Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  With all the cars on the road, people began to demand convenience. They wanted to be able to drive to the market and park there, a few steps from the door. Roadside business became good business. By the 1930s, American highways were cluttered with shops and clubs and restaurants. One forty-eight-mile stretch of U.S. 1 was found to have nearly three thousand buildings with direct access to the road. There was a gas station every 895 feet.

  IN SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA, there are still roadless areas, or places where a cross-country road is nothing more than a path scraped out of the jungle.

  There are good drivers on the Pan-American, and bad ones. The rules of the road are informal, and it is assumed that a certain amount of blood will flow. We had not seen a lot of accidents. There was an ambulance screaming away from a wreck in Buenos Aires. We saw trucks off the road here and there; we saw those glittering piles of glass in the Atacama Desert. And then, in Central America, the inherent necrological density of the Pan-American manifested itself on the Mountain of Death, where someone in a white pickup truck took a ten-thousand-foot dive into the Atlantic. There had been blood on the highway near Guatemala City. A man, possibly dead, lay in a field near his wrecked truck in Mexico. These were human tragedies, but it was the dog that died in Guatemala—the sound of crunching bones—that had underscored the bloody nature of the road.

  “It seems,” Garry said, “darker there.”

  “It’s because there are no cleared shoulders,” I guessed. “The forest runs right up to the road.” Sometimes the trees were luxuriant and branches formed a canopy over the road, so that, in the day, you were driving through a green tunnel. At night, the headlights did not seem to penetrate the darkness.

  Everyone had access to the road. Businesses, rushing to take advantage of traffic on the Pan-American, literally lined the road. Patrons in bars and cantinas could stumble out the front door and onto the Pan-American in a matter of steps.

  “And the people,” Garry said.

  People walked along the shoulderless road because the jungle was thick in places, and, even for those on foot, the highway often the fastest way to go. Sometimes the road was the only clearing, the only flat spot, and if there was little traffic—for instance, on the alternate route over the Mountain of Death out of San José, Costa Rica—people might use the road to work, to slaughter sheep, for instance.

  The Pan-American was a form of entertainment. Whole families—men, women, toddlers—stood on the side of the road, watching semis howl by two feet from their faces. Lovers walked hand in hand under the trees, on the pavement, in the darkness. Children dodged traffic for fun and kicked soccer balls to one another across the Pan-American.

  It was all very much like the American road of the 1920s, even down to the matter of bandits.

  In the U.S., during Prohibition, fast cars were used to run liquor. Later, gangsters—drive-by assassins with tommy guns—operated out of Chicago. Clyde Barrow, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, wrote Henry Ford a letter praising the V-8 engine: for getaways, Clyde thought, a V-8 was the cat’s pajamas. The mythology of the road in the 1930s was one of fast cars chasing fast cars over dirt roads through the eroded farmlands of the dust bowl.

  There were criminals in cars, and bandits on the-road. J. Edgar Hoover called overnight car camps “camps of crime.”

  ALL THIS is again from Open Road, Phil Patton’s celebration of the American highway. Patton also examines the genesis of U.S. inter-states. They were originally tagged national defense highways and were vigorously championed, in the 1950s, by President Dwight Eisenhower, whose experience in two world wars taught him the military value of a good road.

  In 1919, Eisenhower was one of thirty-five officers assigned to a motorized column of seventy-nine vehicles that were to drive from Washington to San Francisco. The trip took fifty-six days.

  Twenty-five years later, Eisenhower, as military head of occupied Germany, studied that country’s autobahn system, the world’s first real system of superhighways. The principles of the modern auto road—division of traffic by a median, the separation of roads at intersections with ramps and bridges, the limitation of access—had all lent themselves to Hitler’s theories of mechanized attack and blitzkrieg.

  The Eisenhower administration pushed for a system of similar roads called national defense highways. During the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the new system of highways was sold not only as a way to move men and munitions: national defense highways could also be used to evacuate cities in the case of nuclear attack.

  The construction of America’s interstate highways remains the most expensive and elaborate public-works program of all time. In 1984, near the town of Caldwell, Idaho, reporters and officials watched as “red-eyed Pete, the last stoplight on the interstates,” was ceremoniously removed, placed in a coffin, and buried.

  WE WERE DOING THE LEGAL LIMIT, which we figured was sixty-five miles an hour, plus five or ten more, depending on the flow of traffic. Canada was only twenty hours away. We would not even have enough time to get bored with the interstates.

  Garry worked the cellular phone, chatting with radio talk-show hosts about the drive, working on the payback. Then it was night and there was a fine dusting of dry, powdery snow swirling across the interstate south of Fargo, North Dakota.

  At eight-forty the next morning, we crossed into Canada. The officer at the Canadian border station was an attractive woman with strawberry-blond hair who saw the markings on the Sierra—ARGENTINA TO ALASKA IN 25 DAYS OR LESS—and said, “Well, what day is it?”

  I checked my calendar. “The morning of the twenty-first day,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess you boys better get trucking.”

  She was unarmed.

  She was Canadian.

  She was nice.

  Garry said, “I knew people were going to start asking that question when we got to North America. I’m glad we didn’t have to change the sign.”

  “What do you mean, change the sign?”

  “I’ve got a bunch of sticker numbers in the back. If we were here in thirty days, I could have changed it to read, ‘Argentina to Alaska in thirty-five days or less.’ ”

  There was a long silence.

  “Why,” Garry said finally, “do I wish I hadn’t told you that?”

  IN WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Garry did a TV interview with the Canadian Broadcasting System. We turned west on Canada 1 and drove into a nasty blizzard. Wet, heavy snow clung to the branches of bare trees but turned to ice on the road. Traffic crawled along at twenty-five miles an hour but winter only lasted fifteen minutes.

  It stopped snowing, though the clouds hung low over the land and the sky was a tenebrous misery of gloom. We drove with our lights on, and Garry put the hammer down: there was a press conference in Regina, Saskatchewan, at four o’clock.

  We sailed over fields of sandy-brown grain stubble interspersed with patches of snow. It was the kind of land that would convince any reasonable person that the earth was flat. Regina was nowhere in sight, and then, bang, there it was. The city has no outskirts: it simply rises from the prairie in a clumping of ten-story-high buildings. There was a break in the clouds to the west of the city, and the sun fell over the modest high-rises of Regina in a single encompassing pillar.

  I felt as if I were on an alien planet. Regina looked like a city in a science-fiction illustration: it was all gleaming towers and celestial illumination set in a monotonous, frightening plain that spread from horizon to horizon.

  We did a radio interview, talked with a newspaper reporter, and, a few hours later, spent another half hour doing a press conference in Saskatoon. At midnight, while I tried to sleep, Garry stopped in Edmonton, Alberta, for a television interview. The cameras were waiting for him on the road. I heard him say that Edmonton was the midway point between Dallas and Prudhoe Bay. The reporter thought our sleeping arrangements unique, and there was a time when bright lights filled the cab of the truck. I heard an announcer’s voice mentio
n “a great adventure.” Piss off, I thought, and pulled the pillow over my head.

  About seven-thirty the next morning, I was driving through Grande Prairie, Alberta. The skies were still a bit cloudy and the sunrise—from false dawn to full light—took over two hours. It was like the endless sunrises and sunsets of southern Argentina. We were coming down a long shallow slope into Grande Prairie, and the lights of the town glittered in different colors under the feeble silver glow of the rising sun.

  At nine o’clock, the clouds took on the faintest tinge of pink, but to the west, where we were going, I could see clear blue sky. And at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, the sky was, indeed, deep blue. People were walking around in light jackets. They dressed like Hondurans, in cowboy hats and jeans.

  DAWSON CREEK is about four thousand miles from Dallas and about two thousand miles from Prudhoe Bay. It is also “mile one” of the ALCAN or Alaska Highway. During the Second World War, the Japanese attacked Alaska and occupied two islands in the Aleutians, the archipelago that stretches south and west of the mainland.

  The ALCAN Highway, a military supply route to Alaska for U.S. forces, was built to defend the mainland, and it was completed in November of 1942. The Canadian portion of the highway was turned over to Canada at the end of the war. The Alaska-Canadian Military Highway was opened to the public in 1948.

  Driving the road used to be a survival trip. These days, the road is asphalt all the way to Fairbanks.

  I took the wheel out of Fort Nelson and pushed the truck through Stone Mountain Provincial Park. It was the kind of mountain road automobile enthusiasts dream about: moderately challenging, with nicely banked turns winding through staggering scenery. It was, incidentally, entirely free of police. I took the corners hard, listening to the tires scream on the asphalt, and thought that I had never enjoyed driving more.

  The sun dropped low in the sky, gathered itself, thought better of setting just yet, made a southward detour, and began to roll along the horizon. A black bear sow and two cubs were wrestling around in the stubbly grass on the shore of a lake. I saw two other black bear on the drive. There was a moose in a small pond, standing belly-deep in the water, grazing on aquatic plants. The slanting light was golden.

  IT WAS DARK and our shifts at the wheel now lasted only three or four hours. I was driving and we were somewhere north of Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. There was a dream I wanted to have and it was waiting for me every time I closed my eyes. I thought: you should close your eyes. Your eyes hurt and they need rest.

  When I blinked for more than a fraction of a second, the dream was there, playing on the inside of my eyelids. I was in an antiseptic room wearing a white coat. I was a doctor or perhaps a scientist.

  The road ahead ran straight and there were no lights anywhere.

  “Close your eyes. There’s no traffic. It’s safe now. Close your eyes. It’s good to rest your eyes. Close your eyes and see what happens.”

  I shook my head and a dull ache became a sharp pain.

  “Close your eyes and it won’t hurt anymore. You’ll drive better if your head doesn’t hurt. Just close your eyes.”

  I noticed that I had pencils and pens in the pocket of my white coat. There was someone at the door of the antiseptic room and I didn’t know who it was, but I knew for certain that something good was going to happen.

  There was a sound that I knew was our engine and another sound that was the hum of our tires on the road. These sounds bothered me. I wanted to open my eyes.

  “It’s only a short blink. Don’t worry. Things happen fast in dreams …”

  I stopped hard in the middle of the empty road and woke Garry.

  “I think I’m tired,” I said.

  THE DAYS AND NIGHTS began to run together: the beating of a great black wing. At six-fifteen that morning we passed into Alaska at the Tok border station. A few hours later, the morning sky was a light robin’s-egg blue, but the sun wasn’t up yet. There were some puffy clouds in the east, and the sun, which was still somewhere below the curve of the horizon, lit these clouds from below. There was no red in the light at all. The clouds were a bright golden color, spiritual in aspect, as if they had been sanctified by the light. I studied the clouds for half an hour, and then the sun finally appeared in a sky that had been pale blue for over an hour. It hung on the horizon, in the manner of a harvest moon.

  The sky turned a deeper blue but the sun’s rays only touched the tops of the fir trees and the uppermost branches of bare aspens and birches. We drove down a shadowed corridor, between the trees, with the golden sunlight trapped in the branches above.

  There was a thin cover of snow on the land. We were driving along the banks of the Tanana River, about fifty miles out of Fairbanks. The river was low, not yet completely frozen over, and there were places where great blocks of ice, driven by moving water, had humped up at some obstruction. These great hummocks caught the light of the sun, which was now higher in the sky, and the ice was so bright that looking at it hurt my eyes.

  Where there was running water, it flowed in twisted braids through an immense valley. The water was warmer than the air so that a low, thick fog rose off its surface. These narrow banks of fog wound through the valley ahead and they, too, were golden. Everything seemed golden in what we thought would be the final sunrise of the drive.

  BY TEN-THIRTY THAT MORNING, we were in Fairbanks, at a GM dealership called Aurora Motors. It had taken exactly half an hour less than three days to drive from Dallas to Fairbanks, even counting the four short press conferences we had done along the way. The GM dealer, Jim Messer, had promised to help us with one last document. We needed a permit to drive the old North Slope Haul Road to Prudhoe Bay.

  The 416-mile road, now called the Dalton Highway, was built in 1974 to service the Alaska oil pipeline. The road is about thirty feet wide and took twenty-five million cubic yards of gravel to surface. The gravel insulates the permanently frozen ground. If the permafrost was allowed to melt, the road would deteriorate rapidly. In some spots, the gravel is six feet deep.

  In 1978, the road was turned over to the state of Alaska and the first fifty-six miles was opened to the public. In 1981, after a bitter debate in the state legislature, public access was extended another 155 miles, to Disaster Creek.

  Disaster Creek is still about 206 miles short of Prudhoe Bay, which is really an oil field, a conglomeration of drilling rigs and pumping stations. Men and women go there to work, to produce oil, and the haul road is Prudhoe’s main supply line.

  Permits to drive beyond the public portion of the road are issued by the Department of Transportation and are granted for commercial and industrial use only. The haul road is patrolled by a state trooper and the checkpoint, where permits must be shown, operates day and night.

  So we needed a permit to complete the last few hours of the drive. The Department of Transportation, when Garry contacted them, had seen no reason to be helpful. There was no appeal.

  That left us two choices. We could attempt to run the checkpoint, get arrested, never reach Prudhoe Bay, and watch the days tick by in a jail cell. This choice was unacceptable: I had gotten to the point where the clock inside my head would not stop, not until we completed the race.

  The other way was to drive the road legally, on a bona fide commercial or industrial mission. This was not an insoluble problem for experienced documenteros.

  Jim Messer, the GM dealer at Aurora Motors, bought our truck on the spot, loaned it back, and hired us to deliver a load of spare parts to a garage in Prudhoe Bay. It took an hour to fill out the proper papers, to remove our plates, and to put the temporary plates on the truck. Aurora Motors now owned the Sierra, and we had a valid permit to drive the Dalton Highway all the way to Prudhoe Bay.

  * * *

  IT’S ABOUT SEVENTY-FIVE MILES from Fairbanks to the start of the Dalton Highway. The first half of that is paved, and the pavement was covered over in glare ice so slick that, when we stopped, it was literally impossible to walk
on the road. I drove along at a maddening fifteen miles an hour. Near a mountain called Wickersham Dome, the pavement ended, but the gravel was packed over with snow, and a hard layer of ice covered that. I still couldn’t take it any faster than fifteen miles an hour.

  We were very conscious of the hours ticking by. It was now the twenty-third day and the twelfth hour of the drive. We had about 450 miles to go. At fifteen miles an hour, it would take another day and then some to reach the end of the road. We hadn’t taken that long to drive from the tip of Texas to the Canadian border.

  The Dalton Highway starts just past Livengood, and, after fifteen more miles and another hour, Garry took over. He drove the ice at nearly thirty-five, feathering off on the throttle rather than braking for curves or for oncoming traffic. Garry’s theory regarding glare ice was that you should drive it as if you have no brakes.

  “Because,” he explained, “you don’t.”

  THE ICE STRETCHED ON for a hundred miles out of Fairbanks, but then it gave way, reluctantly and by degrees, to packed snow. Garry cranked it up to forty-five, the legal limit. He experimented once or twice with the brakes, saw that we had some friction, and pushed the Sierra to sixty.

  We came over a steep sanded hill, perhaps two thousand feet high, and found ourselves in a thin winter mist that hunkered over this low summit. The mist was freezing on the branches of stunted fir trees, some of them only six feet high. As we drove down off the summit and out of the cloud, the trees became somewhat more robust but their branches were covered in thick layers of ice. The sky was bright blue and these ice trees glittered in the mid-afternoon sun.

  Garry caught sight of a truck in the side mirror. He pulled over and stopped. It was the etiquette of the haul road. The Dalton Highway belongs to the trucks, especially those that are fully loaded, headed north. They take the center of the road and drive with the throttle to the floor. A heavily loaded truck has a lot of purchase on snowpack, and this one blew by us at seventy-five miles an hour. There was a valley below and a steep pitch after that. The trucker was working up speed to attack the next hill.