Why Guacho Gil never worries for smokes (Drive Day 208: Jan 23, 2004)

Posted on Updated on

0123a.jpg

Just as suddenly as a mountain goat emerges from a foggy mountainside, we are back in lowland farming country. The crop is familiar; we could be driving through rural North Carolina.

0123b.jpg

When Gary hops out to photograph a tobacco barn a man on a motorcycle pulls up to chat. His white baseball cap has a picture of Che – of course. Rains this year are too late and too little, I learn, and each stalk of tobacco hanging from the rafters makes four packs of cigarettes. I want to think Che would have donated a cig or two to Guacho Gil along his motorcycle sojourn through this part of Argentina, but then again, he might have bummed some from the shrines instead. Who’d have known?

0123c.jpg

Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s