Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  Joe, who is nothing if not a reporter, made a perceptive observation.

  "You guys," he said, "look like shit."

  He regarded us with a combination of shock and pity.

  Enrique Viale, the director of a Lima auto-service center and Stana-dyne representative in Peru, was standing with Joe. He concurred with the reporter's thoughts. It was a long haul to Ecuador and by the time we got there, the border would be closed anyway. We'd have to sleep somewhere. It seemed to him that we needed sleep here and now. Viale had a garage with a security guard where we could safely park the truck.

  Garry considered the idea. The wiring on our console was shorting out anyway. On the last run into Lima, the pump that fed diesel from the big auxiliary tank into the factory tank had shorted out. Garry had crawled into the back, crushing milk shakes on the way, and filled the factory tank through some combination of skill and magic that required the use of a jumper cable. Maybe we could get the short fixed at Viale's garage.

  Garry and I excused ourselves and talked.

  "Tim," he said, "maybe they're right. When I saw you in that hotel lobby, it was strange. People looked like they were afraid of you." "You mean, I looked bad." "As compared to normal people."

  "The normal people," I pointed out, "avoided you, too." "I'm afraid," Garry said, "that we look like dangerous crazies." "Rotos." And so we decided to sleep that night in Lima.

  We got separate rooms and I took a shower, slept for three hours, and snapped wide awake. I was on that kind of schedule. Garry was at Viale's garage, dealing with the short in the console. He also needed to telex Jane: where's the letter of recommendation from the tourism ministry in Honduras? Would we have an escort through customs at the southern Nicaraguan border? Or had our trip to Managua earned us a pocketful of empty promises?

  It was just after dark and I strolled around the Plaza San Martin, outside the hotel, where Garry had met Graham Maddocks and learned the dirt-on-the-shoulder pickpocket trick. I bought a paper at a news kiosk and walked off through the teeming crowd. When I felt the tap on my shoulder, from behind, I was slow and didn't clap my hand on my wallet or grab behind for the pickpocket's wrists.

  Which was good, because it was the handsome young woman who had sold me my newspapers. She had left her kiosk unguarded and chased me half a block. I had forgotten my change. It amounted to about four cents.

  Another shower. We had dinner together—Enrique Viale, Joe, Garry, and I—and it was a real dinner in a real dining room with real food. Somehow it made me feel guilty.

  Another shower. The more news-oriented of the papers I had bought, El Comercio, reported that there had been over twenty-five armed assaults on interprovincial buses in northern Peru in the last thirty days. As we would be in northern Peru presently, the article was of uncommon interest. Last week, an Expresso Sudamericano bus had been stopped by nine machine-gun-toting assailants who had stripped all the passengers of their belongings, money, and jewelry. Two hours later another group of assailants got another bus.

  The other newspaper was a tabloid with a three-page picture spread about a woman boxer. In this age of equality, she dressed for the sport in Everlast trunks and gloves. Though I had a sense that the pictures

  weren't the essence of accurate reporting or journalistic verisimilitude, I did admire one shot of the woman standing in mid-ring, her arms in the air, as in victory. She was bathed in something that looked like sweat and she had terrific breasts.

  Everyone was up at five-thirty the next morning. We did not lock Joe Skorupa in the camper shell. He rode in the extended cab. The new freeway out of town took us past an area of abject slums and it seemed a cruel joke that these people's misery was on such public display. On the hillside above, where affluent drivers could see it, there was a political poster, a full-face illustration of a thin-faced stern-looking man wearing glasses. The artist had evidently thought to make the politician appear to be a man of the future, willing to take harsh but necessary measures. Set as it was above a tangle of hard poverty, the billboard seemed badly placed. I thought: Big Brother is watching you.

  Some miles out of Lima, along the drear coastal desert, we dropped into a relatively fertile valley. There were orchards along a river, and the town was bustling with Sunday-morning activities. The houses were small, perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet, with dirt floors and low ceilings. They fronted the Pan-American Highway, and the sidewalks were only two or three feet wide. A man could step out of his house and be run over by a tourist from Des Moines.

  The streets were alive with strange bicycles: they had a single back wheel and a wooden basket on the front supported by two wheels. The bicycles could carry three people in the basket, or a load of firewood, or thatch.

  Bicycles were racing down the graveled side streets to a parade on the Pan-American. We passed a float—a jeep covered over in a white cloth—and there were dozens of little girls in clean white first-communion dresses riding and hanging on to the vehicle. They waved at us and to the townspeople who lined the street.

  In a less-affluent area of small mud houses, a beautiful dark-haired little girl of about seven was sitting in the basket of a bicycle and being pedaled frantically to the parade by a man I took to be her father. She wore a brilliant white dress, a kind of pointy witch's cap covered over in rhinestones, and carried a wand with an aluminum-foil star on the end. She was holding tight to her hat and her eyes were wide with a kind of full-blown happiness you seldom see along the Pan-American Highway in Peru.

  The Pan-American Highway is just not a viable way to see the best Peru has to offer. In Chimbote, the houses that lined the road were constructed of woven straw mats on poles. A port city, Chimbote smelled of rotten fish. It had a population of 185,000, and an earthquake in 1970 had terminally damaged its sewage system, so the place stunk of human waste and sickness.

  There was a rock tunnel outside Chimbote, and in the cool darkness Garry said, "Maybe when we come through, we'll be back in Kansas and it will all be a horrible dream. We'll wake up and realize that there is no place on earth where everything stinks and people die because nobody thought to fix the sewage system."

  I sought to defend Peru. I had last visited in 1977, and had spent little time in Lima or on the Pan-American Highway. The road, I said, is a major artery, a way out, and it attracts poverty and hopelessness in the same way that the U.S. border with Mexico does.

  No, the Peru I loved was a couple of hundred miles inland, over one of the sixteen-thousand-foot passes through the Andes, and in the forested slopes above the Amazon jungle, the land the local people call "the eyebrow of the jungle." It is humbling to walk the steep trails of the eyebrow. An elderly Peruvian woman, bent double under a load of firewood, can outwalk any gringo marathon runner.

  The mountains of the eyebrow rise to ten thousand feet, and in those high cloud forests can be found the remains of the Inca civilization, and, farther north, pre-Inca cultures, like the Chachapoyas. Most Peruvian archaeology is performed on the Pacific side of the Andes, in the desert, where logistics are not such a headache, where access is easier.

  When I brought back maps and schematic drawings of cities my friends and I found in the eyebrow, professional archaeologists dismissed them with a wave of the hand. These pre-Columbian cities included hundreds of circular stone houses, covered over in jungle. There were larger habitations, probably civic centers or fortifications, located nearby, on commanding ridges.

  But there are ruins everywhere in Peru, one distinguished archaeologist pointed out.

  Yes, of course, it's part of the country's charm, but had the professor ever visited these ruins in the eyebrow?

  No need to, nothing significant there.

  It seems suspicious to me that every single archaeological site in

  Peru that academics consider to be significant is located in the coastal desert or on the western slope of the Andes, accessible from the Pan-American Highway.

  And I suppose that if I were an acad
emic archaeologist nearing retirement, I wouldn't want to hear about discoveries that could invalidate my scholarly papers, my theories, my years of teaching.

  So there are ancient stone cities, covered in cloud-forest vegetation, dreaming, undiscovered, on the peaks that drop down into the vastness of the Amazon.

  The eyebrow is a forbidding land, virtually roadless, relentlessly steep, and not particularly providential. Local Indians may never have seen a white man before, and they speak Quechua, not Spanish. It's hard to get around.

  That has always been the case in the eyebrow. In 1541 Gonzalo Pizarro, half brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Incas, set out to find cities of gold rumored to exist on the eastern slopes of the mountains. The expedition included two hundred Spaniards and four thousand Indians. The local Indians directed him to the groves of spice trees and the wealthy cities he sought: sure, you bet, Gonzalo, the city of gold is a mere ten days march over a dozen ten-thousand-foot-high ridges. There were no groves of spice trees or cities of gold, of course, but the Spaniards never came back to discuss the matter. Which, in essence, is what the Indians had in mind.

  One of Gonzalo's lieutenants, Francisco de Orellana, left the expedition and pushed down one of the rivers in a search for provisions which didn't exist. Rather than try to make it back up the steep forested slopes of the eyebrow, de Orellana chose to build a raft and float to the sea down the great river he named Amazon.

  Gonzalo and his men were forced to eat their horses and dogs. A year later, he stumbled back into Quito, with a handful of men. Over four thousand of his people had died.

  These days, the eyebrow may be a somewhat more dangerous place than when I visited it. Our walk from the nearest road had taken us several days over a well-trod trail. One day, from a slope far away, we heard whistles and shouts. Several hours later, we encountered a mule train headed out to the road. Twenty mules, each of them carrying 150 pounds of dull gray coca leaves, were being driven through the mountains by a group of ten men.

  The leaves were grown on slopes leading down to the Marahon River, one of the source tributaries of the Amazon. It was a perfectly legal procession. The coca leaf—not the cocaine that is made from it—is

  a legal stimulant in Peru, and there are some who insist that no work would ever get done east of the Andes if it was outlawed. The drug helps workers endure cold, hunger, and exhaustion. A chew of coca, in eastern Peru, is the Indian equivalent to a coffee break.

  And the effects, I found, were somewhat similar. Unrefined coca leaves are not a particularly strong drug. I first chewed some with a Peruvian police officer. He had been dispatched from a frontier town to check on my party. We had been asking around about ruins; the word was that we were trekking the ridges, making maps. It was possible that we were grave robbers, that we were in the business of stealing priceless pre-Columbian artifacts.

  The officer had trekked two days, over three sets of five-thousand-foot ridges to find us. He found no digging at our campsites, but offered to "accompany" us for a few days. The man wore a poncho and a .38 revolver on his belt. He also carried a woven shoulder bag full of coca leaves.

  At the base of every ridge, the officer would tell us that the walk ahead was "very easy." Sometimes the hills were steep and endless. It was wiser not to listen to the officer regarding the relative difficulty of climbing the hills. Better to simply see how many coca leaves he wadded into his mouth at the base of the ridge. Lots of coca meant a long hard climb.

  The officer offered my party some of the leaves—people always find it difficult to believe that I was offered my first taste of raw coca by a police officer—and I found the effect not entirely negligible. Still—this was 1977, remember—I didn't think you'd be able to sell a single leaf outside a disco in Queens. Coca leaves turn your teeth and lips green. Chewing them involves a lot of gloppy spitting.

  It helped on the long climbs, though. Most people have felt something of what coca leaves do. Imagine that you have had a hard day: up before dawn, no time for breakfast, errands all morning, nothing for lunch, and now it's two in the afternoon. You stop at a diner, exhausted, and order coffee and a piece of pie. Half an hour later you're ready to go again: that's pretty much the lift you get from a mouthful of coca leaves.

  In the decade since I had been to Peru, the government, responding to pressure from the United States, has been raiding the coca producers. The plantations—I saw one on the banks of the Maraiion—are now heavily defended. It is worth your life, these days, to stumble into the wrong sector of the eyebrow.

  My experience in 1977 was somewhat happier. The Indian people,

  I found, took me into their homes and fed me eggs and the meat of guinea pigs they raise as a source of protein. They sat with me around a fire and offered their sugarcane beer. One man introduced me to his family and friends, and to their friends' families until I was surrounded by hundreds of polite, curious people, anxious to see a real gringo. They wanted to hear me sing (poor fools), see me dance (they were disappointed), but my talentless audition was, finally, a roaring success. One by one people dropped off the homemade wooden benches and fell onto the dirt floor where they rolled about, men and women alike, all of them laughing helplessly. I have, I told myself at the time, this gift for comedy.

  The Peru I visited a decade ago, I told Joe and Garry, was a land of mystery and hospitality and discovery. It had nothing to do with the filth and despair and astoundingly bad driving we were seeing along the Pan-American.

  About two that afternoon, in an agricultural valley, a truck driver began blasting his air horn at us. Garry let him pass and the driver pointed urgently toward the back of the Sierra. We stopped and didn't have to examine the truck for leaks. Diesel was literally pouring out of the back. It was dripping thickly from both sides and out of the tailgate. The auxiliary tank, we discovered, had ruptured at a seam.

  We pulled off the highway, into some tall grasses beside fields of fernlike young palms. An elderly woman, dressed in black, tended a flock of sheep. A dozen children, who seemed to have simply erupted out of the ground, watched us unload gear and curse the tank. Since the boxes were already out on the ground, the kids all got several milk shakes. They stood watching with big curious eyes above the straws in their mouths.

  We had a full tank, ninety gallons, about seven hundred pounds of diesel, and it took an hour for it to drain. I was sitting in the shade, contemplating the future. The big tank fed into the factory tank. Okay. We would just have to use the thirty-five-gallon factory tank, buy some jerricans for extra diesel, and be careful about filling up frequently.

  Garry, mindful of his sponsors, explained to Joe that the auxiliary tank was not GMC equipment. It was an after-market addition to the truck.

  "One good thing," I said. "We don't have to worry about the pump shorting out anymore."

  Garry did not see this as a blessing. He was examining the welds, trying to find where the worst ruptures were, and he shouted at me to

  "go clean up the cab or something." I didn't like his tone of voice, and I didn't like being ordered around in front of a reporter. No reason to lose my temper, though. I had the formula for dealing with this situation. Although I knew it would never happen, not now, not after the roto run below Lima, I envisioned myself slapping Garry Sowerby in Alaska. Or maybe I'd just knee him in the groin.

  I drove through a hazy sunset doing seventy-five on a new road over the desert. There was a fierce wind from the west that drove a sandstorm before it. The sand was heavy and the wind lifted it no more than a foot off the ground, but it swirled over the pavement in odd serpentine tongues that sometimes created dunes two or three feet high.

  There was a small hut ahead, the first we had seen in this northern desert. Three big trucks were parked nearby, and, as we passed, a man and a woman stood in the doorway, kissing passionately. The western sky was a reddish bruise. The lovers were silhouetted in the warm light of a kerosene lantern.

  "Cathouse," I said
.

  But we didn't stop.

  We were not men.

  We were roto.

  Trujillo is an oasis town of 750,000 and, on this Sunday evening, everyone in the world was going to a party somewhere in Trujillo. There were trees lining the outlying highway, but no streetlights, so it was dark and dangerous. I was driving, following a truck with no taillights, going about twenty miles an hour. Young men on small motorcycles were screaming out of town, on their way, I supposed, to pick up their dates.

  Joe Skorupa was charmed by the vitality of the people, their evident good humor, but wondered about my driving.

  "You could," he suggested, "probably pass this guy."

  I would have at any other time in my life.

  "Too many people," I said. There were all over the road, standing on the shoulder and chatting with friends, walking, yelling for rides. The people on the roadside were shadows under the trees, and any little miscalculation—a swerve to avoid a motorbike without a light—would send the five-ton Sierra crunching over some laughing innocent. I pictured a little girl in a rhinestone witch's hat holding a wand that ended in a tin-foil star.

  The irony of adventure driving is that it is the least adventurous driving anyone will ever do. There is absolutely no room for error.

  I felt Joe was disappointed in my skills. Garry, on the other hand, was sleeping peacefully. I was doing the job.

  There was a central plaza arranged around an immense traffic circle where delivery bicycles, motorcycles, overloaded pickups, and semis bound for Ecuador or Lima all whirled around to pounding Latin rhythms booming out of every portable sound system on the face of the earth. I took the circle twice, slowly, then guessed on the proper turnoff.

  The road seemed to end in a pile of sand. Garry was awake, and a couple of flat-out rotos holding bottles of liquor shouted to us. They stumbled toward the truck, yelling and offering us drinks. Their faces were shiny with perspiration, and between the two of them they had enough teeth to fill a single human mouth. One man had large yellow eyes, like a pair of fried eggs.