The Lunatic Express (23 page)

In the end, I thought, as we pulled into Frederick, Maryland, at four in the morning, escape was less the answer than its opposite—that wrapping yourself in the cloak of otherness for a brief time was a form of hiding behind a costume. That being the lone Western face in a crowd of attentive exotics was no substitute for love and its sometimes daunting and irritating bonds.

Maybe there were certain kinds of journeys, assignments, I didn’t have to take anymore. The really long ones alone. The ones to war zones or frozen, windswept plains in northern Greenland in which food ran low and the tents blew down and the intensity was so high that they separated me from the world. I thought of Afghanistan. Things were heating up there, and I’d read in the paper of firefights reported by writers and photographers on the front lines. For a moment I felt jealous of them;
I should be there!
I thought. But they’d all pay a price for those stories, those experiences. At its most expensive, some would die or be kidnapped, leaving behind spouses and children. Even if they returned safely, though, they would be people apart, people carrying experiences that were hard to share with anyone who hadn’t done that same thing.

We pulled out of the station and the bus stopped. Lurched forward and stopped again. A smell of smoke, of burnt rubber, wafted through the coach. The driver got out, came back in, got back out again, and came back in. “We have what’s called a breakdown in service,” he announced. “The brake lines is froze. I’ve called the company and they’ll send another bus, eventually.”

Forty miles from home, it had come to this: the only conveyance in five months of traveling that had failed to get me to my destination was a Greyhound bus. We were supposed to go from Frederick to Baltimore, then on to D.C.; who knew how long we might wait? And I was so close. I called Lindsey, woke her up. Asked if she could pick me up. “I don’t want to,” she said. “Can’t you take a taxi?”

Which I did, nestled in the back of a Chevy Caprice a few minutes later, speeding in quiet and warmth down the interstate toward home. I had been looking forward to the bus pulling into the station, the hydraulic swoosh of the doors opening, and stepping out into the dawn of where I’d started, greeted by my children, Dad stepping off the bus triumphant after so many miles around the world. Instead, I climbed out of the taxi at 5:00 a.m. in front of my empty apartment.

Only this time it was okay. I had seen the world and myself afresh. I had left in order to find my way home again—and I had, even if it was a new and different home. The journey had shown me all this. As a young man I pursued opportunity and career and adventure; I couldn’t see any other choice at the time. It was only later, with success and when a price had been paid, that I could reckon the cost, acknowledge it. I had to forgive myself and start again. I remembered that train rumbling into the station in Mali and thinking,
How in the world can I throw myself on that scarred, battered thing?
Sometimes you just had to close your eyes and board, to travel to things and not just away from them, and of course I could see that because finally I had, in fact, gone away on this journey. I walked up the stairs and through the door, and slipped into bed, the world and my life jangling in my head.

APPENDIX

I asked Fred Kilborne, a veteran insurance Actuary in San Diego, California, to calculate the actuarial risk of my 159-day journey. Here are his findings:

MORTALITY RISK ON THE LUNATIC EXPRESS—OBSERVATIONS

1. The attached tables indicate that, if Carl had taken both of his trips 1,000 times, he’d have about a 50% chance of being killed en route. This follows from the combined cumulative risk of 481,070 per billion trips, according to the tables. The mortality risk can also be expressed as 5% per hundred such combined trips. This strikes the observer as being extremely risky, relative to traveling the 50,000 miles at home in the U.S., but a good deal short of being flat-out suicidal.
   

2. The entire exercise rides, of course, on the selection of the index factors. Reasonably good statistical data was available concerning the risk of getting around in the United States, and the blended risk of one death per billion miles traveled is supportable. Some data is available for international air travel, and the selected indices are probably conservative (i.e., they may be high). Only sketchy data could be found, on the other hand, for such conveyances as ferry and matatu, and the index selections were highly subjective and may in some cases be greatly inadequate. Consider, for example, traveling by bus in and around Kabul. The assigned index of 96 is very substantial, but are we really satisfied that traveling a million miles in that vicinity would bear only a 10% chance of being killed? I’d be inclined to yield my seat to Carl.
   

3. The tables address only mortality due to accidents on the given leg and conveyance. Some consideration was given to the risk of terrorist attack in Afghanistan, but none to the chance of being stabbed by a crazed fellow matatu rider in Kenya or being consumed by a crocodile after slipping off an Indonesian ferry. Death could also result by reason of contracting leprosy in India or mad-cow disease in Canada. There is also a force of mortality at work on all of us even if we lie in bed at home, of course, but we won’t blame that on Carl’s trips.
   

4. We’ve discussed only mortality risk so far, but the actuary (if not the adventure traveler) must also consider morbidity and robbery and all manner of untoward events. I pointed out to Carl that he might have been sickened by the peanuts on the flight to Bogotá, or broken his leg jumping onto the train to Dakar, or been kidnapped for ransom while strolling in Lima, or convicted of espionage in Ulan Bator, or mugged on the bus to D.C., and more, and worse. It turned out that he had already considered some of these events and was nonplussed about the others. This in turn led me to conclude that “The Lunatic Express” was an apt name for Carl’s trips.
   

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I traveled alone and wrote
Lunatic
alone, but neither would have been possible without the help and support of many people.

For her unfailing love and friendship over twenty-seven years and too many months away, I cannot ever thank Lindsey Truitt enough. I wouldn’t be who I am, have the family I do, or have been able to flourish as a journalist without her, and without her support and hard work. Lindsey also thought of the name; it’s fair to say that without her
The Lunatic Express
would not exist.

For their love and patience over too many assignments, I thank Lily, Max, and Charlotte; I love you without reservation.

I owe a huge debt to my agent, Joe Regal, for professional and editorial insight over two books and a decade.

Lunatic
would never have been more than an idea without Charlie Conrad, my editor at Broadway, who took a risk and jumped on
The Lunatic Express
from the start, and whose editorial guidance made a much better book. For helping shepherd
Lunatic
from raw manuscript to final book, a huge thanks at Broadway to Jenna Ciongoli, David Wade Smith, Julie Sills, and Laura Duffy.

I thank Alex Heard for sending me to the Congo and with whom subsequent conversations planted the seeds that led directly to my book proposal.

For reading early drafts of
Lunatic
, and for their friendship, I especially want to thank Clifton Wiens and Keith Bellows.

For their friendship, encouragement, and patient listening, I thank Scott Wallace, Lisa Ramey, Liz Hodgson, Nick Kuttner, and Geoff Dawson.

For their support over the past few years, keeping me busy, I thank Susan Murcko, Adam Rogers, Jim Meigs, and David Dunbar.

I’m extremely grateful to veteran actuary Fred Kilbourne for the painstaking job of calculating the risk of my journey; I know it was more work than he thought.

In Lima, Peru, a huge thanks to Tyler Bridges and Cecelia for their care and feeding, and a few days of the comforts of home.

For their hospitality in New Delhi, I thank Jeremy Kahn and Victoria Whitworth; sorry I stayed so long!

And last, but in no way least,
The Lunatic Express
never derailed, sank, or plunged off a cliff because of Melissa Bell. Her keen editing made
Lunatic
sharper, tighter, and more nuanced than it ever could have been without her. I owe her much, and many thanks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl Hoffman has driven the Baja 1000, ridden reindeer in Siberia, sailed an open dinghy 250 miles, and traveled to sixty-five countries. When he’s able to stay put for more than a few months at a time, he lives in Washington, D.C., where his three children make fun of him on a pretty constant basis. He is a contributing editor at
National Geographic Traveler, Wired
, and
Popular Mechanics
, and his stories about travel and technology have also appeared in
Outside, National Geographic Adventure
, and
Men’s Journal
. He is also the author of
Hunting Warbirds
.

Copyright © 2010 by Carl Hoffman

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY BOOKS and the Broadway Books colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hoffman, Carl.
The lunatic express / Carl Hoffman.—1st ed.
p. cm.

1. Voyages and travels. 2. Hoffman, Carl—Travel. 3. Transportation—
Evaluation. I. Title.
G465.H66 2009
910.4—dc22                                                                            2009021477

eISBN: 978-0-307-59012-1

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