Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  In full dark, some drivers favored parking lights. There was no coherent local custom. No matter what I did, what courtesy I tried to employ—dims, parking lights, anything at all but complete darkness— the Argentine drivers fired their brights at about twenty feet.

  Garry read the master plan under a specially installed passenger-side map light on a flexible gooseneck. I asked him what he thought I should do about the Battle of the Brights.

  "Drive safe," he said.

  "There's nothing I can do. They give me the brights every time."

  "So?"

  "I'm going to nail the next guy."

  "Good," Garry said reasonably. "Blind the sucker. He'll lose control, crash right into us, and you'll win. Lie here bleeding in the sand thinking about how macho you are. Real good thinking."

  "You're right," I said.

  "Remember at the embassy in Buenos Aires," Garry said. "Who was it that said that Juan Fangio was the worst thing that ever happened to the Argentine road system?" Fangio, who was born in Buenos Aires, dominated automobile competition in the 1950s, winning sixteen world championship Grand Prixes. We had been told that every male Argentine driver believes he is Juan Fangio.

  "Just ignore the Fangios," Garry said.

  I told him that I would attempt to err on the side of safety at all times.

  "Remember that waiter at the Canal Beagle?" Garry asked. I understood that he wanted to take my mind off the continuing Battle of the Brights before I became entirely obsessed.

  "Zippy 9 "

  "Yeah. I thought we had a bad case of Zippy's disease this morning. Did everything real fast. Got it all wrong."

  There was a pause. "When I was a kid," Garry said, "I had this teddy bear named Zippy. Larry, my twin brother, had the same bear, but my older brother, Bruce, threw a pillow at it or something. Took the head right off of Larry's bear. So his teddy bear was named Headless."

  We discussed our route for a bit—damn! another driver, another flash of the brights—and Garry asked me how I felt. I told him I thought I was good for several more hours. He excused himself, crawled back onto the bench seat in the extended cab, arranged the pillow under his head, and said that he was going to try to get a bit of sleep.

  "What's the rule about sleep?" he asked.

  "The rule is," I said, "if you think you're tired, you are."

  "So wake me if you feel tired."

  "Absolutely."

  Some Juan Fangio, pushing ninety in a Peugeot, gave me a taste of his brights.

  I covered another fifty miles before Garry said, "Headless and Zippy." I realized that he was thinking about his own children.

  "Did I ever tell you about this thing Lucy does?" he asked. He

  yawned hugely and his voice sounded foggy. "She comes galloping into my office, she's got a mop for a horse, and she's wearing a little cowboy hat. Little scraped knees, and she's making the mop rear up like the Lone Ranger." Garry yawned again. "She's done this about four times," he said, "and it breaks me up every time."

  There was a brief silence and when I glanced back, Garry was dead asleep.

  We had a bank of driving lights mounted on the front of the truck— one-hundred-watt high beams, Halogen foglights—and they were controlled by a series of toggle switches on a console below the radio. We had bright lights on either side of the truck for security and for night work. There were high beams on the back of the truck as well, for the same reasons. All were controlled by separate toggles. I practiced with them for a while on the empty highway, flicking the index, middle, ring, and little finger in sequence—boom, boom, boomboomboom—so that the night exploded in all directions.

  An hour later, when I saw a pair of parking lights hurtling toward me, I was ready. I checked the extended cab. Garry was snoring lightly. The car was less than half a mile away. My fingers tingled at the toggles.

  We closed to twenty feet and drew simultaneously.

  Die, Fangio.

  I had him outgunned. Boom, boom: high beams and Halogens, both at once. I could see two dark heads in the passing car. The night blazed with painful brilliance. They were beaten, fried, and I imagined I could see both their skulls behind the skin, as if in an X ray.

  No mercy: as they passed, I hit the sidelights, and then nailed them in the rear high beams.

  In the side mirror I saw the car weave across the center line, then right itself. I heard, in my mind's ear, the driver ask his passenger, "What was that?"

  And the imaginary reply, uttered softly, in humble terror: "It must have been an angel of the Lord."

  I felt I was beginning to master the local customs.

  BEYOND THE HOUSE OF PORK

  September 30-October 2, 1987

  G

  Iarry woke up about midnight. He made himself a cup of instant coffee using the heating coil and bottled water. The coil was made for boiling eight ounces of water at a time and it did that quite nicely, but gave up entirely when confronted by quarts. We would, out of relentless necessity, live on coffee, beef jerky, and milk shakes.

  Garry needed two cups of coffee and twenty minutes to wake up. He took the wheel, and I sat up for a while in the passenger seat. It was my duty, before I retired, to note driving conditions on a yellow pad. I was also to mark our route on the current map with a dark marking pencil. This information went on the clipboard that was stuck low on the driver's side windshield with a suction cup. I thought of this device as the suckerboard.

  I wrote that there had been intermittent drizzles, nothing serious, and that if he found himself in the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, he had missed the westward turn to Sarmiento. If he felt good at Sarmiento, the road we wanted continued on to a place called Esquel.

  I ate a hardy dinner of beef jerky washed down with two nourishing chocolate milk shakes, and crawled into the back to sleep. The extended cab was not wide enough to stretch out in, but not so narrow that sleeping required an entirely fetal contortion.

  It seemed to me, in drowsy repose, that I had been oversensitive about my driving. There was, I realized, more arrogance in my technique than competence. What was that all about? Sociologists, I supposed, would natter on about motor vehicles and male appendages. Was it that simple?

  I knew people who would say so. As a young reporter, I had been assigned to cover a number of women's meetings in Berkeley, Califor-

  nia, during the early seventies. The women who chaired the meetings called themselves feminists, but it seemed that, stripped of rhetoric, the female persons in question just purely hated men. The meetings were so disagreeable that one of those angry women immediately took up figurative residence in a cobwebbed, contrary corner of my psyche. In certain bad moments, when I am consumed by self-doubt, I get to hear her merciless and hateful rasping. "Little boy thought he could drive, got his feelings hurt, and now he has to worry about his little thingy."

  The truth was that Garry was a professional driver and that he was better behind the wheel than I was. It stood to reason and had nothing at all to do with the size of my thingy.

  In the ALCAN race, for instance, after five thousand miles, Garry Sowerby had placed eighth in a field of twenty-nine. He was driving a nine-thousand-pound Suburban with a diesel engine. Most of the other vehicles were sports cars costing in excess of $40,000. A lot of Audi Quattro drivers finished behind Garry Sowerby in that event.

  And when we'd rented cars in South America, Garry always drove in the teeming cities and handled the scittering confusion with perfect aplomb. He had the techniques of Third World driving down after his around-the-world project. In contrast, I was always flustered trying to horse the big truck through the choked arteries and alleyways of places like Lima or Bogota.

  But that would come. By the end of the trip I'd have it knocked. No problem.

  I had a happy vision of the finish line in Alaska: all snow under a blinding sun. "Another victory for man and machine against time and the elements." We'd say it in tandem, get out in the snow at Prudhoe Bay, and shake h
ands. Garry would then say something about my driving. He'd probably exaggerate how badly I took the mountains to Ushuaia. "You were hopeless at the beginning," he would say, "but by the time we hit the States, you had it. You're as good as anyone I've ever driven with. The best."

  We were a team, and each of us had different talents. My job, I thought, was not hot, fast driving. I was there to talk our way past police and customs officials and to take up the slack when Garry was tired. We knew we would go through terrific mood swings: euphoria and depression generated out of fatigue and tension. So: though I couldn't drive as well as Garry, I could contribute by providing the needed emotional balance. I could tell jokes, laugh, and ride my own emotional roller coaster entirely behind my eyes. Let Garry be the hero: I would be the comical sidekick. It was the way to win.

  Garry was driving the road about ten miles an hour faster than I would have. The rule about speed was simple: if you think you're driving too fast, you are. The idea was to drive just under the limit of one's abilities. It was safer, and less tiring. You could put in more hours behind the wheel that way.

  The corollary of the speed rule was: if your partner thinks you're driving too fast, you are. Garry hadn't said anything about my driving on the long, empty, paved roads of Patagonia where I averaged seventy-five. Maybe I was starting to get it.

  I felt as if I had worked out my sensitivity problem and a wave of confidence washed over me: we were going to make Alaska in less than twenty-five days. And, at the end, Garry would say, "Tim, man, I never saw anyone improve as fast as you." Something like that. I fell asleep composing a number of accolades Garry would feel compelled to fling my way at Prudhoe Bay.

  About four-thirty, Garry woke me and said he was beginning to fade. That was the last rule: if you think you're tired, you are.

  I made myself some instant coffee, drank it, made another cup, drank it, and told Garry I was ready. It had rained during Garry's stint at the wheel, but now, as we rose out of the desert up into the dry steppes that led to the Andes, the weather had cleared, and brilliant stars trembled in the southern sky.

  Garry's instruction on the suckerboard said that I was heading for a town called Esquel, then El Bolson, then Bariloche in the Andes. The road he had driven had been paved but it took a sharp corner now and again. There were a few fairly awesome baches.

  I took the wheel. Garry crawled into the back and fell asleep immediately, without a word. Two hours later I found myself in the town of Esquel. A long road, lined with poplar trees, led to a dead end and not to El Bolson at all. This seemed to be the major road, but there was nowhere to go, which meant that I had just gotten us lost.

  I stopped, compared the map to the compass, and decided I must have missed a turn somewhere out of town. A bus with a sign on the front reading patagonia was parked by a station, and several well-dressed people were sitting on benches under the poplars outside of a closed cafe. The driver of the bus said that, yes, I had missed the turn. It was about fifteen miles out of town, back the way I had come.

  When I got back into the truck, Garry was awake.

  "Wrong turn?"

  I had hoped that I could get us back on the right road while Garry slept. "About fifteen miles back," I said.

  Garry stayed awake until we hit the crossroad. He wanted me to go back down toward the desert for a mile, then come up on the crossroad again, very slowly. It was incredibly dark—darker than any road I had ever driven in the United States—and, at the crossroad, the major highway curved around off to the south. There were no signs.

  Garry saw what I'd done immediately. The larger, better road went into Esquel. That made sense. It was the largest city for one hundred miles in any direction. The road to El Bolson looked like a side road.

  "How many crossroads did you see in the last hundred miles?" Garry asked.

  "This was the first one," I said.

  "We can't just blow by an unmarked intersection," Garry said. "All right. Slow down here. Just creep by."

  There it was, nailed to one of the poplars. The road sign was a weathered board the size of a carton of cigarettes. It said esquel, with an arrow pointing left, and el bolson, with an arrow pointing right. "Which," Garry said mildly, "is why we want to slow down and think every time we hit a crossroad."

  "We lost half an hour," I said. I heard an internal warning siren, and a large mental neon light blinked on and off: mood swing . . . mood swing . . . mood swing. I felt like a dope. Garry, I realized now, would never tell me what a terrific driver I was. I cut corners too sharply in the mountains and now I had gotten us lost. "I'm sorry," I said. Intellectually, I realized that this half-hour error wasn't critical, and that I was shooting fast down the first big drop on my emotional roller coaster. It was time to play gutsball but I was a soiled pile of soggy tissue.

  "It happens," Garry said brightly. He had caught the tone in my voice and was going to stay awake until he could jolly me out of my sudden funk. I thought: first I get lost and now Garry has to do my job. There was nothing in the world I could do right.

  "Last night," Garry said, "in the rain, I guessed on a road at an unmarked crossing. It took fifty miles of staring at the compass and the map before I was sure I made the right decision. That was an hour's worth of navi nightmare."

  Navigational nightmare was draining and could cost time. In each of his record runs, Garry had suffered some degree of full-blown navi nightmare—that is, he had gotten lost for a time—and he wanted me to know that this little misadventure wasn't serious.

  "You're doing fine," he said. I began to feel better and Garry, sensitive to the moment, dropped off the edge into unconsciousness.

  The road turned to gravel and at about six that morning, in the ghostly light of false dawn, I saw the Andes to the west, straight ahead, rising up out of an enormous valley. We were crossing a high plateau, looking down into the valley, and the world seemed to open up all around in the silvery light.

  The mountains were capped with snow and dominated the western horizon. They seemed to glow, as from within, and the snow had the odd color of white things seen under a black light. This light felt vaguely lunar.

  As the sun began to rise, the distant snow took on the colors of the eastern sky, and there was a long period in which the entire world blushed, pale pink. The valley was set in the rainshadow of the mountains, but it was fertile, alive with rushing rivers. The sage was green, and the rivers I saw below took on the pale watermelon color of mountains and sky.

  It was mid-spring in the valley, and there were trees that looked like aspens and some that looked like cottonwoods along the creeks. There were simple ranch houses in the valley with sleek horses running in the fields. I felt at home in the valley—it could have been Montana— and thought that this was the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. My eyes began to tear and there was a vaguely pleasant choking sensation in my throat.

  Mood swing . . .

  In the full light of day, the road turned to dirt and followed the meandering course of a river running gray with snowmelt. Just before El Bolson, we hit pavement. I was careful about the crossing roads, and was doing seventy when I felt the truck wobble through a turn. It didn't feel right at all and I woke Garry. I thought one of the shocks that had taken such a pounding in Tierra del Fuego had failed.

  We stopped and it turned out that one of the rear tires was very low on air. The sides of the tire were blistered and it was virtually useless. We had one spare left.

  "About forty miles back I hit a board in the road," I told Garry. "It might have had a nail in it."

  Garry was silent, sulking, hardly awake, and in contrast to his tolerance in Esquel, he seemed to be in a very dark frame of mind. I had just come through a sunrise that brought tears to my eyes and couldn't help it: I felt good. Garry didn't talk as I changed the tire. He

  spent the time working under the hood, muttering something about the fuel filter.

  "What?" I asked him.

  And in a voice that conve
yed monumental despair, he said: "We've got one spare tire, the cap is disintegrating, and I think we got some bad diesel in Patagonia. The fuel filter is beginning to clog up. I just changed it." These were major disasters, his tone suggested, comparable to learning that a loved one has been given a month to live. He poured some of the Stanadyne diesel mixture into the tank while I fixed him a cup of coffee.

  "Didn't you notice that the truck was handling differently?" he asked.

  "It just started to feel a little slushy around the corners about fifteen miles back. I thought it was one of the shocks."

  "Anything changes," Garry said curtly, "anything at all, you stop. You pay attention to every little noise, every ping. And when you're driving at night, you don't go zipping by a sign near your turnoff."

  "I'll be more careful," I said, not at all sensitive and full of humble virtue.

  Garry took the wheel and began driving in a fierce, monomaniacal manner. The truck had not started at the first turn of the key. "Goddamn Patagonian diesel," Garry muttered. "Clog up our filter and now we have to go over the Andes . . ."

  "There's this pirate," Garry Sowerby's comical sidekick said. "He's sitting in a bar, he's got a wooden leg, and this guy with a pig under his arm comes up . . ."

  Glaciers rolled out of the Andes two and a half million years ago. They advanced on the desert to the east, pushing rock and dirt ahead of them. These eastern moraines formed levees as the glaciers retreated, and the levees held the meltwater. To the west, water was trapped up against the forested slopes of the Andes themselves.

  The Lake District of Argentina and Chile is dazzling. There are still glaciers on the high peaks, seven thousand square miles of ice up there, glittering in the sun above blue lakes and fjords surrounded by forests and granite cliffs.

  Both Argentina and Chile see this area as a prime tourist destination for summer hiking and winter skiing. On the Argentine side, a new road from the east is being built to the resort town of Bariloche.