Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  In 1981 there were border skirmishes over this issue. In order to thwart any planned Peruvian invasion, Ecuador has let the Pan-American Highway out of Aguas Verde fall into something close to ruin. Every ten miles or so there was another military checkpoint, five of them in fifty miles. These were usually placed in a canyon and we could see gun emplacements above. Fifty-caliber machine guns were trained on the road. These weapons have a range of about one mile and can knock out an armored personnel carrier.

  When we left the checkpoints, papers stamped and authorized, we did so slowly, waving at the officers and crawling along at about ten miles an hour for half a mile or more. It is bad form to go squealing out of any military checkpoint. We did not want to look as if we were escaping.

  On the other hand, if we were to be captured by terrorists anywhere, Ecuador was the place. The previous month, during a wildly vitriolic campaign for president, one candidate, Abdala Bucaram, claimed he had been abducted by terrorists for a time. Bucaram, who opposed the government’s ties with the United States, had made his reputation as mayor of Guayaquil, where he campaigned vigorously against pornography.

  Bucaram, in fact, claimed that he had been abducted secretly, and he had told no one of the kidnapping. The videotape released by his opponents, Bucaram said, had been filmed during his captivity. He had been forced, at gunpoint, to have sex with the three women in the video. The evil terrorists who had subjected him to this appalling torture intended to destroy his campaign. And, okay, sure, he appeared to enjoy it, but you had to understand, his life was at stake.

  “Never a dull moment,” Garry offered.

  “From gasoline bandits to pornography terrorists,” I said.

  “Frying pan into the fire,” Garry agreed.

  WE WERE FOLLOWING ALEJANDRO, who was driving a Chevrolet Aska, which looked like a version of the North American Chevy Monza. About fifty miles into the country, the desert gave way to a lush, flat land of banana groves and waist-high grasses. The dirty-gray fog that had deviled us since the Atacama was gone. The Pan-American Highway here was in good repair and wider than anything we had seen in Peru. It was, in fact, so wide that traffic often formed a third lane, in the middle of the road, which was populated by adventuresome souls traveling at high speeds in both directions. The width of the highway provided drivers the opportunity to pull out into the middle lane, evaluate their chances of success or death, then swerve back into their own lane, cutting off other drivers who leaned bitterly on their horns.

  It was like a video-arcade car-crash game.

  Worse, the electrical short in the auxiliary-tank fuel pump had reasserted itself. Since we had no auxiliary tank, this would not have been a problem at all, except that the people who had put in the tank had rewired the truck. Our windshield wipers were connected into the short. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if it weren’t raining. But it was and because we were doing seventy-five miles an hour, a moving shimmer of water on the wiperless windshield distorted the highway ahead. Looking through the glass in front of my face made me feel as if we were driving underwater.

  Garry, who was at the wheel, stopped to find his motorcycle goggles. We had purchased a pair for each of us after Graham Maddocks had asked us what we’d do if someone broke the windscreen. Dropped a rock from a bridge, for instance.

  So Garry was doing seventy-five on the crowded highway, with his head stuck out the driver’s window in a tropical rainstorm. Alejandro, in the light gasoline-powered vehicle ahead, fancied himself a race-car driver and he pushed the Chevy at top speed through a moving braid of traffic. “The Pan-American,” Alejandro had said, “is war.”

  For some reason that wasn’t immediately apparent, Alejandro wanted to push on at top speed for Quito.

  “He doesn’t brake for oncoming cars,” Joe observed.

  Out in the middle lane, it was a game of chicken, with a new opponent every two minutes.

  Garry was staying right with Alejandro in a virtuoso exhibition of Third World driving. He used the horn more than the brakes. Running down the middle lane, with a bus headed directly for us, Garry would just keep pushing for the pass, then pull in at the last moment.

  He seldom used the brakes because he felt there was a greater danger of being back ended than in suffering a head-on crash. In his opinion, drivers on the Pan-American were very good indeed, and he thought that most of them possessed better skills than the typical North American driver.

  Joe and I objected to this. Drivers would consistently pull out to pass in the face of an oncoming car or truck. Sometimes both vehicles pulled back into their own lane simultaneously, inches away from death. Bumpers missed bumpers by feet, sometimes inches.

  “People grew up driving like this,” Garry shouted. It seemed strange to carry on a high-volume conversation with a man wearing goggles and driving a truck through the rain with his head out the window. “It’s what they know,” he bellowed, “this kind of driving is all they know, and they’re good at it. North American rules don’t apply. They’ve got people driving vehicles at twenty miles an hour here, and if they passed safely—what we’d call safely—they’d never get anywhere. So everyone passes everyone, at any time. That bus back there? When we were coming at each other? He saw that I needed more room than he did and feathered back on the throttle. He was good. Different rules here, and if you know the rules, you can see how good the drivers are.”

  Garry, I could see, was in a kind of esctasy, his teeth bared against the sting of rain on his face.

  “Yeah,” I shouted, “but how do you know that someone isn’t drunk, or crazy macho, or suicidal?”

  “Well,” Garry screamed, “you usually have about ten seconds to decide.”

  Through the inch or so of moving water on the glass in front of me I could see the looming grill of a large truck as it peeled off into its own lane.

  “These people,” Garry howled, “are either good drivers or they’re dead.”

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON we turned out of the banana plantations of the coastal lowlands and headed east, into the mountains and Quito. Ecuador’s capital city is set in a mountain basin 9,350 feet high. The city is only about twenty miles south of the equator.

  The road into the city wound its way upward through a lush mountainous jungle. The highway was a narrow black ribbon of asphalt, in very good repair, but the logistics of the mountains sent it spinning into loops and switchbacks and various Möbius strip variations that would have been dizzying if we hadn’t been crawling along behind creeping diesel belchers at four miles an hour for most of the way.

  There was no passing and depending on the other guy to feather back on the throttle here. Trucks and buses, barreling downhill, could literally not stop, even using their brakes, because the road was steep and slick with rain.

  The thick columns of trees that lined the road were alive with parasitic flowers. A waterfall four or five hundred feet high poured through the greenery above. At the bottom, near the road, the waters fell as a fine mist which glittered in a strange lunar manner. Green hanging vines brushed the windshield and roof of the truck.

  There were thick pockets of silvery fog hanging in the hollows, the kind of ethereal mists that inspire German philosophers and Japanese Zen masters. We were, I thought, ascending into realms of the spirit. Ahead, through the purely spiritual fog, I could see a looming, giant form. A revelation, no doubt.

  It was, of course, a large truck doing five miles an hour, and, through the fog, I could barely make out some markings on this erstwhile celestial apparition: the markings read, COCA-COLA. The truck was belching diesel and we were nearing the ten-thousand-foot mark on the hump that would take us into Quito.

  Garry said that the road was well engineered, but the mountains and the wet asphalt were treacherous. He thought that the wives of the drivers who plied this road probably worried about their husbands in the same way wives of fighter pilots worried about theirs.

  Off to our left there was a stupendous drop-off that wo
uld take a truck rolling through some steep greenery, then send it out into the sky, where it would plunge through a layer of clouds and land, in a burst of fire, in some banana grove next to a wooden shack on stilts. The people in the shack would have to suppose that the truck had simply fallen out of the sky.

  It was 5:30 P.M., and here, near the equator, the sun sets promptly at 6:00. It rises at 6:00. There is none of the lazy, lingering light of more northerly or southerly climes in Quito, no such thing as twilight. The sun rises and sets at 6:00 sharp, all year long. Twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness.

  It was no longer possible to see to the bottom of the roadside dropoffs. They were shrouded in shadow, and the impossible depths seemed to purple down into an absolute and final blackness.

  We pushed through a pewtery pocket of silver-gray fog, then rose above the cloud bank itself into a final explosion of dying sunlight. I could see a triangle of sky between green hummocky hills and spires. Streaks of crimson ran across the western sky, and that light fell on the cloud just below us so that I felt I was looking down onto a pastel cushion. It was a stupefying vision of cartoon heaven where people in white robes sit on clouds and play harps.

  And then, bam, it was dark and we were running over a wet, black highway, through the fog, in the dead of night.

  And coming down the hill, careening toward us at crazy speed, was a vehicle decorated with rows of blinking lights arranged at the rectangular periphery of its front end. It looked like a Forty-second Street adult bookstore on wheels, but it was a bus, decorated as buses are in Ecuador, and the driver was speeding, heedlessly I thought, over the wet, slippery asphalt and into the cloudy darkness below.

  Buses, in Argentina and Chile, are not necessarily objects of dread. There, drivers wear white shirts and ties. They are relatively courteous at the wheel, and are treated with the respect accorded airline pilots in the U.S. In Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, by contrast, buses are hurtling projectiles of terror.

  Gringo travelers generally find bus trips in the mountainous regions of Latin America occasions of mind-expanding tumult. Lawrence Millman, in his book Last Places, pretty much hits the note:

  … those infamous Latin American bus rides where the bus—actually a hodgepodge of cast-off tractor and automotive parts mounted on bald tires—bashes its way through mountains, swivels along precipitous gorges, straightens out hairpin curves, and generally avails itself of scenery to which no bus should have a right. Meanwhile the driver pulls off at every roadside shrine and leaves a bribe for the Virgin Mary; Mexican drivers leave iron washers in lieu of pesos, whereas Ecuadorians are more diligent and leave a certain number of sucres per wheel. But it wouldn’t matter if they left Her cassettes of salsa music. Sooner or later the bus will justify everybody’s worst fears by plunging (Latin American buses never crash, they plunge) into a deep gorge, ravine, gulch, coulee, or canyon, the only survivor being a three-year-old child muffled by its mother’s breasts.

  Tom Miller, in The Panama Hat Trail, advises his readers that the driver’s sobriety “isn’t a factor. The presence of his wife or girlfriend is. If she’s along, she will usually sit immediately behind him, next to him, or on his lap. He will want to impress her with his daring at the wheel, but he will also go to great lengths not to injure her. If he has no girlfriend or wife, the chances of a gorge-dive increase.”

  On the other hand, Miller quotes a New York Times editor who finds bus-plunge stories useful as fillers. “We can count on one every couple of days or so,” the editor told Miller, “they’re always ready when we need them.”

  In Miller’s experience, the stories are generally no more than two sentences long and invariably feature the word plunge in the headline. The text will include such facts as the number feared dead, the identity of any group aboard—a soccer team, church choir, or children from a certain school—and the distance of the plunge from the capital city.

  Moritz Thomsen, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador who stayed to farm the land, listened well to neighbors when they told bus-plunge stories. In Living Poor, he writes:

  One of the stories they tell about the Ecuadorian bus driver is that whenever he runs off the road and kills a few of the passengers without killing himself, he immediately goes into hiding in some distant part of the country so the bereaved can’t even up the score. There are rumors of whole villages down in the far reaches of the Amazon basin populated almost entirely by retired bus drivers.

  WE CAME UP over a final rise and drove into a mass of lights arranged in a series of neat grids. Although Quito is only a few miles from the equator, it is high enough that the climate is wonderfully temperate: a spring day in England. The skies had cleared and lights were strung out along wide boulevards.

  Alejandro led us to a locked gate at some kind of garage. He honked his horn, a pair of metal gates swung open, and we were looking into a bank of incredibly bright otherworldly lights, white hot, like something out of a Spielberg film. We drove slowly into them as people on all sides yelled at one another and at us.

  The truck was to be serviced in here, but no one had told GM Ecuador that we did not want to be interviewed. There were two sets of video cameras from an evening news program, and a few print reporters were present along with half a dozen mechanics and a man in a white lab coat, like a doctor’s, who was to supervise the service.

  This, I realized, was the reason Alejandro had been in such a hurry. Everyone was waiting for us. Garry worked with the mechanics and I tried to tell the assembled press that, as much as we would like to, we couldn’t do interviews. They filmed me telling them that. I realized that they would use this snippet of film no matter what I said.

  “A team rushing through Quito today on their way to a world record,” I heard an imaginary newscaster on an imaginary newscast say, “will be pulling into Colombia tomorrow and will be available to those contemplating armed robbery and/or kidnap.”

  We were going to get some publicity whatever happened, and it seemed to me that it would be better to get good publicity than to disappoint these reporters who had spent a couple of hours waiting for us to crest bus-plunge hill. So I spoke with the press.

  “Why do you want to do this?” they asked, and “Do you think of yourself as a romantic adventurer?”

  I told them the drive had been a dream of ours for some time. We were now making that dream come true, and maybe when people saw us, they would think of their own dreams, and they would work to make those dreams come true.

  At the service bay, mechanics were changing the oil and the fuel filter. One of the mechanics, a man with a reputation as a crackerjack electrician, was working on the short in the console. He would attempt to rewire the windshield wipers back into their original circuit. Garry was watching the electrician work. Together, they pulled the console off and saw a tangled bird’s nest of multicolored wires running every which way to every device that we had added to the truck. Why someone thought a nonessential system, like an auxiliary fuel pump, should be wired into the same circuit as an essential system, like windshield wipers, has never been satisfactorily explained.

  I was telling the press that our trip was an expression of Pan-American unity and friendship.

  “It’s the dog’s goddamn breakfast in here,” I heard Garry scream. He and the mechanic were tearing at the wiring.

  Our South American friends were helping make our dreams come true, I told the press. Ecuador was the most beautiful place we had seen, and our friends here were the most helpful. The Pan-American Highway was a ribbon of friendship connecting all of the Americas …

  “Someone dies when we get back!” Garry shouted. He had a handful of wires and did, indeed, look homicidal.

  * * *

  WE STORED THE TRUCK at the garage, slept a few hours, and drove out of Quito before dawn. It was a beautiful, gracious city but Indian people in threadbare clothes slept on the wide boulevards under the glowing streetlights.

  Our windshield wipers were working. P
eople were living on the street in poverty, but by God, we had windshield wipers that worked. That thought tugged at my conciousness, but I refused to entertain it. I wanted to feel good and felt bad about feeling that.

  JOE SKORUPA, who lives at sea level, had a fierce headache generated by the altitude. We were driving through an area of fertile farms. Indian women in colorful ponchos, lime-green slacks, and porkpie hats were already out hoeing in the potato fields. The houses were whitewashed adobe affairs with red-tile roofs and flowers in the front yard.

  As we rounded a sharp corner, Garry had to brake for a cow that was standing in the middle of the road. We drove around the beast and it regarded us with bovine indifference.

  “That’d be pretty hard to explain,” I said, “hitting a cow.”

  “You couldn’t exactly say that it darted out in front of you,” Garry agreed.

  And we started in on that idea, letting it get silly and stupid and all roto around the edges.

  “Cows don’t dart.”

  “It’s one thing you can say about cows all right. They’re piss poor in the darting department.”

  “Don’t dart worth shit.”

  This imbecilic conversation, punctuated by idiotic guffaws, continued for at least fifteen minutes until we heard Joe, in the back, moan loudly. It was a piteous sound meant to be heard over the roar of diesel engine and it meant, Guys, for the love of God, please.

  Garry and I were struck silent. We had been inconsiderate. Still, we hadn’t really finished laughing about those darting cows and occasionally the bottled-up emotion came snorting up out of our noses. We were like children in church who can’t stop laughing.

  “Shhh,” I said, “Joe has a hiddach.”

  Garry fell into a phoney coughing fit, but Joe saw through him. “We get back to sea level,” he said, “and you guys are dead meat.”