Road Fever (26 page)

Garry called the Canadian embassy in Santiago and was told that packages had been hand-delivered to the tourism ministers in Honduras, Panama, and Nicaragua, but there had been no reply from any of them as yet. He asked the embassy to send a telex to Joe Skorupa, of
Popular Mechanics
, who would ride with us from Lima to Colombia. Skorupa was supposed to be at the Gran Hotel Bolívar in Lima. We would pick him up at four in the morning, on Sunday, October 4.

The truck was serviced, but we asked them not to wash it. A filthy truck was less attractive to potential gasoline bandits. We stocked up on tires so that we had three spares on rims and a fourth not on a rim.

Daniel Buteler, an Argentine executive, called GM Colombia to see if they could have someone at the border to ease us through customs there. Buteler said that not only would they have a customs expediter, they’d also provide a chase vehicle to, as Garry put it, “baby-sit us straight through.”

We had lunch at a place that advertised itself as the House of Pork. Al Buchanan said that GM executives all over South America were feeling particularly good this week. The company had just broken all existing sales records, and a project like ours was something executives had time to think about. Something to add to the resounding glory of GM and all that.

Al Buchanan had just come from Colombia. He liked the country and thought it generally got a bum rap in the international press, though night driving there was still not a good idea. There had a been a large mud slide just the other day in Medellín, but the road would probably be cleared by the time we got there. Thieves were another problem: they tended to hijack fully loaded trucks, though bandits seldom went after vehicles as small as ours. The biggest danger, Al Buchanan thought, would be ambush and kidnapping. The United States had just extradited drug lord Carlos Lehder. It was possible the drug traffickers might want to take revenge on United States citizens.

We talked for a time about the courteous drivers of Chile as opposed to the Fangios of Argentina. Buchanan said that he had a special affection for Chilenos: they were less aggressive than Argentines, but honest in their business dealings. There was a kindness about Chilenos that moved him.

“You know how they have days for everybody down here?” Buchanan asked.

“Student’s Day,” I said, “Grandmother’s Day …”

“Chilenos have a day of the
rotos
.”

Rota
is the Spanish word for “broken,” but the masculine form,
roto
, was a new one on me. I asked what the word meant.

We were walking out of the restaurant, full of pork, which, for me, was a welcome change from jerky and shakes, when Al Buchanan pointed out a man lying in a street corner cradling a bottle. “
Roto
,” he said.

“You mean,” I said, “they have a take-a-wino-to-lunch day?”

“You have to love Chilenos,” Al Buchanan said.

T
HE CENTRAL ROADWAY
out of Santiago felt a little like Santa Monica Boulevard in L.A. There were a lot more church steeples, but the haze that shrouded the snow-capped Andes in the distance was depressing and familiar.

Outside of the city, the traffic was bearable and the scenery splendid: we saw vineyards, orchards, small wooden houses, green pastures,
and horses behind newly painted white fences. There was a sense of Mediterranean ease that lasted for over a hundred miles.

It got drier and the trees began to disappear. The hillsides, though still green, supported small stands of cactus. Farmland was being worked in stone irrigation terraces. Occasionally, we passed a small town of weathered adobe huts with dirt floors and corrugated tin roofs.

Late that afternoon, we drove through an area of sand dunes and saw the Pacific, glittering under a cloudless blue sky. The road turned back inland, and the desert began to close in on us.

“We are,” I announced portentously, “even now rolling into the dreaded Atacama Desert.”

We passed a man and his wife in a turbo Peugeot, and when they read the logos on the camper-shell window—
ARGENTINA TO ALASKA IN 25
DAYS OR LESS
—they sped up to keep pace with us. Garry was driving.

“Fools,” he said. “We have two thousand miles worth of diesel. Try to keep up, Peugeot. You’ll exhaust your fuel and die in the desert.”

Near the town of La Serena, just at sunset, we switched drivers, and the tourists in the Peugeot blew by us. I noticed that, for the first time on our trip, the sun was setting to the south of us. I had a piece of jerky for dinner and pushed the Sierra to ninety, running fast down a big hill toward La Serena, where I could see the festive lights on a Ferris wheel slowly turning in the purple desert twilight.

La Serena, a town of about a hundred thousand, is a growing tourist destination. There are colonial homes, pretty gardens, and a forest of steeples. I caught up to the fools in the Peugeot at a traffic circle on the way out of town. The Peugeot seemed to know where he was going and veered off onto one of the side streets. I watched him, sure now that he wasn’t going to go on through the desert, and disappointed that I wouldn’t have someone to race through the desolation.

But where was my turn? It occurred to me that I had come into the circle much too fast.

Another car entered from a side street at normal speed. I nearly sideswiped him, and both of us turned away from each other, he to the outside of the circle, me to the inside. From behind, a driver I had cut off hit a long angry blast on his horn.

“You want that turnoff,” Garry said, pointing the way.

The street was lined with trees and clearly led out of town, but Garry wanted me to stop. He cleared his throat, tried manfully to speak in a calm voice, gave it up, and began shouting at the top of his lungs.
What the hell was I doing? he wanted to know. “You were doing ninety down the hill into town!” he screamed. “
Ninety!
”

It didn’t seem like a good time to tell Garry that I was trying to catch the Peugeot so I’d have someone to race through the Atacama Desert.

“You’re doing ninety and you’re eating and we’ve got a thousand pounds of diesel in the back. Tim, goddamn it, you can’t drive like me. You don’t know the truck. You’re screwing up. You get lost, you drive over boards with nails in them, you drive over rocks in the road. You drove fifty miles on a flat tire.”

Garry was brutally, almost hysterically angry.

“If I fail on this project, my family doesn’t eat!” he shouted. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

I looked over at Garry and his face was lit from underneath by the dashboard lights. People in a fit of rage can look terrifyingly ugly. My own face felt as if it were on fire.

I thought: Nobody talks to me in that tone of voice. I thought: I am going to punch the shit out of Garry Sowerby. Just get right out of the truck and do it right here, on the streets of La Serena. I thought about that for a while as Garry told me that I was driving like a drunken teenager.

There was a little grass boulevard where we could duke it out. Garry said, “For Christ’s sake, Tim, you don’t even know how to back up.”

I wondered, very seriously, how long it would take me to put Garry down. Did I want to do it with a couple of punches, or maybe just wrestle him down, not hurt him too much? Or … and this thought came as a sudden shock: what if he fought back? What if he fought back and won? I saw myself on my back, humiliated, in front of the cheering throngs of La Serena. No.

My hands were shaking on the wheel, and I considered letting go with a swift, savage, backhanded slap. A warning.

And then if he wanted to fight?

Hell, I’d stomp him like a rat in the cheese box.

But the explosion was over. Garry was still yelling a little, but no longer entirely enraged. “We are,” he said, “in a metal eggshell. You have to have respect for the vehicle and for your abilities. I wouldn’t try to write like you; don’t try to drive like me. You can’t do it.”

Of course, if we fought out here on the street, someone might get hurt. The record run would be over. And it would be my fault because I screwed up and Garry got mad, and I let that madness fuel my own. Some comical sidekick.

“Tim,” Garry said, “promise me you’ll take it safe.”

I decided, in what seemed an enormous emotional sacrifice at the time, not to punch the hell out of Garry Sowerby on the spot. What I would do was wait until we hit Prudhoe Bay. We’d be standing in the snow at the edge of the Beaufort Sea talking about men and machines, time and the elements, and I’d just haul off and pop him a good one. Bam! That’s for La Serena, you shitball.

“Tim, I want you to promise me.”

He’d be lying there, bleeding in the snow in front of any reporters that might be on hand.

“Tim?”

I’d tell the reporters that sure, we got mad at each other during the trip and the only difference between us was that I was able to control my temper until the end. They’d take pictures of Garry on the ground, bleeding into the snow,
WORLD RECORD HOLDER SMASHED AT FINISH LINE
. The image amused me in a bloodthirsty and unworthy way.

“Tim,” Garry said, “I seriously want you to promise me that you’ll take it safe. Say those words.”

“Garry,” I said in an earnest voice, “I am going to take it safe.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” Oh, buddy, you have no idea what I promise for you.

“Thank you,” Garry Sowerby said, and I saw him in an imaginary AP Wirephoto with a broken nose.

“Let’s go on,” Garry said. “You drive.”

I thought: another three weeks and you get yours, pal.

G
ARRY DROVE
over a series of low passes that dropped into bare stony valleys dominated by dry riverbeds. The night was dark, and, at the summit of the passes, there was thick fog.

Some people, I thought as I was lying in the cramped extended cab, might not think this is fun. That realization was either a sudden burst of clarity or a rush of self-pity, I wasn’t sure which. It was like being quietly insane. Sleep was the best idea.

Sometime around midnight, I felt the truck stop and heard Garry talking with police. Another official checkpoint: show ’em the international driving license, the carnet, the
Guinness Book
, ask if they want to come to Alaska, hand out milk shakes and lapel pins. We had suffered through five such military checkpoints in Argentina, and this was our second in Chile. Garry’s checkpoint Spanish was improving.

“Where have you been?”

“Argentina,” Garry said, “and we go to Alaska.”

There was some confusion then, a burst of Spanish that defeated Garry. I couldn’t hear well enough to make out the words, but the officers’ voices did not sound angry.

“Tim,” Garry called, “maybe you better talk with these guys for a while.”

Why not? I’d slept for almost two hours. Why not jump out of my nest in the extended cab and chat with five or six men carrying guns on a foggy mountaintop on an empty road in the middle of nowhere? Negotiate with them in my illiterate Spanish. Perfectly reasonable.

The officers, it seemed, were worried about our personal safety. The pass dropped off into the Atacama Desert. There were gas stations along the way, but they were widely spaced and, in any event, were not open at night. If we continued on, we would run out of fuel and find ourselves stranded in the desert.

It seemed best to show the officers our auxiliary fuel tank. I opened the camper shell and pointed out dozens of quart bottles of water. I climbed up over the mess of duffel bags and knelt on a box of milk shakes that hemorrhaged a thick, gloppy, pinkish-strawberry gruel all over the narrow single bed where our clothes were piled.

Clearing away some of the mess, I showed the officers the extra fuel tank. It was a long metal box set against the front edge of the truck bed, and there were two short boxy legs that ran down the side of the bed. The tank was baffled, that is, designed so that fuel wouldn’t shift when we took the Sierra through sharp turns. The auxiliary tank held ninety gallons and fed directly into the factory-installed tank that carried thirty-five gallons.

Five or six policemen stood outside the shell, shining their flashlights inside. We were carrying, I said, over two thousand miles’ worth of fuel, which was more than enough to get us through the worst of the desert. I could hear muffled conversation behind the lights that blinded me, and I dug out several of the strawberry milk shakes that had not been crushed. Garry had already handed out lapel pins and was insisting that the man who seemed to be in command come with us to Alaska.

The officers said we could pass. Just as we were about to leave, Garry had an idea. We gave them the pot we had thought we could use to cook food. It was just rolling around in the front of the cab and had become a complete nuisance.

The officers thanked us. One of them, friendly and serious at the same time, warned us that the Atacama Desert was no place for a breakdown.

Garry drove in silence, but the atmosphere in the cab had warmed considerably. Confrontations with police always charged us up, brought us together. We had to work on the act, smile, read our audience, and, together, convince these men with guns to drink milk shakes and advertise Canada on their uniforms.

“Yow!” Garry shouted.

“Yes indeed,” I said.

It had been four or five hours since our blowup, and I was already refining my plans for the finish. I wouldn’t actually punch Garry Sowerby. I’d slap him, once, moderately hard: that’s for La Serena.

“I couldn’t,” Garry said, “get those guys to understand. You got up and we were out of there in ten minutes.”

“Thank you,” I said, formally.

We were running down a long steep slope, in the fog, directly into the Atacama Desert.

*   *   *

T
HE GREAT
S
OUTH
A
MERICAN DESERT
is a long narrow strip of land stretching from the Pacific Ocean inland a hundred miles or so to the snow-capped Andes Mountains. The desert begins a bit north of Santiago and pushes up along the coast of the Pacific all the way through Peru and into Ecuador. The driest, the most hostile land is the Atacama proper. It is located in northern Chile, approximately between Copiapó and Arica. There are regions in the six or seven hundred miles of Atacama Desert that average a mere inch of rainfall a century.