Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  The document that we had to have attesting to our good character? Could we have that now, on the spot?

  Ahh, no, never, sehor. It was an important and complex document that generally took two days to validate.

  Two days?

  With the help of Luis, we got the document in two hours.

  "You know," Luis told us as we drove through Panama City at about fifteen miles an hour, "I once went to Japan on business. I had never

  been out of Panama, not even to the United States. I arrived in Tokyo on a Sunday morning, and my Japanese associates were supposed to pick me up that afternoon.

  "I wanted to go to Mass. I looked in the phone book in my hotel room and found something that looked like a Catholic church. Then I checked the address against a subway map of the city. I took the subway, then asked a policeman to direct me to the church. I used sign language. I folded my hands in prayer, and the policeman thought I was looking for a temple, so I made the sign of the cross. He understood that. I asked how long it would take to walk there. I made a walking motion with my fingers and pointed to my watch. The policeman took my arm and indicated a fifteen-minute segment on the face of my watch.

  "When the Japanese picked me up at the hotel that afternoon, they were amazed that I had traveled halfway across the city, gone to Mass, and gotten back to the hotel without any help at all. That was the one big foreign adventure of my life."

  He paused and said, "Of course, it's nothing like what you're doing." "No," I said, "it's exactly like what we're doing." "Anyway," Luis said, "I understand what it means to have someone help you in a foreign country."

  With the seemingly unhurried help of Luis, we cleared customs and assembled a Russian novel's worth of paperwork in the hours between six in the morning and noon. Six hours to write War and Peace.

  Back at the hotel there was good news from Moncton. Chistita Caldera would be waiting for us at the southern border of Nicaragua. The letters from Nicaragua and Honduras had arrived at the Canadian embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica.

  Garry said that it looked like we'd arrive at the embassy in Costa Rica sometime between midnight and four in the morning. How would we pick up the letter? Jane had thought of that. There was a night guard at the embassy gate. He would have the documents in hand.

  We pulled out of the port and I stopped at a large North American-style supermarket to buy more bottled water. Then we drove over the bridge across the Panama Canal and headed for the border, 220 miles to the north.

  Garry said, "Let's see what this baby'll do."

  "Part two."

  Panama, for all its trouble, is not a dirt-poor country. Along with Costa Rica, it shares one of the highest standards of living in Central America. This was reflected in the roads, which were straight, well graded, and very fast. Panama's population is comparatively small and there was very little traffic, which was good for us because it was now one in the afternoon and our information was that the border closed at five. Either that or eight. No one knew for sure. It seemed a good idea to get there before five. If the border was closed and we had to stay overnight, we'd lose our escort through Nicaraguan customs. Chistita would be waiting for us there at eight the next morning.

  Our information was that customs formalities at the southern border of Nicaragua could take up to ten hours. Some people had waited two days to enter the country. Others had simply been turned back with no explanation. We needed Chistita and there was no way to contact her at the border. Telephones in Nicaragua most often don't work.

  Garry pushed the Sierra to eighty and eighty-five. He was sweating profusely, flushed with heat and concentration. The road rose over some low green mountains and a cooling rain began to fall. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees, and the air was thick with the fragrance of tropical grasses and flowers. There was a roadside shrine to some forgotten bus plunge, but the drop below was only a few hundred feet. If the road through the Darien Gap were ever completed, Colombians would view this shrine as a tourist attraction: the world's shallowest, most laughable bus plunge.

  The grasses alongside the road were knee- and thigh-high. Rocky spires, spaced at odd intervals, rose several hundred feet above the lower, more rounded green hillsides. The ridges above us held trees that grew in groves of twenty or thirty along the drainages. The trees had thin trunks and they only branched out at the top, like parasols.

  Russell Chatham, the great landscape painter, once said that painting such land was like painting nudes. He would, I thought, love the mountains of Panama. From a distance, the hillsides seemed smooth, like rich green velvet, and the rounded rolling shapes were explicitly erotic. Trees only grew in the folds and pocketed groins of these mountains.

  We dropped out of the mountains and a stupendous rainbow formed behind us. Wet pavement ahead steamed in the sudden sun. A roadside billboard informed us that san juan beer is for men. Garry slowed for a small town that a large sign identified as coca-cola. Further study

  showed that, under the corporate logo, in letters only a quarter as high, there was another name: san lorenzo.

  Panamanians—the white population, the black, the mestizo—are enterprising people. Every mountain village, it seemed, was either a Pepsi or a Coke town. I envisioned hardworking salesmen dealing with shrewd village officials. Say there were three Pepsi towns in a row; the Coke salesman is going to have to cut the next village in line a very good deal. Some towns, the bigger ones, were both Coke and Pepsi towns.

  In the large northern town of David we asked a policeman when the border closed. Five, he said. We were thirty miles from the border. Garry pushed it hard and we arrived at 4:50.

  The formalities took until well after five, but people still seemed to be passing. Okay. But maybe what people meant was that the Costa Rican border, across the way, closed at five. This uncertainty made the usual stamping and initialing process infuriating. The last soldier was very young and it was clearly his first day on the job. He wanted to do everything right and had to fill out a short form, then sign his name to it. He drew every letter, one at a time, concentrating fiercely and biting his lip. It was physically painful to watch him.

  He handed us the completed form and said we should take it to another official in a building a quarter of a mile back into Panama. That gentleman, an efficient older man, said the document was in order. We took it back to the soldier. He stared at it for some time, turning it this way and that. His face was crumpled in cheerless concentration and he was squinting in the manner of a man staring into a very bright light. Would we take it back one more time and get an informal note from the older man? Just to be sure that everything had been done correctly?

  Oh hell, sure.

  The older man said that no such note was necessary and that we should tell the young soldier to stop being such a blockhead and let us through. Everything was in order. He did not want to see us again, he said.

  The soldier still wasn't sure. We argued for fifteen minutes and were interrupted now and again by other people who rolled through the border with no trouble at all.

  "Let's just go," I told Garry.

  We got into the truck and drove very slowly past the guardstand where the soldier stood. He yelled something and we smiled happily.

  "Thank you," we called back, "thanks very much. Thank you for your help. . . ."

  The Costa Rican border was open. A crowd of young children gathered around us at the parking lot fronting the customs building. They were not beggars, but reasonably polite, rambunctious children curious about foreigners. When the word got out on the kid hotline that we were giving out lapel pins, dozens more of the children materialized. We were mobbed and Garry blew up.

  "No more!" he shouted in Spanish and pushed his way into the customs building.

  It was the first time I had ever seen Garry lose his temper with any of the children who constantly surrounded us whenever we stopped. True, he had just spent four tense hours driving at top speed in what we had assumed was a make-or-break r
un for the border. But we had endured some tough drives in South America, and Garry was just never short with children. Never.

  He was sweating out of proportion to the heat, and his skin was flushed. There was something wrong. Something, I thought, that had to do with Nicaragua. Garry had always hated Nicaragua.

  As borders go, Costa Rica was almost pleasant. All the officials were young, most of them no more than thirty years old, and they dressed like students. In one room, dozens of officials crowded around a black-and-white television set: it had just been announced that Costa Rican president Oscar Arias would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Arias and five other Central American leaders had signed a peace plan two months ago. It called for regional cease-fire, amnesty, an end to foreign support for insurgents, and government dialogues with the armed opposition.

  Arias, at forty-five, was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency in Costa Rica. A lawyer and economist, with degrees from the University of Essex and the London School of Economics, Arias pointed out that in six years of armed strife, the region's trade had declined from about a billion dollars a year to S400 million. There had been a corresponding decline in investments. Not only would peace save lives, Arias seemed to be saying, it was also good for business.

  The Arias plan was well received. On the television, Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega was saying that he was willing to meet with the contras fighting his government.

  Before we got the final stamp, we were treated to the televised comments of Ronald Reagan. President Arias, Reagan said, was a world leader of great stature who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan did not say that he approved of the Arias plan, but that detail was lost on the Costa Rican customs officials who broke into cheers at various times during the broadcast.

  There was a sense of great things about to happen in the region, a feeling of hope. I also sensed a wave of great pride among the Costa Rican people, who saw Oscar Arias as a figure comparable to John F. Kennedy.

  It is safe to drive at night in Costa Rica. There are no armed insurgencies, and the country long ago abolished its army. According to Oscar Arias, "in my homeland, you will not find a single tank, a single artillery piece, a single warship, or a single military helicopter." Costa Ricans are forever telling visitors that there are more teachers in the country than policemen; they point out that the country has the highest literacy rate in Central America and the best health-care system in the region.

  The government attempts to remain neutral politically, though it has strong ties with the United States. It has been a democracy for over a hundred years, making it the oldest democracy in Latin America, and one of the oldest in the world.

  In the 1850s, the government offered free land to those who would grow coffee. The crop brought near-instant prosperity, and the peasant class became landowners. Except for the town of Limon, where the people are primarily black, most of the people are white or mestizo. In recent years, Costa Rica has established several remarkable national parks, which are responsibly administered. (Many areas in South and Central America are designated national parks. These are usually remote, underpopulated areas where life goes on as always. People living on the land often do not know they are living in a national park. Mining, timbering, and petro development are all generally allowed, but the government can always point to national parks on its maps and talk about concern for the environment.)

  Costa Rica is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Central America. On this day, when the president had been honored, we expected to see dancing in the streets when we hit the capital city of San Jose.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  The road to San Jose runs along the top of a ridge, through orchid-

  growing country, on a mountain called Buena Vista: good-view mountain. We would, of course, be driving through the orchids on good-view mountain in the middle of the night.

  The road crosses the continental divide at about ten thousand feet. They say from that point, on a rare clear day, you can look in one direction and see the Atlantic Ocean, then turn 180 degrees and see the Pacific.

  There is another, informal name for Buena Vista.

  "Why," I asked a Costa Rican gas-station attendant, "do they call it the Mountain of Death?"

  He was a short man of Italian ancestry and he wore the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up to reveal bulging biceps.

  "Why?"

  He stared at me. "The road to San Jose," he said slowly, as if to a very young child, "is very steep, very narrow, very foggy, and very dangerous. Many have died."

  We were used to people dying from gunshot wounds and I wanted to be sure about this: "They die in automobile accidents?"

  The man jerked back, as if dumb questions were punches, like left jabs.

  "In automobile accidents," he said very slowly, "many have died."

  So Garry, who was still jittery and tense from the run to the Panamanian border, felt he should drive the Mountain of Death.

  There was no one walking on the shoulder because there was no shoulder. Trees and foliage lined the road, and it was very dark. It had rained earlier, and the cooling mountain air was heavy with the sensual fragrance of orchids. A short time later, it was too cold to drive with the windows open. At six thousand feet, there was a customs check and the young officer was wearing a parka and wool cap.

  We were rolling through long uphill climbs followed by short stretches of flatland that invariably led to another steep pitch. Pockets of thick fog sulked in the drainages of the rivers, on the mountain curves, in the flats.

  It was slow, torturous driving through these areas the yellow road signs identified as zonas de neblina. I liked the word neblina for fog. Every time we saw one of these signs, we were plunged into a thick pewter-gray fog that limited our visibility to no more than ten feet.

  "Another nebulous area," I'd tell Garry.

  We were crawling through a fog as thick as porridge on an uphill stretch. There were three big trucks ahead of us and we were probably

  making all of six or seven miles an hour when a new Toyota pickup truck pulled out and passed all four of us on a blind uphill curve, in the fog. It had been a white truck, its side panels barely visible through the fog. Trees and foliage lined the road, but I had a sense that, just beyond the greenery, there were drop-offs everywhere. It felt like bus-plunge country.

  "That guy must be drunk," I said.

  "Either that or suicidal."

  I was playing word games in my mind— nebulous, neblina —when we rounded another corner on a high ridge that was clear of the hellish fog. Two trucks and a car were pulled up on the side of the road. Men with flashlights were standing by a break in the foliage. A truck, they said, had come speeding around the corner, didn't make the turn, and had gone off the road here. It had just happened.

  We were somewhere near the ten-thousand-foot level. Four or five of the thin trunked trees were broken off near the ground, the jagged stumps very white in the light of our flashlights.

  I followed the beam of one of the lights down until the darkness swallowed it. There was no fire, nothing. I imagined this was one of the places where you could see both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The vehicle had sailed off the ridge on the Atlantic side.

  "Was it a truck?" I asked one of the men.

  "A white Toyota," he said.

  So the driver who had passed on a blind uphill curve in the fog had taken a ten-thousand-foot dive into the Atlantic from the top of the Mountain of Death. There was a strange absence of emotion about this. I looked down into the black void and felt insubstantial, nebulous.

  We pulled into San Jose, which was set in a mountain basin, like Quito. The weather was cool enough for a light jacket, and a woman who sold diesel at a convenience store that might have been an American 7-Eleven used her only phrase of English about a dozen times. "Welcome to Costa Rica, my friends," she said.

  It was just after midnight, but people were indeed dancing in the streets, celebrating
the honor their young president had brought to the country. We stopped on a corner to ask directions. People wanted to banter, to joke, to ask us what we thought of Costa Rica and Oscar Arias. It was a very good-natured crowd and we were handing out lapel pins, pledging eternal friendship and Pan-American unity when a flashy red Toyota truck pulled up in front of us and everyone disap-

  peared. The truck was jacked up on monster tires and carried a lot of shiny chrome.

  There were three men in the Toyota. All at once they were crouched behind the open doors of their vehicle like men expecting a gunfight.

  Garry put his hands, both of them, on the wheel at eleven and one. I put mine flat on the dash. When the men saw we were unarmed, they moved out from behind their doors. One of them—a big man with a scar that ran from his ear to the tip of his chin—came at us from the passenger's side. Another approached from our left. He had a ponytail, a furious untrimmed beard, and wore a faded denim jacket which was open to the waist so you could see expensive gold chains against a black T-shirt. You tended to focus, however, on the gun tucked in the front of his pants. It was a big automatic, a nine millimeter that might carry a fourteen-shot clip.

  Here we were in a country with no insurgencies; a country that had more teachers than policemen.

  So who were these guys with the guns? Teachers?

  The third man—younger than the other two—stood by the red truck. He wore a blue short-sleeved polo shirt that set off his brown leather shoulder holster and the wooden handle of a large revolver. Probably a forty-four. He never moved, and his eyes never left mine.

  The man with the scar wore a light-beige rain jacket and there was a gun-sized bulge just under his left arm. He approached Garry, put his right hand into his jacket, and flashed a badge that was in his wallet along with a picture of the scar-faced man and some official-looking stamps. "Police," he said.