Road Fever (20 page)

It is a comment Garry hears often about his work, and it annoys him endlessly because he must explain that one does not simply bring the family sedan to one of the most remote regions on the face of earth and begin driving, as if on vacation.

Garry and I had contacts in thirteen different countries, people we knew and trusted, people we had sought out and who were enthused about the project. We knew tourist officers, ministers of transportation, garage owners, government officials, auto-club executives, automobile executives. We knew the communications matrix in each country: where telephones worked, where telex was best. We had studied the roads, the security problems, and the political situations as they applied to each border and to our personal safety. We knew a lot about each country and about how that country worked and about the people in it.

The drive itself would be a physical challenge, but we would also have to have our papers in order, and deal with the inevitable obstacles. There would be nasty surprises, which are always a good way to learn about different cultures. The tourist brochures seldom say things like:

“There is a song in English,” the German woman said, “about how you must always stop when there are roses to smell.”

“That’s a real good song and a swell philosophy of life,” I said earnestly.

She was right of course.

On the drive down from Buenos Aires, for instance, we had passed through a town at the edge of the pampas called Bahía Blanca at about three-thirty in the morning. The night had turned a bit chilly, and there were people bundled against the wind, pedaling bicycles all over town. What were they doing? They weren’t all going in the same direction: they were scattered all over the city and some passed others going in opposite directions, so, I imagined, they weren’t all going to work in one place. They weren’t carrying goods to or from market. It did not seem like a middle-of-the-night joyride: people rode stolidly, as if sentenced by fate to pedal on against the night for no good reason.

The phenomenon occupied my mind for hours: the mystery of the night riders of Bahía Blanca.

“Tomorrow,” the woman told us, “we will take a boat ride down the Beagle Channel.” She said this as if it were the only thing that reasonable people should consider doing. She did not know, of course, that we had seen the same sights a few months ago on our visit to the end of the road. We were, she implied, philistines, boobs.

If I had been peeved with Garry earlier, this woman’s comments brought us together in a small spate of seething anger. It annoyed us to have a tourist tell us our business.

Travelers without some goal, some small quest, a bit of business to accomplish, are tourists. It’s not a bad way to go, but I find, as a tourist, that I tend to fall into easy patterns: the hotel, the fellow tourists from my own country, the hotel dinner, the guided tour. You see much, but suffer some restrictions. You seldom, for instance, meet local people not involved in the tourist trade.

Garry said, pleasantly enough, “I am not on vacation. This is my job. It’s what I do for a living. It’s better than sitting in an office, don’t you think?”

The distinguished gentleman blanched. Clearly he sat in an office most of the year and did not want to consider the ramifications of a mid-life crisis in some dining room at the end of the earth. He took Garry’s comment as a personal affront and grunted at his family to leave us alone.

Zippy whisked our food off the table half-eaten. We stared at our empty places in bemused silence.

“It’s a disease,” Garry said. “Zippy’s disease.”

We obediently paid our bill and stumbled off to bed.

*   *   *

A
T BREAKFAST
in the dining room the next morning, I lingered over my coffee for an hour and caught up on my notes. The young German boy, who had not said anything the night before, sat for a moment to chat. The Pan-American project, he said, was exciting and he had thought about it all night. How many jungles would we see? How many mountains would we cross? Would there be snow in the north? How does a person get a job driving all over the world?

The boy’s mother and father took a seat in a far corner of the restaurant. Presently, the mother walked to my table and told her son, in German, to leave me alone. She did not speak to me. The son gave me one of those helpless, embarrassed teenaged looks. My parents, man.

An Argentine lady in her middle years approached the table and asked if she could sit with me for a while. She wore a flowered dress and her fingernails were painted green. We spoke in Spanish. Was I a writer? She herself was a writer as well. More or less. She lifted her right hand in a gesture of a leaf falling to the ground. Still, she would like me to have a copy of her book of poems,
Legitimate Creations
. She signed it for me: “To Tim, on a chance encounter in a far region of my country.”

I glanced through the book. The poems were entitled “Equilibrium,” “Sibology,” “To My Son.” My Spanish was not at all good enough to tell if the poems were any good.

“I don’t write intellectually,” the woman said. Instead, she wrote from “the heart.” Here she thumped her chest urgently. It was important to make interconnections between people. Was there an English word that describes the situation where you meet someone and understand immediately who they are? I suggested
synchronicity
. She wrote the word into a small notebook.

She was from Buenos Aires and felt there was a synchronicity between writers far from home, as we both were. She had heard of our project. Everyone in the hotel was talking about it. She didn’t understand why the very idea made some people angry. Others thought it was splendidly exciting.

With my limited Spanish it took a long painful time to tell this woman that I thought there was a “dark weight” that people feel in their lives. We call it—and I had to look the word up in my Spanish dictionary—responsibility.

Responsibility was good but it was not supposed to be fun. A person who wishes to appear responsible, and therefore good, should not seem
to enjoy his job. Garry and I, however, appeared to be having fun. We were irresponsible and therefore bad. We annoyed some people.

“Ahhh,” the woman said, as if she understood. There was a poem in her book I should read. It was about this very idea. She opened the thin volume to the proper page. The poem was entitled “One Hundred Thousand Miles of Promises.” It was about the road of life.

“We all,” she said, “make different promises to ourselves. That is good. To break those promises, that is bad.” She smiled brilliantly, shook my hand firmly, and said she would leave me alone to do my work.

I drove the truck to the airport to meet a flight. Rich Cox, the photographer for
Popular Mechanics
, was coming down to take a few pictures for the story the magazine wanted to do on our trip. Cox was not on the flight.

We were leaving a day earlier than scheduled because of problems with the boat in Colombia. Which meant we had only one more day for pictures. I would have scrapped the photos altogether but the
Popular Mechanics
article was very important to Garry. It was the kind of press his sponsors expected him to generate. We were going to have to do something about photos and do it immediately.

Garry went to the nearby Albatross Hotel and telexed his office in Moncton: find out what happened to Cox. We thought maybe he was stuck in Buenos Aires, having a long conversation about prohibited electronics with a warty-nosed customs official wearing a maple-leaf lapel pin.

In the hotel, there were several large framed pictures of the land around Ushuaia: pictures of the town from the water on a clear day with the snow-capped mountains behind rising against an impossibly blue sky, pictures of golden trees in the fall, pictures of Lake Fagnano. A caption at the bottom of each shot read, “Photos by Eduardo.”

We went to the desk and told the man we needed a professional photographer. Could he get us Eduardo? Surely. It was no problem. One telephone call.

Half an hour later a short young man dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks met us in the lobby. He had a mustache, glasses, a neat short haircut, and carried a large bag containing several camera bodies and lenses.

“Ahh,” I said, “Eduardo.”

“Yes.” He spoke fairly good English but there seemed to be some problem concerning his name. He was Eduardo, of course, and he had
taken the pictures we had seen. Yes, yes, the pictures he had taken were the same: pictures very like the ones we had seen. They were his pictures although not the same ones.

None of this seemed very clear to me.

As we were getting into the truck, a local fisherman stopped to chat with our new photographer. I couldn’t help but notice that he kept calling Eduardo “Pedro.”

We drove an hour to the top of the mountain and took some pictures near Lake Fagnano. Eduardo worked like a professional. It was a cloudy day, and occasionally the sun would break through so that a celestial spotlight illuminated the blue-gray waters of the lake. Eduardo thought he could get some shots of the truck sliding through the mud with this scene out of a Catholic holy card in the background.

Farther north, men were working to pull another truck out of the snow and back onto the road. The semi’s back end had slipped and crashed through a metal guardrail. The rear wheels were hanging in midair over what looked like an eight-hundred-foot drop, straight down. There were half a dozen trucks backed up behind the wreck, and we stopped for a few pictures designed to emphasize the dangers of our expedition.

There were, I noticed, holes in the guardrails about every mile or so.

Eduardo said these twisted bits of metal did not necessarily indicate a death. Mostly the big Scania tractor-trailers only went partway off the road. A wheel might slip but very few drivers died. The last persons to perish on the road did so two years ago, in a taxi coming over the mountains from the northern town of Río Grande. It was a snowy night, the windshield must have gotten covered over in snow, and the car went over the edge. It took searchers two days to find the taxi, which was buried in snow six hundred feet below the road.

“Nothing to worry about then,” Garry said.

“Oh no,” Eduardo agreed, “all very safe.”

At dusk we drove Eduardo back to his house on the outskirts of Ushuaia. The neighborhood was called “Forty Homes” because, Eduardo explained reasonably, there were forty families living there in forty separate homes. The houses were newly built of artfully weathered wood, like condos at Lake Tahoe, but they were closely spaced and set along muddy roads. Eduardo asked us to stop at his photo store, Bariloche Photo, for coffee. The shop, we discovered, was also his house. A curtain behind the counter opened up into a pleasant living room set under a cathedral ceiling.

Eduardo’s wife, a pleasant-looking woman with freckles, was watching some sort of variety show on television. There was some commotion from above, and a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl bounded down the side stairs and into their father’s arms.

Eduardo said that his parents were Chileans but that he had grown up in the Argentine ski resort town of Bariloche. He’d been a tourist guide there for a while and had studied English with a stern Scottish woman who said that his accent gave her “a hiddach.”

“What’s a hiddach?” I wondered.

Eduardo put his hands to the sides of his head and made a face that indicated he was in extreme pain.

“Headache,” I said.

“Yes. That is what she say. ‘You give me hiddach, Pedro,’ ” Eduardo said.

Garry was playing with the little girl, Lorena. He said, “How come everyone calls you Pedro, Eduardo?”

“Ah, yes. Ah. I don’t know. Sometimes, I guess, they call me Pedro.”

“A nickname,” I suggested.

“Yes. I am Eduardo. My nickname is Pedro.”

Garry and Loreena were leafing through one of her books:
My First English Dictionary
. There were colored pictures of frogs and cows with the Spanish and English names underneath. In the front of the book were pictures of flags from various English- and Spanish-speaking nations. Garry showed Loreena the Canadian flag, then gave her a dozen maple-leaf lapel pins. The little girl clapped her hands in delight.

“I have a daughter about her age,” Garry told Eduardo. “I would like her to learn Spanish. You want your daughter to learn English. Maybe my daughter could write to yours. They could be pen pals.”

Eduardo said he thought that would be a very good idea. He seemed suddenly very emotional, choked up about the idea.

It was time for us to leave. Eduardo walked us out to the truck. He kept clearing his throat, as if he had something difficult to say. Finally, at the last moment, during the last handshake, he mumbled, “They called me from the hotel and said some Americans needed a photographer. I am a photographer, but …”

Eduardo stared at the ground for a long time, as if shamed by what he had to say. “But …”

“But you’re not Eduardo,” I said.

“No.”

This was not entirely a surprise.

“Don’t worry about it, Pedro,” Garry said.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Garry took the truck to a local garage to have the fluid levels checked and the mud scraped off. I found a line of cabs outside the hotel. Pedro was sitting in the third one back. It seemed he worked as a cabdriver every other day. I was glad to see him, and realized that I liked him, whatever his name was.

Pedro took me to the airport, where I expected to pick up Rich Cox who, once again, wasn’t on the flight. Pedro said there was one more flight, at 3:30. What did I want to do until then?

We were starting the drive early the next morning. There was plenty to do. I needed to buy a few pillows for the back bench seat in the extended cab. On the drive down Garry and I had decided not to sleep in the bed under the camper shell. It was lonely, and it locked from the outside, so you felt trapped in there. At border points, customs officials searching the truck regarded persons in the camper shell as an unpleasant surprise. Guns were sometimes drawn. This complicated the formalities.