Peking to Paris Read online

  He counters with “Quixote?”

  “Too tall, and too hard to say when you’re tired. D’Artagnan?” I offer, naming our favorite musketeer. “Daring. Loyal.”

  “Possible. But it doesn’t really grab me. How about Homer? The greatest voyager of all times.” We both shake our head.

  “This is getting worse, not better. I like the name of Romeo, but it doesn’t really suit, does it?”

  To which Bernard has a reply. “Juliet?”

  “Of course!” The LaSalle is curvy, voluptuous, a real stunner. She’s not a gangster or a butler. She’s a woman. “I think we’re onto something here. But the car can’t be Juliet. Juliet dies at the end. Kind of bad luck, don’t you think?”

  We email our cheering section to see if anyone is more creative than we are with car names. Weeks pass during which offerings dribble in. We try out the mouth feel of a slew of adventurers, explorers, and cutey-pies. There’s the androgynous Hillary, conqueror of Everest or, conceivably, first female U.S. president, boldly going where no man or woman had gone before. And there’s Baby, which strikes us both as not mature enough for the rigors ahead. One day I receive an email from the husband of one of Bernard’s four sisters. “Consider Roxana,” he writes. “The wife of Alexander the Great. In Persian, the name means ‘luminous beauty,’ and your car obviously is very beautiful. She also had the courage to accompany her husband into battle, and this is a quality you want from your car.” I don’t need anyone to tell me this is also a quality it’d be nice to have myself.

  We have a winner.

  Roxanne rolled off the General Motors assembly line in the summer of 1940. She was painted a discreet field mouse gray, though the quantity of chrome girdling her fenders was enough to blind an entire town. Inside were stiffly padded bench seats and crank windows. Her steering wheel was as wide as a wedding cake platter, her instruments round and easy to read. She seemed to cast a spell over her owners, who treated her like a coddled pet rather than a mode of transportation.

  When Roxanne enters our lives in July 2005, sixty-five years on, she’s been driven barely 29,000 miles. She is perfect as is, if all we plan to use her for are gentle jaunts. The Gobi, however, is no Sunday drive in the park. This grande dame has to be transformed into Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, beautiful, elegant, yet capable of surviving whatever’s thrown at her.

  Bernard has been fascinated by cars and car engines his whole life. As a young man with little money to spare, he rebuilt a Renault, called, in that fanciful way the French have, a Topolino. He followed that with a spell doing winter rallies in France, the sort where cars are driven for 24 hours straight, through blinding snow on icy roads. For fun. Even before Roxanne arrives, his mind is churning with what she’ll need if she’s to complete the Peking to Paris. Concepts like dual fuel pumps, special brake lines, extralarge fuel tank, and off-chassis rebuild enter our conversation. After Roxanne arrives, his list quickly grows to two pages, single-spaced.

  Roxanne, with her white wall tires and glossy bordeaux paint job, reminds me of a vaudeville performer. Like any seasoned entertainer, she immediately becomes the apple of our eye. We show her off, take friends for drives, memorialize her in photogenic spots. We are smitten, in love with the idea that we own something so beautiful. Then there’s the novelty of rebuilding her into a car capable of surviving thousands of miles of tough road, a project of greater scope than even Bernard has ever done. It’s fresh, full of possibilities, with the drama of the Rally always looming there on the horizon.

  We’re suffused with excitement about the enterprise we’re undertaking, and so is everyone else who signs on to help us. They’re all specialists of one sort or another, skilled with brakes, wiring, fuel consumption, engines, gear boxes. Best of all, they all work in the same town, a place called Greeley on the edge of Colorado’s eastern plains. There are pluses to Greeley. It’s home not only to a branch of the state university, but to every sort of car repair or supply shop one could want when rebuilding an old car. But there are also minuses, one being that it is home to a huge, malodorous meat packing plant, the smell from which permeates the air. Here’s the other unfortunate thing about Greeley: it’s nearly three hours away from where we live. This gives us pause, but ultimately we agree that distance pales in comparison to the benefits of all the mechanics having their shops mere blocks from each other. Besides, we have no choice. There’s only one auto repair shop in our town, and it has only a part-time mechanic, except during haying, when he doesn’t come in at all.

  While Bernard shepherds the mechanics into a semblance of a team, I study classic car magazines and subscribe to Hemmings, the bible of old car aficionados. I call elderly gentlemen with a passion for LaSalles and Cadillacs. One has a backyard full of original wheels from the 1930s and ’40s. Another scavenges nothing but carburetors for those cars. Each is willing to talk to me for hours, and many go further, researching the Rally, remembering my name, taking a lively personal interest in Roxanne, a car that would soon be carrying their own set of carefully saved spark plugs into Mongolia and beyond. One man in particular, Bob Cooper, is a consistent savior. I need only phone Bob with the latest bit Bernard has told me we need, and, like a magician, he finds it somewhere in what must surely be a vast warehouse holding a lifetime’s collection of LaSalle and Cadillac parts. Bob manages to locate everything from a dimmer switch, washers for the brake assembly, and an original LaSalle outside mirror to front wheel bearings and even a rear axle. Our UPS man delivers odd-shaped packages. We open one after another, marveling that a small part made over sixty years ago still exists on someone’s dusty garage shelf. It is a time of thrills and satisfaction, as if we’re children kneeling in front of a Christmas tree, ripping open presents year round.

  Months slip by. We discover that the mechanics assigned to strip Roxanne to her chassis are more interested in drinking and dreaming than in rebuilding her. The beer-soaked planning chart shows the grim truth, at least what’s still readable under the blotches of Budweiser smearing the deadline column. We begin to dread seeing each mechanic, steeling ourselves to hear that, again, the promised work has not been done. Like a summer romance, the glow has worn off our relationship with them. Bernard is perpetually exasperated, which he takes out on me in fits of anger centered mainly on the fact that I do not disrupt my life to go to Greeley as often as he does. He’s desperate for these mechanics to do their jobs, as we have no alternative, so he won’t ever let on to them how frustrated he is. To them he’s full of bonhomie, a hail-fellow-well-met comrade so familiar with Roxanne’s needs that he can discuss her most intimate parts on equal terms with the best of them. Then he comes home and snaps, frowns, and picks at me, and in every other way makes clear just how unfair he feels it is that I’m at the ranch when he is not.

  I, too, feel keenly the imbalance that has grown up around the car rebuild. Yet it seems to me I have little if anything to offer. My thoughts of learning auto mechanics faded as quickly as they arose. Now I have nothing material I can contribute to help solve the problem. The car has become Bernard’s problem, while I stay at home and worry, a skill I’ve honed through my entire life. Tension builds between us until one day Bernard explodes. “You’re not doing anything,” he rages at me. “Why don’t you do something, so I don’t have to do it all!” He shoves me aside and storms out of the house. He’s never been so furious at me, never said anything that could wound me so deeply. At the same time, I know he’s right. What happened to the woman he married twenty years ago, the one who seized every opportunity to learn something new, no matter how foreign that something might be? I want a chance for Bernard to see that I’m not just the sum of my flaws. That, yes, they exist, but so do the parts of me that he first loved. More than anything, I want us to do the Rally together, to again have an epic project that we do side-by-side, and at which we succeed. So I tell him that, from now on, I’ll be going with him to Greeley. By then, he’s filled with remorse. “I’m sorry,” he says. “You don’t
need to come. There’s nothing for you to do there.”

  “I know that’s what you think. That’s what you’ve been saying for the past year and look where it’s gotten us. I’m not helpless. I’m sure there are errands I can do, parts to pick up, things to bring to people, that’ll free you up to do the things only you can do.”

  “No, no. Just stay home.”

  “Not any more. I’m coming with you. If I wind up sitting in a hotel room while you’re out working on things, so be it. Though I doubt that’ll happen.” Thus we embark on the final phase of rebuilding Roxanne. Together again, if tentatively and politely so.

  To display our good will, and, if need be, do the rebuild ourselves, we decide we have to leave the lovely green meadows and clear streams of our mountain ranch and move to the Greeley Holiday Inn Express, just ten minutes from where Roxanne is sitting on cinder blocks in a former bean warehouse. On Sunday evenings, we grit our teeth for the long drive to Greeley, where we stay for as many days as we can bear, before dashing back up the mountain for a literal breath of fresh air. Life has turned tense and sour, but it’s too late to turn back now. We’re in the race and we need a car to do it.

  A bright spot is that we learn to love the Holiday Inn. My normally lean frame, accustomed to a more active life of horseback riding and outdoorsy-ness at the ranch, soon reflects an overly intimate relationship with their sugary warm cinnamon buns. The soft, dimpled, chemically chocolate chip cookies they offer each evening are just as alluring. We’re assigned to the same room week after week. I look forward to the cordial greeting of the desk clerk, who barely raises her head from her college text book to greet us with “You again?” Our conversion to all things Holiday Inn is so complete that we even try to replace our mattress at home with their brand.

  Through the months, we wheedle, pay extra, and otherwise twist arms to get work completed. It’s like herding feral cats, trying to get each specialist to complete their part in time for the next specialist, who needs it to complete his part. “Please,” we beg Bruce, the engine guru. “Could you install those new racing pistons in our engine? We have to have it to check if the radiator fits.” “Please,” we cajole the radiator shop. “Could you finish the radiator? We need it to check if the fan works.”“Please,” we plead with the powder coater. “Could you finish coating the chassis? We need it to mount the engine, radiator, and fan.”

  I find myself getting frantic, my natural impatience moving from simmer to hard boil. I want to kill every one of these likable, helpful mechanics whose main crime is that they have other jobs and no time to do ours. It’s fortunate that Bernard is a born diplomat. Whenever I dent egos, he covers my caustic jabs with the soothing sounds of his Frenchaccented words. Yet each morning, at the oatmeal-colored Formica Holiday Inn breakfast table, while I peel a banana and he spoons up strawberry yogurt, this calm man so adept at finding solutions seethes about the situation. He’s a natural perfectionist, and now he’s gripped in a fury over his inability to make things work the way they should, the way everyone has promised they would.

  We no longer talk of esoteric ideas, local politics, or mundane ranch issues like whether to buy a new attachment for the tractor, but of where to find a spare sixty-year-old starter motor or who might redo the brake rotors. I cannot hold an intelligent discussion about cars, so mostly these are one-way conversations, with Bernard musing out loud and me nodding supportively. Still, I’m proud that I can mouth off correctly when I need to, even though it’s about things I really don’t understand. We reach the point where our only friends are auto parts clerks. They know everything about Roxanne, and we no longer need to look at their shirts before greeting them by name.

  Six months later than planned, but still several months before the Rally’s mandatory ship date, we bring Roxanne home. By then I’ve changed from the confident, assertive woman I usually am, the one who closed million dollar deals and built a successful company at my husband’s side, to someone with pinched eyes and a grim face. In the years that it took us to build up our software translation company into an industry leader, I’d learned to work long hours. As the most senior sales executive in the company, I naturally took the lead in persuading new clients to sign with us. I also was the one called in to placate any client who was unhappy. All of our work, from proposal to job completion, was stressful and deadline driven. After seven years on the ranch, though, I’m no longer in shape for stress. I don’t have the resilience to manage tension and uncertainty day in and day out. Battered by months of Roxanne-related disappointment, I’m drained, too easily distraught. Still, Roxanne’s homecoming is undeniably a moment of euphoria. It coincides with the arrival of our passports, with visas for Russia and China in place. The Peking to Paris is again starting to seem a reality, and now, when I pass those maps on the dining room table, I’m again willing to look at them and dream, instead of turning my head.

  Another thing that makes us giddy is the arrival of our special tent, an ingenious item that self-erects in two seconds, folding into a three-foot diameter, flat disc when not in use. The tent isn’t sold in the States, because the fabric doesn’t meet FDA fire retardant standards. We, however, have ignored that restriction and used a well-placed insider to secure one for us: Bernard’s sister in Lyon, France. Our craftiness in securing the special tent leaves us both feeling smugly self-satisfied. We’ll be camping all the way through Mongolia, which some people say will be the roughest part of the race. That we will be able to set up our tent in the dark whenever we arrive late is a reassuring notion. Few things make me happier than knowing I can get to sleep quickly.

  The day it arrives we take it to the most obstruction-free zone in our house, the entry way, and remove it from its sheath. As claimed, it pops open in two seconds. It takes another hour for us to figure out how to twist, bend, and in other ways fold it back into a shape small and flat enough to fit back into its sack, and that’s with directions and a video. “I think we better practice this,” I tell Bernard, both of us wiping sweat off our foreheads. “Either that, or copy the directions and store them somewhere we’ll remember, so we can collapse this thing each morning.”

  “It’s not difficult, cherie. I think I’ve figured out what the trick is,” Bernard boasts, then pops it open again.

  “No, not that way. This way.”

  “Read me the directions. What do I do at this point?” Bernard puffs. He’s bent double, the tent squeezed between his knees while his arms hug the flexible rods that should have complied by folding into a circle.

  “I think you’re off course. It looks wrong,” and I hold the instruction manual to his face, which is inches from the floor. Bernard falls to the floor, the tent flies into the air and, lands on top of him, a wonderful dome structure that I am certain we’ll be grateful to have somewhere in the Gobi. Our situation is absurd. How can we possibly believe we can finish a complicated car rebuild, when we can’t even fold a tent? We agree to adjourn for a gin and tonic, leaving the popped-up tent in regal splendor in the entry way. Every day we each do a solo tour of duty figuring out how to fold it, until we both can get it flat and stuffable again within five minutes.

  The tent is a perfect diversion from what any casual observer could have seen: the entire car project is cursed. To establish Roxanne’s fuel consumption with her new double gas tanks, we take her for long, steady drives. The easiest route is the sixteen miles from the ranch to town. And back again. Over and over, past hay stacked in snowy fields, stands of naked willows, black cows exhaling jets of steam as they plod to their mineral lick. When the tank shows one quarter full, we fill up at the town pump, note the number of gallons and the miles covered, and repeat our short, steady circuit.

  Even this one blessing, of living in a county crossed by empty two-lane highways that stretch to the horizon, proves useless. We drive Roxanne no more than a few hundred miles before her engine blows up. A day earlier, Bernard comments that the engine is acting strangely. When I stutter something uncertain
about this not being a good thing, Bernard adjusts his blinders more snuggly in place. “Oh, it’s probably just because it’s still being broken in,” he assures me. The next day the message comes clear. Instead of its normal purr, the engine alternates between a rheumy cough and a death rattle.

  I place a frantic call to Bruce, our engine guru. On his instructions, I raise the hood, Bernard starts the engine, and I shake half a can of Bon Ami cleaning powder into the carburetor. The engine gurgles and splutters, as if to say, “Yummy. I like this stuff.” I feel a glimmer of hope. “This seems to be helping. Maybe I should pour the rest in?” I shout to Bernard.

  “Yes. No. Well, yes. OK, ummm, yeah, go for it.” Hesitancy about a mechanical issue is not what I expect from Bernard, and that alone should have signaled me to hold off. We are both desperate. Nothing else has worked till now, so why not put our faith in a can of white powder? I dump the rest in, and for a second the engine comes back to life. Miracle. I peer around the hood to smile at Bernard just as the engine dies. For good.

  It baffles me that such good mechanics could repeatedly fail to get our car in working order. Something else must be going on, but what? I’m a confirmed atheist, which leaves me no one to pray to when times get tough, and Bernard’s a firmly lapsed Catholic, so he’s no help in that department either. Still, there are times where things are so bleak that even I have to look elsewhere for help, and this is one of them.

  Call it revelation, call it desperation, but what I decide is this: Roxanne, in whom we’d installed the finest parts money could buy, is sabotaging the work herself. I consider this to be a rational conclusion, because I believe she has good reason to do so. All her life she was a cosseted conveyance, never having done more than a sedate tour to the country club or around California’s Central Coast vineyards. For months now she’s listened to people talking about all the places she’s supposed to drive. It’s obvious that she’s frightened out of her whitewalls about it. In despair, she’s thrown every wrench she could into the works to sabotage the rebuild. If I were a car, I’d do the same thing. Even though I’m not a car, I wish I could do the same thing. Sabotage the trip, that is. Make it not happen. I mean, look at it from her point of view. Why in the world would we believe she could accomplish a trek as potentially torturous as the Peking to Paris? She had no choice. It’s either injure herself severely enough that she’s undriveable or wind up in places where she’ll break down and, horrors, be left behind.