20,000 Miles South: A Pan American Adventure

284 Pages·2017·14.4 MB·English

by  Helen Schreider

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Text originally published in 1957 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of
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20,000 MILES SOUTH:
A Pan American Adventure

by

HELEN and FRANK SCHREIDER

Drawings by Helen Schreider
Photographs by Frank Schreider
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
DEDICATION 5
CHAPTER ONE 6
CHAPTER TWO 20
CHAPTER THREE 39
CHAPTER FOUR 61
CHAPTER FIVE 81
CHAPTER SIX 89
CHAPTER SEVEN 130
CHAPTER EIGHT 145
CHAPTER NINE 176
TRAIL’S END 194
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 201

DEDICATION
To everyone, named and unnamed, without whose friendship and understanding
this adventure might well have had a different ending.
CHAPTER ONE
IT WASN’T until we met Captain Parker that we were discouraged. Others
had told us it couldn’t be done, but before it had been easy to rattle off glib
answers to their doubting questions. To the ex-Army officer who had had an
amphibious jeep sink from under him in a calm bay we had replied, “But ours
has a watertight cab.” To the sailors in Panama who warned of the chocosanos
we had answered, “But we won’t put to sea when it’s stormy.” But now, after
four days of waiting for the weather to clear, marooned on a tiny island in the
Caribbean, with the wind bending the palms horizontal and the sea piled in high
mountains and the sand glaring white as salt under a black sky, those answers
didn’t seem like answers at all.

When a fishing boat took shelter in our cove, we swam out to her, eager for a
few cheerful words of English. But what we heard was far from cheering. As I
reached for the ladder, a large man leaned over the rail, yachting cap on his head
and rat-sized fox terrier perched on his shoulder. In one breath he said:
“I’m Captain Parker of the Sea Horse, and I’ve got ten to one bet ya won’t
make it. If the storms don’t finish ya, the reefs will.”
I looked back at tiny La Tortuga parked on the sand spit. Our fifteen-foot
amphibious jeep looked mighty small, and I wondered if he was right.
Later Helen and I sat under the whipping tarp by the jeep and thought about
what he had said. This was not the way we had planned it. This month, May, was
supposed to be the calmest time of the year in the Caribbean, just after the
beginning of the rainy season and just before the chocosanos were due. The
sailors had painted a vivid picture of those short but violent storms of near
hurricane force that plague the coast of Panama after the middle of June. The
storm around us was bad enough—what would the chocosanos be like?
We had allowed one month to bypass the third gap in the Pan American
Highway, two hundred and fifty nautical miles from the Panama Canal Zone to
Turbo, Colombia, where we could again reach a road. A month had seemed
ample time to island-hop two hundred and fifty miles, even in an amphibious
jeep. Yet it was already the twenty-fourth of May. A week had passed since we
left the Canal Zone, and we had covered but twenty-five of those two hundred
and fifty miles. While the rain cascaded in sheets, we again studied the charts,
even though we knew almost by heart every cove and reef, every landmark and
island in this section of the Caribbean. Repeatedly we stared at the frothing
turbulence of Hellsgate at the far end of the island. We had already been turned
back once by that channel.
On this pin point in the ocean off the coast of Panama the ten thousand miles
that lay behind us and the ten thousand miles that lay beyond Turbo didn’t seem
to matter. Only the next 225 miles, the next few weeks, seemed important. We
knew now that if we didn’t make Turbo before the chocosanos came we never
would.
No—this was not the way we had planned it. In California’s Balboa Bay we
had cruised confidently in La Tortuga, secure in the belief that we would never
put to sea in anything but calm water. Despite her bright gray paint, La Tortuga
was an ugly duckling among the sleek yachts. Neither car nor boat, but a little of
each, she looked more like a Victorian bathtub with wheels. But, ungainly
though she was, we were as proud of our amphibious jeep as the owner of the
most deluxe cabin cruiser—or Cadillac. Her bunks were comfortable, her one-
burner stove an adequate galley, and when the day’s cruising was over we could
pull up on the beach to the highway and drive home to the Palomar Mountains of
San Diego County, California.
People laughed at La Tortuga. When California “dew” was falling and the
streets of Los Angeles were flooded, motorists teased, “I know it’s raining, but
isn’t that a bit ridiculous?” Others hailed her as a scout car from a flying saucer.
And one night, a week before Christmas, when we pulled into a Pasadena
service station, three attendants just stood and stared. One finally recovered
sufficiently to stammer, “Is that for the Tournament of Roses?” Though I
couldn’t imagine La Tortuga bedecked with flowers, I guess it was a logical
question. All Pasadena was busily preparing for the parade of roses that precedes
the great football classic each New Year’s Day. But when the champions of the
Pacific Coast Conference and the Big Ten met in the Rose Bowl on January i,
1955, La Tortuga was on her way to Nogales, Arizona, and points south.
Four years earlier we had driven that same road in a different jeep. The plans
we had made then had not worked out either—the plans that began in 1947,
when Helen and I were both students at the University of California at Los
Angeles. Married while still lower classmen, we couldn’t crowd a honeymoon
into the budget of the GI Bill or the busy curricula of painting and engineering,
so we talked of a trip after graduation. Since dreams were cheap we could afford
the best, and I thought a short jaunt by jeep to South America would make a fine
belated honeymoon.
I don’t think Helen took the dream seriously until one night when we received
a telephone call at the home where we were renting a room with kitchen
privileges. Perplexed, she came over to my desk and asked, “Do you know