The Test Run

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Why in the world would a software designer, an electrical engineer and a pair of busy bookkeepers—all middle-class San Diego professionals—volunteer themselves for a grueling 30-hour battle with Mexico’s unforgiving Sonora desert? Freelance writer Gonzolo Rivera goes along for a high-speed test run in this, his first in a series of articles that will follow the group, San Diego’s Team Anvil, through five months of preparation that will culminate in November’s 40th running of the renowned Baja 1000 desert race.

THE TRUCK COMES OUT OF A HIGH BOUNCE, finds the passenger-side wheels and starts drifting to the side of this sandy road—one that’s abutted by 3-foot gullies. Hitting one of them on two wheels would surely end in a roll. In the seconds it takes to dread the possibilities, Ed Pickens brings the vehicle down onto four wheels, the rear end fishtails wildly, and then, as suddenly as the havoc began, we’re back on something like solid ground. There’s no time for what-ifs. Within seconds we’re negotiating the next obstacle.

We’re somewhere near the unpopulated town of Amboy, east of Palm Springs, in the middle of the no-man’s-land where the Mojave meets the Colorado Desert. The inhospitable landscape transmogrifies from ancient black lava plains to light brown sand and is spotted with gnarled desert brush. A bright ball sun hovers in the vivid, neon-blue sky. The off-road trails we’re on—barely visible skinny green lines on a California atlas—snake alongside power lines and train tracks through the desert, occasionally meeting up with state roads and small towns.

One of those small towns, Rice, is nothing more than the intersection of two rural highways. The remnants of an old petrol station lie in a heap next to a quiet, windswept service island with rusted, archaic gasoline pumps. Ed and I arrive a full half-hour in front of our chase truck (our route took us straight through the desert, while Ed’s wife and his friend, electrical engineer Brian Fraser, were forced to follow the meandering highway in a roundabout, singsong path). We chuck rocks at empty beer bottles and explore the remains of razed buildings in the pervasive silence.

On the course, we’d bounced along at anywhere from 25 to 50 miles per hour, on a road that was sometimes flat and relatively stable but at other times bottomed out in deceptive silt-filled ditches that were as much as 3 or 4 feet deep. My only other off-road experiences were with two brothers-in-law: once in Florida, on a late-night drunken stretch of backwoods road carved out of the northern Everglades, and then again, years later, with another brother-in-law on a masochistically bumpy Colorado mining road. The latter of those two trips took place in an old Chevy pickup that sat about 12 feet high and had terrible shocks; pure misery on the back.

Ed’s truck is a 1995 Jeep Cherokee with a customized roll cage, a raised suspension and a 248-cubic-inch, 4-liter engine. To my great relief, the shocks are more than adequate. Flying down these desert paths, hitting rocks the size of bowling balls and ditches that could eat small cars, my back suffers no apparent abuse. Even my sense of balance and equilibrium—put off by the violence and insult done to the notions of gravity, physics and even common sense—are assuaged when, after 15 minutes of learning on a steep curve, the realization sets in that it’s par for this course, and therefore presumably okay, for such a ride to feel as belligerently out of control as this one does.

It’s my first time really off-roading, at least in the desert, and certainly the first time doing it as if there were a legitimate reason—other than taking a blind swing at that ethereal barrier Hunter S. Thompson called “The Edge”—for the urgency and speed that we’re putting into this effort, and my fantasy notions of off-roading are disappearing quicker than water in sand. The naïve vision I’d fostered, of the cool aplomb of Steve McQueen (who drove the Baja 1000 in the 1970s) riding a motocross bike through the blinding sand, in all the glorious sangfroid that bespoke him in Bullitt, has gone out the dusty window—as have those calm, dignified, heroic poses I’d dreamed up of James Garner, Jesse James and San Diego builder Corky McMillin (all of whom have raced the event), in their modified racing machines.

Now there’s no turning back. The run has begun, and I’m strapped in like a monkey inside a Mercury capsule. The whole thing feels more like a high school joy ride than training for one of the world’s preeminent off-roading events, the difference between what we’re doing and those old high school rides being that one parlays the momentary escalation of joy-ride risk—speeding through a blind turn or passing on the double-yellow with dangerously close traffic—into a rush of adrenaline that burns the viscera and culminates in a long, cool, heart-racing comedown. A good driver (and Ed Pickens impresses me immediately as good driver or madman—I suspect there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the two terms) has no concept of coming down. In this world, the savage burn of each successive calamity is followed by another near-miss, stomach-floating moment—or the smashing snarl of abused metal. The highs are doubled down, and the parlays are magnificent. The obstacles are perpetual, and the madman-saint next to me, with a motocross halo hovering over his head and the beaming, mischievous smile of a pervert in a porn shop, keeps the pedal as close to the floor as is possible under the mandate (which seems like more a loose guideline or an irrelevant suggestion, as far as he’s concerned) of keeping all fours on the ground.

I’m strapped into a four-point harness, feeling the tightly cinched security of an F-16 pilot, and the odds begin running through my head. Putting my feet on the floor and bucking for the ceiling, my dome doesn’t move more than a few inches. I’m relatively certain that if ... that when we topple ... whatever furious G-forces throw us to all the dimensions simultaneously, this harness is going to keep my head from jamming into that roof (and the hard desert beneath it) with the determination of a work boot crushing an aluminum can. Then I wonder about arms flying out of windows and being crumpled under all that rolling metal. With that thought in my head, my hands clench tighter around the cell phone–size GPS unit in my hands.

Ed bought the unit—by way of recommendation of Ben Indyk, a thirtysomething software engineer and the team’s IT guru—for a couple hundred dollars the week before this first test run. It’s his first time—our first time—working the technology, and it couldn’t be more straightforward. Ed laboriously pored over that atlas for an entire week, preceding our outing, and marked two dozen checkpoints on the 157-mile course. Each point has an input and a name on the GPS unit, and as we reach each one I hit a couple of buttons and the next coordinates magically appear; then an arrow points in the direction of the next checkmark—with an indication of the distance and time to reach it—and I call out to Ed that we’re on track or not on track and the kilometers it’s going to take to get us there.

The GPS guides us in (though Ed’s memorized the route, and we never need the unit to actually tell us where we’re going) to about .2 kilometers before the arrow flips and begins pointing at the bottom end of the LED compass display. As soon as that arrow flips and starts pointing behind us, I know it’s time to seek the next coordinates. More than peace of mind, the unit gives me a needed respite—something to mull over besides the impending metal-smashing, flesh-rending violence my gut tells me is coming our way. But even with the relief of the task at hand, my mind gets away from me. Why do so many professional Americans lack health insurance? I think. Particularly freelance writers? And would Ed’s auto insurance cover controversial paralytic costs, or a life flight out of the Mojave Desert?

“So, Mr. Rivera, where did you say the accident happened?”

“About 50 miles northwest of Amboy.”

“The thing is, Mr. Rivera, this atlas I’m looking at here, it’s telling me there’s nothing there.”

“Nothing there? Jesus God, man, it’s right where the road flips hard and does a hairpin turn around that 300-foot pile of lava.”

“Our estimator tells us the vehicle appears to have launched into the air at least 50 meters and rolled more than a dozen times.”

“I don’t remember anything after the third one—he’s probably right, give or take a half-dozen.”

“So Mr. Rivera, I have to—the company has to ask: What were you doing out there?”

“We were lost—must’ve taken a wrong turn after we got gas in Rice.”

“Of course.”

Fate and The Edge are the most visible threats in this sun-bleached arid desert, but it’s the boredom that eventually kills you, I can see that already. The mind strays, you let your guard down, you aren’t paying attention as you should be, and you fail to see one of those small rock outcroppings in the middle of the road, and next thing you know you’re suddenly missing a front tire, which makes driving in 6 inches of sand damned near impossible … or you fail to slow enough for that deceptive 3-foot washout that’s filled with fine silt, and your front end hits the berm on the other side with enough force to crush a small car into a neat heap of scrap metal.

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