Road Fever by Tim Cahill

Author:Tim Cahill [Cahill, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80937-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

BEYOND THE HOUSE

OF PORK

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September 30–October 2, 1987

GARRY WOKE UP about midnight. He made himself a cup of instant coffee using the heating coil and bottled water. The coil was made for boiling eight ounces of water at a time and it did that quite nicely, but gave up entirely when confronted by quarts. We would, out of relentless necessity, live on coffee, beef jerky, and milk shakes.

Garry needed two cups of coffee and twenty minutes to wake up. He took the wheel, and I sat up for a while in the passenger seat. It was my duty, before I retired, to note driving conditions on a yellow pad. I was also to mark our route on the current map with a dark marking pencil. This information went on the clipboard that was stuck low on the driver’s side windshield with a suction cup. I thought of this device as the suckerboard.

I wrote that there had been intermittent drizzles, nothing serious, and that if he found himself in the town of Comodoro Rivadavia, he had missed the westward turn to Sarmiento. If he felt good at Sarmiento, the road we wanted continued on to a place called Esquel.

I ate a hardy dinner of beef jerky washed down with two nourishing chocolate milk shakes, and crawled into the back to sleep. The extended cab was not wide enough to stretch out in, but not so narrow that sleeping required an entirely fetal contortion.

It seemed to me, in drowsy repose, that I had been oversensitive about my driving. There was, I realized, more arrogance in my technique than competence. What was that all about? Sociologists, I supposed, would natter on about motor vehicles and male appendages. Was it that simple?

I knew people who would say so. As a young reporter, I had been assigned to cover a number of women’s meetings in Berkeley, California, during the early seventies. The women who chaired the meetings called themselves feminists, but it seemed that, stripped of rhetoric, the female persons in question just purely hated men. The meetings were so disagreeable that one of those angry women immediately took up figurative residence in a cobwebbed, contrary corner of my psyche. In certain bad moments, when I am consumed by self-doubt, I get to hear her merciless and hateful rasping. “Little boy thought he could drive, got his feelings hurt, and now he has to worry about his little thingy.”

The truth was that Garry was a professional driver and that he was better behind the wheel than I was. It stood to reason and had nothing at all to do with the size of my thingy.

In the ALCAN race, for instance, after five thousand miles, Garry Sowerby had placed eighth in a field of twenty-nine. He was driving a nine-thousand-pound Suburban with a diesel engine. Most of the other vehicles were sports cars costing in excess of $40,000.

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