Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  I don’t completely understand his Spanish but grasp enough of it—“fool,” “rudeness,” “this American crewman”—to guess that he feels offended and also perhaps embarrassed in front of the crewman.

  “I’m very sorry about the confusion. I’ve never visited here before, and I apologize that I don’t recognize you. Have we met before, somewhere else possibly?”

  “You are the writer Barry López?”

  “Yes, I am a writer. Soy un escritor, sí.”

  “Yes, you were a guest here at the university several years ago. The students read your novels. You came to my home for supper several times.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think you have me confused with someone. I’ve never written a novel.”

  “But I recognize you, your face, your hair. How could you not be who you are? Why are you doing this?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I’m trying to get to the bottom of this. I told you, I am in Punta Arenas for the first time. I arrived here three days ago, aboard this ship—”

  He waves me off. A liar, rude, a disappointment to him now. He turns abruptly and descends the aluminum gangway with long, loud strides. At the bottom he turns to regard me, glaring, the way you might glare at a willful child, and then he walks off.

  Standing there at the ship’s railing, I don’t know what to think. His ideas made no sense. Was he just a deluded person who had perhaps seen my face on a book jacket and was now operating here in a reality of his own? If I came back to Punta Arenas in a few years to write a novel in rented rooms in the Cabo de Hornos, as I intended to do, would we meet again? What would I say?

  Years later I mention this incident to a friend in Bogatá, a Cervantes scholar. “Once again,” he says, “the two Americas collide, North and South. The logos and the mythos.”

  * * *

  —

  IN MARCH 1584, the Spanish explorer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa founded a settlement on Chile’s Brunswick Peninsula, about halfway between Cape Froward and what would later become the town of Punta Arenas. He called it Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe. His purpose was to establish a military presence in the Strait of Magellan, to prevent the British from entering the Pacific, as Drake had in 1578, an ocean the Spanish regarded as their own.

  Gamboa landed about three hundred soldiers and settlers and departed as winter was coming on. The settlement faltered. When the English navigator Thomas Cavendish visited the site three years later, he found everyone had perished from starvation and exposure. He renamed the place Port Famine. Today local people call it Puerto del Hambre (Port Famine, Port of the Starving, Port Hunger).

  Early in the nineteenth century, Puerto del Hambre began to serve as a base for members of the Royal Navy surveying the coasts of Patagonia. In 1828, while the survey ship HMS Beagle was anchored there, its commanding officer, Pringle Stokes, killed himself. Command of the Beagle passed, after some delay, to a flag lieutenant, Robert FitzRoy. FitzRoy sailed for England in 1830 with an impressive collection of nautical charts and four Kaweskar people: Yokcushlu, Orundellico, and El’lelaru were the names FitzRoy wrote in his notes before rechristening them, respectively, Fuegia Basket, Jemmy Button, and York Minster. The fourth Kaweskar, a twenty-year-old man christened Boat Memory, died in England of smallpox. His body, pickled in a barrel, was presented to the Royal College of Surgeons in London.

  In 1831 FitzRoy was given command of the Beagle once more and ordered to continue the British survey of the coasts of South America. On December 27 he sailed from Plymouth with a young naturalist, Charles Darwin, aboard.

  After surveying the southeastern coastal waters of South America, the Beagle anchored again at Port Famine in midwinter, on June 1, 1834. Darwin wrote of the place that he “never saw a more cheerless prospect; the dusky woods, piebald with snow, could be only seen indistinctly, through a drizzling hazy atmosphere.” After a visit ashore, during which he attempted to force his way through dense thickets of heavy brush, he described the surrounding area as a “death-like scene of desolation exceed[ing] all description.”

  I’d always thought of Port Famine as a profoundly desolate place, a negative monument to human efforts to seize and possess on a monumental scale. The site of the old Spanish camp was only about forty miles down the coast from Punta Arenas. Darwin’s having been there was also something of a draw for me, a second prompt to see the place, as were some historical descriptions I’d come across. What had come to interest me most about the site, though, was a small chapel there, built, I believe, in the 1950s. Individuals disabled by despair regularly make pilgrimages to this chapel. Its walls, I’d heard, were thickly crowded with milagros, the corsage-like assemblages of fresh flowers, religious medals, holy cards, ribbons, and handwritten notes imploring the saints, especially the Blessed Mother, to intercede for them in heaven. (Milagro is the Spanish word for miracle.)

  Small folk chapels like this one, their walls and sometimes even their ceilings crowded with milagros, can be found all over South America, their interiors lit by hundreds of votive candles. For me these chapels transcend religion. They speak to a fundamental human need, the need to be reassured. Whatever we may say to each other about living well, about enjoying the fruits of our labors and the closeness of our families and friends, these chapels insist that the experience of human suffering known to us all, the universal suffering that takes more lives than anyone would have the stamina to hear about, not be ignored.

  The chapels are as eloquent about deep-seated human fears as they are about deep-seated faith.

  I find it impossible to visit such places and not feel compassion. To regard the milagros there as evidence of superstition, or to describe these out-of-the-way chapels as backward, seems to me to dismiss what it means to be human, which is to live in fear in a world in which one’s destiny is never entirely of one’s own choosing.

  Puerto del Hambre is now a part of a Chilean national monument. The setting is humble, just a few cleared acres, the chapel and several other buildings clustered together near a parking lot. A few sections of post-and-split-rail fencing keep drivers from wandering off into a field of unmarked graves. The dominant element in the clearing is a monument that iterates Chile’s claim to a pie-wedge-shaped slice of Antarctica. (Like Argentine, British, Australian, and three other national claims to Antarctic territory, the Chilean claims are not internationally recognized. The Antarctic Treaty placed all such national claims in abeyance in 1959.) Puerto del Hambre is about 2,450 miles south of Chile’s border with Peru and about the same distance north of the South Pole, the apex of Chile’s pie-wedge-shaped claim. The monument was erected here to mark, defiantly, the country’s geographic center.

  I rented a car in Punta Arenas one morning and found my way out of town on the coast road leading to Puerto del Hambre. The road is not paved, but it is good and has been routed high enough on a slope that rises up from the Magellanic shore to provide a traveler with a grand view of the strait and of the island of Tierra del Fuego to the southeast. Green hills stand on the mainland interior to the northwest, many of them cleared for pasture, the paddocks separated from one another by copses of beech trees. It was cloudy when I left the ship, but as I drove along the clouds began to clear, and I stopped several times to get out and look through my binoculars into the vastness of the strait. Directly across from me was Bahía Inútile (Useless Bay), an indentation in the northwest coast of Tierra del Fuego. To the south of there I could make out the tip of Isla Dawson.

  Beyond those far shores was the immensity of the southern horizon. The land of Tierra del Fuego and the waters beyond, where I could see them, folded over the edge of Earth here like a waterfall. What lay off still farther, on the other side of the last water, was a place I had visited three times before, but which, nevertheless, still remained just out of reach for me. The journey ahead, into the Weddell aboard the Palmer, promised further illumination, but, I thought, there c
ould be no end to the illumination of what existed out there beyond that line.

  I was eager to see it.

  * * *

  —

  THE RAYS OF THE SUN were intense now, coming over my left shoulder as I drove south toward Puerto del Hambre. Under the press of its light, the wind-buffed waters of the strait gleamed like a jostled tray of black ink. I was keeping track of the birds I saw, a few shearwaters and petrels mostly, and was thrilled to see a crested caracara at one point, sitting on a fence post ahead of me, a falcon with a streaked black-and-white chest and long legs. Despite its being technically a falcon, the caracara has the appearance of a long-legged hawk and is mostly a carrion feeder. It’s red-faced, with a black crest, and its dark wings are tipped with white. I saw a caracara once, many years before this, on Matagorda Island off the Gulf Coast of Texas. The bird is more common in South America, more apt to be seen. A thread might be said to connect the two places, however. I was pleased to find a caracara here on the Brunswick Peninsula, the southernmost extent of its range, the northernmost point of its range being on the Texas coast, 5,700 miles away. A gossamer thread, I thought, holding an abstract idea together.

  Sighting the caracara was really a kind of trivial thing. What made it more memorable that morning was that I had barely passed the caracara sitting on the fence post by the road when I saw a second caracara, sitting on another post in the same fence line, about a quarter mile ahead. And then, farther on, was a third. In all I slowly passed seven or eight of them at these regular intervals, all sitting on fence posts alongside the road. Each was facing in the same southerly direction the others were. I wondered why, of course, but most of the time you can’t figure such things out. Neither logic nor a grasp of falcon behavior and ecology far better than my own, I thought, could prise anything loose here. Perhaps the Kaweskar would know something.

  Brief rain showers passed through as I drove along, the heavy drops beading up on the dusty road. I hadn’t seen another car past the outskirts of Punta Arenas, nor any person walking in the pastures or standing in the yards of homesteads or at work within corrals visible from the road. The sky along the horizon above Tierra del Fuego bulged gray and black, with streaks of amethyst, henna, and puce, the colors of a black eye. Occasionally, as cumulus clouds unblocked the sun, the dirt road ahead would brighten up, the tan and umber shades there turning chalky as it did.

  And then I saw someone, a man walking toward me on the left side of the road. I was driving slowly and he was walking the same, so it took a while to reach him. There was no farmstead about, and then suddenly he was under a rainbow. The colors formed for just a few moments over the road, a short, low span of vapor. I was so amazed I took my foot off the accelerator.

  He came on steadily. His nondescript shoes were worn out. He wore black pants and a dark shirt and was hatless. Perhaps he was sixty or seventy—or, considering the place we were in, maybe younger. He came to a stop some feet in front of the car but paid me no attention. He was grimacing at the waters of the strait, as though the strait was animate, willful. Defying him. Or maybe it was the unsettled weather he was reacting to. He passed a few feet from the driver’s side window, which was rolled down—should I speak? offer him a ride?—but he never glanced over.

  I watched him grow smaller in the rearview mirror, a determined walker in a sunlit and otherwise deserted landscape. I wondered if he was someone who was mentally disturbed.

  * * *

  —

  WHENEVER I RECALL this man, I imagine him as a small figure under the Magellanic sky and picture him wearing a white shirt, though it is there in my notebook that it was a dark shirt. I see him in that plein air panorama with all its bold colors, the high sky of cumulonimbus and the distant darkscape of Tierra del Fuego, the crêpe de chine surface of the water. I see the shock of white hair and the improbable rainbow and know that, for me, this was a portal, one that I did not enter. For now, it remains an inscrutable memory. I hold it against the day when something will cause the scene to suddenly open.

  I think of him on the road to Puerto del Hambre, mad though he might have been, as no different from most of us, doing what we all do when the scaffolding of the certainties we carry with us, and by which we navigate, collapses, when indisputable truth suddenly reassembles itself in front of us, like the images in a kaleidoscope. We go on professing confidently what we know, armed with a secular faith in all that is reasonable, even though we sense that mystery is the real condition in which we live, not certainty. We forge ahead, stating what we know, watching for, hoping for, those who believe as we do, and trying to keep peace with those who see it differently. And even as the tension mounts, above all this the blue sky towers, masking, during our waking hours, the dark voids of space beyond, as we are accustomed to think of them. The sky, with its anomalous waist and that horizontal line, where what we take to be real—the ocean, the land, the ice—encounters what we regard as only speculation.

  Cook, at sea aboard HMS Endeavour, writing up his thoughts on the Maori; the mestizo traveler and historical footnote Ranald MacDonald, carefully pronouncing his English words in the court of the shogun; the young Darwin, picking his way through Cordia lutea thickets on Isla Isabela, searching for a finch. The pioneering of those few who have altered the way we see is known. The pioneering of others remains unknown to us, or barely noted. What we say we know for sure changes every day, but no one can miss now the alarm in the air. Our question is, What is it out there, just beyond the end of the road, out beyond language and fervent belief, beyond whatever gods we’ve chosen to give our allegiance to? Are we waiting for travelers to return, to tell us what they saw beyond that line? Or are we now to turn our heads, in order to hear better the call coming to us from that other country? It arrives as a cantus, tying the faraway place to the thing living deep inside us, a canticle that releases us from the painstaking assembly of our milagros, year after year, and from a faith only in miracles.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. If I’m certain about the identity of a particular plant or creature for which I offer a common name in the text, as here with “white oak,” I’ve listed its genus and species alongside its common name in the Appendices. When the term I’ve used in the text refers to one of several animals, all in the same genus, but where I’d be guessing about the species, I’ve used the scientific name for the genus followed by “spp.” In cases where I’ve used a common term, like sea lion, but can’t be certain of the genus—a “sea lion” might be either a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) or a Steller sea lion (Eumetopias jubatus), whose ranges overlap—I’ve not included a scientific binomial. An animal already identified in the text by a binomial is not listed again in the Appendix. For domestic or feral animals, I’ve not provided scientific binomials.

  2. A memoir describing a period of traumatic sexual abuse in my childhood, “Sliver of Sky,” appeared in the January 2013 issue of Harper’s.

  3. Though the state of Alaska could not be considered an international destination for an American writer, that vast landscape seemed a uniquely untrammeled part of the larger world when I first visited it, in March 1976. I think of having gone there then as a greater leave-taking of my country than earlier trips to Europe, in 1962 and 1966. Over the following seven years, I continued to travel widely in both Alaska and the Canadian High Arctic, working on a book and on magazine articles and essays. Outside those earlier trips to Europe, and boyhood jaunts to the California borderlands in Mexico, I didn’t feel I had any real international experience (not in the usual sense of that term) until I decided to travel to Japan, in 1984. That exposure to rural and urban Asian culture began a period of heavy international travel, a way of working that hardly slowed until 2016, when I had to adjust the way I travel for health reasons.

  When a marriage of twenty-nine years ended for me in 1996, I went on living in the house I had shared with my first wife si
nce 1970. It’s situated on a white-water river in temperate rain forest on the west side of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. My first wife and I didn’t have children; in the years following our divorce, I found myself away from home even more often than before—back in Alaska or Antarctica or traveling without a definite purpose through Indonesia, the Middle East, and Central Asia. During those years I developed a relationship with Debra Gwartney, a writer who would later become my second wife, a single mother with four young daughters.

  Because I had had no children during my first marriage, and because I had mostly set my own schedule for decades as a freelance writer, I was able to travel the world as few others my age ever could. When Debra and I became a couple, and I got to know my four stepdaughters as a stepfather, my sense of how most of the world actually lives—in families, with all their inherent complications and responsibilities, and with the joy and illuminations and expressions of love that family life brings—and my perspective on human life began to change. I took my youngest daughter to Cuba with me. I took my oldest to Antarctica, and the six of us traveled together to Belize. Traveling with my family gradually changed the way I understood the complexity of social forces at work in the modern world. Debra traveled with me to Greenland and to the Canadian High Arctic. The two of us traveled to Mexico, to South America, and to Europe together. With this experience I began to see even the remoter parts of the world through which I had traveled earlier (without them) through the eyes of these people I loved.

  Whatever it is in me that requires—demands, Debra might say—the kind of travel experience one can find only by traveling alone—journeying to physically demanding places, where following the story is everything, or choosing arduous situations, where the schedule for eating and sleeping is haphazard—I need to thank both my family and my first wife. I benefited enormously from their understanding and support.