It never occurred to me that I would spend so much time in a car—any car—and in places a GPS has to think twice about pinpointing. I’m just not suited to this. I get carsick. I live in a perpetual state of anxiety. And I hate not knowing what comes next. I’ve done a lot of things in life because I didn’t think carefully enough beforehand, didn’t know to turn tail and run. When I’m in trouble, I rue this major defect in my character. Once I’m out of trouble, I thank goodness for my ability to use fantasy to pull me into escapades for which I’m utterly unsuited. Without that ability, what follows could never have happened.
We’ve barely set foot in China, and already I’m feeling the familiar twinge of panic that I might get lost. Knowing how to find my way is a skill of more than ordinary importance to me. In a matter of days, we’ll be idling at the Great Wall in a seventy-year-old vehicle and waiting for a checkered flag to wave downward, releasing us on a 7,800-mile car race to Place Vendôme in Paris. My husband Bernard will be driving. And for the next thirty-five days, I’ll be telling him where to go.
At the moment, I am plowing my way through the crush of people jostling to meet arrivals at Beijing Capital International Airport. I walk as my mother taught me when, as a small girl, I struggled behind her, bucking the rush-hour crowds in New York’s Grand Central Station. “Put your hands on your hips, darling,” she said in her lilting French accent “comme ça,” her manicured hands placing mine properly, so my elbows stuck out. “When people are too close, just poke them,” she told me, tossing her head with laughter at her own daring. The trick worked for her, but I suspect it had nothing to do with arm placement and all to do with her glamour and perfume. I was five years old. My head barely reached the average commuter’s waist. No one gave way for me, leaving me struggling to keep up, face reddening with panic, rubbing my bruised elbows.
Here in Beijing, my mother’s crowd-tamer trick is once again deficient. Buffeted by hordes of happy greeters, I watch Bernard swiveling his hips through the mass of people like a retreating rumba dancer. So sure is he that he’s breaking trail for me, helping me along, that he doesn’t even glance back to see I’m falling further and further behind.
To keep my carry-on bag from sliding off my shoulder, I scrunch my neck to keep the strap in place. But my neck, already cocked at an odd angle from eighteen hours in a plane, refuses to maintain the position. The bag, loaded with maps, chargers, a handful of my favorite lemon Luna bars, and a Radio Shack-worth of spare batteries, slams to the floor. I stop to readjust, looking up just in time to make out Bernard as he dodges into a small taxi. By the time I duck in beside him, I’m a sweaty mess. I’m also a happy mess, ready for the relief offered by this safe, though sadly too temporary, mobile haven.
Despite being jet-lagged, with eyes shriveled to hard little raisins from too many hours on a plane, there’s one thing I do notice: there are a lot of people here, more people in one square block than in the entire 2,400 square miles of my Colorado county, where the resident population barely breaks 1,400 souls on a day when everybody gets out of bed. Millions are going about their business as our taxi driver wends his way through traffic, stopping now and then to let a flood of pedestrians flow across the clogged streets. When a gap appears at the curb, new pedestrians swarm to fill it, backed by countless more. Peering through the window, I alternate between stunned gratitude that I’m here and a fretful anxiety at what this implies. Everywhere are street signs in Mandarin, a language I’ve been unable to learn. Since I’m stupefied with lack of sleep, I actually believe if I stare hard enough at them I’ll learn the language by osmosis. If I don’t, how will I ever understand signposts to get us out of the country once the race begins?
Our driver swerves around pedestrian obstacles in a marvel of brakeless daring, his body a universal symbol of diligence with hands clenching the steering wheel, back ramrod straight. As for me, normally so impatient I’d like to personally press a cab driver’s foot on the gas pedal, I feel a distinct yearning for him to slow down. I’d be delighted to live in this cab forever, if it meant avoiding the moment when I have to don the mantle of navigator-in-chief to Bernard’s role as driver. If someone were here to listen, I’d say, “This is all a big mistake.” Yes, I know Bernard is next to me, but he’s not in any position to understand my longing to flee. He’s a man with limitless faith in himself. I don’t mind a risk or two, but only if I can control the outcome. As surely as I know my long hair and deep-set eyes are brown, and that while I’m not plump I will never be skinny, I know the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge is a runaway horse charging downhill with the bit in its teeth. I’ve ridden such a horse so I can tell you: control is not one of the things you feel in that situation.
What perplexes me is how in the past 700-odd days I never found the courage to tell Bernard I don’t really want to do this. Of course, that would have meant bucking the trend of our marriage. We’re a couple who generally does everything together, accommodating each other’s foibles in a way many people never manage. We created a successful software company together, built our dream home, turned our backs on it all, and took on the ranching life. Any one of those would have shredded a relationship more fragile than ours. Yet here we are, still married.
Let’s be clear, though. This race is Bernard’s dream, not mine. Cars for me are purely a functional means to reach a pleasant end, like a friend’s house, a good restaurant, or my favorite nail salon. And then there’s that other issue, that small matter of getting carsick. The nausea wells up as soon as I try to read in the car and it lasts for hours after I again set my feet on terra firma. Equally dire for any car-related enterprise, I can barely tell a car jack from a jackass. How could I have been so spineless as to agree to this enterprise or so deluded as to think it would go away on its own?
Giving up on learning Mandarin from the back of a cab, I rest my head on the nubby fabric of the back seat, a spot marked by so many resting heads that the gray upholstery is darkly stained with hair grease and scalp sweat. When I close my eyes, the lids become a screen for a movie trailer, an endless loop I’ve been rerunning for months now. It starts with clonking Chinese percussion, shrill violins, trilling flutes, then the booming bass voiceover: “When their car collapses, stranding them in the Gobi, fun and fireworks erupt. Will they make it? Or will one of them walk home alone? Follow this manic duo as they feud their way through Siberia and beyond . . . .” We’re in the starring roles, and this sounds like a comedy preview, only none of it strikes me as humorous.
The whining din of those devil violins fades away as I drift back to a warm September afternoon on the courthouse lawn of my tiny ranching town. Sizzling elk burgers spatter their juices onto charcoal. Tantalizing riffles of meat- and fat-scented smoke drift into the heavy branches overhead, where robins twitter their fervent hope that they will not become bird-kebabs on that grill.
As days go, that one was benign and rustic in its charms. I saw no sign saying “Caution! Anguish and marital discord ahead,” had no inkling I was about to descend into a realm of merciless travails with the swiftness of a barrel over Niagara Falls. All for one thing: to drive the Silk Route taken by Genghis Khan and race against 125 other teams, using a classic car most people would have left in their granddad’s garden shed.
It’s a day I’d reviewed in my mind countless times, wondering if that afternoon could have had a different ending.