by Brian Kevin
From Santa Cruz, I set out on a wild Google chase. Looking at my laptop one morning, I noticed on Google Maps a spot just north of Santa Cruz that was marked with the word “Texas.” On the satellite view, it looked less like a town and more like some patchy green fields, but the label was tantalizing. Gulf had brought many of its employees from Texas to Bolivia back in the day. Surely, I thought, this area must have some connection to that era. Back then, the spot marked “Texas” would have been pretty far out of the city, but I figured maybe it was an oil camp, several of which Thompson had toured on his way through eastern Bolivia. Further Web searching offered no more information, and when I asked at the Santa Cruz tourist office, neither of the puppy-eyed college girls there knew anything about the place. I approached a few drivers at the bus station whose routes seemed to take them nearby, but the only Texas anyone had heard of was the cowboy capital back in the United States. I asked a few taxi drivers, but it never rang any bells.
“I have a cousin in Houston,” one of them suggested helpfully.
So I got up early one morning and rode a city bus as far as Santa Cruz’s northern airport, just outside the city, from where I could hoof it the last few miles to the general area where Google’s cartographers had placed Texas, Bolivia. Thankfully, it was an overcast day, so the heat was bearable. The road north of town was a four-lane highway like something out of rural Kansas, busy with semi-trucks and buses, cutting across an empty, scrubby flatland. Inexplicably, I kept walking past piles of rotting fruit—rank mounds of bananas and oranges piled up along the shoulder, covered in buzzing flies.
After a couple of miles I came to a tollgate and a military checkpoint, where a young soldier standing off to one side eyed me curiously as I walked up. Just cruising on by seemed awkward, so I stopped and asked him whether I should pay the toll.
“Where are you going?” he asked, one eyebrow arched. He was justifiably suspicious. The vehicles next to us were six deep in three lanes, and I was the only pedestrian in sight. Santa Cruz, for all its prosperity, is also a drug-trafficking hub, and I’m sure he could think of reasons why I might hop out of a truck and try to breeze through the checkpoint on foot.
“Not far,” I said. “Another couple of miles, I think. I’m looking for someplace called Texas, or maybe Tejas.”
“And why do you want to go there?”
One thing about not speaking a language well is that sometimes it’s easier to lie than tell the truth. Back in Cali, I had fibbed about my rich retiree parents because any attempt to explain about Thompson and the British golfer would have only led to confusion. In this circumstance, though, I had no credible alternative motivation. So I launched into a complex answer about researching the history of oil exploration in Santa Cruz, and I took out my phone to show the Google map. When I’d finished clumsily explaining myself, the soldier stared at me for a moment, then broke into a broad grin.
“First of all, the place you are looking for is called Texas Arizona,” he said, pronouncing the x. “But more importantly, it doesn’t mean anything. It is just a barrio, my friend. There’s nothing there. No petroleum history, no American history. No history at all. The people who live there, they just picked some names off a map.”
He was smiling at me, amused and a little condescending, but I still wasn’t sure if he was going to let me pass. Surely they must have something there, I said. Maybe I could just get some lunch and come back?
“There is no lunch in Texas Arizona,” he insisted, smiling wider. “There is nothing there at all.”
“Well, a refresca, then,” I said hopefully.
“No refrescas, sir. There is nothing.”
Well, I asked, could I please just go check it out anyway? I’d come all this way. The soldier was bemused, but he waved me through with a gloved hand and told me where to turn off. It was only another mile, he said, and Google’s map had actually put it on the wrong side of the highway.
So half an hour later, I was walking down a dirt road, out of earshot from the paved one, when I walked up on a sign reading URBANIZACION POLICIAL TEXAS ARIZONA. It was painted with stencils on a couple of old two-by-fours: Texas Arizona Housing Development. It seemed like the soldier was right. For the next hour or so, I walked the community’s dusty streets, surrounded by a few dozen simple brick hovels. The grid of unpaved paths was surrounded by beige scrubland, relentlessly flat, with the towers of the airport and the city silhouetted against the far skyline. Everything was quiet except for the occasional dirt-bike traffic. Most every family in Texas Arizona seemed to keep a few chickens, and all of them had sizable gardens, coaxing who-knows-what out of the sandy hard-pack soil. In the ditches along the road, a chorus of frogs cried like space babies—a weird, high-pitched vibrato. But I found no crumbling derricks and no tumbleweed ranches of forgotten American oil barons. It was just a flat, hardscrabble little housing project with none too many people around, and in all likelihood I was its first-ever tourist.
So I tried striking up conversations with the handful of pedestrians, bricklayers, and porch-sitters I ran into, apologizing for approaching them out of the blue and asking whether anyone knew the history of the community’s name. The soldier, as it happened, was wrong about the refrescas. One house had a shed fixed up into a tiny bodega out back, and as I bought a cold beer there, I quizzed the twelve-year-old girl behind the counter. Elsewhere, a couple of teenage boys looked up from a disassembled dirt bike to stare at me, and I walked over and asked them, too. I was met with everything from blank stares to thoughtfully furrowed brows to observations that Grandpa might know, if only he were still around. But no one had any idea. A few folks seemed surprised to learn that “Texas” and “Arizona” were geographical entities outside of their little corner of Bolivia. In truth, nobody seemed to feel much like talking.
By the late afternoon, I was tired and a bit frustrated. It occurred to me that what I was doing in Texas Arizona wasn’t so different from what I was doing all along the Thompson Trail—just grasping around for links with history. I feel a bit compelled to travel this way, always sniffing around for the cultural-literary-historical significance of this or that. It would be easy to chalk this up to a simple excess of liberal-arts education, but there’s more to it than that. In a sense, I feel like this is the only avenue of exploration left to me. Sure, I had consciously set out to follow in Thompson’s footsteps, but the truth is, we are all following in someone’s footsteps now. There is no more terra incognita, if there ever was any to start, one person’s incognita being another person’s backyard. There are no trails left untrod. In only the most isolated of circumstances will a human being on this planet ever again stumble into a corner of the world that hasn’t been thoroughly mapped, explored, photographed, and otherwise documented—if not probed for oil and covered up with a housing project.
This may seem demoralizing at first, but the silver lining is a gradual unveiling of whole new dimensions of travel, unknown and unknowable to yesteryear’s swashbucklers. History is a space through which we can travel now just as easily as through longitude, latitude, and altitude. Thanks to the steady accumulation and diffusion of human knowledge, the enticing blankness of terra incognita has been replaced with bottomless layers of story and meaning and causality that, know it or not, we are forever drifting through, like scuba divers among the eddies. And if I can’t tease out the links and the logic among these layers, I sometimes feel like I’m failing as a traveler.
Another mile up the road from Texas Arizona was a slightly larger community called Satélite Norte, with shops and services and buses into the city. I walked there to rest and regroup. The strip in Satélite Norte was actually a surprisingly happening place. Moto-taxis zoomed up and down the paved main road, and several blocks were filled with folks drinking beer in open-fronted bars with blaring videokaraoke machines. The bars were lined up side by side, five in a row, all blasting terrible adult-contemporary tunes at top volume. It was the philosophy of setting up next to your co
mpetitor taken to its full, nonsensical zenith, as each karaoke bar battled valiantly to be heard over its neighbor. The result was an unlistenable cacophony of synthesizers and power chords.
I picked a karaoke bar at random. It was my kind of place—no kitchen, no pool table, no bar. Just six tables, forty glasses on a wall-mounted rack, one video karaoke machine, and a giant cooler full of beer. I ordered a bottle and tried to figure out just what the hell I was doing there. I’d found Bolivia’s Texas easily enough, but I still had no idea what it meant. And wasn’t that the point of all this? To find some meaning in the experience of these places? Thompson seemed to think so anyway.
“I came to South America to find out what it meant,” he wrote in 1963, toward the end of his trip, “and I comfort myself in knowing that at least my failure has been on a grand scale.”
I looked out toward the dirt road back to Texas Arizona, then at a man who was herding three goats past the video bars of Satélite Norte. My failure was playing out on a rather provincial scale, I thought. I drained my first beer and ordered a second. The bartender was wearing a faded Green Bay Packers T-shirt, and even though that’s my favorite football team, I kept quiet. You only have to see two or three grown men wearing Twilight tees before you realize not to read too much into fashion in South America. The shirt didn’t mean that the bartender was a fan of American football. It didn’t mean anything. He set a fresh beer in front of me and opened the bottle wordlessly.
Back in Wisconsin, on the wall of my favorite college bar, there was a large framed poster of a Mr. Natural comic book from 1971. The white-bearded character drawn by cartoonist R. Crumb is probably best known for his thumbs-up, keep-on-truckin’ pose, but this particular panel finds Mr. Natural cruising down the sidewalk on a scooter. As he scoots along, a bystander shouts, “Mr. Natural! What does it all mean??” To which Mr. Natural, not pausing from his ride, replies, “Don’t mean sheeit.… ”
I must have drunk a thousand beers in front of that poster. Maybe, I thought, Mr. Natural was right. Maybe Thompson gave up on finding meaning down here around the same time he started embracing the fundamental absurdities of life in South America. In another letter, from December of 1962, Thompson wrote glumly that he had already found out “what I came down here to find out, and there is nothing else left for me to do but document it. Dostoyevsky was right.” What did he mean by that? What had Thompson found that validated the troubled Russian existentialist, himself famously obsessed with meaning and absurdity? Dostoyevsky’s heroes tend to embrace suffering and neglect their own best interests. Is that what Thompson saw happening around him in South America? In Bolivia’s mines, for example?
I thought about it as a hundred decibels of Hall & Oates went head to head against a hundred decibels of Toto next door. Above all, Dostoyevsky’s characters are rarely motivated by reason. So maybe I was wrong to expect a rational explanation for Texas Arizona, Bolivia. Maybe it just didn’t mean sheeit.
All the same, I walked back to Texas Arizona when I’d finished my beers. From the girl at the shed bodega, I bought three more warm cans. It was getting late, and I’d have to get back to Santa Cruz before the buses stopped, but with the sun going down and people settling into their leisure hour, I hoped that maybe I could find and lubricate an old-timer, some strolling graybeard who’d loosen up with a can of suds. But the streets were still eerily quiet. I walked twenty minutes before I saw a man in the road a short distance ahead. He was helping a woman and two small children onto the back of a moto-taxi that barely looked big enough for two. She straddled the driver and held a child on each thigh. Somehow the bike sputtered away without tipping, and the man stood in the street, waving good-bye.
I caught up with him and begged his pardon before introducing myself. He wore a polo shirt and a baseball cap and was probably somewhere in his fifties. Juan Carlos was his name, he said, and he considered my question thoughtfully as I followed him back toward Satélite Norte.
“This place has been called Texas Arizona since before there were people here,” he said, “since even before they built the houses.”
“And when was that?” I asked.
“Maybe fifty years ago.”
Now we were getting somewhere. That was about the same time that the Gulf Oil Company was hitting its stride in Bolivia. Did he think that the area might have been named by the oil companies? Might there have been oil camps here? Juan Carlos just shrugged. He had never heard such a thing. We walked quietly for a while, and I reached into my backpack to offer him a beer.
“No, thank you,” said Juan Carlos politely. “I don’t drink.”
It was getting dark, and the weird frogs in the ditches were trilling even louder than before.
“I guess I’m a little disappointed,” I said. “I really thought that someone around here could tell me the significance of this name.”
“You wanted to hear a story,” Juan Carlos said, shaking his head, “but this is difficult, because sometimes the people come, and then later, they forget all the stories.”
The wall of sound from the karaoke bars echoed a good half mile from Satélite Norte. On a side street, Juan Carlos spotted some friends walking a different direction, and he wished me well before joining them. I took a quick look back at Texas Arizona, then opened a beer and walked to the bus stop alone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hope for the Mato Grosso
There are no brochures on the Mato Grosso … which is one of the reasons land there is selling for $4 an acre. I have no idea what it’s like except that it’s godforsaken and full of jaguars.
—Personal correspondence, February 28, 1962
I
A traveler who has booked passage aboard what is widely known as the “Death Train” is entitled to certain expectations. Among these is the prospect that, yes, at some point during the trip, one’s life will be imperiled. Gazing out the window at the flat, grassy lowlands of eastern Bolivia, it’s difficult to imagine how this might occur. Needless to say, the region lacks the sheer cliffs and gaping chasms of the Andes. There is, in fact, next to nothing off which you could tragically plunge. The Death Train’s route follows the comparatively dry outermost edge of the Amazon basin, so the few adjacent rivers run at a trickle, wholly incapable of submerging a railcar full of frantically clawing passengers. Meanwhile, the gradual clearing of eastern Bolivia’s forests and savannas for farming and ranching has put pressure on the local jaguar population, so a passenger stretching his legs during a stopover is less likely to be mauled by a big cat than mooed at by a Holstein.
In short, I am sorry to report that a 420-mile trip aboard Bolivia’s tren de la muerte is actually a rather comfortable and pleasant affair. There’s no clear consensus on how the train acquired this nickname, reliably invoked by travel guidebooks, tourism and hospitality types, and the ticketing agents at the Santa Cruz train station. The owner of my hotel told me that hundreds of workers died while constructing the line across Bolivia’s eastern backcountry in the 1940s and ’50s. At the time, this was a landscape so perilous and remote that a British travel writer of the day nicknamed it “the green hell.” A number of guidebooks and websites disagree with this, however, claiming that the name stems from the train’s violent shuddering and tendency to jump its tracks. Still another theory holds that the route was used to transport bodies in the wake of a well-documented 1946 yellow fever outbreak. I’m personally sympathetic to the notion that the sobriquet stems from the deadly tedium. From Santa Cruz to the Brazilian border, it’s a sixteen-hour trip (only mildly shaky) across a rather monotonous landscape of ranches and gentle green waves. The few stops along the route are at rural stations that range from concrete bunkers to sheet-metal gazebos. The most exotic wildlife I saw during the ride consisted of a few large sows nosing around in the brush. To liven things up, the railroad showed the 1979 Christian propaganda flick Jesus, alternately known for being one of the most widely watched and one of the dullest films of all time.
At the Brazilian border, the thrill ride that is the Death Train reached its anticlimactic end. Beyond that point, the line carries only cargo. Fifty years ago, however, passenger service kept going clear across Brazil, and Thompson took the same train from Santa Cruz all the way to São Paulo in 1962, arriving there in mid-September. Ironically, the train would have breezed rather quickly through the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, which more than any other region had fascinated Thompson since before he left for South America. Not that I think Thompson would have minded the rush. After four months on the continent, he was desperate to reach Rio de Janeiro, where there was an election to cover, but which, moreover, he’d built up in his mind as a sort of antidote to the Andes: warm, civilized, relaxed, and gringo-friendly.
But months before, Brazil’s wild interior had captured Thompson’s imagination. Back in the States, he had written long letters to friends, bemoaning his poverty and his inability to sell The Rum Diary and fantasizing about escaping to “the unplumbed jungle of the Mato Grosso.” As a burgeoning gun nut, he dreamed of hunting wild game there and even schemed about buying land, which he had heard was going for a song.
“It is a rumor, you know,” he wrote excitedly to a friend, “like GOLD! or WHISKEY! In this case, it’s CHEAP LAND!”
Thompson’s pre-travel letters show a somewhat starry-eyed fascination with South America’s wild and primal landscape—a far cry from the largely urban reporting on culture and policy that mostly became his focus. All throughout his correspondence, Thompson confessed a romantic longing for the “wild country.” Later on, after arriving in Rio, he regretted allowing his election coverage to curtail his time in the bush. He wrote to a fellow hunter back in California, wistfully mentioning a tall and foxlike predator called the maned wolf, native to Brazil’s western grasslands. “I recently swung through Maned Wolf territory,” he wrote, “… [but] I missed the animals. I am so fucking involved in politics, etc. that I don’t have much time for the oddball stuff that is really the most important.”
