WE ARE NOT MEN, WE ARE ROTO : On the Road From Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay--With the Help of Psalm 91, High Beams and the Milkshakes That Conquered the Pan American Highway

A WAKE-UP CALL, in my opinion, is not a fire alarm. It is best to loll about for half an hour or so, contemplating the task ahead, which on this morning, Sept. 29, 1987, was a monthlong drive at top speed through 13 countries--from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay. It was 3:20 in the morning in the last hotel in the last town at the end of the earth. I was reading a small pocket Bible--Psalm 91--in search of inspiration.

Back home in Montana, my next-door neighbor, an Episcopal priest named Michael Morgan, had honored me with a blessing before I left. Father Morgan’s house is close enough to mine that he is often treated to involuntary glimpses of a less-than-spiritual lifestyle. He is, therefore, in the habit of giving me books with titles such as “Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith.” We do not discuss these books, and Father Michael gives them to me, I suspect, out of a sense of duty rather than any real hope for my immortal soul. This is one of the many reasons that I respect my neighbor.

His blessing had consisted of a brief prayer, smack to the point. Father Michael used to own a motorcycle, a great screaming hog that he liked to ride through Yellowstone Park. Ahh, the wind in his face, the odor of fertile land . . . the sound of police sirens yipping behind. He has since sold the bike, but he knows something of the high edge of the highway.

“Psalm 91,” Father Michael said, “is a prayer of protection. It’s a good highway prayer.”

My neighbor gave me a pocket Bible to pack away with my new, close-quarters Zorro knife and borrowed bulletproof vest. In a pinch, he thought, when quick action was called for, a prayer might consist of simply saying, “Psalm 91, Lord.”

So, at the end of the earth, just before setting off in pursuit of the world speed record for driving the Americas tip to tip, in the process of pulling my way up out of two hours and 45 minutes of sleep, I tried to draw a bit of spiritual motivation from my neighbor’s impressive faith.

Trust in God, the psalm says, and

You will not fear the terror of the night,

nor the arrow that flies by day .

There came an impatient knocking at the door, bam bam bam.

. . . then no harm will befall you,

no disaster will come near your tent.

Or, I supposed, by extrapolation, your new “it’s not just a truck anymore” GMC Sierra. The knocking became more urgent and protracted. It was Garry Sowerby, my partner, sounding alert and Canadian (which he is): a real eager beaver.

“Tim, there’re about 30 people standing around outside. Everyone’s waiting. And we still have to pack the truck.”

For he will command his angels concerning you

to guard you in all your ways ;

they will lift you up in their hands,

so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

Bam, bam, bambambam. “We’re late! People are waiting!” There was a silence that lasted for a minute or more: an agitated void.

You will tread upon the lion and the cobra,

you will trample the great lion and serpent .

Bambambambam. Garry’s voice had an edge to it. “ Let’s go. “

It was all just hurry-up time. We threw suitcases and duffel bags in the back of the truck under the camper shell with the boxes of food and the 999 Farmer’s Milkshakes--333 chocolates, 333 vanillas, 333 strawberries--in little square boxes with a shelf life of nine months. (Farmer’s, like GMC, was one of our sponsors: From the Antarctic Through to the Tropics to the Arctic--The Quality Never Varies.)

At 4:43, 13 minutes after our official ceremonial starting time, we climbed into the cab of the Sierra and fired her up. Garry had offered to let me start the trip. He wanted to finish it, and it was only fair that I start. Garry Sowerby, a professional endurance driver, had worked two years for this moment. It seemed to me that he should both start and finish.

“You sure?”

“Do it,” I said. “We’re now”--I checked my watch--”15 minutes behind schedule.”

There was a police car in front of us, with the lights flashing. The officers had decided against using their siren in deference to the sleeping citizens of Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego.

“All right.” Garry tapped the horn, and the car in front of us took off slowly down the street.

“Let’s see what this baby’ll do,” Garry said.

THESE WERE the rules: Distance and speed records had to be set from geographic point to geographic point. The editors of “The Guinness Book of World Records” were adamant. “Otherwise,” they explained, “you’d have people claiming a record drive from, say, Columbus, Ohio, to Detroit. You’d have someone claiming the world record for a drive from his house to his girlfriend’s. Where does that stop?”

The geographic points for the purposes of the Pan American north-south driving record were those that could be reached by road. Prudhoe Bay, for instance, isn’t as far north as Barrow, Alaska. But there is no road to Barrow. It seemed ludicrous to air freight a vehicle over the roadless tundra. The road ends where the road ends. Provided it ends at a geographical point. Like the Beaufort Sea at Prudhoe Bay and the Beagle Canal at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

“The Guinness Book of World Records” would have given the same instructions to anyone who bothered to inquire. For instance, the Frenchman, Prince Pierre D’Arenberg. He had started from Prudhoe Bay in February and, according to the tourist office in Tierra del Fuego, had arrived at the other end of the earth in 55 days, 23 hours and 27 minutes. And then there was another fellow, a crazy Polish-Canadian in a black Cadillac. He was supposed to have swept into Ushuaia from points north the previous November, late on the night of the 27th to be exact, in 24 days, or 25 days, or 26 days, mas o menos , depending on whom you believed. The “Guinness” editors said Jerzy Adamuszek had officially claimed 26 days and a few hours as his time. They had not yet decided whether Adamuszek and his Cadillac were for real. “We’re not,” said one editor, “certain he obeyed the rules.”

Still, it seemed wise to regard Adamuszek’s time as the time to beat. Besides, as Garry pointed out, if he did it--if he really did it--we were honor bound to consider his time the standing record. Not 40 days, not 35 days. Didn’t matter if those times would give us the record. “It’s a matter of morality,” Garry had said.

And just in case, just to cover all possibilities, I thought, privately, that it would be nice to bring it all in under 24 days.

No questions that way.

So: 23 days, mas o menos .

A matter of morality, mas o menos .

WE MADE 30 miles the first hour. High in the mountains, in the slush and snow, we were startled by the sudden flash of a strobe in the darkness. A photographer had gotten there first and was taking pictures of the truck as we shot by. Flash, flash, and then we were alone in the somber snow and darkness, with only a month or so of driving ahead of us.

Parts of Tierra del Fuego are owned by Chile, and to catch the ferry to the mainland, we had to pass into that country. An officer on the Chilean side came out to search our truck. We asked him if he wanted to come with us to Alaska. The comment struck him as a very good joke. Fellow officers encouraged him to go, as if they were tired of having him around, and the officer himself pretended to consider our proposal. He waved us through.

“Let’s remember that one,” Garry said later.

“What?”

“Asking them to come with us. Seems to soften them up.”

As Garry explained it, it was wise to develop an act for policemen, customs officers and other officials. “We give them,” Garry said, “all the required papers, then the handout describing the trip, the ‘Guinness’ book in Spanish; we show them letters requesting assistance written by bigwigs in their own government. And we do it lightly. We don’t want them to think we consider ourselves big-deal guys. We hand out maple-leaf lapel pins. We don’t alienate them or challenge their authority in any way.”

The road north was little more than a cruel joke. It was a dry scar scraped across a monotonous plain, and gravel had been dumped into the scar and spread. Large tooth-rattling ruts ran across the road itself, at right angles to our direction of travel.

Garry was checking the rearview mirrors. It seemed that the camper shell on the back of the truck was undulating to the rhythm of the ruts.

“We’re going to lose that cap,” he said. “It’s going to start cracking. We can’t take much more of this.”

I thought of Garry as the star of this trip, the man who could drive through any eventuality, and my job, as I saw it, was to keep his spirits high and speak Spanish. This had to be the worst and roughest road on the entire two-continent trip, I said. If we could just make it off Tierra del Fuego, everything else would surely fall into line.

We arrived at the Straits of Magellan at 11:30 in the morning, in time to see the ferry just pulling out. We got out in the mud and chill to examine the truck.

“Every time,” Garry muttered bitterly, “and I mean every time I modify a vehicle, the after-market stuff craps out on me.”

We hadn’t eaten anything for eight hours--and I couldn’t find our camp stove. It was buried under the gear we had thrown into the truck. I decided to try the heating coil. It took 40 minutes to heat enough water to make lukewarm macaroni and cheese. It occurred to me that we were embarking upon what was likely to be a long, involuntary diet. I dug through the mess in the camper shell and brought out several bottles of water, a box of beef jerky and some milkshakes. I wondered if we could exist on dried beef and warm milkshakes. Probably not. We would starve to death long before we reached the first drive-through McDonald’s.

Two hours later, the ferry coughed and spluttered up to the shore and, 20 minutes after that, we drove into Patagonia. Not far into the mainland, we passed from Chile back into Argentina and worked on our act at customs. Respect, papers, passports, forms, jokes, lapel pins. There was an American in line ahead of us. He was a scientist, he said, and he had been studying a big hole in the atmosphere’s ozone layer that seemed to be centered over Antarctica. “It’s huge,” he said. The man seemed genuinely alarmed and described the situation as a potential global disaster. I decided not to tell him that we had a problem with our camper shell and that our heating coil didn’t work very well either.

IN PATAGONIA, the sun sets in the north, and we were driving directly into it. We had finally hit paved two-lane highway. Every half hour or so we encountered a car or truck running south. Argentine drivers do not waste headlights on the dusk. I was driving with the lights on, just the way American gym coaches teach you to do in Drivers Ed.

For reasons that remain opaque, this seemed to annoy drivers in the oncoming vehicles. The drivers would flash their lights on and off, once. I’d flash mine--bright, dim. A minute, or several, might pass before the other driver flashed again. And then, invariably, these drivers would wait until they were directly in front of our truck and hit us with their bright lights, full on. A blinding flash in the dark of night as two vehicles roared by one another at about 150 miles an hour.

There was no coherent local custom. No matter what I did, what courtesy I tried to employ--dims, parking lights, anything at all but complete darkness--the Argentine drivers fired their brights at about 20 feet.

I asked Garry what he thought I should do about the Battle of the Brights.

“Drive safe,” he said.

“There’s nothing I can do. They give me the brights every time.”

“Just ignore the Fangios.” Juan Fangio, born in Buenos Aires, dominated automobile competition in the 1950s. We had been told that every male Argentine driver believes he is Juan Fangio.

“I’m going to nail the next guy.”

“Good,” Garry said reasonably. “Blind the sucker. He’ll lose control, crash right into us, and you’ll win. Lie here bleeding in the sand thinking about how macho you are. Real good thinking.”

“You’re right.” I said.

Garry excused himself, crawled back onto the bench seat in the extended cab and said that he was going to try to get a bit of sleep.

Some Juan Fangio, pushing 90 in a Peugeot, gave me a taste of his brights.

We had a bank of driving lights mounted on the front of the truck--100-watt high beams, halogen fog lights--and they were controlled by a series of toggle switches on a console below the radio. We had bright lights on either side of the truck for security and for night work. There were high beams on the back of the truck as well, for the same reasons. All were controlled by separate toggles. I practiced with them for a while on the empty highway, flicking the index, middle, ring and little finger in sequence--boom, boom, boomboomboom--so that the night exploded in all directions.

An hour later, when I saw a pair of parking lights hurtling toward me, I was ready. I checked the extended cab. Garry was snoring lightly. The car was less than half a mile away. My fingers tingled at the toggles.

We closed to 20 feet and drew simultaneously.

Die , Fangio.

I had him outgunned. Boom, boom: high beams and halogens, both at once. I could see two dark heads in the passing car. The night blazed with painful brilliance. They were beaten, fried, and I imagined I could see both their skulls behind the skin, as if in X-ray.

No mercy: As they passed, I hit the sidelight and then nailed them in the rear high beams.

In the side mirror, I saw the car weave across the center line, then right itself. I heard, in my mind’s ear, the driver say to his passenger, “What was that?”

And the imaginary reply, uttered softly in humble terror: “It must have been an angel of the Lord.”

I felt I was beginning to master the local customs.

IT WAS EARLY morning in Peru. I had been driving all night, and I stayed at the wheel while Garry drank the concoction of half-part instant Nescafe to one part water that we still called coffee.

“When I was 9 years old,” he said, “a guy came to town in a ’59 Mercury station wagon. It had a black bubble on the top where the guy could stand up and do exercises. Turned out the guy hadn’t been out of the vehicle in two years. Or maybe it was five years. There was some sort of a bet that if he could stay in there for some impossible amount of time, he’d get $100,000.”

“This was a vision that warped your life,” I said.

Garry did a quick calculation: “We made 360 miles in 12 hours.” From Arica, Chile, to wherever the hell we were, Peru.

“What day is this?” Garry asked.

“Friday.”

“No. Thursday.”

“Wait.” I needed to figure it out on my fingers. “Tuesday we left Ushuaia. Next night we slept five hours in Chile. . . .”

We had followed the highway some 800 miles through Patagonia and crossed the border from Argentina into Chile, along the crest of the Andes mountains, on a single-lane road. At the Chilean customs checkpoint, we had encountered our first search. The officer simply pointed to boxes at random and asked us to open them for him. Of the five he wanted to see, four contained milkshakes. He seemed bitterly confused about this.

We showed him how to take the plastic straw off the milkshake box and insert it into the container. When we left, there were seven bemused officers standing in the middle of the road watching us. They were wearing maple-leaf lapel pins, sucking milkshakes and waving.

“The milkshakes,” Garry had said, “that conquered the Pan American Highway.”

We stopped at a motel south of Santiago after 40 mostly sleepless hours. That had been Wednesday. The next day we made Santiago, where we serviced the truck at a brand-new GM plant. GM’s president for overseas sales, Al Buchanan, happened to be in the office. He bought us lunch and pointed us north, toward the 600 or 700 miles of the Atacama Desert and the Peruvian border.

It had taken 24 hours to get through the flat dirty-gray Chilean high desert. For 1,200 miles the horizon was broken only by strange mud tufts, arid fog, grim towns and one--only one--billboard, 20 miles out of Antofasgasta, as familiar as a recurring dream.

“Garry, you see that?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if I’m hallucinating.”

“It says, ‘Pepsi Cola.’ ”

“I want a Pepsi,” I heard myself whine and realized, in that moment, why all billboards should be banned.

Garry said: “Water or milkshakes.”

Finally, we had pulled into the border town of Arica. When the Peruvian customs man opened the camper shell, the smell of festering strawberry milkshakes knocked him back a step. He waved us through.

We knew that had been yesterday evening. Now Garry began counting. We concluded that today was the fifth day of the drive and it was Saturday.

“The days and nights,” I said, “run together.”

Garry took over the driving and I decided to stay up for a while. We both felt giddy and talkative. I told Garry about the graffiti I had seen driving through the night. We had passed through occasional towns, monuments to poverty so grotesque I imagined people literally starved to death in these places. Outside one town, I rounded a curve and saw something that squeezed at my chest like a vise. On the cliff wall ahead, written neatly in white paint where every driver had to see it, was a bit of large, angry graffiti: “We are not animals.”

“We,” said Garry, referring to the two of us, “are not men.”

I thought briefly of Al Buchanan in Santiago. Chilenos are kind, he had told us, they have a day for everybody--students day, grandmothers day, a day of the rotos . I had asked him what the word meant. He had pointed to a man lying on a street corner cradling a bottle. “ Roto ,” he said.

“We are not men,” I said to Garry. “We are roto. “

“We’re filth,” Garry said.

“We’re dirt,” I shouted. “We’re slime. We are ROTO !”

“We spent,” Garry screamed, “$350,000 to be like this!”

Garry and I couldn’t stop saying the word.

“Roto coffee. You eat it with a spoon.”

“We are,” Garry said, “on a roto run.”

“In our roto wagon.”

He passed a line of three lumbering trucks.

“ Roto ‘d ‘em.”

“ Roto ‘d ‘em good.”

We were laughing and shouting and not making any sense at all. I realized, at that moment, that Garry and I fully understood one another. We could handle anything the Pan American Highway had to throw at us. We were roto , and men who descend into roto hood at the same time in the same place, only inches away from one another, are forever brothers.

Roto .

WE WERE DUE to pick up a passenger in Lima. Joe Skorupa, a writer for Popular Mechanics, was hoping for the adventure of a lifetime. The last time Skorupa had seen the truck, it was shiny clean with logos all over. Now it was caked in filth. The last time Garry and I had seen Joe, we were men, not roto . When we met him at his hotel, Joe looked a little shocked about the situation. Was Popular Mechanics paying him near enough to deal with this?

“You guys,” he said, “look like shit.”

It was a long haul to Ecuador, through bandit country, and by the time we got there, the border would be closed anyway. We’d have to sleep somewhere. It seemed to him that we needed sleep here and now.

Garry and I excused ourselves and talked.

“I’m afraid,” Garry said, “that we look like dangerous crazies.”

“ Rotos .”

We slept the night in Lima. I took a shower before and after dinner.

BEFORE WE LEFT the United States, we had consulted with a security man. Graham Maddox was a Canadian SWAT specialist. He was full of little story problems. Like, “It’s hot. The truck windows are open. Somebody runs up, throws a pail of gasoline on you. Sticks his arm in the window holding a Bic lighter. What do you do?” We went to him because he thought like that and we didn’t. We went to him because there were stretches of road like the one we were on now in northern Peru. Dark, no traffic, noted for highway robbery. The main thing, he told us, was not to get stopped.

Garry, who had the evasive driving technique, was driving. The road ran straight through the darkness and sand. No lights, no traffic. . . .

And there they were, half a dozen men with guns, waving us over. They didn’t seem to be wearing uniforms. On the other hand--and these calculations were made in the space of about 20 seconds--there were two buildings on either side of the road, and both were lit. And it was close to the border with Ecuador, a likely spot for a checkpoint. It was, in fact, a military checkpoint. The tallest of the men, the one who seemed to be in charge, wore a khaki safari suit and a footlong knife in a leather sheath on his belt. He had a crew cut and pockmarked skin. The men serving under him looked like teen-agers. They wore the black silky T-shirts of the Peruvian military, emblazoned with the motto “Honor, Discipline, Loyalty.”

We were motioned out of the truck, and one of the teen-agers held an automatic rifle at my neck. I could see he had been trying without much success to grow a mustache. The safety on the rifle appeared to be off, and he had his finger on the trigger.

I smiled brilliantly, as if happy to see new friends and exchange stories. I thought, Put your safety on, bozo.

Our papers were in order, and the soldiers lowered their guns. We began handing out flyers in Spanish, but the man with the knife simply dropped his on the ground, unread. He had the knife out of the sheath and motioned at Garry to open the tailgate.

The lights across the street came from a bar. Several drunken men wandered over to watch the fun. Garry fiddled with the twin padlocks on the camper shell. There was an anticipatory hush among the assembled drunks. Both doors opened at once, and the fetid smell of sour milk and diesel flooded out. The officer pointed the knife at a box that, for once, did not contain milkshakes. It was filled with cans of Argentine hashed beef.

“Bad food,” I blathered to the soldiers. “I wouldn’t feed Argentine hash to a dog.” The teen-agers were warming up, I thought. Our trip would take us through 13 countries, I said. We would always remember Peru. It was so beautiful. Did anyone want to ride with us to Alaska?

The officer asked us to drive the truck back behind the building. Garry looked at me and Joe. Anything could happen. As instructed, Garry drove over a narrow pit dug into the ground. The officer lowered himself under the truck, and Garry followed him down so no contraband could be planted. Using a flashlight and flexible file, the officer poked around for 10 minutes.

I was in full joke mode with the drunks and teen-agers. What a pleasure it was to talk with such honorable and witty men. Would anyone like a lapel pin? This is a maple leaf, this one is a replica of the truck. Well, yes, the truck is very dirty now, so it is hard to see the markings, and the pin isn’t exactly the same, but who would want a very dirty lapel pin. Ho ho, it is to laugh, such a joke of humor.

Oh, and had anyone ever drunk sweet milk from a box?

The officer came out of the pit and walked into the ramshackle checkpoint shack without a word. One of the teen-agers followed him in, then came out a second later and said we could pass.

It had been Psalm 91 all the way.

THE BORDER with Ecuador was closed, and we slept for six hours in a hotel at Tumbes, the most northerly Peruvian town. We were first in line at the customs shed the next morning. A handsome man with curly blond hair saw the truck and introduced himself. Alejandro Penaherrera, from General Motors Ecuador, had been sent to help us through customs and escort us to the capital, Quito.

Alejandro went first. The Pan American Highway here was in good repair and wider than anything we had seen in Peru. It was, in fact, so wide that traffic often formed a third lane, in the middle of the road, which was populated by adventuresome souls traveling at high speeds in both directions.

We were in the middle of a video arcade car-crash game.

Worse, we had an electrical short in the auxiliary-tank fuel pump. Since the tank itself had broken apart miles ago, this would not have been a problem except that our windshield wipers were connected into the short. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if it wasn’t raining. But it was.

Garry, who was at the wheel, stopped to find his motorcycle goggles. We had purchased a pair for each of us after Graham Maddox had asked us what we’d do if someone broke the windscreen.

So Garry was doing 75 on the crowded highway with his head stuck out the driver’s window in a tropical rain storm. Alejandro, who fancied himself a racing driver, was pushing at top speed through a moving braid of traffic.

“He doesn’t brake for oncoming cars,” Joe observed.

Garry was staying with Alejandro in a virtuoso exhibition of Third World driving. He used the horn more than the brakes. Running down the middle lane, with a bus headed directly for us, Garry would just keep pushing for the pass, then pull in at the last moment. In his opinion, drivers on the Pan American were very good indeed.

“These people grew up driving like this,” Garry shouted. It was strange to carry on a high-volume conversation with a man wearing goggles driving a truck through the rain with his head out the window. “North American rules don’t apply,” he bellowed. “That bus back there? When we were coming at one another? He saw that I needed more room and feathered back on the throttle. He was good.”

Garry, I could see, was in a kind of ecstasy, his teeth bared against the sting of rain on his face.

Through the inch or so of moving water on the glass in front of me, I could see the looming grill of a large truck as it peeled off into its own lane.

“These people,” Garry howled, “are either good drivers or they’re dead.”

WE SLEPT FOR a few hours that night in Quito and drove on before dawn. By the time we crossed the Equator, Garry and I were elated.

“We’re in the northern hemisphere,” I shouted to Joe Skorupa. “Nothing can go wrong now.”

“Don’t say that,” Garry pleaded.

I CANNOT PRODUCE an orderly list of the things one must do to load a one-ton, four-wheel-drive pickup truck onto a containerized cargo ship out of Cartagena, Colombia. The suffocating blizzard of paper generated in the process, once assembled, stacks up like the manuscript pages of “War and Peace.” It takes two or more people to cart the paper around, and all the documents must be allowed to visit many different buildings in all areas of the city.

The boat that would carry us, strictly by “Guinness” book rules, around the southern half of Panama, the one roadless area on the route from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, was leaving some time in the evening or early morning hours. It was Friday, Oct. 9, Day 10, and we had one business day--until 5 o’clock--to write “War and Peace.” If we failed, it would be a week or more before we could book passage on an appropriate ship.

We had already spent two days driving through Colombia with Santiago Camacho and Luis Nieto. Like Alejandro in Ecuador, they had met us at the border. Camacho wore jeans and loafers, and his black hair was moderately long. Luis Nieto had close-cropped dark hair, a nose that had been broken at least once and a small black suitcase in one hand. Santiago had told us that Colombia would cost us two days.

“Two days?” I was amazed. It didn’t look that far on the map.

Well, we must stop at night between midnight and 5, Santiago explained.

“Because it’s dangerous to drive at night?” I asked

“Not at all,” Santiago said.

But, of course, it is dangerous to drive at night in Colombia. I had a clip file that bulged with articles indicating that Colombia was either a vigorous country of extremely high-spirited adventurers or a nation on the verge of anarchy. Guerrillas kidnaped ranchers, the ranchers bought Uzis. Rival gangs of emerald traffickers had killed 23 people and injured 24. And that didn’t count what the Medellin drug cartel was up to. In the last year alone, 11,000 Colombians had been murdered, making homicide the country’s leading cause of death among males aged 15 to 44.

In two days we had passed through too many military checkpoints to count. In the darkness, we’d switch on the dome lights so the soldiers could see us. Sometimes the soldiers simply waved us through. Sometimes they pulled us over. In one town, where once again a teen-ager stuck a gun at my neck, it was the letter from the Ecuadorean ambassador that did the trick. The gun came down. “Go,” said the officer. Back in the truck, I pulled out the map.

“You know what the name of that town was?” I asked. I was probably shouting. Bad stops always made us shout. “Buga,” I yelled.

“Then,” Joe Skorupa quietly suggested, “those guys were the Buga men.”

Joe, it seemed, had become slightly roto.

We had slept four hours in the town of Pererira. “I had a good time in town last night,” Garry said. “Rode an elevator up one floor. Locked my door. And this morning was great. I brushed my teeth. There’s a lot to do in that little town, especially when you schedule enough time to really enjoy yourself.”

In Medellin, we had stopped for diesel. Luis stood close by, watching everything, his black suitcase in hand. I asked Santiago if this was a dangerous city.

No, no, not so bad. About like Lima. Still, it wasn’t a place you wanted to go alone. It was best to have Colombian friends along.

You mean, I suggested, as guides. Like somebody might want a guide to Disneyland, because of all the wonders?

Santiago smiled, all goodwill and charm. I saw a newsstand across the street and decided to go buy a paper.

“Tim.” It was Luis.

“I’m going for a newspaper.”

“No.” We arrived in Cartagena the next afternoon, where Luis and Santiago introduced us to Jaime Lopez, who had some experience with getting trucks put onto boats. Jaime, I saw with dismay, was not at all sure we could write “War and Peace” in one day, especially not this day. The coming Monday, Oct. 12, was a national holiday, Discovery of the Americas Day, and Colombians were looking forward to a three-day weekend.

THE SHIPPING agent took our money and told us that our ship was called the Stella Lykes. We paid cash and got a few hundred receipts. The shipping agent said we’d have to come back later with certain official forms obtainable only at the port.

After an interminable conversation with a number of friendly but uninformed officials at the port, it became clear that we couldn’t put the truck in the cargo container and obtain the documents we needed until we secured yet another set of documents at the customs office, which was conveniently located a mile away.

The customs office looked like a junior college in Bakersfield, and a man wearing muted green slacks and a bright green shirt came out to examine the truck. He looked like the late comedian Andy Kaufman, with that same expression of eager bewilderment. It was, he said, impossible to examine the truck because it was raining. Did we have an umbrella? No? This is true? He appealed to Jaime Lopez. These men had driven the length of South America without an umbrella? Yes. But it was unthinkable!

A compromise was reached. Kaufman would ride down to the port where a soldier could examine the truck in the rain, report to him, and then we could ride back to the customs building and sign the proper documents.

Back at the port, a tall soldier in a crisply pressed uniform opened the camper shell and reeled back. Garry had inadvertently crushed a boxful of strawberry milkshakes trying to fix the auxiliary diesel tank. Besides, it had become clear that these things did not have a shelf life of nine months, at least not under truck camper shells in South America. This was, by far, the worst the truck had ever smelled. The soldier could, it seemed, sign the necessary documents.

Back at the customs office, we were subjected to a cruel psychology experiment involving a maze of offices. A man sitting behind a desk and wearing a big gold chain around his neck looked at our papers, stamped them and gave them back. In an office 50 feet down the hall, a large lady in a red skirt with tightly curled black hair put a stamp on top of the stamp the man with the gold chain had awarded us. We visited five more offices where we secured various stamps, bam, or where previous stamps were initialed.

We had scattered throughout the maze working independently. Jaime Lopez appeared in the lobby looking disproportionately forlorn. He motioned us back into a corner office where Andy Kaufman sat behind a large, empty desk, looking morose in his eagerly bewildered way.

Some of our papers were written in French. Though Kaufman didn’t speak the language himself, he knew what information went where. All except for item No. 12. He didn’t know what it said and couldn’t sign the document.

The desk was covered with glass, and under the glass was a picture of Jesus, His Sacred Heart glowing in his chest. Garry looked at the picture. It was huge, about twice the size of a record album.

Garry explained, through Jaime Lopez, that he was from Canada and that French was a national language there, taught in all the schools.

Garry can’t read a lick of French. He stared at Jesus, took a deep breath and lied. “Item 12 is the number of your badge.”

And so, with another flourish of the pen, we cleared customs.

Back at the port, there was, it seemed, need for another search. Buffeted by the unspeakable stench, the customs official motioned for me to close the camper shell, hurry up, right now. Another document was signed.

Garry could now drive the truck into the container, which was a large rust-colored metal box. We couldn’t, however, lock the container until we had certain other necessary documents. Santiago smiled, put an arm around the document-demanding soldier and walked with him. There seemed to be an exchange made, hands touching hands. They came back laughing. For us, the soldier would lock the container.

We were speeding through the crowdedstreets on our way to collect documents from the immigration service when we were blocked by a parade. The parade killed us. It was noon, and every official office would be closed until 2. Jaime Lopez groaned in despair.

We dropped Joe at the hotel. He said he promised to meet us in Prudhoe Bay witha bottle of champagne. I said I didn’t know if we would make it. Maybe I’d just stay in Cartagena and sign documents for the rest of my life. I could die happy then; hell would hold no terrors for me.

Santiago tore through traffic, violated stop signs and parked in the only available spaces, all of which were under clearly visible signs that read “No Parking.” If there was a police officer present, all the better. Santiago would leap out of the car, throw his arm around the officer, hands would touch hands, they would laugh for a moment, and then the officer would watch our car until we had completed our business.

We got the very last document we needed, the bill of lading from the shipping agency, at exactly 4:59. Jaime Lopez didn’t care about the Pan-American Highway: He thought we had set an unbreakable record on this very day.

AT NINE THE next evening, the Stella Lykes was in port in Panama City. Garry and I shook hands, and I assured him that nothing could go wrong now. We could clear customs in a couple of hours tomorrow, head north and have the record in our pocket inside of two weeks.

Tomorrow, it turned out, was National Revolution Day in Panama.

We stayed in a hotel in Panama City, just off a major road flanked almost entirely by bank buildings 20 and 30 stories high. Down the empty streets, I could see a pair of golden arches. It could have been a street in any American city, but everything was closed, and there was no one on the streets. It was like an Ingmar Bergman film, with ceiling fans.

My room had a TV, and I watched CNN for a while. Bork would not be confirmed for the Supreme Court, the Minnesota Twins had won the American League pennant, there was a hurricane approaching Florida. I lay there in bed and the same news kept happening: Bork, Twins, Hurricane.

Garry called from his room, which was next to mine.

“Wouldn’t it be terrible,” he said, “to be in jail?”

It was an excruciating afternoon. At an early dinner we discussed the possibility of going out. There were any number of enterprising nightclubs all over the city. “We can’t,” Garry said.

“I know.”

“I can’t stand this,” Garry said.

Which is the ultimate irony of the adventure-driving business: On a down day, it is wise to sit in the hotel room, alone--on the off chance that you could get into some kind of trouble just walking around. The essence of our adventure was to avoid adventure at all costs.

THE PHONES IN Panama City worked just fine. You could dial an international call from the hotel room. Garry called his wife, Jane, in Canada, and she gave him a message. GMC expected us in Dallas at 9 in the morning next Monday for a press conference. If there were a bunch of reporters waiting for us and we didn’t arrive on time, or at all, it would look very bad indeed. Our absence could be blamed on the Sierra and not on the fact that, for instance, we were enjoying a few carefree days in some Central American jail. Or that we had been shot and were hiding in the jungle bleeding and without food.

“In its first real-world test,” the nightmare AP wire copy might read, “a GMC Sierra driven by a team seeking a world speed record on the Pan-American Highway failed to appear as scheduled today in Dallas. Spokesmen for the automotive giant could not explain why the Sierra, newly redesigned at a cost of $2.8 billion, could not be present at the press conference. ‘We don’t know where the truck is,’ one obviously bitter executive said, ‘but one of the drivers has kids, and we know where they are.’ ”

Could we promise absolutely to be in Dallas next Monday? All we had to do was endure an unspecified amount of time in Panama City document hell, whip through six borders and 12 sets of formalities and cross one war zone--between Nicaragua and Honduras.

Hey, no problem. We’d be there, 9 Monday morning, sharp.

With the help of a calm and efficient Panamanian automotive-industry executive named Luis Paz Cardenas, we cleared Panama customs and assembled another Russian novel’s worth of paper in the hours between 6 in the morning and noon the next day.

We pulled out of the port, and I stopped at a large American-style supermarket to buy bottled water. Then we drove over the bridge across the Panama Canal and headed north.

Garry said, “Let’s see what this baby’ll do.”

“Part 2.”

WE HIGH-TAILED IT through Panama, pushing the Sierra to 80 and 85. We were thinking about getting across the border into Costa Rica and then to Nicaragua. Our information was that customs formalities at the southern border of Nicaragua could take up to 10 hours. Some people had waited two days to enter the country. Others had simply been turned back with no explanation. We had a date to meet a representative of Nicaraguan tourism at the border, a woman who was supposed to get us through. We couldn’t be late.

The border with Costa Rica was open and, as borders go, very pleasant. Costa Rican president Oscar Arias and his Peace Plan had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Costa Rican border officials were crowded around a television set watching the news. Before we got our final stamp, we were treated to the televised comments of Ronald Reagan. President Arias, Reagan said, was a world leader of great stature who richly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan did not say that he approved the Arias Plan, but that detail was lost on the customs officials who broke into cheers at various times during the broadcast.

It is safe to drive at night in Costa Rica. Costa Ricans are forever telling visitors that there are more teachers in their country than policeman. And on this day, when the president had been honored, we expected to find people dancing in the streets. What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, the Pan-American Highway was closed by a rockslide. An undercover cop who stopped us after watching the seemingly surreptitious transfer of lapel pins and milkshakes in Santiago told us. At 2 in the morning we found ourselves stopped behind a line of perhaps 50 semis on the back road to Nicaragua.

Two trucks, we were told, had had a mishap and were blocking the road. A small car could squeeze through, but our Sierra was too big. We would have to wait. It would take 12 hours minimum.

Garry fumed in silence. We had to meet Chistita Calera of Nicaraguan Inturismo in a little over five hours. Suddenly he got out of the truck carrying a flashlight.

“We have,” Garry said when he returned, “about five inches of clearance between those trucks.”

“You measured it?” I asked.

“Eyeballed it.” He put the Sierra into four-wheel drive, low. “The problem is,” he said, “that there are sheep guts all over the road. The stuff looks fresh, and it’s slippery as hell. I don’t know why, but the road is ankle deep in blood and intestines.” The trucks blocking the road were sitting back to back. To squeeze through, we’d have to drive at a right angle to the road, on a carpet of slime, going downhill.

“You’ll never make it,” one driver called.

Another bet we would. Money began to change hands.

It was all over in 20 seconds. Behind us, the truck drivers cheered in the jungle night.

CHISTITA CALERA--Chepy--eased us through the Nicaraguan formalities in only three hours. Garry drove, Chepy sat in the back of the extended cab, I talked. She wanted to interview us for the Inturismo newsletter.

How did I like Nicaragua?

We were 15 miles into the country. I said that Nicaragua was beautiful and all Nicaraguans were imbued with the spirit of friendship. Nicaragua was the most. . . .

Chepy cut me off.

“I would like you to comment on the political situation.”

“We are apolitical visitors,” I said.

“But you must say something about the political situation.”

I thought about it for a while. The “political situation” was the Contra insurgency against Chepy’s bosses, the Sandinista-led government. Telling the whole truth was going to be out of the question. I thought the Sandinistas were heavy-handed ideologues who had succeeded in squeezing every ounce of joy out of the country. On the other hand, the Contra insurgents were terrorists, funded by my own government.

I said that I hoped the Arias Peace Plan would be fully implemented.

“You are against the interference of foreign governments in Central American affairs?”

“Yes.” I sensed that this was what Chepy needed to hear. It had, for me, the added benefit of being my actual opinion.

“Would you write this down so I can translate exactly?”

And so I wrote it down and drew a happy face under the place where I signed my name.

WE WERE NEVER stopped in Nicaragua, not once. We were at the border four hours after we entered the country. In Honduras, we saw a billboard for Lee jeans. The last billboard we had seen was in Nicaragua. It had showed a heroic Nicaraguan woman taking a blond-haired man captive near the wreckage of a small plane. The one in Honduras was about pants, proper fit and buttocks.

We might have driven farther, into the night and Guatemala, but that would have put us into Dallas a couple of days early, and waiting around in motel rooms made Garry vomit.

At the Mexico border, formalities went quickly. We were stopped for a second customs inspection at a roadside checkpoint half an hour into the country. And half an hour after that, two police cars pulled us over for another document check. Ten miles later, we stopped for an agricultural inspection and traded jokes with the fruit police.

All the officers accepted lapel pins. All were professional, polite, and there was never a time when I felt a bribe was in order. Mexico wasn’t living up to its reputation as the most corrupt, bribe-ridden society in all of Latin America.

We turned east onto a highway that would take us to the Atlantic coast. At the intersection, there was another police checkpoint. The land was bare and sandy. A 30-mile-an-hour wind drove the heat before it like a blast furnace, and the two officers manning the checkpoint belonged in the Mexican version of “Deliverance.”

The older of the two was a short man with a mean, sour face and one gold tooth in the middle of his mouth. His shirt was rumpled and stained with sweat. He had no holster for his revolver and wore it inside his pants. The other officer was a tall, stooped man with dull, uncomprehending eyes and a slack face.

They wanted to see our passports. They wanted to see the lengthy document we had filled out at customs. The short man, who seemed to be in command, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pair of reading glasses. The lens on the left side had been shattered in a starburst pattern.

“You will need to show me an inventory of everything you are carrying in the truck,” the short man said.

We knew from our reconnaissance trip that this was not true. Still, we had the document and gave it to the man. It must have been infuriating.

The officers already had their lapel pins, but I could see they didn’t want to settle for mere pin money. Garry and I were well ahead of schedule and pretended not to understand. It was a chance to stand and stretch and torment these officers with shrugs and dumb questions.

“Why can’t we go? Everything is in order?”

The tall man walked in a circle, muttering. The short one stared at us with his one shattered eye. No words were exchanged for at least five minutes. The hot, dry wind kicked up a minor sandstorm. It would be much more comfortable in the checkpoint guard shack.

“Go,” the man with the bad eye said finally. “Go now.”

In the truck I said, “I don’t believe they were real policeman. A guy with a perfect starburst in his glasses? C’mon. I think they were from the department of tourism. Their job is to give visitors something to talk about.” I saw in my mind’s eye a travel documentary featuring these officers. “And so,” I said, “as the sun sets slowly in the west, we bid fond adieu to our friends.”

“Igor,” said Garry, “and the Cyclops.”

WE SLEPT IN Vera Cruz 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 have a coffee party,” I said.

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

A coffee party now seemed particularly appropriate. In a few hours, we’d enter the United States. The thought of interstate highways made us giddy. Cruise control! Mindless hours of monotony. Paradise.

Matamoros, then Brownsville. We 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 10 minutes. Garry pulled in at the first convenience store in America that happened to be on our side of the street. Garry called Jane. I called my friend Karen and told her I was not far from an interstate highway. This did not seem as remarkable to her as it did to me.

We drove north admiring the flawless monotony of the road. There was an old Aretha Franklin song on the radio, and we cranked it up. A man’s voice told us that that song had been brought to us, in part, by Big A Auto Parts. It was, he continued, a solid gold Saturday night.

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

ALMOST NO ONE SHOWED UP for the press conference. We were ready to talk about places with names like Ushuaia, but just south of us in Texas, a little girl had fallen into a well and gotten trapped. And the stock market had opened badly. It was Black Monday.

We left Dallas doing the legal limit, which we figured was 65 miles an hour, plus five or 10 more, depending on the flow of traffic. Canada was only 20 hours away. We wouldn’t even have time to get bored on the interstates.

When the officer at the Canadian border saw the markings on the Sierra--”Argentina to Alaska in 25 days or less”--she said, “Well, what day is it?”

I checked the calendar. “The morning of the 21st day,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “I guess you boys better get trucking.”

Garry said, “I knew people were going to start asking when we got to North America. I’m glad we didn’t have to change the sign.”

“What do you mean, change the sign?”

“I’ve got a bunch of sticker numbers in the back. If we were here in 30 days, I could have changed it to read: “Argentina to Alaska in 35 days or less.” There was a long silence.

“Why,” Garry said finally, “do I wish I hadn’t told you that?”

We hit Fairbanks, on the Alcan Highway, at 10:30 in the morning just two days later. Jim Messer, the GM dealer in Fairbanks, had promised to help us with one last document. We needed a permit to drive part of the Dalton Highway. The last 206 miles to Prudhoe Bay were open only for commercial and industrial use. Garry had requested a permit from the Alaska Department of Transportation, but the answer had been no, with no appeal. So Jim Messer bought our truck in Fairbanks and immediately hired us to deliver a load of spare parts in it to a garage in Prudhoe Bay.

A hundred miles north of the Yukon River, and 350 miles out of Fairbanks, we crossed the Arctic circle and felt that we had truly come up in the world. The trees were gnomish and twisted. From high points in the road, I could see the Alaska pipeline rolling over snowy ridges, heading north. We crossed what seemed to be the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, and then we were plunging down the north slope, running slowly in first gear past signs that read, unnecessarily I thought, “Icy.”

THE FIRST building we saw at Prudhoe Bay was a guard station that led into Standard’s oil fields. We parked by the side of the road and jogged stiffly to the shack. The guards regarded us with suspicion until we asked them to, please, sign our logbooks.

“Hey,” one of the men asked, “are you the guys trying to set that record?”

We admitted that we were.

“There’s a guy from Popular Mechanics looking for you,” the man said.

“Could you, uh, please sign the logbook?” Garry asked. “The, uh, clock is still running.”

The guards conferred among themselves and decided that it was precisely 10:13 on the night of Oct. 22.

Factoring in the five-hour time change from Ushuaia, it had taken us 23 days, 22 hours and 43 minutes to drive from the tip of South America to the edge of the frozen Beaufort Sea in Alaska.

Garry caught my eye. “Another victory,” we said in ragged unison, “for man and machine against time and the elements.” The men in the blue jackets seemed to be amused by our condition.

“So,” one of the guards said, “you guys think you got this record.”

We said we did.

“And how long,” one of them asked, “did it take you?”

“It took,” Garry replied--and I could tell that he just purely loved saying these numbers-- “23 days, 22 hours and 43 minutes.”

The guard stared at us, as if amazed. “What’d you guys do,” he asked, “walk?”