Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  I was driving that road, cursing through continuous curves. That,

  in fact, is what a yellow diamond-shaped warning sign read: continuous curves ahead. The road was one lane wide, gravel, and it wormed its way along the side of the mountain so that first Garry was looking into a two-thousand-foot drop and then I was. The slopes I was driving were sparsely forested and free of snow, but a thousand feet above, glaciers groaned in the sun.

  The continuous curves were closely spaced, and the road was so steep that I had to take it in first and second gear. Garry, who had been sleeping off his last stint at the wheel, was up, watching me drive.

  "You got it," he said, apparently comfortable with the way I was driving. He had liked the story about the pirate and the pig.

  In certain places, the single-lane road made 90- and 180-degree loops, so that it was impossible to see ahead. Trucks, coming the other way, plunging down the Andes fully loaded, couldn't stop, so that it was sometimes necessary for me to stop and back up, quick, with a big Mercedes semi looming over us, its brakes moaning in protest. Garry helped me find wider spots in the road. We'd back the truck up toward the side of the mountain and let the semi roll by, its far wheels sending little showers of gravel into the dropoffs below. Sometimes the drivers would flash us a V-for-victory sign.

  The route over the Andes was, in fact, a major artery, and there were trucks coming at us every five minutes or so. The semis hit their air horns at every turn, and this made enough sense that I began hitting our big air horn on each blind curve. It was an annoying, nerve-racking drive through some of the grandest scenery on the face of the earth. Garry calculated, after taking a half-hour average, that I was shifting every fifteen seconds.

  Shift, count ten, honk, count five, shift: it was tedious and dangerous both at the same time. Argentine road crews were working the wider spots with dozens of Cats and backhoes. They looked efficient and experienced.

  In one of these areas, we were stopped by a flagman, then allowed to proceed. The crew was digging its way into the mountain side, widening the lane, and there were rocks and boulders scattered willy-nilly across the right-of-way. I was driving a five-mile-an-hour slalom course through them but lost my concentration for a minute and hit a volleyball-sized rock with the right front wheel.

  "Jesus," Garry growled, suddenly angry.

  I was about to snap back, to say that nobody could drive this stretch of road without hitting a rock (Garry could), and anyway, what damage could I do to a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive vehicle by climbing over a

  small rock at five miles an hour (break an axle, knock the front end out of alignment)?

  "Sorry," I said, too tense to be anyone's sidekick, comical or not.

  The road past the construction took a sudden vertical jump and the truck handled it with power and grace.

  "I think that fuel stuff is working," I said.

  "It's working," Garry said. And then: "Hey, I didn't mean to bark at you back there. This is tough and you're doing good."

  Shift, honk, shift. In three bad hours we made forty-five miles. At the paved road just outside Bariloche, I felt that I could honorably let Garry take the wheel.

  "I think I'm tired," I said.

  I had been driving for eight hours and we were thirty-one hours into the trip.

  Bariloche is a pretty resort town on the southern shore of the 210-square-mile Lake Nahuel Huapi, which is the largest body of water in the Lake District, and the most spectacular. The area was declared a national park in 1934.

  It was a calm day, not much wind, and the glaciered peaks surrounding the lake were reflected in its surface: white on blue.

  Bariloche is set in the humped glacial rubble below a mountain called Cerro Otto. There were outdoor cafes along the cobblestone streets, and wood-frame chalets perched on low ridges above the town. It felt more like Switzerland than South America.

  We stopped to fill a thermos with good strong Argentine coffee, then headed west to the crest of the Andes and Chile.

  Above and to the west, dark clouds obscured the mountains. A brisk wind had sprung up on the lake and battered the reflected peaks with whitecaps until the entire surface of the Nahuel Huapi was a white froth. Our route took us along the lake shore, over an ungraded dirt road with sheer cliff faces dropping down to the water.

  Garry and I talked a bit about Enrique Gutierrez, a representative of the Chilean Auto Club. When we had interviewed him several months ago, he had said that the road we were taking into Chile was "very bad."

  Why was that?

  "It is only an earthen road." While Sr. Gutierrez was studying a map, Garry caught my eye and made a brief masturbatory gesture. "Earthen road?" In Colombia, when they tell you a stretch of road is bad, they mean that it is frequently the scene of ambushes.

  The tourist brochures and auto clubs fail to mention one of the more attractive features of the Lake District, namely that terrorists in Argentina and Chile, where they exist, work the cities. There are no bandits, no drug barons, and no hostage-takers in these mountains.

  The earthen road left the lakeshore and shot straight through a forest of sixty-foot-high cypress trees. These cypresses, unlike the North American variety, were tall and straight with heavy trunks and looked a little like small redwood trees. Sunlight fell through the trees in shafts, as light falls in a cathedral.

  Presently, the clouds to the west drifted over the road, and the forest seemed suddenly sepulchral and gloomy. There was the brooding threat of a storm. I felt as if I had walked out of Notre Dame Cathedral and into an Edgar Allan Poe poem.

  The border between Argentina and Chile is the crest of the Andes Mountains. Puyehue Pass, at about four thousand feet, is a fairly easy drive, at least in comparison to the fifteen-thousand-foot passes common in Peru or Bolivia. Argentine and Chilean customs stations are both situated well below the divide on their respective sides. We cleared Argentine customs, and started up over Puyehue Pass with Garry driving.

  A cold rain fell, and as the road rose, the vegetation changed. Great leafy ferns, six and eight feet high, stretched out to caress the truck. What trees we saw were lower, stunted by the altitude, and their trunks were covered over on every side by moss. The scene felt vaguely prehistoric.

  The rain became snow, and some of it settled, unmelted, on the black volcanic mud of the road. A strange forest of low leafless trees was hung with great drapes of moss that looked impossibly green through the falling snow.

  At the crest of the Andes, the snow lay three feet deep, and Garry drove for five minutes through what amounted to a heavy blizzard. As we descended into Chile, the snow turned to rain.

  A yellow warning sign featured a picture of a car pointed about ninety degrees downhill with a small diamond-shaped hunk of land under it. I liked the sign because the wheels of the car didn't touch the ground. It was going like a bat out of hell, this boxy little car on the sign.

  The temperature rose at least thirty degrees, and the rain hissed and steamed on the black mud track ahead of us. Trees erupted out of the earth at this altitude and they were not the straight-trunked vari-

  ety of the Argentine side. These were trees with slender trunks; trees that twisted this way and that to steal the sun from myriad competitors. They leafed out only at the very top and looked a bit like the broccoli-shaped trees of the jungle.

  The road, on this wet western side of the continental divide, became a great green colonnade of trees interspersed by the occasional mountain meadow. At one point, we drove through a cloud of small yellow butterflies, and Garry slowed it down to about twenty-five to avoid splattering this sudden beauty against the windshield.

  "Wouldn't hurt a fly," I said.

  "No need to."

  "Norman Bates wouldn't hurt a fly."

  "Who?"

  "The guy in Psycho. The psychotic killer."

  Garry thought about this for a time, then laughed in a manner that he imagined sounded maniacal.

  The Chilean check
point was located in a forest. Like the Argentine customs officers, the Chilenos wore clean uniforms and were pleasant and efficient. We had passed through four customs points and three Argentine police points on our way through Patagonia, but this was our first search. One of the Chilean officers looked in the cab and another wanted to see what we had under the disintegrating camper shell. It was a mess back there, and the officer simply pointed to boxes at random and asked us to open them for him. Of the five boxes he wanted to see, four contained milk shakes. He seemed bitterly confused about this.

  We showed the officer how to take the plastic straw off the milkshake box and insert it into the container. He drank a bit and shrugged as if to say, "not bad." Another half-dozen officers came out to look at the truck and we gave them all milk shakes and lapel pins.

  One of the officers signed our logbook. We asked him to note our mileage, the time, and the date. He added his stamp for good measure. When we left, there were seven bemused officers standing in the middle of the road, watching us. They were wearing maple-leaf lapel pins, sucking on milk shakes, and waving.

  "The guy who was looking in the back," Garry said, "he didn't get it about the milk shakes."

  "Probably thought we were big-time milk-shake smugglers."

  "Mission Impossible ," Garry said. "Men, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to take these milk shakes to the tip of South America . . ."

  "Drive them to Alaska."

  "The milk shakes that conquered the Pan-American Highway!"

  As Garry drove, I took all our documents for Argentina and filed them away.

  "What's happening in Chile?" Garry asked.

  I got out a three-ring binder that contained news clips I had compiled over the past six months. The human-rights group of the Catholic church had accused the government's National Information Center (CNI) of using torture. The CNI is an internal intelligence agency whose top official was directly appointed by General Augusto Pinochet, Chile's seventy-one-year-old ruler. Human-rights lawyers were alleging not just brutality on the part of the government, but murder as well, and these murders were committed under the country's embracing antiterrorist laws. There were student protests, a bus strike, and— most painful for Pinochet—growing dissent within the armed forces. Powerful military leaders were telling the foreign press that the next president should "be a vigorous man perhaps fifty-one or fifty-two years old, and he should be a civilian."

  On the other hand, everyone we'd talked to said that Chile was a relatively safe place for a foreigner who was not involved in the country's politics. You could drive at night, for instance, and the police, the carabineros, would not only not accept bribes, they might actually arrest a person who offered one.

  A diplomat we'd talked to was the first to point out what I began to see as a bitter irony. Right-wing countries, known for abusing human rights, were generally the safest. People disappeared from their homes, the press was censored, but you could drive at night.

  "So these are nice places to visit," I had said. "But . . ."

  "Exactly," the diplomat had replied.

  Chile, as any U.S. grade-school teacher can tell you, is "the string-bean country." It is 2,700 miles long and averages only 110 miles in width. "Chile," Henry Kissinger is supposed to have said in assessing the country's strategic significance, "is a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica."

  In the south, near Antarctica, the country is damp and cool, not much good for agriculture, but it possesses a kind of soaring beauty absolutely foreign to the rest of the world. In the south, tidewater glaciers formed on the coastal mountains flow down to the sea through dense rain forests. Seals share the beach with hummingbirds.

  Seventy percent of the population of Chile lives in the center of the country, around the capital of Santiago, where the climate is Mediterranean, rather like Southern California. The northern part of Chile is arid, and the Atacama Desert there is the driest desert on the face of the earth.

  The country's physical diversity and beauty remain abiding mysteries above the Rio Grande. A story is told of a competition among New York Times correspondents: write the world's most boring headline. The winning entry read, small earthquake in chile; not many dead.

  It's a reasonably good bet that not one in a hundred readers would find themselves reading that story. On the other hand, I was fascinated by a piece in my clip file: "Quake in Northern Chile Kills 6, Triggers Slides." The quake in question had happened thirty-five days earlier. "A landslide and rock slides on the Pan-American Highway," the piece in The Miami Herald read, "cut off Chile's main north-south road."

  Our road.

  At Osorno, we stopped at a clean gas station that might have been a truck stop in the United States. Garry phoned Santiago to tell them we'd be there at nine the next morning. The truck needed to be serviced, and Garry would require the use of the telex. I filled the fuel tanks, suffering a little pit-stop case of Zippy's disease—get this done before Garry gets off the phone!—and managed to drench my left arm with diesel.

  The road ahead, Highway 5, was paved, in good condition, and the compass was pegged, once again, on north. I was driving, and Garry was working on the problems ahead. What were we going to do about the twenty-foot shipping container and our twenty-one-foot truck; where did we have any slack for emergencies; was it possible to get someone in Colombia to do the paperwork for the boat; did we really need to replace the camper shell; was it possible to get to Dallas on time for a press conference GMC wanted to schedule?

  Garry was thinking out loud: "So if we get out of Panama on Sunday night. .. let's say we don't get out until Monday morning. Okay. We're in Costa Rica Tuesday, Managua Wednesday, Thursday Guatemala. We hit Texas on Sunday, and, oh shit, no one goes to press conferences on Sunday and GMC is going to have a fit. But, all right, let's say we drive at night in Mexico . . ."

  The land was summer green, and large rivers, rushing down from the nearby Andes, screamed "trout." Occasionally, we'd pass a man on horseback wearing a poncho made of a blanket. Men and women rode

  bicycles past fields where fat dairy cows grazed. There were people traveling the shoulder of the road in horse-drawn carriages. Chilean drivers were generally courteous. The sky was blue and clear.

  After sunset, large lumbering trucks seemed to own the Pan-American Highway. The fastest trucks were doing forty, the slowest twenty, and a man felt obliged to pass them. The trucks traveled in packs, like hungry wolves, and every time I'd manage to pass four or five in a row, I'd find myself behind another grouping. Our Sierra, with its weight and its diesel engine, was not particularly fast, and there was plenty of oncoming traffic, so that passing was an unpleasantly tense experience. Estimating our speed relative to the other vehicles was maddeningly difficult: a set of taillights ahead could be good lights half a mile in the distance, or very dim lights only four hundred feet ahead. Pulling out to pass in the face of oncoming lights was a gamble: to conclude that the dim lights meant distance could be deadly. It was one life-or-death judgment call after another.

  There was never a time to relax, to glory in having spent some anxiety and skill passing the last line of diesel belchers. It was seven straight hours of driving that consisted of nothing at all but passing trucks.

  I felt like Sisyphus, the mythological king who was punished in Hades by repeatedly having to roll a huge stone up a hill only to have it roll back down again. Sometimes, when I found myself out in the oncoming lane with headlights barreling out of the night at me, I felt I had pushed the tolerance a little. At those times, I had to edge back into my lane a little faster than I would have liked. Either that or die. Sisyphus, as I recalled, was punished for cheating Death.

  Every truck, without exception, featured a large sign on the back that said, frenos de aire, air brakes, but I couldn't help reading the first word as an English cognate: friends. Friends of the air? All of these trucks belched out diesel fumes in great choking clouds that were blacker than the night itself.
/>   "These trucks," I told Garry, "are no friends of the air."

  "Why?"

  "Can't you smell the diesel? The whole highway stinks like diesel."

  "That," Garry said reasonably, "is because your left arm is soaking in it."

  "Oh."

  "How did that happen?" Garry asked.

  "Case of Zippy's at the gas station."

  We stopped that night at a motel on the highway about 130 miles south of Santiago. After forty mostly sleepless hours, I fell into bed, fully clothed, while Garry took a shower. My dreams smelled like diesel. Five hours later—and those five hours felt like a luxury—we were both up and I took a shower. The bed I had slept in was filthy with dirt and smelled like petroleum products. It looked like a pack of filthy rabid animals had gotten into a big dog pile and had sex on the sheets.

  The road to Santiago was not nearly as infested with trucks as it had been the night before. There was a low fog swirling across the highway, and the trees in the river bottoms, when we could see them, were in full leaf. There were houses two deep lining the road, and fields in the back. A man on horseback, wearing a sport coat and tie, rode along the black shoulder of the road.

  On the outskirts of Santiago, we stopped a taxi. I gave the driver the address of the GM facility and rode with him as Garry followed, so we never missed a turn and arrived at nine in the morning, exactly as we had said.

  Al Buchanan, GM's executive vice president for overseas sales, happened to be in the office. Buchanan had arranged all the GM contacts on the reconnaissance trips, and the last time Garry had seen him was in his office in Detroit. Al seemed to feel as if he had a stake in our success and was exceedingly helpful. A quick call confirmed that the road in the north had been cleared of earthquake debris. There was a GM factory in Arica, Chile, twelve hundred miles north, up near the border with Peru, where there were some ingenious mechanics who could put in a superstructure under the camper shell.