After the Army turned me down, things at Stanford got dark. My assigned roommate was as conservative as the Confederate Army, so even the place where I slept was uncomfortable. I was spending more time protesting the war than going to class, but our protests weren’t stopping the violence. It was a frustrating cycle: protest, smash a window, rinse, repeat. By now I knew a lot about the stalemate in Vietnam: the increased troop deployments, the rising casualties, the certainty of defeat. My understanding of the situation had evolved to the point where I felt rage at my father. This was still before the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, which publicly confirmed his long-held private skepticism about the war and his dishonesty. But I realized that he must have known, all along, that we couldn’t win.
I felt like a draft dodger at the time, though I don’t put myself in that category now. To cope with my shame, I drank and smoked dope. At one point, I sold a small bag of cocaine to a friend who got caught with it in the airport when returning from an overseas trip. He had to hire a good DC lawyer in order to get off. I found out about this years later, and the incident clarified the feeling I remember from back then, the sense that everything I touched caught on fire. Yet I was never the primary victim, never the one who got burned. I only felt guilt and embarrassment and insecurity. What was I doing with myself ?
Whatever waited after graduation was unappealing. Getting a job, moving to suburbia, and starting a nuclear family seemed like going along with the Establishment. There was talk in the streets and in class of radical new lifestyles: communes, traveling circuses, free love. People my age were leaving the country to do things like join the Venceremos Brigade, an organization of American students who traveled to Cuba to work on farms and support revolution. Was I even going to graduate from college with the grades I had? I’d enjoyed some literature classes at Stanford, and I wrote some poetry, but I had no idea what I wanted to do after college. I only had a strong sense that it needed to be far removed from Washington, DC, politics, business, and the military-industrial complex.
So when my friend Will suggested we travel to the southernmost tip of South America in the spring of 1971, I didn’t need much persuading.
I met Will at St. Paul’s. He was the friend I wanted to be: tall, handsome, and a talented performer. He seemed so self-assured, so confident. At prep school we’d starred together in a production of Julius Caesar. Will was Brutus, and I was Caesar, and I remember his performance being almost as good as James Mason’s. I’m sure he must have carried my weight, and he probably helped me rehearse my lines. To this day, I have no idea how I ever succeeded in memorizing lines like “But I am constant as the Northern Star, / of whose true-fixed and resting quality / there is no fellow in the firmament.” And I’ll never forget Will’s delivery of some of Brutus’s responses. “O Rome, I make thee promise. If the redress will follow, thou receivest / thy full petition at the hand of Brutus.”
Will went on to perform in many other plays in high school and college. He starred alongside Sigourney Weaver in the Stanford production of Androcles and the Lion. My recollection is that I was part of the Christian mob. I was mesmerized by Sigourney, who was portraying a Christian slave. I’m guessing that the budget for the play was on the thin side, because Will wore his motorcycle helmet, decorated with pine branches in place of laurels.
He loved his motorcycle. When it came time for us to set off south, Will insisted that we really needed to do this Latin America trip on bikes. I remember having some questions. First of all, I didn’t have enough money. Plus, wouldn’t it be much more engaging to go by bus or hitchhiking so that we could meet people along the way?
Will was so wonderfully convincing. He meticulously described the joys of riding motorcycles through Mexico and Central America. As if giving a stage performance, he made me imagine the feeling of freedom we would get cruising south as if pulled by gravity. The performance he gave was worthy of Easy Rider. Just that quickly, I became a believer. Will also succeeded in recruiting our friend Rob for the trip. Rob was an East Coast kid like me. He had grown up on Long Green Farm outside Baltimore. His mother and father were, in his words, “gentlemen farmers.” All his life, Rob had been raising cattle, turkeys, green beans, corn, and tomatoes. He studied mycology and (later) wine making.
I don’t think any of us gave much thought to the ultimate goal of this trip. It was the middle of our sophomore year. I had been living out of the house since I was fifteen years old, first at St. Paul’s and then at Stanford. I had worked the previous summer on a trail crew, and I felt completely confident in my outdoorsmanship and my competence as a traveler. At that time, I saw my parents only during vacations, most often in Colorado. Dropping out of college seemed completely natural, and I didn’t think about whether I would return to school or not.
Apparently the only motorcycle to buy was a BMW 650. Will found a dealer in Redwood City. We made the journey there and bargained for some new bikes. I gave my bike the nickname Boojum, inspired by Edward Koren’s illustrations of a Lewis Carroll monster. Rob’s bike was named Maytag because it was white and reminded us of a Maytag washing machine. Will’s was called the “Arf Train,” and I’m not sure what that name meant. We made a lot of trips to assemble a hodgepodge of makeshift gear. We didn’t have fairing pouches or motorcycle panniers to store our belongings in, so we had to customize carriers ourselves. We bought aluminum attachments made for airplanes, rigged them to the rear of the motorcycles, and loaded them with spare tires and parts. The wearable gear was pretty rudimentary too. We had bulky waxed cotton raincoats and pants that got stiff and hotter than hell in the steamy Costa Rican jungles. Of course Will’s motorcycle monologues didn’t mention that part.
We left school with a few AAA maps and no Spanish. As I remember it, we each had some cash and about $300 dollars in traveler’s checks, and we assumed that would last us the duration of the trip. Will, Rob, and I rode out of Palo Alto on a bright spring day in 1971. I was leaving behind my country, a partial Stanford education, and my activism. The road ahead was uncertain. Our only goal was to get to Tierra del Fuego, but by no particular date. I was riding away from all my feelings about my father and my country, and I thought I could leave them behind.
What I would discover over the next two and a half years, winding my way from Palo Alto to Chile, was a deeper understanding of the crisis unfolding in our American democracy. I would witness firsthand things I’d seen on the news: war, racism, and imperialism. Without intention, I would discover a path to my future career, farming. I would encounter utter loneliness, kindness beyond belief, beauty, political upheaval and revolution, sickness, and transformation.
As we were departing, I wrote a poem in my journal:
Before me all my thoughts seem to reach. They look back at me and then to the sky where they take their rest. I am twenty now, I’ve seen twenty lives go by and I have not gone with them. I have spoken twenty words but heard no reply.
The mountains of my life have only begun…
The road south through the Sierra Madre of Monterrey was transcendent. Voluptuous waterfalls shimmered into focus among dense forests as we rounded mountain curves on our bikes.
On one of these stretches, I had my first rollover. Rounding a steep, oily uphill curve, I dumped the bike and watched as it skidded off the road. This early in the journey, we were still pretty optimistic, and my spill didn’t slow us down too much. We extracted spare parts from our makeshift panniers, threw some of them on my damaged bike, and with a little ingenuity and within a few hours, I was back on the road. That night, tired and hot after the glory of a spring day in Mexico, we settled down for a meal at a roadside cantina. If you drive or take a bus through most parts of Mexico, you can still see these shady stops on the shoulders of highways, with painted concrete walls sheltering groups of simple tables, maybe protected by a tarp or canvas roof, and the smoke rising as delicious street food antojitos cook in big iron pots and on top of flat griddles.
Of those early weeks of the trip, I remember nothing but hospitality and warmth among the local people, despite our rudimentary language skills. We were also welcomed by plenty of mosquitoes and harsh rain. One night, after swimming in a river underneath a noisy bridge, we tried our very basic Spanish on two young Mexican guys, who assured us that the thunder, lightning, and clouds did not mean it was going to rain. After we shared a few warm beers with our new friends, the rains started up and dashed our optimism. We tried to set up a tarp for shelter to protect all our clothes and sleeping bags. Eventually, we moved under the bridge, where I cut my foot on some old glass. Rob, familiar with livestock, turned out to be the ideal companion in this situation. He helped me wash off the cut with some boiled water and sterilized cow pies.
The problems always seemed to anticipate—if not lead to—even more problems. Once my bike was patched up, and I was patched up too, we had to endure more onslaughts. The bugs were so bad that night under the bridge that we could hardly sleep. At last we packed up, leaving at three in the morning, and drove twenty miles to a place with fewer bugs.
All the way to Mexico City we were in that early stage of travel when the joy of the open road and a kind of benign naïveté prevail. We slept just about anywhere, even in dusty fields with burros braying and roosters pecking at our packs. No one seemed to mind. And it seemed that everywhere we went, the locals took great pleasure in sharing with us their favorite meal, menudo.
Menudo is traditionally a family dish, a stew prepared with beef tripe and served on special occasions, like birthdays or Christmas. Conveniently, it’s also thought to be a great cure for hangovers. It typically takes hours to prepare and is served with chopped raw onions, oregano, red chili powder, lime or lemon segments, and flour tortillas. The trick to eating menudo, if you have a gringo’s stomach, is to get past the rather greasy aroma. You slurp down the pools of floating fat and entrails, then quickly stuff down tortillas to counterbalance some of the extreme bloody flavor.
I remember eating menudo at a particular roadside stop. For the nth time, we thought we were being served this delicacy because we were special guests. As the steaming bowls of beef tripe were brought before us again, we couldn’t help but feel a little envious of the campesinos at the other tables, enjoying their carne asada and chili relleno. After what seemed like weeks of being served just menudo, we figured out what was happening. When waiters at the cantinas asked us what we would like to order, we always responded in broken Spanish, “Por favor, el menu.” This was interpreted as “Menudo, please.”
Near Mexico City, I took another big fall. My motorcycle tipped, and I slid a long distance on the highway. This time it wasn’t only the bike that was damaged. I had a few bad scrapes, and I was lucky that I didn’t snap in half. We managed to pick up the parts that had fallen off the bike. It was still roadworthy, but the alignment was affected for the rest of the trip. In our group logbook I wrote, “I know that I can’t live forever, but my fall brought it too close.” Looking back, I think about how many times I could have crashed. We were reckless riders. Maybe if I had died in a motorcycle crash, historians of my father’s life would have written a few sentences about the irony of my death, given that so many kids died on his watch before they were twenty-one.
We arrived in Mexico City on my twenty-first birthday: April 18, 1971. We desperately needed to stop, but the city was not a restful place. I remember the haze over the cityscape as we approached, and the tint of reddish brown in the air between the buildings as we rode along streets where we saw no signs or lights. It was intimidating, and that made it feel lonely. We found La Rivera, a cheap residencia where we could rest awhile and keep our motorcycles parked in safety and peace. For my twenty-first birthday we bought some beers and sat around, talking and drinking a little. It was not a mood of celebration; at least I don’t remember it that way. We were regrouping and recovering. To be turning twenty-one seemed unimportant compared with our direction: south, down, away. We had been driving at a quick pace, and Mom and Dad had no idea where I was. There was no birthday phone call.
The morning after, we ventured onto the city streets to buy some food. This was when I discovered the city’s fresh orange juice. It was abundant and beautiful liquid gold to me. I drank a lot of that fresh juice, like someone trying to avoid sickness, or like an invalid trying to recover. Meanwhile I picked cigarette butts off the street and sidewalk in order to have something to smoke. When I bent down, the scabs from my motorcycle crash would stretch and break open.
Calling around Mexico City to try to buy motorcycle parts, we constantly heard the words No inglés, no inglés. Whenever we were attempting to communicate with a local, we’d have to use unsophisticated grunts or muchas gracias. Sometimes we’d frustrate people to the point that they’d erupt at us in anger. Things got a little better when we met Jose. Clad in a black tie, white shirt, and black suit, he said, “Hey, amigos. California, si? You need help, no?”
Jose was about forty-five years old. His eyes moved constantly. He offered to show us Mexico City in exchange for a few cups of coffee and some tips. Somehow navigating our halting Spanish, and with very little English of his own, Jose took us to his favorite and most cherished city landmarks. One place was the Plaza de las Tres Culturas, where the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 had occurred. Jose showed us buildings pitted by machine-gun fire, where hundreds of student demonstrators had been murdered by Mexican military police. I remember looking at the plaza and reflecting on the year 1968 in the US. In March, LBJ had announced that he would not seek reelection as president, Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, and Bobby Kennedy was gunned down weeks later. While we stood at the plaza, I remembered fleeing the St. Paul’s campus to attend Bobby’s burial in Arlington. Maybe that had been the first time I really woke up to the fact that something was wrong in America. The consequences for me had been limited; I was not shot, never arrested, never in danger. But there had been a quieter violence, an inner battle. I was against the war, against authority, and against my father, yet I still identified with him and was hard on myself because of the draft.
I remember standing in the plaza and feeling like an egg. My body was a shell. Somewhere at the center, there was supposed to be a yolk.
We continued with determination south from Mexico City, though our daily rate of travel varied greatly with the country’s diverse terrain. One of our longest stops was in Oaxaca, the state known for its textiles and mole. Irregularly, we journaled and sketched in our collective logbook. We were mostly concerned about the next place to sleep—a bed or a field—and our next meal. Throughout this journey, it was possible to send letters at the correos and receive mail at American embassies, but there was no guarantee that our messages would reach home. More than anything else, this style of travel kept my mind from wandering too much toward the things at home that haunted me: the war, my silent father, the draft, and my uncertain future. Unlike during the vacations of my early adolescence in the American outdoors, there were no park rangers keeping tabs on us and no Quaker friends reminding us of the evils of war.
I don’t remember discussing US politics with my travel buddies. As we cruised through the Yucatán, our goal was simple—to go even farther south—and the thought that we would be stopped didn’t occur to me. I was fairly naive about political life outside the US. As we crossed from Mexico into Guatemala, I had no idea of the situation that was unfolding there.
When we arrived at the border crossing, an official warned us about the curfew. We couldn’t travel at night, and neither could anyone else with a vehicle. The strongman in power was President Carlos Arana Osorio. Allied with death squads roaming the countryside, he was committed to pacifying Guatemala by killing the socialists who opposed him. In the 1960s, the US military had supported him in efforts to round up and kill thousands of citizens.
Bearded gringos on motorcycles (the preferred mode of transportation for guerrilla fighters) raised a minor alarm at the Guatemalan border. Young boys toting machine guns looked at us threateningly as old men sat in the shade, cutting their hair with nail clippers. I remember being frisked by some very macho military police and told we were not welcome in the country. They made us sleep on the border for two days.
Eventually, we were waved past the checkpoint. The border guards probably decided that, with our broken Spanish, we couldn’t possibly understand what was going on well enough to lend aid to one side or the other. They probably figured that the danger was all ours. We rode gingerly through the verdant countryside of Guatemala, avoiding any more contact with the military police, through some of the most beautiful land I’ve ever laid eyes on.
When I think about what it was like to ride Boojum through Central America, all I can recall is the beauty of the landscape and an ephemeral sense of moving toward a periphery. My family and my education had been the center of my being, and this was far away from that. Guatemala was a country in a state of civil war, but I didn’t really understand it until years later. Recently, I read an archived New York Times article from June of 1971 that describes the situation in Guatemala just as we were arriving there.
Until mid-February, a 9 P.M.-to-5 A.M. curfew (later 11 to 5) was in force, and it could be restored at any time. In the first 12 weeks after Nov. 13 at least 1,600 persons were arrested without formal charges or arraignments, and 700 to 1,000 more—among them a dozen prominent Guatemalans—were assassinated by vigilante groups of the military and the police. Urban guerrillas with Castroite or Maoist sympathies have accounted for 25 to 30 more assassinations, mostly of army and police officers and Government informers.
Even while traveling through countries struggling with nascent democracy, civil wars, and poverty, I was never worried about safety. Probably our group didn’t talk much about it. It wasn’t about us, so it wouldn’t affect us. We didn’t know any better.
More than fear, my shadow on this journey was loneliness. I distinctly remember one moment when we were stopped somewhere in Costa Rica after a period of downtime at a gold mine owned by the father of one of our Stanford friends. I felt myself becoming depressed by the combination of dense, dark jungle and the stark economic disparity between the mine workers and owners. After we left and got back on the road, I said out loud to myself, “You have to remember. You have to remember what you’re seeing in its most raw form. You have to be truthful with yourself about the complete uncertainty of life. Forty years from now, what you are experiencing today will be a story you tell about yourself. You have to remember what really happened.”
The colors, customs, and flavors of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua followed as we rode on through the steaming jungles and windy passes on our way to Panama. Once we got there, we were surprised to learn that the road south ended. The Pan-American Highway, a network of cobblestones and potholes, stops at the Darién Gap. To this day, there’s a hundred-mile stretch of rain forest separating Central America from South America, with no passable road.
We eventually found a small fishing trawler in the port of Colón. The sailors were willing to let us come aboard. They picked our bikes up with nets and lifted them into the hold. The Arf Train, Maytag, and Boojum all rose like great mechanical marlins caught by a fisherman. We boated to San Andrés Island. From there our goal was to find a freighter to ferry us the 450 nautical miles to Cartagena, Colombia.
We spent a few weeks on San Andrés. We camped out under coconut palms, eating iguanas and sampling ayahuasca on that island paradise. At last we caught a freighter for our final leg to South America. I have no idea what we would have done if there hadn’t been a ship willing to carry us. For now our luck held, and our group cohered.
We rode from Cartagena to Bogotá. Our motorcycles were hot and heavy after being ridden for hours through the lush green canopy of the cordillera. We had just summited a hilly overlook. Ahead lay the highway, which was really nothing more than a dirt road. I can still picture the spot: a fork in the road with a cow pasture to the left and a split-rail fence to the right. No maps, no people. This was fifty years before Google would have solved our problem instantly. Which way would we go?
I can’t remember another time that I fought with Will. But on that day, Will and I had a difference of opinion. He wanted to follow the split-rail fence, and I wanted to go along the pasture. I don’t remember exactly what I said. Probably it was something simple like I’m thinking left. Then silence. I remember the silence the most. It got very quiet as we both stewed about how correct we were. I was probably thinking of all my outdoor experiences in the Sierras, and how skilled I was at navigation. How could he not see that my instincts were good? I didn’t say any of this. There was not much to talk about; it was a black-and-white choice.
At long last Will won out. His waiting game was much longer than mine. The split-rail-fence route did get us to where we needed to go: the hill town of Valdevia, just as afternoon was fading to evening. After that day, I realized that my life would always be linked to Will’s. Together we’ve lost mothers and fathers. We’ve been each other’s best man. I even introduced him to his wife. We didn’t diverge in that moment. We became closer.
As I recall the junction, my mind goes back to my father and his favorite poem. On this journey, the fork we took did matter. On this adventure, we weren’t focused on telling the stories of our lives, to ourselves or anyone else, and we weren’t thinking about justifying our choices. We were just making them, surviving, and going along naturally. I remember sleeping well that night, and for many others after, even when we got to Bogotá and stayed in pensiones full of mosquitoes and cockroaches the size of small cats.
Finally saying goodbye to Will and Rob in Bogotá, I headed south and solo for the first time in my life. We each understood, and amicably so, that our own lives were pulling us away from one another for the time being. Rob felt the call to return home and return to school. Will remained in Bogotá and spent the next five years raising bees and selling honey in Colombia. I didn’t know it at the time, but the next decade would take me along a similar path.
Devoid of company—at least, anyone who could understand English—I discovered myself in a bardo state between joy and loneliness, between a sense of discovery and a sense of being utterly lost. On that spiritual plane, with no one with whom to be in conflict, no friend or father to challenge me, experience and memory merged into one. The butterflies of the Ecuadorian jungle; working on a dairy farm in the chill of the morning, with the mist lifting off the pails of milk; hitching through the northern desert of Peru in the backs of semis carrying sugar and oil; living with a Quechua family in the highlands; making my way to Cusco in a Mini Cooper that almost fell off the mountain road; walking for four days to reach Machu Picchu.
I didn’t look for these experiences. They just happened. My goal was to get to Chile, but by no particular date, and the openness of my life could be felt by the people I came across. In Ecuador I happened upon a farm where the women invited me to help them milk cows. I spent two nights on their land, sleeping on the slopes of a twenty-two-thousand-foot volcano. In the next village, I looked into the window of a small home and was invited in for five days with a mere gesture. I didn’t speak a word of the language, but the man who lived there allowed me to sleep on his floor and harvest corn during the day. It’s hard to remember how I communicated, but I remember that it did not feel difficult or even awkward.
There was a lonely beauty in my highland experiences. I went weeks without meeting anyone who could speak English. With Will and Rob gone, Oaxaca and Mexico City and all mail far away, a crushing loneliness overtook me on the road to Lake Titicaca. Sleeping in a pasture somewhere, I woke up to a bull staring at me, his great big animal face like something out of the depths of the darkest stage of a vision quest. Somewhere along the road, I got horribly sick and was taken in by a Catholic priest. Farther along, in Argentina, a customs agent in a small town told me to get the hell out of the country. I met some young revolutionaries, theater actors, in Mendoza, and whenever I remember them today, I think they certainly must have been rounded up and murdered during the Dirty War a few years later.
There were many left-leaning types on the road and even some North Americans and Europeans. I met fellow travelers while riding on the backs of flatbeds, walking the streets of the larger towns, and at archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu and beautiful natural places like General Carrera Lake. I didn’t tell anyone that I was Robert McNamara’s son, and no one asked. Of course, it didn’t mean that I stopped being his son. It only meant that I stopped thinking about it for a time.
There was a final ascent over a last cordillera, into Chile. I had come to my “promised land.” Since the sixth grade, when my yearlong project was on Chile, I’d wanted to travel there. It was September of 1971, springtime in the Chilean valley.