Taillights -- and black humor -- bring relief on scary journey

February 25, 1999
Web posted at: 1:34 p.m. EST (1834 GMT)

(CNN) -- The smoke was black, the fog was white and our prospects grew grayer by the minute. Foul-smelling diesel and fading red taillights were, it seemed, all that separated us from asphalt and the abyss.

The road from San Miguel, in the Andes of Northern Peru, had lulled the false hope that blacktop would be better than rocks and mud.

My crew and I were traveling to remote Peruvian villages with one of the world's leading experts on potatoes ... in the very hills where the world's first spuds were cultivated. For two hours, our Land Cruiser had rattled along what we figured would be the roughest part of the road: hairpin turns, crumbling hillsides and great stretches of a slippery soup of recent rain and Andean dust.

As daylight rolled into dusk, we passed the spot where a truck had plunged down a gully the day before. The paved road -- at last! -- was blessedly free of boulders and big holes. Although the sky was dark and stars were in hiding, the bright lights and warm beds of Cajamarca promised to be only 90 minutes away.

But our road to relaxation was paved with more than just asphalt. The narrow highway was smooth, but it led only upward. We barely noticed as thin air gave way to fog ... a blanket so thick it seemed to smother the street. As we drove ever more slowly, the car and all its captives seemed to suffocate, as we gasped for a glimpse of anything resembling a road. Even at a snail's pace of 5 mph, we veered back and forth like a slow bee caught in a bottle ... bouncing from the right side of road to the left, rebounding only as the thin edge of the blacktop emerged once again from the mist.

There was no center line, no reflectors on the side of the road, only the occasional concrete barriers painted with black stripes that seemed to appear only after we had passed them.

Two of us stared out the right windows, two others the left, while John, our producer, glared into the white wall in front of us, hoping to see approaching headlights before they saw us.

Stress in slow motion breeds silence, and for a long while, the only conversation was sharp commands to our Peruvian driver, like derecho! (right!) when we were too close to the left side. All of us had been in hairy situations before, but few played out like this one, where there was so much time to imagine being off the side of a cliff, wondering how long it might take for anyone in this rugged wilderness to even notice.

Many miles into the fog, the strained silence was finally broken by my photographer, Diana.

"In Spanish," Diana wondered aloud, "is the word for being on the edge the same as going over the edge?" The bilingual among us quietly searched for an answer to what seemed like a serious question ... until two of us began to chuckle. The chuckle became a laugh, and it spread throughout the dark car until the laughter squeezed a few tears. What kind of question was that? The floodgates opened. Was that a white cross we just passed? Do you suppose the hillside drops straight down? And my favorite, from our guide Christine: I should never have disagreed with my husband.

Each question or comment had a serious undertone, but each drew laughter until a morbid black humor threw a shield around our pathetically trapped little car.

My mom believes in guardian angels, and it occurred to me she might be right when -- out of the darkness -- a giant tour bus passed us on a steep, winding turn. The bus seemed to have special headlights, and in any event, the bus driver had likely traveled this windy road dozens of times before. The driver of our car never hesitated. He pounded the accelerator and followed the wake of the bus, lurching left and right on the invisible road in a desperate attempt to keep the red taillights from fading into the fog.

Our car filled with diesel fumes, making heads already light from high altitude ready to float off our shoulders. For 45 minutes, we plowed upwards through the Andes, putting our faith and maybe our lives in the hands of a bus driver whom we would never meet.

When, at long last, we reached the sign welcoming us to Cajamarca, the car exploded in applause. We were praising our gutsy Peruvian driver, we were applauding our good luck and morbid humor. And, I suppose, I might have been thanking mom ... just in case she had something to do with sending that bus our way.

Jack Hamann's column appears regularly in Nature.

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