Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  Garry said that the road was well engineered, but the mountains and the wet asphalt were treacherous. He thought that the wives of the drivers who plied this road probably worried about their husbands in the same way wives of fighter pilots worried about theirs.

  Off to our left there was a stupendous drop-off that would take a truck rolling through some steep greenery, then send it out into the sky, where it would plunge through a layer of clouds and land, in a burst of fire, in some banana grove next to a wooden shack on stilts. The people in the shack would have to suppose that the truck had simply fallen out of the sky.

  It was 5:30 p.m., and here, near the equator, the sun sets promptly at 6:00. It rises at 6:00. There is none of the lazy, lingering light of more northerly or southerly climes in Quito, no such thing as twilight. The sun rises and sets at 6:00 sharp, all year long. Twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness.

  It was no longer possible to see to the bottom of the roadside dropoffs. They were shrouded in shadow, and the impossible depths seemed to purple down into an absolute and final blackness.

  We pushed through a pewtery pocket of silver-gray fog, then rose above the cloud bank itself into a final explosion of dying sunlight. I could see a triangle of sky between green hummocky hills and spires. Streaks of crimson ran across the western sky, and that light fell on the cloud just below us so that I felt I was looking down onto a pastel cushion. It was a stupefying vision of cartoon heaven where people in white robes sit on clouds and play harps.

  And then, bam, it was dark and we were running over a wet, black highway, through the fog, in the dead of night.

  And coming down the hill, careening toward us at crazy speed, was a vehicle decorated with rows of blinking lights arranged at the rectangular periphery of its front end. It looked like a Forty-second Street adult bookstore on wheels, but it was a bus, decorated as buses are in Ecuador, and the driver was speeding, heedlessly I thought, over the wet, slippery asphalt and into the cloudy darkness below.

  Buses, in Argentina and Chile, are not necessarily objects of dread. There, drivers wear white shirts and ties. They are relatively courteous at the wheel, and are treated with the respect accorded airline pilots in the U.S. In Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, by contrast, buses are hurtling projectiles of terror.

  Gringo travelers generally find bus trips in the mountainous regions of Latin America occasions of mind-expanding tumult. Lawrence Millman, in his book Last Places, pretty much hits the note:

  . . . those infamous Latin American bus rides where the bus— actually a hodgepodge of cast-ofF tractor and automotive parts mounted on bald tires—bashes its way through mountains, swivels along precipitous gorges, straightens out hairpin curves, and generally avails itself of scenery to which no bus should have a right. Meanwhile the driver pulls off at every roadside shrine and leaves a bribe for the Virgin Mary; Mexican drivers leave iron washers in lieu of pesos, whereas Ecuadorians are more diligent and leave a certain number of sucres per wheel. But it wouldn't matter if they left Her cassettes of salsa music. Sooner or later the bus will justify everybody's worst fears by plunging (Latin American buses never crash, they plunge) into a deep gorge, ravine, gulch, coulee, or canyon, the only survivor being a three-year-old child muffled by its mother's breasts.

  Tom Miller, in The Panama Hat Trail, advises his readers that the driver's sobriety "isn't a factor. The presence of his wife or girlfriend is. If she's along, she will usually sit immediately behind him, next to him, or on his lap. He will want to impress her with his daring at the wheel, but he will also go to great lengths not to injure her. If he has no girlfriend or wife, the chances of a gorge-dive increase."

  On the other hand, Miller quotes a New York Times editor who finds bus-plunge stories useful as fillers. "We can count on one every couple of days or so," the editor told Miller, "they're always ready when we need them."

  In Miller's experience, the stories are generally no more than two sentences long and invariably feature the word plunge in the headline. The text will include such facts as the number feared dead, the identity of any group aboard—a soccer team, church choir, or children from a certain school—and the distance of the plunge from the capital city.

  Moritz Thomsen, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador who stayed to farm the land, listened well to neighbors when they told bus-plunge stories. In Living Poor, he writes:

  One of the stories they tell about the Ecuadorian bus driver is that whenever he runs offthe road and kills a few of the passengers without killing himself, he immediately goes into hiding in some distant part of the country so the bereaved can't even up the score. There are rumors of whole villages down in the far reaches of the Amazon basin populated almost entirely by retired bus drivers.

  We came up over a final rise and drove into a mass of lights arranged in a series of neat grids. Although Quito is only a few miles from the equator, it is high enough that the climate is wonderfully temperate: a spring day in England. The skies had cleared and lights were strung out along wide boulevards.

  Alejandro led us to a locked gate at some kind of garage. He honked his horn, a pair of metal gates swung open, and we were looking into a bank of incredibly bright otherworldly lights, white hot, like something out of a Spielberg film. We drove slowly into them as people on all sides yelled at one another and at us.

  The truck was to be serviced in here, but no one had told GM Ecuador that we did not want to be interviewed. There were two sets of video cameras from an evening news program, and a few print reporters were present along with half a dozen mechanics and a man in a white lab coat, like a doctor's, who was to supervise the service.

  This, I realized, was the reason Alejandro had been in such a hurry. Everyone was waiting for us. Garry worked with the mechanics and I tried to tell the assembled press that, as much as we would like to, we couldn't do interviews. They filmed me telling them that. I realized that they would use this snippet of film no matter what I said.

  "A team rushing through Quito today on their way to a world record," I heard an imaginary newscaster on an imaginary newscast say, "will be pulling into Colombia tomorrow and will be available to those contemplating armed robbery and/or kidnap."

  We were going to get some publicity whatever happened, and it seemed to me that it would be better to get good publicity than to disappoint these reporters who had spent a couple of hours waiting for us to crest bus-plunge hill. So I spoke with the press.

  "Why do you want to do this?" they asked, and "Do you think of yourself as a romantic adventurer?"

  I told them the drive had been a dream of ours for some time. We were now making that dream come true, and maybe when people saw us, they would think of their own dreams, and they would work to make those dreams come true.

  At the service bay, mechanics were changing the oil and the fuel filter. One of the mechanics, a man with a reputation as a crackerjack electrician, was working on the short in the console. He would attempt to rewire the windshield wipers back into their original circuit. Garry was watching the electrician work. Together, they pulled the console off and saw a tangled bird's nest of multicolored wires running every which way to every device that we had added to the truck. Why someone thought a nonessential system, like an auxiliary fuel pump, should be wired into the same circuit as an essential system, like windshield wipers, has never been satisfactorily explained.

  I was telling the press that our trip was an expression of Pan-American unity and friendship.

  "It's the dog's goddamn breakfast in here," I heard Garry scream. He and the mechanic were tearing at the wiring.

  Our South American friends were helping make our dreams come true, I told the press. Ecuador was the most beautiful place we had seen, and our friends here were the most helpful. The Pan-American Highway was a ribbon of friendship connecting all of the Americas . . .

  "Someone dies when we get back!" Garry shouted. He had a handful of wires and did, indeed, look homicidal.

  We stored
the truck at the garage, slept a few hours, and drove out of Quito before dawn. It was a beautiful, gracious city but Indian people in threadbare clothes slept on the wide boulevards under the glowing streetlights.

  Our windshield wipers were working. People were living on the street in poverty, but by God, we had windshield wipers that worked. That thought tugged at my conciousness, but I refused to entertain it. I wanted to feel good and felt bad about feeling that.

  Joe Skorupa, who lives at sea level, had a fierce headache generated by the altitude. We were driving through an area of fertile farms. Indian women in colorful ponchos, lime-green slacks, and porkpie hats were already out hoeing in the potato fields. The houses were whitewashed adobe affairs with red-tile roofs and flowers in the front yard.

  As we rounded a sharp corner, Garry had to brake for a cow that was standing in the middle of the road. We drove around the beast and it regarded us with bovine indifference.

  "That'd be pretty hard to explain," I said, "hitting a cow."

  "You couldn't exactly say that it darted out in front of you," Garry agreed.

  And we started in on that idea, letting it get silly and stupid and all roto around the edges.

  "Cows don't dart."

  "It's one thing you can say about cows all right. They're piss poor in the darting department."

  "Don't dart worth shit."

  This imbecilic conversation, punctuated by idiotic guffaws, continued for at least fifteen minutes until we heard Joe, in the back, moan loudly. It was a piteous sound meant to be heard over the roar of diesel engine and it meant, Guys, for the love of God, please.

  Garry and I were struck silent. We had been inconsiderate. Still, we hadn't really finished laughing about those darting cows and occasionally the bottled-up emotion came snorting up out of our noses. We were like children in church who can't stop laughing.

  "Shhh," I said, "Joe has a hiddach."

  Garry fell into a phoney coughing fit, but Joe saw through him. "We get back to sea level," he said, "and you guys are dead meat."

  By the time we crossed the equator, Joe was feeling better. Garry and I were elated.

  "We're in the Northern Hemisphere," I shouted. "Nothing can go wrong now."

  "Don't say that," Garry pleaded.

  Stamp this document, then that one. Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Uh, senor, this says that your truck is from 1988.

  Yes, brand-new.

  How can that be? This is 1987.

  Well, it's what we call a model year. . . .

  Did you go into the future and bring this truck back? Ha, I made a joke.

  And a very good one. But no, you see, in the United States . . .

  There is a mistake on your carnet, no?

  A mistake?

  It says 1988 but it is 1987.

  Oh, right. Very good you caught that: a stupid mistake. This is clearly a 1987 truck.

  Just as I thought. Very good.

  Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Across the border into Colombia. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Occupation? Mother's maiden name. Marital status? Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Carnet? Rip, stamp, stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp. . . .

  A mere four hours of this and we were in Colombia where we were met by two men from GM Colombia, called Col Motors or Colmotores. Santiago Camacho wore a blue jacket, jeans, loafers, and wore his black hair moderately long. He had the quick smile of a ladies' man and walked with a confident swagger.

  The other man, Luis Nieto, stood by the truck while we spoke with Santiago. He had close-cropped dark hair, a nose that had been broken at least once, and he carried a small black suitcase in one hand. People passing by would look at the truck, as they always did, everywhere, and Luis would look at the people and then they wouldn't look at the truck anymore.

  Santiago said we were to follow him to the port of Cartagena and that the drive would cost us two days.

  "Two days," I said, amazed. It didn't look that far on the map.

  Well, we would stop at night between about midnight and five in the morning, Santiago explained.

  "Because it's dangerous to drive at night?" I asked.

  "Not at all," Santiago said.

  But of course it is dangerous to drive at night in Colombia. A travel advisory from the U.S. State Department in my clip files read, "Because of sporadic guerrilla activity, travel in certain areas may be hazardous. Before venturing into rural areas, check with the nearest U.S. Consulate. . . ."

  The clip file was bulging with newspaper articles which indicated that Colombia was either a vigorous country of extremely high-spirited adventurers or a nation on the verge of anarchy. "Ranchers and peasants in rural Colombia are arming themselves with more and better weapons to resist attacks from leftist guerrillas," The Miami Herald said. The guerrillas kidnap ranchers, engage in extortion, and harass rural business people. The ranchers were buying Uzi submachine guns. A government official thought this sort of thing could escalate the spiral of violence.

  Which seemed to be true: members of the Patriotic Union—a political party representing the leftists and born out of a 1984 guerrilla-government effort to reintegrate armed rebels into civic life—were being assassinated at an alarming rate. In the last two years, 375 members of the party had been shot to death by unidentified gunmen.

  There were three groups of rebels: ELP, M-19, and FARC. M-19 had, for a time, been at war with the Medellin drug cartel, but the drug lords had taken to disemboweling the leftists and hanging the corpses in trees outside the homes of the victims' families. There was an uneasy truce at present.

  FARC, previously on good terms with the cartel, was now engaged in a miniwar with drug traffickers for control of plantations in the eastern jungles.

  The previous week, one clipping read, a rebel land mine killed three government soldiers and wounded eleven others. Meanwhile, rival gangs of emerald traffickers killed twenty-three people and injured twenty-four during a war for control of the precious stones.

  And last year eleven thousand Colombians were murdered, making homicide the country's leading cause of death among males aged fifteen to forty-four.

  In the area of the country we were presently driving, a lot of trucks were being hijacked. It was easy to see why.

  The road was a good two-lane blacktop with ample shoulders, but the pitches were steep through mountains rising to seven thousand feet. Along the sheer hillsides, there were scars where the mud and rock had simply given up to gravity and fallen away from the land. The roads writhed painfully through this wounded land. The turns were

  sharp and continuous. Our tires screamed through them: Garry was pushing hard and we were doing no more than thirty miles an hour.

  Santiago and Luis were out ahead in another Chevy that looked like a Monza but was called a Classic. It was red and had an automatic transmission. Santiago was driving, pushing the gutsy little gasoline engine hard, and when he passed a truck, he'd hold beside it for a while and then we'd see his arm shoot out the window and make a graceful circle: come ahead, come now.

  If there was a car coming, he'd make a motion like patting a dog on the head: stay back.

  "The guy," Garry said, "is a great driver."

  Sometimes Santiago would circle us forward, then quickly pat the dog on the head: come ahead, ahh, sorry, not now boys, we got certain death up here.

  The trucks, even the best of them, were moving ponderously on this serpentine roller coaster of a road. We followed one semi down a pretty perpendicular hill and he was going so slowly that our speedometer didn't even register. The driver, certainly in his lowest gear, was tapping his brakes every thirty seconds, holding them for perhaps five seconds and then letting go. The truck was probably overloaded—I imagined the driver was carrying at least twenty tons—and if the vehicle got away from him on a grade this steep, he would go screaming to the bottom of the hill and be horribly crushed by his own cargo. The grind of the brake pad against the wheel echoed off the scarred hillsides. It sounded like the
moaning of a large wounded animal.

  The truck, I couldn't help but notice, was going no faster than a man could walk. An ambush could be a one-man affair: jump up on the running board with a gun and discuss the matter with a man who couldn't take his eyes off the road or his hands off the wheel.

  Just after sunset, we came screaming around a corner that led into yet another blind curve, but in the middle of this one there was a disabled truck carrying a load of logs. There were no lights or flares, and we didn't see it in the dark. Santiago slammed on his brakes and the little Chevy stopped about two feet from a projecting log.

  Both Joe Skorupa and I knew that, on a steep downhill grade, our four- or five-ton vehicle was never going to be able to stop. We were going to smash into the back of the Chevy, drive it into the logs, and kill Santiago and Luis. But Garry hit the brakes full on and he stopped with inches to spare.

  Garry was delighted and talked with Joe about GMC antilock

  brakes and real-world capabilities and the wonders of this Sierra, which wasn't just a truck anymore. It gave me a hiddach.

  We passed through too many military checkpoints to count. In the darkness, we'd switch on the dome lights so the soldiers could see us. Coast up to the guns with our hands where everyone could see them. Sometimes the soldiers simply waved us through. Sometimes they spoke with us for less than a minute. Sometimes they pulled us over.

  "God, I hope they don't have a pit," Garry said, "anything but the pit."

  When we were stopped, Santiago and Luis came back and talked to the soldiers. Luis showed them some sort of identification that seemed to impress them.

  The road took us through a few towns and the streets were narrow, just wide enough for two trucks to pass. The sound of music boomed out of the open doorways of the crowded bars, and couples walked the streets, hand in hand. Everyone, it seemed, was socializing in the cool of the evening.