Road Fever (6 page)

This was par for the course: I wasn’t going to steam myself into any kind of tantrum.

An announcement was made about the captain and how he had instructed us to put our tray tables up and to return our seats to the full and upright position. As the flight attendant passed my seat I attempted to ask again if she had arranged for the cart. The woman was overworked—Northworst could have provided a couple more attendants on this flight—and the exertion of firing nuts at the passengers had dampened her hair so that moist ringlets framed her face. She appeared to be in her early forties, and wore a fatigued expression that said something about what I imagined were twenty years of professional glamour and fun at thirty thousand feet. With frequent stopovers in Minneapolis.

“Excuse me,” I said as she strode by my seat.

The woman treated me as she might treat a flasher on the street. No recognition: all these perverts want is attention. Don’t encourage them.

“Miss?”

But she was gone.

I reached up and punched the attendant call button. Nothing. Once more.

Bing, bing.

And the attendant was standing there, towering over me, glowering. “Yes,” in a tone that meant “now what?”

“Did you arrange for that cart?”

“Sir,” the woman sighed, “I said I would call and I did.” A dozen passengers within earshot now knew that I was the kind of guy, he’s got a friend on crutches, he’s gonna ask for help not once but twice. Twice! I felt my face flush with anger and consoled myself with
Furry Fury
.

So, of course, when we had collected Karen’s crutches and deplaned, there was no cart. We stood there, at the boarding gate, while the scheduled time for our connecting flight came and went. Karen could not walk more than fifty yards on her new feet. We were stymied. The other passengers were gone and the area was devoid of people. Presently, our crew deplaned, the pilots carrying their square flight bags, the attendants pulling suitcases on leashes behind them. When the woman with damp hair passed, I did no more than catch her eye.

She stared at me coldly and in her best homeroom teacher’s voice said, “Sir, I made the call. If the cart isn’t here, it’s not my fault.”

And off she went to have sex with animals.

A
LL RIGHT
, I’m sorry. That was a little tantrum right there and it was uncalled for. Time has passed. I’m better now. I can say nice things about the airline industry if I really want to.

For instance: the flight out of Montreal to Moncton, New Brunswick, left smack-bang on time, and the Canadian attendants seemed to enjoy their work. It was a pleasant flight and no surprise at all. Over the past six months, in preparation for the long drive, I’d flown to nearly a dozen countries in South and Central America. Not one of my flights originating from a Latin destination—not one—had ever been delayed. No bags were lost. The flight attendants had been professional and pleasant. Even American carriers were on time out of South America. Small Central American carriers—companies that might be called Firecracker Airlines—had been on time. Professional.

And now a Canadian flight was proving as pleasant and professional as a flight out of El Salvador.

I just want to know how it is that the United States of America suffers
the worst airline service in all of the Americas
.

No, wait. A pleasant upbeat attitude is said to prolong life. I’m going to take a deep breath here, count to ten, and try to see it from the industry’s point of view.

So:

Air travel, in the United States, is no longer the option of the privileged few—as it is in Third World countries—and what passengers experience is the result of a kind of economic egalitarianism. That’s the way to look at it. The airports are crowded because more and more people can afford to fly; which results in more scheduled flights; which results in delays; which results in crowded airports; which results in seatmates who know, and can recount with enthusiasm and startling endurance, the plot of the latest
Star Trek
movie.

Better conversation, I’d say, than the kind of things you hear from ticket agents.

When I’d gone to London to talk with Alan Russell, my flight out of Kennedy in New York had been delayed. Natch. “It’ll be about three hours,” the ticket agent said. A line formed and several people changed flights. After a half-hour wait, I had my audience with the man behind the counter.

“Can you tell me,” I asked, “how long we’ll have to wait?” I thought I could cab over to see a nearby friend.

“You mean exactly?”

“Sure.”

The man smiled one of those you-poor-fool smiles: the kind of merciless grin you might see on the face of a Marine drill instructor hectoring a naive recruit.

“Sir,” the ticket agent said, “we could leave in two hours. We could leave in five. There is no such thing as ‘exactly’ in the airline business.”

It’s the kind of attitude you expect from bureaucrats in failing countries all over the earth, and the nicest thing I can say about the airline corpocracy in the United States is that it is not precisely evil. Odd that mismanagement and inefficiency should breed such arrogance.

N
EW
B
RUNSWICK
, bounded by the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, lies on Canada’s eastern seaboard, just north and a bit east of Maine. It is one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces along with Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Prior to the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which ceded the region to Great Britain, the area was known as Acadia and was French. During the American revolutionary war, British Loyalists settled the Maritimes. The Acadians, a French-speaking minority, however, have preserved their identity and have increased in population. The sense of struggle that Acadians live with has toughened them, and Acadian men, especially the younger ones, are regarded as tough monkeys: “Hey, Bobby Choquette, he can scrap, eh?”

Many of the Acadians live on the Atlantic coast and are fishermen. You meet men of forty who recall the shame of going to school every day with a bag lunch that was the mark of their poverty. The rich kids had peanut butter and jelly. Sons and daughters of Acadian fishermen had to make do with lobster sandwiches.

New Brunswick was once famous for the quality of its ships and the men who sailed them. Today, it is the eighth most populous of Canada’s ten provinces, and per-capita income lags behind Canada as a whole. The best and the brightest of New Brunswick’s young people often see little opportunity, and there has been an exodus to the more dynamic provinces to the west. On the other hand, forest covers over 80 percent of the province, and the moose population is increasing.

Maritimers who stay in the provinces are often great travelers, adventurers of a sort, the kind of people who venture out to see the big world, absorb all they can, and return to commune with the moose in what they consider to be the finest place on earth in which to live.

Maritimers, and Canadians in general, generally suffer a beneficent affliction that the Canadian writer Marian Botsford Fraser has forth-rightly and fearlessly labeled “niceness.” An American who spends too much time engaged in a corrosive harangue about a bad airline flight falls into line soon enough. Persist in your ill temper and people begin looking at you as if you’re wearing a leather mask and carrying a chain saw.

Garry Sowerby picked the two of us up at the airport in his family car, and older-model Oldsmobile 98 with ninety thousand miles on it. On the way into Moncton from the airport I believe I said that the land was inspiring and the people seemed, well, nice.

“It’s a national trait,” Garry said sorrowfully. “We can’t help it. It’s like, well, you know why Canadians say ‘eh?’ at the end of the sentence?”

“I thought it was a lingering French habit, like saying, ‘
n’est-ce pas?
’ ”

“No. It’s this niceness. This Canadian niceness. You say, ‘piss off!’
and then add ‘eh?’ What does that mean? It means piss off but, uh, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I mean, look at your national symbol. You’ve got a bald eagle. Fierce eyes, a snake in its talons. What do we have?” Garry bit down on his lower lip, thrust his face into mine, and widened his eyes so that he looked moronically eager. “Beaver, eh?”

Sowerby, who had the slightest of Canadian accents—“aboot” for about—was a connoisseur of great “ehs?” but he himself never eh-ed except in jest. “Remember when we came back from Panama?” he asked. “We flew out just before the riots. And then you got back to the States, what were the big headlines there?”

“Iran-contra,” I said.

“The big scandal here, front page across the country, somebody found out the prime minister owned forty pairs of shoes.”

“Yeah?”

“That was it. That was the scandal.” Apparently, Canadians felt that the prime minister was about thirty-five pairs of shoes to the dark side of nicety. Garry, like any man who deeply loves his country, purely enjoyed complaining about it.

“You know who our prime minister is?” he asked.

“Uh, used to be Trudeau. Now it’s, who, Mulroney?”

Niceness doesn’t make headlines. Americans don’t know anything about Canada. We read about Noriega, or Qaddafi, or Khomeini. We respect Canadians, we like them, but the great mass of ordinary Americans somehow missed the big northern footwear exposé. Virtually any Canadian could tell you the name of the American secretary of state. I didn’t even know what you called his Canadian counterpart.

The two-lane road ran through the forest and into Moncton where Garry Sowerby was born and raised. It is a town of sixty thousand, an old railroad center where the streets run parallel to the tracks and the homes are generally well maintained and newly painted. The nearby Bay of Fundy, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, surges with the highest tides in the world—up to seventy feet—and at their highest, these tides produce a kind of tidal wave that runs up the Petitcodiac River, so that, in Moncton, the river runs backward twice a day. I think this is called the tidal bore.

“We’ve got the biggest tidal bore in the world,” the nice people of Moncton will tell you. Or they say that the finest eating lobster in the world is processed at a nearby plant at Cape Bimet. Research on my part reveals that this brag is, in fact, an indisputable fact. Or they tell you about a rise outside of Moncton where a car in neutral appears to roll uphill. “I’ll take you out to Magnetic Hill,” Garry said, full of false
portent, “and you will be sore afraid.” Research on my part reveals the mystic powers of Magnetic Hill are an optical illusion.

The railroad has recently pulled out of Moncton in a big way, so the housing market is depressed, and Garry’s $35,000 (American) home is a large two-story affair, neatly painted, like all the other houses on the street. There are a backyard, alive with flowers, a garage, and two vehicles parked in the driveway. One was our truck. The other was a GMC Suburban, riddled with bullet holes.

I
KNEW
that bullet-ridden truck. I had driven it a couple of thousand miles through Canada and Alaska with Garry. That was in 1985 when he was competing in a five-thousand-mile road race—a rally actually—through Alaska and Canada. The event was called the ALCAN 5000 and I had been assigned to cover it and Garry for a magazine.

There were three of us in the big truck—Garry, myself, and Glen Turner, from Moncton, Garry’s codriver. Sowerby explained that he made his living as an “adventure driver,” and I thought, as we barreled down the Alaska Highway, that if I could learn all there was to know about the bullet holes in the Suburban, I would begin to understand this rather unique occupation. I had never heard of a professional adventure driver before.

So, start at the beginning:

In 1977, Garry Sowerby and his friend Ken Langley began working on a project they conceived in college, nearly a decade earlier. The boys were Maritimers, they liked road trips, and the idea, as originally hatched, was posed as a question: Wouldn’t it be great to drive around the world? What began as a lark took almost three years to organize and cost $300,000 in money raised from various sponsors.

Sowerby and Langley formed a corporation, Odyssey International, Limited (“We’re in OIL”) and borrowed $25,000 from friends and relatives to launch the project. They studied bus schedules from various countries to estimate the driving time from point to point. They produced a slick professional proposal, and spent years pitching the project, called Odyssey 77, to various companies.

Garry is always a little amused when people, noticing his success—he is something of a Canadian national hero—suppose they can simply approach a sponsor with an intriguing proposal.

“Nothing’s easy,” Garry likes to say. “Nothing’s free.”

Of the three years the round-the-world project took, the vast majority of the time was spent raising money.

“You have to understand,” Sowerby told me, “we weren’t kids. We
were twenty-nine when we started this. Ken was a lawyer. A great organizer and planner. I had a lot of experience with vehicles.”

Garry, in fact, had a degree in physics, had flown jets in the Canadian air force, and had sailed as an officer on destroyers. In the service at Camp Borden, Ontario, Sowerby had taken an extensive automobile engineering course and was posted to a five-hundred-acre vehicle-testing ground. He designed tests devised to take vehicles to their failure limits. He drove armored personnel carriers over swampy tundra and frozen muskeg, and rolled more than his share of Jeeps. On purpose.

This background was invaluable in the struggle to fund the project. “Kenny and I,” said Sowerby, “had some credibility.”

The trip would take them through four continents and twenty-three countries in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. At every coast, they had to have planes waiting to airfreight the vehicle to the next country or continent. Guinness, at that time, required that the circumnavigation entail “an equator’s length of driving (24,901.47 road miles).” Sowerby drove; Langley navigated. (The previous record for the fastest trip around the world by land had been 102 days.) The Canadians completed the drive (26,738 actual miles) in seventy-four days one hour and eleven minutes.