Road fever : a high-speed travelogue Read online

  Garry and I examined Lucy Panzer for a moment. I put my little finger into one of the bullet holes, and then started to tell him about my latest travel adventure but thought better of it. They don't actually shoot at you on Northworst.

  THE BUSINESS OF ADVENTURE DRIVING

  [OUR DIRTY LITTLE SECRET]

  July 1987 • Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

  S

  o i got my finger out of the bullet hole in the Suburban and followed Garry into his house. He was going to come clean, to show me the documents that outlined, in what I hoped was obscene detail, the fine points of our dirty little secret.

  The floors were hardwood, newly sanded and waxed. There was a fireplace set into a new stone wall, and all of the rooms had been painted very recently. A door from the kitchen led to the darkened basement, a good place for dirty secrets. We walked through a long, dark, concrete-floored hallway flanked by a furnace and water heater. Heating ducts snaked about overhead and there was a dim light at the end of the tunnel. Two lights, actually.

  The room to the right was "the bunker," a research room containing an IBM Selectric typewriter, a dictating and transcribing system, and a copying machine. The walls were lined with files—House Insurance, Sponsors in General, Correspondence (In and Out), and others with the names of several African countries: Uganda, Sudan, Botswana, Kenya. On one wall was a framed commendation from the mayor of Moraine, Ohio, presented to Garry and Ken, in honor of their Africa-to-the-Arctic run. The engine they used, a Detroit Diesel 6.2-liter job, had been built in Moraine, Ohio. Next to the commendation was a picture of the Suburban, caked with mud and scarred with bullet holes. It was the vehicular equivalent of the unshaven jungle tough guy.

  Next to the bunker was another room Garry called "the pit." It was decorated with a giant picture of the Volvo bursting through a big paper banner reading: "Start Odyssey 77," and prominently featuring

  the word "SHELL!" There was one desk, littered with papers, all held down by a globe and a telephone which was flanked by a number of paper-filled wire baskets. Two chairs, one defective. A single overhead light.

  The bunker and the pit: these were the offices of Odyssey International, Limited.

  Stuck to the globe, somewhere in the mid-Pacific, was a yellow Post-it note reading: "sunglasses, coffee holders, windshield clipboards, secret document place, moose whistles." Driving necessities. A moose whistle is a small upright plastic flutelike gadget mounted on the upper front fender of a motorized vehicle. A car traveling at speed generates enough wind through the flute to generate a high-pitched scream, inaudible to human ears. The sound is supposed to clear the road ahead of any lingering moose. In New Brunswick, the animals can weigh up to one ton. Enraged moose have been known to charge and overturn beer trucks.

  The uppermost sheet on a pile of papers a foot deep read: "Review tools, test jack, spare parts. Thermos, safety triangles, water ..."

  "Have you got that stuff I wanted to see?" I asked.

  Garry lifted the globe and there it was, a great stack of papers, several hundred pages thick. I liked Sowerby's touch: our dirty little secret lay under the weight of the world.

  Adventure costs money. Whether it's a surly stewardess or an African ambush, the point is to put your equanimity or your life on the line using other people's money. It is an insight that occurs very soon after one discovers that he or she has drifted helplessly into a life of travel and/or adventure. My friend Rick Ridgeway, the first American to climb the world's second-highest mountain without oxygen, said that the essential OPM insight occurred to him with particular force during the successful American ascent of Everest in 1976. "I was up at the magic twenty-four-thousand-foot level, feeling very good, strong," he said. "There was someone filming what I was doing, and suddenly I realized that this guy was having every bit of the adventure that I was. The only difference in our situations was that someone was paying him for it." Ridgeway has since written several well-regarded books, a screenplay about mountaineering, and has designed his own line of backpacking gear.

  There are dozens of opportunities and scams in the adventure business. Just lately, large corporations have begun paying adventurers big money to motivate employees by describing various against-all-odds

  escapades. These talks are thought to be a source of cost-effective inspiration.

  Colleges pay for lectures. Money from foreign governments is often available to would-be travelers, and likely targets of opportunity include various ministries of tourism or national parks administrations worldwide. Companies that manufacture beer or cigarettes sometimes sponsor expeditions. There is a growing market for professionally produced videos shot in exotic locations.

  Alternately, a writer, photographer, or video artist approaches an airline, generally a foreign carrier—for instance, Garuda, out of Indonesia—and offers to document the beauties of, say, Java. Garuda assumes that the project—a photo essay, film, or article—will appear in the United States and inspire tourists to fly to Java on Garuda.

  There is a obvious problem here. The essence of travel is discovery, and if you are going to Java for the first time, you have no idea whether it's your kind of place. Java could be a hellhole—I've been there, it isn't—and, having been financed by Garuda, you are obligated to expound on the island's beauty.

  Consequently, I finance my own travels so that I don't feel obligated to write glowing accounts of destinations that I may find dismal or dull or desperate. This policy makes me feel upright, even sanctimonious, so I should hasten to add that picking the source of your OPM is also good business for someone who wants to stay in the low-rent travel biz. Write too many puff pieces out of the Sheraton and editors begin to doubt your commitment to the truth.

  My travel money comes from magazine assignments or advances on books. Any extended stay usually requires that I piggyback assignments. An airline magazine doesn't usually pay well, but tickets are considered part of an article fee. Since I spend a lot of time at my destination walking around with a pack on my back and eating gummy freeze-dried dinners, airline fees are often my largest single expense. With a ticket to some exotic location in hand, I can approach any number of magazines and propose a story. (Magazines, sad to say, are not nearly so free with expense money as most people think.) Pitching my stories—gorillas in Africa, lost cities in Peru, river running in India, drunken diving for poison sea snakes in the Philippines—is important, of course, but editors can sell almost any project to their financial officers if it looks like a bargain. An author also needs a fairly respectable track record in such endeavors. Virtually no one will issue expenses to an unpublished writer.

  "All I need," I tell an editor, "is in-country expenses." Sometimes,

  I'll pile another article on top of that, consulting with editors at three magazines to be sure that the stories I want to do don't conflict. A three-story piggyback, in my experience, is good for a couple of months' worth of hard traveling.

  I do not take junkets provided for travel writers. A junket is a tour group and that is all. People on junkets never get to go anywhere interesting. They stay in four-star hotels and end up in the bar talking to the other travel writers about previous junkets.

  Given my profession, such as it is, I am constantly reading between the lines of the most recent adventure or travel book: how did the author finance this saga? Do we have an airline ticket scam here, a generous book advance, an articles piggyback, a cigarette company advertising expedition? Some journeys are clearly self-financed and they often result in the best books. A tight budget is the mother of adventure. It generates tense situations, confrontations with unsavory characters, hysterical desperation, and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.

  Self-financed travel books are generally written by previously unpublished writers driven by an immense love of the subject matter and a deep desire to prove that every editor who turned down the initial proposal is an idiot. Sometimes, reading a particularly good travel-writing debut, I can hear the
sound of disembodied and distant applause as editors all over New York slap their foreheads in chagrin. But editors are not complete idiots, and if the book is good enough, or if it simply made money, the author can expect an advance on the next project.

  I know of no author of a successful self-financed adventure-travel book who put his or her money on the line for the second effort. You don't get rich writing these books—most of us don't—because they are generated out of some timeless human desire that has little to do with remuneration. But, hey, why not get someone else to pay us to do what we'd be doing anyway? In the past half-dozen years, my travel expenses have exceeded my income, sometimes by a factor of two or three. That's the business of the adventure-travel business. It's not a bad life.

  Happily, travel and adventure has recently become a hot publishing item. The best writers travel to provocative destinations to explore the interior as well as the exterior landscape. Writers freely discuss their fear or fret over subtle racist attitudes that they didn't know they possessed. Some of them admit to cowardice, or extraordinary moral lapses. You read of writers, alone in the forest, masturbating in homesick loneliness.

  But no one ever writes about the money. It is, as D. H. Lawrence said about sex, our dirty little secret.

  And yet the quest for financing is often a story in itself. Like travel itself, there are setbacks, victories, and plenty of moral lapses to be considered.

  When Garry Sowerby and I began planning our Pan-American run, I asked him to take notes on the fund-raising process, to read his thoughts into a tape recorder. The transcripts of those tapes were the documents under the globe.

  Here's our dirty little secret, just under $350,000 worth of it:

  In May of 1985, John Rock, the manager of the truck-bus group at General Motors—the man who had been principally behind sponsoring the Africa-Arctic Challenge—asked Garry if he would be interested in setting a new record on the Pan-American Highway as a way of promoting the all-new designed-from-the-wheels-up Sierra (It's not just a truck anymore).

  Interesting, I thought. Finding sponsors for the first project, the around-the-world run, had taken three years. Sponsors for the bullet-ridden Africa-to-Arctic run had fallen into line in less than a year. By 1985, sponsors were coming to Sowerby.

  The new truck was scheduled to be introduced in 1988, which meant, in Detroit terms, late 1987. Documents in Garry's files seemed to suggest that John Rock was completely behind Garry, but that other executives, somewhat down the chain of command, saw the professional adventure driver as a particularly adroit con man. However, there seemed to be no doubt that GMC would love to prove that their pickup could handle anything the real world could throw at it. They wanted an advertising hook, press coverage, something to exhibit in auto shows ("It conquered the Americas," or some such), and even a book. But, some suspicious execs wondered, why not do the project in-house?

  Sowerby asked GMC to consider what their internal costs would be. It was always cheaper to contract someone than to do it in-house: a corporate fact of life. Furthermore, he had a proven record of success in similar projects. Who else did they know who held two world records? There were other advantages: ventures billed as Odyssey events rather than GMC undertakings would come across more as a legitimate adventure than a corporate advertising scheme. Garry asked his critics in Detroit to consider the ramifications of failure, especially—a worst-case scenario—equipment failure. How could your easy-guy buyer see

  himself as an upscale cowpunk in a truck that had crapped out in Peru? In public.

  There were other advantages: in face-to-face meetings, executives could see that Sowerby was articulate, a storyteller. Tall and fit, with a pleasantly self-effacing sense of humor and the requisite adventurer's beard, he was also a man who saw clearly the main chance, and could name reporters all over the world whom he counted as friends. People reported on Garry Sowerby because he was Garry Sowerby, completely aside from his association with GMC. Every person who had ever interviewed him was on a list, and Garry sent off a newsletter on his activities so that reporters knew when he was likely to be in their area for a personal interview. They only had to review the last few letters and make a phone call to churn out a quick feature in a pinch. Garry was a great interview, full of good stories: ambushes and pirates.

  "And what I'm selling is good news," Garry told prospective sponsors. He generally wore what he called his automatic-man suit, an expensive pinstriped affair, and he could sell the logistics of the event like a general briefing his troops. Sowerby had hated the military when he was in it, but the experience had taught him to set goals and achieve them. His wife thought he was a workaholic.

  Even so, he could appear completely relaxed: sit with his feet up, shoot the crap, join the boys for a drink and regale them with stories. "Ultimately," Garry would tell the executives, "the trip is about international cooperation. About products that work. About a dream and how that dream became a reality."

  Sowerby thought of himself as a dream merchant: the shabby basement office of Odyssey International was "the dream factory."

  Better yet, Sowerby wasn't asking GMC to foot the entire bill. Garry himself would bring on additional sponsors. In all of his projects, the major sponsor—in this case GMC—provides the vehicle and service requirements and enough money for Garry to pay himself a modest wage and run Odyssey's operations. Sowerby argued that budgeting the project involved many variables, including logistical arrangements such as flying or shipping the truck to South America, communications costs, and research trips to the various countries. It was impossible to honestly estimate how much the drive would cost. GMC, however, would not be liable for any of Sowerby's financial shortcomings.

  The actual expedition costs would be raised through associate sponsors. Garry did not approach potential associate sponsors—tire companies, oil companies—until he had secured a contract with the major

  backer. According to Garry's records, it looked as if he made or lost money on the associate sponsors.

  So Garry would put it all together as he always had. There was one major problem: Ken Langley wasn't interested. The young lawyer had had the adventure of a lifetime on the around-the-world trip. He'd had the adventure of a lifetime in Africa. It seemed to him that all he'd had was adventure, and no lifetime. It was time to settle into his law practice. "It was very emotional," Garry said. "I knew exactly how he felt. Still, it was like we'd been married, and this was a separation. It was hard. But I understood what he wanted to do and why he wanted to do it."

  Five months after talking with Rock about the Pan-American run, I met Garry in Alaska on the ALCAN 5000, and we hit it off immediately. We both worked out of home offices, lived out of the mainstream in country-and-western sorts of towns, and traveled for a living. I spent a lot of time patching deals together, financing those travels, and I sure wasn't rich. In fact, Garry and I both spent the same amount, about $50,000, for our respective houses, well less than half of what the average new house costs in the United States. We had both gotten good deals because, in both places, at about the same time, the local railroad had abandoned the town. Garry listened to country-and-western music and classic rock as I did. He didn't complain about the Bach and Vivaldi tapes I popped into the cassette on waking. We were both a little over six feet tall, we both had beards, and more to the point, we both liked to tell stories. Garry's tales of corrupt Turkish border guards gave way to my descriptions of what it's like to be interrogated by the Peruvian Investigative Police.

  Better yet, I spoke some Spanish. Garry had only a smattering. And I could write a book about our Pan-American run, sell it to a publisher, and Garry could use that contract to attract the associate sponsors he needed to realize a profit on the venture.

  We shook hands on our collaboration at the end of the ALCAN 5000. That was the only contract we ever had.

  By December of 1986, Garry had put together a proposal out of his basement office: a press kit that emphasized his experie
nce, the backing of GMC, and the public-relations benefits that would accrue to potential sponsors. According to Garry's notes, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Goodrich had declined sponsorship. He made a note to hold off sending out another fifty proposals until the first of the year. The proposals

  were glossy, professional, and they cost twelve dollars apiece. Six hundred dollars.

  Which meant, in essence, that Lucy would get a lump of coal in her stocking for Christmas, and Jane, pregnant with their second child, would get a tender hug. On the other hand, why send out the proposal so that it arrived three or four days before Christmas when it was likely to get buried? Why not get it to the various offices first thing into the new year, when the executives were fresh, more likely to look favorably on a new venture.

  And that decision generated a trip to the bank, which was not in Moncton but two hundred miles away in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the bank Garry dealt with on his other projects. Garry had met Jane there in the late seventies. For Maritimers, Halifax had been something of what San Francisco was to American young people a decade earlier.

  The long drive to Halifax was a good time for reflection. Garry spoke into a tape recorder he'd brought along for the purpose. "There's Amherst, Nova Scotia, where I used to go as a kid. My dad installed windows in storefronts there and he used to take me and my twin brother, Larry, with him when we were kids. It's the first town in Nova Scotia, Amherst, and you come over a rise, it's just sitting out there, like a fried egg on a marsh. I saw my first blacks there. We didn't have any in Moncton, and they seemed terribly exotic and exciting."

  Years later Garry would find himself traveling through places where everyone was black and few had ever seen a white man. Children wanted to touch him, and he let them examine him as if he were an animal on the sales block. He understood the impulse.