The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (30 page)

He passed the half-empty beer around for us to share, clearly warming to the conversation.

“Of course now, we pay a lot for our carts, our drills and lamps, things like that,” he said contemplatively. He shrugged in the darkness. “After the coca and the alcohol, there isn’t much left over.”

I took out my bag of coca and handed it over. Pablo pinched a generous handful and gave it back with a grateful nod. Each leaf was a smallish green spear, a dead ringer for a bay leaf. As he talked, Pablo expertly stripped each blade with his front teeth, tossing aside the petiole and adding to an already prodigious cud in the corner of his mouth. I reached into the bag and tried to mimic his technique, letting the chewed-up leaves gather and moisten in a pocket below my gums. They tasted bitter and earthy, like mature arugula or raw green tea.

Pablo pointed to the lump bobbing in his jaw. “Thanks to this,” he said, “I can work ten or twelve hours with just one meal.” He didn’t look like a guy who skipped a lot of meals, I thought, although maybe his girth came from all that beer. Pablo was already opening another fresh one.

“Do you worry about cave-ins?” asked the Portuguese girl, a bit nervously.

“You mean getting trapped? Like those Chileans?” Pablo laughed and gestured around him with his beer can. “This mountain is like Swiss cheese. Everywhere there are holes. If something collapses?” He shrugged and raised his beer can. “What can you do but sit and drink for a while? You smoke and tell a few jokes. Then eventually someone says, ‘OK. Let’s go this way.’ ”

I could already feel a pleasant, localized numbness spreading through my cheek. I spat when I saw Pablo spit, and it was too dark to tell, but I imagined my saliva to be green.

“No, I don’t worry much about that,” he said, shaking his head. “I worry about silicosis. I worry about Tío.” He said both words with the same conviction, drawing no distinction between the seriousness of either threat. “When you are alone sometimes, Tío comes to visit you, and this is very dangerous.”

The Israeli guys chuckled. With a smirk in his voice, one of them asked why.

“Because he looks just like one of your friends,” Pablo said, unsmiling. “Or maybe he takes the form of the dead, except that he has golden teeth. But if you don’t give him what he wants, he will try and kill you.”

“And what does Tío want?” I asked.

“Alcohol, usually. Sometimes food or cigarettes.”

Pablo nodded somberly. It was like the old biblical
parable, I thought, only backward. Feed and clothe your neighbor, Christ said, because you never know when it might really be God, and he’ll reward you with eternal life. Give your neighbor booze and smokes, said Pablo, because he may actually be Tío, and he can blow you to bits with a badly timed stick of dynamite.

We chitchatted and waited for David. Yet another beer was cracked open and passed, then another and another after that. After five or so had gone around, Pablo held out a can in front of him and squinted, like he was examining a fine specimen from his mineral bag.

“Yes, alcohol is good,” he said with a sigh, and he took a deep swig. “I don’t usually drink beer, though. Too many chemicals.”

I asked him what he preferred, and naturally he said the miner’s cane spirits, which is chemically similar to antifreeze.

We were partway through our second six-pack when David suddenly came scuttling around the corner. “Turn off your lamps!” he ordered, an excited edge to his voice. “Everyone turn off your lamps!”

We all flipped the switches on the back of our helmets, and in an instant, the cave went utterly, hopelessly black. It was the sort of darkness that most human beings don’t often get to experience, the kind that prompts entire phyla of insects to evolve without eyes. In front of my face, Tío himself might have been dancing a jig, waving his giant phallus around, and I would have had no idea.

“Now, put your fingers in your ears,” David commanded.

I did so, lightly, and waited. When the explosion came it sounded like suction, like all the air being pulled out of the mine.
Whump!
came the noise, both deafening and dull, and the chamber shook noticeably. I felt a shower of dust settle
on my face and neck. And then, silence. After a beat, we all exhaled and flipped our headlamps back on, grinning nervously at one another. A fine particulate mist hung in the air, like dust blown off a bookshelf, a gauzy mineral cloud that miners like Pablo breathe every day.

“That was dynamite,” David said needlessly. Then he sat down on a boulder and clapped his hands together. “So! Who has a beer left for poor, thirsty Pablo?”

The serious drinking began a couple of hours later, at a cinder block–sorting facility in the shadow of the mountain. We drove there with David and Pablo together, after helping haul several thirty-pound sacks of tin ore back up to the rail line. We walked in to find a sparse courtyard festooned with empty bottles and three soggy-eyed miners blasting Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is” from a boom box covered in rock dust. Jesus, I thought. For a people so dependent on heavy metal, Bolivians sure go in for the soft rock.

We spent the rest of the afternoon milling while the miners drank and laughed, drank and crushed tin in two aging electric mills. A smiling, staggering assistant passed out beers for the
turistas
, and he kept them coming while the crew weighed the day’s haul on a small flatbed scale. Later on, when we’d walked back out to the van, the German gave voice to what everyone had been thinking.

“Well,” he said, unzipping his jumpsuit, “I guess if I had their life, I’d probably drink that much too.”

I made one more stop before leaving Potosí, hopping a taxi to the large cemetery on the edge of town. It’s a place that the city’s few tourists tend to avoid. Like many cemeteries in Latin America, Potosí’s is a patchwork of funerary vaults called columbaria—large walls lined with recesses
for the storage of cremated remains. In the Potosí cemetery, these walls are arranged in squares surrounding simple courtyards. On the inside, each wall is a grid of crematory niches containing the remains of the dead, and in lieu of a headstone, each niche has its own plaque, along with a small shelf for flowers and other tributes.

It was a sunny Sunday morning, and the cemetery was crowded with mourners. At least a hundred people were lined up loosely along a central pathway, getting ready for some kind of procession. It wasn’t a festive scene, obviously, but neither did it seem particularly somber. The crowd of mostly women chatted casually among themselves or sat on stone benches arranging flowers. Children chased one another around the benches, crying out from time to time and diving into their mothers’ prodigious skirts.

The first columbarium I came to was dedicated to one of the miners’ cooperatives. On a sign outside, a line of flowy cursive read:
Here rest those who left their lungs in the mines
. I walked inside the courtyard and found myself alone. The countless niches in the surrounding walls looked more or less the same. Each one contained a picture of a miner dressed in his Sunday best, some flowers in various stages of wilt, and a few small plastic replicas of beer and liquor bottles.

My bus to Santa Cruz broke down on a high Andean pass sometime just after four a.m., about eighty miles away from the closest city, Cochabamba. I’d been sleeping more or less soundly and woke to find the bus motionless and about two-thirds empty. There was no announcement, of
course. To hear my seatmate tell it, there had been a noticeable clattering for some time. Then, while we were passing a small farm at the crest of a rock-strewn hill, the driver had simply pulled over, stepped out of the bus, and never come back in. A few passengers eventually got out and started walking, and I could see about fifteen others out my window, sitting on their luggage on the opposite side of the road, waiting for some alternative conveyance.

I wandered outside and found the driver reclining against a suitcase in the luggage compartment, silently smoking. It was just after dawn, and the first pink rays were struggling to reach into the mountains. A few thatched-roof buildings clustered on the neighboring hillside, and a leafy patch of coca plants extended clear up to the road. I cleared my throat, and the driver looked at me like I’d just interrupted his favorite TV show. With my limited vocabulary, I tried to inquire what was going on.

“We are waiting here for a person to come and fix this?” I asked.

The driver shrugged impassively.

“Maybe a mechanic, maybe another bus,” he said. “I’m not sure.”

The back end of the bus was open, I could see, which is where I’ve always presumed the engines of buses to be. I almost asked what was wrong with it, but even if the driver had answered in crisp Oxford English, I wouldn’t have known what he was talking about.

“And them?” I asked, nodding toward the people across the street.

“They want another ride, but no one will come.”

“When do you think we’ll be moving again?”

He picked at a luggage tag on somebody’s duffel bag.

“Mediodia,”
he answered, which could mean noon but
could just as easily mean any vague time around the middle of the day. It was not yet six a.m. So I asked for my rucksack and sat down across the street with the rest of the mutineers.

The group of us waited there in silence, trying to wave down trailer trucks, which passed sporadically and all seemed to be hauling livestock. I debated whether I’d rather wait in the mountains all day or ride into Cochabamba ankle-deep in manure. The question was moot, though, as none of them stopped. It was cold out, and later I figured that we were probably stopped there at about 10,000 feet. The driver crouched pathetically in his luggage carriage, smoking and avoiding our eyes. In retrospect, I realized he probably wished he could join us.

Eventually another company’s double-decker bus came tearing around the corner, and we all waved like castaways. The bus pulled over and we hurried inside, abandoning the sorry driver and a dozen or so optimists still seated in the broken-down coach. In the new bus, I grabbed an open seat in the first row of the top level, where I could watch out the wide front windows as we descended into the valley. It had only been about ninety minutes since I’d woken up. That could have been a lot worse, I thought.

Then, no more than twenty miles up the road, my new bus slowed dramatically. I peered out the big window and did a double-take. A bus coming from the other direction had somehow swerved into our lane and crashed through the meager guardrail. It was perched on the edge of the mountain and dangling in space, seemingly three-quarters of the way over, tilting drunkenly toward the steep slope below. It looked like the slightest kick might send it hurtling into the canyon. Inexplicably, though, all of the passengers seemed to have come out unscathed. They were milling around glumly on the opposite side of the road.

We didn’t stop, presumably because my companions and I had just taken the last remaining seats. Maybe our bus driver encountered this sort of thing all the time. Farther along, we passed a fleet of fifteen yellow taxis speeding in the direction of the accident. Bolivia is a difficult country for buses.

If the rest of modern Bolivia has been shaped by labor unions, popular uprisings, and socialist impulses, then Santa Cruz is the city that multinational capitalism built. On the sidewalk outside my motel, a woman selling black-and-white prints of historic Santa Cruz showed me a few images from the early 1960s that might have been from the 1860s. The city that Thompson saw in September of ’62 was a straight-up backwater, with horses clopping along unpaved streets and not one building over three stories tall. Electric lights and potable water were fairly new. A paved road connecting the tropical, low-lying city to the Andean half of the country had been completed just six years earlier, and the railroad that Thompson would ride east into Brazil was itself just eight years old.

Thompson, however, wasn’t the only American drifting around Bolivia’s wild, wild east. A few years earlier, the Bolivian government had signed a contract for oil exploration with the US-based Gulf Oil Company, and as Thompson noted, the region had since filled up with transplanted Texas oilmen “drilling the hell out of the Bolivian jungle,” searching for petroleum and natural gas. If Gulf came up short, it would deal a serious blow to Bolivia’s efforts to scale back its mining dependency.

“Should Gulf come through, however,” Thompson wrote, “Santa Cruz will be a hell of a boom town.”

Gulf did indeed come through, and today Santa Cruz is Bolivia’s largest city, a thoroughly modern metro built with
oil profits over the span of just a few decades. The
fútbol
team, founded by oil workers, is named Oriente Petrolero. The affluent neighborhood is called Equipetrol, once home to Gulf’s employees and likely where Thompson would have hobnobbed with its execs. On a continent where unchecked urban migration leads to spontaneous communities like El Alto or Huaycán, Santa Cruz is just the opposite—a masterpiece of rationality and urban planning. The city center is surrounded by nine concentric rings of traffic, with broad palm-lined boulevards extending through them like spokes in a wheel. What Thompson would have experienced as basically the entirety of Santa Cruz in 1962 now occupies only the smallest, innermost ring.

The success of Santa Cruz has put the city at odds with the culture of the Altiplano and the government of Evo Morales. The largely white
cruceños
tend to have a Western, pro-capitalist attitude that defies Morales’s socialist and indigenous-centric vision. Santa Cruz prides itself on what Americans might call a kind of blue-state urbanity: It has a reputation for turning out models, five-star chefs, and swaggering
fútbol
titans. Many
cruceños
see Andean Bolivians, known as
collas
, as a backward people who are unfairly partaking in the wealth of the east. When Morales nationalized Bolivia’s oil and gas reserves in 2006, he did so with tacit support from Santa Cruz, but the city has since seen protests and referendums demanding autonomy from La Paz and more control over the country’s fossil fuel revenues.