by Dina Bennett
Like everything else I’d imagined before the Rally, my immersion therapy seems to have resulted in the opposite effect. I am not seeking out groups and being sociably chatty. Then again, I don’t have to, because everyone in town approaches me instead. It turns out that for May, June, and part of July, we were the hottest thing in town since regular mail service. It didn’t even matter that I’d sent only one email, and that from Moscow. The organizer’s daily reports had made up for my silence. People read them every morning, along with blogs posted by a few other crews. “Have you heard the latest from the P2P?” our friends and neighbors asked each other. “Did you notice they’ve slipped in the standings?” they said, when unbeknownst to them we suffered the first of our many shock absorber problems. Someone even sounded the alarm, “They don’t know where Dina and Bernard’s car is!” while we were enjoying our impromptu truck ride to Moscow after Roxanne’s leaf spring broke.
I find myself grumpily amused that, upon our return, I have 1,400 new buddies, all huggy and happy and hungry for the backstory no one else has been told. When well-wishers greet me with, “Gosh, it must have been a blast,” I find I can only relate the hardships, can only talk about how difficult it was. I burst into tears without cause, and, even though I sleep extra hours to make up for what I missed on the P2P, when I wake up I think mostly about just going back to sleep. I’m not so far gone that my behavior doesn’t disappoint and mortify me. To collapse after such an accomplishment . . . wouldn’t that be rather contradictory?
Bernard shows signs of being embroiled in a similar struggle. He goes his separate way during the day, getting our hay crew settled in. Evidence that he’s not happily in the swing of life comes out when he grouses to me about things he knows happen every hay season: equipment breakdowns; lending his tools and getting them back filthy; too much hay cut too soon, turned to acres of brown mush in the seasonal monsoon. We sit together at meals as we always have, but there’s little conversation. The general silence in our house is more brooding than companionable. It’s as if, without Roxanne around us anymore, we’ve each landed on opposing rims of the Grand Canyon, and, instead of walking down and trying to connect somewhere in the middle, we’ve turned our backs on each other and are walking away.
When I look at Bernard across the table, he seems small, distant, out of focus. He’s going through the motions of ranch work on autopilot. I can tell his heart isn’t in it. Usually a paragon of patience, he now has little. He snaps at me over ridiculous things, like why am I taking so long to put on my shoes and how could I forget to buy his favorite juice on my weekly food run. It’s obvious to Bernard, too, that something’s not right with me. A month after the Rally’s end, instead of being out with the horses, I drag about the house, listless and unenthused. I match him for pettiness, chiding him about not fluffing both pillows on the bed and setting a sloppy table for dinner.
For over two years, preparations for the P2P have consumed all of our waking moments, and, for me at least, too many of my sleeping moments as well. Now it’s over. It feels like we’ve crash landed, and the peace and natural beauty of the ranch are not enough to distract us from rehashing all the what-ifs of the Rally. What if Roxanne had been ready sooner? What if we’d been able to test her? What if we hadn’t packed so much? What if Bernard hadn’t careened off that rock? What if we’d thought of bringing spare steel to make new parts?
After six weeks of this nonsense, we start to talk about it. “You know, I was remembering this morning about our stay in Gdansk, at that beautiful inn. With James and the rest. That was wonderful, wasn’t it?”
“Um hmm. Remember that meal? And the cigars? Hey, and when we reached Tsagaannuur, just before Siberia, how exhausted we were. Little did we know . . . . And when we gave Robert that bottle of Glenlivet? How his eyes lit up?!”
“Yeah, but they weren’t quite so lit the next morning. I know, because I saw him before anyone else did.”
“You did?”
“Well, remember that cup of coffee I brought you? I wanted to let you hang out in the tent so I brought him and Maddy a cup of tea.”
“You woke him up? I didn’t know about that.” We’re off, reminiscing about P2P high points, surprised and delighted to rediscover there are quite a few. After a while we both sit back, smiling, ruminating on how we’ve finally started to shrug off the obvious disappointments that for these past weeks have laid so heavily upon us.
Though it’s just a fraction, the door is now open enough to let a slim ray of light enter. I revisit that door a few days later and give it another nudge. “You’re going to think I’m nuts to say this,” I start out one evening at dinner, while Bernard frowns into his salad. “But I miss the Rally.” This is such a shocker that Bernard jerks his head up, a leaf of salad half way into his mouth. I can see he thinks I’ve lost whatever remained of my mind. I fumble for clarity. “Well, that’s not essentially true. Of course I don’t miss the Rally overall. But you know what I do miss? I miss that surge of drama I felt, wondering how I’d cope with each day’s route instructions. I miss seeing something new each day. I even miss discovering what gas stations are like in each country. I also miss the time trials. God, I really loved them. Hard to believe, huh?” I stop here, momentarily lost in my recollections.
“I wish we could find something like that to do here. Just a time trial. For the fun of it.”
It’s astonishing to both of us that either would dare broach doing anything related to a rally again, let alone that we would associate any element of the P2P with the word “fun.” In one way, it feels like too soon to be reliving the intensity of that experience. Then again, what’s becoming clear is that there are big parts of the Rally that we both miss profoundly. And now the flood gates open.
“So, you know,” I say, “We’re here, we’re home, and we’re doing the usual things. But it’s as if we’re not together anymore. I liked being in the car with you. It was just you and me, and we were together all day, every day, figuring things out . . . I liked that.”
Bernard looks at me, listening, and for the first time in weeks I feel us starting to reconnect. “You did?” he says, reaching for my hand and squeezing it hard. “I miss that, too. I miss you.”
“I know. I loved that part of the Rally. That the car was the only place we had to be. And we both had roles to play. We did well at them, don’t you think? And we didn’t fight. It was just you and me, against the world. Kind of.”
“Would you do another rally?”
“Another rally? Are you crazy? No way!”
“So what would you do?”
“Well, I don’t know. As far as the Rally organization and having to do everything by their rules? That I don’t miss, and that I’d never do again. Ever. Those other things we’ve been talking about, like driving together somewhere new? I think I’d like that.”
A week passes, during which we both tussle with a nascent idea. Bernard offers the opener, again at the dinner table, since that’s the only place where neither of us is distracted by something else. “Remember my drive around the world?” he starts out. “We could do something like that.”
“Drive around the world? Isn’t that a bit long?” He’s barely begun and already I’m hesitant, afraid he’s going to propose something that I can’t see myself doing.
“No, not around the world. We’d pick a place and go explore. Unplanned, sort of. We’d take it day by day, the way I did on that round-the-world drive, staying longer in places we enjoyed and moving on when we were ready.
I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve never traveled without a plan, not knowing where I might be the next day, not having hotel reservations for each night. I want to keep this conversation going, though, so I say, “Hmmm,” which strikes me as reasonably positive and properly noncommittal.
Bernard charges on, “It’d be perfect to get away from here for a couple of months in the middle of winter, don’t you think? Anyway, I’ve had enough of plowing and shoveling every
day for months on end.”
“A couple of months?” I splutter. This is all moving too fast for me. I started out imagining we’d do a local drive for a week or two. Left to his own devices, Bernard’s gone off on a totally different tack, and now he’s proposing we go away for a period longer than the Rally, without even booking a room for the night. “Oh no, what have I started?” I think. I’ve barely finished the Rally that nearly did me in, and now Bernard’s concocting another escapade that is so beyond the borders of my comfort zone I doubt I can even get a visa for it.
Then a strange and wonderful thing happens. The nameless dreads subside, and I move into rally mode, searching for something productive to make of Bernard’s idea. When I do, what’s obvious to Bernard becomes obvious to me. His suggestion isn’t as far-fetched as I feared, because if there is one thing I know how to do now it’s a long road trip. If I can be in a car for thirty-five days, why not forty or fifty? What’s the big deal? Besides, what I said to Bernard days ago was the truth. For weeks now, I’ve been filled with a veritable ache, a hunger, to be in an automobile again, as long as it’s with Bernard. I crave it the way I crave a juicy Angus ribeye after a hard day’s work. At those times, the urge to get back in a car, close the door, and see what happens next is almost more than I can stand. The very unknowingness of being on a new road, unmasking the secret of what’s around the bend, reveling in the fatigue and the exhilaration of driving and discovering, all with Bernard beside me, fill me with longing. If the man offered to drive me to the moon, I’d say “When do we go!?”
This time though, I have one imperative: I want to do it my way. “You mean just the two of us, right? On our own. Picking a region and then going there and driving through it. Right?” It feels important at that moment to make sure Bernard doesn’t have another rally hidden up his sleeve.
“Never again three hundred people,” he says. We grin at each other in relief.
“OK!” I say, two syllables which are so quickly said and can get me into such trouble. “No support organization because we won’t need one, no ambulance crew because we don’t get sick anyway, no mechanics because you’re the best one there is.” I want to wake up in the morning and pore over a map with Bernard, pinky finger tracing a thread of road as we decide where to go that day, free to wander as the spirit moves us. “This,” I say to Bernard, “is going to be the polar opposite of the P2P in every way.”
With that, we’re transformed. We click back into sync, excited to find time together during days that now seem filled with too many distractions from the essential. The essential being figuring out where we’re going to go on our first multi-week road trip and what we’re going to use to cover all those miles. The second part comes easier than the first.
“Shall we use Roxanne?” Bernard asks, raising the obvious question. “She’s ready to go.” I can tell from his tone that he misses her, misses this vehicle into which he poured a year and a half of his life and so many dreams.
“I know,” I tell him, and I sigh to buy more time, procrastinating, not wanting to hurt Bernard’s feelings by what I say next. “Obviously, I do know just how much effort you, we, put into getting Roxanne ready for the Rally. Still, I don’t think I can do another long car trip in her. At least not right now. I realize nothing should go wrong with her now, but theoretically nothing should have gone wrong with her on the Rally. And it did. If we use her I’ll be worrying all the time about what might break next. I don’t want our next trip to be about the cool car. I want it to be easy, no car worries, just us seeing what’s around. Know what I mean?”
“No, no,” Bernard says, which is how he expresses that he agrees with me. “You’re right. We could get a different car.” His eyes get that wounded puppy look, and I can tell he’s stifling some disappointment, but he’s not making a big deal of it. We’re figuring out our next trip and we’ve both adopted the practice of compromise that served us so well on the P2P.
“We don’t need to buy yet another car, I don’t think. How about we just rent? You know what’d be great about that? Car repairs would be someone else’s problem!” I feel quite triumphant about this. “We get a car from Avis or Hertz, and if it breaks down, we call them and they bring us another one.” I’m in love with my new adventure, my imagination already running wild with the marvels of wherever we’ll be going.
“Yes. You’re right. Perfect.”
Figuring out where to go takes more thought. Bernard starts. “We could go around Europe. Visit friends and family. Go skiing,” he suggests. I applaud the notion of touring ski resorts and being away in February and March, the depths of our snow season. “But,” I say, “if we go to Europe during ski season we’re just trading one winter for another. It’d be more inspiring to get away from winter altogether, wouldn’t it?”
“So that means somewhere where it’s summer during our winter. How about Australia?”
“How about Patagonia?”
“Patagonia? That’s a country in South America right?” Bernard’s stumped. I’ve finally caught him out by proposing a place he doesn’t know of. What he doesn’t realize yet is that Patagonia’s not a country at all. “It’s a region at the tip of South America” I explain, “that’s split between Chile and Argentina and goes all the way down to Cape Horn, in Tierra del Fuego. Remember when my father went there, about 15 years ago?”
It’s an area that my father, by then in his late seventies and well past his prime mountaineering days, loved. Looking at photos in the den of his Salt Lake City home, he described to us the majestic black spires of Torres del Paine and FitzRoy, the pure sparkling rivers spilling from immense glaciers, the coastline teaming with penguins and seals, magical names like Straits of Magellan and Beagle Channel, and gauchos in black berets galloping horseback through the waving grasslands of the pampas. He loved the clarity of the air, the broad, sweeping views. Above all, he was enchanted with the start of what was projected to be a magnificent wild road called the Carretera Austral, which for the first time would permit access by car to Chile’s isolated southern coastline. I’d been longing to go there ever since.
“Patagonia is the region where I wanted to do that long horseback ride through, but couldn’t because of work, remember? I think I must have shown you the description of that horse trek several times.” I’m nudging Bernard along, trying to jog his memory and impress on him that my suggestion isn’t pure whimsy. At this point, I have no idea whether the Carretera Austral will be too scarily remote even for the new me. I do know one thing, though, which is that Bernard is not excited about a place where I would go horseback riding. To reel him in I have to hook him with something enticing. Seven hundred miles of deserted gravel road is my worm.
We go to the computer together and google “Carretera Austral.” As Bernard reads the description, he’s silent. He turns to me and says, half puzzled, half accusatory, “How come I’ve never heard of this before? Tell me again how you say it?”
Cah-rreh-teh-ra Ow-strahl” I say, rolling the r’s. “It means Southern Highway.” Though I’m no fisherman, I sense he’s got the hook in his mouth. It’s time to set it. “Hardly anyone ever drives there. Especially not driving themselves in their own car. I mean rental car.” I can feel the hook dig deep and grab.
“Really? Patagonia. Hmmm. You know, maybe I have heard of this Carretera,” which he says like most Frenchmen, unable to roll an “r” to save his life. “Yes, yes. I think I read something about it.” Bernard loves to be the most knowledgeable about everything. Then he returns to reading the road information on the screen. “You know, I think I’ll go to my office and see what else I can learn about this road. Do you think we could find a map of it?” The hook is set so hard that Bernard is going to reel himself in. I’m jubilant.
We’re going to Patagonia. Our travel companions will be maps and a guidebook. We’ll have three hotel reservations, one in Santiago for the day of our arrival, and one each to guarantee us the perfect locale in Torres del Paine an
d for access to FitzRoy. The notion of being so footloose fills me with a delicious dread. Four months later, we board a plane for Chile.
Epilogue: Are We There Yet?
APHORISMS FROM A DRIVING LIFE
Roxanne did not return with us to Colorado at the end of the P2P. One of James’ friends, visiting in Reims the night before the rally ended, fell so completely under her spell that he asked if he could adopt her. “I will care for her as if she were my own,” he said. From the comfort of her climate-controlled, heavily guarded garage near his home, she was outfitted with a new windshield, got her leaky parts tightened, and had proper shock absorber mounts measured and welded in place.
We had planned to drive her again, indeed we kicked around several possible jaunts, but somehow it never worked out. Finally, wishing her a chance to once more strut her stuff on the roads of the world, we sold her to an Australian couple who wanted a rally-ready car to take on a variation of the P2P being run by the same organizers in 2010. They did a shakedown rally with her in 2009, driving from London to Casablanca. She performed beautifully, but afterward her new owners decided she merited a new engine. A year later, they started the P2P with her, at the same spot in Badaling where we departed three years earlier. This time it was Day 2 when a fan bolt broke, severely damaging the radiator. Roxanne made it to Ulaanbaatar where the damage was repaired, but within an hour of the start from UB it happened again, this time destroying her radiator completely. Roxanne was withdrawn from the rally altogether and shipped back to England. The whole episode gives me the shivers. It’s more than odd that on both P2Ps a fan-related incident happened within the first two days, the only difference being that, in our case, we kept Roxanne going. Part of me likes to think my fender hugging in Greeley really did touch Roxanne’s soul.