Bruce - The drive: searching for lost memories on the pan-American highway

W e are marooned in the center of a country in the center of a continent. It would be better to be lost, comforted by the possibility of search and rescue. But my husband and I have driven here on purpose, searching for the remains of my childhood home. Somewhere between the mountainous Bolivian outposts of Mizque and Aiquile, the dirt track we are following narrows to the width of a hospital gurney and then doubles back on itself in a hairpin turn. Manageable, actually, if it werent for the fact that it does so directly under a waterfall. This particularly contorted switchback is pinched under a flood-swollen river gushing to a gorge below.

Gary stops our one-ton truck and vintage camper just shy of a pummeling cascade. Another ten feet forward and neither one of us will be able to get out of the vehicle. On the drivers sidethe inside corner of the hairpin left turna sheer cliff plunges three hundred feet. There is no guardrail or shoulder; the road is perfectly aligned to the terrifying drop-off. On my side is a low overhang, water-carved out of a mountain face and so claustrophobically close that opening the trucks door will impale it into solid rock.

The roof of the camper might squeeze under the overhanging ledge, but if the back wheels slip we will be swept over the edge in an instant. The road is too narrow and unstable to turn around, so if we chicken out we will have to negotiate hours of mud ditches and washboard road in reverse.

We are days off course already, on a dubious detour forced by washed-out bridges along the Pan-American Highway. There is no guidebook or app we can consult to tell us what to do, and the road is dissolving before our eyes. I visualize a wave of mud with our beautifully restored 1968 Avion camper riding its crest like a surfboard. Not even two years into our married life together, Gary and I would be swallowed whole, our quest to find the camper I grew up in submerged in grief and second-guessing.

It is told-you-so infuriating, the kind of unfair that gushes out in hot tears when it would feel much better to punch something. We quit amazing jobs and sold a house on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, to take this trip, leaving a trail of friends and family questioning our sanity. Men fired guns over our heads in Mexico and Nicaragua. We depleted most of our budget to ship the camper around the kidnapping narco-traffickers of Colombia. My intestines are pickled in Cipro, and Gary carries dengue fever in his blood. There are ashes from an aborted llama fetus scattered on the camper bed.

All for nothing. The road is impassable. After seven months of driving we will have to console ourselves with platitudes. You can never go home again anyway. Its the effort that counts. Better to have tried and failed than never dared a leap of faith.

Gary squeezes my hand. We are standing behind our dented, road-bruised camper in helpless silence when the sky splits. It pours with enough force to obliterate the road on either side of the hairpin waterfall. The weight of our decision lifts; we both realize that turning back now would be as dangerous as going forward. We run back to the truck, lock the hubs into four-wheel drive, and climb in.

Steam obscures the windshield so we inch forward in first gear, driving almost blind. I am too scared to talk but we cant hear each other anyway. The sound of the downpour becomes deafening when the waterfall hitsfirst the trucks hood and then the campers aluminum roof. I have the absurd sensation of driving through a car wash on a roller-coaster.

Can I come any closer on your side? Gary shouts as he begins to take the inside curve. I roll down my window, which is under the protection of the rock ledge overhang, and yank the side-view mirror toward me to give us another few inches of clearance. We cant afford to get wedged in so we will have to bump our way through by feel. My heart tastes cold and metallic lodged in the back of my throat.

The back end starts to fishtail to the left, like someone is tugging at the corner of a carpet underneath us. Gary steers the front wheels into the deepest ruts for traction. My side of the camper begins to scrape the cliff wall. Solid rock is gouging into its thin aluminum skin, peeling back reflector lights and rivet strips like tortured fingernails.

Are the back tires holding? I yell.

I cant tell. Open your door in case we have to jump.

It takes a second to sink in. If the road gives way, our only hope of survival is both of us clambering out the passenger side before the camper plummets into the ravine.

I brace my left arm against the dashboard and crack open the truck door. It is so heavy I can barely hold it off the latch while I peer under my armpit at the road below. Gary drives and I watch for signs that the tires are slipping. Mud spins up and into my eyes. I let go of the dashboard to wipe my face, and when my weight shifts the momentum of the swinging-open door starts to take me with it.

An image washes over me: a three-year-old boy startled by backward-slipping, mud-slick tires. He is struggling with a heavy truck door, trying to get out. His panic melds with mine; his racing heartbeat overtakes my own. His face is turned but I would know him anywhere. He is my little brother.