Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 90
Speaking of which, the restaurant where we were stalled was halfway along a mile of road between an Apache reservation and a liquor store. The Apaches coming from the reservation paid no attention to us. But the Apaches returning from the liquor store found our huffing and puffing of gasoline fascinating. After an hour we had a John Wayne movie’s worth of Apaches surrounding us. Whether they considered us harmless lunatics or thought the opportunity to sniff Mobil premium was a prize worth capturing we could not determine. In fact, we couldn’t get much dialogue going with the Apaches at all. Every now and then one would come from the liquor store to our engine bay and announce, “Me, Indian.” Then he would act like I had and giggle and get sick. (I realize that “Indian” was, even in 1977, not the sensitive term of ethnic description. But my code of journalistic ethics forbids me from reporting that any Apache said, “Me, Native American.”)
Humphrey found a length of radiator hose, which he put over the fuel filler neck and blew into. What this was supposed to do I don’t know, but it certainly made him look funny. More Apaches giggled and got sick. After that Humphrey insisted on taking the fuel pump apart. I’d never seen the inside of a fuel pump. (It isn’t wildly interesting.) Humphrey claimed that the fuel pump was doing all a fuel pump should. He put it back together. Giggling, sick Apaches were closing in. I tried the starter and the engine caught and ran like nothing had happened, thank God.
We got out of Cuba, over the continental divide, and into the huge Navajo reservation that takes up almost a quarter of Arizona. The landscape opened up, impossibly vast and void, and it dawned on us, for the first time really, that when the next thing broke we might be in serious trouble. We’d go forty or fifty miles without seeing another car and the Buick was overheating worse than ever. We’d bought a five-gallon jerry can in Tucumcari and whenever the gauge went all red we’d stop and one of us would get out and splash down the radiator while the driver gunned the engine. This would hold us for two hours, or one hour in the midday heat, or ten minutes on an uphill grade. We had no business being away from the amenities and attentions of the interstate in this car. We knew that. But we’d started out driving on the back roads because the Buick couldn’t make turnpike speed, and these little bypaths had been so quaint and charming in their primitive way, and with such quaint, charming people and so many quaint, charming places to break down in front of and buy beer in that we’d forgotten ourselves and now we were in a real piece of Americana indeed.
Between Kayenta and the Grand Canyon we went a hundred miles without seeing any sign of human life besides each other—and the signs of life in these two humans seemed precarious. Then the sun went down and for the first time since we’d left Florida the temperature fell below seventy degrees. All of a sudden the Buick was a different car. It seemed to exude an aura of strength and dependability, almost as if it might run forever. I was driving, so I put my foot down and—in a Dynaflo way—we took off. If I pushed the old Buick enough past fifty mph all the jitterbug and hootchie-kootchie in the front end went away. Maybe Humphrey was right about “suspension harmonics” (whatever they may be), at least on smooth pavement. And upon smooth pavement we were. We went sixty-five, seventy, eighty miles an hour down these twisting roads, whipping along for all the world like a freshly minted Mercedes-Benz.
We were pulling out onto Route 89 just over the Utah border when some fellow in a late 1960s Datsun Fairlady roadster, of all things, buzzed by doing eighty-five or so, and I lit out, lumbering after him. It was wholly dark by then, and a misty night, and I wonder what the guy thought when he saw that wall of chrome well up in his rearview mirror. He was being overtaken by the past. And the past went by at a hundred miles per hour with door handles higher than his head and two inches of travel left under the accelerator. For me it was a truly exhilarating moment of rapport between man and machine. Then we got vapor lock and the engine conked out.
Monday, July 4
Utah to Las Vegas
We had to go almost a hundred miles up into Utah to find motel rooms. I celebrated America’s birthday by awaking in a condition that those who’ve spent much of their lives on the road in America will recognize. I had no idea where I was. I looked around the anonymous room and there was nothing—no notepad, no matches, no phone book, no area code on the phone—to indicate my location. I turned on the TV. It wasn’t working. Usually such disorientation is momentary, or, at worst, you just can’t remember the name of the woman snoring next to you. But there was no woman in this case, and my amnesia lasted through shit, shower, and shave. I was beginning to suspect I’d died in my sleep and gone to motel purgatory when I thought to open the door. There was the Buick. Purgatory was not an option.
It was raining. The Buick wouldn’t start for a while. Something had gotten wet under the hood and we had to wait for the rain to let up and mop around under there with a motel towel before we got it going. Ten miles down the road it began to rain again and we discovered that we didn’t have any windshield wipers. We’d been hearing obscene sucking noises from the brake pedal for a couple of days and we knew there was a problem somewhere in all the tubes and hoses of the Buick’s Medusa-head vacuum assist mechanism. But everything seemed to work and we didn’t realize that the windshield wipers ran off this system too. I could get the blades to move a little when we were headed uphill and acceleration increased the vacuum pressure. But downhill deceleration did the opposite. The only way to maintain any vacuum pressure at all was to keep my right foot pressed on the accelerator while using my left foot to try to slow down. Since the drum brakes on a ‘56 Buick are about three times more effective in front than they are in the rear, the back wheels began to slip around. It was not a recipe for safe driving. And, naturally, we were treated to clearing skies up every incline and drenching squalls down every slope until we got back into the desert and began to overheat.
We played it safe through Arizona and Nevada, sticking to Interstate 15 almost to Las Vegas. Then Humphrey insisted that he had to see the Valley of Fire. So we filled the jerry can and headed down a maze of gravel roads into that red sandstone wasteland. I suppose it’s very beautiful, if you think you’re going to live to tell anybody about it. We were completely alone, and it was 110 degrees in the shade. I was sure that when they found us—our bones picked clean by whatever it is that bothers to live out here—they’d think we were left over from some 1956 Vegas mob slaying. And we did manage to get lost. To add irony to probable death, we’d had a CB radio with us all along. But we’d kept forgetting to have it installed. It was a glum moment out there in the desert when Humphrey and I realized we would not be able to figure out how to connect that radio. Not, literally, for the life of us.
Fortunately we got unlost. Then I decided there was a quicker way to get to Las Vegas than the interstate and we got lost again for a while. Quite a while, actually, so that when we pulled over the top of one more hill and saw the city glistening below us we were almost out of gas, completely out of water, and totally out of patience with each other.
Dirty, half-naked, and our car covered with dust and grit, we weren’t sure they’d take us in at the Sands. But the doorman had “had one just like it” and bent our ears for twenty minutes about how nothing ever went wrong with a ‘56 Buick.
Humphrey and I drank a few drinks in the lobby bar. I went to my room, exhausted. Humphrey ordered a nightcap. This apparently turned into a morning sombrero. (He was drinking tequila sunrises.) I came out of my room early in the a.m. and there was Humphrey, more or less where I’d left him, but now accompanied by two scantily sequined young ladies of the type who may be said to have “a rich and varied social life.” I must say they were quaint and charming in their primitive way, and each was a real piece of Americana.
Tuesday, July 5
Las Vegas to Los Angeles
There’s a 2,400-foot climb up the Barstow incline on the California–Nevada border, and we knew that if we didn’t make it before ten in the morning we wouldn’t make it at all. So I had to pry Humphrey away from his bosom buddies and pour him into the car. Besides, we were three days overdue in LA and practically broke. (Humphrey had been luckier in love than at craps.)
Somehow we made it to Barstow without seizing up. The temperature gauge was half in the red at exactly fifty miles per hour and if I went even two miles per hour faster the radiator began to boil from engine heat while if I went two miles per hour slower the radiator began to boil from lack of cooling air.
Humphrey was flopping all over in his sleep, flailing at me and falling against the steering wheel. Once, when we were completely boxed in—trucks fore and aft and a car in the left lane—his leg shot out and he stamped on my accelerator foot. We would have crashed if I hadn’t given him a swift kick and caused him to curl up on the seat.
It had taken eleven days to cross the country, and we’d had some kind of breakdown every one of those days except this last one. When we got to LA we missed Sargent’s home address, went to turn around, and reverse gear gave out. Gave out completely—the Buick couldn’t even be pushed backward in neutral. We had to make a circle through the neighborhood and come back to Sargent’s house.
I suppose I still love old Buicks. I remember thinking I probably wouldn’t try to drive another across the whole grocery store, A&P, Atlantic to Pacific. And I never have. And I never have found out how Tom Sargent got that car out of his driveway.
A Better Land than This
(1984)
Michael Nesmith had been racing in the Baja 1000 for several years and I’d accompanied his team in 1982. Indy 500 legend Parnelli Jones described the Baja off-road race as “like being in an all-day plane crash.” In 1983 I was part of a Car and Driver magazine road test where we attempted to take five sport sedans the length of the Baja peninsula and destroyed three of them. Baja California was a bad place to race and a worse place to test sport sedans. Therefore, Michael and I reasoned, it would be a swell place for a romantic getaway. Michael invited his then wife Kathryn and I invited my then girlfriend Elena to go on an “off-road road trip.” We would take two four-wheel-drive vehicles down the Baja, for fun, attempting to avoid all pavement while camping out along the way. I’m not blaming the Baja for Michael’s divorce or my breakup. But …
I talked the then extant American Motors Corporation (I’m not blaming the Baja …) into loaning us a pair of their products—a newly introduced SUV model, the Cherokee, and a Jeep CJ with a pickup bed, the Scrambler.
We took these to Michael’s race garage in LA. We (by “we” I mean Michael and his mechanics) reinforced the suspensions, bolted in extra spares, fitted the Cherokee with a safari-style roof rack and an electric winch, and wired each Jeep with a set of four auxiliary lights. When the lights were switched on they lit the garage like a Los Alamos A-bomb test.
Mexico has only one brand of gasoline, Pemex, owned by the government. Quality and supply are the same as they would be if the U.S. Post Office was also the gas station. We installed thirty-gallon gas tanks, added backup fuel filters, and packed a case of octane booster.
We also packed oil, coolant, extra radiator hoses and fan belts, a tow strap, jumper cables, fire extinguishers, several sets of wrenches, a shovel, and an air compressor, plus tents, sleeping bags, coolers, twenty gallons of American water, a camp stove, dried food, a compass, two-way radios, piles of maps and guidebooks, and four snake-bite kits.
In retrospect this strikes me as three snake-bite kits too many. I mean, once I’ve had to use one snake-bite kit I’m out of there. Hello medevac, good-bye me. On the other hand there was no medevac in the Baja. While you’re treating yourself with the first snake-bite kit, I guess the same snake could sneak up and bite you three more times. Even so, for the sake of our love lives, Michael and I would have been better off replacing a couple of the snake-bite kits with a pair of small blue boxes from Tiffany & Co.
Larger gifts from Tiffany wouldn’t have fit. The Jeeps were so full that we had to leave a lot of things behind, but only the things we’d be needing. It took us from morning until late afternoon to pack the Jeeps with the other things. On the first day of our journey we made it to Huntington Beach.
On the second day, Tuesday, May 8, we entered Mexico at Tecate and took Route 2 east along the border to the Mesa del Pinal, the pine forests on the western slope of the Juárez Mountains. Here we turned off the road. Forty miles south was Laguna Hanson, the Baja’s only lake.
We were lost two hundred yards from the pavement. Lumber is scarce in Baja, and Mesa del Pinal is webbed with woodcutters’ roads. Once a way is cleared in the desert it stays clear. The woodcutters’ roads overlaid four centuries of cattle trails, mining cuts, Indian paths, and missionary pack routes—all still open to passage, mainly by us. We’d left the compass behind.
Still, it was a beautiful afternoon, sun lighting up the stands of trees, air redolent with incense cedar, piñon pine, sage, and gasoline. I stopped the Scrambler. Gas was pouring out of our custom-fitted tank. A little nest of vent tubes designed to meet some U.S. air pollution regulation had come undone. We would dribble gas the rest of the trip.
Michael got under the car. Elena walked off to photograph the scenery. These uplands look inviting, like Devonshire pastures, but the flapjack-shaped nopal cactus has tiny spines that must be removed by depilatory waxing. Cholla cactus spines are large, barbed, and nearly unextractable. And cholla branches detach so easily they’re said to throw themselves at people. Elena was back in a minute.
We kept driving around in the pines. The sun was setting. We got out all our maps. No two agreed on anything. “Laguna Hanson,” I read aloud from one of the guidebooks, “is named for an American ranch manager who was murdered there.”
We got back in the Jeeps and Elena confessed she’d never spent a night outdoors. I looked over and saw her knuckles gleaming white on the grab handle. I explained that there was nothing to worry about. We had enough food and water to spend weeks lost in the piney woods. Furthermore, Elena had been born in Havana. “You speak the local lingo,” I said.
“Are we going to die?” she asked.
We couldn’t find any place to pitch camp except the dry washes. These are poor campsites because livestock wander up and down them all night except when they drown during flash floods. A stake bed truck passed by full of drunk and yelling ranch hands. “You see,” I told Elena, “we’re not that far from civilization. What are they yelling?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
We found the highway again about eleven p.m. We’d penetrated maybe twenty miles into the wilderness.
The Juárez range had climbed gradually from the Pacific, but to the east the descent was immediate. The road peeled down a giant bluff in frenetic switchbacks. There were no shoulders on the highway. Cliffs rose without preamble from one edge of the asphalt and dropped like ruined stockbrokers from the other. Guardrails were few and there were no dents in them, just large holes punched straight through. The only traffic at midnight was enormous diesel trucks doing eighteen-wheel drifts through the turns at seventy miles an hour or, worse, going ten miles an hour in both lanes with their lights out. Clusters of memorial crosses decorated every curve. Sweat greased my palms. My knees shook. I looked at Elena. She lived in New York. Apparently she equated being back on pavement with urban security. Lulled by the familiar noise of honking horns and squealing brakes, she was asleep.
We reached flat land at Mexicali and drove into a fog of chemical spray and fertilizer stink rising from the irrigation canals. We rushed across the border and checked into an American motel.
We were ashamed of ourselves in the morning and returned to Mexico immediately, driving south on the San Felipe road into the delta of the Colorado River. For years Mexico had been arguing with the United States about Colorado water rights. During the Carter administration a treaty had been signed and the United States agreed to divert less of the Colorado’s flow. But the Mexican government hadn’t completed its channel dredging operations in time. The land Mexico was eager to irrigate was now under four feet of water.
Farther south was El Desierto de los Chinos, the desert of the Chinamen, where nothing grew at all. To the east was a wide salt flat, an eerie mirage of bright sunlight on still water. To the west was sand as bright as the salt, rising to shining hills that merged with brilliant sky, which arched back to the salt’s glare until the whole landscape pinwheeled. The temperature was 120 degrees.
About 1900 a group of Chinese immigrants set out across this desert, hoping to find work in the United States. They paid a Mexican guide $100 to lead them. He said he knew where the water holes were. Halfway between San Felipe and the Colorado delta the guide admitted he didn’t. They all died, including the Mexican. (Leaving us to wonder how we know the story.)
At El Chinero, where the bodies were buried, we turned west up the San Matias pass, which divided the Sierra Juárez from the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, the highest range in the Baja. Six thousand feet up in these peaks, a hundred miles from any city, and separated from the road by twenty miles of crag and gorge was a hacienda with a dirt air strip and guest rooms: Mike’s Sky Ranch.
Michael and I had been eager to get into bad terrain. We were anxious to try our expensive car modifications. The handcrafted dual front shock-absorber mounts on the Cherokee came loose immediately. Then there was an ugly noise from the Scrambler. I stopped. Water was pouring out of the radiator. One fan blade had bent double and sliced an arc out of the radiator core.
In the Baja 1000 race they attribute such accidents to a special gremlin, the Baja Monster. They say the Baja Monster makes things go wrong no one ever heard of going wrong before. I’d certainly never seen this happen to a fan blade. Actually, like most remote places, the Baja was supposed to have a monster. Tibet had the Yeti. The Rockies had Sasquatch. And the monster reported by early travelers in Baja was, rather sadly, Zorillo the rabid skunk.
