Road Fever:  A High-Speed Travelogue, by Tim Cahill

If you have ever taken a lengthy road-trip with somewhat dodgy company, as I have, you will be able to understand some of the charm of this kind of book.  Reading this book reminded me of a 25 hour trip that my father and I took in the spring of 2004 from rural Western Pennsylvania (where he lived) to West Hartford, Connecticut, where my girlfriend at the time lived.  Like the co-drivers here, we wanted to drive in several hour shifts, but the bad driving of one of the parties made it difficult for the other to sleep.  In my case, it was my father’s errant going back and forth between the median and the sleep strips as we made our way through rural New York and southwestern Vermont around the town of Barre into western Massachusetts that made it impossible for me to sleep.  My father ended up doing a marathron drive with one hour of sleep in the parking lot to a grocery store in the suburbs outside Boston and we both made sure to get plenty of sleep as soon as we arrived at our destination exhausted and not entirely sane.  The author shows a similar sense throughout this trip and, for this reader at least, it was entirely relatable.

This particular book is the tale of how two men, a somewhat fussy Canadian long-distance driver who already had a couple of notable trips that had gone of well, and the author, managed to set a record traveling from the southern to the northern ends of the Western hemisphere and the experiences they had a long the way.  The author shows the logistical planning as well as financing for the trip, which are certainly interesting to some readers and help this book reach about 250 pages, as it would be fairly short if it only discussed the journey without any other context.  Once the journey itself begins the author shows what it is like to drive up the Pan-American Highway, how one deals with terrible terrain, crazy drivers, and the corruption involved in border crossings.  The author also shows the temperamental problems that result when two tired people driving in difficult terrain in shifts get on each other’s nerves before embracing the brokenness of the experience with terrible food and coffee and the need to stay awake and to keep driving with occasional naps and bathing until one reaches one’s destination triumphant, which they do.

Reading this book was an interesting way to compare this particular journey with others.  The author’s experiences can be compared, for example, to that of the noted long-distance horsemen of Argentina [1], and the author’s brief trip on the Stella Lykes can be compared to the lengthier trip of John McPhee on that same ship.  It does seem that when one commits to a life of adventure driving or adventure writing that one is involved in a very small world where one’s paths may often cross with other writers, and where readers may be able to place a book and a writer within a larger constellation of related people and adventures, for even when it comes to such matters as making record-breaking runs, one is still not doing anything that is particularly original because so many of the records and adventures one is seeking are in competition with others who are also writing about these events and seeking the same sort of attention and memory themselves.  This is certainly an account that one can relate to, even if the author failed to prepare adequately when it came to the logistics of feeding oneself on such a journey.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018/03/17/book-review-tschiffelys-ride/