The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

The moment that South America first became real to me, I was tearing across the roadless desert in the back of a jostling beer truck. Exhaust fumes hung heavy on the air. Mirage ponds quivered in the distance. From the truck’s shuddering chassis, a blast beat echoed across the flats, muffling the clink of contraband bottles, a death-metal soundtrack to the rawbone panorama of sand and sky.

We were crossing the Guajira Peninsula, a desolate nubbin of yellow dirt that juts like a fist off the very top of South America. Until that moment, it had all been prologue, the familiar rites and venues of an orderly arrival abroad: customs lines and cab stands, sterile hotel hallways, clumsy introductions in an unfamiliar tongue. Now the Colombian outback was screaming past me on both sides, hazy behind a sandstorm of our own making. With every turn, the photographer and I braced, clinging tightly to the truck-bed’s wooden rails, holding on to keep from being thrown onto the flats.

This felt real because it felt dangerous, I thought. And fairly or unfairly, danger was what I’d come to Colombia expecting to find.

At the wheel of the truck was Bernie José, the jovial, elfin proprietor of a nameless pool hall in a remote Colombian fishing village called Cabo de la Vela. Bernie, for the moment, was my guide. Together with my photographer companion, I was crouched in the back of Bernie’s pickup truck, surrounded by twenty-one cases of Venezuelan beer that clattered as we roared past cactus clusters and thatched-roof homesteads. Before we’d set out that morning, Bernie had dolefully recalled for us the day he’d flipped his truck while driving across a dry riverbed, breaking a leg and permanently disfiguring his passenger in the process. Now he
waved at us periodically in the rearview mirror, flashing a grin and a thumbs-up whenever we hit a particularly kidney-rattling bump.

In 1962, the American writer Hunter S. Thompson described a similar ride across the peninsula as “punishing both truck and passengers unmercifully.” Thompson would later become known for his fondness for hyperbole, for liberally sprinkling his prose with adjectives like “savage,” “brutal,” “terrible,” and “fearsome.” In this instance, though, his description seemed apt. Truck suspensions have come a long way in the last fifty years, and yet each time Bernie’s Toyota walloped the dry, packed earth, I found myself wondering how my own whiplash must have compared to Thompson’s.

Hunter S. Thompson was a young and decidedly unknown reporter in 1962. He had come to Guajira in search of smugglers, researching a story for an American newspaper about the region’s brisk trade in bootlegged goods. I, in turn, had come to Guajira in search of Thompson. The smugglers I encountered more or less by accident.

Seventy-two hours earlier, I had stepped off a plane in Barranquilla, a jumbled Colombian metro on the country’s muggy Atlantic coast, only to find that I had no baggage. It was a double-whammy of arrival shock. To a denizen of the dry Montana Rockies, stepping out of the airport into coastal Colombia is like getting bludgeoned with a sack of wet laundry. The equatorial humidity is just so complete, the saturation so overwhelming, that the lungs simply give out on you, withering in the swelter like damp paper bags. As I’d staggered out of the passenger terminal, trying hard to jumpstart my jangled respiratory system, I had studied the slip of paper handed me inside. On it was a phone number, a hotline to call in order to find out whether the one small rucksack I’d
packed for my six-month journey across the continent might eventually be located. Naturally, my luggage had been lost, because this is how all good trips begin—with adversity.

Hunter S. Thompson had it worse. In May of 1962, on the eve of a yearlong hitch across the continent, he described his circumstances grimly in a letter to a friend. “My situation is as follows,” he began.

By comparison, my situation was cushy. For starters, I was already in Colombia, and getting there had been easy-bordering-on-impulsive. Some months earlier, I’d sat in front of a laptop in my local coffee shop in Missoula, Montana, feeling listless and depressingly bourgeois. I was twenty-nine years old and functionally unemployed, recently divorced, and more recently awarded a flimsy master’s degree in the humanities. On something like a whim, I’d traded a few years’ worth of airline miles for a ticket to a country that I associated mostly with drug kingpins and guerrilla armies. It took about ten minutes, six mouse clicks, and zero smugglers’ boats.

Upon my arrival in Barranquilla, I had several hundred dollars and only a vague itinerary. In the absence of my rucksack, I also had the clothes on my back, a half dozen Nature Valley granola bars, and one dog-eared copy of
The Proud Highway
, Thompson’s first volume of collected correspondence.

Like a lot of people my age, I first encountered Hunter Thompson via director Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film adaptation of his most popular book,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
. The film was kind of a dorm-room standard in the late 1990s, a surrealist take on Thompson’s classic and quasifictional 1972 account of a drug-fueled search for the American Dream. I remember watching
Fear and Loathing
in my dormitory basement with a passel of stoned freshmen, giggling at the trippy visuals and at Johnny Depp’s comic portrayal of Raoul Duke, Thompson’s profligate alter ego. For those unfamiliar,
Fear and Loathing
is essentially a psychedelic buddy comedy. The protagonists are the journalist Duke and his bad-mannered Samoan lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (an overweight, mustachioed Benicio del Toro). The two of them spend 118 minutes wandering around Las Vegas in an LSD fog, wreaking havoc on hotel rooms, halfheartedly reporting on a big-purse motorcycle race, and lamenting the inevitable decline of the California counterculture. To an audience of Clinton-era undergrads at a state college in small-town Wisconsin, the movie’s mind-altering milieu was as foreign as anything Fellini might have cooked up.