Road Fever Read Online Free Page A

1977–78. He too had felt compelled to go to the end of the road, which at that time was at Lapataia, a bit west and a few miles south of Ushuaia. Mark had stayed on in Ushuaia: for three-and-a-half years he worked for the American National Science Foundation as deputy director of ITT Antarctic Services, and was relief captain of a research ship,
Hero
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    Mark, clearly, knew his way around the southern tip of South America, and, as an American, he wasn’t blinded by national pride in regard to assessing precisely where the road ends. Mark pointed out that Tierra del Fuego was an island, separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan. The true end of the continent was Cape Froward, a hundred miles north, in Chile.
    Still, Tierra del Fuego looked like the end of the road on the map, it felt like the end of the road, and there was emotional resonance to the idea. A regular and frequent ferry service, for instance, across the Strait of Magellan (it runs twelve hours a day), connects the island to the mainland, and Mark felt that such a ferry was a de facto bridge. “Looking for the end of the road,” he said, “is an exercise in banging your head against the wall.” He mentioned a road he knew of on King George Island, just off the Antarctic Peninsula. The road runs from the Chilean air force base there to the Uruguayan base to the Chinese Great Wall Station. It is two-and-a-half-miles long. Did you include these little bits and pieces of roads?
    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.
    S ATCHEL P AIGE , 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