Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  We had a good diner-quality U.S. meal, nothing gourmet, and our

  waiter was a man who looked like the entire front line of the Washington Redskins. We were tempted to call him "sir" rather than "waiter" but mustered up the courage to ask if there was any liquor available.

  The front line of the Washington Redskins approached another gentleman, a tall black fellow with a way of standing that suggested his bones had a great deal of elasticity to them. The front line said: "These boys ain't had a taste for some time."

  The rubber man—his name was Frank—told us to go up to our stateroom, and he arrived a short time later with a bottle of vodka and a bucket of ice. It was his own personal bottle but he wouldn't allow us to tip him. "Worth about, I suppose, eight bucks," he said.

  A few drinks later, Captain Juergen Steinebach, the head of the stevedore company, stopped in for a visit. He was a burly man who had been around the world and done some rally driving. He had heard about our project and knew we would be concerned about our vehicle. He wanted to talk about what we were doing.

  I said that the record run had two aspects: driving and documentation. The captain had worked in ports all over the world and agreed with me that the countries of Latin America had produced the most document-intensive set of cultures on the face of the earth.

  It was now after midnight. The longshoremen were supposed to stop working at one-thirty. The captain took us for a stroll down the pier. We walked past a ship called the Encouragement and Captain Steinebach said that there was more to a cargo ship than one that will carry a lot of weight at good speed. He was most interested in the loading gear. "A cargo ship," he said, "becomes obsolete not because of her hull or engine, but because of her capacity to load and unload quickly."

  The night was hot, the air heavy with humidity, and the pier was still wet with the morning's rain. Light from working ships fell across the damp pavement in sheets and patches. All else was darkness. It occurred to me that here, in a major Colombian port, there was a possibility that persons currently pursuing a career in international crime might be hard at work, and that such individuals could resent an accidental intrusion.

  Still, we needed to be sure that the truck was loaded onto the Stella Lykes. In the utter darkness behind warehouse number 7 was the large rust-colored container that carried our truck. The longshoremen loaded it onto a towing trailer, hooked the Stella Lykes 's crane into it with a spreader device (most of the other containers were twenty-footers) and loaded it atop the other four forty-foot containers on the port bow.

  We went back to the stateroom and tried to sleep. I was up three hours later. We were on that kind of schedule. I went into the lounge, then wandered back to the room where I lay in bed, on my back, staring up into the darkness. All Zipped up and nowhere to go.

  There were some books in the lounge. One was about a man who killed people and kept a diary detailing his foul deeds. His wife found the diary. There was a confrontation and the wife was in jeopardy for some time but the bad guy got his in the end. I read the book while lying in the sun on a lawn chair on the gray metal deck in a deep canyon formed by towering stacks of rusty-orange containers.

  It was an absolutely clear day. The water was a brilliant deep-water blue and there wasn't a whitecap in sight. We had a 260-mile voyage to the Panama Canal and Panama City. To the west, I could see a bit of the jungle: the roadless Darien Gap.

  The Panamanians say that completing the road would be difficult: there are a lot of bridges to build, a lot of grading to be done. The official explanation for the eighty miles of roadless wilderness is that South American cattle have hoof-and-mouth disease. A road would allow infected cattle to wander into Panama and introduce the disease to Central America. (Which is why Roberto Raffo, the Argentine who was organizing the horseback traverse of the Americas, was having such a hard time getting permission for the trip into Panama.)

  There are other reasons for the gap. On my previous visits to Panama, I had the distinct impression that Panamanians hate and fear Colombians on the basis of the sort of news that I had in my clip file. Why build a road for the convenience of paid assassins? That seemed to be the attitude.

  Finally, everyone everywhere agreed that General Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian strongman, was involved in the drug trade. Specifically, it was alleged that he allowed traffickers to land and refuel planes in Panama in return for a percentage of the profits. Given a road from Colombia through Panama, Colombian freelancers could simply drive through the general's territory, thus depriving him of a major source of income.

  So the gap was there because the Panamanian people didn't want a road. General Noriega didn't want a road.

  I made the mistake of finishing the book in about an hour. Why was I speed-reading? Now what was I going to do?

  There was a momentary shadow, a patter of rain, then it was clear again. The sun touched the clouds on the horizon and they burst into

  flame, burned out spectacularly, then darkened down into the color of a deep bruise. Below these damaged clouds there was the occasional flash and streak of lightning. Then it was dark.

  About two the next afternoon, we were in Gatun Lake, the huge artificial lake in the center of Panama, eighty-five feet above sea level. We had passed through the first set of locks, Gatun Locks, and had risen into the lake at two in the morning. The water was greenish and there were strange circular islands, tufts of tangled emerald jungle that dotted the lake. The islands generated a slight misting fog that rose out of the greenery in drifting silver pillars.

  The large freighter was hugging a meandering curve of red buoys, carving a wide sinuous wake around the jewel-like islands.

  The Stella Lykes passed close to the southern shore and I could see areas where the waters of the lake had eroded the banks. The land was the deep red of jungle clay. Creeks that emptied out into the lake flowed red: the color of diluted blood or bad catsup. There was something feverish and malarial about the color of these sluggish rivers against the impossible greenery of the jungle and the more muted palette of the lake.

  The channel winds twenty-four miles through Gatun Lake before it enters the Gaillard Cut, an eight-mile-long canyon blasted through the rock of the continental divide. In places, the freighter seemed a stone's throw from shore and the land looked vaguely prehistoric with ferny grasses and large-leafed plants. Frank, the rubber man, said that before the cut was widened, about twenty-five years ago, a man on the deck of a ship had to duck overhanging branches.

  "Snakes on those branches," Frank said.

  The jungle seemed to close in on the ship, and the odor of the land, rather than the sea, freshened the air. Birdcalls burst out of the jungle with increasing urgency just at dusk: the whistles and melodic songs of jungle life and not the shriek of seabirds.

  The last set of locks—Pedro Miguel, a thirty-one-foot drop, and Miraflores, a fifty-four-foot drop in two steps—would lower the Stella Lykes back to sea level. Lines connected to four small locomotives pulled us into the narrow lock. The engines were called mules.

  "They used to really use mules," Frank said.

  Beside us, a large cargo ship, painted bright-yellow, was rising in the adjacent lock as we sank. The lights of the lock complex, set on high poles, were blinding, and the night seemed exceptionally dark behind them.

  "Ought to be tying up in Panama City in a couple of hours," Frank said.

  At nine that evening, the Stella Lykes was in port. Longshoremen began working immediately, and we waited for them to off-load the truck. Frank, who hadn't been around for some time, emerged from the crew's quarters wearing an iridescent gold suit, gold boots, and a wide-brimmed gold hat. He carried a polished wooden walking stick with a gold handle. On board, Frank was a man who wore T-shirts and faded jeans.

  "You boys ought to come along," Frank said.

  "We need to be sure they off-load the truck."

  "Be a shame," Frank said, "to miss the flatback factory here."

  "Next time
, buddy."

  An hour later the container carrying the truck was unloaded and trucked over to a large customs shed. Garry and I stood on the pier, shaking hands, and I assured him that nothing could go wrong now. We could clear customs in a couple of hours tomorrow, head north, and have the record in our pocket inside of two weeks. About that time, Frank appeared out of the darkness, flanked by two Panamanian policemen. He seemed to be under arrest.

  "Forget my shore pass," he explained.

  We followed him back onto the Stella Lykes. "Maybe you boys want to go into the lounge, have a drink," Frank said.

  "We're driving tomorrow," Garry said.

  Frank shook his head: negative on that.

  "What?" I asked.

  "See, you boys shoulda come with me. I met this girl. She was a master of tongue fu."

  "Frank, what are you saying about driving tomorrow?"

  "I'm saying you ain't gonna be doing any. This girl, she could . . ."

  "Frank!"

  "Well," Frank said, "it seems that, uh, tomorrow is, well, it's a national holiday here. National Revolution Day. They tell me customs don't work for sure, not on National Revolution Day."

  National Revolution Day, I suppose, is an occasion of great merrymaking in Panama. I can tell you that customs officers do not work on National Revolution Day.

  We were staying in a hotel in Panama City, just off a major road flanked almost entirely by bank buildings, twenty and thirty stories high. Swiss bank. Bank of this country, bank of that. In the distance,

  down the empty streets, I could see a pair of golden arches. It could have been a street in any major North American city—indeed, the official currency in Panama is the U.S. dollar—but everything was closed and there was no one on the streets. It was like an Ingmar Bergman film, with ceiling fans.

  My room had a TV and I watched CNN for a while. Bork would not be confirmed for the Supreme Court, the Minnesota Twins had won the American League pennant, there was a hurricane approaching Florida. I lay there in bed and the same news kept happening: Bork, Twins, hurricane.

  Garry called from his room, which was next to mine.

  "Wouldn't it be terrible," he said, "to be in jail?"

  Bork, Twins, hurricane, Bork, Twins . . .

  Our rooms were on the third floor. Across the street was a three-story pink apartment building badly in need of paint. There were no windows in the building: balconies, which could be closed off by a curtain, opened up into a combination kitchen and living room. I could see women cooking dinner and men sitting shirtless on the balconies, drinking beer. The walls of the building were covered with graffiti: change now, the words read, and enough!

  I assumed that these messages had reference to General Manuel Noriega, head of the Panamanian Defense Forces, the man who ran the country.

  Just outside my room, sitting on the sill of the hallway window, were two men in their thirties wearing white polo shirts with alligators on them. They had been there all day, sitting beside the kind of white suitcase used to carry a computer. The suitcase was open, and some sort of electronic listening gear was arranged to pick up conversations from the "change now" apartments. The men were sitting out in the open, in a public hallway, and didn't seem to care who saw them.

  Sure, we listen in on the conversations of private citizens. So what?

  It was a holiday, and there wouldn't even be a riot. Riots only happen on workdays. This is a rule.

  On our last trip to Panama, there had been the electric threat of riots in the streets. The middle class wanted badly to get rid of Noriega who they saw as increasingly bad for business. The fact that he had had political opponents murdered and dismembered did not endear him to the people I met, and his reputation as a drug profiteer was an embarrassment.

  "He makes fifty thousand dollars a year as head of the Defense

  Forces," one executive told me. We were having lunch at an exclusive club overlooking the Pacific. "So how come he owns at least three houses worth a million dollars each?"

  The executive had picked us up at our hotel in an expensive four-wheel-drive vehicle. He apologized for being late, but he felt there would be a riot that afternoon—perhaps the government would fall— and he thought that it would be wise to take his money out of the bank. Just in case. The cash was stashed in the back of the vehicle, in a large leather suitcase.

  As we drove to the club, past the row of banks, I saw hundreds of people standing in line to make similar withdrawals. Workers were putting plywood boards over the plate-glass windows of the banks in preparation for the afternoon's riot.

  Did the executive expect to participate?

  Sure. He'd stand behind barricades and wave a white flag, the symbol of opposition. He'd pound pots and pans like everyone else. That is, if a riot developed.

  Were there a lot of wealthy executives rioting in the street?

  Yes.

  That afternoon, there had been a heavy tropical downpour and the riot was postponed. It was to erupt several days later, after I left. There had been a sense, then, that the general could not survive.

  Now, two months later, the opposition seemed dispirited. Noriega was too cunning, too clever. He was entrenched.

  For want of anything better to do, Garry and I went to the hotel restaurant for an early dinner. It had been an excruciating afternoon.

  "This," Garry said, "is the worst day of my life."

  We discussed the possibility of going out. There were any number of enterprising nightclubs all over the city. On our last trip, we had been to an art deco bar where women on stage, dressed in crossed bandoliers and little else, did a close-order drill with toy rifles to the music of the "Colonel Bogey March." All the customers in the place were men in suits who seemed to consider the drill the apogee of classy eroticism. Forever afterward, whenever I wanted to make Garry laugh, all I had to do was whistle the opening bars to the "Colonel Bogie March."

  Which is what I did at dinner. Da-da, da da da dat dat dada.

  "We can't," Garry said.

  "I know."

  "I can't stand this," Garry said. He was actually suffering.

  Which is the final irony of the adventure-driving business: on a down day, it is wise to sit in the hotel room, alone—Bork, Twins, hurricane—on the off chance that you could get into some kind of unexpected trouble just walking around. The essence of our adventure was to avoid adventure at all costs.

  Garry called from his room.

  "I just threw up," he said.

  ON THE MOUNTAIN OF DEATH

  October 13-14, 1987

  T

  he phones in Panama City worked just fine. You could dial an international call from the hotel room. At five-thirty the next morning, Garry was speaking to Jane in Moncton. Could she please get in touch with the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica? Find out if there was any word from Honduras? The director-general of the Institute of Tourism there, Melissa Valenzuela-Treffot, had promised us a letter of recommendation to smooth our passage through customs. It had been three months since we talked to her. Where was the letter?

  We were waiting on another letter from Mayda Denueda, the director of international promotion for the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism, called Intourismo. (Yes, the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism.) Another woman, Chistita Caldera, who worked for Intourismo, had made a vague promise to meet us at the southern border of that country. Could that be confirmed?

  Jane had been working on these matters but there had been no one at the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica yesterday. It had been a national holiday there as well: Columbus Day.

  One other thing: Jane said that GMC expected us in Dallas at nine next Monday morning for a press conference. The public-relations firm organizing the event was adamant. If there were a bunch of reporters waiting for us and we didn't arrive on time, or at all, it would look very bad indeed. Our absence could be blamed on the truck and not on the fact that, for instance, we were enjoying a few carefree days in some Central American jail. Or th
at we had been shot and were hiding in the jungle, bleeding and without food.

  No, the public-relations firm's thought was that our absence at the

  press conference might be attributed to mechanical failings in the Sierra. "In its first real-world test," the nightmare AP wire copy might read, "a GMC Sierra driven by a team seeking a world speed record on the Pan-American Highway failed to appear as scheduled today in Dallas. Spokesmen for the automotive giant could not explain why the Sierra, newly redesigned at a cost of 2.8 billion dollars, could not be present at the press conference that had been scheduled for almost a week. 'We don't know where the truck is,' one obviously bitter executive said, 'but one of the drivers has kids, and we know where they are.' "

  Jane was being pressured: could we promise, absolutely, to be in Dallas six days from now?

  Well, let's see: all we had to do was endure an unspecified amount of time in Panama City's document hell getting the truck out of a locked metal box in the port. Once on the road, we had to whip through six borders and twelve sets of formalities. One of those borders—the one between Nicaragua and Honduras—was a war zone.

  The public-relations firm wanted a definite yes or no, today.

  Hey, no problem. We'd be there, nine Monday morning, sharp.

  Jane said she'd call the Canadian embassy in Costa Rica and tell them we'd be there sometime in the middle of the night. Garry said he would call her back from the hotel once the truck had cleared customs.

  Luis Paz Cardenas, the director of Industrial Equipment and Motors in Panama, took us on our tour of document hell in Panama. He was a calm, dignified man who expected to retire in nine months. There was a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard of his car, and he drove slowly, carefully, to the various buildings housing various officials who needed to stamp, initial, and restamp our documents. Luis did everything slowly and carefully: there was not a germ of Zippy's disease in the man and he may have been the most cheerfully efficient individual we met on the whole trip.