Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

"Right. There were bottles of schnapps, a lot of toasts, and I tried to keep up with the giant, which was a bad mistake. I stumbled up to

  bed, called Jane in Canada, and, I don't know, I fell asleep on the phone. Woke up and the phone was lying there beside me, off the hook.

  "So that morning, I didn't feel good at all, and the last thing we had to do, we had to ride this bobsled gadget on rails. Everyone said, 'C'mon, you're the big driver, go faster.' So, of course, I flipped the thing over and broke my finger. When I got back to the hotel, they gave me a phone bill for four hundred dollars."

  The story brightened my morning considerably. I thought: how could you slap a guy who hangs around with drunken giants? Who pays $400 so his wife can listen to him snore for several hours?

  It was my turn to drive the good straight road.

  The Atacama—the whole of the coastal desert—seemed at first a baked mud flat: cracked, dry land, totally devoid of vegetation. The wind sent forty-foot-high dust devils spinning into the distance. Sometimes I saw five or six of them dancing their dizzy fandango over the desert floor.

  There were occasional low, rocky ridges separating the larger valleys and plains. Each sterile expanse of flatland was different. There were a few areas of shifting dunes, but most of the valley floors were cracked, flat, black mud plains or fields of dark gravel. One of the more fascinating valleys consisted of nothing but tufts of dried mud. The tufts looked like something that would happen if you put Vaseline in your hair, twisted it around, coated the whole affair with mud, and carefully blow-dried the resultant mess for a couple of decades. All we could see, off to the horizon in every direction, were these strange, twisted, dusty tufts.

  The mud—mud that forms those strange tufts—is created during the spring runoff, when streams plunging down the western slope of the Andes pour onto the Atacama plain. Some of the water runs underground, and every few hundred miles there is an oasis. Much of the water comes down in thin, flat sheets. Most of it evaporates rapidly.

  The Atacama is a high desert. The bulk of its arid plains stand somewhere near 2,500 feet, so it is not particularly hot. It is, in fact, the coolest place in the world at the latitude. The average summer temperature in the Atacama Desert is sixty-five degrees.

  During most of the year, and especially during the warmer months, a cold, dirty fog hangs over the sand and gravel. The mist, called the gariia, rises up over the coastal headlands from the Pacific Ocean, where a cold Antarctic current—the Humboldt Current—sweeps northward along the rugged coastline. It is the interaction of warm air and frigid water that conspires to blot out the sun and cool the land.

  The fog passes over the desert and rises into the foothills of the Andes, where it settles in hollows or on ridges. In these perpetually fog-shrouded areas, small stands of trees, called lomas, literally drink the curiously dry and sandy-colored fog from the air.

  Occasionally, the spring runoff may uproot entire lomas and deposit them below in an arid salt pan, where the fallen trees are covered in mud, then buried under several feet of wind-blown grit and sand. People dig up these trees for firewood. The Atacama is the only place on earth where people mine wood.

  We passed through the mining town of Antofagasta in the dry fog that was now a sandy gray color. A beachfront road ran along the Pacific headlands, and I could see the working of a large port below. There was a small park where the city had attempted to grow bushes and trees with some small success. We passed a large soccer stadium and a twenty-story-high office building. On the way out of town, the houses began to look like U.S. tract developments, circa 1951: ranch-style buildings with sliding glass doors. One of the doors was festooned with decals: colorful pictures of Snoopy, the dog in the Peanuts cartoon.

  On the rise leading to thp outskirts of the town, we passed an area where the houses were nothing more than tumble-down metal sheds.

  "The arse," Garry muttered, "has dropped out of the living accommodations." His voice was hoarse from lack of sleep and he seemed depressed.

  Men in threadbare jackets, dozens of them, walked down the hill toward some common job. They walked with their heads down and didn't speak with one another.

  Back in the desert, we saw a house made from blocks of earth that seemed to have been cut right from the ground. When you build your house out of dirt, you are not expecting rain, ever.

  In the distance, atop the highest hill that flanked the road, I saw my first hallucination. But no: it was real; I was sure it was real. Twenty miles out of Antofagasta, in the Atacama Desert, atop a high, rocky brown hill that rose above the arid, pebbled plain was something that looked as familiar as a recurring dream.

  "Garry, you see that?"

  "Yeah."

  "What is it?"

  "A billboard."

  "What does it say?"

  "Can't you read it?"

  "I wonder if I'm hallucinating."

  "It says, pepsi cola."

  "That's what I thought."

  I wondered if this was the driest place in the driest desert on earth. The billboard—it was the only roadside billboard in the whole Atacama—was new and it stood out against the ocher landscape and gray fog. It was the most effective piece of advertising I had ever seen in my life.

  "I want a Pepsi," I heard myself whine and realized, in that moment, why all billboards should be banned.

  Garry said, "Well, we have our choice of water or milk shakes." He was definitely feeling low, and it occurred to me—after reviewing our various ups and downs to date—that Garry's spirits tended to sink just after sunrise. I hit the low point on my roller coaster a couple of hours before the sun set.

  At 7:12 that morning the fog let up and we passed over the Tropic of Capricorn. I stopped to get breakfast—beef jerky and milk shakes— out of the camper shell. Garry came out and we sat on the tailgate: a sit-down breakfast. There was a fetid sour-milk smell inside the camper shell.

  I made an attempt to haul Garry out of his morning funk by asking about his family.

  " Ahhh," he muttered. Then: "I feel a little guilty talking about Lucy all the time. I have another daughter. And, oh man, after she was born, I just felt so down and bitter and guilty and dirty ..."

  We sat in silence, chewing the beef jerky that was making both of our jaws ache.

  "I never told anyone this," Garry said. "Not even Jane."

  He looked stricken.

  "I knew, when Natalie came home," he said, "that I would never love her as much as I love Lucy."

  The land all around was flat and sandy gray.

  "I think every father feels that way about his second child," I said. "It's natural. I don't care what parents say, an infant doesn't have much in the way of a personality."

  "No lights on," Garry said, "no one home."

  "And everyone feels guilty and no one says anything, so you end up feeling that there's something wrong with you. When there isn't."

  "I guess," Garry said. He was sounding a little brighter. "And Natalie is almost six months old now. Just before I left for this trip, it really started to happen. I began to see who she is, to get to know her. A couple

  Roto _ 165

  of times, Jane and I would be in bed, and I would hear her fussing in her room. Jane's exhausted, and it's my turn anyway, so I go check on Nat. But she's not fussing at all. I can see her in the night-light. She's smiling and laughing and looking at her feet, her hands. This wonderful little baby, my daughter, lost in infant ecstasy."

  I glanced over and caught Garry smiling.

  "Let's play some music," I said.

  We had two audiotapes. Each of us had thought the other was to bring tapes, so all we had was a tango that I had bought in Argentina, mainly because I wanted to study the lyrics. Garry, I knew, was pretty sick of that one. The other tape was something Garry had put in the cassette in Canada and forgotten about. I thought we should dine alfresco, to music, and put Garry's tape on at full volume. George Jones and Merle Haggard were singing a mournful duet about
lost love and loneliness: "She's out there somewhere, looking for me ..."

  We drank our milk shakes and stared out into the lifeless world of the Atacama Desert.

  The next town was Iquique. In 1835 Charles Darwin visited the port city of Iquique and traveled briefly inland, into the Atacama. Darwin, as always, took copious notes, and wrote that he was getting pretty damn tired of the adjectives barren and sterile.

  Ironically, it is the ocean that has left the land so dry and lifeless. The same icy current that sends its dirty fog rolling over the sand also creates an impenetrable high-pressure dome over the land. Pacific storms, moving in from the west, bump up against the dome and skitter off to the north or south. The strongest of the storms slide up over the dome, like a skier over a mogul, and dump their moisture on the slopes of the Andes. It is this perpetual high-pressure ridge that has parched the Atacama over the centuries. Indeed, there are small areas in the desert where it has never been known to rain, where nothing grows and nothing lives. Nothing.

  The Atacama makes Death Valley look like a zoo set in a botanical garden. During a Death Valley summer, there will be coyote tracks in the central valley, and burros beyond counting feeding on the sage of the higher hillsides. Compare this to the observations of Clement W. Meighan, an archaeologist who has done fieldwork in the Atacama. During a month at one site, a list was compiled of animals seen. The list consisted of one bird and one butterfly, both transients on their way from one oasis to another. The one permanent resident of the camp was a spider. There were also "a few flies."

  When you get down to counting flies, there's not much life around. What there is, is death.

  The first of the mummies discovered in the Atacama Desert were thought to be a thousand years old. They were found several decades ago by an iron-willed renaissance Jesuit, Father Le Paige, who often took payment for marriages and baptisms in archaeological artifacts. Father Le Paige has passed on to his just reward, but his collection can be found in the museum at San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in the heart of the desert.

  Deserts are attractive places for archaeologists because of the excellent preservation of the sites and artifacts. Even bodies.

  Recently, anthropologists from the University of Tarapaca in Chile discovered ninety-six mummies near the town of Arica, on the border between Chile and Peru. Some of the remains were eight thousand years old, three thousand years older than the mummies of Egypt.

  The oasis-dwelling people of the ancient Atacama—Atacamanos— apparently used pelican beaks to strip the corpses of flesh. The abdominal cavities were emptied, filled with feathers, and the long bones of the arms and legs were reinforced with sticks. It is thought that the bodies may have been placed upright in the village in a macabre ritual. For burial, the corpses were wrapped in layers of cloth, the finest closest to the body, the coarsest grade on the outside. The dry desert air preserves fatality, and autopsies performed on rehydrated mummies have pinpointed the causes of deaths that occurred at the dawn of civilization. The autopsies have also revealed some puzzling stuff. What to make of this knowledge: 25 percent of the ancient desert people, it seemed, suffered from chronic ear infections.

  The Atacamanos knew well that their climate preserves death. So do modern men. A few hundred miles north of Arica, there are other burial sites. Several travelers—notably Michael Andrews, a British filmmaker—have stumbled through that perpetual ocher fog and found themselves standing in the midst of fields of bleached bones: they have seen human skulls, scattered like soccer balls, grinning up from the sand.

  Grave robbers are interested primarily in the textiles used to wrap the bodies. Those once made in Paracas, Peru, for instance, are noted for their elegance: perfectly perserved tapestries woven by unknown artists two thousand years ago. The textiles bring a pretty price, and grave robbers, Michael Andrews noted, are "none too discriminating: some of the staring skulls wear collars and ties."

  There was, along this fast desert highway, a scene of past horror from the more recent past every fifty or sixty miles. You could see them glittering alongside the road in a bullying sun that had finally burnt away the fog. Automobiles that collide in the Atacama are salvaged. The broken glass is not. It is swept to the side of the road into a heap, and every time I saw such a pile flashing in the distance, I thought of bodies bleeding in the sand, on the burning asphalt, here, in this lonely, hostile desert.

  Garry slept well and took the wheel about one that afternoon. We stopped to check the truck, and Garry thought he found a leak by the radiator.

  We were rising out of the Atacama, pushing over passes through high rounded hills covered over in grainy black sand. When I looked ahead or to the side, I could see faint hints of green or red in the land. The green was, what, copper; the red, iron. A man wouldn't have to be much of a geologist to locate mineral deposits here.

  We were careening over the hills, and Garry took the corners at a speed that made our tires scream against the blacktop. I thought he was pushing too hard and said so.

  "We need to push it," Garry said. "Gotta see if the radiator will hold. We've got fifty miles into Arica, where they have the GM factory. If the radiator has a hole in it, I'm going to blow it out, and we'll get it fixed."

  But the radiator wasn't leaking and we both knew it. We always had leaks under the truck after it was serviced. Mechanics, who were given to understand by their bosses that our mission was important, tended to overfill anything that required fluid. There was no room left for heat expansion, and things leaked for a day or so after every service.

  We took a hillside on what felt like two wheels. I looked below and saw the line of a boulder that had rolled down the black sand. It looked like the track of a snowball rolling down a powder slope. I had a vision of the Sierra jumping the road and rolling, end over end, down the hill, leaving a curious hop-and-skip track.

  "This," Garry said, concentrating fiercely, "is the classic situation for a gauge to be just about ten feet high on the dash."

  "What?"

  "The temperature gauge is the gauge of the day. Did you ever see a horror film called Videodrome? TVs and things start swelling up to abnormal size."

  It occurred to me that Garry needed a daily crisis to keep him going,

  and if we didn't have a crisis, he'd invent one. It was late afternoon and I was at the low end of my cycle, feeling sorry for myself, stuck, as I was, in a speeding truck driven by a madman through a land of horror, where glittering glass on the side of the road meant death and dismemberment. . . .

  "What's going on?" Garry asked.

  "Depressed again," I said.

  "What do you need?"

  "Silence in which to brood."

  We pulled into Arica, near the border with Peru, at three-thirty that afternoon, found the GM plant with no difficulty, and met with the plant manager, Oscar Nuenschwander, who was expecting us. There was a message for Garry from Daniel Buteler, of GM Chile. Call him.

  So for half an hour, Garry talked to a man in Santiago, Chile, concerning a telex that Buteler had gotten from Jane, in Canada, which was about a call she had received from a publicity firm in L.A. The firm was setting up a press conference for us in the United States. People wanted to know the exact time we would be arriving in Dallas. These people in L.A. had never heard of gasoline bandits: it seemed a surreal phone call.

  Garry had decided against reinforcing the camper shell. It had not gotten any worse since Tierra del Fuego. While he supervised the mechanics—the radiator was fine; any leaks were the result of overfilling—Mr. Nuenschwander ran me down to the Chilean Auto Club in his personal car.

  We had heard that in order to enter Peru we would need some document from the Chilean Auto Club. Then, in Peru, we needed a corresponding document from that country's auto club. When we had both documents, we would be issued decals to put on the windows. Without the decals, police could turn us back.

  A young man at the auto club said no such documents were necessary.

&nbs
p; For a certainty?

  An absolute certainty.

  Why had auto-club people in Lima invented these documents then?

  Who could say?

  Garry, imagining that we had to clear the border and get to the Peruvian Touring and Automobile Club before a five o'clock closing time, was whipping the mechanics into a froth. There were five of them

  in white lab coats, dashing back and forth, waving their arms and screaming about the fuel filter. Garry was, I saw, filthy and not completely coherent. He had a virulent case of Zippy's, which he had passed on to five competent and otherwise intelligent individuals in the space of one hour, Zippy's being somewhat contagious.

  Garry was happy to hear that we wouldn't have to race through customs. Given the state of our affairs, however, it seemed cruel to mention a bit of bad planning on our part that had just occurred to me. There was a curfew from midnight to 5:00 a.m. in Lima. We couldn't pick up Joe Skorupa there at 4:00 a.m. as planned. Being out after curfew could be deadly in Lima.

  Garry telexed Jane in Moncton. Contact Skorupa in Lima. We wanted him standing out in front of the Gran Hotel Bolivar at five p.m. instead. He should be packed and ready to go.

  While Garry sat at the telex, I went out to the truck, filed away our documents for Chile, and got out the maps and documentation we needed for Peru. I brought my clip file on Peru back to read to Garry.

  "We've got," I said, "terrorists in the south. Shining Path guerrillas, Maoists. They operate mainly in the southeast. Two months ago, guerrillas, armed with machines and shotguns, intercepted several boats on the Apurimac River and, after a 'popular trial' executed nineteen men who were accused of being members of the peasant militia fighting the terrorists."

  The guerrillas were thought to be operating out of the jungle area of Ayacucho, which was about 150 miles from the Pan-American Highway. Worse, the guerrillas were increasingly threatening tourists in an effort to destabilize the economy, which depends a great deal on tourism. The guerrillas had blown up the train to the old Inca city of Machu Picchu.