Road Fever (24 page)

We were a team, and each of us had different talents. My job, I thought, was not hot, fast driving. I was there to talk our way past police and customs officials and to take up the slack when Garry was tired. We knew we would go through terrific mood swings: euphoria and depression generated out of fatigue and tension. So: though I couldn’t drive as well as Garry, I could contribute by providing the needed emotional balance. I could tell jokes, laugh, and ride my own emotional roller coaster entirely behind my eyes. Let Garry be the hero: I would be the comical sidekick. It was the way to win.

Garry was driving the road about ten miles an hour faster than I would have. The rule about speed was simple: if you think you’re driving too fast, you are. The idea was to drive just under the limit of one’s abilities. It was safer, and less tiring. You could put in more hours behind the wheel that way.

The corollary of the speed rule was: if your partner thinks you’re driving too fast, you are. Garry hadn’t said anything about my driving on the long, empty, paved roads of Patagonia where I averaged seventy-five. Maybe I was starting to get it.

I felt as if I had worked out my sensitivity problem and a wave of confidence washed over me: we were going to make Alaska in less than twenty-five days. And, at the end, Garry would say, “Tim, man, I never saw anyone improve as fast as you.” Something like that. I fell asleep composing a number of accolades Garry would feel compelled to fling my way at Prudhoe Bay.

A
BOUT FOUR-THIRTY
, Garry woke me and said he was beginning to fade. That was the last rule: if you think you’re tired, you are.

I made myself some instant coffee, drank it, made another cup, drank it, and told Garry I was ready. It had rained during Garry’s stint at the wheel, but now, as we rose out of the desert up into the dry steppes that led to the Andes, the weather had cleared, and brilliant stars trembled in the southern sky.

Garry’s instruction on the suckerboard said that I was heading for a town called Esquel, then El Bolsón, then Bariloche in the Andes. The road he had driven had been paved but it took a sharp corner now and again. There were a few fairly awesome
baches
.

I took the wheel. Garry crawled into the back and fell asleep immediately, without a word. Two hours later I found myself in the town of Esquel. A long road, lined with poplar trees, led to a dead end and not to El Bolsón at all. This seemed to be the major road, but there was nowhere to go, which meant that I had just gotten us lost.

I stopped, compared the map to the compass, and decided I must have missed a turn somewhere out of town. A bus with a sign on the front reading
PATAGONIA
was parked by a station, and several well-dressed people were sitting on benches under the poplars outside of a closed café. The driver of the bus said that, yes, I had missed the turn. It was about fifteen miles out of town, back the way I had come.

When I got back into the truck, Garry was awake.

“Wrong turn?”

I had hoped that I could get us back on the right road while Garry slept. “About fifteen miles back,” I said.

Garry stayed awake until we hit the crossroad. He wanted me to go back down toward the desert for a mile, then come up on the crossroad again, very slowly. It was incredibly dark—darker than any road I had ever driven in the United States—and, at the crossroad, the major highway curved around off to the south. There were no signs.

Garry saw what I’d done immediately. The larger, better road went into Esquel. That made sense. It was the largest city for one hundred miles in any direction. The road to El Bolsón looked like a side road.

“How many crossroads did you see in the last hundred miles?” Garry asked.

“This was the first one,” I said.

“We can’t just blow by an unmarked intersection,” Garry said. “All right. Slow down here. Just creep by.”

There it was, nailed to one of the poplars. The road sign was a weathered board the size of a carton of cigarettes. It said
ESQUEL
, with an arrow pointing left, and
EL BOLSÓN
, with an arrow pointing right. “Which,” Garry said mildly, “is why we want to slow down and think every time we hit a crossroad.”

“We lost half an hour,” I said. I heard an internal warning siren, and a large mental neon light blinked on and off:
MOOD SWING … MOOD SWING … MOOD SWING
. I felt like a dope. Garry, I realized now, would never tell me what a terrific driver I was. I cut corners too sharply in the mountains and now I had gotten us lost. “I’m sorry,” I said. Intellectually, I realized that this half-hour error wasn’t critical, and that I was shooting fast down the first big drop on my emotional roller coaster. It was time to play gutsball but I was a soiled pile of soggy tissue.

“It happens,” Garry said brightly. He had caught the tone in my voice and was going to stay awake until he could jolly me out of my sudden funk. I thought: first I get lost and now Garry has to do my job. There was nothing in the world I could do right.

“Last night,” Garry said, “in the rain, I guessed on a road at an unmarked crossing. It took fifty miles of staring at the compass and the map before I was sure I made the right decision. That was an hour’s worth of navi nightmare.”

Navigational nightmare was draining and could cost time. In each of his record runs, Garry had suffered some degree of full-blown navi nightmare—that is, he had gotten lost for a time—and he wanted me to know that this little misadventure wasn’t serious.

“You’re doing fine,” he said. I began to feel better and Garry, sensitive to the moment, dropped off the edge into unconsciousness.

The road turned to gravel and at about six that morning, in the ghostly light of false dawn, I saw the Andes to the west, straight ahead, rising up out of an enormous valley. We were crossing a high plateau, looking down into the valley, and the world seemed to open up all around in the silvery light.

The mountains were capped with snow and dominated the western horizon. They seemed to glow, as from within, and the snow had the odd color of white things seen under a black light. This light felt vaguely lunar.

As the sun began to rise, the distant snow took on the colors of the eastern sky, and there was a long period in which the entire world blushed, pale pink. The valley was set in the rainshadow of the mountains, but it was fertile, alive with rushing rivers. The sage was green, and the rivers I saw below took on the pale watermelon color of mountains and sky.

It was mid-spring in the valley, and there were trees that looked like aspens and some that looked like cottonwoods along the creeks. There were simple ranch houses in the valley with sleek horses running in the fields. I felt at home in the valley—it could have been Montana—and thought that this was the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. My eyes began to tear and there was a vaguely pleasant choking sensation in my throat.

Mood swing …

In the full light of day, the road turned to dirt and followed the meandering course of a river running gray with snowmelt. Just before El Bolsón, we hit pavement. I was careful about the crossing roads, and was doing seventy when I felt the truck wobble through a turn. It didn’t feel right at all and I woke Garry. I thought one of the shocks that had taken such a pounding in Tierra del Fuego had failed.

We stopped and it turned out that one of the rear tires was very low on air. The sides of the tire were blistered and it was virtually useless. We had one spare left.

“About forty miles back I hit a board in the road,” I told Garry. “It might have had a nail in it.”

Garry was silent, sulking, hardly awake, and in contrast to his tolerance in Esquel, he seemed to be in a very dark frame of mind. I had just come through a sunrise that brought tears to my eyes and couldn’t help it: I felt good. Garry didn’t talk as I changed the tire. He
spent the time working under the hood, muttering something about the fuel filter.

“What?” I asked him.

And in a voice that conveyed monumental despair, he said: “We’ve got one spare tire, the cap is disintegrating, and I think we got some bad diesel in Patagonia. The fuel filter is beginning to clog up. I just changed it.” These were major disasters, his tone suggested, comparable to learning that a loved one has been given a month to live. He poured some of the Stanadyne diesel mixture into the tank while I fixed him a cup of coffee.

“Didn’t you notice that the truck was handling differently?” he asked.

“It just started to feel a little slushy around the corners about fifteen miles back. I thought it was one of the shocks.”

“Anything changes,” Garry said curtly, “anything at all, you stop. You pay attention to every little noise, every ping. And when you’re driving at night, you don’t go zipping by a sign near your turnoff.”

“I’ll be more careful,” I said, not at all sensitive and full of humble virtue.

Garry took the wheel and began driving in a fierce, monomaniacal manner. The truck had not started at the first turn of the key. “Goddamn Patagonian diesel,” Garry muttered. “Clog up our filter and now we have to go over the Andes …”

“There’s this pirate,” Garry Sowerby’s comical sidekick said. “He’s sitting in a bar, he’s got a wooden leg, and this guy with a pig under his arm comes up …”

G
LACIERS ROLLED OUT
of the Andes two and a half million years ago. They advanced on the desert to the east, pushing rock and dirt ahead of them. These eastern moraines formed levees as the glaciers retreated, and the levees held the meltwater. To the west, water was trapped up against the forested slopes of the Andes themselves.

The Lake District of Argentina and Chile is dazzling. There are still glaciers on the high peaks, seven thousand square miles of ice up there, glittering in the sun above blue lakes and fjords surrounded by forests and granite cliffs.

Both Argentina and Chile see this area as a prime tourist destination for summer hiking and winter skiing. On the Argentine side, a new road from the east is being built to the resort town of Bariloche.

I was driving that road, cursing through continuous curves. That,
in fact, is what a yellow diamond-shaped warning sign read:
CONTINUOUS CURVES AHEAD
. The road was one lane wide, gravel, and it wormed its way along the side of the mountain so that first Garry was looking into a two-thousand-foot drop and then I was. The slopes I was driving were sparsely forested and free of snow, but a thousand feet above, glaciers groaned in the sun.

The continuous curves were closely spaced, and the road was so steep that I had to take it in first and second gear. Garry, who had been sleeping off his last stint at the wheel, was up, watching me drive.

“You got it,” he said, apparently comfortable with the way I was driving. He had liked the story about the pirate and the pig.

In certain places, the single-lane road made 90- and 180-degree loops, so that it was impossible to see ahead. Trucks, coming the other way, plunging down the Andes fully loaded, couldn’t stop, so that it was sometimes necessary for me to stop and back up, quick, with a big Mercedes semi looming over us, its brakes moaning in protest. Garry helped me find wider spots in the road. We’d back the truck up toward the side of the mountain and let the semi roll by, its far wheels sending little showers of gravel into the drop-offs below. Sometimes the drivers would flash us a V-for-victory sign.

The route over the Andes was, in fact, a major artery, and there were trucks coming at us every five minutes or so. The semis hit their air horns at every turn, and this made enough sense that I began hitting our big air horn on each blind curve. It was an annoying, nerve-racking drive through some of the grandest scenery on the face of the earth. Garry calculated, after taking a half-hour average, that I was shifting every fifteen seconds.

Shift, count ten, honk, count five, shift: it was tedious and dangerous both at the same time. Argentine road crews were working the wider spots with dozens of Cats and backhoes. They looked efficient and experienced.

In one of these areas, we were stopped by a flagman, then allowed to proceed. The crew was digging its way into the mountain side, widening the lane, and there were rocks and boulders scattered willy-nilly across the right-of-way. I was driving a five-mile-an-hour slalom course through them but lost my concentration for a minute and hit a volleyball-sized rock with the right front wheel.

“Jesus,” Garry growled, suddenly angry.

I was about to snap back, to say that nobody could drive this stretch of road without hitting a rock (Garry could), and anyway, what damage could I do to a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive vehicle by climbing over a
small rock at five miles an hour (break an axle, knock the front end out of alignment)?

“Sorry,” I said, too tense to be anyone’s sidekick, comical or not.

The road past the construction took a sudden vertical jump and the truck handled it with power and grace.

“I think that fuel stuff is working,” I said.

“It’s working,” Garry said. And then: “Hey, I didn’t mean to bark at you back there. This is tough and you’re doing good.”

Shift, honk, shift. In three bad hours we made forty-five miles. At the paved road just outside Bariloche, I felt that I could honorably let Garry take the wheel.

“I think I’m tired,” I said.

I had been driving for eight hours and we were thirty-one hours into the trip.

B
ARILOCHE IS A PRETTY RESORT TOWN
on the southern shore of the 210-square-mile Lake Nahuel Huapí, which is the largest body of water in the Lake District, and the most spectacular. The area was declared a national park in 1934.

It was a calm day, not much wind, and the glaciered peaks surrounding the lake were reflected in its surface: white on blue.

Bariloche is set in the humped glacial rubble below a mountain called Cerro Otto. There were outdoor cafés along the cobblestone streets, and wood-frame chalets perched on low ridges above the town. It felt more like Switzerland than South America.

We stopped to fill a thermos with good strong Argentine coffee, then headed! west to the crest of the Andes and Chile.