Road Fever (10 page)

“She’s in Halifax for a checkup. Lucy’s with her. While she’s been gone, I’ve managed to get the floors done anyway. Verathane.”

Garry was sitting home, alone in the basement pit, talking into his tape recorder. “The house smells a bit. I don’t know: last summer we
talked about getting pregnant and we both wanted to do it. But this spring is madness. Jane having babies in the middle of all these recces. We’ve both got to be strong. Can’t stop the baby. Imagine being born between Dad’s two recces to South America.

“Let’s see: under that I’ve got my corporate year-end report.

“Under that is a list of lists: stuff for the house, media contacts, GMC contacts, associate sponsors …

“What else?

“A bill for the copy machine.

“A note to myself to work up a contract for Canadian Tire. They’ve come on as a sponsor. Motomaster tires. I love that name. Motomaster. I figured I’d just copy the legalese off the Firestone contract for Africa to Arctic. Save some legal fees on that.

“Under that note is a list of things for Cars and Concepts, the company that will be putting the camper shell on the truck. We need driving lights, a tach, plug outlets for tape recorders, and stuff.” Sowerby did not believe in modification, “after-market” changes to the basic truck. The vehicle had been tested, but modifications were always someone’s best guess. Besides, driving a stock vehicle right off the assembly line somehow seemed more honest. Part of the dream. Buy one of these vehicles and there is no road in all the Americas that you can’t drive. “The only thing we’ll do to the basic vehicle,” Garry noted, “is beef up the shocks. I want to see if we can get Delco involved in that. Also I’d like to upgrade the sound system.”

Under the Delco notes, Sowerby found some of Lucy’s artwork and he began telling a story about it. “She comes down here to play at night sometimes when I’m waiting for calls. The other day she was coloring. She’s got her tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth. So she gives me this flower she colored, and I put it through the copier. My plan was to put the original on the refrigerator, keep the copy for my office. The copy comes out of the machine and I thought Lucy would be thrilled. And she started to cry. She thought the machine had sucked all the color out of her picture.”

It wasn’t difficult to begin reading a mood into the transcript. It was late at night, Sowerby was alone in his house, thinking about his wife and child, but there was something else bothering him.

“I don’t know if I can talk about this now, but I met with Kenny last night. And it was sad. I knew he wanted to get on with his life, but I didn’t know how he felt. He looked at me … like he wanted this. It was like a divorce. We had been separated, and now we were getting a
divorce. Yesterday we signed the papers. He gave me a little over two thirds of his shares, and I think it was fair.

“But it was Kenny, man. We had a dream together and we made it work. He was there. He was always there. You think about those times. Getting shot at: we went through that together. You could depend on Kenny. Just stupid things: the first drive, we’re in India, the steering wheel is on the wrong side, just like Kenya, and Kenny is leaning out his window telling me when I can pass. I trust him, he trusts me, and our lives were at stake on his judgment and my driving. We trust each other with our lives.

“Or—you know how you get silly after a long time, laugh at stuff that isn’t really very funny?—In India Kenny and I notice that Indian men stand on the street with their hands over their privates. And we spent a long time trying to figure out why. Were they advertising? Or was it a defensive thing? Was it a way of constantly telling themselves, yep, I’m a man all right. And we talked about this for hours, different anthropological and psychological theories. And we couldn’t figure it out. Now, I’m not proud of this, really. I know it’s wrong. I know these guys standing on the corner grew up in a different culture and it’s not for me to judge. We’re just silly, Kenny and I. Goofy. And he leans out the window as we’re going around the corner, he screams, ‘Get your hand off your dick!’

“And the guy waved at us. With the other hand.

“I suppose it’s not funny in the telling, but we had tears in our eyes from laughing. Couldn’t stop.

“And once we were in a plane on our way from Pakistan to Athens with the Volvo. Cargo plane. We were over the coast of Iran. It was the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war and there were oil refineries burning below. Kenny said he was having some trouble. We were badly fatigued and he couldn’t sleep. He said, ‘It’s like a hallucination.’ He was seeing something he didn’t want to see, like something that was going to happen in the very near future. And finally he told me that he had a very clear vision of himself popping the emergency exit and jumping. ‘I have to be restrained,’ Kenny said. So I told the captain and we looked around and found some rope, and that’s the way Kenny went to Athens, tied to the fuselage.”

The transcript ended there, on that bittersweet note.

Few people who know Sowerby, I thought, understand how hard he works. I suspect Jane is right: Sowerby is a workaholic. He spends sixteen hours at a crack shuffling between the pit and the bunker, or
he’s on the road, traveling to Detroit or Toronto or Los Angeles to make deals. His parents shrug off his life-style: he’s thirty-seven years old, he keeps his family fed, and he’s not hurting anyone. They refer to him, affectionately, as the orangutan. Jane’s parents are supportive, though her father, a prominent physician, isn’t sure why Garry doesn’t simply go into some legitimate business. With his capacity for work, persuasive personality, organizational talent, and drive for success, he could be a very wealthy man in a very short time. Work in a real office with fluorescent lights.

After Kenny bowed on the Pan-American run, Garry made some notes about what keeps him in the adventure-driving business.

“I never set out to become an adventurer. The money we owed after the around-the-world trip forced us to do the Africa-Arctic trip, and by the time that was done I was hooked. I like taking a concept that involves travel and making it a personal, political, and technical challenge. The job involves conceptualizing, planning, financing, public relations, writing, and lots of wheeling and dealing. I like the fact that I can move through different elements of the job, which keeps the boredom factor at a low level.

“The glossy image is a nice bit of frosting on the cake. I think the reaction I get from people thrills me more than the fact that I am the guy that’s done it. And dealing with the unusual, sometimes in stressful situations, has forced me to be more capable, to manage things more responsibly. This carries over from my business to my family.”

We were in the pit from eight that morning until seven-thirty that night. Garry did a phone interview for CBC radio. He assembled another package to be sent south to Canadian embassies, to the auto clubs, GMC dealers, and other contacts in Latin America. “Let them know we’re coming in a couple of months,” Garry said.

The day before, Garry had registered the truck, which had been built in Canada’s new GM plant. It had New Brunswick plates that read:
B
4
NE
1. “That was Janet’s idea,” Garry said. Janet Shorten had been working for Sowerby as an aide-de-camp. Garry had wanted a personalized plate, “but I didn’t want it to be a word, like ‘further’ or something. I thought the plate ought to have numbers and letters. Prevents confusion at the borders that way.”

In the time that it took me to read over the transcripts, Sowerby also arranged for a kind of loan, a $75,000 letter of credit from GMC in Pontiac, Michigan, to cover the Carnet de Passage, a document required to take a vehicle across borders in South America. (Central
American countries do not operate on the carnet system.) “The carnet itself is one of the largest obstacles for a novice endurance driver,” Sowerby said. “When you tell people that in order to get a carnet you need to submit a letter of credit to your national automobile association for three hundred percent of the value of the vehicle, they think about it.”

Foreign automobiles are heavily taxed in most South American countries. The idea is to stimulate the local economy by forcing people to buy locally built or assembled cars. These nations do not like the idea of North Americans driving comparatively cheap cars to their countries and selling them at an outrageous profit to wealthy locals who consider such vehicles a bargain. The carnet is a small book, and each page is perforated into three sections. The first section is taken by a customs officer when a vehicle enters the country, the second section is taken when you leave. If you don’t have the vehicle when you want to leave—if it has been stolen, for instance, or demolished in an accident—you forfeit the entire letter of credit, say, 300 percent of the actual value of the vehicle.

“The carnet situation scares people,” Garry said. “They realize that they may need to back the letter of credit with their house. By the time you paint the picture of the truck being stolen in Colombia and the insurance only covering the vehicle and not the markup, they realize they would lose their house to cover the letter of credit. So the carnet is a problem. Tomorrow I’m going to see if I can have the truck insured at approximately the amount of the letter of credit.”

“I wonder how our pal in the Caddy handled the carnet,” I said.

“I suppose we’ll never know,” Garry replied. “I wrote him at the Montreal address he gave Veronica in Ushuaia. No answer. I asked a reporter friend there to look into it. Guy went to Jerzy’s place, no one there ever heard of him.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think he did it and we have to do this drive in under twenty-six days.”

When the local paper,
The Times-Transcript
, came out that night, there was a long feature story about our upcoming trip. Garry had managed to name every one of his sponsors: GMC truck, Canadian “Motomaster” Tire, Stanadyne Auto Products, Delco Suspension Systems, Detroit Diesel Allison, GM Canada, and something I’d never heard of called Farmer’s Milkshakes.

“Who’s Farmer’s Milkshakes?” I asked.

*   *   *

T
HAT NIGHT
, about eight o’clock, Garry and I walked down the beach at Cape Bimet, about a twenty-minute drive outside of Moncton. He had rented a beach-front cottage for a month. “Our vacation,” Jane said mildly as we walked in twelve hours after we left. Lucy, three and a half, was watching a video featuring Rainbow Bright, who was, apparently, a chubby white horse who could fly. Or maybe Rainbow Bright was a little girl who could ride the chubby white horse. I never figured it out.

Karen and Jane had had the kids all day, so Garry and I took them for a walk. Sowerby gently picked up Natalie, who was three months old, born between Garry’s first and second reconnaissance trips to South America. Lucy came out of her bedroom wearing a T-shirt and nothing else.

“Put your swimming suit on,” Jane said. Lucy stared up at the assembled adults with the contemptuous disdain of the true sophisticate. “I like to air my bum,” she said.

It only took a moment before Lucy was decently dressed and we were walking down the brown sandy beach. The waters there were shallow, surprisingly warm, and it would be another two hours until dark. The Canadian sun was dithering about above the western horizon on this long summer day, and every little cloud it touched burst into flame so that our shadows fell red-orange on the sand. Lucy was looking for shells, which she pronounced “fells.” When I squatted down to examine one of her prizes, she said I looked almost exactly like the Magic Bunny. This creature, I learned, was Lucy’s imaginary friend who unaccountably lived in Key West, Florida. Lucy showed me how to hop like the Magic Bunny. I was to squat with my hands balled into fists and placed precisely between my feet. The Magic Bunny hops as high and far as he can and lands back in the proper position, with his balled fists between his feet.

“Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy screamed, and I hopped down the beach followed by my red shadow and Lucy’s hysterical laughter.

“Farmer’s Milkshakes,” Garry said, “is a Canadian dairy. They make these shakes that come in little square boxes, Tetra Packs, and they have a nine-month shelf life. Don’t have to be refrigerated. Little seventy-five-cent milk shakes and they want to come on board for five thousand dollars.”

“How did that come about?”

“Do the Magic Bunny!” Lucy demanded.

I hopped down the beach in my magical way. Garry said that on a
flight out of Montreal, he had met a man who represented Farmer’s. They had talked a bit and the Farmer’s representative came to see the Pan-American run as a good way to promote his product. Farmer’s Milkshakes: from the Antarctic through the tropics to the Arctic: the quality never varies. “They’re going to give us about a thousand shakes to take with us,” Garry said. “Three hundred thirty-three vanillas, three hundred thirty-three chocolates, three hundred thirty-three strawberries.”

“What’s in line for tomorrow?” I asked.

“We’ve got three more people coming in.” Joe Skorupa was the outdoor and boating editor for
Popular Mechanics
. The magazine was planning a feature story on the Pan-Am run and Skorupa would ride with us for the Peru-to-Colombia leg of the trip, then meet us at the finish line. Jon Stevens was a Canadian photographer Garry had met in Barcelona, and he was coming to take some photos for Skorupa.

Graham Maddocks was a police officer from Vancouver, Canada. Garry had asked him to be our security consultant. Maddocks had some impressive credentials: he was a hostage negotiator, a member of the Emergency Response Team (SWAT) in Victoria, and had been a bodyguard to British royalty. It all sounded good, but I wondered if the guy knew South America.

“I met him in Peru,” Garry said. “I should tell you that story.”

“What I mean is, does he have any idea about what we’re likely to run into down there?”

“He thinks of things that never occurred to me,” Garry said.

“Like what?”

“Like: we’re driving through some little town on the Pan-Am Highway. You know how those places are, narrow cobblestone lanes, no curbs, houses that front the street, people all around. Okay, we’re at a stop sign. It’s hot. The windows are open. Somebody runs up, throws a pail of gasoline on us. Sticks his arm in the window, he’s holding a Bic lighter. Graham asked me: ‘What do you do?’ ”