Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  So we left the friendly Argentine officials laughing and wearing new maple-leaf lapel pins in their uniforms.

  On the Chilean side, we refined the act a bit, then went back into one of the offices where a man sitting behind an old manual typewriter stamped the documents we'd need to enter Chile.

  Garry said that I would come to love that sound: the solid thud, thud, thud of the last few stamps on the last few documents.

  The road to the north was little more than a cruel joke. It was a dry scar scraped across a monotonous plain and sometime, perhaps years ago, gravel had been dumped into the scar and spread. Now that gravel was compacted and hard as concrete. Large tooth-rattling ruts ran across the road itself, at right angles to our direction of travel. This truck route from the mainland was even more punishing, if less dangerous, than the road over the mountains.

  We seldom saw any cars, and the semi-trucks we did see came in small convoys of three and four, fresh off the ferry across the Strait of Magellan. They came barreling down the road, this most important artery of commerce on the island, and showers of gravel accompanied them. In Tierra del Fuego, wise drivers protect their windscreens with chicken wire stretched across a frame that can be raised or lowered depending on the condition of the road.

  Garry was checking the rearview mirrors. It seemed that the camper shell on the back of the truck was undulating to the rhythm of the ruts.

  "We're going to lose that cap," he said. "It's going to start cracking. We can't take much more of this."

  It had always seemed to me that Garry was the star of this trip, the man who could drive any eventuality, and my job, as I saw it, was to keep his spirits high. Consequently, I said something about this being the worst and roughest road on the entire two-continent trip. The

  concept, as I presented it, was that if we could make it off Tierra del Fuego in one piece, everything else would fall into line.

  That was to be our goal for the next few hours: get off Tierra del Fuego in one piece. Garry grunted, preoccupied.

  A llamalike animal, a guanaco, stood in the road at the crest of a small hill with the dim sun behind him. The animal was pale-brown with a white belly. Unlike the llama and alpaca, guanaco are not domesticated. The animal's head was silver-gray. It stood sideways to our oncoming truck, then easily leapt a five-foot-high barbed-wire fence.

  This route into and out of Tierra del Fuego was the fastest and most direct route from the mainland. The ferry from Punta Arenas, Chile, costs twice as much, takes five times as long, and runs only once a day. If there had been trouble in the mountains, we could have missed the ferry to Punta Arenas and lost a day. Research, I thought, reconnaissance, smart thinking.

  We arrived at a place called Bahia Azul, Blue Bay, on the Strait of Magellan, at eleven-thirty in the morning. The bay, however, was not blue, like the Atlantic near San Sebastian. It was a chill roiled gray carrying high whitecaps. The road to the strait simply ended in a muddy path that ran down to the water at a shallow angle. The wind was fierce.

  The ferry was just pulling out when we arrived. Garry and I watched it leave with something less than good cheer. A schedule nailed to a wooden post said that the ferry would be back from the mainland in two hours. As we waited, several of the big Scania trucks rolled up behind us.

  We got out in the mud and chill to examine the truck. Garry said that the camper shell, hammered badly on the rough Fuegan roads, was pulling away from the bolts that held it to the bed of the truck. He didn't know if the shell would last and was talking about our options.

  GM officials in Santiago, Chile, had our schedule. They expected us at noon on October 1. We knew there was a GM plant in Santiago, and Garry thought they might be able to repair or replace the camper shell very quickly if we gave them a day or two's notice. There was, we knew, a telex at a hotel just north of us in Rio Gallegos. If the shell got any worse, we'd stop and contact GM Chile.

  "Every time," Garry muttered bitterly, "and I mean every time I modify a vehicle, the after-market stuff craps out on me."

  I looked at the camper shell. There were some small cracks around

  the bolts that held it to the cab. That was all. Garry was lying in the mud, under the truck, checking for fluid leaks. It didn't seem like that big a deal to me.

  We hadn't had any breakfast—nothing to eat for eight hours—but I couldn't find the camp stove we had bought in Ushuaia. It was buried under the gear we had thrown into the truck so haphazardly. I finally decided to try the new heating coil. It took forty minutes to heat enough water to make lukewarm macaroni and cheese. There was simply no way we would be able to use the coil to heat food on our trip.

  It occurred to me that we were embarking upon what was likely to be a long, involuntary diet. The food had been my responsibility, and I had failed. I dug through the mess in the camper shell and brought out several bottles of water, a box of beef jerky, and another box of milk shakes. I wondered if we could exist on dried beef and warm milk shakes. Probably not: we would starve to death long before we reached the first drive through McDonald's. Everything, in all directions, was dismal and gray.

  In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the strait that bears his name, and everywhere, as far as he could see, there were fires burning. Local Indians, who paddled the sea in canoelike vessels, no doubt watched the alien vessel in the kind of alarmed awe Japanese actors reserve for Godzilla. The fires were signals to others: "It's Godzilla."

  Off to my east, not far away, an oil-fire flare was burning in a pit in the ground. The fire looked feeble against the brown land and cloudy water. There were oil facilities on the other side as well and we could see another flare burning on the mainland. No pure-blooded Indians survive on Tierra del Fuego, and these oil flares were the only fires we ever saw on the island Magellan called the land of fire.

  Two hours later, the ferry coughed and spluttered up to shore. It was a small roll-on roll-off barge, which is to say, one end of the boat dropped down to form a ramp, like an amphibious landing device. It could take four large semi-trucks and several cars as well as a pickup or two. The ferry worked the narrowest section of the Strait of Magellan, called, locally, the First Narrows. Twenty minutes after departure, we landed on the mainland and drove ofT the ferry into Patagonia.

  The area around the mainland oil patch was littered with garbage. Fifteen miles later, we were back into the dull brown-under-gray color

  scheme of northern Tierra del Fuego. Off to my left, in a plain of sage, there were four rhea, large flightless birds, like ostriches. The birds measured about four feet high, and they were standing with four grazing guanaco. As we drove past, the guanaco ran off and the birds waddled along with them, keeping pace.

  I told Garry that in Africa, ostriches sometimes run in herds with zebras. He said something about getting rid of the camper shell and maybe using a canvas cover over a stock rack.

  Not far into the mainland we passed from Chile back into Argentina and worked on our act at customs. Respect, papers, passports, carnet, forms, jokes, lapel pins. We were delayed by a bus that had just gotten in ahead of us. I found myself behind a tall thin American fellow wearing jeans and a professorial white beard. He was a scientist, he said, and he had been studying a big hole in the atmosphere's ozone layer that seemed to be centered over Antarctica. I asked him if the hole was very big. "It's huge," he said. The man seemed genuinely alarmed and described the situation as a potential global disaster. I decided not to tell him that we had a problem with our camper shell and that the heating coil I just bought two days before didn't work very well at all.

  The road on the mainland was not much better than the one on the island. Garry fretted continually and without surcease about the camper shell. "We can," he said, "jettison the shell. Figure a different way to pack the spare tires, and put a plywood board over the bed of the truck."

  It had rained heavily the night before and the storm had softened the road a bit. After about fifty miles of somewhat less-punis
hing driving, Garry began talking about how long the shell might last. "We could get lucky, get it all the way to America," he said.

  Just outside the town of Rio Gallegos, I changed our first flat, while Garry tightened up the shock absorbers that had taken a bad beating over Tierra del Fuego. I don't know: maybe you don't tighten shock absorbers. All I know is that Garry went around the truck and fiddled with gadgets that I'm positive were shocks. Both of us were lying in the cold mud, working together.

  North of Rio Gallegos, we knew, the road was paved, straight and very fast. Garry checked the camper shell. It was his momentary opinion that the thing might hold if we could hit the pavement without much more damage.

  Rio Gallegos is a deep-water port, famous for its nearby colony of penguins and the fact that, in 1911, two famous outlaws on the lam

  from police in the United States successfully robbed the local bank. As we drove into town I wondered about that robbery. This part of Patagonia is infinitely, immensely, and criminally flat. You could see a man on horseback for about twenty miles. How did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ever make their escape?

  The night's rain in Rio Gallegos had been torrential. Wood-frame houses lined streets that ran with muddy water. Some citizens had dug earthen levees to protect their homes, and they had gotten the dirt from the streets, so there were little lakes in the residential section, along with ten-foot-high piles of dirt to skirt. We passed lines of snarled traffic, cars stranded in puddles three feet deep, and helpful civilian volunteers at every corner pointing in every direction and gesturing urgently.

  People stared at us oddly as we passed, and it occurred to me that both of us were filthy from working under the truck in the mud. Garry had caked dirt in his hair.

  Out of Rio Gallegos, we hit the paved two-lane highway, which was straight as an arrow. The compass was pegged on north, due north. I was driving and Garry was doing some calculating. We had come 330 miles from Ushuaia to Rio Gallegos and had averaged twenty-nine miles an hour. That included two borders, four separate sets of formalities, a two-hour wait for the ferry, and thirteen lost minutes at the start. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well, but Garry was obsessed.

  "If we lose the camper shell," he said, "and spend a day getting it fixed in Santiago, we'll miss the boat in Colombia. So . . ."

  We had decided, after listening to enough horror stories, not to drive at night in Colombia. But if we lost a day in Santiago, we could make it up in a couple of Colombian night drives, which, I suspected, would be genuine nail biters. This was not a happy prospect and I wondered where in the back of the truck our bulletproof vests were. I had already lost my combat knife. It was probably lying in the mud where I had changed the tire outside of Rio Gallegos.

  Psalm 91, Lord.

  Geologists argue about where Patagonia begins and ends. People on Tierra del Fuego, for instance, do not care to be called Patagonians. They are Fuegans. But there are some scientists who would include the monotonous plain of the northern part of the island in their definition of the great Patagonian desert. Geographers agree that the southern portion of Argentina, below the fertile pampas, is the largest desert in

  the Americas, with an area, by some definitions, of 260,000 square miles.

  The aboriginal inhabitants of the region were thought by Europeans to be surprisingly tall and well muscled. They wore their hair in long bushy mats, clothed themselves in fur against the wet and wind, and painted their faces in a way that terrified Europeans. Magellan named them Patagones, after Patagon, a dog-headed monster in a sixteenth-century Spanish romance.

  For a time, English pirates found hideaways in the coves off Patagonia. The Spanish attempted to found colonies to clear the coasts of the English pestilence. None of the settlements lasted for more than a few years. Some would-be settlers were driven off by the fierce Patagones who were, themselves, virtually wiped out by the newly independent Argentines in the wars of 1879 to 1883. The defeat of the Patagones opened up the pampas of the north to stock growing and agriculture. English, Welsh, and Scottish immigrants were attracted to Patagonia.

  Today the desert remains rural, and, except for oil works at the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, Patagonia lives on woolly profits derived from sheep. The portehos of Buenos Aires like to joke that the sheep of Patagonia are a special breed, clawed animals who grip the spare sandy soil so the howling winds won't send them spinning out into the Atlantic.

  The people of Patagonia live a hardscrabble life and seem, for the most part, to be boundlessly exuberant. These descendants of Welsh and English agriculturalists exhibit a kind of brash, likably unsophisticated frontier spirit generally associated with the American West.

  The government, in an effort to develop the overwhelmingly rural vastness of Patagonia, subsidizes flights to the various towns of the desert. A flight from Buenos Aires, two thousand miles south to Ushuaia, costs the equivalent of $150, round-trip. These flights are full of large men wearing cowboy boots and hats. They speak a slow, drawling kind of John Wayne Spanish, and smoke constantly during the flight, which makes five stops. At each airport, during the twenty-minute deplaning and boarding process, Argentine stewardesses attempt, without success, to stop the big men from leaving the plane.

  "No can do, little missy," they say, or Spanish words to that effect. There are footraces to be run on the tarmac. None of this jogging nonsense: these big men, some of them in their forties, run fifty-yard wind sprints in cowboy boots. The race ends with much shouting, a mock wrestling match, and a new challenge.

  The highway through the sage flats was a pleasure, and it was no trouble to hold at seventy-five miles an hour. The houses we saw, separated one from the other by 150 or 200 miles, were small, well tended, and brightly painted, like the ones on Tierra del Fuego. Occasionally we'd pass the failure of some grand scheme: a large two-story Victorian home with gables, abandoned, beaten dead-gray by the wind and the weather. The grasses of the desert are so sparse that a year or two of overgrazing results in pastures of sand. Small family farms, in contrast, survive.

  The small settlements we passed—Santa Cruz, for instance—announced themselves dozens of miles away with bits of cloth and paper impaled on the branches of the sandy sage. These wind-driven perimeters hinted at certain elemental hardships. Living in a place like Santa Cruz, I imagined, must be like working in space. Anything vulnerable to the wind would simply float away, never to be seen again.

  I thought about this for twenty or thirty miles and decided that I was wrong. You might see things again. You'd probably see them for years. The wind blows in Patagonia, but it does not always blow in the same direction. You could lose something, say a scarf, and have it go skittering out into the immensity of the surrounding desert. It might catch on the sage half a dozen miles away. Then, one day, just the right storm might lift it into the sky and it'd come screaming back through town at about forty miles an hour.

  "Wasn't that your old scarf, honey?"

  We crossed the Santa Cruz River, a large, wild, rushing body of water, running through a wide shallow valley filled with real trees. The water was a pale aquamarine, and though the valley looked fertile, there was no development anywhere, only flocks of geese as far as the eye could see.

  Garry was sitting next to me, studying the master plan and trying to calculate various times of arrival against our progress so far.

  I felt like talking. "You know these signs that say vado, and the ones that say baches?"

  "Means potholes," Garry said.

  "There's a difference, I think. It seems to me that when the sign says vado, there's a little roller-coaster dip in the road. Baches are potholes. Usually with water in 'em."

  "We could knock this thing out of alignment, break an axle in some of the baches. "

  "You don't see them but every hundred miles or so."

  "Watch out for the baches, " Garry said.

  "That's why I'm not using cruise control," I said, full of virtue. It could be done, but it woul
d be wrong.

  "You ever see that movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked.

  "Humphrey Bogart, John Huston?"

  "We don't need no steenking baches."

  "Steenking baches," Garry echoed.

  And then, because we had had less than three hours of sleep the night before; because we had survived 330 miles of exceptionally bad road; because we had worried about camper shells and shocks; because we had had one bad freeze-dried meal in the sixteen hours we had been driving; because the road was paved and fast; because the compass was pegged on due north; for all these reasons, we laughed and giggled like schoolgirls. Steenking baches. Ha.

  The sun was setting in the north, and we were driving directly into it. In the long slanting light, the expanse of flat brushy land took on a muted aureate radiance, like a golden sigh. The sky was still gray, covered over in cloud, but the northern sun broke through in places, so that long bright streaks, orangish red, spread over the horizon ahead. This far southern sunset took an extraordinarily long time to purple down into darkness.

  Every half hour or so we encountered a car or truck running south. Argentine drivers do not waste headlights on the dusk. I was driving with the lights on, just the way American gym coaches teach you to do in Drivers Ed. For reasons that remain opaque, this seemed to annoy drivers in the oncoming vehicles. The road was so flat and straight that you could see vehicles coming at you for miles. The drivers would flash their lights on and off, once. I'd flash mine—dim, bright, dim. A minute, or several, might pass before the other driver flashed again. And then, invariably, these drivers would wait until they were directly in front of our truck and then hit us with their bright lights, full on. A blinding flash in the dark of night as two vehicles roared by each other at about 150 miles an hour.