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

by Brian Kevin

  “So what my contact took away from that,” Sean said, “is that if you get a Peace Corps member, then you too will get free chickens.”

  The woman was upset when Sean explained that, actually, it wasn’t this easy. Fine, she said, then we’ll just start one of these women’s cooperatives. That’s a great idea, Sean had told her, but it can’t just be for the purpose of getting free chickens. The women would have to meet for a few months to establish their long-term goals, and then eventually, they could start looking into opportunities and working on their grant-writing skills. None of this is what his contact wanted to hear.

  “So did you ever get the free chickens?” I asked.

  “Man, we didn’t even get the women’s group,” he said. Like most PC volunteers, Sean now lived alone.

  In general, Sean said, he had realized that folks around Oculto approached life with a fairly hand-to-mouth attitude. One of his main goals was to encourage some agroforestry in the many fallow fields and logged-over plots scattered around town. Planted today, valuable and useful hardwoods could have a big financial and utilitarian payoff twenty or thirty years down the road. But so far, he’d had little success getting the locals on board. Even when the farmers had plenty of unused land, he said, they just didn’t seem disposed to plan for the long term. Sure, they realized planting and growing trees required comparatively little work, but most preferred to focus on their sugarcane and their cotton crops, they told him. Maybe they’d get around to the trees eventually, but these were simply more immediate concerns.

  “And you know what?” Sean asked dryly. “So is drinking a lot of tereré, and so is sitting in the shade for a couple of hours when the heat gets bad in the afternoon. So the whole thing has been an uphill battle.”

  We passed a few groups walking toward the schoolhouse, and Sean stopped to chat in a mixture of Spanish and Guaraní. Que guapo! they said to one another, a weird piece of Paraguayan slang and a common greeting for someone you admire. In other Spanish-speaking countries, it would mean “How handsome!” but in Paraguay it implies “How hardworking!” Sean’s grasp of Guaraní was impressive (he knew zero when he first arrived), and judging from those few interactions, he seemed well liked around the village.

  As we doubled back toward the schoolhouse, I asked him his thoughts about the Peace Corps’ balance between service and cultural exchange. It was clear that he’d already given the topic some thought.

  “There’s a difference of opinion about that among Peace Corps volunteers,” he said, “but I’ve come to place more importance on the intangible stuff.” A lot of volunteers, he explained, drive themselves crazy trying to launch project after project. They worry that if they can’t point to something permanent at the end of two years, they’ll feel like they’ve failed. So they commit themselves to grandiose undertakings that aren’t always well planned out—that sometimes no one even wants—because they’re motivated by a fear of failure rather than a community’s needs and desires. As far as Sean was concerned, the relationships he’d made around Oculto were already their own best legacy. Everybody learned something, and at the very least nobody was harmed. So even in the worst-case scenario, he joked, it was all a net-zero, right?

  “I look at it this way,” Sean said. “If I sit around all day drinking tereré and talking to these guys about baseball, there’s still a value there. But it’s hard to show that to politicians back home who want to see results.”

  We stepped back onto the porch of the makeshift clinic. Oculto had been slow all morning, and there was nobody waiting in line. Inside, a little girl was throwing a full-on, five-alarm tantrum, and we looked in to see a haggard-looking Dr. Laurel trying to peek into her ear with an otoscope. Sean and I exchanged a sympathetic cringe. For the moment, anyway, I think both of us were pretty glad not to be doctors.

  George, Cessar, and Laurel drove back into Asunción at the end of the week, to drop me off and retrieve another doc who was flying in that weekend. Sean had a PC event to attend in the capital, so he came along for the ride. On the way into the city, it poured so hard that it made the first night’s storm seem like a produce mister at the supermarket. We tried to cover up our gear in the truck bed with a tarp, but by the time we reached Asunción, my backpack was a sopping-wet sponge. Cessar’s trusty Toyota dropped Sean and me off at a corner near the PC headquarters. I told George and the medics that they were doing important work. I thanked them sincerely for putting up with me and warned them to steer clear of Pombero.

  That night, I went to dinner with Sean and five other PC volunteers who were in town for the weekend. After seven days of sharing beers and eating nothing but oatmeal, chicken, and rice, I’d built up a great hunger and thirst. Needless to say, the PC crowd was equally voracious. After dinner, I splurged on a bottle of Malbec and quizzed the table about what kind of projects they were working on at their sites.

  In fairness, it was late, and these guys didn’t come to the city very often. Their towns and villages probably seemed a million miles away, and I imagine the last thing they wanted to talk about was their work. So each of them hemmed and hawed. They made a few self-deprecating jokes about not accomplishing much. One of them mentioned a beekeepers’ union she’d helped get off the ground, and another was organizing a market for local handicrafts. All were in their twenties except for one middle-aged volunteer, a Southerner in her fifties who was relatively fresh off her PC training. Maybe she sensed I was a bit disappointed with their answers.

  “I think if you asked many of us,” the Southerner explained, “there aren’t a whole lot of real specific service projects we’re involved in.” She took a slow sip from her water glass. Her drawl was Loretta-Lynn thick.

  “It’s more about planting seeds,” she continued. “It’s about an awareness of other cultures that changes people’s lives. You think of all of these people living in these far-off places. Well, we’re able to come in there, and now for the first time”—she spoke this last part with the singsong lilt of a big reveal—“they can say that they have a friend who’s from the US!”

  I nodded slowly and attempted a smile. In my head, however, I thought, What a cop-out. What a stupid, shitty cop-out.

  It had made sense to me when Sean explained it, but right then, it sounded worse than shallow. I felt flushed with disappointment and wine, even a little angry. What good is having a friend from the United States, I thought, if you’re still living with hyperthyroidism and no clean water? How useful are your new American pals when your bowels are raw with giardia and your road floods every time it rains and you have no decent land to grow anything on because the rich people in your country took everything and left you with nothing? How thrilled are you to have rubbed shoulders with an American, I wanted to ask, when your blue fucking kid is going to die of a broken heart because you’re too stubborn and poor and uneducated even to take advantage of free health care when it’s offered to you?

  What about all that? I felt like shouting. Are you planting some seeds to take care of all that?

  I wanted to ask these things, but I didn’t. I didn’t because it was late, and all of them were very nice, and I was suddenly very tired. So instead I just topped off our glasses with the dregs of the Malbec, and I raised my glass to them in a long, silent toast.

  CHAPTER NINE

  One for the Road

  Thus the haze of optimism that hung on the land early this year is slowly being burned away by the hot glare of reality.

  —National Observer, March 11, 1963

  I

  The only thing I did in Argentina was stop for dinner, and the only thing I ordered there was beer. The café was a roadside trucker joint in the big-sky province of Corrientes, the heart of a region so wide, flat, and fertile that the Argentines call it Mesopotamia. The waitress there didn’t care what currency I paid in—Argentinean, Paraguayan, Brazilian, Uruguayan. “Right now, you are everywhere and nowhere,” she told me.

  Thompson passed through Argentina briefly
in November of 1962, but he didn’t publish any stories about it, so I only zoomed through on a bus bound for Uruguay. As it happens, he didn’t write much about that country either, only a single and somewhat bland story about the country’s upcoming election, less interesting for its political insight than for the sharp distinctions it drew between the rest of South America and the safe, modern, socially advanced, and comparatively wealthy little nation of Uruguay.

  The Danish guy back in Asunción had spent some time in Uruguay’s coastal capital of Montevideo, and when I’d asked him what he thought of the place, he had furrowed his brow and declared, “Montevideo is nice, but it is like a meal without salt.” Now I could see what he meant. Montevideo reminded me of a pleasant, smallish European city, more like Milan or Brussels than Lima or La Paz. Its streets were clean, and the light traffic flowed briskly past joggers and dog-walkers. The requisite historic district was handsome enough, but the skyline consisted mostly of gleaming condos and office towers. To Thompson, who’d been growing increasingly preoccupied by the extent of South American poverty, what stood out about Montevideo was that it had “none of the vast, sprawling slums that disfigure other South American capitals, and its streets are almost free of beggars.” Fifty years later, the city does have its poor neighborhoods, but nothing on the level of its Andean counterparts. Thompson also called attention to the country’s social programs, which were, in 1962, “among the most advanced in the world.” Back then, Uruguay offered an eight-hour workday, a generous minimum wage, workman’s comp, and pension for retirees. More recently, it’s become the first country in South America to allow same-sex civil unions and the first in the world to issue laptops to every schoolkid.

  Nearby Buenos Aires tends to siphon off most of Montevideo’s more urbane young people and creative types, and the city didn’t strike me as particularly edgy or exciting. It was nice, though, in the Minnesota sense of the word—subdued, wholesome, nonthreatening. Nice was a welcome change of pace. Ever since Bolivia, the general dysfunction of life in South America had been getting me down. In my head, it was all starting to ball up and press down on me a little—the salt harvesters and the hopeless miners, the dying rivers, the day-tripping backpackers and the ineffectual Peace Corps workers, the street kids of Huaycán and the starving ones on the Mbyá reservation. I felt like I was on the cusp of a realization about what it was that most dramatically altered Thompson’s thinking down here, but a small voice was telling me that I wasn’t going to like it.

  I wanted to put it all out of my head for a few days, and Montevideo provided the opportunity. It’s a good city for biking, loitering on the beach, and hanging around in waterfront cafés, so I rented a fixie from my hostel, and for the next few days that’s all that I did. I followed a well-kept bike trail fifteen miles along the Atlantic coastline, heading east of the city on a long, lazy ride. It was late April in the Southern Hemisphere, too cold for swimming and sunning (Montevideo is about the same distance from the equator as Virginia Beach), so the dozen or so picturesque beaches I passed were empty except for the gulls. It’s important to stay hydrated while biking, so I stopped periodically for beer at a series of beachside patio cafés. The waitresses there draped heavy woolen blankets over my shoulders and gave me binoculars, the better to see the fortress-like trawlers pressing up against the horizon.

  I spent a few hours one day hanging out near the container port downtown, watching the cranes stack up shipping crates like giant LEGO blocks. I walked out to the end of the seawall and made small talk with the fishermen, perched stoically against the spray. They all used spinner reels and handsome carbon-fiber rods, and I thought back to Julio and the net-fishermen beneath the bridge in Barranquilla, then to the wading old men with their soda-bottle reels in Corumbá. I stared out at the ocean, standing at the very tip of the concrete barrier, so the rolling sea filled my entire vision. What had the Pacific looked like out the window of Reid’s high-rise back in Lima? Hadn’t it looked the same? What about the Caribbean rolling up on that lonely beach outside Bernie’s place in Guajira? Take the land out of the picture, I thought, and all of the world’s oceans look alike to me. They don’t change much over time, either. The churning spectacle in front of me would have looked just the same if Thompson had stopped to stare at it fifty years ago. Hell, it would have looked the same fifty million years ago, back when the Andes were just beginning to rise up out of the crust. The mountains project permanence, disguising a history of change. The flux of the ocean, meanwhile, just distracts us from its constancy.

  I mooned around Montevideo for a few days, thinking thoughts like these and whiling away the hours in parks and cafés. Then one morning it all suddenly felt very dull, and I grabbed an early bus for the sleek, modernist airport on the edge of town. I hopped the first available plane there for Rio de Janeiro, where fifty years earlier, the Hunter S. Thompson Trail had come to its abrupt end.

  II

  Rio is where Thompson penned the lines that had been bouncing around my head since before setting foot in Colombia. “I came to South America to find out what it meant,” he wrote in April of 1963, “and I comfort myself in knowing that at least my failure has been on a grand scale. After a year of roaming around down here, the main thing I’ve learned is that I now understand the United States and why it will never be what it could have been, or at least tried to be.”

  It’s a gloomy sentiment, but when Thompson arrived in Rio de Janeiro in September of 1962, he was actually feeling rather upbeat. One look at Rio and it’s easy to understand why. The city delivers instantly on its sexy reputation: toned bodies, hypnotic sambas, miles of perfect beaches. There’s a sensuality to the place that grabs you on your first seaside stroll. Part of it derives from the sticky heat and the seemingly constant pulse of music. Part of it stems from the fact that the beach is Rio’s living room. At all hours of the day, the city’s waterfront is packed with half-clothed residents (known as Cariocas, just like the spray foam that’s named for the Carnaval-loving city). They’re playing beach volleyball, beach bocce, and beach soccer. They’re tying up beach slack lines and holding impromptu beach footraces. You get the feeling these people would play beach Battleship if the sand didn’t clog up the little holes. It’s hard to reconcile a place like Rio with the fact that Brazil itself is an emerging superpower, seeing as how no one in the country’s former capital seems to put in a full day’s work. The banks are only open from ten to three, the bars never close, and every time you look around, half the city seems to be barefoot and intensely focused on a game of Frisbee.

  Thompson told his editor at the Observer that he planned to make Rio his home base for a while. “It is about time I lived like a human being for a change,” he wrote. Rio was cheap compared to the Andes. Thompson had friends and contacts in town, including Bob Bone, a journalist and photographer whom he’d met years before during a brief stint at a small-town newspaper in New York. He had supplementary work lined up at the Brazil Herald, Rio’s English-language daily paper, and within a couple of months, his girlfriend of three years, Sandy Conklin, flew down to shack up with him. Sandy arrived just days before Thompson’s trip to Paraguay and Uruguay. When he came back at the end of November, the two of them moved into a tiny and kitchenless apartment in the beachside neighborhood of Copacabana, the center of a soon-to-be-famous expatriate scene that was just then getting off the ground.

  “If you talked to people back then,” Bob Bone told me, “maybe they went to Europe, but they didn’t go to South America all that much.” I talked to Bone via Skype while sitting on a flea-ridden bunk bed in the cheapest hostel in Rio—also in Copacabana and, by sheer coincidence, within a few blocks of Thompson’s old apartment building. Bone was in Rio in 1962 running an English-language business magazine for the American Chamber of Commerce. He stayed there until 1963 as well, after which he went on to a long career as a travel writer and photographer. Now in his eighties, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is still an active contributo
r to a number of travel publications.

  Back then, Bone said, Rio de Janeiro didn’t yet have its worldwide reputation as a beach-blanket paradise. There were Americans and Europeans floating around, of course, many of them connected to the embassy and various English-language media, and yeah, the Copacabana Palace Hotel had been a storied celebrity hangout since the 1920s. But the idealized image of sunny, seductive, sophisticated Rio only cemented itself in the American imagination with the widespread export of bossa nova music a few years later. Bossa nova was the catalyst for the worldwide Rio “brand,” and even in Brazil the swinging, jazzy take on the samba was still a new phenomenon in 1962 (the phrase means “new trend” in Portuguese). The nightclub district on Copacabana Beach was the happening heart of the nascent bossa nova scene. In fact, a month before Thompson arrived, in a club just blocks from his soon-to-be apartment, an audience of hip students and artists heard the very first rendition of a song called “The Girl from Ipanema,” which would do more to define the sultry Brazilian mystique than all of the string bikinis and cocoa butter on the Atlantic coast.

  What’s more, Brazil in 1962 wasn’t yet the stable, affluent world power that it’s since become. Back then, the largest country in South America was in many ways a microcosm of the continent as a whole, characterized by sporadic violence, a roller-coaster economy, and a vast gulf between the powerful and the powerless. Thompson wrote five Observer articles about Brazil. Four of them covered the country’s unstable political situation, which was rapidly deteriorating as hyperinflation prompted a crisis of confidence in Brazil’s leftist, labor-aligned president, João Goulart—popularly known as “Jango.”