It is a humid, pearl gray early morning late in May, when 127 magnificent old cars roll silently out of the hotel lot and begin their 7,800-mile journey, Roxanne among them. It turns out I needn’t have worried about the scrutineering. The organizers want everyone to pass. They’ve accepted several Chevy Fangio Coupes with bodies that look like they belong to a dune buggy and have allowed in a car with sections of cardboard fastened to the wheel wells, a crude approximation of the obligatory mud flaps the regulations specify.
All is peaceful in predawn Beijing, the incessant traffic absent, the roads empty and beckoning. An hour later we’re at Badaling, one of the most visited sections of the Great Wall. From miles away we can see it snaking along a convoluted ridge line above intricately folded slopes clad in low green shrubbery. Sections of the Great Wall, which at one time spanned 9,000 miles, were first built as early as 200 BC. Though now much of it has crumbled away, Badaling has benefited from its proximity to Beijing, securing funds for major reconstruction. Built of huge beige stones, this is no mere antisocial fence. At twenty feet wide, it’s broad enough to allow horses to gallop five abreast. There are no horses here now, only thousands of tourists clambering from archery perches to signal towers, taking snapshots and buying cheap souvenirs.
As instructed by the route book, we park in a cobblestoned square in front of an ornately carved and painted gateway. It’s so high I could stack my house under it twice and still not reach the top. At one time, the massive wood doors, carbuncled with huge iron studs, would swing open to allow passage of imperial coaches. Now, access to those doors is cordoned off, since they’re the backdrop to the P2P starting line. The sheer size of the gate dwarfs the hundred or so classic cars below, a fitting tribute to the immensity of our undertaking. When we arrive, there’s already a ragged, green satin dragon, with bulging plastic eyes the size of beach balls, writhing around the square. He snakes his way through the crowd, ogling small children and rubbing lasciviously against women’s thighs. Stilt walkers in yolk yellow silk pajamas and red masks dip and prance, hopping stiffly as cymbals crash, drums boom, violins wail. My heart picks up the drummers’ rhythm and feels ready to exit my chest as I realize it’s my imagined movie trailer come to life. Normally I’d be congratulating myself for successfully foreseeing the future. Not now. If this part of the fantasy is true, then the rest of it, the part with the Gobi and me alone in it, also may be true. And that would be bad.
With force of will alone I put my hand on the door handle and open it. A few tepid rays of sun have conquered the dense layers of air pollution, enough to warm the day. I wander near the dragon, daring him to do his worst. I take photos, standing next to some smiling and laughing competitors in hopes their insouciance will rub off on me. I’m stiff with anxiety, which dissipates only a little when the dragon dancers and stilt walkers take a break, remove their masks, and I see that they’re just school children. Either that or the Chinese are a remarkably well-preserved people.
The organizer calls through a bullhorn for cars to enter the starting area in groups of ten. When Car 83 is at the starting line I start to hyperventilate. Even if movement were possible at this moment, there’s no turning back. Car 85 is tight on our rear bumper and Roxanne never was very good at U-turns. Then I hear “Car 84, take your place at the starting line, please.” Television cameras are rolling, the checkered flag is lifted. In slow motion, so slow I can see every ripple and wave, the flag descends, Bernard gently presses the accelerator, and Roxanne rolls under the starting gate. It’s too much for me. I tear up, from sheer disbelief that we are on our way. I have my doubts that we’ll make it to Paris, but at least we’ll have gone part of the way, even if that part is short. I give Bernard a weak smile and wipe my eyes. Then I tell him to turn right.
By the time we reach the first time control of the Rally 185 miles later, Roxanne is in serious trouble. Chugging up a hill behind a slow-moving truck her temperature gauge hovers on the red line. This is a bad sign. We’re moving so slowly no air is going through the radiator to cool her engine, which is now apparently minutes away from blowing up. We barely make it to the parking area, but barely is still enough for the course marshals to stamp an acceptable arrival time on my time card. Popping the hood, Bernard reports that the fan, which is supposed to force extra air into the radiator, has fallen off its perch and has been blocking air from the radiator instead. Why did it fall off so soon? Because it was installed backwards.
Out come the tool bags, the towels, the bolts and screws I so carefully labeled and packed months ago. I’m happy to have them along, but honestly, did we have to need them so soon? Other teams saunter by, casting pitying glances. Most make an unnecessarily wide circuit, as if afraid by coming too close they’ll catch whatever we have. Those whose cars are going fine can use this rest stop to visit the nearby Hanging Monastery of Hunyuan, an exquisite complex of buildings poised precariously on sheer cliff walls, complete with current monks and 1400-year-old Buddhas. Robert and Maddy are already up there, or so I imagine seeing their empty car near ours. Only Sybil and Nick stop by to commiserate. Nick spends a few minutes with Bernard, who’s opened the hood to investigate what’s gone wrong. The two men peer inside intently, pointing, pinching parts to see if they might be loose, talking quietly. Sybil gives me a hug. “We’re off, dear,” she says. “Such excitement!” Just having Sybil standing next to me makes me feel better.
“This isn’t a very good start, though,” I say. “We already have car trouble . . . ”
“Ah, don’t worry about that. We’ll all be in that position soon. Anyway, the boys will get it sorted,” nodding her head toward Nick and Bernard, who by now are carefully lifting the loose fan from in front of Roxanne’s radiator.
An hour’s been designated for the monastery visit, and that’s all the time we have to make our repair before we’re expected to clock out again and return to the road. To get a Gold medal, we will have to match our prescribed time slot for every time control during the day. Bernard’s bid for Gold at present trumps my desire for Bronze, so it’s important we depart and arrive on the minute. It’d be too depressing to already get a penalty on Day One.
Bernard sets to with determination. He grimaces, he extracts, he refits. There’s not much I can do except search for a particular size of bolt or wipe off a socket wrench for him. I’m purely a set of hands with no brain. Now and then I glance at the monastery above us. The dark gray cliff face looks like it’s been polished by hand over the centuries, and I wonder why religious buildings are so often placed in spots that are so difficult to reach. From my vantage point it looks like a toy, peopled with tiny Rally crews making their way along narrow wood walkways that connect the buildings. A request for a screwdriver brings me back to the hot tarmac. Bernard sweats while I loll about trying to look engaged in the serious work going on next to me.
Having time on my hands allows a new concern to surface: that Bernard may be doing much more work on this trip than I. The experience of Roxanne’s rebuild has me hypersensitized to things getting out of balance. Keeping the car running is so obvious and essential that I can’t think of anything I can do to compare. How important can it be to dispense bolts and wrenches? I swat away that niggling sense of inadequacy that recently colors so much of what I do, but it’s too late. A score card’s been posted in my brain, comparing me to Bernard, how much he’s doing, how little I’m doing. Right now, I give him a one to my zero. Already I owe him.
After forty-five minutes, it’s clear the fan won’t go back on. Bernard stomps once around the car, to settle his aggravation. “It’s missing a pin,” he tells me. “It must have been put in loose and fell off somewhere between the hotel and here.”
“No biggie,” I say, reassuring myself. “We have over a hundred pounds of spares. Surely we have a pin.”
In the hundred pounds of spares and extras I sorted, labeled, placed in Ziploc bags, and packed, there are no spare little pins. Without the fan, there’s only one way to keep the engine cool enough. Tossing the fan in the trunk, Bernard disengages the side panels from Roxanne’s hood, stowing them behind the front seats. Now most of the engine is exposed to the breeze. Bernard’s panel-removal solution is effective, but without them, Roxanne’s sleek lines turn lumpen and un-sexy.
Surveying the hundred-plus cars of the Rally in the past few days, I’ve become conscious that Roxanne, a car that had seemed quite special to me, does not have the coolness factor that many of the older, more glamorous cars have. The organizer also seems drawn to those old convertibles, the cars with spoke wheels and spare tires strapped to running boards. He’s all over those owners, chatting them up, with barely a stray hello for us.
None of this bothers Bernard, because he has important work to do. He doesn’t have time to spend wondering who isn’t speaking to whom and why. Which is good, because there are only minutes to spare when he presses the hood closed and we take our seats. “Right on time,” the Clerk of the Course says as we clock out of the time control. I give Bernard the instruction to turn right onto the highway. Since we’re on a one-way access ramp entering three busy lanes going in that direction, this is so obvious as to beggar the need for a navigator to transmit the information. Bernard’s game and repeats after me: “Take the entry ramp right and merge onto the highway.”
Finally, we’re into the countryside, making our way through a patchwork of small towns strewn across stony hill country. Trees are few, coal mines plentiful. While I can’t see the mines, I can tell they are there by two things: the crushed coal roadways that intersect the paved road we’re on at frequent intervals, and the trucks piled high with coal, their sides dusted black with coal residue, that turn onto the pavement from the hidden mines. The sky is murky, a lethal mix of coal dust and Gobi sand, which I inhale in gasps, trying to get by with as little air in my lungs as possible. Coming down a hill in one town I see what look to be three nuclear towers, their concrete not quite as pristine as I suspect it should be. Each tower is blackened with a sooty substance, and as we descend I can see chunks of concrete scattered around the base. It’s easy to pick out the ragged spaces left in the towers. Then I read in the route book that the towers are a landmark, where we take a right fork. We’ll be going right past them. In a moment of brilliance I intuit that to save myself I must hold my breath as we drive by. How that would stop radiation from entering my body I couldn’t tell you.
Soon after, we come across a broken-down local truck. It’s a big one, with a bulbous cab painted robin’s-egg blue and a bed with wood slat sides, long enough to carry a small car. Its tires look stout enough to support the weight of a tank. The driver is going about his repair with a few measly tools, while his assistant tends a little pot of food heating on a gas burner. They’ve stretched a tarp from the truck frame for shelter. It’s a sobering thought that they’re camped here till the fix is done. To make sure their truck doesn’t roll, they place cinderblock-sized rocks under each wheel. Good plan, I think. With one small deficiency. I begin to notice large rocks in the middle of the road, left there by a repaired truck that’s driven away. Until we reach our hotel, I scan the road for rocky obstacles and ponder the unavailability of roadside assistance should Roxanne break down.
Thankfully, we are on a good facsimile of an expressway for much of the way from Hunyuan to Datong, where we will spend our first night. Even finding our hotel in this strange Chinese city turns out to be fairly simple, as it’s located right off the main square. There’s no time to celebrate what is one of the most momentous achievements of my life. “Well, Bernard, we made it!” is all I can think of to say, almost too tired to feel exhilarated.
“Bravo, cherie,” he tells me. “My little navigator!” He gives my hand a squeeze. In one way, it’s anticlimactic. Then again, we both seem to feel we’ve now crossed an invisible line. Before Datong we aspired to do the Rally. Now we’re doing it—we’re in the race. All in one day, a number of things that have been gremlins on my shoulder for over a year have come to pass, and I’ve survived. We’ve had a breakdown, yet Bernard found a workaround that kept us moving. I’ve used the route book and all my navigator tools, if not with ease then at least correctly. I’ve relayed directions to Bernard in a way he could follow. He has not snapped at me and I have not yelped. We are at the proper hotel, where there’s a room, a shower, and dinner waiting. We are truly on our way.
After a day of general industrial ugliness, the hotel’s manicured grounds, neatly planted with geraniums and petunias segmented by narrow gravel paths, are a refreshing sight. The scene that greets us when we pull in that evening is one I’ll discover will be repeated many nights. Despite stern-faced, rifle-toting security guards at the gates, hundreds of local citizens have made their way into the hotel’s courtyard and are wandering around admiring the cars.
Bernard immediately goes off to the mechanics’ triage center to see if they have a proper pin to put the fan back on. I feel puffed up with immense satisfaction, as pleased with myself as if I’d swum the English Channel. Grabbing our time card, I head into the hotel lobby to sign in at the FTC, which is swarming with Rally teams, euphoric simply because they, like us, have completed the first day’s drive. Maddy’s at the reception desk, already checked in, waiting to get a key for her room. She and Robert have a car number much lower than ours, and I know they will always arrive before us, unless they have trouble on the road. It’s thanks to Maddy’s instruction that I know exactly what I’m supposed to do when we arrive. I give her a happy wave and she waves back. “Maddy,” I have to yell to be heard over the clamor. “We got here. And get this: no mistakes!”
“Good for you!” she shouts back. “I told you it wasn’t that hard.”
After my time card is scanned to show we’ve completed the first day, I join Maddy in the room key queue. “Let’s have dinner together tonight,” I tell her. “You won’t believe what happened to us. Is your car OK?”
“Robert’s outside checking a few things, but you know, that’s what he likes to do, even if there’s nothing to check.”
“Yeah, Bernard’s like that, too. How about meeting at seven?”
After signing in, I return to Roxanne to get our bags. A young couple with a small boy approaches me. They walk around Roxanne, peer in her open windows, all the while nodding approvingly. They seem to admire me as much as they do the car. Shyly, the man displays his camera, points at me, then at his family. “Photograph?” I say, wiping my hands on my pants. “Sure thing.” I move out of the way so he can shoot Roxanne’s curvaceous lines unadulterated, but he motions me forward, to join his wife and child. Standing at Roxanne’s side, the woman places herself next to me, hoisting her young boy onto her hip. She just about reaches my shoulder. We turn to the camera, me with my long braid coming undone, scraggles of hair catching in my mouth, and shirt already stained, she in her thin floral-print blouse and white capris, bobbed straight black hair neatly held with two red barrettes, toenails a nearly matching crimson. Her husband jogs backwards, then crouches. He shouts something to us in Chinese. We grin.