Road Fever (43 page)

We passed a rolled-over truck on a straight stretch of road. There were four or five vehicles stopped nearby, and several people stood over a man who lay in the grass, as if dead.

Traffic was murder, and had been for days. Ever since the Mountain of Death.

W
E SLEPT
in Veracruz, and were up and out of the city before dawn. We passed through Tampico, and then crossed the Tropic of Cancer.

“We’re coming up in the world,” Garry said. It looked that way on the map.

“We should,” I said, “have a coffee party.”

Since one of us was usually trying to drive while the other slept, we seldom drank coffee together. When we did, it was a celebratory occasion.

And now a coffee party seemed particularly appropriate. We had just crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and in a few hours we’d enter the United States. Matamoros, then Brownsville, Texas. The thought of interstate highways ahead made us giddy. Cruise control! Mindless hours of monotony. Paradise.

“You know those tires we got in Chile,” Garry said.

“We didn’t need them. We just put them in the back and gave them a ride.”

“They’re Korean tires,” Garry said. “I wonder what they thought?”

During coffee parties, various objects in and on the truck often developed their own personalities.

“They were probably terrified,” Garry said. “Get thrown in the back with a couple of old tires that are all beat to hell, punctures all over.”

Garry spoke for the voiceless tires: “ ‘Don’t put us on! Don’t leave us in Colombia! Take us to the United States!’ ”

“And our jackets,” I said. “Coats that we wore down south, rolling
around in the mud, tightening shocks, changing tires. They’re all soaked with diesel. Roll ’em up and throw ’em in the back with the old beat-up tires and the quivering Koreans.”

“I wonder what they say to one another back there?”

We cogitated on this matter for some time, presenting various conjectures as to the nature of the conversation between our tires and our jackets.

We were only twenty miles from the United States.

W
E DROVE OVER
a toll bridge on the Rio Grande, checked in with U.S. customs and immigration, got our logbooks stamped, and were back on the road in ten minutes. Garry pulled in at the first convenience store in the U.S. that happened to be on our side of the street. There were two pay phones in front of the place. Garry called Jane. He spoke to Lucy and listened to Natalie gurgle. I called my friend Karen and told her that I was at a convenience store in the United States, not far from an interstate highway. This did not seem as remarkable to her as it did to me.

“Karen,” I said.

“Yes?”

I heard my voice rise in excitement. “They have shampoo here!”

A flashy red Camaro driven by a teenaged boy pulled up near the phone. He had his sound system turned up near the level of physical pain.

“This is a place,” I screamed, “where you can use the phone and buy shampoo.
In one stop
.”

There was a private home next door. An elderly gentleman was sitting on his lawn in a wooden chair watching a small black-and-white TV that was set up on a card table with a blue cloth over it. A long extension cord snaked its way back to the house. The man had a pad on his lap and was taking notes.

“I’m surrounded,” I shouted, “by Americans!”

W
E DROVE NORTH
on Highway 77, a double highway, two lanes going in each direction, and there was a large grassy strip of land between the lanes. Everything was very clearly marked with big green signs. There were no chickens, burros, or oxcarts on the road. Everyone had lights that worked.

Outside of a town called Raymondville, we were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. The officers chatted with us for all of thirty seconds, then waved the truck through.

“What kind of checkpoint was that?” Garry said.

We were consumed by an entirely feigned anger and shouted at each other fiercely.

“
They call that a checkpoint?
”

“Wimp!” Garry screamed. “Wimp checkpoint. We should have said, ‘Okay, we give up. Take us to the pit. Where’s your pit?’ You need a pit that doubles as a garbage dump.”

“Do we have to teach them how to run a checkpoint? What you do-first you turn off all the lights and then you take people around the corner in the dark.”

“To the pit.”

“That’s full of garbage …”

“And you have to put a gun to someone’s neck.”

We drove for several more hours admiring the flawless monotony of the road. There was an old Aretha Franklin song on the radio and we cranked it up. Somebody named Dick Barkly told us that the song had been brought to us, in part, by Big A Auto Parts. It was, Barkly continued, a solid-gold Saturday night.

Which meant we were going to get into Dallas about a day ahead of schedule.

W
E SLEPT
in Kingsville, drove to Corpus Christi on time for a Central American-type red-ball sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico, then stopped in San Antonio to have a celluar phone installed, all of which put us in Dallas at three on Sunday afternoon. The press conference was scheduled for Monday, at nine o’clock in the morning.

Garry handled the waiting well. It was his job: the PR payback. We met with some representatives of the public-relations firm who wanted to talk about the trip thus far. The PR people cautioned us not to make the transit of Nicaragua sound “too easy.” On the other hand, Chistita Caldera from Intourismo in Managua wanted us to make the country sound like a lot of fun for dentists. This, I thought, might require some tap dancing.

I washed our clothes while Garry watched the mechanics put a new auxiliary fuel tank in the truck. The Sierra also got new shocks, four new tires, an oil change, and a new fuel filter. The back of the truck was cleaned and organized.

I had some time to fill in a pocket calendar with our driving days. If we left tomorrow at noon, hit it full-tilt roto, all the way to Prudhoe Bay, we could be there in under twenty-five days, easy.

“Why not,” I suggested, “do it in under twenty-four?”

“Let’s do it,” Garry said.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, we were standing in the front of the dealership at nine, ready to lift the veil of secrecy that had shrouded our project from the very beginning. From here on north, there was no significant threat of banditry or terrorist activity. Now it could be told.

The media, however, wasn’t much interested in what was under the
veil. It was not the kind of slow news day that generates our kind of story. The stock market had opened badly. We were trying to talk about places with names like Ushuaia during the Black Monday stock-market crash.

Big money is a big story in the United States. So is ongoing human drama, and there was a potential tragedy in progress just a bit south of us, in Texas. It seemed that a little girl had fallen into a well. She was trapped there. The rescue efforts were being televised nationally, even as we spoke. Every reporter in Texas was there. Which is why so few of them were in Dallas to see us lift the veil of secrecy.

W
E LEFT AT NOON
, twenty-one hours after hitting Dallas. Before that, one of the supervising mechanics in the service department of the dealership asked if he might speak with us. The man said he was a born-again Christian and would offer us a blessing. He prayed that we would have a safe journey. We thanked him for his concern.

“Who was that guy?” I asked Garry. “Did you meet him last night?”

“No.”

“Nice guy, though.”

“Yeah,” Garry said, “Mr. Godwrench.”

T
HE SIGN
was a blue shield with a little crown of red: 35. We took the interstate north into a big, flat, straw-colored grassland that was patched red with shrubs in their autumn colors. We had had our spring in Buenos Aires and now we would get to appreciate fall until dark. When the sun came up, it would be winter.

I
N
1910, there was no auto road across America. There were a series of dusty tracks heading west, but they all ended somewhere in Nebraska. After that, the road was a wandering progression of ruts across the prairies. Adventurers attempting to drive beyond Nebraska encountered fences and locked gates.

By 1923, a coast-to-coast highway, Route 30, had been built. According to Phil Patton, in his book
Open Road
, there were road signs on Route 30, but they were not uniform, and interpreting them was a matter of intuition: did the skull and crossbones mean dangerous intersection, and was it necessary to stop at the painted picture of a raised palm?

The sudden popularity of the installment plan in the 1920s put America on wheels. By 1925, over half the families in the country owned a car. The roads weren’t very good, the road signs were sometimes
enigmatic, and first-time carowners did not always drive with grace and precision.

Measured in terms of deaths per million miles driven, the 1920s was the deadliest decade in the history of American driving. The road was a festival of blood.

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.

I
N
S
OUTH AND
C
ENTRAL
A
MERICA
, 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.”

A
LL 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.