Road Fever (23 page)

Today the desert remains rural, and, except for oil works at the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, Patagonia lives on woolly profits derived from sheep. The
porteños
of Buenos Aires like to joke that the sheep of Patagonia are a special breed, clawed animals who grip the spare sandy soil so the howling winds won’t send them spinning out into the Atlantic.

The people of Patagonia live a hardscrabble life and seem, for the most part, to be boundlessly exuberant. These descendants of Welsh and English agriculturalists exhibit a kind of brash, likably unsophisticated frontier spirit generally associated with the American West.

The government, in an effort to develop the overwhelmingly rural vastness of Patagonia, subsidizes flights to the various towns of the desert. A flight from Buenos Aires, two thousand miles south to Ushuaia, costs the equivalent of $150, round-trip. These flights are full of large men wearing cowboy boots and hats. They speak a slow, drawling kind of John Wayne Spanish, and smoke constantly during the flight, which makes five stops. At each airport, during the twenty-minute deplaning and boarding process, Argentine stewardesses attempt, without success, to stop the big men from leaving the plane.

“No can do, little missy,” they say, or Spanish words to that effect. There are footraces to be run on the tarmac. None of this jogging nonsense: these big men, some of them in their forties, run fifty-yard wind sprints in cowboy boots. The race ends with much shouting, a mock wrestling match, and a new challenge.

*   *   *

T
HE HIGHWAY THROUGH THE SAGE FLATS
was a pleasure, and it was no trouble to hold at seventy-five miles an hour. The houses we saw, separated one from the other by 150 or 200 miles, were small, well tended, and brightly painted, like the ones on Tierra del Fuego. Occasionally we’d pass the failure of some grand scheme: a large two-story Victorian home with gables, abandoned, beaten dead-gray by the wind and the weather. The grasses of the desert are so sparse that a year or two of overgrazing results in pastures of sand. Small family farms, in contrast, survive.

The small settlements we passed—Santa Cruz, for instance—announced themselves dozens of miles away with bits of cloth and paper impaled on the branches of the sandy sage. These wind-driven perimeters hinted at certain elemental hardships. Living in a place like Santa Cruz, I imagined, must be like working in space. Anything vulnerable to the wind would simply float away, never to be seen again.

I thought about this for twenty or thirty miles and decided that I was wrong. You might see things again. You’d probably see them for years. The wind blows in Patagonia, but it does not always blow in the same direction. You could lose something, say a scarf, and have it go skittering out into the immensity of the surrounding desert. It might catch on the sage half a dozen miles away. Then, one day, just the right storm might lift it into the sky and it’d come screaming back through town at about forty miles an hour.

“Wasn’t that your old scarf, honey?”

We crossed the Santa Cruz River, a large, wild, rushing body of water, running through a wide shallow valley filled with real trees. The water was a pale aquamarine, and though the valley looked fertile, there was no development anywhere, only flocks of geese as far as the eye could see.

Garry was sitting next to me, studying the master plan and trying to calculate various times of arrival against our progress so far.

I felt like talking. “You know these signs that say
vado
, and the ones that say
baches
?”

“Means potholes,” Garry said.

“There’s a difference, I think. It seems to me that when the sign says
vado
, there’s a little roller-coaster dip in the road.
Baches
are potholes. Usually with water in ’em.”

“We could knock this thing out of alignment, break an axle in some of the
baches
.”

“You don’t see them but every hundred miles or so.”

“Watch out for the
baches
,” Garry said.

“That’s why I’m not using cruise control,” I said, full of virtue. It could be done, but it would be wrong.

“You ever see that movie,
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
?” I asked.

“Humphrey Bogart, John Huston?”

“We don’t need no steenking baches.”

“Steenking baches,” Garry echoed.

And then, because we had had less than three hours of sleep the night before; because we had survived 330 miles of exceptionally bad road; because we had worried about camper shells and shocks; because we had had one bad freeze-dried meal in the sixteen hours we had been driving; because the road was paved and fast; because the compass was pegged on due north; for all these reasons, we laughed and giggled like schoolgirls. Steenking baches. Ha.

The sun was setting in the north, and we were driving directly into it. In the long slanting light, the expanse of flat brushy land took on a muted aureate radiance, like a golden sigh. The sky was still gray, covered over in cloud, but the northern sun broke through in places, so that long bright streaks, orangish red, spread over the horizon ahead. This far southern sunset took an extraordinarily long time to purple down into darkness.

Every half hour or so we encountered a car or truck running south. Argentine drivers do not waste headlights on the dusk. I was driving with the lights on, just the way American gym coaches teach you to do in Drivers Ed. For reasons that remain opaque, this seemed to annoy drivers in the oncoming vehicles. The road was so flat and straight that you could see vehicles coming at you for miles. The drivers would flash their lights on and off, once. I’d flash mine—dim, bright, dim. A minute, or several, might pass before the other driver flashed again. And then, invariably, these drivers would wait until they were directly in front of our truck and then hit us with their bright lights, full on. A blinding flash in the dark of night as two vehicles roared by each other at about 150 miles an hour.

In full dark, some drivers favored parking lights. There was no coherent local custom. No matter what I did, what courtesy I tried to employ—dims, parking lights, anything at all but complete darkness—the Argentine drivers fired their brights at about twenty feet.

Garry read the master plan under a specially installed passenger-side map light on a flexible gooseneck. I asked him what he thought I should do about the Battle of the Brights.

“Drive safe,” he said.

“There’s nothing I can do. They give me the brights every time.”

“So?”

“I’m going to nail the next guy.”

“Good,” Garry said reasonably. “Blind the sucker. He’ll lose control, crash right into us, and you’ll win. Lie here bleeding in the sand thinking about how macho you are. Real good thinking.”

“You’re right,” I said.

“Remember at the embassy in Buenos Aires,” Garry said. “Who was it that said that Juan Fangio was the worst thing that ever happened to the Argentine road system?” Fangio, who was born in Buenos Aires, dominated automobile competition in the 1950s, winning sixteen world championship Grand Prixes. We had been told that every male Argentine driver believes he is Juan Fangio.

“Just ignore the Fangios,” Garry said.

I told him that I would attempt to err on the side of safety at all times.

“Remember that waiter at the Canal Beagle?” Garry asked. I understood that he wanted to take my mind off the continuing Battle of the Brights before I became entirely obsessed.

“Zippy?”

“Yeah. I thought we had a bad case of Zippy’s disease this morning. Did everything real fast. Got it all wrong.”

There was a pause. “When I was a kid,” Garry said, “I had this teddy bear named Zippy. Larry, my twin brother, had the same bear, but my older brother, Bruce, threw a pillow at it or something. Took the head right off of Larry’s bear. So his teddy bear was named Headless.”

We discussed our route for a bit—damn! another driver, another flash of the brights—and Garry asked me how I felt. I told him I thought I was good for several more hours. He excused himself, crawled back onto the bench seat in the extended cab, arranged the pillow under his head, and said that he was going to try to get a bit of sleep.

“What’s the rule about sleep?” he asked.

“The rule is,” I said, “if you think you’re tired, you are.”

“So wake me if you feel tired.”

“Absolutely.”

Some Juan Fangio, pushing ninety in a Peugeot, gave me a taste of his brights.

I covered another fifty miles before Garry said, “Headless and Zippy.” I realized that he was thinking about his own children.

“Did I ever tell you about this thing Lucy does?” he asked. He
yawned hugely and his voice sounded foggy. “She comes galloping into my office, she’s got a mop for a horse, and she’s wearing a little cowboy hat. Little scraped knees, and she’s making the mop rear up like the Lone Ranger.” Garry yawned again. “She’s done this about four times,” he said, “and it breaks me up every time.”

There was a brief silence and when I glanced back, Garry was dead asleep.

We had a bank of driving lights mounted on the front of the truck—one-hundred-watt high beams, Halogen foglights—and they were controlled by a series of toggle switches on a console below the radio. We had bright lights on either side of the truck for security and for night work. There were high beams on the back of the truck as well, for the same reasons. All were controlled by separate toggles. I practiced with them for a while on the empty highway, flicking the index, middle, ring, and little finger in sequence—boom, boom, boomboomboom—so that the night exploded in all directions.

An hour later, when I saw a pair of parking lights hurtling toward me, I was ready. I checked the extended cab. Garry was snoring lightly. The car was less than half a mile away. My fingers tingled at the toggles.

We closed to twenty feet and drew simultaneously.

Die, Fangio.

I had him outgunned. Boom, boom: high beams and Halogens, both at once. I could see two dark heads in the passing car. The night blazed with painful brilliance. They were beaten, fried, and I imagined I could see both their skulls behind the skin, as if in an X ray.

No mercy: as they passed, I hit the sidelights, and then nailed them in the rear high beams.

In the side mirror I saw the car weave across the center line, then right itself. I heard, in my mind’s ear, the driver ask his passenger, “What was that?”

And the imaginary reply, uttered softly, in humble terror: “It must have been an angel of the Lord.”

I felt I was beginning to master the local customs.

G
ARRY WOKE UP
about midnight. He made himself a cup of instant coffee using the heating coil and bottled water. The coil was made for boiling eight ounces of water at a time and it did that quite nicely, but gave up entirely when confronted by quarts. We would, out of relentless necessity, live on coffee, beef jerky, and milk shakes.

Garry needed two cups of coffee and twenty minutes to wake up. He took the wheel, and I sat up for a while in the passenger seat. It was my duty, before I retired, to note driving conditions on a yellow pad. I was also to mark our route on the current map with a dark marking pencil. This information went on the clipboard that was stuck low on the driver’s side windshield with a suction cup. I thought of this device as the suckerboard.

I wrote that there had been intermittent drizzles, nothing serious, and that if he found himself in the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, he had missed the westward turn to Sarmiento. If he felt good at Sarmiento, the road we wanted continued on to a place called Esquel.

I ate a hardy dinner of beef jerky washed down with two nourishing chocolate milk shakes, and crawled into the back to sleep. The extended cab was not wide enough to stretch out in, but not so narrow that sleeping required an entirely fetal contortion.

It seemed to me, in drowsy repose, that I had been oversensitive about my driving. There was, I realized, more arrogance in my technique than competence. What was that all about? Sociologists, I supposed, would natter on about motor vehicles and male appendages. Was it that simple?

I knew people who would say so. As a young reporter, I had been assigned to cover a number of women’s meetings in Berkeley, California,
during the early seventies. The women who chaired the meetings called themselves feminists, but it seemed that, stripped of rhetoric, the female persons in question just purely hated men. The meetings were so disagreeable that one of those angry women immediately took up figurative residence in a cobwebbed, contrary corner of my psyche. In certain bad moments, when I am consumed by self-doubt, I get to hear her merciless and hateful rasping. “Little boy thought he could drive, got his feelings hurt, and now he has to worry about his little thingy.”

The truth was that Garry was a professional driver and that he was better behind the wheel than I was. It stood to reason and had nothing at all to do with the size of my thingy.

In the ALCAN race, for instance, after five thousand miles, Garry Sowerby had placed eighth in a field of twenty-nine. He was driving a nine-thousand-pound Suburban with a diesel engine. Most of the other vehicles were sports cars costing in excess of $40,000. A lot of Audi Quattro drivers finished behind Garry Sowerby in that event.

And when we’d rented cars in South America, Garry always drove in the teeming cities and handled the scittering confusion with perfect aplomb. He had the techniques of Third World driving down after his around-the-world project. In contrast, I was always flustered trying to horse the big truck through the choked arteries and alleyways of places like Lima or Bogotá.

But that would come. By the end of the trip I’d have it knocked. No problem.

I had a happy vision of the finish line in Alaska: all snow under a blinding sun. “Another victory for man and machine against time and the elements.” We’d say it in tandem, get out in the snow at Prudhoe Bay, and shake hands. Garry would then say something about my driving. He’d probably exaggerate how badly I took the mountains to Ushuaia. “You were hopeless at the beginning,” he would say, “but by the time we hit the States, you had it. You’re as good as anyone I’ve ever driven with. The best.”