The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  Gary laughs from the safety of the side-view mirror. “Mariamalia was right. I’ll never forget your ridiculous dances.”

  The houses strewn between these mountains are dismal and defeated—stranded in dirt yards, dotted with litter and pecking chickens. Even though they are surrounded by felled forests, they are made of cement blocks and left unpainted, except for graphic political endorsements that banner-wrap their dimpled grey walls. The tin roofs have almost no slant, so as to minimize the gap between metal and cement at the peak, and the walls are less than six feet high. The people peering from them seldom wave or smile; old women wag their fingers when they see Gary’s camera.

  He is not tempted to shoot anyway; to document this poverty without some compelling reason would be like buying souvenirs in a ghetto.

  “I would rather be a missionary than a tourist here,” he mutters. “Even if it’s only lies, I’d still have something to offer.”

  We camp along the side of the road, and Gary pries dead bugs from a new continent out of the truck’s grill. We’re at 10,099 feet, but the camper’s thermometer isn’t working, leaving blank spaces in his sketchbook records. The next morning there is a thin crust of ice on the carpet down the center of the Avion. The cobblestone roads of the Quilotoa Circuit have aggravated the cracks in the aging water tank, and nearly half of the tank’s contents soaked into the carpet during the night.

  We are days from any sort of pavement, and the weight of the remaining water sloshing around in the damaged tank will hasten its ultimate demise. I drain our precious supply of water while Gary cuts a plastic milk jug into flat sections and uses contact cement to stick them over the crack like patches.

  “I hope this holds,” he says. “If not, we can’t wash dishes or use the toilet or shower for the rest of the trip.”

  We both know it could be worse. By this point in Ecuador, the Jeep was deep into my mother’s catalog of sixty-one catastrophic breakdowns.

  MAY 7TH, 1974

  Fixed brakes and radiator. Bugged all afternoon by kids. Drove on and stopped for bread. The truck wouldn’t start. Battery dead. Night in shop. Terrible noises all night. Dave sick.

  My gut is holding up and our Ford F-350 is blissfully reliable, but our thirty-five-year-old Avion is struggling to survive. If we ever do find my father’s handmade camper in Bolivia, we may well need to salvage parts from its skeleton.

  It seems like years ago that the Avion felt like an albatross, strung uselessly around our necks in Central America when overnighting in hotels would have been so much easier. Now our camper is the only vestige of familiarity in a bleak new world. It is a fortress of comfort and warmth compared to even the sturdiest of homes and hostels we pass. I would cover it in a million Band-Aids if that’s what it took to hold it together. It goes wherever we go; abandoning it is unthinkable.

  The nearest town where we might be able to replenish our supply of contact cement is called Chugchilán, and in its plaza a woman is cooking meat-and-potato stew for workers coming in from the surrounding fields. She wants her daughters to meet the two sunburned foreigners. Blanca Mariana is sixteen and Adriana is twelve, and they speak just enough Spanish to giggle at mine. They have glowing red cheeks and glossy black hair pulled so precisely over their ears and behind their necks that their heads look like delicately painted brown eggs.

  Each girl is hunched over, carrying a burlap bag lumpy with potatoes. They keep the bags from dragging on the ground by strapping them to their bodies with tangerine-colored shawls—like beauty-queen sashes for hunchbacks. I can’t tell how tall the girls are because if they stand up straight the potatoes will tumble into the dirt.

  I ask Adriana how far they carry the potatoes, and she can measure distance only by the hours. They leave for the fields while it is still dark and they are returning only now, when the sun is setting. I ask if Gary can take their picture and they agree.

  “¿Puede mi padre verlo?” Adriana wants a copy of the photograph to show her father. Gary is shooting black-and-white film; we’ll have to find a lab and process it when we reach the next major city.

  “Claro.” I tell her I’ll mail her a print in a few weeks. Then I ask where to send it. “¿Cuál es su dirección?”

  The girls stare at me and offer up awkward smiles. They have never sent nor received a letter; they have no idea what an address is.

  For a moment I can’t think of what to say, how to explain. But then I realize I don’t have to; they are teaching me. These girls don’t need an address to know where and who they are. They have a home. They are home. I am the nomad searching for one from long ago.

  Suddenly this quest doesn’t seem so illogical. Everything that rooted me disappeared when my little brother died. Tragedy compelled my parents to run away from home, but for me the camper became home. And that home is abandoned somewhere in Bolivia without an address or anything to document what it meant to me.

  I will find a way to mail these girls their portraits, even if the envelope simply lists the names Adriana and Blanca Mariana and the town where their mother sells potato stew. And it may take hundreds of fork-in-the-road direction dances and the Law of the Third Lane to pass the obstacles in my path, but I will search for the camper until I find it.

  Chapter Thirty

  THE ANNIVERSARY

  The road out of Chugchilán the next morning is punishing, requiring four-wheel drive and all the good luck charms I can fit on the rearview-mirror necklace. Evil-eye amulets and Navajo dream catchers replace the possibility of tow trucks or garages. The last time we drove along a road this grueling, the drive ended with shots fired into the emptiness.

  Today we pass only one rusting passenger bus in the four hours it takes to drive just twenty miles. We inch along so slowly I can inspect every detail of the panoramic views from the comfort of the passenger seat. Footpaths lead to what look like huts thatched in long, unwashed blonde hair. Stretching to each one of these forlorn abodes is a thin black ribbon of electricity.

  We climb to twelve thousand feet, and the hair huts and electricity ribbons vanish. Gary turns up the truck’s heat to ease the cramping cold. If not for the jarring potholes, he would fall asleep at the wheel. I wipe the windows free of fog. At nearly thirteen thousand feet the llamas look filthy, the cows miserable, and the sheep too tired to move out of the road.

  Thin thinking, we drive around them. The dirt on either side is no worse than the road itself. Intermittently, one side of the two-lane road is paved. So all buses drive on that side regardless of their direction or destination. Evidence of collision is strewn throughout the stubble of the surrounding fields: an axle skewered in the dirt here, a shattered windshield there.

  Gary’s hands are clenched around the steering wheel; he is struggling to stay focused. When we are so high that there are no more llamas to stare at, we marvel at the emptiness. I begin to fashion a new vocabulary for the Ecuadorian Andes made up of words like impressive, striking, desolate, and melancholy.

  That’s as close to beauty as I can truthfully come. I can’t stretch out straight; my body curls and cramps from the cold. My head throbs, my lungs flutter, and my toes feel like tiny blue potatoes at the bottom of my muddy boots. Most of all I am craving a hot bath. Which is why my half-frozen finger is stabbing at a tiny dot on my father’s map of Ecuador, trying to point out a town called Baños.

  We begin a descent from one world into another, and the day’s drive passes in a blur of incongruities. At eleven thousand feet, natives trudge on foot while their twice-as-tall pack llamas float past the camper at window height. At nine thousand feet, kids wearing blue jeans wash their soccer balls in the grey runoff of drainage pipes. At seven thousand, sidewalk butchers with bloodied cleavers separate hooves from legs of dangling hog carcasses.

  At six thousand feet I start to see signposts for Baños, and for the first time since entering South America, we pay five dollars to park the camper inside the gates of a hotel compound. There is sleep deep enough to block
out dreams, and then there is sleep so deep you aren’t sure you’ve awakened the next morning. It isn’t the altitude. Gary’s journal notes six thousand feet and a balmy sixty-seven degrees. But the sky seems reluctant to let sunlight pierce through a hazy blanket.

  Gary checks his watch. We’ve slept until nearly ten, and yet neither one of us feels relinquished by the clutches of night. While he inspects the camper’s wounded water tank for more cracks, I open the screened windows. The air that rushes inside is sulfurous, somehow more alive than before. That’s when we hear the first rumble.

  The sound starts at our feet, as if the earth underneath the truck were moaning. It rises through the camper, resonant and omnipresent, like how I imagine a miles-long wave would sound to a creature of the deepest sea.

  “Another earthquake?” Gary suggests. But nothing is rattling or rolling around, like it did in Guatemala, and the ground seems steady. So do my nerves.

  “It must be the volcano.”

  Neither one of us has any idea how to pronounce the name we see above Baños on our crumpled map: Volcán Tungurahua. Leaning out from the camper’s door we can’t even see it. We have managed to pick a camp spot directly under the flanks of an active volcano. We are so close there is no horizon to measure its level, no tree line to gauge its height, no perspective from which to see where it starts and ends. What we need is some distance from this rumbling mountain. And caffeine.

  “It’s a little disingenuous to name this place Baños,” Gary grumbles as we walk into what looks like a tourist town thirty years past its prime. “It should be called Volcaños or Eruptos—to give you a hint of what you’re getting into.”

  Over mugs of tree-sap-thick coffee I consult a smattering of official brochures and guidebooks. Apparently the last time Tungurahua actually erupted was in 1918, but eighty years later two foreign mountain climbers got burned by exploding gases at the caldera. The whole town was evacuated, and it was months before the locals were allowed back in. By then, not even Lonely Planet could entice visitors.

  It is still a bulging, unpredictable threat, and if it chooses to spew itself down the slopes, our tin-panel home-on-wheels will melt like a welder took a blowtorch to it. But the engineering marvel of thermal hot springs piped into communal swimming pools is too enticing to resist. The main pipe-fed pool looks like a submerged skateboarding rink, filled with squealing kids and old ladies dog paddling in circles to prevent the water from touching their flowery bathing caps. I shake my head to dismiss a wandering photographer offering steamy Polaroid portraits and find a quiet corner with underwater steps to lean against. I inhale the aroma rising from the mineral-rich water and examine toes that, after two days at much higher altitude, look more like prunes than potatoes. Gary finds it considerably less relaxing.

  “That’s not mine,” he says, peeling a long strand of black hair from his forearm.

  Washing it off in the communal, coed, thermal showers brings even more intimate encounters. A little girl, eyes squeezed shut against stinging shampoo, clings to my right thigh and wails, mistaking me for her mother. She could have been my little sister, thirty years ago.

  What rushes back isn’t homesickness—the Avion is home now—but something more like the memory of a life I borrowed once. In that life, today is Thanksgiving. Our friends and families are sitting down to turkey dinner and pumpkin pie, but here, three thousand miles due south, we are eating purple-potato curry and preparing for another night in the shadows of an active volcano.

  This time, when the rumbling starts, I am too jumpy to stay flat on my back, listening to the eruptions from the confines of our bed.

  “If it blows, it’s not like the Avion can save us,” I tell Gary.

  “Agreed,” he answers. “I’m not partial to tin tombs anyway.”

  We bundle up and drag our blanket outside, to spread atop the growling ground. Outside the Avion, unencumbered by man-made surfaces to absorb the sound, we are one with it. Each rumble rattles through my rib cage. A thousand jetliners queueing up to land could not approach the tone and depth of the seismic booms beneath our feet.

  It is humbling to stretch our fragile bodies out on earth so restless and tensile. The ground quivers like a stretched-tight trampoline, reacting to unseen forces that could project us and every other living thing high into the night sky. It might be the blood racing through my veins, but I am literally quivering, too.

  “Happy anniversary,” Gary says, pulling me closer to him.

  I stiffen, stunned and horrified. How could I have forgotten a date this important? I have written no verse, cooked no special meal, worn no sexy lingerie to mark the occasion. I haven’t even properly bathed; my unbrushed hair still stinks of sulfur. I check my ring finger; a woman like this could only dream she’s married.

  But it’s there, thin and snug against my skin. And so is the man who put it there. I can let go of my inner lectures, doubts, and insecurities. He doesn’t need romantic reminders or rituals, just me.

  “Pretty intense place to celebrate, right?” Gary says. “I could never have imagined this before marrying you.”

  I am listening to the comforting tick of his heartbeat when I hear the gasp of escaping gases. We both sit up to witness the black night above Tungurahua licked by tongues of fiery orange. I cling to Gary’s hand, not out of fear but to the urgent need for contact, for grounding. If tonight is meant to change everything, I am ready.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  CATS AND DOGS

  Ours is the only vehicle waiting to cross the dismal frontera between southern Ecuador and Peru. There is no obvious reason for the delay. It isn’t near lunchtime. No migrants are being strip-searched. So I have a queasy feeling in my stomach when border officials with guns slung over their shoulders ask me, not Gary, to step inside a shabby customs building. I get out of the cab, unlock the box under Wipeout’s seat, and take the satellite phone with me.

  Gary looks confused; he’s the driver, the male through whom all shakedowns normally pass. “It’s not like you’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free number programmed in speed dial,” he tells me. He wants to come with me, but one of us has to stay with the truck.

  “I’ll use it as a prop,” I say. “Maybe they’ll think I’m a reporter.”

  The customs building looks more like a hut the closer I get, and inside it is clammy and dark. There is only one electrical outlet in the wall. From it stretches one cord powering a portable heater and another leading to a beat-up Japanese boom box.

  “Que significan las palabras ‘gotta’ y ‘whoa, whoa’?” an Ecuadorian border guard in his early thirties wants to know.

  “Y ‘playing for keeps’ tambien,” the Peruvian aduanero chimes in. “De ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’”

  It turns out they are not about to strap me to a chair and demand all my cash to enter their country. They are just Bon Jovi fans excited to come across an American who can help them translate the liner notes of a stack of pirated CDs. We drive away with windows rolled down, singing our good-byes to the border.

  “I’m a cowboy,” I belt out from the passenger side. The aduaneros twirl imaginary lassos over their heads, and on a steel horse we ride into our second South American country.

  However bleak and dreary parts of Ecuador are, they are lovely compared to northwestern Peru. The soil is baked to a dull yellow, and whatever grass still clings to the surface looks sunburned to an ashen grey. The sky has no lift and so closely matches the charred grass that there is no discernible horizon. One hundred and fifty miles pass without a single tree.

  Gary glances over at a photograph I am clutching on my lap. It shows my father’s camper, pulled over to the side of the road, facing a landscape of desert sand dunes. There are no mile markers or signposts, no houses, shops, or even people as references.

  “Are you sure your father even took that photo in Peru?” he asks.

  Diesel fuel is more expensive than we’ve budgeted, we’re running low on propane, and this photograph me
ans nothing to him. It has come to mean everything to me, and I don’t know how to begin to explain. The loneliness I see in it, for one thing. Until my father stopped to take this picture, we had been traveling in a convoy with other travelers headed for Lima. But somewhere in the desert of northwestern Peru, I made him turn our camper around, and I want to find that spot again.

  MAY 9TH, 1974

  We accidentally left the cat behind. So we had to go back to get Pantera.

  Gary is astonished. My father voluntarily backtracked to rescue a cat. “You two girls must have howled like you were getting stuck with forks.”

  I remember searching for brutal hours over an unforgiving road. My mother’s journal strips it down, like testimony of yet another trial.

  Hit some bumps, frame broke. Fixed frame

  Our own camper is rattling and shifting above our heads, sliding too far right in the truck’s bed to be stable. Gary pulls over and we walk to the front to check. It looks like a two-headed monster, the truck veering slightly right as if to hug the center line, the Avion aiming at an angle to the left, straining to go its own way. It will take both of us to ratchet it back into place. We’ve tried to prevent this from happening by boosting the camper up on blocks of wood as if it were a wobbly table with uneven legs. But it is as dubious a fix as my father’s welded wheel covers.

  The Avion is chained from both sides to the frame of the truck. Maneuvering the camper back to center involves a physicality never demanded in Gary’s former life. He has to grab one section of chain with both hands while squatting horizontally against the side of the truck, like he’s rappelling down a short cliff. I have smaller hands and less strength, so my job is to wedge scraps of wood between camper and truck bed without leaving fingers behind. Our ability to work as a team has never been more essential or miscommunication so potentially disastrous. In the Sechura Desert, one chain link at a time, we coax the beast into balance.