Fault Lines - John Knoop

so we go there. It’s an Italian restaurant full of truck drivers and workers. For forty cents we
each have a heaping plateful of spaghetti with meat sauce, bread and a beer each. We savor each
mouthful, thinking it might be our last hot meal for days. A man at the next table hears us talking
English and comes over to ask if he can join us. He brings his wine bottle with him. He’s a taxi
driver, and we are good friends by the end of the second bottle of wine. He insists that we spend
the night at his house. In the morning his wife gives us coffee and fruit, and we head south into
the dust and wind of the Atacama Desert. The road is a broad, unpaved course of unremitting
washboard ruts that leaves us picking our way along the shoulder at twenty miles an hour or less,
trying to find any smooth patch. Occasionally we try driving at sixty or more to see if we can
plane on the ridges of the ruts but this seems to promise blown out shock absorbers even sooner,
so we resign ourselves to the slow pounding and curse the government of Chile for spending
nothing on road maintenance. We begin asking gas station owners if we can work in exchange for
gas and almost without fail we are given a fill-up. As usual, we trade the story of our journey for
what we need. Sometimes we get an empanada or two in addition to the three or four gallons of
fuel. In contrast, when we stop at the American consulate in Antofagasta to ask if we might
borrow a few dollars for a few days, the consul treats me with contempt and shows no interest in
the story of our journey or in helping us beyond giving me a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes. My
least favorite brand.
The shock absorbers go out, one after another in quick succession as we come to a river
valley between burning desert plateaus. We drive slowly and painfully through the sandy, rock-
strewn upper end of an arroyo and down along the river through irrigated fields of alfalfa and
wheat. We ford the emerald green, fast moving water running down from the Andes. The water
hisses on the engine and steam rises in our faces. We begin climbing the long hill to the next
plateau with a hot tailwind blowing our dust ahead of us, the overheated engine stinking in the
dead air. Suddenly the luggage carrier snaps from the relentless vibration of driving without the
cushioning effect of shock absorbers. We stop and unload our duffle bags to wait for a truck or
bus. Three hours later, after sunset, we hail the first vehicle to come past. It’s a bus commanded
by a huge woman who sits behind her driver and gives orders in a strong rasping voice like a
ship captain. The passengers get down stiffly to stretch and relieve themselves behind the bus,
and the assistants pour water into the boiling radiator from a barrel lashed to the roof. Then the
woman shouts to her crew to put our bags aboard and tells us we can meet them in Iquiqui at the
marketplace around 3 A.M.
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