Road Fever Read online

  No, Mark thought Route Zero had to be the end of the road, the last place you could reasonably drive to if you left Des Moines and turned south.

  I stopped back in at the tourist agency and asked Veronica if there was a regular and frequent ferry service from Ushuaia to Puerto Williams. Yes, she said, there was a ferry that runs on Sundays only, but “he is broken.” Veronica spoke English with the most delightful accent. In any case, the broken boat wasn’t a car ferry. Veronica did mention that Garry and I would pass Harberton Ranch on the way to the end of Route Zero and if I was interested in car ferries, I might talk to the manager who, she said solemnly, “has a boat that carries ships.”

  The more I thought about that special boat, the more intrigued I was. A boat that carries ships? Wasn’t that like a car that carries trucks? And why would you put a ship on a boat anyway? Why couldn’t you just pull the ship along behind the boat?

  There were three places in Ushuaia that rented cars. Two didn’t answer their phones. At the third place, I got their last available vehicle: the last car at the last rental station in the last place on earth.

  SATCHEL PAIGE, the great and ageless major-league pitcher, once described the secret of his longevity thus: “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” I couldn’t look back because the last car on earth—a cruel, clattering, two-cylinder beater—didn’t have much in the way of a defogging fan or heater. Occasionally, there was a strangled huff from the one vent under the driver’s side of the windshield. “Uhhhh,” the fan said, and, sometime later, I’d smell, rather than feel, a feeble fetid sigh from the vent. Each breath promised to be the last. It was like waiting for someone to die of halitosis.

  April, in the Southern Hemisphere, is genuinely cruel, the beginning of winter, and we were driving through a steady-falling rain that wanted to be snow. The first snow of winter would be brilliant and joyous, but the temperature was recalcitrant, and it continued to hover inconveniently. Consequently, the rain was sullen and angry, gray, desolate, and moody.

  “Nice day,” Garry said. He was sitting in the passenger seat with his knees bunched up around his chest, and I could see his breath as he spoke.

  There was a fog bank in the backseat that obscured the back window, and, because there were no side mirrors on the last car on earth, I couldn’t tell if anything was gaining on me. I wiped the windshield with the sleeve of my jacket.

  The road was earthen, puddled, and potholed. To the left, mountains rose four thousand feet and more above the Beagle Channel. They were capped with snow, and icy skeins of white ran down the couloirs. There were streams, swollen in the steady rain, that ran alongside the road. Deciduous trees along the creek bottoms were deep into their fall colors of crimson and gold, so that the evergreens among them stood out in bold relief. There was an occasional small lake. The landscape was reminiscent of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State except for the New England intensity of the foliage. In all, this strip of land along the Beagle Channel was a strange mix of those things that are beautiful across the entire northern part of the United States.

  At a place called Rancho Hambre, I turned off Route 3 onto Route J. In Argentina, an estancia is what Americans would call a ranch, and a rancho is a shack. It seemed appropriate to hit Route Zero at a place called Hungry Shack.

  Along the river bottoms, the grass was golden, but, rising up over a hill, we found ourselves in a strange and spectral forest of leafless trees and hanging moss. Farther on, there were areas of pasture where great flights of geese and ducks were massing for the migration north. Cattle, fat as any in Iowa, grazed among the ducks. Sheep wandered along the road and scattered as the car passed them. They were so robust and heavily wooled that they ran in a comical bow-legged fashion.

  This was all part of Estancia Harberton. Established one hundred years ago, Harberton is the oldest ranch in Tierra del Fuego. We stopped to talk with the manager, Tom Goodall. He was a young-looking fellow with a weather-reddened face and an anomalous gray beard.

  It was like talking to any rancher. Prices were down. Times were tough. Because the ranch was a piece of history, Tom had started tourist trips to the place. Out in the bay, I could see a few small boats and a large flat-bottomed barge. I wanted to ask about the amazing boat that carries ships, but Tom started telling me about the barge. It was handmade. He used it to carry his sheep to pastures on nearby islands owned by the ranch.

  “Don’t you have another boat,” I asked, “one that carries …” And then it occurred to me that the “ships” Veronica mentioned were, in fact, sheep. Sheeps, ships. A boat that carries ships. The barge.

  Tom said the road had been finished to Harberton in 1962. When tensions between Chile and Argentina began rising several years ago, it was thought that a road to the military base farther east and south along the Moat Channel would be of strategic significance. There were three islands just to the south of the base—Picton, Lennox, and Nueva—that were in dispute. Fortunately, a few years ago the pope settled this disagreement between these two largely Catholic countries. The road, Tom said, was no longer a priority. Tensions had eased and work was going slowly. It was about twenty miles to the end of the road.

  I had gotten wet in the cold steady rain and now, approaching the last road sign in the world, the heat from my body had combined with cold, sopping clothes to produce a fog bank that encompassed the entire interior of the car.

  “Uhhh,” the dying beater gasped, flatulently.

  Nineteen miles past Harberton, we passed the military road-crew camp, drove over the last bridge in the world, and pushed on through the ungraded soggy mud. Three miles later, the road ended on a hillock, in a ridge of black mud. We stepped out of the car and sank up to our calves in cold mud. Wind-driven rain stung my face. I calculated the road ended at 54 degrees 52 minutes south.

  There was a bulldozer that looked defunct, a small trailer, and a ridge of mud. Nobody was working on such a foul day. Sowerby and I were alone at the end of the road. Directly below the hill, dead ahead, was the sea, roiled and gray. To the right, I could just make out Picton Island through the mist. Beyond Picton, seven hundred and some miles across the gray sea, was Antarctica.

  Garry and I stood shivering at the end of the world. There was nothing to say. Our calculations suggested that we could drive the entire Pan-American Highway in about a month. We’d been to Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and several other South American countries. In a few months we’d visit Central America, where conditions were changing from day to day. The more recent our knowledge of those countries, the better off we’d be. The politics were volatile, but the distances were compressed. (Three days from Nicaragua to Texas, the president said, to hoots of derision. I thought, Three days, huh?)

  So: we’d let winter come and go in the south land, and then, in five or six months, in the southern spring, we’d return.

  I thought about the drive back from the end of the road in the last car in the world. It wouldn’t matter that there were no side mirrors or that I couldn’t see out of the back window. It’s the one thing you say about going to the end of the road: when you start making your way back to civilization, you don’t need the rearview mirror. Ain’t nothing gaining on you.

  Or so I thought.

  THE DEAD COAL CAR’S

  COUNSEL

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  June 1987 • London, England

  ALAN RUSSELL passed a statue of the world’s tallest man, which was across a hallway from a statue of the world’s heaviest man, which was around the corner from a statue of the world’s smallest person, who, judging by the life-sized replica, was about the size of your basic bust of Beethoven. Mr. Russell and I were strolling through the Guinness World of Records, an amusement arcade of sorts located in The Trocadero Centre in London’s West End.

  There were exhibits graphically depicting the jumping ability of fleas (stupendous), kangaroos (don’t hold a candle to fleas), an
d men (pretty punk in comparison). There were videotapes of various incredible human sporting achievements (let’s see a flea—any flea, any five fleas—backlift 2.8 tons off trestles, as Paul Anderson of the United States did on June 12, 1957).

  I had wanted to meet Mr. Russell at the Guinness offices: I had envisioned an oak-paneled boardroom, a library of maps, perhaps a pint of Guinness stout. Unaccountably, the idea seemed to make Alan Russell uncomfortable. He preferred to meet at Guinness World.

  Russell was a sturdy man of fifty, impeccably dressed in a blue pinstriped suit. He carried an elegantly battered leather briefcase and his manner was exceedingly precise. I had the agreeable sense that he was the sort of Englishman whose precision masked an underlying balmy eccentricity. Indeed, London entertainments and tourist attractions generally suggest that the English habit of polite understatement is a rigid necessity, a last-ditch defense against the danger of a great nation falling forever into the abyss of wretched excess.

  Outside, on the winding cobblestone streets leading to a large pedestrian mall outside Guinness World, there were people lining up to buy cut-rate tickets to that night’s performances of the hottest plays in town: Chess or Les Misérables or Starlight Express. The latter was an extravaganza performed entirely by actors on roller skates who represented train engines (and smoking cars and dining cars) from several different nations. The American engine was played by a guy in a leather jacket with greasy black hair and an attitude. He was supposed to be a diesel. There was a full orchestra sequestered under the stage, and the performers sang inspirational songs about striving for railroad excellence as they rocketed through whirling colored spotlights over twisting ramps that snaked through the audience.

  Near the cut-rate-ticket vendor, men of all nationalities could be seen skulking into the LOVE shop, where someone had scrawled the words you pathetic little wanker under a sign on the door advising passersby that the establishment provided entertainment for adults. News shops sold London tabloids that all seemed to feature headlines about plucky grandmothers foiling “sex beasts.” Inside small kiosks lining the mall, British citizens from Pakistan and Jamaica and Hong Kong made change for people from America or Germany or Switzerland: they took dollars or francs or marks and turned them into pounds. People from all over the world used these pounds to enter the Guinness World of Records.

  Alan Russell said he had been editing the Guinness Book of World Records for just over a year. The job was “fascinating and challenging,” though, of course, Russell admitted, “there is always the danger of becoming a record bore.” For instance: “If there are potato chips at a party, you hear yourself reeling off the most stupendously dreary statistics regarding potato-chip consumption. You can become a monotonous pomposity.”

  Mr. Russell said that, in many cases, he personally certified various records. “If a sport or event is governed by an international body, such as in track-and-field events,” he explained, “then that body lays down the rules and ascertains what is a record and what is not. In those cases where an event is not sanctioned by a recognized governing body—such as eating baked beans with a cocktail stick—then we lay down the rules. In this case, the record is held by Karen Stevenson, who, on the fourth of April 1981, ate two thousand seven hundred and eighty cold baked beans in thirty minutes. We do not accept hot baked beans because we have to have a standard. Hot beans can shrink or expand. The beans must be stuck on the cocktail stick and eaten one at a time.”

  Mr. Russell and I contemplated this achievement for a few moments. “That would be, what, about ninety baked beans a minute,” I said, striving for an English sense of precision in excess.

  Alan Russell allowed that Karen Stevenson must have had a very fast hand indeed. “It works out to one point five four baked beans a second. You see, we no longer accept duration gluttony records. We have established time limits for eating events.”

  Mr. Russell said that there were many records that he knew about that didn’t make the book for one reason or another. “Sometimes we don’t have the space. If I put every record I knew about in the book, I’d be writing twenty-four volumes every year. To be included in the book, a record must be interesting and preferably based on some sort of international competition. Another reason is pure subjective opinion, which is a writer’s and an editor’s choice. It’s your right to omit, oh …”

  “The loudest fart,” I suggested.

  “Precisely. I wouldn’t approve it. Another one, a supreme example, is the world’s youngest mother. I won’t even give you the details on this one. Tragic, tragic. This is the sort of fact that is fascinating in a medical journal, of course, but a lot of children worldwide read the Guinness Book of Records. I do not want to encourage some child to break that record.

  “And today I turned down a record from America. Someone wanted to see how many grapes he could put in his mouth without swallowing them. I refused that one. There are many reasons. First, it’s medically dangerous. Grapes could get stuck in the throat. Secondly, who is going to measure the grapes? Should it be done on weight or on the size of the grapes? One has got to find a universal standard. Third, the person has got to spit them out afterward and someone has to actually count them. A pretty horrific job.”

  As we strolled through the exhibits, Mr. Russell said that “people should realize we very often have to change the rules and invent new rules in a category. We have to anticipate problems. Very often, records change because of changes in the world that are beyond control. We have, for instance, a record for driving across America, coast-to-coast. There is, of course, a nationwide speed limit of fifty-five miles an hour, so there is a limit to how fast the drive may be done. We will not accept anybody who gets a speeding ticket. I will not require people to break the law to get into the Guinness Book of Records. That is ethically very, very wrong indeed. But what has happened in America recently—I just got a telex from my American editor—is that federal law now says that people may drive ten miles an hour faster in certain areas. So rules change.

  “Sometimes, in fact, we change the rules ourselves. Just in the past year, for instance, there has been a very serious competition for a record in rope jumping. Skipping rope with a team of ninety on the same rope. How many turns can the team do? Now, I don’t know whether the concept started here in the UK or in Japan, but Japan is a very big skipping country. They hold a lot of skipping records. And battle was waged between Japan and Britain over this team of ninety. I was speaking to some Japanese recently, trying to analyze this from a physiological point of view, and I realized that some of the teams are now so disciplined that they will be able to push this record further and further, depending on the strength of the people turning the rope. Very strenuous. And it occurred to me that soon they’d be changing the rope turners. So I’ve specified that the rope must be turned by the same two people for the duration of the record attempt.”

  “There is a Japanese edition of the book?”

  “At present,” Mr. Russell said, “we have editions in thirty languages. I write the book in London. A team of editors decide what we will and will not accept as a record. Now, we put two types of records in the British edition: world records and British records. Americans may not be interested in some of the British records. Say, records set in the sport of cricket. But they will be interested in baseball records. The Japanese will also be interested in baseball records, but with an emphasis on baseball as played in Japan.

  “Foreign editors have the right to put those categories in their own books because their own national records are of interest to them. They also have the right to leave out a record they feel is not appropriate to them. But if any country wants to claim a world record for something, it must be authenticated in London. We are the only people who make that final decision.”

  “So people all over the world read the book,” I said.

  And Alan Russell, who knew the dangers of becoming a record bore, simply couldn’t help himself. “It is,” he said, “the
largest-selling book in the world. Actually it is the largest-selling ‘copyrighted’ book in the world. We do bow down to the Bible, which is the largest-selling book in the world. The Bible, however,” Mr. Russell said, with his customary regard for accuracy, “is not copyrighted.”

  The book itself—or at least the incipient idea for it—was born in Ireland, on a place called the North Slob, near the river Slaney. On the afternoon of November 10, 1951, the late Sir Hugh Beaver raised his shotgun, fired at a passing golden plover, and missed. Beaver, a good shot, declared that the plover must be the fastest game bird in Europe. That evening, Sir Hugh ransacked his reference library and discovered that it was impossible to ascertain which game bird flew the fastest.

  Nearly three years later, in August of 1954, the argument arose again, this time in relation to grouse. Sir Hugh was the managing director of Guinness, the makers of a black and ambrosial stout bearing that name. In this capacity, he was familiar with social interactions in the 81,400 pubs of Britain and Ireland. These were places where people sometimes disagreed about the velocity of bird flight and other subjects of note. There was, however, no book with which to settle arguments about records. Guinness, Sir Hugh decided, might publish such a book in the interest of public relations.

  On September 12, 1954, Sir Hugh asked Norris and Ross McWhirter to produce the first Guinness Book of World Records. The brothers were former track-and-field athletes who had published a sports magazine. The first Guinness Book had a plastic cover to protect it from the sort of spills that happen frequently in pubs, especially toward closing time. The 198-page edition was a number-one best-seller in six months. By 1986, worldwide sales amounted to fifty-three million, which, the Guinness Book itself proclaims, is equivalent to 118 stacks of books, each as high as Mount Everest.