The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  “But you’ll miss some of the prettiest countries if you take that route,” he begins, then backs off as though offering a way of saving face. “Of course, we had two little girls; it was like having two extra passports to get us into places and out of situations.”

  The “situation” he’s referring to is the one when he refused to pay another bribe, and all eleven vehicles on our freighter ship got locked up in a customs-impound yard in Cartagena, Colombia. For three days we were prisoners behind a razor-wire-topped wall, not allowed to leave even for food or water.

  “But Pantera needs more cat food. Mommy says we’re almost out,” I remember telling my father. His response was far from comforting.

  “We might all be eating cat food before this is over.”

  Just before the third dusk, one couple finally agreed to pay the bribe, and the aduanero on duty gave them a stamped exit pass and signed the logbook with their vehicle’s license plate, make, model, and year: a 1963 red Volkswagen bus.

  I have closed my eyes and listened to my father tell this story countless times, waiting for the moment when he rubs his hands together with impish glee and interrupts himself with snorts of laughter.

  “So this couple drives away, parks their VW around the corner, and waits until the guards change shift. Then they waltz back into the compound, right past the night-duty watchman, and give us their pass.”

  In the space where my father was supposed to enter our vehicle’s year, make, and model, he wrote “1963 red Volkswagen bus”—to match the information on the one legitimate pass. Then he drove around the corner, left the truck running, and sneaked back into the lot to give the pass to the next vehicle in line. Eleven 1963 red Volkswagen buses left the compound that night.

  “The guard on duty was a young kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, and he obviously couldn’t read,” my father explains. “I don’t know what ever happened to that kid. He probably wound up in the salt mines or got beheaded when they found out the next morning.”

  By then we were a hundred miles away, after bribing an off-duty ferry to shuttle all eleven vehicles across the bay in the dead of night. The group split up and went in different directions. My father picked due north, and we drove day and night without stopping.

  The stone in the shoe pestering our decision is that following my father’s route through Colombia to Venezuela will place more than just me in danger. There is Alex to consider. I have no right to transfer the panic I felt at seven to my husband’s son. This whole trip is about finding the camper, saying good-bye to John. There’s no way in hell I want Alex to have to do the same for us. I think of my trusting, solid Wisconsin in-laws: Angie and Joe are too old to put through this. There is my own family, too. My grandmother is valiantly trying to master the Internet to keep up with our progress.

  “Can’t you fly home for Christmas?” Nellie Mae asks after one of our e-mail updates. “Just so I can wrap my arms around you for a moment.” She has waved good-bye too many times.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  WHAT REALLY MATTERS

  This is what circles back to me. It would be much cheaper to ship the Avion from Panama to Colombia, but there is a ferry leaving for Ecuador the next day. The freight will cost us $1,500—in cash—and the plane for us to get to South America another $1,000. But adding up the numbers somehow frees me. Our safety—our lives—is worth more than $2,500.

  “We can give this money to a travel agent, or we can hand it over to some cocaine commando who carjacks us in the jungle,” Gary says as I plunk down a credit card to buy our plane tickets out of Panama City. “Either way, we may never see the Avion again.”

  I am still thinking of my family’s narrow escape through Colombia when Gary and I touch down at Bogotá International Airport en route to Ecuador. Our goal is to make it to the port of Manta to meet the camper arriving by sea. If we are physically present at the unloading, we’ll clear customs at the same time as all the other cargo on the roll-on, roll-off freighter, presumably without being locked inside an impound yard for three days. If the beautiful Avion beats us to Ecuador and waits, conspicuously, on an empty dock, the chances of history repeating itself are higher.

  I am rereading my mother’s journal when the pilot announces that we are leaving Colombian airspace, about to cross the equator. We are flying over more than just a physical milestone. On the first trip we crossed the equator on what would have been the second anniversary of my brother’s death, but there is not a word mentioned of it in the journal.

  APRIL 24TH, 1974

  Hot, tired and dirty. Found stream and took baths. Thunder and lightning storm. Dave had to move truck in middle of night as stream rose fast.

  I am thinking of a grave, more than four thousand miles away, promising that John John’s love and laughter would live forever. Somewhere on this massive, enigmatic continent is my chance to make good on that promise.

  IT TOOK MY PARENTS THIRTY-FIVE DAYS TO REACH ECUADOR, MOSTLY ON dirt roads over the high mountain passes of the Northern Andes. It takes Gary and me about twenty-three hours. Still, it is the longest period of time we’ve been separated from the Avion since we drove it out of Gary’s parents’ driveway in Wisconsin. The plane’s cabin feels claustrophobic. I am a turtle without my shell, cold and vulnerable. Gary can’t just press the accelerator of the Ford F-350 and put distance between the present and the past.

  We land in Quito and fly on to the coastal hub of Guayaquil to sign our bill of lading. The port where our home-on-wheels awaits, Manta, is farther up the coast. We taxi to a long-distance terminal for a four-hour bus ride through the steamy twilight. I am fidgety and nervous. We have to go through a metal detector, and the driver’s helper collects cell phones from every passenger and locks them in a safe behind his seat. My unease grows. This collective phone confiscation seems foreboding, and once we are rolling along I ask the driver about it.

  “Es así que un ladrón no puede llamar a su compadres,” he explains. The drill goes something like this: a thief with a cell phone, riding the bus as a passenger, reaches out to partners waiting along the route. He gives them a heads-up when the bus is a few minutes away, and the partners stage an accident to make the driver stop. In jump his compadres. Out come the guns. Off go all the wallets of the passengers.

  “Pero no se preocupe,” the driver tells me. Not to worry, it doesn’t happen every time.

  The scenery is just as bleak. Where Panama was lush and green, coastal Ecuador is arid and brown. Piles of litter along the roads and under houses offer the only color visible through the fingerprint-smudged window of the bus. I plaster my forehead to the cool glass, searching for any signs of life and beauty straddling the highway.

  Two-story houses made of mud or bamboo, or sometimes both, lean in toward the bus as though too weary to collapse. Through open windows I see women inside, peering at the faces flying past. We are inches, yet worlds, apart—the bus passengers wrapped in light sweaters against an artificial chill, the villagers barely enduring the heat. Grown men wear only briefs; naked children play in dry ditches.

  I can’t hear myself think; the passengers inside the bus are glued to a gruesome Hollywood action movie dubbed into earsplitting Spanish. We pick the hotel nearest the Manta bus station and collapse on a sagging, stained, and sheetless mattress. I would trade it in a heartbeat for the moldy futon inside the Avion.

  I wake early after a fitful night’s sleep and spend an hour organizing a manila folder with the papers required to collect our truck and camper. I’ll need all the gumption I can muster. There is nothing more ridiculous than approaching the gates of a major commercial port in South America, on foot, and asking if you can go inside and retrieve your life.

  “Estoy aquí para aceptar entrega de mi casa rodante.” I announce my intention to claim the camper, holding out our bill of lading. We are sweating in front of a locked gate with no names to drop or bribes to offer. This is a place ruled by cranes and forklifts and men wearing badges a
nd hardhats. I have no such legitimacy and have never felt more incompetent or irrelevant in my adult life. Seven-year-old me would burst into tears and pitch a fit to get my house back. But thirty-seven-year-old me waving my manila folder is as effective as chasing a Guatemalan earthquake with a broomstick.

  For something like $300 I could hire a broker, and the Avion would be released in the customary fashion. Lots of stamps, photocopies for ten different files, here’s a pen to sign on the dotted line, no se aceptan tarjetas de credito. But $300 is the equivalent of one week’s budget, and I feel compelled to at least attempt to beat the system before capitulating.

  I ask a man in a khaki uniform where I’d find the customs office. He points to a side building, and in its air-conditioned hallways we meet the aduanera: a large woman with silver hair that still holds the stiff tubular shape of plastic rollers. She is in the midst of celebrating her own going-away party.

  “We’re doomed,” Gary says, but I can’t back down.

  I decide to capitalize on the general good cheer and join the line of people waiting to congratulate her. When it is my turn, I ceremoniously give her a copy of a magazine with a travel piece Gary and I did about Mexico.

  “Estoy escribiendo un libro acerca de Ecuador.” I shamelessly claim to be a guidebook writer. “¿Puede usted ayudarnos?” Can she recommend a way for me to retrieve our vehicle and continue on our journey?

  “¿Tiene ustedes un carnet?” she asks as she thumbs through the article and compliments Gary on his photographs. I open my file, and as soon as she sees the navy blue ATA carnet cover she calls over a man in a tight brown business suit.

  Then, in perfect English, she says, “Good luck, say wonderful things about Ecuador, and let this man take care of everything.”

  I feel invincible and vindicated. “No 1963 Volkswagen bus ruse for us,” I brag to Gary as the aduanera’s assistant takes our folder and walks us out into the hallway.

  Out of earshot of the aduanera, the man in the tight brown suit tells us, “Vuelta sobre dos horas, con one hundred dólares en efectivo, y todos esperarán.” We have two hours to gather a hundred dollars in cash, and our truck and camper will be waiting.

  My pride plummets to the place in my stomach that knew it had been too easy. The official doesn’t have to say a word; he is holding our passports, carnet, and the title to our truck in his hands. This is beyond any roadside shakedown, in a different league than common traffic-cop corruption. Our roles are suddenly reversed, and Gary puts his arm around my shoulders and steers me, seething, to the exit.

  “But we vowed,” I sputter, “never to cave to these bastards again.”

  “Look at it this way: you still saved us two hundred bucks,” he tries to placate me. “We’re ahead of the game, and nobody’s chasing us with guns.”

  There is a dingy beach with rentable umbrellas next to the port of Manta, so we kill the requisite two hours fully dressed, downing beers and eating fresh ceviche among crowds of scantily clad sunbathers and souvenir vendors. When we return, with the bribe, our carnet is perfectly perforated, our passports are duly stamped, and a signed letter from the aduanera granting us passage through Ecuador is stapled to the front.

  A customs agent accompanies us through the port’s front gate. Parked on a flat, sizzling expanse of asphalt are one hundred identical, new GM compact cars and one 1968 shiny Avion camper. It is a giant among toys. The equatorial sun glints off its silver roof like the refraction from a diamond.

  I understand in this moment that there is no way I should have expected to drive it away without redistributing some of the privilege and power it represents. A bribe to our eyes is simply delayed compensation to others. Gary checks the truck cab, bed, and camper for damage and finds nothing dented or missing except a pair of sunglasses he left on the dashboard back in Panama.

  “Restores my faith,” he says, and grateful relief lifts my spirits. We are on the same page again.

  Gary and I drive out of the port of Manta, Ecuador, wedged among a convoy of cattle trucks. They are loaded down with tuna the size of great white sharks—black dorsal fins thrusting between the wooden slats of the trailers like daggers, inches from our windshield. Don’t let your guard down, they are warning. Creatures far more magnificent than the two of us have been hooked and dragged into South America.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ECUADOR

  On a map’s legend, we are driving through the slice of Ecuador where thin red lines signifying roads connecting the coastal wetlands to the Andes Mountains. What it does not indicate is how to get from sea level to six thousand feet in a reasonable amount of time.

  The temperature plunges from thick nineties to the thinnest of sixties before we discover the secret to South American mountain driving: the Law of the Third Lane. It is invoked when an impatient vehicle attempts to pass a slow-moving vehicle on a solid white line. If the vehicle approaching from the opposite direction is smaller than the one attempting the pass, it obligingly moves over to the shoulder of its lane. The slow-moving vehicle being passed hugs the right side of its lane, thereby creating a narrow passage through the middle: the third lane. What we learn just as quickly is that the law is absolutely, unforgivingly Darwinian.

  If the approaching vehicle is bigger than the vehicle attempting the pass, the driver of the latter nods his head and slips back into his place to wait for a more appropriate time. Occasionally an overloaded semitruck schools Gary in this unwritten law, but the combined mass of the Avion and the Ford F-350 is infrequently challenged, and our first day’s drive in South America feels like a victory lap.

  Until we get to the part where the highway disintegrates, just south of Quito. There is no advance warning to prepare for the shock of loose gravel and deep ruts after spongy-fresh asphalt. The settlement at the top of this particular peak in the Andes is a crossroad of construction and chaos. We arrive at dinnertime, and Indians with food carts are selling chunks of fried meat, marinated in exhaust fumes for no extra charge.

  At one point there are nine lanes of vehicles, if you count the carts interspersed with traffic. Unlike a “normal” nine-lane highway—where presumably four lanes are grouped together in one direction, separated from five lanes grouped together in the opposite direction—this is a mix-and-match pattern. We are driving through a gravel loom with no idea whether we are the weft or the warp.

  “The training wheels are off,” Gary mutters. “We’re in another continent now.”

  There is no going back; we literally can’t turn around and drive home even if we wanted to. Everything will be different from this point forward: the languages, the food, and especially the climate. We are headed for an ancient Andean market town called Saquisilí that is so high in elevation that the sun blisters even the cheeks and noses of the locals. It sears Gary’s uncovered head and my unshaded eyes, and I feel as if we are on another planet, one unprotected by an atmosphere.

  We’ve been in countless Latin American street markets on this trip, but here there are no cell phones, televisions, or even portable radios entertaining the vendors or their customers. The most modern piece of technology for sale is a battery-operated toothbrush, and we only discover that because we squeeze into a circle of poncho-covered people watching a dental-hygiene demonstration. I am standing in a time warp, seven years old again and marveling in amazement.

  The entire market is utterly efficient in a centuries-old sort of way. Nothing is worthless and everything is salvaged. It is organized in seven separate plazas—all the sewing notions here, all the sugars and spices there, all the hardware one block over. Between these plazas are curbside restaurants selling whole roasted guinea pigs, cattle-hoof-and-blood-sausage stews, and sweet steamed corn cakes.

  I’ve never seen so many chickens for sale in one place; we could buy them alive or slaughtered, still feathered or plucked. Some are still screeching with fight while others are quietly resigned to their fate. Women stand in parallel lines holding out burlap feed bags f
illed with thrashing birds. Interested buyers make their way down the center, peeking into the bags and pulling out chickens by the neck to examine them more closely. Buyers and sellers alike wear felt porkpie hats with peacock feathers, neon-dyed wool shawls, and tiers of skirts over thick, sagging stockings. The whole interaction resembles a line dance with constantly changing partners and patterns.

  Fat and furry guinea pigs, called cuy, squirm in straw baskets instead of bags. Customers pluck them out and pass them around by the backs of their necks—their little arms and legs stiffly extended like those of toy piggy banks. It is the same position in which they are ultimately impaled on a spit and rotated over open fires. They are displayed in front of the shops that sell them, crisp and golden, their mouths agape in silenced screams.

  My conversion to carnivore is more tenuous with every squirming, screeching, or skewered animal I see. We stock up on fresh fruits and vegetables and head for what the guidebook calls the Quilotoa Circuit. The route isn’t highlighted on my father’s maps; the truck’s brakes were so fragile by this point in Ecuador that he opted to stick to the Pan-American Highway.

  I am ready for a dose of exploration, eager to chart a new course in this new continent. But determining just what constitutes the circuit and how to navigate around it requires language skills I do not possess. Getting directions in English is out of the question, but often so is Spanish, and I speak not a word of Quechua. I have to resort to basic sign language and pantomime to get from one village to the next.

  When we reach a group of villagers huddled around a fork in the road, they never agree on which way is best. So a kind of dance ensues: toothless men with walking sticks flailing their free arms in every direction, turning and leaning and bending for emphasis; and me following their movements like a clumsy student at a ballroom-dance studio.