Peking to Paris Read online

  “Just now,” she says, explaining that they came upon their friends Richard and Jill whose 1929 Bentley had broken down, and decided to stay in the desert with them to ensure they were OK. “It was such fun,” she tells me. “We took out our stoves, made tea and broth, had tinned fish and biscuits.

  “Weren’t you worried about the storm?”I ask, incredulous that someone could have met adversity with such a blithe spirit.

  “Not at all. One of the marshals managed to find us and told us to stay put. So we knew someone other than us knew where we were. When the storm blew out, you should have seen the stars. It was marvelous.”

  “Sybil, what about your Gold?” I ask her, knowing that Nick, like Bernard, has his heart set on one. In my humble opinion and disregarding the affection I already feel for this couple, I’ve already decided theirs is the most beautiful car on the Rally. It’s the color of a precious gem and has the long, slender, lightweight lines of a greyhound, as compared to Roxanne’s more ponderous St. Bernard frame. It deserves to win a Gold medal.

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s gone. But, you know, that’s OK. Now we can relax and enjoy the Rally.” Then, our eyes catching, we both say, “Maybe!”

  I’m about to fill her in on our experience when Bernard arrives. I can see clearly now that his eyelid is swollen and red. In as offhanded a manner as possible I say, “Perhaps the Rally doctor has some suggestion for you.” Since the doctor’s not married to Bernard, I’m hoping his opinion will carry more weight than mine. We wander through camp, looking for cars of people we know, noticing that barely half the Rally made it in before the storm. Some have tents next to them that look like squashed fruit, the owners having given up on inserting the support poles in the proper places. The storm clearly hit everyone with a knockout punch, and we seem to be the only ones stirring. Where the rest of the Rally is, who knows, and I silently bless Bernard for getting us through yesterday. Near the edge of camp we finally find the doctor’s van. Its hood is smashed, the windshield shattered out, and the roof a crumpled mess. “My god, Cyclops, I hope they’re OK,” I say.

  “Well, somebody put up their tent, so they must be,” he grumps, in no mood for jokes.

  It seems unkind to knock on their tent flap at this early hour. Back at our tent, Bernard dabs at his eye with a damp tissue. When we do finally find the doctor in the dining tent, all in one piece, but with hands shaking as he pours himself a mug of coffee, Bernard lifts his face with its red, swollen eye and asks his advice. “I can check it further this evening,” he’s curt, sounds frazzled, as I would if I’d survived a launch and flip in the Gobi. “Meantime, if you have some antibiotic drops, that’s what I’d prescribe.” The scorecard lights up. We’re even.

  Giving Up Gold

  SAYNSHAND-ULAANBAATAR

  We grab a few rolls off the breakfast table and head out. There’s Roxanne to tend to and only one mechanic in Saynshand. “Having the number 84 is really a liability,” I say to Bernard as we’re packing the car. “I mean, if we’re to toe the line and leave at our sanctioned time every day, we’ll always be leaving an hour and a half later than we could. We’re up at 6:30. We could even leave at 7:30, if they’d count that as legal. But no. We have to wait till they say we can go.” My natural impatience, so successfully tamped down while the going was easy, is asserting itself with vigor. “How can we ever get to a repair shop, make our start time and still get in at a reasonable hour?”

  “That’s right,” is Bernard’s terse response, which doesn’t answer my question. He’s angry, at himself for the shock absorber calculation error he seems to have made, and at the Greeley mechanics who, by procrastinating on their tasks, made it impossible for us to stress test our car before departure. We passed the lone mechanic’s shop on our way in last night, and so we know that it’s as small as a horse stall and, if the shabby exterior is any indication, minimally equipped. If we’re not the first ones there, it could be many hours before the sole mechanic is able to tend to our needs. “When would we be allowed to clock out if we stayed?” he asks me.

  “Today it’d be about 10:30, because Car 1 is scheduled to leave at 9:00. If they’re even here.”

  “That’s impossible. We can’t wait till 10:30. We’d never be able to get Roxanne repaired and finish the drive to Ulaanbaatar! Come on. Let’s get going.” Bernard’s aggravation at objective rally rules is a good indication of how unhappy he is. The MTC isn’t even open when we leave. If it had been, we could have clocked out early, simply receiving penalty minutes. As it is, we won’t be recorded as having clocked out at all. This is a grave matter, since only those recorded as leaving every morning, and of course passing through every time control and running every time trial, can stay in the running for Gold. I feel profoundly sad for Bernard. At the same time, I know that the decision to focus on fixing Roxanne at the expense of the Gold is the right thing, the practical thing, to do. In this sense, it, too, is the Bernard thing to do. I keep to myself how relieved I also feel that the competitive edge required of me if we’re going for a Gold is no longer expected.

  Saynshand’s mechanic chooses this particular morning to sleep in. Roxanne’s problems are a pressing matter only to us, of course, and it’s a long, frustrating hour before he shows up. When he does, he rubs his bleary eyes in disbelief. Watching him, I can’t tell whether he’s seeing his fondest dream or his worst nightmare come to life. During the time we’ve been waiting, six other Rally cars have pulled in behind us on the greasy concrete in front of his shop. This is more business than he sees in a month. Perhaps more than he sees in a year. Their presence is the main reason why we did not dare do the half hour drive back to the MTC to clock out properly. To do so would have meant giving up our spot. We thank goodness we’re early risers and therefore can claim first dibs on the mechanic.

  Bernard is at the man’s side in an instant. After a brief palaver in sign language embellished by the limited number of English words they know in common, the mechanic disappears into the grimy recesses of his shop. I hear the scraping of a chair, a box fall, some clanking and then he’s back. Allowing ourselves to puff up a bit with hope, we turn to the mechanic to see what he’s found. Roxanne is a hefty girl, and it’ll take some substantial metal to repair her. Like a child offering to share his favorite candy, the mechanic extends his hands toward Bernard. In his cupped palms are unburied treasure, a modest selection of small metal bits and pieces he’s saved over the years. His eyes are hopeful and apologetic. Thus we learn that, in a country where horses still outnumber motorized transport, and where most of the latter are small motorcycles, there are few steel scraps to choose from.

  Bernard sighs and smiles. We are good at reading each other’s expressions, and his eyes convey that none of these really will do. He pokes through them anyway, turning the pieces over, hefting them to assess their mass, admiring them to give the mechanic encouragement, eventually picking out the stoutest of the flimsy options. The mechanic amazes us, doing more with a handmade welding torch jury-rigged with suspect threads of frayed cable than many American body shops do with all their fancy acetylene gadgets. He’s so thorough it takes him four hours, during which time some of the six other Rally crews borrow his tools and get to work on their cars themselves; others give up and leave. By the time he’s done, the rest of the Rally is long gone. That includes the Rally mechanics, the ones who check the road for cars in trouble and who stay out late to make sure everyone’s made it to the day’s destination. Ahead lay seven hours of rough track to Ulaanbaatar and the end of that day’s trek. We are well and truly alone in the Gobi.

  As we drive out of town, looking for the prescribed telegraph poles to guide us, we see a dead Rally car perched on a dune. It’s a turquoise blue 1930 Delage D6L. Queued up behind it are two other vehicles, which I’m able to identify by their competition numbers. One’s a canary yellow 1927 Rolls Royce 20 Tourer, the other a 1931 Ford Model A. The car teams loaf about in the sand, looking broadly pleased with themselves. Th
e object of their ardor is a local transport truck backed up at roughly dune height. It has a wide cargo bay that’s at least twenty-five feet long, with walls of wood slats painted sky blue. They’ve found a way to get to Ulaanbaatar without having to drive, and they’re thrilled about it. The problem is that the truck driver does not have ramps to span the empty space between the bed and the car that needs to be loaded. Assembled townsfolk mill about, admiring the cars, hoping for some action. The men divide up, rolling up their sleeves, joshing in that masculine way that conveys they do not consider lack of ramps an obstacle. Four go to the back to push, two others hunch under each front fender, ready to heave upwards, and one leaps into the truck bed where he grabs the hauling end of a coarse rope. To a raised cry and chant, they push, shoulder, and pull that car into the bed. This strikes me as the way to go.

  “Bernard, it’s a long way to UB. Maybe we should let a truck take us?” I say, my voice quaking. As far as I’m concerned, if a truck could take us all the way to Paris I’d be happy. The Gobi is so big, so wide and empty—so endlessly burnt and brown—and I am so small and unimportant by comparison. It’s too dismaying to say this aloud, but it seems the greater the vastness, the weaker my assurance. If only to humor me, Bernard stops next to the truck. We ask how long it would take to haul our car to UB. The driver draws a one and a two in the sand. Twelve hours. That’s after a truck has been found to accommodate us, since the present long-bed truck is full. Even to me that seems too much.

  “Dina, we can make it,” Bernard says. “We’ll be fine.” I’ve seen the look in his eyes at the mechanic’s, and I know this isn’t strictly true. If Bernard can fake that everything’s OK, I will rise to the occasion and fake it, too. “OK,” I say. “So, let’s go.”

  I hide my jagged nerves by forcing myself to speak directions in a calm voice, but I’m besieged by the notion that we are by ourselves in this wild, lonely place in a car that’s not running well. I start to make navigation errors. The more I make, the more nervous I get. “Bernard, I think we’ve gone off track,” I finally say. The amount of pride I have to swallow to say this is so large it nearly blocks my throat. After four days of getting us where we needed to go, a part of me was starting to think I might be able to manage the remaining 7,000 miles to Paris flawlessly. Now, though, we have come to a stop on a promontory with a great view over a whole lot of nothing, except that to get to it, we’d have to descend the slope below which is strewn with major boulders. I know I’m a Gobi novice, but even to me it doesn’t seem probable that anyone would plan for us to slalom downhill through those obstacles. I cringe, waiting for recriminations to start, as they have in years past when Bernard and I have gotten lost on the road. I’m expecting to be given a stern lecture about how I should have spoken up sooner, looked around better, used my sense of direction. I would be unable to explain that I’d thought I’d been doing all those things.

  “You’re right,” Bernard says. “This doesn’t look right.” He’s enjoying himself, doesn’t seem fussed at all. The Miracle of the Gobi doesn’t stop there. Sensing how unhappy I am about my mistakes he now rises to the occasion. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing so well, cherie,” he continues. “I’m so proud of you.” He leans across to give me a peck on the cheek and squeezes my hand reassuringly. I hand him the route book and the GPS. “Look here,” he says. “We went off track just a little ways back.” I have to gulp when I see what he’s discovered. If we hadn’t stopped, my modest navigation error would have led us far in the wrong direction. Bernard’s unconcerned, though. He’s looking into the distance, surveying the field. “I think I can just drive down this slope and we’ll be back where we should be.” Though I feel like a dope, at the same time I’m hugely relieved. In a few minutes I’m also justly proud. My mistakes have given Bernard a chance to drive where no one else on the Rally has gone before.

  I know for certain we’re back on the proper route when, half an hour later, we pass one of the few stable landmarks the organizers have been able to offer us: the hamlet of Lun Bag, which used to be the site of the largest Soviet air base in Mongolia. It’s now empty of military personnel, the Soviets having skipped town in the 1990s. Mongolian families have moved into some of the abandoned flats; others have pitched their gers among the cracked concrete huts. It’s a derelict and uninviting place, but even so, I search the landscape for highlights I can memorize, in case I need to make my way back there on foot if Roxanne collapses for good. All I see are sand, gravel, rocks, and shrubs, none of which is a likely candidate for landmark of the month. The route book instructs us to continue on the so-called road, which in my opinion barely qualifies to be called a track. To me it just looks like tire treads where someone else decided to drive. As fate has it, it’s not long after passing Lun Bag that we feel Roxanne’s rear end sink with a thud. Four hours of repair, gone.

  With a sigh, Bernard pulls over and climbs out of the car. Around us the barren, parched hills of the Gobi stretch to infinity, as they have since we entered Mongolia. I’ve been searching in vain for those verdant slopes and lush valleys I saw photos of last year. All I see, for hours on end, are brown plains, rocky outcroppings, and tufts of dead plant life. Mongolia is so far inland that no sea moderates its climates. No island of clouds breaks the gauzy blue of the sky. No afternoon shower drops its curtain in the distance. In this unrelieved arid solitude, baked by a merciless sun and chapped by the wind, I stand by the car, as insignificant a speck on the landscape as a flea on an elephant.

  Looking down at the dirt with distaste, Bernard kneels to peer under Roxanne. “Shock absorbers are broken,” he says, and lets out a breath of exasperation. He bounds up and trots back to Roxanne’s trunk, where he grabs his flashlight, a large wrench and other tools, along with some paper towels. Years of fastidiousness with his tools are not going to be ignored just because we’re in the desert. Meanwhile I’ve brushed the sharp pebbles and stones away from where I know he’ll have to lie down. Then he’s on his back, wriggling under Roxanne, inspecting the rear shock absorber mounts and muttering curses to himself, and, perhaps not coincidentally, taking advantage of the only spot of shade for hundreds of miles.

  Fifteen minutes go by before a ruined shock is flung aside, followed fifteen minutes later by the second one. “That’s all I can do now,” he says, his voice muffled by Roxanne’s body. He inches his way out from under Roxanne using elbows and knees to move forward without shredding his shirt, then gathers the set of broken shocks and turns them around a few times. “Same problem as last time,” he says. Tossing them behind his seat, he puts his hands on the small of his back and stretches, then lowers his head and shakes it. “Well, nothing more to do here. Let’s go,” he says, climbing back into the car.

  Eying each other is the only communication we’re up for. We motor slowly onward, as Bernard babies Roxanne’s fragile suspension. Our beloved Roxanne lists forlornly to port, unable to handle the load of spares and tools we’ve crammed in her trunk alongside her extra-large retrofitted fuel tank.

  My outlook turns to benign irritation as the sun drills a hole through the metal roof. The first air-conditioned car was a 1939 Packard, but Cadillac, the LaSalle’s fancy cousin, didn’t get air-conditioning until 1941. Roxanne was made in 1940, and the only air conditioning she has is the natural sort, supplied by an open window. My window’s down, offering as much cooling effect as if I were fanning myself inside a 400-degree oven. We crawl along at a pace that would make a beetle swimming in molasses look like Michael Phelps. I can attest that nothing seems to get closer when you’re going 9 miles per hour. The one benefit of our pace is that we don’t even raise a dust cloud. That’s left to the few other late Rally cars that every once in a long while whiz by, covering us in yet another layer of Gobi powder. One by one they disappear around a tufted hillock, reappearing soon thereafter as a plume of dust on the far horizon, already depressingly closer to Ulaanbaatar than we are, or may ever be.

  By mid-afternoon, our temper
s frayed, we have sunk into glum silence. Our mouths are gummed shut with the dust, our food and water covered by the fine powder carried on an otherwise welcome breeze. We avoid the fuel gauge, knowing there are no gas stations to tank up anywhere before UB.

  I invent a pastime to cope with my mounting aggravation. It’s called Endurance Rally Solitaire. In this game, I prohibit myself from looking at my watch or the speedometer for a set period. I do this for five minutes, fifteen minutes, whatever I can endure. During that time, I force myself to think positive thoughts, such as how we’ll soon hit a smoother stretch of road and be able to let ’er rip at 15 miles per hour. I think about how quickly we’ll reach UB and be able to get out of the car once we achieve that brave new speed. I whistle happy tunes, picking sand out of my hair, drawing figures in the dust that now swaths the dashboard, anything to distract myself. Finally I peek at the odometer, confident that we’ve covered a heartening distance, only to find that we’ve advanced barely six miles. Soon my game is aggravating me as much as knowing how much distance we haven’t yet covered and how much time we’ve spent not covering it.

  Moving in slow motion magnifies everything. Each breath I inhale is a long inward sigh. The sun can’t seem to move along its normal arc to the horizon. The cracks on my fingertips, desiccated from constant use of antibacterial baby wipes these past few days, are splitting into deep crevasses. Worst of all, as my spirit flags, my own voice starts haranguing me. “You’re not going to make it. Give up. Go home.” This is not the voice I want to hear. I believe I’ve set reasonable expectations for myself on this trip, beyond just not vomiting in the car. And OK, I haven’t quite met all of those. Yet. That doesn’t mean I should be giving up. It’s demoralizing to me to have made mistakes, despite knowing that Bernard, too, has made mistakes. Big ones. After all, the onus of Roxanne’s Gobi-worthiness rests on his shoulders. What could be a more visible sign of a major flaw in his design than that Roxanne’s shock absorbers have broken twice in two days? If he’s demoralized, though, he doesn’t show it. I try to do likewise, putting a patch on my damaged ego, offering myself a little forgiveness for my earlier navigational errors. We’re careful now, each recognizing in the other bruised fruit that needs to be handled tenderly.