Somewhere in my messy shelves, I have a copy of this book but I can’t seem to lay my hand on it just now¹ and I have been thinking a lot about it lately. Maybe it’s all the travel vloggers who are so proud of themselves for van-lifing from Ushuaia² to Prudhoe Bay.

Tim Cahill did it first, kids, and he set a world record for the speed in which he did it.

Granted, Road Fever is a little light on descriptions of tourist attractions, brilliant sunsets, and friendly locals. But it’s not intended to be that kind of book. It does, however, share a certain tone about travel – that, oops I made a wrong turn and now we might die, sort of tone. But Tim doesn’t weep into the camera when he does it. It’s 1987. He doesn’t have a GPS or a smartphone – or a cell phone or even what we called in those days, a mobile phone, like the car in Sixteen Candles.

In Pass the Butterworms³, Cahill describes his specialty as “remote travel in difficult situations” while avoiding what he called the tone of the “stone age” of literary travel writing.⁴ Tim’s voice, to me, has become the voice of Outside, a sort of wry, I thought I could handle a 60 mile hike through the snow but boy was I wrong but it was worth it sort of tone. You can seem him blazing the trail for people like Anthony Bourdain, and travel vloggers – although they may not know it – are also his descendants. It’s a humorous, self-deprecating narrative, tinged with the danger of being a human in a place that sane humans really shouldn’t be.

The story behind Road Fever, if I remember accurately since I don’t have the book in front of me, is that he wanted to make this trip, or maybe his travel partner in this case – professional long-distance driver, Garry Sowerby⁵ – was the instigator and Cahill just happened to be the in the right place at the right time. That right place being the unveiling of the 1988 GMC Sierra truck, an event that Cahill describes in the same tone and spirit that he describes his interactions with rebels in the back country of Peru. After persuading GMC that letting Garry and Tim slap a shell on the bed of one of their pre-market trucks and set a record in it, driving from one end of the world to the other would prove it was a Man’s truck, they lure in a few more sponsors,⁶ secure their visas and take off.

They plan to trade driving shifts. Garry – an expert already – advises Tim: we need to drive fast but we don’t want to be stupid. One wrong turn because you’re focused on getting there fast, can put us in really dangerous situations. If you get tired, don’t push on until you make stupid mistakes, wake me up. They come up with a word for it, a catchphrase that I can’t remember.

But they’re really just talking about Continuation Bias, where you get so focused on the things you need to do to get there, that you lose sight of the big picture. Like pushing AI out as an MVP. Or solving all the little problems that you need to solve quickly, so you can drive to completion on a project, but missing the purpose. When your workday becomes a combination of spin-the-bottle and whack-a-mole, you’re multi-tasking in every meeting, working through lunch and staying late, you’re going to make dumb mistakes.

Like taking a left turn into an unfamiliar town off the Pan-American Highway, a town that might be filled with 1980’s drug cartels that would probably like to kidnap you for ransom or kill you and steal your truck. 1987 was not a safe time to be driving the length of South America.

Road Fever: totally worth reading. Which I will do again, myself, once I can figure out where I put my copy.

1. It may just be that I’m looking too quickly. While the front cover is distinctive, the spine, I remember is deceptively different, and this hasn’t been the only time that I haven’t been able to find it when looking for it. ↩︎
2. On my list of places to return to. I’ve only been twice, on both occasions on the way to somewhere else, and couldn’t see past the tourist areas. ↩︎
3. Beautifully packaged, as all his books were when originally released. ↩︎
4. From Pass the Butterworms: “magazines with titles like Man’s Adventure […] directed, apparently, at semi-literate, semi-sad bachelors interested primarily in the ‘nymphos’ who, in this genre, seemed to populate the jungles and mountains at the various ends of the earth. The events of these stories were of dubious veracity…” ↩︎
5. A crazy Canadian who, just before this trip, set a world record for driving from the southern tip of Africa to the Northernmost tip of Europe. And before that drove – get this – around the world. But this is the trip he describes as the hardest of them all. His note in the Maritime Motorsports Hall of Fame website also notes that he smuggled 4,000 children’s books into Moscow libraries in 1992. Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo, dude! ↩︎
6. One of them being beef jerky and another, a drinkable sort of yogurt or chocolate milk juice box or something, that breaks open in the chaos that is everyone’s back seat on a long road trip, getting all over their sleeping bags. ↩︎