, and our celebration begins with tequila we saved from the honeymoon. The bed is already in storage so we tumble onto a futon on the ground, clothes fluttering down atop cardboard packing boxes. I don’t hear Wipeout clicking into the bedroom, but I feel her wet nose as she sniffs the edge of the futon.
“Get out of here, girl, we’re getting busy,” I say, nudging her with a knee.
She must think that we have lost our minds, wrestling on what to her looks like a dog bed. She plops herself down right behind Gary’s bare body, and we become three layers of a crescent moon howling with laughter.
“You better get used to it,” I tell him. “In a camper things are even cozier.”
Our final week in Washington, DC, passes in a blur of vet and consulate visits seeking visas for Wipeout to enter Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. That’s right: canine visas. I never knew there was such a thing, but not only do we have to pay a fee, in advance, for Wipeout to enter each country legally; we’re also supposed to know the exact dates of entry and exit.
“We’re driving, not booking a flight,” I sputter to the consulate official. “Can’t we leave the transit time blank?”
Even with my father’s meticulous maps I have no idea how long it will take to drive through each country.
“The whole point is not to have a schedule!” I can hear the tone of my own voice: pissy bordering on pleading. For the first time in my life I am trying not to commit to every detail in advance. I want to slow down and absorb what flew past me as a child.
But I have no idea how long Wipeout will live. I don’t dare let on that the canine in question needs pills to control her bladder, chews herself bloody if she’s left alone too long, and only makes it upstairs if Gary carries her. We may need all twelve visas or she might not make it through Mexico. So I pore throu
gh the dates in my mother’s journal, subtracting days lost because of truck breakdowns and sick kids and, under protest, fill in arrivals and departures for every country.
Back in Gary’s office, I let down my defenses. “They’re going to take her away from me and it’s all my fault.” I may have satisfied bureaucrats behind counters, but even a control-freak producer can’t predict the timing of a road trip as complicated as this one.
“That’s not going to happen,” Gary comforts me. “I have a plan.” He hands me an iron and the first of twelve canine visas. “Okay, babe, ease the steam under the edge of this foil stamp and it’ll come right off the original.”
My hands shake, but the steam button sends puffs of moisture into the gluey substrate between foil and document. The seal of official permission lifts right off.
I stand, sticky foil stars and disks attached to my thumbs while Gary scans the unsealed visas of a dozen countries into Photoshop. In a matter of minutes, he erases the dates I was forced to commit to and then prints out exact duplicates with everything filled in but the lines for entry and exit. With trembling hands, I reaffix each foil seal to its doctored original document.
“There!” Gary says when the last one is finished. “Just before we get to each country’s border we’ll fill in whatever date we want, and no one will be the wiser.”
Wipeout will begin her final road trip with a portfolio of forged documents, a scheme I assume will impress my father. Instead, over a crackling long-distance telephone connection, he tells me, “Some illiterate border aduanero is going to want a hell of a bribe to let that mutt through.”
My father’s tone gives him away; this isn’t about Wipeout. My parents are living forty miles off the coast of Nicaragua now, their plan to build the island dive resort mired in permissions waiting for appropriate payoffs. My father doesn’t know who will talk to lawyers in Spanish for him, who will wire him money when he runs out, who will forward his mail and shred his bills when I am gone. I have chosen Gary over him, to follow our dreams instead of his.