11

Not-So-Ugly Americans and the Road of Good Intentions

The principal figure in each of the four scenarios below is either (a) Indian, (b) German, (c) French, or (d) American. Test your knowledge of international stereotypes by matching the behavior of the traveler with his or her nationality.

1. A ferry is scheduled to depart the Croatian island of Rab for the mainland at 5:30 AM. Because the ship is small and vehicle space limited, tourists and locals have been gathering at the pier since four o’clock in the morning. By the time the tiny, wooden ticket booth opens at five, approximately thirty parties are lined up in as cooperative a manner as Europeans of varying nationalities, all of them high on caffeine and nicotine, are capable of in the hours before dawn.
      At precisely 4:58 AM, a sporty, two-door Saab pulls up across from the ticket booth. As the wooden window slides up and the ferry office readies for business, the door of the Saab opens. A broad-shouldered man in a suede jacket leaps from the vehicle and sprints to the window. Using his elbows like an NFL fullback breaking through a pile at the end zone, the man muscles to the front of the line. Unaware of this minor ruckus, the clerk in the booth looks up, assumes the man in the suede jacket is first in line (which, technically, he is), and sells him a ticket. In response to the murmur of protest that spreads through the crowd, the blatant line-cutter offers a grunt of aristocratic entitlement and returns to his car, which he proceeds to maneuver in front of all the other vehicles waiting to drive onto the ship.

2. A train leaves Bangkok for the three-and-a-half-hour trip to Kanchanaburi, site of the Bridge on the River Kwai, made infamous by the Academy Award–winning World War II film of the same name. Thirty minutes before Kanchanaburi, the train stops in a small town. Among the large group of tourists who pile on is a middle-aged couple with wide-brimmed hats, cameras slung like silver bricks around their necks, and the scent of mosquito repellant and body odor thick in their clothes and hair. The woman and man—who is bald and several inches shorter than his wife—quickly move to the row with the last vacant seat, a window spot next to a man in a blue T-shirt who occupies the aisle seat. The woman motions to the blue T-shirt man that she would like to sit by the window. He nods politely, stands, and steps into the aisle to make room for her to slide past. This she does, but when the man in the T-shirt sits back down, he’s startled to find himself in the lap of the bald man. Using the momentary diversion created by his wife, baldie has violated a number of widely accepted rules of public civility and stolen the other man’s seat.
      The chump on the losing end of this bit of shameless chicanery smiles icily and shoves his ticket in front of the bald man’s face. This shows beyond any doubt that the man in the T-shirt holds a reservation for the seat, which he makes clear he wants back. Instead of rising with an embarrassed apology, the bald man simply ignores the complaints. With the dead eyes of a shark, he fixes his gaze out the window and keeps his lips pursed until the man in the T-shirt finally accepts the fact that although it’s humiliating to lose his seat to a complete and utter asshole, standing for the next thirty minutes is preferable to engaging in a physical confrontation on a train rumbling through countryside already notorious for the spilled blood of foreigners.

3. On a flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Fiji, a man is seated next to a middle-aged woman in a loose-fitting, multihued dress. Ten minutes into the flight, the woman removes a glitter-covered shoe, folds her right foot onto her left thigh, and begins furiously picking at a thick scab that covers the side of her foot with an impressionistic pattern of purplish bubbles. After puncturing and removing parts of the scab, the woman begins carelessly flicking away bits of skin, many of which land on the pant leg of the man seated next to her.
      Next, the woman removes from her enormous bag (which takes up most of the space beneath both seats) a long pick, something resembling a blunt fondue sword, and starts scraping off layers of dried and cracked toe skin with a scooping motion that sends more flaky particles in the direction of her seatmate. By the time the flight is over, the entire scab and other sections of unwanted skin have been removed like endless layers of moist filo dough. The woman’s foot is a throbbing red stump, a signal of either recovery or advancing infection. Impressively, her labor has been completed with virtually no pause despite the increasingly insistent complaints from the unfortunate man forced to endure this revolting exhibition of DIY surgery.

4. A solo male tourist arrives on Malaysia’s Tioman Island, a paradise of swaying palms, soft beaches, and volcanic peaks that rise straight from the sea, the kind of place where one walks around all day humming “Bali Hai,” half expecting Bloody Mary to pop out from behind a thatch hut spitting betel nut and offering a good price on her daughter. Naturally, Tioman has been discovered by backpackers who come to the island in clumps to do the usual backpacker things—get high, wander around in Bob Marley T-shirts, make ill-tempered demands of the local help as though they were staying in a four-star resort, and complain about the United States. For whatever positive traits they might possess, backpackers aren’t renowned as tidy people, and since neither are most Asians, islands like Tioman have acquired the patina of magnificent garbage dumps.
      On the first day of his visit, the aforementioned tourist checks into a cheap bungalow, throws his bag on the bamboo-frame bed, takes a walk along a length of garbage-strewn beach, and gets an idea. Back in the village, he scares up a large, plastic garbage bag and returns to the beach, this time picking up all the trash in his path and putting it in the bag. He makes it a hundred yards before the bag is full, at which point he returns to the village for another sack.
      “What you doing?” In the village, the man is pelted with questions. There’s no Sierra Club in Asia, not even a legacy of TV ads featuring tearful Indian chiefs mourning Big Mac wrappers on the side of the road, so the man’s selfless behavior has aroused suspicion.
      “I’m cleaning your beach,” the man answers his mystified inquisitors. “It’s filthy.”
      During his short stay on the island, the man fills ten or fifteen bags. Not one person, local or tourist, lifts a hand to help him. In a place like Tioman, it’s likely the bags will be “thrown away” by being hauled fifty yards out to sea and dumped overboard. Still, the man feels good about the fact that the beach is cleaner when he leaves than it was when he arrived.

The answers are:

1. b (German)

2. c (French)

3. a (Indian)

4. d (American)

The man in the Saab was actually driving a Mercedes-Benz, but since that detail seemed like a dead German giveaway, I changed it. Otherwise, all of the stories are completely true. The hapless victim of foreign abuse in each of the first three examples was I. The heroic beach cleaner in the fourth anecdote was my brother-in-law, Matt, a man also admirable for being the rare white guy who speaks decent Cantonese yet almost never whips it out when ordering in a Chinese restaurant.

 

Given the setup and my predictably contrarian point of view, it probably wasn’t hard to guess where I was going with those anecdotes. But that doesn’t make their point—that Americans aren’t the worst travelers in the world, and that oftentimes they’re the best—any less valid. Or difficult to prove.

Choosing to illuminate my encounters with a nasty German, a French couple, and an Indian lady was tough because it meant ignoring the two Dutch girls who clogged the toilet, flooded the floor, and, only after someone else cleaned the mess, kept themselves locked in the shared bathroom of a guesthouse in Dubrovnik; the freeloading Austrian who arrived in the Philippines woefully unprepared to hike ninety-five-hundred-foot Mount Apo and subsequently demanded and received from me and everyone else on the hill loans of dry clothing, gloves, water, food, and money, without so much as a thank-you; the legion of Middle Eastern satyrs who feast on young boys and girls in Southeast Asian brothels yet treat the rest of the population as though it were beneath contempt; and the Koreans who erected a sign on Tinian Island in the Western Pacific attesting to the “eternal grudge” they swore on behalf of their ancestors to bear out against the despised Japanese.¹⁰

None of these stories are meant to imply that all foreigners are line-cutting, seat-stealing, scab-picking, litter-bugging, bathroom-hogging, boy-screwing, hate-mongering jackoffs. On the American-Canadian Chilkoot Trail, Randy and I were befriended by an immensely likable German hiker named Eckhard Holler with whom I retain hope of someday reconnecting. In predigital days, a French photographer on a sailboat from Scotland to Norway saved my ass by generously sharing his film. In this book, I’ve thrown a few good-natured shots at Australians (believe me, they can take it), but without the friendship of a pair of Aussies named Dean Robson and Donella Johnston, to say nothing of a timely introduction to legendary Aussie bar band Cold Chisel, I very likely would have lost my mind in Gifu, Japan. An Indian guy in…well, for whatever reason I haven’t had much interaction with Indian tourists beyond the foot-scraping lady on the plane to Fiji, but the Indians I know in the States are all good people, so I have faith that the vast majority of their home-country brethren, like the vast majority of all humans, are all right.

They just haven’t been drilled in the new art of cultural accommodation the way twenty-first-century Americans have. Molded by two decades of politically correct boot camp—in what we like to call the world’s most free-speaking country, it’s worth noting that your professional career can be ruined by any number of random remarks less offensive than those heard daily on school playgrounds—an entire generation of Americans has been browbeaten into becoming, after Buddhist monks, the most considerate, polite, and nonjudgmental travelers in the world. Whereas writers like Paul Theroux once became famous for bringing their unyielding value systems in contact with distant cultures and describing the inevitable conflict, today’s inbred terror of criticism based on cultural differences hamstrings all but the most fearless or pompous of modern American travelers. Compared with the stereotype that gained universal recognition with the 1958 publication of The Ugly American, U.S. tourists today move across international territory like neurotic kittens, apologizing ad nauseam for everything from their inability to speak foreign languages (and unless you work at the United Nations, this is nothing to be made to feel guilty about) to their country’s habit of electing a nonstop parade of opportunistic slimeballs to political office, as though politicians in every country weren’t a nonstop parade of opportunistic slimeballs.

 

There remain, of course, plenty of asshole Yanks with passports. I once watched an American, a friend no less, entertain himself in Tijuana by throwing pennies on the sidewalk so that he could laugh at the street urchins who kicked and shoved each other out of the way as they scrambled for the loot. No nationality has a monopoly on, or scarcity of, ugly.

There’s just one problem with this rosy view of Americans as enlightened, beach-cleaning priests of tolerance. No one believes it. If indeed Americans are the least objectionable tourists in the world, they sure don’t get treated like it. As anyone who’s been abroad before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq can tell you, the reception desks overseas have become chillier, the locals a little less friendly, the political debates a lot more spittle filled. Explaining this paradox—good people/bad reputation—requires a brief digression into current events.

First the bad news: Americans are the new Germans. Around the planet, “America” has become a byword for the kind of pushy, greedy, arrogant, ignorant, scheming, intolerant, hypocritical, violent, militaristic, goose-stepping, blood-gulping, Limbaugh-worshipping bullies that civilized people since time eternal have despised and occasionally battled to the death. We’re no longer the Rick Blaines of the world, romantic rogues just trying to lie low and mend a broken heart with a little gin and jazz. We’re the Major Strassers, dickhead rulers of the new order practically begging the world for comeuppance. All you 82 million Germans can start thanking the United States anytime now for taking those goat horns off your heads.

No matter how many beaches we pick up, no matter how many schools we build amid the rubble of villages we bomb, the world will judge Americans not as well-meaning individuals but as faceless supporters of a fascist regime drunk with military power and an unslakable thirst for oil. In the way Americans once held all citizens of the Soviet Union in contempt, in the way the world’s 1 billion baptized Catholics are somehow held accountable for every impetuous decree from a geriatric pontiff whose native language the majority of them don’t even speak, the world now judges Americans as an evil herd.

Unfair, maybe, but this makes a kind of sense. Universal scorn is what results from willingly paying taxes to a government that sends soldiers around the globe to secure oil fields and flatten ancient civilizations before trying to rebuild them according to its own shabby blueprints. More than voting, demonstrating, righteous sermonizing at cocktail parties, or forwarding Cheney-bashing e-mails, it’s April 15, not the first Tuesday in November, that reveals the depth of your political convictions. It doesn’t matter whom you voted for or who’s in the White House, if you pay the taxes that foot the bills, you’re complicit in the big picture. And you’re hated for it.

Not that this gives the Europeans, in particular, the right to complain about the American government, given the fact that it wasn’t Americans but Europeans who introduced land theft, African slavery, gunpowder, religious intolerance, and genocide of natives to North America. Since the entirety of American civilization is based upon European civilization—language, religion, education, military, politics, banking, architecture, farming, industry, transportation, all copied from Europe, the continent that never met a dictator it didn’t line up to salute—the progression of American history shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone in the Old World. In the Middle East today, the United States is only acting in the manner that virtually all of its European fathers did whenever they enjoyed military, technological, and economic superiority over a foreign country—that is to say, using a dominant army to overthrow a foreign regime and shuttle in private enterprise beneath the security of a semipermanent military presence to extract resources and amass wealth. Long ago these quasi-governmental commercial operations had names like the Hudson’s Bay Company and Dutch East India Company. Today they’re called Halliburton and Bechtel. Nothing bums out America-bashing Euros like having their own reflection held up in a mirror. I’ve spun the beret off the head of more than one smug citizen of the EU Corporation with that argument.

On the other hand, let’s all stop being so naïve about who runs the U.S. government and remember, particularly if you’re a hater of Herr Bush, that it was that great peacenik Jimmy Carter who in 1980 signed the Carter Doctrine, making it official U.S. policy to employ “any means necessary” to protect the flow of oil from the Middle East, a document used by both Bushes to justify military actions in the region. Democrat or Republican, the U.S. government always operates in the interest of corporate profit. And when it yaps about protecting your freedom and the “American way of life,” that expressly means the inalienable right to burn Middle Eastern oil so that we can be warm in winter, cool in summer, and travel anywhere we want, whenever we want, whether it’s to a beach in Tahiti or the beer cooler at the Quickie Mart down the street.

 

Over the next two decades, the way and frequency with which Americans travel abroad will likely proceed down one of two very different paths. The optimistic forecast, shared by most of the large companies whose business it is to make bankers and stockholders optimistic about these things, is that travel will grow exponentially in the next twenty years, turning the global village into a global metropolis. Boeing and Airbus, the world’s only important manufacturers of large commercial aircraft, each project an annual 5 percent increase in air travel, which they say will cause world air traffic to triple by 2030. Imagine New York to L.A., only with three times more screaming babies and three times as many wankers in the middle seat battling you for arm-rest hegemony.

In this scenario, as in everything else, Asia will lead the boom. The three most traveled air routes in the world are already in Japan (Tokyo/Haneda-Sapporo, Tokyo/Haneda-Fukuoka, Tokyo/Haneda-Osaka). Within two decades, Chinese airlines are expected to add twenty-three hundred aircraft worth $200 billion to their fleets. To accommodate increased traffic, Boeing will introduce its 787 Dreamliner. Boeing calls the plane, which is capable of carrying 350 passengers, “the biggest step we have taken in fifty years.” The 787 is expected to enter service in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the People’s Republic of China’s glorious coming-out party.

All of this growth is predicated on one decisive variable: the uninterrupted supply of affordable oil. Boeing likes to call its new 787 a “game changing” aircraft, but the real game changer on the horizon is the possible disruption of the global fuel supply. And even a secure and peaceful Middle East might not be enough to guard against it, bringing the discussion to future-travel model number two.

Conceived in the 1950s but gaining widespread acceptance only recently, the concept of “peak oil” is the recognition that oil and gas are finite resources subject to depletion. This might not sound like a groundbreaking idea, but it sort of is. For most of the twentieth century, the petrochemical industry operated on the assumption that oil and gas reserves were governed by the inelastic laws of supply-and-demand economics. As long as there was a demand for oil, so went the thinking, there would be oil. Which is like saying as long as people want to keep illuminating streetlamps with whale oil, there will always be a supply of whale oil. Strictly speaking, true, but not necessarily practical in the twenty-first century.

The arrival of peak oil—the date, one to twenty-five years in the future, when global oil production begins to decline—is expected in some quarters to lead to rapid societal disintegration. This will be kicked into high gear by the collapse of the international banking system, the totality of which is dependent upon the increasing prosperity of an oil-based economy, and end with you guarding your family and meager supply of canned vegetables from packs of bandits with whatever primitive weapons you were able to fashion from the trees and houses in your neighborhood before they were all burned for warmth. In this context, your winter trip to Costa Rica to commune with macaws and howler monkeys will appear slightly frivolous, if not impossible. You’ll be lucky to make it to the Ration Center and back each month with your stick of lard and four ounces of sugar.

This might or might not be farce, but even the oilglutted Saudis have a well-known saying: “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son rides in a jet. His son will ride a camel.” Even if peak oil is dystopian fallacy, oil prices might still reach the stratosphere, turning recreational travel into an activity restricted solely to the truly elite. Mass tourism as we know it could cease to exist.

Given this grave potential sequence of events, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that we’re living at the end of a golden age of travel. The period that began with the jet age in the 1950s and got a boost from deregulation of the airline industry in the 1980s has moved more people to more parts of the planet over the last half century than in all the years of human history that preceded it. Today, almost anybody armed with plastic can buy a ticket and, within a day or two, land him- or herself in just about any place in the world.

You can take a week off work and be in Dakar or Tashkent or Borneo in less time than it took Ben Franklin to get from Boston to Philadelphia. Largely taken for granted, this revolutionary ability to go anywhere on a whim has altered our perception of the world in ways we probably don’t fully comprehend. If that instant mobility is taken away, our worldview will be drastically reshaped again. The planet could once more become a forbidding place, expensive to see and scary to traverse, one that forces us to reexamine the basic lessons about the world collective that travel used to teach. This might not be a bad thing.

 

As I’ve alluded to more than once, a few months after I turned seventeen, I bought a 1973 Ford Torino for four hundred dollars and announced a plan to spend the summer driving to New York City and back, catching as many Major League Baseball games along the way as I could. The Torino was the color of day-old guacamole, and its rear quarter panel on the passenger side so weakened by rust that it flapped in the wind. Otherwise I believed this machine to be among the last credible products of the American muscle-car era (Starsky and Hutch drove the slightly sportier and, let it be said here, ridiculously painted Gran Torino). Running away with the circus always seemed like an idiotic idea to me; a summer behind the wheel of an uninsured, decade-old Ford was the type of adventure that held real promise.

The cross-country extravaganza was originally to have included Randy, alongside whom the Alaska–to–New York idea was hatched. Like Morgan with Thailand, however, Randy wound up bailing on the trip. In the end, this proved to be a good move, since the baseball players went on strike in June, I got hit by a drunk driver in South Bend, Indiana, made it only as far as Grove City, Ohio, ran out of money on the way home, and spent three weeks stranded in a one-bedroom apartment with two other guys in Salt Lake City. With no idea that any of these events were on the horizon, I quit my job at Juneau’s KINY AM-TV and put the Torino on the ferry to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, a day and a half away by ship, and the nearest road entry to the Lower Forty-eight.

I spent the first night on board amid the colorful nylon village of freestanding tents and sleeping bags that turn the upper decks of Alaska state ferries into floating hippie festivals each summer. Snagging a plastic lounge chair, I laid out my sleeping bag next to a pair of guys with greasy gray ponytails who, as the entire ship would soon discover, made up a pretty mean guitar-and-fiddle duo. Aging though by no means over-the-hill folkies, the guys broke out their instruments sometime after dinner and used them to earn applause and gratis bong hits from the mob of like-minded sprout munchers who partied deep into the starry Alaskan night.

As I was young and talkative and one of the few locals slumming it on the top deck, I became a sort of pet for the friendly dopers from Down South. It felt good to be taken into their adult fold, get to play a few songs on guitar, and, most important, share in their never-ending supply of Canadian Club whiskey, a fresh bottle of which somehow materialized each time another was finished. You’d never imagine how pleasant a fiddle screeching in your ear at two in the morning can be until you’ve experienced it with your tenth cup of CC and Coke resting just next to your head as you black out.

The morning sun rose like an angry red meatball. Shortly after sunrise, I crept out of my sleeping bag, clutched my throbbing skull, staggered to the head, took a terrifyingly long and out-of-control piss during which I had to brace myself with both hands against the wall, somehow made it back outside in time to spray several gallons of vomit over the railing, and returned to my deck chair, where I remained paralyzed inside my fart sack for the rest of the morning, unable to answer my body’s ferocious demands for more water and urination.

Sometime around noon, one of the ponytailed guys sauntered across the deck (sans fiddle, praise Christ) and tactfully informed me that it was time to man up and clean the mess from beneath my deck chair. I lifted an eyelid, rolled on my side, and looked under the chair. Despite the agonizing rush of blood to my forehead, I could plainly see that directly beneath me was a sizable lake of puke that I’d apparently discharged the night before.

With the sun now high in the sky, the aroma of festering chunder was starting to bum out the tie-dye crowd. A dustpan and spatula were presented to me. Scraping up my own walrus call in front of fifty or sixty strangers and pitching it over the side of the ship was brutal—getting the dried bits out of the Brillo fibers of the deck’s outdoor turf took prodigious effort—but with the job done the hippies rallied round, forced some organic beet juice down my throat, and made me feel like part of the gang again. The fiddle player even offered me a pick-me-up toke.

“Just brush your teeth first,” he said, and for the first time I noticed the gums along his bottom row of teeth were almost entirely black.

I didn’t touch his soggy one-hitter and didn’t go near the Canadian Club again either, so it was with a clear head, bright eyes, and more or less purified body that on the following morning I said farewell to my new pals, inched the Torino onto land at Prince Rupert, and found the terminus of the famed Yellowhead Highway: 1,002 miles of narrow, two-lane asphalt through Canada and across the border to Seattle.

 

Particularly along the 450 miles between Prince Rupert and the first major town of Prince George, the Yellowhead travels through a desolate wilderness of dense forests, empty meadows, rushing rivers, and misty, glacier-covered mountainsides. As the Torino’s after-market sound system blared and wild Canadian splendor flew past my window, I spent the morning congratulating myself on leaving home and driving to New York in a four-hundred-dollar automobile, a move that, at this early stage of the trip, was looking like the wisest decision I’d ever made in my life.

Like all perfect things, this wasn’t meant to last. At some point between microscopic settlements with names like Telkwa and Endako, a dark presence began shadowing my path. On the downhill side of a long slope, I glanced behind me and was startled to see a metallic black Pontiac GTO, which only a moment before had appeared in my rearview mirror as an indistinguishable dot. The GTO had the model’s famous hood scoop, squared front end, stacked headlights, and split chrome grill, but within seconds, its front end was so far up my ass I couldn’t even read its B.C. plates.

Around corners, up hills, on straightaways, the black GTO stuck to my bumper like an alien parasite. When I accelerated, the GTO accelerated, never leaving more than a body length between us. After five or six miles of this unnerving intimidation, the GTO’s engine finally opened into a full-throated roar, overwhelming Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard blasting from the Torino’s tape deck, and the maniac behind the wheel swerved into the opposite lane and pulled alongside me. There he remained until we careened into a tight curve, waiting until we were about halfway through before completing his pass.

As he sped by, the guy in the driver’s seat flashed a sly smile, causing me to instantly make two observations. One, this guy was a tremendous douche bag. And, two, despite his crew cut and chiseled jaw, he didn’t look much older than me. This surprising discovery released a bit of my fear and stimulated a competitive nerve. Soon I found myself punching the Torino’s gas pedal and jamming my front bumper as close to the rear end of the GTO as I could manage. Keeping the heat on high boil, I waited for an opportune spot to pass—plenty of flat, straight blacktop for me—and slammed my foot to the floor as though squashing an insect.

A couple of times in Juneau, I’d coaxed the Torino above the hundred-mile-per-hour mark, a feat that required a small hill, fifteen or twenty seconds to gather momentum, and Randy in the passenger seat watching the speedometer while I kept my eyes glued to the pavement. Getting from ninety to a hundred in the Torino was a labor of love, but between eighty and ninety, the car had always demonstrated good pickup, so I was able to blast past the GTO and in the process flash the same shit-eating grin at the Canuck he’d thrown me a few miles back.

With my heart racing like a hummingbird’s, we continued our precarious duel for twenty or thirty minutes, passing and repassing as the grades became steeper, the curves sharper, the speeds more daring, and the late-afternoon sky darker; our through-the-windows smiles turned to snarls, the kind you see just before the first punch is thrown. On a piece of cliff-side road, the GTO pulled alongside me. I was used to this trick by now, except this time a pickup truck coming from the opposite direction loomed in the near distance. Even steven at ninety miles per hour, the GTO had forced one of three choices upon me: I could accept defeat, hit my brakes, and let him slide in front me; hope that he’d chicken out, hit his own brakes, and fall behind; or maintain speed and force a fiery three-car collision in approximately ten seconds.

The oncoming truck began flashing its lights. Its driver’s panic and confusion were palpable. So were mine. With maybe three seconds till showtime, my front bumper deadlocked with the GTO’s, I mashed both of my feet into the brake pedal hard enough to give myself blisters, fishtailed into the oncoming lane with a high-pitched scream of smoking rubber, miraculously righted myself at seventy miles per hour, watched the GTO dart ahead of me, and heard the Doppler whine of the pickup’s horn as it passed safely by.

A hand emerged from the GTO and waved at me as it shot away, leaving me beaten and choking on the smell of exhaust and alpha wolf. Only then did it occur to me that a 1973 Ford Torino with a factory Windsor 351 under the hood never stood a prayer against a customized GTO. The son of a bitch behind the wheel had been cat and mousing me from the start. In terms a later generation would understand, I’d been playing Dick Trickle to his Dale Earnhardt.

He’d also been toying with a primary fear on the Yellowhead Highway: fuel. Drivers crossed central British Columbia in those days much the way the Afrika Korps crossed the Libyan desert, constantly reassessing the relationship between the petrol in their tanks and the distance to the next filling station. With the GTO out of sight, I had time to review my dashboard and saw to my alarm that the needle on the gas gauge was hovering directly over the big red E.

I slowed to forty, agonizing after the high-speed dog-fight, and continued on in silent terror as the needle actually dropped below E, something I’d not known was possible. My scrotum tightened like a frozen walnut as I obsessed over the gas situation. Even on the flat track in Detroit, the Torino had never been celebrated for its fuel efficiency. At the nerve-splintering speed I’d been traveling up and down mountains for the past half hour, it had been sucking down juice faster than a team of six-year-old soccer players.

When the car finally sputtered to its inevitable death on the side of the road, I remained in the front seat for a full five minutes, demeaning myself with a healthy session of self-loathing. Then, like an estate attorney opening the will in front of the family for the first time, I gingerly unfolded the enormous B.C. map my dad had given me for the trip. With forty-four panels, the map took up half the cabin, and it was tough to tell exactly where I was. No matter what, the next town was easily miles away and getting to one was no guarantee of salvation. Half the “towns” marked along the route didn’t seem to have a gas station, much less any permanent residents.

 

A dozen or more cars ignored my outstretched thumb as they screamed by on their ways to whatever oh-so-goddamn-important appointments they possibly could have had in the sphincter of British Columbia on a Tuesday evening. I offered each of them a piece of my anger as they passed until, after two miles of walking, I heard the sweet crunch of tires slowing on a gravel shoulder. I turned around to see a blond guy with a scraggly beard and embroidered headband sticking his head out of the passenger-side window of a sky blue VW Microbus.

“Need a leeft?”

I ran to the van before whoever was inside could change their mind.

“Get een back,” the blond guy said.

The side door jerked open on a set of rusty tracks, and for a moment I could only stare in bewilderment as several pairs of hands beckoned me into the Marrakech Express. Surrounded by red tapestries, paisley pillows, beaded curtains, and assorted orange and saffron accoutrements, two guys, one girl, and a filthy long-haired baby dressed only in a stained little white tank top were splayed in the back of the van like Nepalese monarchs on feast day. Up front were the driver, one of those balding-on-top-but-long-hair-down-the-back dudes, and the blond guy in the passenger seat. I’ve never cared for the mixed aroma of hummus, ganja, and dirty feet, but I had Brother Torino to think about. The door rattled shut behind me, the van crawled off the shoulder at a solid five miles per hour, and my old pal Eric Clapton started up through a set of blown-out Pioneer speakers.

“Es r oto bahine?”

This was the driver saying something I couldn’t catch.

“Eh?” I said.

“The green car,” explained the blond guy in the passenger seat. “We saw the car on the side of road. Have you lost your gas?”

I acknowledged my immense shame. “No problems,” said the blond, scratching his beard. “We take you to gas.”

They were six Germans, counting the baby, who’d been traveling the west coasts of Canada and the States in this van they’d purchased in California.

“You have very beautiful country,” the blond guy told me.

“It’s not mine,” I said. “I’m American, not Canadian.”

“Well, we have been to United States and you also have very beautiful country.”

The rest of the van bobbed their heads in agreement, and I settled into an old beanbag missing half its beans. Tabouleh and hookah smoke flowed, but I was too agitated to take a puff or accept the vile-looking plate of fecal-y organics the woman put together for me. My uptight vibe quickly infected the van. I felt lousy about this, but at seventeen the Torino was pretty much everything I had in life and until I got to a gas station and back to my car, I wasn’t emotionally ready to get started on the happy hour. Getting high and chilling with a hairy-pitted German chick while she breast-fed a pantsless baby wasn’t going to get me back on the road any faster.

“Käse?” The woman thrust a sweaty white lump at me.

“Eet es cheese,” said the guy in an orange blouse next to her. “Bery goot. Try.”

I tore off a hunk of bread and ate the cheese, hoping this might appease my hosts. Mistaking this sacrifice for conviviality, one of the guys passed me a bottle of red wine with the cork out. Christ. I don’t even like drinking out of the same bottle as my wife, let alone Euro stoners who appeared not to have showered in weeks. In certain situations, however, the kindness of strangers is impossible to snub. I took a mighty swig from the bottle just as the van hit a pothole and a quarter cup or so of dark red wine dribbled down the front of my jacket.

The Germans were nice, but I never found a rhythm in the van. Despite my artful attempt at discretion, they’d all seen me wipe the rim of the wine bottle with my shirt sleeve before touching it to my lips. Worse, although I’m generally good around babies, this one smelled like the bottom of a bag of beef jerky, and I did what I could to discourage its advances on me. Even the blond guy up front exhaled with relief when a gas station and restaurant finally appeared in the distance.

I offered money for the lift, a gesture they refused with such violence that I wondered if they thought I was trying to purchase their baby. We traded good-byes, and I hopped out of the van in front of the gas station, which, I noticed after the VW had creaked away, was burning only a dim security light. I walked to the pumps. Both were padlocked. A handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard hung from one of the nozzles: “Closed.”

I stared without expression at the pumps, then jiggled the handles to make sure the locks were secure. They were. With the weary, self-pitying moan of the defeated, I turned and faced the small clapboard restaurant across the empty parking lot. A lamp glowed weakly in a corner window. At the very least, there must be a phone inside. Hunching against a gathering wind and steadily dropping temperature, I trudged across the pavement, turned a corner around the side of the building, and felt my stomach rise into my mouth. Parked in front of the restaurant was the metallic black GTO.

 

Aside from an old couple eating silently in the middle of the room, the restaurant was empty. Nobody appeared to be working. The oldsters ignoring me, I rattled the bells on the front door for a second time and shouted, “Hello!” This brought a muted conversation from the back. A door opened behind the bar and out stepped, unmistakably, the lantern-jawed, crew-cut driver of the GTO. He looked across the room, instantly recognized me, and flashed his cock-of-the-walk grin.

“Didn’t see you drive up,” he said, pulling back the curtain on the front window. “Where’s the Torino?”

Such tender irony, bowing your head to the prick who just ran you off the road. I might as well have been on the USS Midway, pushing choppers off the deck on the way out of Saigon. I mumbled something noncommittal, the way you do when you creep in at two in the morning and your mother asks what you’ve been doing all night.

“Ran out of gas?” he guessed. “Don’t worry about it. Happens all the time along this stretch.” He extended his hand and gave a friendly shake.

Shanghai Bob once confided that his first impression of me was that I was a tremendous horse’s ass, exactly the type of neophyte gaijin that old Asia hands such as himself loathed on principle. It was not an uncommon confession. Many of the people I now count as friends apparently had to overcome some initial repugnance toward my supposedly radioactive personality. Though I’ve never completely understood it, over the years I’ve come up with a few theories to explain this intriguing phenomenon. People are thin-skinned. They get offended when you refuse to slurp out of wine bottles with them. Or point out that no matter how many times they voted Democrat, voluntarily coughing up federal taxes means they’ve got Iraqi blood on their hands. Or insist that since two remakes (“Cocaine” and “I Shot the Sheriff”) represent the pinnacle of Eric Clapton’s career, and since “Layla” is memorable mostly for Duane Allman’s slide guitar and the Jim Gordon–composed piano coda, the allegedly masterful Slowhand belongs atop the compost heap of rock’s most overrated stars. It takes a while to get used to some people, I guess.

Despite the rocky first impression, the GTO driver didn’t seem like a bad guy, and I sensed he was thinking the same about me. His name was Gary; he was nineteen, from Nova Scotia, working that summer for his aunt and uncle, running the gas station and tending bar six days a week and not getting paid squat, but at least his room and board were taken care of.

“It’s not bad out here,” Gary said, comparing B.C. to his home in the east. “Boring as shit, though. Running into you was the most exciting thing all week. Got a gas can?”

Gary yelled at someone in the kitchen, grabbed a loop of about fifty keys from a wooden peg by the door, and led us outside. On the outer wall of the restaurant, he flipped a switch and the fueling bay lit up like Christmas morning. He unlocked one of the pumps and filled a large red fuel can, talking nonstop while the burning ember of his cigarette dangled within the mirage of blurry vapors escaping the pump.

“Canadians out west are a dim bunch,” he said. “Can’t even get a fucking beer after ten o’ clock in most places. Sunday’s the worst. How’s Alaska? I was supposed to work on a fishing boat out of Sitka, but it fell through. Got offered a cannery job instead. Fuck that shit. I’ll stick it out till winter, then go home. Pretty nice here, but between the best-looking girls and the best-looking cows, there isn’t much difference. Slower than algebra class most nights. How far back’s your car?”

We got in the GTO. Gary turned the ignition, and a pair of afterburners he must have stolen from an F-16 shook the car to life. We sat idling for a while, the expression on Gary’s face indicating that I should be taking this moment to drink in the stirring howl of his motor. He leaned on the gas until the car began vibrating on its chassis like a rocket trembling on the launchpad. Gary talked about things like engine displacement and torque-induced gyroscopic precession, and I nodded in a way that suggested these were precisely the types of conversations my grease-monkey buddies and I sat around having all the time. Then he shoved the beast into gear, and we peeled out shooting twin rooster tails of gravel behind us.

On the highway, Gary weaved through dark corners and mountain inclines averaging eighty. I got the feeling he could’ve managed every hairpin with his eyes closed. While he drove and smoked, he gave me the specs on the GTO and bitched some more about Western Canada’s backward ways. I’d grown up far enough from New York and the East Coast to both be in awe of them and have a chip on my shoulder about their influence. It had never occurred to me that a similar regional rivalry existed in Canada.

“Found On Road Dead,” Gary smirked when the Torino came into view. “That’s what Ford stands for. Also, Fix Or Repair Daily.”

When we got to the car, Gary showed me the neatest trick I’d seen since my dad had fixed my stalling carburetor by clipping open its check valve with a wooden clothespin. The gas tank on the Torino was located behind the rear license plate, which flipped down on a little spring, revealing the fuel pipe. When Gary saw this, he grunted and toed out his cigarette on the road.

“Fucking nozzle is never going to reach that tank,” he said, and I immediately saw the problem. The stubby nozzle on the gas can poked out only a few inches, not nearly far enough to reach the Torino’s recessed gas tank. We tried to bridge the gap by pouring gas on an arc through the air, but it spilled all over the back bumper and onto the ground.

“Got a newspaper or magazine or something?” Gary asked.

I shook my head. Nothing.

Gary opened the door of the Torino and fished through the debris under my seats.

“This should work.” He held up a crumpled Alaska Marine Highway summer schedule newspaper insert. Pressing it out flat on the trunk, he tore the schedule in half and creased the pages in the middle as though making a paper airplane. Then he crimped one end into the shape of a funnel and ran his cupped hand up and down the crease until it formed the approximate shape of a half-pipe. He jammed the funnel end of the paper pipe into the gas tank and told me to hold it in place while he poured gas from the can down the paper. It took about ten minutes, and my hands were marinated with gasoline and newsprint by the time we were finished, but most of the fifteen liters made it into the tank. There wasn’t any good place to throw a section of gas-soaked newspaper, so Gary dropped it on the ground and tossed a match on it, and we watched it crinkle into a little black fist and disappear in the wind.

“You can fill up at our place if you want, but this’ll get you seventy or eighty kilometers,” Gary said. “About twenty kilometers past the restaurant, there’s all-night gas. It’s cheaper than ours. Good pizza, too.”

Gary stuck around to make sure the Torino fired up. It took a few pumps on the gas pedal, then the engine purred to life. I left it idling and walked over to the GTO.

“I really need to pay you something.” This was the third time I’d offered. Gary waved me off for a third time.

“You’ll do the same for someone down the road,” he said, sticking his hand through the window. “It evens out in the end.”

I thanked him again, and we shook hands and said good-bye. Gary whipped the GTO around with a theatrical squeal of tires and gave his horn a short blast as he crested a small hill and disappeared.

Standing on the side of the road, waiting for the cry of afterburners to fade away, I had no way of knowing that someday I’d be writing about this moment. Nor could I have been aware that some distant corner of my mind was already banking lessons that would reach far into a future I barely recognized as reality. Growing up in an isolated town, I already knew I was going to end up traveling as much as I could. And as an occasionally snakebit traveler, I’d soon be accepting more Good Samaritan charity, like the loan from the Kiwi in Thailand; I’d also be passing it on, like the food, clothing, and cash I gave to the Austrian in the Philippines. But as a fundamentally skeptical kid, it would have seemed laughable to me that I’d ever move beyond sheer recreational travel and end up devoting a substantial portion of my life to an industry in which snakebites and other reality checks are kept hidden away like back hair and incarcerated cousins.

As the years drifted by, however, and my life became one of delayed flights, middle seats, bad hotels, cold buffets, awkward property tours, pushy PR flacks, off-season travel, miserly budgets, butchered copy, kill fees, and every other indignity visited upon the itinerant travel writer, my unexpected blizzard of experiences led to a growing collection of ideas. These I made a goal of one day stepping outside of the system to share with an audience perpetually cheated out of the truth. In time, my stacks of Mead spiral notebooks filled an entire file cabinet. My catalog of untold stories, impertinent observations, and verboten opinions added up to miles of material, the first section of which, I eventually came to realize, had been laid by the small list of rules that started me down this road in the first place:

Clean up your own mess, no matter how tough a job it is.

Foreigners are almost never as bad as you think they’ll be.

A lot of interesting things can happen when you run out of gas.

If the world can forgive the Germans, it can forgive anybody.

Just when you think you’ve seen the best the world has to offer, there’ll always be Canada.