Peking to Paris Read online

  There’s no time left to lose. I go to the service shop where Roxanne has been towed, nodding to the clerk up front and then heading through a side door directly into the back room. From there I weave my way past twenty or so car engines in various stages of deconstruction, inhaling the oily perfume of engine grease and solvents as I always do, hoping this time it won’t make me gag. I hurry out the back door coughing. From there it’s through the narrow, weedy concrete yard bounded by chain-link fence, pausing briefly to greet Buster, the guardian pit bull. His job is to look fearsome to the uninitiated, and he does it perfectly. Now he bounds over to me, tail wagging for his anticipated scratch. I’m not attracted to engines, but Buster I love.

  Opening the door to a side building, it’s time to brave ridicule. “Excuse me,” I say to the three mechanics bent over Roxanne. “Could I have this space to myself for a moment, please?” How else could I say it? That Roxanne and I needed a little girl time? Predictably, they cast surreptitious looks at me, eyebrows furrowed as they stifle their collective desire to ask me why or to tell me not to mess with their work. I’m the owner and I don’t need their approval. I just need them gone.

  What does one do when trying to commune with a car? Pretend it’s a dog. I wrap my arms around her hood and give a squeeze. Quietly stroking her fenders, I begin speaking in soothing tones. “Don’t you worry,” I murmur. “We won’t abandon you.” I pause and wait, nursing a faint hope that I’ll receive a sign. Roxanne does not turn and poke a wet nose in my face to acknowledge the attention. Nor does she wag her trunk.

  The whole situation is embarrassing to me even now. I observe myself and am not pleased with what I see. Despite my life on the ranch there’s still much of the city girl in me. I have silk shirts and strappy sandals in my closet; I love opera; I take great pleasure in having a facial; I know the difference between regular and smoked paprika. What have things come to that I now find myself in a grease-spattered service bay, light filtering through the permanent fog of exhaust-clouded windows, muttering sweet nothings to an old car? Surely this can’t be my destiny. I plow on, because for no rational reason, I feel what I’m doing is essential to our success. “Look at all we’ve done to make you strong. You can do this trip. And I swear we’ll be with you every inch of the way.” In a final bid to get her on my side, I say, “Trust me. I don’t want you to break down anymore than you do. Because if you break down, I’ll be stuck, and I hate getting stuck. So please,” I plead. “Work with me on this. I promise you’ll be OK.”

  There’s no weird revelation when I stop talking. No mild exhaling of exhaust, or subtle sinking of tires to indicate vehicular relaxation. There’s just the faint whir of the shop’s overhead heater. Regardless, I have no doubt that, without ever lifting a wrench or dirtying my hands, I have fixed Roxanne. For on April 6, there she is, shiny new paint reflecting the snowy fields at our ranch headquarters, the white number 84 affixed to her doors next to the American flag, Bernard’s name on the driver’s side, mine on the passenger’s side. She’s packed, polished, and ready for shipment to China.

  What I Learned

  Car repairs didn’t fill all my time in that year and a half. Several months after we received our acceptance packet from the Rally organizers, I decided it behooved me to know a bit more about what I would be doing between Beijing and Paris. I bought a pamphlet mentioned in the packet, which the organizers claimed would explain everything one needed to know about being a rally car navigator. The booklet that arrived was a slender sixteenth of an inch thick, small enough to fit in my purse. Its beige cover made it seem inconsequential. It was so modest in size, so rudimentary in its descriptions, that it gave me the impression there was little to know and even less for the navigator to do than I’d imagined. Here’s what I gleaned from the book the first time around: the navigator is the person who sits in the passenger’s seat of the rally car. Using the route book for reference, he or she describes the approaching road to the driver. “What’s the big deal?” I thought. “The organizers will give me the route, I’ll read it to Bernard. And that’s that.” I tossed the booklet on a corner of my desk, where soon it was buried under a stack of more pressing rally documents.

  More than a year later, that slender, tan booklet resurfaced, just like one of those bloated Mob bodies come loose from their concrete mooring at the bottom of a murky lake. This time, with our departure for Beijing six weeks away, I opened it to the first page and read it with attention. I turned one page, then the next. Then I found Bernard and shook the booklet at him.

  “They’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Did you know I’m supposed to track our time between intervals for the entire day, plus read maps, work a GPS, follow directions, and, lest we forget, know mileage to the hundredths?”

  “Of course. I think I told you that a year ago.”

  “You mean that statement about the navigator having responsibilities? I thought that was just to make me feel good.” I felt like sinking to the ground moaning before turning into the Road Runner, legs churning up a cloud of dust so fast would I be fleeing. “I know you know how to do all these things, but I can barely do one of those things at a time, and some I don’t know how to do at all, like using a GPS and this Tripmeter thing. There’s no way I’m ever going to do them all at once.”

  “We’ll practice. How about we go out in the car with the GPS right now, and I’ll show you what to do.” Bernard’s pragmatism jolted me with aggravation, which happens when he stays calm and I need to fret.

  An hour of driving back and forth in front of the ranch and I had the basics covered. By the next morning, I’d forgotten it all. When we went out the next day I was too embarrassed to reveal to Bernard that he had to give me his explanations again, from scratch. This time I made notes to remind myself of what I needed to do. Reading the notes the following morning, I had no clue to what they referred.

  “Do you want to go out again?” he asked.

  “No. Don’t worry about it,” I lied. “I think I’ve got it.” Despite so many years of marriage, I couldn’t bear Bernard knowing my mind was such a sieve that I couldn’t make sense of what I myself wrote 24 hours ago. I took the GPS to my office, planning to fiddle with it in private, notes in hand. Turning the GPS on, I stared at the screen, which remained stubbornly blank. Then it dawned on me that, since GPS stands for Global Positioning System, it only functioned outdoors, where it could scan for satellites. I stashed the offending gadget away, hiding my deficiency with it, nursing a vague hope that the instructions Bernard gave me would float to the surface of my brain, like a magic carpet, when I needed them most.

  Perusing the pamphlet’s pages until they became dog-eared, I picked up certain salient facts. For instance, I realized that a long-distance rally is a peculiar beast, part road race, part endurance event. And I accepted that, along with all competitors, we would be timed from the second we crossed the starting line in the morning till we crossed the finish line at the end of each day. In our case, that meant the clock would be ticking for 7,800 miles, a distance we were expected to complete in thirty days, with five rest days scattered in between in which to work on our car, relax, or sightsee. I had no qualms about the 250 miles or so that we were expected to cover each day. All it required would be maintaining an average speed of about 35 mph, the equivalent of a gentle cruise through a shopping mall parking lot.

  I did not see this as posing a problem, because I willed my eyes to skip over the word “average.” It was redolent of things mathematical, and I’ve always found math to be a bother. Word problems make me dizzy, and solving anything with an “x” in it gives me a headache. So, as a matter of convenience, I ignored the term. What I pictured in my mind was us driving along at a sedate but steady pace, as befit old cars. We’d be finished with a day’s drive in seven hours. That seemed bearable to me, especially since going at a slow pace would give me that much more time to take in the scenery. It was all to the positive.

  The Peking to Paris was organ
ized by an English firm, which makes sense if you consider that the British are motoring enthusiasts, passionate about their cars and ardent about driving them. As I was to learn firsthand on the Rally, there’s nothing an Englishman likes better than to take his grandfather’s old Bentley out, wind up stuck on a rough road somewhere back of beyond, get filthy and exhausted getting himself out of trouble, and then laugh heartily with friends about it over beer or whisky that night. On the Peking to Paris Rally there were close to a hundred British crews (or, as some called them, teams); a smattering of other nationalities, plus nine American crews, rounded out the roster.

  Though all the teams would be driving the same route, they would be doing so in vastly different cars, some nearly a hundred years old, others merely sixty years old, some with large, powerful twelve-cylinder engines, others with tiny four-cylinder engines. To create a level playing field, we were divided into car categories, pitting like against like. There was Prewar (for cars built before 1921), Vintageant (for cars from 1921 to 1940), and Classic (for cars from 1940 through the early 1960s). Each car was assigned a number, which also corresponded to the number of minutes post-departure of Car 1 that each subsequent competitor would be flagged off. We were given number 84, which meant our start time was always 84 minutes, or close to an hour and a half, after the first car would leave for the day. This, too, struck me as wonderful. I imagined we’d have time to sleep in and still visit the local village where we were staying.

  Our organizers had been piecing together the details of our route since 2004, driving over every inch of it themselves and noting the distance between each reference point or landmark with two-decimal-point precision. I had thought the route was a starting point from which to explore on our own. Not so. The route book we’d be given was meant to be followed to the letter, plain and simple. I was disturbed to learn that for the entire 7,800 miles there’d be no deviating, no shortcutting, no self-determination. It’s what makes a rally so quirky and appealing. To some. We are all making a gentleman’s agreement that we’ll go exactly where the organizers tell us and that we’ll move at a pace and time of their choosing. Of course, there’s great temptation to stray, which is why they set up points along the route where each car checks in with a course marshal during the day.

  In a road rally, crews compete over a predetermined course against the clock, though not like NASCAR or Formula I, where the cars circle round and round the same track. In the morning, we would be flagged off from that day’s starting point, called the main time control, at those one-minute intervals, so there would be no direct head-to-head racing. The pamphlet tells me that, if you’re of the rally world, you call the starting point the MTC. I adopt this acronym immediately, which makes me feel sporty and in-the-know; I also make up one of my own, dumping the time-consuming, multi-syllabic Peking to Paris for P2P.

  Once flagged off from the MTC, we’d be driving on normal roads, with each car having a set number of hours to cover the same distance between the MTC until the first time control and from there all subsequent time controls till we reached the finish time control at day’s end. I figure out for myself that the “in” abbreviation for the day’s end point must be FTC. At each time control there’s a marshal whose job it is to check in each car. On arriving, I’m to hand my microchipped time card to the marshal, who scans the chip with a handheld gadget that logs in our car and its arrival time. The same is done when it’s time to leave the time control and get back on the road. The marshals have a set of highly accurate synchronized clocks. At the end of each day, the number of minutes each car took to cover the day’s distance would be tallied. Whoever wound up in Paris in the amount of minutes closest to what was specified, would win the overall gold medal. Within each car category there would be gold, silver, and bronze medals as well. Simple enough, until I learned there also were penalties.

  As navigator, it was my job to make sure our watches matched the marshals’ clock to the second. I also had to man the distance instruments in the car. I’d have a special computer that measures mileage to the hundredth of a mile, which I would have to set each morning and make sure its mileage matched exactly that in the route book. The route book itself seemed designed to give me a mental breakdown, crammed as it was with the minutiae of mileage and description, in numeric, verbal, and pictorial form, that I couldn’t fathom how I’d ever grasp it all.

  Our route would be divided into daily stages, or sections. To avoid any possibility of an enterprising soul checking out the route beforehand, we would be given the P2P route book in Beijing, two days before the start of the Rally. There would be no time to study it in advance, no time for me to learn what a route book looked like, nor to familiarize myself with the arcane symbology used to signify landmarks and directions.

  There was a lot more riding on my ability and accuracy than I’d expected. Arrive too early and we’d get penalty points. Go off-route, arrive late, or miss a time control altogether, penalties again. If our car has mechanical problems, or we’re distracted in a conversation and miss our check out time, more penalties. At the end of the day, all efforts would be for naught if I didn’t present our time card to the marshal at the FTC before it closed. If we got lost, or had a bad breakdown en route, we’d drop further and further in the standings. We might even be out of the running for the gold or the silver altogether.

  To further enliven our days, we would have time trials. The description of these terrified me. They were short stretches of road filled with tricky driving challenges like hairpin turns, sand or gravel patches, hills, and a multitude of other car handling tests. On these, the object is to drive as fast as possible and set the lowest possible time, which is tracked to the hundredth of a second. I knew that Bernard would have his foot on the gas pedal the whole way. What I didn’t know is how I’d be able to give him instructions on what was coming up quickly enough, so he’d have time to react and deal with it, when we’d be moving at 60 mph. I could picture Roxanne flying over a ditch, ka-banging over stumps, doing a 360 when Bernard had to brake too late because of my delayed instruction, and coming to a halt in a swirling cloud of dust.

  To bandage any competitor who crashed their car, whether in a time trial or elsewhere, a medical officer with a fully stocked ambulance was along for the entire Rally. This probably reassured many competitors. For me, the only “A” word in my medical vocabulary was Advil. It had not yet occurred to me that rallies were an activity where a crash of devastating proportions could occur. Why would anyone want to drive so recklessly as to smash a beautiful old car? Or to put this another way, if you were in such a car, wouldn’t you drive carefully enough that you wouldn’t ever crash? Pain of the sort requiring an ambulance was not part of my internal bargain about acceptable risks and when added to the list of Things I Do Not Possess, pushed me into a state of anxiety I hadn’t known since discovering my wedding dress made me look like a crinoline-wrapped pear. I didn’t sleep for days.

  Then there were the five mechanics and their several mobile repair vans, whose job it was to patch up those smashed vehicles, or any vehicle for that matter, that could not handle the rigors of the road. Bernard was the best mechanic I knew and, given his intention to oversee the detailed preparations of our car himself, I doubted anything would go wrong with it. However, he couldn’t change or build in just anything he wanted. Like all the others, our car would have to pass something called, in the arcane vocabulary of the rallying community, scrutineering. This task, in which each car would be checked to ensure no unauthorized modifications had been made, would be handled by a representative of FIVA, which is a French acronym for the International Federation of Vintage Automobiles. The P2P rules specified that every major component of a car must be as it was when the car was manufactured. If a car was built with rotor brakes, new ones could be put on, but they had to be rotor brakes, not disc brakes. If a car was built with an inline V-6 engine, that’s what it had to race with. A few modifications for safety were allowed. A skid plate
to protect a car’s underbelly was permitted, as was rewiring for 12 volt electronics, necessary for running the trip computer. Anyone who wanted to install a roll bar could do so. “Yes to the roll bar,” I told Bernard. And then I sank into gloom imagining that on the day before the race started, as we underwent scrutineering, the FIVA rep would take one look at Roxanne and send us back to the parking lot.

  The myriad regulations, definitions, rules, and requirements didn’t comfort me. They burdened me. I’d opened a Pandora’s box of information, which revealed one thing: I was unfamiliar with every navigator’s tool other than maps. Sitting in a passenger seat was something I knew how to do. But stick to Rally rules? How could I do that when I couldn’t even remember them all? The mere thought of my elevated status as navigator, now of equal importance to Bernard’s driver role, agitated me. I felt like a cornered animal, which made me panic, and when I panic, I do not get to work and solve the problem, the way Bernard does. I am overcome by deerin-the-headlights syndrome: I stop in my tracks, petrified, and there I stay. If I could possibly veer off this path I’d gotten on and escape, I would have.