Road Fever (Book Review)

Road Fever. By Tim Cahill. Vintage Books; c1992; #0394758374; 288 pages; $12.

In 1987, Cahill and endurance driver Gary Sowerby decide to embark on a record-breaking drive from the South-end of Tierra del Fuego to the North-end of Dalton Highway, circa Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. The 15,000-mile drive, if accomplished in less than 24 days, would result in a record, as recorded by those wonderful people with that big Guinness Book. This is their mission, and their means is "secured funding" and a road-ready GMC Sierra, complete with camper.

A work like this, obviously, has rather limited coverage for Nicaragua (pp.240-251), but it is a chapter in their long-haul diary. "Road Fever" is much more than a trip diary though, and the first nearly one-third of the text is the process of setting up the attempt and securing the countless permits, visas, promises, assistance, and attempting to get people (essentially, anyone other than themselves) to fund the bizarre trek.

Though Sowerby is a professional driver and has held endurance records, anyone who has driven (or even just watched others drive around) in South or Central America, knows full well how many things can go wrong. So, driving speed isn’t the only measure, and there is also that little matter of border crossings. If things go badly, you could spend as much time at the border as you do passing through a country – even if you are passing through as 80 mph, which in Central America doesn’t happen on all that many roads. This is a book about all the little (and sometimes not so little) things that go wrong on the way to that one big thing going right - at least by Guinness standards.

I had missed this book when it debuted and just now came across it for the first time. After stumbling across some online reviews (“One of my favorite books!”; “…and I just couldn’t stop laughing”, “…most magnificent adventure book I ever read!”; “...funniest travel book I have read in years”; “…and it is one of the most hilarious books I ever read…”; etc.), it is fair to say I had very high expectations. While the book is surely worth reading, I cannot help but think it overrated. It is more or less just “above average” by most many travel writing standards. With nearly 30% of the book dealing with the preparation, and only 20 pages covering the concluding leg of the trip across the U.S. and Canada, it is as if the written record morphed and was then hacked to fit a sub-300-page manuscript model. It is a good, but by no means a great, book. Cahill can tell a story and is good with anecdotes, and he has a certain detached sense of humor that somehow often seems fitting for the cast of characters he encounters. While sometimes entertaining in themselves ("Psalm 91 Versus the Gasoline Bandits"), the chapter titles are usually not representative of the contents so there is not much reason to reproduce them here. You can pretty much guess the fastest route given their goal, though for some bizarre reason this book does not include a map of their route or any of their stops long the way.

While the author does a good job detailing the little things, that might be because no real big thing ever happens; this is clearly a story of "getting there". No one could make this long-distance drive, regardless of speed, and not have stories to tell. There are some good ones, which is why the book has such a large fan base. Per Nicaragua, neither driver seems all that impressed with the place, and one is quite antagonistic, for reasons the book eventually makes clear. It is not intended as deep political commentary or a culturally revealing work, and it certainly isn’t. It is a what-if-we-tried-something-crazy-got-other-people-to-pay-for-it-and-didn’t-go-a-little-insane-or-get-arrested-doing-it sort of story, and a small part of that craziness is a trip across unfortunate late 1980’s Nicaragua. You wont learn anything about Nicaragua by reading the book, but in case you thought this 15,000 mile cruise sounded tempting, perhaps the book will give you some second thoughts.

*** Tim Cahill is travel- and adventure-writer, and the founding editor of Outside Magazine; he still serves them as Editor-at-Large. He work is well-known to readers of Outside, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic Adventure Magazine, as well as to anyone to walked past a weirdly-titled book at the local store (he is the also author or editor of: “Pecked to Death by Ducks”, “Jaguars Ripped My Flesh”, “A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg”, “Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why: The Best of Travel Humor & Misadventure”, “Lost in My Own Backyard”, “Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor & Misadventure”, “Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered”, and nearly a half-dozen other less weirdly-titled volumes). ***