The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  “Duck and cover,” the voice announced, pronouncing the space between each word. “Get away from the windows and await instructions.”

  The buzzing echoed again, seemingly louder and across the entire floor. Instinctively, I glanced at the window next to me, then looked at Carrington.

  “Bomb drill,” he said calmly. “This happens sometimes. It’ll probably be over in just a minute.”

  We waited another ten or fifteen seconds for the buzzing to stop. Then the man’s voice came on once more.

  “Duck and cover. Get away from the windows and await instructions.”

  The buzzing continued, and Carrington’s brow began to furrow. I stupidly peered out the window, expecting to see—what? Masked guerrillas? Government troops? It occurred to me again that I wasn’t clear who the bad guys were in Ecuador, or whether there even were any.

  “All right, then,” Carrington said, sounding more confused than alarmed. “I guess we should probably duck and cover.”

  He started lowering himself out of his chair, and I followed suit. I realized that, while I’ve heard the phrase a lot, I didn’t really know what ducking and covering looked like. Absurdly, I wondered whether Thompson, a child of the 1950s, had ever had to crawl underneath his school desk, like in all those old Civil Defense PSAs. I was gauging whether there was enough space under Carrington’s desk for the both of us when the voice abruptly came back over the PA.

  “This has been a drill,” it announced, and the buzzing ceased. A muffled wave of chatter broke out over the cubicles outside. On TV, Hillary had finished speaking and was shaking hands with men in suits. We both slid back into our seats, and Carrington grinned at me a little sheepishly.

  “Well, that doesn’t happen every day,” he said, straightening his tie. “I guess you got to see something exciting after all.”

  Public Diplomacy Officer Jennifer Lawson didn’t come to the Foreign Service via the usual channels. She and I were headed back to the Plaza Grande in a government SUV—jet-black with tinted windows, a beefy driver in a dark suit, the works. We were tagging along with PAS intern Liz Mayberry, a chipper Minnesotan who’d invited us to sit in on her weekly after-school English class at one of the embassy’s “American corners.” The resource hub was actually in a wing of the same cultural center where I’d seen the Quito photo exhibit a week before.

  Lawson’s first love was modern dance. She’d studied it at Mount Holyoke College in the late 1980s, and she’d toured abroad with various dance companies before founding her own troupe in the mid-1990s. Her sister was an enthusiastic Foreign Service officer, and after years of her urging, Lawson took the Foreign Service exam on something of a whim. At the time, the pass rate for candidates was between 25 percent and 30 percent, and when Lawson saw that she’d passed, she opted to trade in her ballet flats for a pair of sensible diplomat’s heels.

  “I’d been to these amazing arts festivals all over the world,” she said, “and after a while it dawned on me: government can make these cool, life-changing events happen.”

  She was blond, in her early forties, and she still had a dancer’s slight build. The enormous purse on her lap made her look even smaller as she slouched in the backseat of the SUV.

  “That might be a more popular idea in Ecuador than it is in the US,” I said. “Not a lot of people at home these days are crowing about the wonderful role that government can play in our lives.”

  “You know, this job actually gives you a new perspective on that whole US political party debate,” she said. “People in the US look at our own governmental system and political parties and say, ‘These two sides can’t agree on anything.’ But they agree we should keep the Constitution, and you can’t say that about every country.”

  The SUV dropped us off in front of the Centro Cultural Metropolitano, and we walked upstairs to what looked like a middle-school study hall. Liz the intern had a whiteboard waiting for her there, along with some markers and photocopied worksheets. The bookshelves were a hodgepodge of picture books, teenage vampire chronicles, and paperback versions of children’s classics: Jules Verne, Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island. There was a rack of magazines with a few well-thumbed issues of National Geographic, plus some conspicuously dusty copies of Time and Newsweek. Back in the United States, it was Black History Month, and all around the center were educational posters with photos and bios of prominent African Americans: Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and, bizarrely, Tyra Banks.

  “We try and give people what our social media team calls ‘veggies and candy,’ ” Lawson said with a shrug. “You know, balance out some info about foreign policy with some info about the Grammys.”

  A few minutes later, twenty elementary-schoolers in blue jumpers came wandering in, and Lawson and I grabbed desks in the back of the room. The median age was about nine. The kids were surprisingly well behaved as they gathered around the table, reaching for markers and grinning when they responded, “Fine, thank you” to Liz’s round-the-table survey of how they were doing. Adjectives were the topic of the day, and she launched right in with a series of flash cards that paired nouns with modifiers. “Tall girl,” the class repeated. “Fast car. Brown dog.”

  Lawson and I squirmed to get comfortable in our tiny school desks. I understood, I told her, why it was important for these kids that they learn English—it expanded their horizons, gave them a competitive advantage, and so on. But why was it important to the embassy? Why was it important for America? I wasn’t entirely clear on how a tutoring program advanced our national interests.

  “It has to do with making ourselves understood around the world,” she said. “Look, it’s in our best interest for Americans to be able to communicate with as much of the world as possible, even for those people who don’t travel or speak foreign languages.”

  Liz asked the students to turn to their worksheets, and the room got quiet as they grabbed pencils and put their heads down.

  “The other thing,” Lawson whispered, “is that we hope a bunch of these kids will someday come to the US and take that experience home with them. If you want to prevent a skewed impression of the country, there’s really no substitute for cultural exchange programs.”

  “Skewed because of what they read in the Ecuadorian media?” I asked. “Anti-imperialist rhetoric and all that?”

  “Sure, that’s part of it,” she said, “but also American media. Say you watch a lot of Law & Order. You’d think that our country was swimming in homeless people standing around on street corners and witnessing murders. Or, depending on what kind of media you’re consuming, you could also come off with a simplistic, Pollyana-ish view, where everybody’s wealthy and we have no social problems.”

  This, Lawson explained, is what ultimately motivates a lot of the PAS’s efforts, a drive to present the United States as a more nuanced place than it might come off via Hollywood movies, music videos, or celebrity magazines. To a lot of Ecuadorian nine-year-olds—hell, to a lot of Ecuadorians—the United States is basically one big Miami, from sea to shining sea. Or maybe it’s New York, but either way it’s a cartoon version, where everyone drives a big car and lives in a skyscraper. So the bluegrass bands and the step-shows are more than just circuses, imported to keep the locals entertained and thereby well disposed to the United States. They’re part of a coordinated effort to beat back ultimately harmful stereotypes of America as a land of urban millionaires who spend their days sunbathing and murdering one another.

  In a sense, I realized, the United States is kind of its own worst enemy. We’re victims of our own cultural success. In Thompson’s day, USIS officers were battling negative images of America promoted by Cuban news agencies and socialist agitators. But so much of the PAS’s job today involves fending off the American culture machine itself, the more pervasive and not always flattering elements of our society that manage to promote themselves whether we like it or not. If colonialism is somebody else taking over your story, then what is it called when
your story starts telling and retelling itself, all over the world, without your control or approval? I thought of all those folks on the Gringo Trail, trotting the globe while carrying all the baggage of American culture, and I wondered if maybe they had more to do with international relations than I’d thought. Maybe more than all the sputtering anti-imperialists in Latin America. We have met the enemy, as the saying goes, and he is us.

  Of course, if we’re the bad guys in that scenario, then we’re still the good guys too, which was easy to remember as I watched Liz the intern help her students read aloud from their adjective worksheets. They were clearly fond of her. All the kids seemed excited to be there, and they were, without exception, ferociously cute. They took turns writing their best sentences on the whiteboard, and I tried not to read too much of the American Dream into their examples of adjectives-at-work. I have a big house. My watch is expensive. My girlfriend is beautiful.

  When class was over, I walked back outside with Lawson and Liz. It was late afternoon, and the Plaza Grande was full of people on benches, talking and smoking and eating empanadas. Ten or fifteen picketers marched slowly in front of the presidential palace, protesting the ruling against El Universo. The building was once the seat of the Spanish Crown, and they looked very small in front of its fat Doric columns. When the black SUV pulled up, I thanked Lawson and Liz for their time. The sound of their car doors ricocheted off the buildings in the square, and I waved as they drove away. I had to imagine them waving back on the other side of the tinted windows.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His Once-Great Empire

  Everybody here is working terribly hard on some Worthwhile Project, and for some queer reason it is depressing.

  —Personal correspondence, June 6, 1962

  I

  There is a velocity that a plane achieves on a runway just seconds before lift-off, known to pilots as “rotation speed” or VR. It is reached at the precise moment when the nosewheel of the plane leaves the ground, but before the rest of the aircraft follows. From your cramped seat in coach, you’ll know you’ve hit VR during that split second when you can physically anticipate lift-off, if only because the speed at which you’re traveling feels so deeply, intuitively unsustainable. This is the speed at which buses in the Andes travel all the time.

  South America offers a dazzling array of intercity bus experiences. On one end of the spectrum, you have your classic chicken bus—a Frankensteinian assembly of repurposed auto parts, packed with people and livestock, adhering to no discernible schedule. Far on the other end is the luxury cruiser, with reclining seats, movies, meals, and, if you’re lucky, even wireless. These are a bargain by American standards and make even your nicer Amtrak routes look like jostling covered wagons on the Oregon Trail. Speed, however, is always a factor, particularly in Ecuador. Unlike in neighboring Colombia, where the law kindly requires bus companies to post annual fatality counts at the ticket counter, choosing a bus company in Ecuador is always a roll of the dice. Just days before I left Quito, a speeding bus plunged off a cliff two hours north of the city, killing twenty-nine and injuring another thirty. This is a common enough occurrence as to not make the front-page news.

  My night bus to Guayaquil hit VR somewhere in the mountains south of town, and it maintained that speed uninterrupted for the next eight hours. As we hurtled through the Andes, I settled in with a tattered copy of Travels with Charley, which I’d picked up from an English-language bookstore in Gringolandia. A famously contemplative travel text seemed like an appropriate choice for the long miles ahead. Lost on me until later was the fact that John Steinbeck’s classic road-trip chronicle was actually published during the same week in 1962 that Thompson would have been in Guayaquil. Today, we know Steinbeck to be as much a fabulist about his roadside encounters as Thompson would later become (and maybe already was), but the fabricated dialogue has never been my favorite part of Travels with Charley anyway. I enjoy the book because of Steinbeck’s wistful commentary on the open road, because of elegant lines that remind me, for example, why it’s possible to doze off even while your chicken bus is approaching Mach 5.

  “The unbroken speeds are hypnotic,” Steinbeck explained, “and while the miles peel off, an imperceptible exhaustion sets in.”

  I spent just two nights in Guayaquil, a hot and gritty port city that doesn’t have much to recommend it. Unlike Quito, Guayaquil lost most of its colonial character to a massive fire in 1896, and the blaze was just a punctuation mark at the end of an already dismal century for Ecuador’s largest city. It was besieged by the Peruvian military twice. It was invaded by Quito, its own national capital, once. During an epic yellow-fever outbreak in 1842, Guayaquil’s own provincial governor described the city as “an immense cemetery of dread and horror.” Guayaquil, in fact, has its own page in the Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, which ominously notes that the low, wet town is “an ideal breeding habitat for the mosquito.”

  It was so low and wet that Guayaquil’s riverfront remained unsettled for centuries after its founding in 1538. Rock was too distant and expensive to import and use as fill. The surrounding mangrove forests, however, were loaded with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hard-shelled oysters. The tasty bivalves were so numerous that they became, in the words of one nineteenth-century British lieutenant, “the continued and never-failing food of the inhabitants.” So city planners dictated that shells from Guayaquil’s favorite snack be strategically discarded in order to fill the bogs and build infrastructure.

  “For instance,” wrote the lieutenant, “whilst I was there the authorities wished to construct a battery below the town …; subsequently every morning a crowd of people were to be seen opening oysters and throwing shells in the appointed spot, the daily increase of the battery giving promise of being sooner completed than the generality of public works in Spanish America.”

  The people of Guayaquil have been building up their riverfront ever since. Today, that onetime pile of oyster shells is about the only nice place to kill an afternoon in the otherwise dumpy city. I spent two days strolling the boardwalk there, enjoying the watery views and the watery pilsner beer. I admired the historic monuments and ate my fill of a tuna-and-onion stew called encebollado. Then I skipped town on the first bus for the Peruvian border.

  “Nowhere is my natural anarchism more aroused than at the national borders,” Steinbeck wrote after he and his dog Charley were turned away from Canada for a lack of veterinary papers. “I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?”

  I’m with Steinbeck. The immigration checkpoint at the town of Aguas Verdes was in bad need of a paint job and worse need of a janitor. I waited with fifty or so of my co-passengers to get my passport stamped by an unsmiling officer who stood behind an iron gate. Coming into Ecuador had been no problem. All of my papers were in order. So I had no reason to be nervous, but there is always some tension at a border crossing—that cultivated air of Serious Business, exacerbated by the presence of men with large guns.

  Stapled on the wall next to the immigration counter at Aguas Verdes were posters of Peru’s desaparecidos, the “disappeared” victims of one or another of the Andes’ many armed conflicts. Most of Peru’s “disappeared” are victims of the country’s twenty-year war against the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, which raged across the country during the 1980s and 1990s. It was a brutal campaign that left as many as 70,000 Peruvians killed or unaccounted for, many of them victims of clandestine campesino massacres carried out by both sides. When it was my turn to approach the customs booth, I saw that the victim on the poster closest to me was standing alongside an older woman I presumed to be his mother. The two of them watched over my proceedings with the gruff Peruvian official, and their gazes cast a shadow over the already grim exchange.

  Or so it seemed to me. The truth is, I was in a melancholy funk for the entire ride to Lima. What Steinbeck wrote about driving long distances also holds true
for long bus rides: “A large area of the conscious mind is left free for thinking,” and this is doubly true when the terrain is monotonous. Peru’s coastal-desert landscape looked like the Nevada high country, all sandy flats and low ocher mountains, with rare glimpses of the ocean through the dunes. It was barren, and in the absence of scenery, my mind started to wander.

  How were things going so far? Would I call this trip a success? I had wanted to figure out how travel in a foreign land could turn a moony misanthrope like Thompson into a shrewd cultural observer. Maybe I’d wanted some of that transformation for myself. After a year in South America, Thompson said he suddenly understood why the United States “will never be what it could have been,” but all I had found so far was a series of ambiguous relationships: between South Americans and their environments, South Americans and their governments, South Americans and North Americans. If any of this shed light on what America was, wasn’t, or “could have been,” I wasn’t seeing it. And if I had so far been transfigured by the experience, I wasn’t feeling it.

  It’s not that I was discouraged. I had learned a lot already, and there was plenty of Thompson Trail still spooling out in front of me. It’s just that I could feel my wheels spinning, and for all the friction, I didn’t yet know where I was going.

  II

  When he got to Peru in late July of 1962, Thompson was in no higher spirits. In fact, he was growing surlier by the day. His longest published letter from South America is essentially a litany of complaints written from his hotel room in Lima, describing the myriad ways in which the continent was slowly destroying him—physically, psychologically, spiritually, and sexually. Lima was gray and overcast, he wrote, almost as bad as Bogotá. All of the food was poison. His bowels were inflamed and the doctors had forbidden him anything but bread and mineral water. Cigarettes were expensive, and he was broke. He hadn’t had sex since Colombia (and he was broke). His Spanish still sucked, and no one in the Andes had any sense of humor. Peru was oligarchical in the extreme, dominated by a snobbish aristocracy known as the “forty families,” and only days before he arrived, the military had overthrown the government after a populist reformer in the mold of Colombia’s Jorge Gaitán had won the presidential election. Lima’s poor, Thompson wrote, were “unbelievably primitive.” The rich were insufferable. The only Americans in town were businessmen, and they were golf-balls-off-the-balcony types, every bit as bad as the corrupt Peruvian elites.