Richmond VA
7.11.98
1826 EDT
On your mark --- get set --- HOP!
The Peace Frogs Rally officially began this evening when a helicopter
whumped above the skyline of downtown Richmond, Virginia, came to hover
about 20' above Mayo Island in the middle of the James River, and dropped
an attache case onto a concert fairground. Hundreds in the audience clapped
appreciatively as the helicopter rose up and disappeared as quickly as it
had arrived. I've seen some clever kickoffs to automobile and motorcycle
rallies before, but this was unique.
Chief administrative frog [Anura ranidae], Andrew Crosby, picked up the air
mail package and hurried to the bandstand. He then opened the case
dramatically and took out a few pieces of paper. One by one he called for
the members of the starting teams to come to the stage, introduce
themselves, and receive the first of a series of bonus locations (known in
frog-speak as "challenges") that the contestants might visit on the initial
leg of the rally, which runs from Mayo Island to Branson, Missouri. They
won't stop there: the final leg will kick, galvanically, into San Jose two
weeks from today. Not the San Jose in California. The one in Costa Rica.
The teams:
Frogzilla - Chevy Caprice Classic - Four young men and women, clearly
excited and clearly heading for a DNF. Their car doesn't look as if it can
make it to the outskirts of Richmond, much less cope with the fearsome
roads that Guatemala will throw at the poor thing.
Los Hermanos Ramos - Datsun 510 - Siblings (the name means "Frog Brothers")
who, if one stood on the other's shoulders, have maybe ten feet in height
altogether. They make up for their lack of altitude with the class ride in
the field. One may wound a Datsun 510; one may even remove its motor and
drive shaft; but even then one will never completely pith a 510. They run
on pure, mean will. It is the Terminator.
Brew Crew II - Ford 150 van - Two older men (one, the team's navigator and
the mayor of a small town in New York, is 51 today, and was doing his best
to promote the team's name) who are preset for Party Mode. Emblazoned on
both sides of the van in letters 6" high is the slogan: "Come meet your new
drinking buddies!" They may not win, but no team will have a better time.
406 - Jeep Cherokee Classic - Two young men who promise to run silent and
deep. When Crosby introduced them, he noted, "We can't seem to get much
conversation out of them." At which point one of them came forward and
said, "I'm Joe." His partner said, "I'm Jim." Crosby looked at them
curiously for a moment, then turned back to the microphone. "See what I
mean?"
Trafalmador - Suzuki Samurai - The name sounds vaguely Hispanic, which
would befit the rally's terminus deep in Central America, but it's really a
planet in Kurt Vonnegut's drug-dazed novel, "Slaughterhouse Five."
Obviously a name this arcane must come from an arcane mind, and it does.
The Trafalmadorians are Greg McQueen and Bob Ray, '97 Iron Butt Rally
veterans, and easily the early odds-on favorite. Don't blame Greg for the
team's name, however; he can't remember it.
Los Ramos de la Media Noche - Chevy Astro - The "Midnight Frogs," a man and
two women, have a beautiful looking van and evident experience, but they
seem to lack a certain quality of preparation, namely their fourth
teammate. They offered the job to me --- I'm not making this up --- but I
told them I didn't have my passport with me. Had I known the heavy bonuses
right off the bat were near my house, 110 miles up the road in D.C., I
might have changed my mind.
Milagros - Mercedes diesel sedan - The inclusion of Team Milagros on the
grid is more a matter of courtesy than of fact, for they were not present
at the start. When last heard from earlier in the afternoon, they were
somewhere in West Virginia, trying to figure out why their car wouldn't run
very well. The name means "miracles" in Spanish. They could use one right
now.
Each of the six (or seven, depending on Milagros' whereabouts) starting
teams --- and twenty others who dropped out in the months before the rally
started --- paid a $1,500 entry fee for the privilege of competing for
first place. Whoever takes it will pocket $10,000. Second place is worth
nothing. With that kind of brass ring, you would naturally think that this
event will have restrictions on conduct that make the Federal Rules of
Criminal Procedure look like a Dick and Jane story. Nothing could be
farther from the truth.
I think there were maybe ten prohibitions. Basically, cheating is not
permitted, but there's no enforceable penalty for trying to outwit your
opponents and/or the organizers by fraud, piracy, immersion therapy, bluff,
commingling, perjury, white slave trading, forgery, collusion, bribery,
compounding a felony, polygamy, behavior modification, agitprop,
harassment, spin control, treason, or . . . well, cheating.
The "collusion" problem is particularly curious. If Team A catches Team B
trying to claim a patently fraudulent "challenge," Team A is rewarded for
its snitching by receiving the points that Team B was trying to steal. It
doesn't take a well-focused mind to see what could happen here with $10
large ones sitting on the table. Suppose, for example, that neither Team A
nor Team B has any legitimate chance to win the rally because they can't
stay awake very long, don't like to drive much, and are just no good. They
get together and pick one --- say Team B --- to be the stalking horse. Now
they both head straight to Branson and sleep for a day or two. There Team
A tells the organizers, "We caught those bastard Team B guys trying to glom
the following challenges (listing the 25 biggest bonuses on the leg)." And
for their good deed in reporting the miscreants, Team A now stands in first
place, approximately forty octobillion points ahead of the team in second
place. In Costa Rica, of course, the two conspirators will quietly divide
up the ten grand.
This problem had not really dawned on Andy Crosby, a Johnny Depp look-alike
(though taller and without the sullen stare that portends the trashing of a
hotel room), until I mentioned it to him. They're good-hearted people,
innocent and caring, who are trying in a very meaningful way to drum up
support for research on the cause of terrible decreases in frog populations
around the globe. That is a quite touching, selfless, and noble idea, I
think.
Additionally, but far less emphatically, they want to promote their Peace
Frogs product --- I believe it's a line of clothing, and from the beautiful
T-shirt they gave me merely for my standing around and telling them what
was wrong with their rally for about three hours, I can tell you that it
truly is fine merchandise --- and to provide a stage for happy people to
take a long, if somewhat unstructured, drive. They don't naturally think
in the carnivorous way that is second nature to an SCCA automobile
rallyist, divorce lawyer, or department store Santa Claus. Even a
comparatively low-key set of Iron Butt Rally rules might seem like a
fascist nightmare to the Peace Frogs. If some loophole is found that
destroys the very concept of competition --- exactly as has happened on the
two previous runnings of the event --- they'll take care of the problem
next year. The rally will survive; the frogs may not. First things first.
The contestants looked over the challenges, sorted by those states lying
roughly between Virginia and Missouri. Some bonuses, such as taking a
photo of a live frog at the city limits of any town with a population in
excess of 50,000, can be accomplished anywhere (but for a limited number of
times). Those who handle live frogs are cautioned that the animal had
better not be harmed or sent to heaven. There is a serious penalty for
that, and Crosby's troopers aren't kidding.
Iron Butt veterans wouldn't recognize these sorts of bonuses, or, if they
did, would rip Mike Kneebone's head off for using them. "Act goofy," it
says in the District of Columbia section, "at the National Gallery of
Caricature and Cartoon Art." Say what? Where the hell is it? I've lived
in D.C. for more than 40 years and I'd never heard of the place. But I
shoved the R80G/S back toward home behind Team Trafalmador and we
eventually managed to find the place by 2300 in the absolute heart of
downtown Washington. It's an office building. There was no chance it
would be open. It wasn't.
If you're an Iron Butt and you run into this kind of bad luck, you curse
grimly and get back on your bike. If you're a Trafalmadorian Peace Frog,
you get your partner to take a picture of you acting goofy in front of a
sign at the entrance to 1317 F Street, N.W. You haven't quite gotten to
the front door of the gallery, but you are at a front door of something
where the gallery presumably dwells, though it may be six floors above the
street. The challenge is worth 1,000 points. Three judges will rule by
majority vote on the Trafalmadorian claim in Branson. The team might get
nothing. They might get 1,000. They might get anything in between. It
isn't, as they say, a tight ship.
And that may be the very thing that makes it so intriguing. There's heavy
money waiting for the winner, but these teams don't seem all that
interested in it. My guess is that every one of them would be doing the
trip if there were ten hard-boiled eggs sitting in the victory circle.
I've never seen anything quite like it. I smiled a lot today.
By midnight the Trafalmadorian team had eaten a kosher sandwich and danced
a brief disco at The Jewish Mother Deli in Richmond, taken a photo at a
jazz bar near the White House, visited a Peace Frogs outlet in Georgetown,
paid respects to John Philip Sousa at the Congressional Cemetery, tried to
take a picture of Al Gore's front steps without getting arrested, and acted
goofy. When last seen, they were steaming west on I-66, searching for the
drug store in Winchester, Virginia where Patsy Cline used to hang out.
Tomorrow they'll be looking for a pet store. They need a live frog.
Now that they have escaped into The Void, I will know no more about them or
their escapades than you. But I shall be checking Greg McQueen's web site
(http://members.aol.com/gsmcqueen/gbook.htm) for periodic updates (and I
surely hope that whoever is running that site can soon figure out what
paragraph marks are supposed to do). There I shall find links to various
other froggish sites. Perhaps we can all piece together some semblance of
the truth from the rumors that are sure to follow. But then, if you're a
true Peace Frog, you know that it really doesn't matter. Things will work
out.
Peace. Frogs. Ribbit.
Bob Higdon
Washington, D.C.
