by Tim Cahill
“Wrong turn?”
I had hoped that I could get us back on the right road while Garry slept. “About fifteen miles back,” I said.
Garry stayed awake until we hit the crossroad. He wanted me to go back down toward the desert for a mile, then come up on the crossroad again, very slowly. It was incredibly dark—darker than any road I had ever driven in the United States—and, at the crossroad, the major highway curved around off to the south. There were no signs.
Garry saw what I’d done immediately. The larger, better road went into Esquel. That made sense. It was the largest city for one hundred miles in any direction. The road to El Bolsón looked like a side road.
“How many crossroads did you see in the last hundred miles?” Garry asked.
“This was the first one,” I said.
“We can’t just blow by an unmarked intersection,” Garry said. “All right. Slow down here. Just creep by.”
There it was, nailed to one of the poplars. The road sign was a weathered board the size of a carton of cigarettes. It said ESQUEL, with an arrow pointing left, and EL BOLSÓN, with an arrow pointing right. “Which,” Garry said mildly, “is why we want to slow down and think every time we hit a crossroad.”
“We lost half an hour,” I said. I heard an internal warning siren, and a large mental neon light blinked on and off: MOOD SWING … MOOD SWING … MOOD SWING. I felt like a dope. Garry, I realized now, would never tell me what a terrific driver I was. I cut corners too sharply in the mountains and now I had gotten us lost. “I’m sorry,” I said. Intellectually, I realized that this half-hour error wasn’t critical, and that I was shooting fast down the first big drop on my emotional roller coaster. It was time to play gutsball but I was a soiled pile of soggy tissue.
“It happens,” Garry said brightly. He had caught the tone in my voice and was going to stay awake until he could jolly me out of my sudden funk. I thought: first I get lost and now Garry has to do my job. There was nothing in the world I could do right.
“Last night,” Garry said, “in the rain, I guessed on a road at an unmarked crossing. It took fifty miles of staring at the compass and the map before I was sure I made the right decision. That was an hour’s worth of navi nightmare.”
Navigational nightmare was draining and could cost time. In each of his record runs, Garry had suffered some degree of full-blown navi nightmare—that is, he had gotten lost for a time—and he wanted me to know that this little misadventure wasn’t serious.
“You’re doing fine,” he said. I began to feel better and Garry, sensitive to the moment, dropped off the edge into unconsciousness.
The road turned to gravel and at about six that morning, in the ghostly light of false dawn, I saw the Andes to the west, straight ahead, rising up out of an enormous valley. We were crossing a high plateau, looking down into the valley, and the world seemed to open up all around in the silvery light.
The mountains were capped with snow and dominated the western horizon. They seemed to glow, as from within, and the snow had the odd color of white things seen under a black light. This light felt vaguely lunar.
As the sun began to rise, the distant snow took on the colors of the eastern sky, and there was a long period in which the entire world blushed, pale pink. The valley was set in the rainshadow of the mountains, but it was fertile, alive with rushing rivers. The sage was green, and the rivers I saw below took on the pale watermelon color of mountains and sky.
It was mid-spring in the valley, and there were trees that looked like aspens and some that looked like cottonwoods along the creeks. There were simple ranch houses in the valley with sleek horses running in the fields. I felt at home in the valley—it could have been Montana—and thought that this was the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. My eyes began to tear and there was a vaguely pleasant choking sensation in my throat.
Mood swing …
In the full light of day, the road turned to dirt and followed the meandering course of a river running gray with snowmelt. Just before El Bolsón, we hit pavement. I was careful about the crossing roads, and was doing seventy when I felt the truck wobble through a turn. It didn’t feel right at all and I woke Garry. I thought one of the shocks that had taken such a pounding in Tierra del Fuego had failed.
We stopped and it turned out that one of the rear tires was very low on air. The sides of the tire were blistered and it was virtually useless. We had one spare left.
“About forty miles back I hit a board in the road,” I told Garry. “It might have had a nail in it.”
Garry was silent, sulking, hardly awake, and in contrast to his tolerance in Esquel, he seemed to be in a very dark frame of mind. I had just come through a sunrise that brought tears to my eyes and couldn’t help it: I felt good. Garry didn’t talk as I changed the tire. He spent the time working under the hood, muttering something about the fuel filter.
“What?” I asked him.
And in a voice that conveyed monumental despair, he said: “We’ve got one spare tire, the cap is disintegrating, and I think we got some bad diesel in Patagonia. The fuel filter is beginning to clog up. I just changed it.” These were major disasters, his tone suggested, comparable to learning that a loved one has been given a month to live. He poured some of the Stanadyne diesel mixture into the tank while I fixed him a cup of coffee.
“Didn’t you notice that the truck was handling differently?” he asked.
“It just started to feel a little slushy around the corners about fifteen miles back. I thought it was one of the shocks.”
“Anything changes,” Garry said curtly, “anything at all, you stop. You pay attention to every little noise, every ping. And when you’re driving at night, you don’t go zipping by a sign near your turnoff.”
“I’ll be more careful,” I said, not at all sensitive and full of humble virtue.
Garry took the wheel and began driving in a fierce, monomaniacal manner. The truck had not started at the first turn of the key. “Goddamn Patagonian diesel,” Garry muttered. “Clog up our filter and now we have to go over the Andes …”
“There’s this pirate,” Garry Sowerby’s comical sidekick said. “He’s sitting in a bar, he’s got a wooden leg, and this guy with a pig under his arm comes up …”
GLACIERS ROLLED OUT of the Andes two and a half million years ago. They advanced on the desert to the east, pushing rock and dirt ahead of them. These eastern moraines formed levees as the glaciers retreated, and the levees held the meltwater. To the west, water was trapped up against the forested slopes of the Andes themselves.
The Lake District of Argentina and Chile is dazzling. There are still glaciers on the high peaks, seven thousand square miles of ice up there, glittering in the sun above blue lakes and fjords surrounded by forests and granite cliffs.
Both Argentina and Chile see this area as a prime tourist destination for summer hiking and winter skiing. On the Argentine side, a new road from the east is being built to the resort town of Bariloche.
I was driving that road, cursing through continuous curves. That, in fact, is what a yellow diamond-shaped warning sign read: CONTINUOUS CURVES AHEAD. The road was one lane wide, gravel, and it wormed its way along the side of the mountain so that first Garry was looking into a two-thousand-foot drop and then I was. The slopes I was driving were sparsely forested and free of snow, but a thousand feet above, glaciers groaned in the sun.
The continuous curves were closely spaced, and the road was so steep that I had to take it in first and second gear. Garry, who had been sleeping off his last stint at the wheel, was up, watching me drive.
“You got it,” he said, apparently comfortable with the way I was driving. He had liked the story about the pirate and the pig.
In certain places, the single-lane road made 90- and 180-degree loops, so that it was impossible to see ahead. Trucks, coming the other way, plunging down the Andes fully loaded, couldn’t stop, so that it was sometimes necessary for me to stop and back up, quick, with
a big Mercedes semi looming over us, its brakes moaning in protest. Garry helped me find wider spots in the road. We’d back the truck up toward the side of the mountain and let the semi roll by, its far wheels sending little showers of gravel into the drop-offs below. Sometimes the drivers would flash us a V-for-victory sign.
The route over the Andes was, in fact, a major artery, and there were trucks coming at us every five minutes or so. The semis hit their air horns at every turn, and this made enough sense that I began hitting our big air horn on each blind curve. It was an annoying, nerve-racking drive through some of the grandest scenery on the face of the earth. Garry calculated, after taking a half-hour average, that I was shifting every fifteen seconds.
Shift, count ten, honk, count five, shift: it was tedious and dangerous both at the same time. Argentine road crews were working the wider spots with dozens of Cats and backhoes. They looked efficient and experienced.
In one of these areas, we were stopped by a flagman, then allowed to proceed. The crew was digging its way into the mountain side, widening the lane, and there were rocks and boulders scattered willy-nilly across the right-of-way. I was driving a five-mile-an-hour slalom course through them but lost my concentration for a minute and hit a volleyball-sized rock with the right front wheel.
“Jesus,” Garry growled, suddenly angry.
I was about to snap back, to say that nobody could drive this stretch of road without hitting a rock (Garry could), and anyway, what damage could I do to a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive vehicle by climbing over a small rock at five miles an hour (break an axle, knock the front end out of alignment)?
“Sorry,” I said, too tense to be anyone’s sidekick, comical or not.
The road past the construction took a sudden vertical jump and the truck handled it with power and grace.
“I think that fuel stuff is working,” I said.
“It’s working,” Garry said. And then: “Hey, I didn’t mean to bark at you back there. This is tough and you’re doing good.”
Shift, honk, shift. In three bad hours we made forty-five miles. At the paved road just outside Bariloche, I felt that I could honorably let Garry take the wheel.
“I think I’m tired,” I said.
I had been driving for eight hours and we were thirty-one hours into the trip.
BARILOCHE IS A PRETTY RESORT TOWN on the southern shore of the 210-square-mile Lake Nahuel Huapí, which is the largest body of water in the Lake District, and the most spectacular. The area was declared a national park in 1934.
It was a calm day, not much wind, and the glaciered peaks surrounding the lake were reflected in its surface: white on blue.
Bariloche is set in the humped glacial rubble below a mountain called Cerro Otto. There were outdoor cafés along the cobblestone streets, and wood-frame chalets perched on low ridges above the town. It felt more like Switzerland than South America.
We stopped to fill a thermos with good strong Argentine coffee, then headed! west to the crest of the Andes and Chile.
Above and to the west, dark clouds obscured the mountains. A brisk wind had sprung up on the lake and battered the reflected peaks with whitecaps until the entire surface of the Nahuel Huapí was a white froth. Our route took us along the lake shore, over an ungraded dirt road with sheer cliff faces dropping down to the water.
Garry and I talked a bit about Enrique Gutiérrez, a representative of the Chilean Auto Club. When we had interviewed him several months ago, he had said that the road we were taking into Chile was “very bad.”
Why was that?
“It is only an earthen road.” While Sr. Gutiérrez was studying a map, Garry caught my eye and made a brief masturbatory gesture. “Earthen road?” In Colombia, when they tell you a stretch of road is bad, they mean that it is frequently the scene of ambushes.
The tourist brochures and auto clubs fail to mention one of the more attractive features of the Lake District, namely that terrorists in Argentina and Chile, where they exist, work the cities. There are no bandits, no drug barons, and no hostage-takers in these mountains.
The earthen road left the lakeshore and shot straight through a forest of sixty-foot-high cypress trees. These cypresses, unlike the North American variety, were tall and straight with heavy trunks and looked a little like small redwood trees. Sunlight fell through the trees in shafts, as light falls in a cathedral.
Presently, the clouds to the west drifted over the road, and the forest seemed suddenly sepulchral and gloomy. There was the brooding threat of a storm. I felt as if I had walked out of Notre Dame Cathedral and into an Edgar Allan Poe poem.
THE BORDER between Argentina and Chile is the crest of the Andes Mountains. Puyehue Pass, at about four thousand feet, is a fairly easy drive, at least in comparison to the fifteen-thousand-foot passes common in Peru or Bolivia. Argentine and Chilean customs stations are both situated well below the divide on their respective sides. We cleared Argentine customs, and started up over Puyehue Pass with Garry driving.
A cold rain fell, and as the road rose, the vegetation changed. Great leafy ferns, six and eight feet high, stretched out to caress the truck. What trees we saw were lower, stunted by the altitude, and their trunks were covered over on every side by moss. The scene felt vaguely prehistoric.
The rain became snow, and some of it settled, unmelted, on the black volcanic mud of the road. A strange forest of low leafless trees was hung with great drapes of moss that looked impossibly green through the falling snow.
At the crest of the Andes, the snow lay three feet deep, and Garry drove for five minutes through what amounted to a heavy blizzard. As we descended into Chile, the snow turned to rain.
A yellow warning sign featured a picture of a car pointed about ninety degrees downhill with a small diamond-shaped hunk of land under it. I liked the sign because the wheels of the car didn’t touch the ground. It was going like a bat out of hell, this boxy little car on the sign.
The temperature rose at least thirty degrees, and the rain hissed and steamed on the black mud track ahead of us. Trees erupted out of the earth at this altitude and they were not the straight-trunked variety of the Argentine side. These were trees with slender trunks; trees that twisted this way and that to steal the sun from myriad competitors. They leafed out only at the very top and looked a bit like the broccoli-shaped trees of the jungle.
The road, on this wet western side of the continental divide, became a great green colonnade of trees interspersed by the occasional mountain meadow. At one point, we drove through a cloud of small yellow butterflies, and Garry slowed it down to about twenty-five to avoid splattering this sudden beauty against the windshield.
“Wouldn’t hurt a fly,” I said.
“No need to.”
“Norman Bates wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Who?”
“The guy in Psycho. The psychotic killer.”
Garry thought about this for a time, then laughed in a manner that he imagined sounded maniacal.
The Chilean checkpoint was located in a forest. Like the Argentine customs officers, the Chilenos wore clean uniforms and were pleasant and efficient. We had passed through four customs points and three Argentine police points on our way through Patagonia, but this was our first search. One of the Chilean officers looked in the cab and another wanted to see what we had under the disintegrating camper shell. It was a mess back there, and the officer simply pointed to boxes at random and asked us to open them for him. Of the five boxes he wanted to see, four contained milk shakes. He seemed bitterly confused about this.
We showed the officer how to take the plastic straw off the milkshake box and insert it into the container. He drank a bit and shrugged as if to say, “not bad.” Another half-dozen officers came out to look at the truck and we gave them all milk shakes and lapel pins.
One of the officers signed our logbook. We asked him to note our mileage, the time, and the date. He added his stamp for good measure. When we left, there were seven bemused offi
cers standing in the middle of the road, watching us. They were wearing maple-leaf lapel pins, sucking on milk shakes, and waving.
“The guy who was looking in the back,” Garry said, “he didn’t get it about the milk shakes.”
“Probably thought we were big-time milk-shake smugglers.”
“Mission Impossible,” Garry said. “Men, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to take these milk shakes to the tip of South America …”
“Drive them to Alaska.”
“The milk shakes that conquered the Pan-American Highway!”
AS GARRY DROVE, I took all our documents for Argentina and filed them away.
“What’s happening in Chile?” Garry asked.
I got out a three-ring binder that contained news clips I had compiled over the past six months. The human-rights group of the Catholic church had accused the government’s National Information Center (CNI) of using torture. The CNI is an internal intelligence agency whose top official was directly appointed by General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s seventy-one-year-old ruler. Human-rights lawyers were alleging not just brutality on the part of the government, but murder as well, and these murders were committed under the country’s embracing antiterrorist laws. There were student protests, a bus strike, and—most painful for Pinochet—growing dissent within the armed forces. Powerful military leaders were telling the foreign press that the next president should “be a vigorous man perhaps fifty-one or fifty-two years old, and he should be a civilian.”
On the other hand, everyone we’d talked to said that Chile was a relatively safe place for a foreigner who was not involved in the country’s politics. You could drive at night, for instance, and the police, the carabineros, would not only not accept bribes, they might actually arrest a person who offered one.
A diplomat we’d talked to was the first to point out what I began to see as a bitter irony. Right-wing countries, known for abusing human rights, were generally the safest. People disappeared from their homes, the press was censored, but you could drive at night.
