`Road Fever’ an adventure on wheels

ROAD FEVER, by Tim Cahill, Random House, 278 pages, $17.95.

Once you’ve set records like driving around the world in 77 days, and driving from the tip of Africa to the most northerly point in Europe, what do you do for an encore?

For “adventure driver” Garry Sowerby of Moncton, New Brunswick, who holds both of the above records, the answer was obvious: Drive from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska — a distance of 15,000 miles — with the aim of breaking the record of 26 days, as acknowledged by the “Guinness Book of World Records.”

Sowerby had driven a GMC Suburban in his African odyssey, and although it had gotten shot up pretty good by bandits in northern Kenya, vehicle and driver had made it to their destination to bring GMC reams of good publicity.

In January 1987 General Motors needed an eyecatching promotional stunt for its new Sierra pickup, which represented a $2.8 billion redesign of the old workhorse (“It’s not just a truck anymore.”) Sowerby was only too happy to oblige, suggesting the Pan-American run. Cahill went along to write the story of the adventure, and to help drive.

For the record, the guys made the drive in 23 days, 22 hours and 43 minutes and their names are now in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” along with a photograph. But don’t worry — I haven’t spoiled the story for you by telling you the outcome. The fun was in getting there — especially in bribing their way through the South American leg, and through Central America’s various war zones — and this is where the meat of the story lies.

Cahill writes in a breezy style that puts you in the cab with these two hot tickets, red-eyed and given to occasional steep mood swings from lack of sleep and a diet or ersatz coffee and powdered milkshakes that would give pause to the most hopeless junk food junkie.

This is not your basic travelogue, although Cahill throws in enough interesting historical notes to keep a guy off guard. No, this is an adventure story, wherein our heroes cross mountain peaks in blizzard conditions, traverse the world’s driest desert, navigate muddy jungle trails and worry constantly about bandits, the heavy-handed methods of banana republic bureaucrats susceptible to bribes, and winding up on the wrong side of dope runners, revolutionaries and/or the local constabulary.

Here they are in Costa Rica’s notorious bus-plunge country driving over the notorious “Mountain of Death” at night:

“We were crawling through a fog as thick as porridge on an uphill stretch. There were three big trucks ahead of us and we were probably making all of six or seven miles an hour when a new Toyota pickup truck pulled out and passed all four of us on a blind uphill curve, in the fog…”

Not long afterward they rounded a curve at the 10,000-foot level and came upon two trucks and a car that had pulled over. Men were shining flashlights into a void where several trees had been snapped off at their trunks. Silence. No explosion, no flames. Nothing but empty space.

“So the driver who had passed on a blind uphill curve in the fog had taken a 10-thousand foot dive into the Atlantic from the top of the Mountain of Death. There was a strange absence of emotion about this. I looked down into the black void and felt insubstantial, nebulous.”

After the Perils-of-Pauline encounters south of the Mexican border, the run from Texas to Alaska was a breeze. The guys had nothing much to do except fine-tune their historic statement to whatever elements of the shivering press might be waiting at the guard shack on the edge of Standard Oil Co.’s Prudhoe Bay fields: “Another victory for man and machine against time and the elements.”

Not exactly Neil Armstrong first-man-on-the-moon stuff, perhaps, but not bad, either.

Kent Ward is the NEWS associate managing editor.