Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  Raffo asked Garry if there was anything he could do for us. He was wealthy and well connected in Buenos Aires. What he could do for us, Garry said, was figure out how we could put some pressure on the Costa Rican embassy. Raffo said he'd think about it. It might take only a single call from the right official.

  We called Raul Capuano of GM who said he'd try to have someone call the embassy in the morning.

  Garry had some papers coming from the Costa Rican embassy in Ottawa to his office in Moncton. They hadn't arrived before he left. He wasn't sure what they were. Perhaps they included the "in-transit" form. If not, he could get his visa service in Ottawa to go to the Costa Rican embassy early and see if they had the form. They could fax it to us and we could take it to the disagreeable Dr. Arnaja.

  Back at the hotel, Garry called Jane in Moncton. He asked her to check the mail to see if there was a letter from the Costa Rican embassy in Canada, which had been very helpful. Maybe they could call Dr. Arnaja.

  It seemed to me that the Costa Rican snafu was critical, but Garry was calmly taking care of other business. Jane should call a photographer named Rich Cox in California. Cox would be shooting us for Popular Mechanics magazine and would meet us in Tierra del Fuego at the start of the trip. "Tell him to bring some malaria pills down to us." Occasionally, we had heard, Nicaraguan borders are closed to those who can't prove they are taking the pills. Also, we had not heard from the Nicaraguan ministry of tourism. They had promised us a letter when we visited Managua, something to flash at the border.

  It was an hour-long business call. Garry hung up and said that he hated the telephone. "I'm used to Jane," he said. "And she's used to

  being called from anywhere, used to the work, used to me being frantic. But Lucy grabbed the phone. She said, 'Dad, I miss you.' "

  "You should have told her to go watch Zig Zag," I said.

  Garry would not be jollied out of his sudden funk.

  "Little voice from the top of the world." he said. "It broke my heart." Which, as I recalled, was just what Garry had said when Lucy hadn't wanted to talk to him in New York. The little girl could break his heart with a word.

  The next day we were up early, waiting for Jane's call. For want of anything useful to do, I tried to see if I could get the American embassy to help me out with Costa Rica. I was shuttled from one voice to another and finally fobbed off on a man who said he really didn't know what he could do for me at all.

  For contrast, and by way of making a point, Garry called Jacques Crete at the Canadian embassy Not only had we met with Crete on our last trip, but Garry had written him frequently with progress reports. Garry explained the Costa Rican problem Crete said he'd see what he could do.

  Ten minutes later Crete called back to say he'd talked to Dr. Arnaja at the Costa Rican embassy. The man was not very helpful, he said, but he had agreed to meet with us again

  "Which is why," Garry explained, "you need to make your contacts months ahead of time. This is why there is such a thing as reconnaissance "

  I called Andreas and had him make an appointment with Dr. Arnaja at one. Andreas called back to confirm the appointment. He said the doctor sounded pretty sour on the phone.

  Jane called at noon. The Costa Rican ambassador in Ottawa did not know anything at all about a specific in-transit form. It seemed to have been something the acting counsel had made up out of whole cloth for reasons that weren't at all obvious.

  The Canadian ambassador to Costa Rica had, however, written a letter to the minister of transportation in Costa Rica requesting his cooperation and assistance in this project. The minister had replied immediately and with grace. Costa Rica, his letter said, saw our trip as a way to promote tourism and inter-American friendship. Jane had a copy and would fax it down to the hotel immediately.

  At twelve-thirty, letter in hand, we took a cab to the Costa Rican embassy. Andreas met us there.

  We knocked on the acting consul's door. He opened it about twelve

  inches, muttered something about not being able to get any work done because of all the telephone calls that morning—here he shot us an accusing look—and asked for our passports and the carnet. We slipped the letter from Canada in along with the other documents.

  We sat in the lobby, which was the size of a walk-in closet. It was paneled with very dark brown wood, and one wall was a smoky mirror that you didn't want to look into because it distorted your features. Ten minutes later the consul opened the door and handed out Garry's passport along with the carnet and letter. He still had my passport but he seemed to be growing smaller inside his office.

  About twenty minutes later the door opened a few inches. There was a tiny gibbering gnome inside and he handed out my passport with a grunt. We examined it. Sure enough, there was a Costa Rican visa there on the page, along with two stamps and an official signature. It said that I could pass into Costa Rica by land provided I had documentation to leave. It was valid for thirty days, and there was a space for a date, but there was no date on it.

  "This could mean trouble at the border," Garry said. We looked at each other. "What's he going to do," Garry asked, "revoke it? He's committed himself. He can't revoke a visa because he forgot to date it."

  Andreas knocked on the door. There was a grunt from behind the great seal of Costa Rica. Andreas knocked again, somewhat louder.

  "This must be dated, could you do that, please," he said with a courtesy I found wondrously excessive.

  "Argghhh," the counsel screamed. In point of actual fact, he grunted sourly again, opened the door a crack, took the passport, and disappeared for five more minutes, at which time the door opened only wide enough for an arm to reach out with the passport. Now it was dated. With a grotesque and illegible scrawl.

  "What was wrong with that guy?" I wondered aloud.

  "He's a chanta, " Andreas said.

  "What's a chanta?" Garry asked.

  "A dickhead," I explained.

  "Guy's got the bad attitude," Garry said. "He can't be having very much fun."

  We said good-bye to Andreas, who wished us luck.

  The Nicaraguan embassy occupied an entire house and was located on a pleasant, tree-lined street. There was an iron gate leading up to the door. A woman answered the door and asked us to please come back at two-thirty. Garry and I took a walk. It was almost seventy degrees, the sun was shining brightly, and we were both in a good mood. The

  trees were glorious. In just one day leaves had virtually erupted on the elms. "When we left New York," Garry said, "it was the beginning of fall. The temperature was about the same, but the feeling was totally different."

  "I know," I said.

  We went back to the Nicaraguan embassy. There was a secretary sitting at a desk in front of large wooden doors. "Canadian?" she asked.

  She had been expecting us. They had spoken with the Canadian embassy and were happy to help. The American would not need a visa. Garry's passport was taken behind the wooden door. We should sit in a small room off to the side with Queen Anne chairs, a lopsided chandelier, a fireplace, and two intriguing portraits of Augusto Sandino. One was a filmy monochrome. The other was a poster that identified Sandino as "the General of the Army of Free Men and the Leader of the Anti-imperialist Revolution." I read this to Garry and he muttered, "Shit."

  Garry, I knew, had a problem with Nicaragua. He had hated it when we were there and, in our travels, referred to any hot, miserable place as "a real Nicaragua." I found it strange: for all practical purposes, Garry Sowerby was apolitical. I glanced up at the portraits and noticed that, in each one, Sandino seemed to have one bad eye. I wondered if he had been cross-eyed and thought I might look it up someday.

  There was a click and then the sound of classical music coming from two speakers. It was something melodically frenetic and slightly discordant, something with violins in rapid conflict that I couldn't identify, perhaps Bruckner. I wondered what it meant. Why here, under the portraits of Sandino? Presently, a voice came over the speaker
s and identified a Buenos Aires classical music station. An older woman who looked as if she might do a lot of mopping brought us two cups of coffee in flowered demitasse cups.

  A short time later a tall dark-haired woman in a sweater that looked Scandinavian came out to smile and hand Garry his passport.

  We walked a few blocks, feeling spring come in. "All our problems are solved," I told Garry "Nothing can go wrong now."

  "Don't say that," Garry said.

  We walked for a while under the new leaves, for the joy of it, then took a cab back to the hotel. We passed a grassy park in which young people were studying under the suddenly magnificent trees, either that or holding each other for the rapture of spring and their own youth and beauty.

  There was a sheaf of telexes and faxes for Garry at the hotel desk.

  Good news and bad news. The ship from Colombia that would take us around the Darien Gap was definitely booked for October 10. The bad news was that the documentation involved in getting the truck on the ship would take a day. That meant we should probably be at the port the night of Thursday, October 8. Which meant we should probably start a day earlier than planned. Which meant our schedule was suddenly jammed up. Which meant we had to check out of the hotel—right now—and get the truck 1,800 miles south, to the start of the drive. It would be a relatively easy three- to four-day warm-up drive to the end of the earth.

  We drove south through the traffic of Buenos Aires, passing middle-class neighborhoods that looked a bit like something you might see in the Sunset district of San Francisco: neat wood-frame houses and small yards with flowerbeds about to erupt into color.

  The roads wound about themselves—it was almost as difficult as getting out of London—and there were occasional hard knots of poverty: a square block of brick shacks, all perhaps twelve feet by twelve feet, hastily and haphazardly constructed, set cheek by jowl on a muddy plain. Through open doors I could see dirt floors and walls decorated with illustrations torn from magazines.

  Everywhere, there was graffiti spray-painted on whitewashed walls and roadside political billboards, elect a working man to work for you, advised one sign that featured a picture of a real bruiser in a blue work shirt with a noble look on his face. There were small signs, white letters on a blue background, informing the driver that, despite whatever he may have read in the newspaper, the malvinas [Falklands] belong to Argentina. Some of the graffiti I found entirely opaque:

  ENOUGH OF PAPER, NOW WE WORK FOR OUR CHILDREN.

  The traffic was brutal, even when we got onto Route Three out of the city. Though the weather was dry, the road itself was slick with the secretions of various vehicles. Trucks crept along at twenty-five and thirty miles an hour on a two-lane highway.

  The industrial section, infested by these creeping trucks, extended for what seemed to be a couple of hundred miles. The sunset on this splendid spring day was intense, consisting of flashes of crimson which muted down to rose, and pink streaked with bands of gold. The whole effect was magnified tenfold by a thick haze of industrial pollutants that hung in the air and took on the colors of the setting sun, so that, for just a moment, that which is ugly by definition partook of beauty.

  By eleven, five hours later, we were out of the metropolitan circle, out in the ranches of the pampas.

  We were standing there, Garry and I, beside the truck on an empty highway, relieving ourselves under unfamiliar stars. The night was moonless, black, and there were frogs in the irrigation ditches setting up an eager cacophony. The velvet night was full of amphibian mating calls—"take me, take me now"—and the sound of it was odd, a note struck on a large stringed instrument, or perhaps a padded mallet on a metal bar.

  "Sounds like marimbas," I said, but Garry didn't reply.

  "What?" I asked, and he didn't reply. "What?"

  "That telex about the boat in Colombia," Garry said.

  "Yeah?"

  "It said they had a container for the truck. It's a containerized ship, right"'

  "Right. Everything packed in metal crates."

  "Well, it said that they had reserved a twenty-foot container."

  "So?"

  "Truck's twenty-one feet long," Garry said.

  It was probably that little uncertainty as much as anything that kept us up, moving, driving until dawn, and then until dawn the next day. It would be much colder at the end of the world and I had been in Buenos Aires long enough to absorb a bit of its style, its mad tango of self-dramatization. The way I saw it, we were running backward in time, out from under spring: we were running directly into the howling heart of winter itself.

  ZIPPT'S DISEASE

  September 26-28, 1987 • Ushuaia, Argentina

  I

  t only seemed like winter over the rugged mountains north of Ushuaia, where eighteen-wheel trucks, unsuited to the narrow earthen track, lay on their sides in the snowbanks lining the side of the road. Jackknifed semis blocked the sparse traffic which consisted, for the most part, of other semis waiting their turn to take a spin through the ice and mud and snow. The big Scania trucks were taking a gamble on a quick plunge over deadly drop-offs so they could unload vegetables, then pick up a load of Sanyo television sets and Philips stereos manufactured in the most southern tax-abatement zone on the face of the earth.

  The people of Ushuaia live on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the Beagle Channel. Ushuaians take an inexplicable pride in the fact that, while they may look up and see the Andes every day, they are not, in fact, an Andean town. "We are situated," one proud resident told me on my last visit, "at the very base of the spine of the continent." I did not say that the metaphor seemed unfortunate. I like Ushuaia very much and the anatomical feature located at the base of the spine is an inappropriate appellation for this graceful little town at the tip of South America.

  The road over the last of the mountains into Ushuaia was lined with snow, but spring temperatures, during the day, rose to well above freezing, so that slush and mud made driving immoderately provocative. At twilight, our headlights shone off puddles the size of small ponds, and the ponds themselves took on the sunset color of the sky above, so that our truck threw yellow tracks across sheets of bloody pastel.

  I was driving, and after we shifted into four-wheel drive to skirt another defeated truck, we found ourselves alone on the road. It felt like a good time to push the Sierra a bit, to see how it would handle

  in mud and slush in an environment where a mistake could be highly unpleasant. Garry seemed fairly relaxed about this.

  Our rule was that backseat driving was allowed and indeed encouraged. If one of us felt that the other was taking chances, he should say so. The driver was obliged to desist. It was a promise we had made to each other.

  The truck took slushy corners on track, and it was difficult to get the back end to come around in a power slide.

  "Try the brakes," Garry said. "Get a feeling for performance characteristics in extreme conditions."

  We were cruising down a straight, flat road in the saddle between two peaks and there were no drop-offs to consider. I slammed into a full-panic stop, and the truck stopped dead in its tracks. It felt as steady and sure as if it were on rails.

  "Antilock brakes," I said.

  "Don't think I'll ever buy another vehicle without them," Garry said.

  "You want me to push it anymore?"

  "No. Take it easy."

  "I drive a lot of this kind of stuff in Montana," I said.

  "You have a pretty good sense of it."

  I had once owned a three-quarter-ton pickup, a Dodge Power Wagon, with full-time four-wheel drive. It got eight miles to the gallon—a real insult to the energy crisis—but it would motor right up the side of a cliff. "I know what I'm doing in a pickup," I said.

  "You're pretty good with it," Garry said.

  "Pretty good?"

  "Yeah."

  I thought about this for a time. Pretty good 9 In ice and snow and slush and mud in a truck? I'm damn good.
/>   "In what way," I asked, "would you suggest I could improve?" I felt aggrieved.

  "We don't want to get into arguments about driving," Garry said. "We haven't even started."

  I drove in silence. We were passing a huge mountain lake, Lake Fagnano. It was seventy miles long and surrounded by snow-covered peaks. The last of the sun glittered across the water in a long, glittering, golden track.

  "What it is," Garry said, "you're used to a three-quarter ton. This is a one ton, and we're carrying almost a thousand pounds of diesel. So

  it's heavier than your old truck. You have to drive further ahead than you do because with this weight, even with the brakes we got on her, she's not going to be able to stop as fast."

  "There's ruts in this road," I said. "Potholes that have lakes in them."

  "You're still driving too close. Look out further ahead. Believe me, you'll see the ruts and rocks and potholes. It's really tiring to drive close. Things seem to be coming at you faster. You have to make decisions faster. It wears you out."

  The sun had set behind the mountains, but there was still a last glimmer of silvery light in the sky. Another lake below the road—there was a sign that thoughtfully identified it as Hidden Lake—was shiny black below the pine trees that ringed the shore. We were surfing down a slope in the mud, and there was now a skim of ice forming on the surface of the pothole lakes.

  "Another thing," Garry said.

  "What?"

  "I'm not criticizing."

  "Tell me."

  "We have an extended cab, right?"

  "You mean this area directly behind us where we've been sleeping? Is that what you mean?"

  "The extended cab, yeah."

  "I can really see what you mean now, Garry," I said. "Why hell, I should have thought of this before. We have an extended cab. Affects the performance characteristics. Any moron could see that."