Peking to Paris Read online

  This epic adventure captured every corner of my imagination. In Mongolia we would be camping at night, in a set location where we would be met by fuel trucks. Such gas stations as Mongolia could offer would never have enough petrol to serve 125 cars at one time. There’d be a camp support team, hot showers, port-a-potties, chilled beer, and a hot dinner and breakfast for us each day. It sounded like a wonderful safari, absent the elephants and lions. In China and everywhere else, we’d be in hotels. In Siberia, though, some of the cities where we’d be sleeping were so off the tourist track that there weren’t hotels large enough to accommodate the entire Rally; in those places as many as four hotels had been booked each night, with crews divided among them.

  There were days I could see myself in an elegant, open-topped old car, chugging through quaint hamlets that time had passed by, my long white scarf fluttering behind me in the wind, à la Isadora Duncan. Only I never would be so careless as to let my scarf get caught in the wheel spokes and snap my neck as hers did. In my daydreams, we’d pull into a humble cafe, where we’d be able to sample whatever the regional cuisine had to offer. Villagers and kids would stop by and, drawn by our exotic car, sit down and chat with us. We’d learn about their lives, share details with them about ours. “I don’t think we’ll be able to stop for lunch,” Bernard told me. “Normally on rallies you keep going till you reach your final control point for that day.”

  “Oh, that can’t be possible, Bernard,” I scoffed. “Why would anyone bother driving through these places if they couldn’t ever stop?” I was busy creating the trip of a lifetime and didn’t want to dwell on what he was saying.

  On other days, I envisioned myself dressed in immaculate khaki pants, unpacking a brown embossed leather trunk with brass hinges, jaunty in my crisp white shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbow, a sporty, soft deerskin vest holding my navigator tools, whatever those might be. I’d be a Ralph Lauren model come to life, and I even toyed with the idea of asking Ralph Lauren if they’d care to sponsor us. Then it occurred to me that if they accepted, I’d be beholden to someone or something. For me, the appeal of the Peking to Paris was that it would be Bernard and me against the elements, with no one looking over our shoulder, not even the 250 other competitors and 50-odd members of the support crew.

  Through a contact at The Nature Conservancy, we asked to host three visiting Mongolian naturalists. They brought a book of photographs with them to show us their country. I was stunned how similar our landscape was to theirs, the deep forests, rushing rivers, and alpine flowers, and the eagles, marmots, and other wildlife that filled it. I loved the notion that two places a world apart could resemble each other so closely and thought myself the luckiest person in the world to be able soon to see it for myself.

  At more practical times, I made secret plans to enroll in various auto mechanic and rally driving classes. “Don’t worry about that,” Bernard said. “I’ll do the driving. And I can take care of the car.” This was Bernard’s gracious way of telling me I had never shown aptitude for auto mechanics, so why start now. A new dream began to recur, with me kneeling beside Bernard working on a repair, the two of us bent over an antique car, heads together, discussing what the problem could be with the engine. Bernard would look at me adoringly, flabbergasted by my new skills. Again we’d be equals. One day when I was showing him an off-road driving course I’d discovered, which I thought would give me the driving chops I lacked, he said, “But Dina, in a rally the driver stays as the driver throughout the race. You won’t need to drive.”Then he added, “Besides, as navigator, you’ll have your own responsibilities.” I would?

  Grill That Beaver, Ride That Ditch

  After a decade, it seemed that Bernard and I had given up our souls for the growth of our company, that all we did now was work. Gone were the joys of discovering shared passions. The jokes, the dancing, the laughter, all faded. Pooh gathered dust on a shelf. Bernard had become The Road Runner, zipping along in manic overdrive, gripped by a compulsion, which I couldn’t fathom and no longer wanted much part of. I was Wile E. Coyote, panicked smile glued to my face, clinging to the crumbling cliff of our marriage with frantically scrabbling paws.

  In the cartoon, Coyote plunges into the abyss, to be resurrected moments later battered and disheveled, but ready for another go. But this was real life, and I desperately didn’t want to fall. So I hung on, feeling ever more frayed, sometimes despairing, but always convinced that if I could just manage a bit longer, I’d be able to pull myself—pull us—over the precipice and back to safety.

  Several more years passed before things finally fell into place and our company sold. With funds and freedom firmly in our grasp, it was time to blow the lid off our pent-up travel urges. We trekked to remote Kanchenjunga in the eastern Himalayas. We cantered on horseback through the African bush. I even squelched my fear of avalanches to ski in the Canadian wilderness. Before each of these trips, I steeled myself to the anticipated rigors with a stern talking-to, shoring up my timid side with a bracing reminder that lesser mortals than I were able to do this. Not so Bernard. If anything, the impression he gave me was that the trips were pleasant, but, well, rather tame. Another sign I should have read, but ignored.

  In between all this coming and going, we moved to a cattle and hay ranch high in the Colorado mountains. Acquiring land, having space, was Bernard’s idea, but as usual I was happy to follow. Besides, I’d acquired a horse habit. This had started seven or eight years before, when I told Bernard, half in jest, that I wanted to be a well-rounded human being, one who, for instance, could handily saddle a horse and mount up should I be invited to Balmoral Castle by the Queen. For some reason, he didn’t need to ask me which part of that statement was the joke.

  On my next birthday, Bernard led a handsome bay gelding across the field in front of our house. Behind him trudged my father, nearly buried under a western saddle so large and heavy I could barely heave it onto the upstairs railing in our home, where it stayed as a decorative element for many years. The next morning, Bernard and I spent half an hour trying to figure out how to get a halter over my new horse’s head. Things could only improve from there. I bought myself a lightweight English saddle, took riding lessons, and learned by personal experience how carefully one rises after falling off a fast-moving horse and how long it takes the purple to appear on ones butt when the bruise is bone-deep. We got a barn built and learned the difference between good and bad hay, as well as how much of the former a horse needs to eat. Terms like farrier, tack, and worming entered my consciousness. Bernard bought a horse, too. It was his only hope of ever seeing me again.

  By the time the ranch came into view, I knew one thing for sure. I no longer wanted to be tied to home, throwing hay to horses each day. That the ranch came with eight additional horses was not a worry. There was so much pasture we could let the horses self-feed—locals called this ‘grazing’—and still have plenty left for a few spare equines. Besides, we both wanted a radical change of lifestyle. On a ranch we’d be outdoors. I’ve read all the Little House on the Prairie books, so I knew what that meant: fixing fences, checking cows, tracking water through ditches, cutting and selling hay, bringing hot covered casseroles to neighborhood potlucks, helping those neighbors with branding. That our ranch was eighty miles and two hours of winding mountain roads from the nearest shoe store or pharmacy was put in the category of “minor inconvenience.”

  Though things didn’t go perfectly our first summer on the ranch, we were hooked by our new life. Instead of being slaves to product release schedules, we now followed the seasons. Our concerns shifted from errors in a Japanese translation to whether it would rain. I abandoned hard drives and learned to drive a tractor pulling a baler over a back meadow. The first summer on the ranch I helped put up a thousand tons of hay. In the golden light of a setting summer sun, I watched red-tail hawks wheeling low, on the mouse hunt, as my baler compressed sweet smelling grass into a tight seventy-pound package bound with orange twine.

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nbsp; As for enlarging our horse herd, I went to the federal penitentiary in Cañon City, home to the BLM’s wild horse adoption program, where I adopted a scrawny young mustang stallion newly culled from the wild herds that populate western Colorado and Utah. In my quest to become the ultimate horsewoman I rode alone over the ranch’s dry bluffs and marshy willow cars. My horse sniffed the recent scat of a large elk herd and spooked six feet sideways when equally surprised mallards took flight from a beaver pond. I attended clinics on natural horsemanship, practiced the tricks back home, and picked sagebrush out of my hair every time I got bucked off. Bernard had time to indulge his passion for big equipment, amassing a collection of trucks and tractors, each one necessary for some ranch task. It seemed to me I should learn to use them, too. That doing so was an essential part of being a ranch woman. But then there was my penchant for daydreaming, for spacing out at critical moments. Bernard couldn’t fathom how I never seemed able to remember how to turn any of them on, couldn’t understand how what had become so obvious to him remained so obscure to me. Impatience burgeoned between us, and I left the equipment side of ranching to him. I’m keeping the peace, I told myself. And anyway, why would I need to use them myself, when Bernard could drive, use, and fix them all?

  After a summer of putting up hay and tending to ranch chores, the sparkling days of fall were pure pleasure. With no more snow melt to fill it, the river outside our door shrank, and beavers built their dams in inconvenient places, creating ponds deep enough for moose to swim across. Sixpoint bull elk jousted in the meadow, keeping us up at night with their clacking antlers and strident, ringing calls.

  Bernard accumulated an assassin’s-worth of guns, one for every sort of bird or animal. Ever since his days as an artillery captain in the French army he’d been a crack shot, on friendly terms with the sort of precision rifles of which Carlos the Jackal would approve. He bought me a lightweight, century-old Winchester .22 repeating rifle. It had a long, slender barrel of some deeply tanned wood, black burnished steel fittings, and a manual scope. Recalling my childhood shooting a cap pistol around the backyard, terrorizing my sister as I chased her in my red cowboy hat while she fled screaming in her matching blue one, I was delirious to finally have the real thing. When my first shots came within inches of the bull’s eye, we both were stunned. Secretly, I put another notch in my pioneer woman belt. Then I bought a handgun.

  On cold, misty mornings, Bernard rose at four o’clock to hunt. Though I refused to hunt, I was happy to share in the bounty, insisting only that if he took an animal’s life, we needed to make use of it. Cured elk skins carpeted the floor and beaver pelts covered the backs of chairs. With only an occasional glance at a cookbook, our diet changed from beef to elk. My culinary adventures began with a wild goose hung for so short a time that the roasted version was as tender as a basketball and as palatable as a rubber tire. The beaver tail I grilled made us grateful we weren’t nineteenth century trappers, dependent on its dense white fat to keep us alive. My beaver haunch pot roast drew fairly favorable reviews, though the leftovers remained in the freezer for a year.

  One day Bernard took his Unimog, a monster-size vehicle that’s an adult equivalent of a Tonka truck, far into the mountains beyond our ranch. When he returned, hours late, he was covered with grime and flashing a smile as wide as the Mississippi. “I got stuck on a road in a really tight spot,” he explained, beaming. “So I figured I’d wrap my winch around a tree, to pull myself to a spot where I could turn around.” So far so good, I told myself. Nothing new here.

  “Then, guess what? I heard a creaking, looked up, and,” he held his head in his hands, shaking it back and forth as if he himself couldn’t believe what he was about to say. “That tree was coming down on me. The winch pulled the tree over instead of pulling me up to it. I just barely managed to jump off the bed before it crashed down right over the hood of the Unimog. I can show you the dent . . . ” I was no longer so happy. The Unimog’s bed was eight feet high and I could too easily imagine Bernard breaking his leg in that unplanned leap.

  “So there I was with a sixty-foot pine tree lying on my truck. Thank goodness I had my wood knife with me.” He dug into his back pocket and pulled out the Japanese serrated knife with the six-inch blade he’d bought at a hardware store some years ago. “It took me hours.” Eyes squeezed shut and head thrown back in utter joy at his escapade, he gasped and wheezed in the throes of a major laughing fit.

  I offered a tentative chuckle of commiseration. I wanted to show him my appreciation for his accomplishment, but the truth was, what filled him with pleasure sent a surge of resentment through my gut. Bernard was euphoric with the ranching life, able finally to indulge his passion for the outdoors and all things mechanical. At that moment I knew that at heart I was a suburban girl. I was raised on HMS Pinafore and ski vacations. I had never gotten cozy with a wrench and had never thrilled to the delights of diesel engines.

  Here I’d thought I had everything in balance. We were living in heaven, weren’t we? Now I realized Bernard had far outdistanced me. He was fully involved in keeping everything running. He understood our water rights, knew our ditches, and, with repair people hours away, fixed anything that broke. After two decades of marriage, we’d grown nonchalant about our togetherness. We needed a new project, something that would pull us off our separate paths and merge us into a team again. The Peking to Paris seemed just the ticket. There was no way to know that the eighteen months of preparations would nearly undo us.

  Car Troubles

  For the year and a half after we are accepted into the Peking to Paris, I inhabit a hitherto unknown level of Dante’s Inferno. It’s the one where you’re forced to repair a car engine over and over again. Even now I can’t tell you what sins I committed to deserve such misery.

  It’s a sign, surely, that the most fun either of us have in the eighteen months prior to the actual race is perusing classic automobile websites for a suitable rally car. There are thousands from which to choose. Bernard, who’s been tinkering with cars since babyhood, is in his element. To narrow the search, we agree our car has to be American-made. “And it has to be goodlooking,” I say. “Something we’re proud to sit in.” That doesn’t narrow the search since, in my view, all pre-WWII cars are gorgeous. There are elegant Packards, the choice of Hollywood stars in the 1930s, fabulous Cadillacs favored by mobsters, and spindly Ford Model Ts that hauled migrants across the dust bowls during the Great Depression. An Hispano Suiza catches my eye, but it’s out of our league, too expensive and so beautiful neither of us can imagine taking it on what’s appearing to be an extraordinarily difficult drive.

  One morning, Bernard calls me over, and I lean on his shoulder to peer at his computer screen. “What we need is this,” he says, pointing to a car so voluptuous she seems ready to burst at the seams. “This is a beast of a car. But beautiful, don’t you think? And fast,” he says, rattling off various details about the engine, which go directly over my head.

  The 1940 GM LaSalle two-door coupe that steals Bernard’s heart has many things going for it, not least of which are a split front windshield, pontoon fenders, and a tall, handsome fountain-style grille in the front. On the open road, of which there should be plenty between Beijing and Paris, the car can easily do seventy miles an hour. It’s helpful that she’s new enough in an old way that we won’t have too much trouble finding spares. Best of all, the brand is named for the French explorer, René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle. Call it fate, good fortune, or karma, it’s a perfect mirror to the nature of the drive we’ll be doing and our own dual nationality. True, Bernard took the oath of US citizenship about thirteen years ago, but in his soul, his voice, and definitely his stomach, the man remains French.

  The car payment has barely cleared the bank before Bernard is typing up what will be done to make the LaSalle rally-ready. My first rally-related job, if not meaningful, is helpful: to read his lists and check for typos. It’s just like the earliest days of working together at o
ur company, and just like then I’m soon looking around for something more compelling to do. “We have to give this car a name,” I declare. “When you talk about driving from Beijing to Paris, you have to call your car something as epic as the trip. We can’t just refer to it as ‘car’.” Bernard gives me a specific smile. It’s small and sweet, signaling he doesn’t understand me, but won’t object.

  Suggesting this is evidence of just how delusional I have become. I wasn’t even able to name our last puppy. But I’ve convinced myself that my lack of car knowledge and my general carsickness will disappear because I will them to and that I will be transformed into Mother Courage when the need arise. Why not become good at names, too?

  “Dudley? Jeeves? Godfrey?” I’m attracted to a British name, because this is a British rally.

  “Too simpering. Too stiff. How about Momo? Or Lansky? I know: Scarface!” Bernard’s been riffing on 1940s Las Vegas ever since discovering our LaSalle was used in the movie Bugsy.

  I move on to literature, always a source of inspiration. “OK, there’s Bilbo, you know, from The Hobbit?” Bernard doesn’t know. “He was adventurous, an explorer, but also comfy. It all fits our car.” Silence. I move on to literature Bernard will be more familiar with, like Shakespeare and the classics. “OK. How about Cyrano?”