Road fever : a high-speed travelogue Read online

  We discussed Marilyn Monroe and various other subjects that fired the reporters' imaginations: who was canned at what four-wheel magazine, who was getting divorced, which auto company put on the most lavish launches and provided the most drinks. They didn't talk much about the new Sierra, easy guys, or the fact that these trucks were not just trucks anymore. A GMC executive I was chatting with couldn't stand it anymore. The company had put up a fortune and here these guys were, standing around like ordinary people, men and women who had not just driven the new GMC Sierra.

  "What's the matter with these guys?" the man asked me.

  I understood, suddenly, that this was a very nervous time and that these executives were rather like actors waiting for opening-night reviews. They were, most of them, big hardy men. and there was an odor of ego and anxiety in the air. It wasn't just business or money as I saw-it. These guys genuinely identified with the new GMC Sierra, which wasn't just a truck anymore. When I told one executive that I wasn't particularly in love with the dashboard layout, a look of hurt bewilderment crossed his face, and this was followed by a quick flush of anger. I might have said, "Gee, you sure got some butt-ugly kids."

  "Most of the reporters I talked to really like the truck." I said. "You just don't go around gushing about anything if you've been in the business for a while. It's bad form. Makes you look like a patsy. Your colleagues think you're a jerk."

  "I thought you were a driver."

  "On this trip."

  "You talk like a journalist."

  "That too."

  I was in my room at the Bally, watching closed-circuit TV psycho-dramas that showed GMC dealers how to sell trucks to easy guys. Garry called just as an actor portraying a GMC dealer said. "Dodge makes a

  fine product, all right, but maybe you'd like to see a few of the features we think make this vehicle an outstanding . . ."

  Garry said, "They're nervous about you. They wonder if you'll say bad things about the truck."

  I knew I wasn't going to like this conversation. "We have an agreement," I said.

  "I know."

  The arrangement was simple enough. I would not endorse or participate in advertising the truck. I would accept no money from any sponsor, and Garry would pay my expenses. Because the rules called for a codriver, he'd figured those expenses into his original proposal to GMC. If the truck fell apart on the record run, I was free to write about it.

  "They're thinking about the two-point-eight billion they put into the project."

  "Look, Garry, if they want a book that's an advertisement for the truck, maybe they should send some ad guy with you."

  "I'm just telling you what they told me. As far as I'm concerned you're my codriver. But it's their money."

  "Because there's no way I'm making them any promises."

  "I'll talk to them, try to calm them down."

  "Tell 'em it's smart business. Advertising costs money and no one believes it. The truth is free."

  "We might have a problem is all I'm saying. I'll tell you what they think tomorrow."

  At nine the next morning, the final day of the launch, GMC put on a two-and-a-half-hour show about the 2.8-billion-dollar vehicle. Four women in tight golden pants danced erotically around a couple of gleaming trucks. Three video screens above the stage kept flashing the word "HOT" at us in feverish stroboscopic bursts. Several executives spoke, one after another, and then there was a grand finale with explosions and sparky fireworks—"it's hot hot hot"—and the women in gold draped themselves lasciviously over protruding bumpers and sang about how it wasn't just a truck anymore so that any nincompoop could tell what it was—every easy guy has one—and green laser beams swept over our heads, preternaturally bright in the lingering smoke from the fireworks, and Garry leaned over and said, "They want you to tell the truth."

  THE ENP OF THE ROAD

  April 1987 • Ushuaia, Argentina

  T

  ■ H

  hese are the last five road signs in the world: conserve su derecha, followed closely by a yellow diamond-shaped warning featuring an arrow snaking upward; a few miles later there are two more closely spaced yellow warning diamonds, both with the same schematic drawing of rocks dropping off a cliff onto a rather boxy-looking car; the last road sign in the world is posted on the last bridge in the world and it reads, 20 t maximo peso. After that, there are no more road signs. You might imagine that beyond the last road sign there would be a warning or legend such as ancient mapmakers placed on unexplored portions of the globe: "Here there be dragons." But no, the last messages civilization imparts to drivers seeking the end of the world are: keep to your right, watch the curves, don't let rocks fall on your car, and, finally, twenty tons is about all the last bridge in the world can handle.

  A month before GMC launched the new Sierra in Las Vegas, Garry Sowerby had visited London and hammered out the rules for the trip with Alan Russell, the editor of the Guinness Book of World Records. "The clock starts when you start and ends when you get there." That was it. Simple.

  Garry and Alan Russell were eating in an Italian restaurant on Southampton Row. They were on their coffee when Russell said, "It might interest you to know that we have two parties attempting the record." One, a Frenchman, Prince Pierre D'Arenberg, would start from Prudhoe in February. Another fellow, a Canadian, had started in early November. Russell gave Garry a hastily scribbled note. Jerzy Adamuszek was driving a Cadillac, alone. "Which is one reason people should contact us," Russell said. "We would, on this trip, require a codriver. A driver attempting to set a record could easily push himself

  past the danger point. Complete exhaustion can have bloody consequences. I don't want to be responsible for accidents to anyone, the would-be record setter or someone standing alongside the road. For this reason, for safety's sake, we require a codriver."

  Garry looked at the note from Adamuszek and didn't give the guy much of a chance anyway. A lot of people attempt this particular trip. Some are stymied by mechanical problems, or fear, or exhaustion, or a simple failure of will. A fellow who had neglected to inquire about rules at the outset, Garry guessed, was most likely to be crushed under the weight of some peculiarly baroque border-crossing formality.

  The prince, however, could be a problem. You can never tell about French princes. They're always breaking records on wind surfers or skiing down entirely vertical mountains. A prince is likely to get better treatment at the border. The prince could be trouble.

  "What about the Darien Gap?" Garry asked.

  After some consideration, Russell made a decision. "You have to drive to the northern end of the road in Colombia, then to a port and ship your vehicle. Once in Panama, you have to drive to the southern end of the road there."

  "Can we airfreight over the gap?"

  "No," Russell said, "I don't think so. If the road is ever completed, and somebody makes that drive, including the gap, you'd have done eighty miles of your trip by air. This doesn't seem fair. Boats, however, are slow. Shipping is the only fair way to do it."

  "Let's say we set the record."

  "Yes."

  "Then the road is completed, someone else comes along, they drive the gap but they don't beat our time. Do they get the record?"

  "It's a judgment call."

  "I keep hearing," Garry said, "about groups that have driven the whole way, gap and all. Some guys with a whole corps of engineers to build bridges across the river in the gap. Stuff like that."

  "Those groups have never contacted us."

  "What if someone does it all, including the roadless area of the gap, but they take, say, a year more than we did. Does that count?"

  "It's a judgment call," Alan Russell said.

  Several people, Russell said, had claimed the record, but he had not seen fit to recognize any of them for a number of reasons. Some claimants to the Pan-American record had failed to provide any very convincing documentation. One person had started his trip from Anchorage, Alaska, and Russell was adamant: distance and spe
ed rec-

  ords had to be set from geographic point to geographic point, and in this case from one end of the Americas to the other; from the Beaufort Sea to the Beagle Channel; or vice versa. "Otherwise," Russell explained, "you'd have people claiming a record drive from, say, London to Shropshire, or Columbus, Ohio, to Detroit. You'd have someone claiming the world record for a drive from his house to his girlfriend's apartment. Where does that stop?"

  The geographic points for the purposes of the Pan-American record, however, were those that could be reached by road. Prudhoe Bay, for instance, isn't as far north as Barrow, Alaska. On the other hand, there was no road to Barrow. It seemed ludicrous to airfreight a vehicle over the roadless tundra. The road ends where the road ends. Provided it ends at a geographic point. Like the Beaufort Sea at Prudhoe.

  "I've been doing some research," Garry said. "I think the end of the road in the south extends a bit beyond Ushuaia, the last town."

  "Are you going to scout the area before you start?"

  "Of course."

  "Send me a report. I'll give you a ruling."

  And so, in April of 1987, Garry and I flew to the town at the end of the earth. Ushuaia, Argentina, at the extreme tip of South America, on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, is considered to be the southernmost town in the world. Founded a little over one hundred years ago, the town has a population of about 23,000 permanent residents. They are descendants of English missionaries who stayed on as farmers, of Yugoslavian and Romanian miners, of sailors from Spain and Italy, of Chileans who came looking for work, of a few Germans, and of the minuscule sad remnants of the native Indian population. The people are miners, fishermen, farmers, sheep ranchers, builders, construction engineers, cannery workers, and shopkeepers. A large number are involved in tourist services, an industry that seemed, in April of 1987, to be booming.

  In the lower-latitude competition, Ushuaia is the clear winner. Port Elizabeth in South Africa is 33 degrees 58 minutes south; Hobart in Tasmania is 42 degrees 54 minutes south; Invercargill on New Zealand is 46 degrees 26 minutes south; and Ushuaia is 54 degrees 48 minutes south.

  More than likely, many tourists are drawn to Ushuaia precisely because it is the town at the end of the earth. The settlement is a scant 760 miles from Antarctica, specifically from the Antarctic peninsula, a section of the icy continent that stretches up well above the Antarctic Circle. Even so, the weather in Ushuaia is surprisingly constant and

  mild. The record winter low is 10 Fahrenheit degrees above zero. The record high is just above 80 in the summer, with an average summer day coming in at 51 degrees. The town of graceful frame houses is set on a hillside overlooking the Beagle Channel to the south. A spectacular range of mountains, the Cerro Martial, rises behind the town, to the north. Those tourists who come to see the end of the earth often return because Ushuaia is beautiful, serene, and temperate. The Argentine government has recently upped the ante on tourism as well: Ushuaia is now a duty-free port and there are a number of elegant shops selling expensive goods at a discount. A visitor can now buy Calvin Klein jeans and shirts with alligators on them at the end of the earth, an idea with all the charm and grace of a mugging.

  Chile claims to have the most southern city on earth, Punta Arenas, at 53 degrees 9 minutes south, and there are Chileans who will claim that the settlement of Puerto Williams, on Isla Navarino, a mile or so across the Beagle Channel from Ushuaia, is the southernmost town in the world. But Puerto Williams is a Chilean navy base. Even the tourist hotel on the island is owned by the navy.

  And there are Argentines who contend that military installations don't constitute an actual permanent and entirely voluntary population. In Ushuaia, there is a government tourist agency, Turismo, where a spritely young Argentine woman named Veronica Iglesias argued that her town had to be considered the last in the world. It got down to splitting hairs, really, Veronica felt. There were scientists and workers who overwintered in Antarctica, after all. Were they a true "permanent settlement"? Did any of them own their own houses there? Or expect to live out their lives there? Be buried there? And how about Puerto Williams? Wasn't it really a military base? Not really a civilian settlement where men and women lived as a matter of choice?

  Garry and I told Veronica we were looking for the end of the road, and she was equally adamant. There was a road, after all, on Isla Navarino, but it "wasn't a national road." I gathered that Veronica meant the road existed on the island and for the island. It was not part of a larger national and international system. Veronica believed that the road we wanted was even now being built east and south of Ushuaia. It branched offof Argentina Route 3, was part of the national system. It was called Route J, though when it was first being built about twenty-five years ago, the governor of the territory felt it was such a poor excuse for a road that he called it "Ruta Cero," Route Zero, and the name has stuck.

  The next day I ran into an American, Mark Eichenberger, who understood the search for the end of the road. He had driven down from the States over the winter of 1977-78. He too had felt compelled to go to the end of the road, which at that time was at Lapataia, a bit west and a few miles south of Ushuaia. Mark had stayed on in Ushuaia: for three-and-a-half years he worked for the American National Science Foundation as deputy director of ITT Antarctic Services, and was relief captain of a research ship, Hero.

  Mark, clearly, knew his way around the southern tip of South America, and, as an American, he wasn't blinded by national pride in regard to assessing precisely where the road ends. Mark pointed out that Tierra del Fuego was an island, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan. The true end of the continent was Cape Fro-ward, a hundred miles north, in Chile.

  Still, Tierra del Fuego looked like the end of the road on the map, it felt like the end of the road, and there was emotional resonance to the idea. A regular and frequent ferry service, for instance, across the Strait of Magellan (it runs twelve hours a day), connects the island to the mainland, and Mark felt that such a ferry was a de facto bridge. "Looking for the end of the road," he said, "is an exercise in banging your head against the wall." He mentioned a road he knew of on King George Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula. The road runs from the Chilean air force base there to the Uruguayan base to the Chinese Great Wall Station. It is two-and-a-half-miles long. Did you include these little bits and pieces of roads?

  No, Mark thought Route Zero had to be the end of the road, the last place you could reasonably drive to if you left Des Moines and turned south.

  I stopped back in at the tourist agency and asked Veronica if there was a regular and frequent ferry service from Ushuaia to Puerto Williams. Yes, she said, there was a ferry that runs on Sundays only, but "he is broken." Veronica spoke English with the most delightful accent. In any case, the broken boat wasn't a car ferry. Veronica did mention that Garry and I would pass Harberton Ranch on the way to the end of Route Zero and if I was interested in car ferries, I might talk to the manager who, she said solemnly, "has a boat that carries ships."

  The more I thought about that special boat, the more intrigued I was. A boat that carries ships? Wasn't that like a car that carries trucks? And why would you put a ship on a boat anyway? Why couldn't you just pull the ship along behind the boat?

  There were three places in Ushuaia that rented cars. Two didn't answer their phones. At the third place, I got their last available vehicle: the last car at the last rental station in the last place on earth.

  Satchel Paige, the great and ageless major-league pitcher, once described the secret of his longevity thus: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you." I couldn't look back because the last car on earth—a cruel, clattering, two-cylinder beater—didn't have much in the way of a defogging fan or heater. Occasionally, there was a strangled huff from the one vent under the driver's side of the windshield. "Uhhhh," the fan said, and, sometime later, I'd smell, rather than feel, a feeble fetid sigh from the vent. Each breath promised to be the last. It was lik
e waiting for someone to die of halitosis.

  April, in the Southern Hemisphere, is genuinely cruel, the beginning of winter, and we were driving through a steady-falling rain that wanted to be snow. The first snow of winter would be brilliant and joyous, but the temperature was recalcitrant, and it continued to hover inconveniently. Consequently, the rain was sullen and angry, gray, desolate, and moody.

  "Nice day," Garry said. He was sitting in the passenger seat with his knees bunched up around his chest, and I could see his breath as he spoke.

  There was a fog bank in the backseat that obscured the back window, and, because there were no side mirrors on the last car on earth, I couldn't tell if anything was gaining on me. I wiped the windshield with the sleeve of my jacket.

  The road was earthen, puddled, and potholed. To the left, mountains rose four thousand feet and more above the Beagle Channel. They were capped with snow, and icy skeins of white ran down the couloirs. There were streams, swollen in the steady rain, that ran alongside the road. Deciduous trees along the creek bottoms were deep into their fall colors of crimson and gold, so that the evergreens among them stood out in bold relief. There was an occasional small lake. The landscape was reminiscent of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State except for the New England intensity of the foliage. In all, this strip of land along the Beagle Channel was a strange mix of those things that are beautiful across the entire northern part of the United States.

  At a place called Rancho Hambre, I turned off Route 3 onto Route J. In Argentina, an estancia is what Americans would call a ranch, and a rancho is a shack. It seemed appropriate to hit Route Zero at a place called Hungry Shack.

  Along the river bottoms, the grass was golden, but, rising up over a hill, we found ourselves in a strange and spectral forest of leafless trees and hanging moss. Farther on, there were areas of pasture where great flights of geese and ducks were massing for the migration north. Cattle, fat as any in Iowa, grazed among the ducks. Sheep wandered along the road and scattered as the car passed them. They were so robust and heavily wooled that they ran in a comical bow-legged fashion.