Back of Beyond Read online

  Hell’s Angels? Or something worse?

  “Hi!” I tried to sound nonchalant and cheerful.

  No one replied. Not one of the three enormous men even looked at me. A young girl, also encased in black leather, stood off to the side, leg on the upturned wheel of my car. They were laughing. Nasty sly chuckles. One of the men was mumbling something low in a gravelly bass voice and they’d all sniggered again.

  “Thought I’d never find anybody ’round here,” I said (I could hear my voice rising and cracking).

  Still no response. No acknowledgment that I even existed. Then one of the men turned slowly, the apparent leader of the bunch, and looked toward me but not at me. I traced his gaze. He was staring straight at my camera bag. I had so much equipment inside that I hadn’t been able to close the zipper. My expensive Nikons with fancy lenses gleamed in the beams of their lights. He growled something to his companions and they all turned and stared at the bag and smiled some of the nastiest smiles I’ve ever seen. The girl gave a hissing giggle and I didn’t like the sound at all. So this is how it happens, I thought (sometimes I wish my brain would just switch off), at night, stuck in the pines, helpless, with a pack of Pineys, armed, eyeballing a couple thousand dollars of easy pickings. And another hapless backroader vanishes forever.

  “Can you help me get this thing out?” I asked. “I’m stuck.” (Talk about the bleedin’ obvious….)

  More gravelly sniggers. Still no one looked at me. Then one of the men slowly sauntered over to the car and rocked it. I could hear the bog gurgle. More chuckles. Then, as if they did this kind of thing all the time, two of the men moved to the rear, one moved to the front (the girl still giggling), a quick heave in which they lifted the whole damned machine (half a ton of mulchy muddy metal) and dropped it with a bounce back in the middle of the sand track. All in a second or two. Easy as cutting cake. I stood gaping.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot. Thank you…” I chuntered on. Now they all stood, arms in riveted belts and stared—this time right at me—with those sinister smirks.

  “Get in.” The largest man with the longest hair was speaking.

  “Right. Right. I’ll see if she’s okay. There was plenty of mud around the tailpipe.”

  I squeezed between them (like passing through a granite wall) and slid into the driver’s seat. She started! First go. Ah—what a machine! “Thanks again. I’ll just get her turned around and…”

  “You’ll never make it that way.” The big one again. But I felt safer now inside my car with the doors locked from the inside.

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’ll find it.”

  “Follow this guy.” He pointed to one of his companions who was already mounting his bike and revving the engine. That girl was still watching and smirking. She really unnerved me. Like a bloodthirsty Madame Defarge with a front seat by the guillotine.

  “We’ll be right behind.” They were already lining up their bikes.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Faster way out.”

  Oh yeah. Sure. Right to some broken-down shack in the darkest part of the pines. Bye-bye sweet life.

  “Listen…”, I began.

  “Let’s go!”

  They literally corralled my car forward, deeper and deeper down the track, which now rapidly became a rutted trail with more swampy patches. It was black. I needed full beams to avoid overhanging branches and rocks half hidden in the sand.

  Pretty soon there was hardly any track at all, just snaky patches of flattened earth. How stupid could I be. Like the metaphoric lamb to the slaughter. They were still going fast, not giving me a chance to slow down and think. Then ahead was water, a stretch of shallow swamp. The lead bike spurred through. I skidded and swirled about but somehow made it. Branches were crashing against my windshield. Mud sprayed high on both sides. I couldn’t see any signs of trail now.

  Okay. Time for action, David, Rambo-style. These guys aren’t ever going to let me out of this damned wilderness. At least make a break for it. Put your foot down, get ahead of the front guy and try to blast your own way out. They’re going to get you anyway. At least I’ll go down fighting….

  Waiting…waiting for a chance to break. The track is widening again. I can get past. I can see tire ruts ahead. Maybe I’ve got a real chance after all….

  Foot down, fist on horn, lights full beam, and we’re off; the car leaps ahead like a leopard missing the front biker by inches, sand hissing on the chassis. A surge of pure beautiful speed, barreling down the track, the bike lights behind me now. Oh boy, I’m going to make it, I’m going to get out alive….

  Then the track ends. With no warning. I slam everything on, including the hand brake, and the machine spins in an explosion of flying pebbles and sand. This is it! I thought I’d won but now I’ve had it….

  An enormous eighteen-wheeler roars past, a couple of feet from my front fender. Three cars follow, flashing past in flurries of hot air. There are lights. A lot of them. It’s a highway. A real hard-surface, macadam, fast-lane, beautiful, flat, straight, smooth highway….

  Someone knocks on my window. It’s the big man with the longest hair. His bandanna is halfway down his eyes and he’s as mad as hell. “What the mother-f……hell do you think you’re doing you crazy mother-f….. b……you’re out of your f….. mind, you stupid son-of-a-bitch!”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say or do except smile as nicely as I could. I was safe and that was enough.

  The two other bikers strolled up and peered in—dirty, frazzled, old-young faces looking at me as if I’d gone wacko.

  Then one of them gave that smile again.

  “Bet you thought you’d never make it out.”

  I still couldn’t speak. I just nodded like the crazy man they thought I was. The big man was still mother-f….. g away in the background and I could hear the girl giggling again.

  “You’re okay now. So—right here and it takes you straight into Philly.”

  And that was it. They were gone. Bikes revving like a hundred hornets’ nests, lights disappearing down the track back into the forest, and then utter silence.

  I got out of the car. I was smothered in sweat and my legs wouldn’t hold me straight. I leaned against the hood. There were some stars out—beautiful bright stars. The breeze was cool. I put one foot on the hard road. It felt wonderful. Turn right and straight into Philly he said. So I did. And it did. (And much, much later that night I did enjoy an expensive bottle of champagne with Anne and the cats.) But I still prefer my adventures a bit further from home. This was altogether too close.

  Some very wise writers have defined travel as “the exploration of inner space—the losing of the self in order to find oneself,” “a pursuit of rootlessness,” “the recurrent human desire to drop our lives and walk out of them,” “to leave home where we impersonate ourselves and to become whomever we please.” Paul Fussell wrote in Abroad about the travels of D. H. Lawrence: “What he really saw in other things and places was the infinite.”

  Travel indeed has many dimensions. The harassed executive has his needs—to be filled fully, urgently, and with flair, for a relatively short time. Singles often travel to search for the ultimate romance, away from the monotonous mundanity of the daily grind. Many seem to travel merely because it seems to be the way to use up accumulated vacation time. It is often a stress-filled experience (the planning, the schedules, the packing, the itinerary, the flight, the diarrhea, not to mention the inevitable lost travelers checks and absence of good home cooking). One wonders why most people put up with all the grief. Surely a gentle period of country walks close to home, fine dining in local restaurants, visiting nearby sights that would otherwise remain unvisited might be far more relaxing and rewarding.

  For me, travel has become a way of life but not just because I happen to write about some of my journeys. The “professional” travel writer seems almost a contradiction in terms anyway. How can one get professional about something as potentially open-ended and intim
ately personal as travel—the ultimate exploration of self and all its possibilities?

  I think I travel because I’m alive. And I don’t mean that to sound glib. I mean that I really should be dead. A part of me still thinks that maybe I did die twenty-two years ago when I was an ambitious urban planner working with the Shah of Iran and his wife, the Empress Farah, on the future master plan for the city of Tehran, and that someone else (another me?) took over my body and mind and has been living here happily ever since.

  It’s a short story, but still a disconcerting one. Even as I write it now I feel the old tremor through my fingers.

  Anne and I were high up in the Elburz Mountains of Iran. This dramatic range acts as a fourteen-thousand-foot wall separating the desert of Tehran and the south from the lush jungled hills bordering the Caspian Sea. We’d had a few lazy days of meandering, trying to learn a little more about this anomalous country and its long history. We were returning back over the mountains on the “old road,” a narrow unpaved trail that promised more adventure than the carefully graded curves and tunnels of the new road a couple of hundred miles to the west. Everything was going fine. There was no traffic and we felt very much at peace among the peaks and high valleys.

  We were descending a steep pass, the road curling and twisting through a broken stretch of country. Around a sharp bend we approached a one-lane bridge with no retaining wall on either side—just a vertical drop of three hundred feet or so into a shadowy ravine. A dramatic place. Then suddenly, with no warning, an enormous Mack truck came barreling across the bridge spewing rocks and dust. He, like us, assumed he had the road to himself and was trying to gain acceleration for the long climb up the pass. By this time we were actually on the bridge, which seemed hardly wide enough for one car, let alone two vehicles heading straight for each other. We realized he couldn’t possibly brake without careening off the bridge. We also knew the same applied to us, and there wasn’t time to stop anyway. But I did brake. I didn’t know what else to do. And—like watching a slow motion film—we could see our car skidding sideways right toward the wall-less edge of the bridge and the ravine. We both closed our eyes and I remembered two silly things quite distinctly: A beautiful color of bright purple inside my closed eyelids, and feeling a strip of torn leather on the steering wheel and wondering why I’d never repaired it. We were still skidding; I could hear the gravel hissing under the sliding tires. We waited, eyes still closed, for the collision with the truck or for the fall into the ravine—or both. We were absolutely calm. No screams. Just acceptance.

  What seemed like minutes later, but can only have been a second or two, we opened our eyes to find ourselves moving slowly forward, down the center of the bridge. The car seemed to be driving itself. We pulled to a stop and looked behind us. There was no truck, no dust. We got out of the car and listened. There was no sound—no indication that the truck had ever been there at all. We were absolutely calm; no fear, no shaking, no aftereffects of shock. We just kept looking around and then looked at each other (we even looked over the bridge to see if the truck had tumbled into the ravine). Nothing.

  We got back into the car and drove on. We didn’t speak for a long time. Then Anne said: “That did happen, didn’t it?” “It happened” was all I could think to say. Though what had actually happened we couldn’t understand. All we knew was that something very strange had taken place, and we were still alive. And then we were weeping. Great big sobs. And then laughing and then very quiet for most of the journey back to Tehran.

  Many people experience some climactic event that makes a radical change in their lives. Well, this was ours. We still don’t know what happened; we don’t know how we survived when it was obvious that we were going to die at least in one way if not two. And even now, having written it all down for the first time, I’m none the wiser. Wiser, that is, about the event itself. But we both became much wiser in other ways that completely transformed our lives.

  We began to understand with greater clarity the fragility and wonder of life itself; we knew from that moment we would try to live our lives to the full, doing what we felt, deep down, we should be doing, no longer putting things off until we had accumulated enough capital or confidence or security to feel “free.” We had found freedom on that bridge. We needed for nothing after that. Even though there were difficult years in material and other ways, we never had any real doubts about what we were doing with our lives. It didn’t always make sense, particularly to others. But somehow that singular experience had bored a hole into our souls and certainty flowed out and just kept on flowing.

  And we just floated with it as best we could. We found a deeply imbedded love for travel and the open road; we also found a need to give back something to the world (we both work with the blind in developing countries); and we found a need to be alive to life every day through creative endeavors (many of which make no economic sense whatsoever!).

  Which brings me finally to this book, a culmination of fifteen years of travel and travel book writing. I’ve explored a good part of our earth in search of people and places that possess an essential integrity, truth, and centeredness—wild places, secret places, unspoiled nooks and crannies on the backroads, and people who seem to live life as fully as they are able—finding, as Joseph Campbell would say, their own “bliss.”

  I love travel with a passion, the good days and the bad. And I don’t care to analyze the reasons too deeply—running to, running from, inner journeys, outer journeys, fear of commitments, fear of dying, fear of missing out on things—all of the above, or none. Who cares?

  My travels are open-eyed experiences of the unknown, the child in the man still romping on from adventure to adventure; trying to learn, to understand, and to share the joys of “earth-gypsying.”

  May you enjoy all your journeys, too.

  1. VENEZUELA’S GRAN SABANA

  Journey to a Lost World

  We’d made it!

  The clouds, swirling like wraiths throughout our long climb up the five-thousand-foot-high vertical mountain, suddenly lifted. My two Indian guides hauled me the last few feet through the mud and mossy slime onto a slab of cold black rock. We were utterly exhausted. I had never felt so drained. The ascent had taken two long days, up from the gloom and tangle of the jungle, along slippery ledges hardly wide enough for a toehold, shinnying up wet clefts, and always cursing the constant mists that cut visibility to a few murky feet.

  Many times I thought we’d reached the summit only to peer through fleeting holes in the cloud and see the rock face rising up, endlessly.

  I was convinced we’d never arrive but decided to keep going as long as my guides seemed optimistic. It was hard to tell what they thought. I had only the mountain to worry about. They, on the other hand, brought with them an ancient tribal inheritance plagued with terrible legends and fears of curupuri, the constant lurking spirit of the forest, and a dozen other demonic entities that kept most of their peers well away from these strange, pillarlike mountains—the mysterious tepuis of Venezuela’s Gran Sabana.

  But this truly was the summit. As the clouds melted, I could see a barren plateau of incised rocks stretching away into the sun. A cold wind tore across the wilderness, screaming and howling in the clefts. There were no trees. Spongy clumps of dripping moss clung to the more sheltered sides of broken strata. The rest of the summit was as arid as a stone desert of scattered black stumps, frost-shattered and worn into shapes like petrified figures.

  I was shivering, dazed with fatigue, amazed by the bleakness of the landscape—and elated. After years of dreams and half-baked schemes, I was finally here. One of few, if any, white men ever to stand on this towering tepui in one of the remotest regions on earth, a true lost world, where you could see forever across an infinity of Amazonian jungle.

  I blame it all on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  Way back in 1912 the world-reknowned creator of Sherlock Holmes released his new novel The Lost World to enthusiastic reviews. It was based on a tan
talizing premise. Somewhere on the most remote northern edge of the Amazon Basin, an eccentric professor from England had discovered a primeval lost world of flat-topped sheer-sided mountains, thousands of feet high, soaring out of impenetrable jungle. He had seen evidence of prehistoric creatures, been attacked by pterodactyls and returned, after numerous misadventures, to proclaim the existence of land where time had stood still, a bastion of ancient life forms long considered extinct.

  Expecting adulation and fame from his discoveries he found himself instead ostracized by skeptical scientists and relegated to the ranks of crankishness. Sir Arthur begins his tale as the professor sets out with a group of fellow explorers to rediscover this lost world and return with tangible evidence that the earth is still a place of great mysteries and secrets. The journalist of his fictional story records the outset of the journey in prose designed to excite the imagination of his readers (and this reader in particular): “So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate. I have no doubt that we are really on the eve of some of the most remarkable experiences.”

  I first read the book as a child and vowed to my ever-patient parents that one day I’d find this place and lead my own expedition to the top of one of those impossible mountains.

  Years passed but the idea never faded. I learned that Sir Arthur had indeed traveled in the remotest parts of southern Venezuela and that these strange mountains, hundreds of eight-thousand-foot-high tepuis, did in fact exist on the fringes of the Amazonian basin.

  So finally, I went to Venezuela to see them for myself.