The Cloud Forest

by Peter Matthiessen

  The original mission buildings at Ushuaia have been replaced by stores and houses—Ushuaia, like Punta Arenas, is a thriving free port—and by the edifices of government, including an Argentine naval air base; until recently it was also an important penal colony. It has the finest harbor on the main island, and the most beautiful, located as it is beneath the striking peaks called Mount Olivia and the Cinco Hermanos—five sharp spires on a single rise, east of the village. Across the channel looms Navarin Island and, to the west, the Andean snowfields of Hoste Island. But Ushuaia is best known for its location: if Punta Arenas is the southernmost city in the world, Ushuaia, more than one hundred miles nearer the Pole, is the most southerly settlement of decent size. (The Chilean settlement called Puerto Williams, across the channel on Navarin Island, may eventually appropriate this claim.) It lies just north of the fifty-fifth parallel, about fifty miles north of the outer Hermites and Cape Horn Island.

  The famous Cape is rarely “doubled” any more, and in fact is scarcely ever seen, except by whaling crews, the rare planes to Antarctica, and the few hunters who pursue the last sea otters in the channels of the outer islands. The winds and seas of what are called the “Roaring Forties”—from 40 to 60 degrees south latitude—remain as formidable as ever; conflicting with strong currents, they combine to make Horn Island one of the least hospitable spots on earth, “a taste of hell,” as an old seaman in Dana’s account refers to it. There are no boats available in Ushuaia, the sudden winds make a trip by small plane dangerous, and finally, the Cape lies in Chilean territory; continuing disputes about jurisdiction of the eastern islands make frontier crossings complicated. In short, I could find no one in Ushuaia who had the slightest interest in taking me to see it.

  In what may have been some subconscious attempt to get as far south as possible, I walked across a sort of causeway and down the rock beach of the outer harbor. Sea ducks, cormorants, and winter plovers came and went, and among the gulls was a species new to me: the small gray-headed gull, with crimson beak, much the prettiest gull I have ever seen. Floating in the harbor mouth and wheeling back and forth like clumsy albatrosses against the dark mountains which soared out of the sea was another species new to me, that huge soot-colored petrel, the giant fulmar; I shall not think of Ushuaia in the future without remembering the impression made by this great somber bird.

  The following day I started north again, this time with a couple named Menon met through the courtesy of the Governor, Captain Ernesto Campos (met in turn through the courtesy of Señor Menendez; one passes from hand to hand in Tierra del Fuego). The weather had changed for the better, and the trip north through the mountains was quite different from the night ride of two days before. The Campos children were also in the car, and we moved leisurely, pausing for lunch at the pass high above Hidden Lake and Lake Fagnano. Here Señor Menon and the Campos boy got out their .22s, but we confined ourselves, for want of anything more lively, to shooting cans. At one point we crossed the Río Hambre, and it occurred to me how many names in this part of the world convey the low opinion held of it by the first travelers. In addition to “Hungry River,” a few that come to mind are Port Famine, Mount Misery, Fury Island, Useless Bay, Last Hope Bay, Cape Deceit, and Desolation Island. On this bright, still day of summer, however, there is little to complain of: we stop here and there to drink the clear water of the lakes and streams, or pick wild mushrooms and calafate berries. Some of these damp, wood-fringed valleys look rather like the spruce muskegs of Alaska, and the open vegas are reminiscent of Montana. And yet these parts are all but uninhabited; it is incredible that a spectacular lake like Fagnano, surrounded by snow peaks and reputedly full of fish, should be deserted, without sign of life, on a fine midsummer day—but only until one stops to think about it.

  The wood road to Viamonte roughly parallels the trail north laid out originally by the Onas and by Lucas Bridges, who in 1899 became the first white man ever to travel overland from the south coast to Río Grande. Thomas Bridges’ life among the Yahgans was paralleled by his son’s dedication to the Onas. These nomad families were not, anthropologically, Fuegians, but were related to the “pampa” tribes, particularly the tall Tehuelches of mainland Patagonia. Unlike the stunted, near-naked Yahgans and Alacalufes, whom they terrified, the Onas were tall and well made, and wore moccasins, a guanaco robe, and a peaked cap made from the soft gray skin of a guanaco’s head. They were expert hunters and woodsmen, carrying large bows and fine arrows, and their fascinating customs had many traits of the Indian’s affecting nobility, but, like the Yahgans—and unlike most Indian tribes of the Americas—they possessed an incorrigible treachery which even Bridges’ indulgent accounts cannot quite put aside; throughout the early years, while the Onas still constituted a potential threat, he remained aware that even the closest of his Ona friends might murder him without a qualm if it seemed expedient to do so. As in many tribes of North America, they killed one another freely, expecting no better in return, and a lack of unity among the Ona groups—the northern or plains people, the mountain people, and the “Aush” of the southeast—prevented an effective resistance to the white man. Many were killed, and others were taken prisoner and removed by the hundreds to the Chilean Islands, where they died off, and still others died in the recurrent plagues. The last community was the one which attached itself to the new estancia at Viamonte.

  Viamonte looks very much the same today as it did when the main house was first built, in 1907, and Lucas Bridges’ younger sister, Bertha, now Mrs. Reynolds, still comes there to visit. The house is attractive, looking out across a field of planted cedar to the ocean, and I was happy to spend a few fine days there on the way back to Río Grande. Each morning I took a horse into the woods of scrub beech and out across the vegas. One vega contains a large, shallow lake, alive with caiquen, brown pintail duck, and white-rumped sandpipers. Small bands of feral horses sail, tails high, across the open ridges, and everywhere the silent, grim caranchos: “their vulture-like, necrophagous habits,” Darwin writes, “are very evident to any one who has fallen asleep on the desolate plains of Patagonia, for when he awakes, he will see, on each surrounding hillock, one of these birds patiently watching him with an evil eye; it is a feature of the landscape of these countries, which will be recognized by every one who has wandered over them.” Rabbits, let loose upon the land some years ago, are very common, and one afternoon I helped the Bridgeses with the sad job of releasing trapped rabbits inoculated with myxamatosis. We put these doomed creatures down likely burrows under the beech roots, to infect their hosts, while the watchful caranchos, as if anticipating death, prowled back and forth over our heads or flopped among the branches, long heads craning.

  One afternoon at Viamonte I walked out for nearly a mile on the remarkable shelf which the Atlantic lays bare here at low tide. The hard gray clay of the beach is littered with boulders, inexplicably sculpted; some are rounded, like stone wheels or pedestals, with rims on their upper edges, and others are oblong sections with strange channels, lying in lengths like fallen columns. There is the effect of broken statuary in a vast ruin once inhabited by giants. The sand supports a variety of algae, green and red and brown, including that great kelp Macrocystis pyrifera, prostrate in the shallows, held in place by taut holdfasts of intertwined “roots.” This is the world’s largest plant, attaining a length of more than two hundred yards; its lily-like fronds can rise to the surface from a depth of one hundred fathoms.

  To the surface of the smooth green algae clings a tiny clam, blood-red in color; there are also a white clam, a blue snail, and a small snail with peppermint stripes, two species of mussel, a striated shell of the murex family, and a smooth univalve which grows quite large and is eaten by the local people. No crabs of any kind were visible in the tide pools—one cannot stay out on the ledge too long, for fear of being trapped by the sudden rush of the incoming tide, and I could not look too carefully—though there were small rock fish or “blennies” of some kind. Sea anemones appare
ntly occur here, though I saw none. Cormorants and the antarctic duck swam in the leads, but the most striking bird, in appearance, voice, and numbers, was the oystercatcher common on these coasts. This species has a lovely, wistful call; I am trying to remember that call, and how it rose and fell against the distant thud of surf, but of course it is already gone.

  My host, like his uncle and father, was born in Tierra del Fuego, at Ushuaia—his kind wife, Betsy, is an American—and though the members of the family rarely winter here, but go to Buenos Aires, they all have a deep loyalty to the island and dispute its reputation. Oliver Bridges points out that the wind, though fairly constant, is broken by the beech woods and in any case is much less violent than in parts of mainland Patagonia; the rain, which is heavy in the mountains and especially in the southern islands, is very moderate at Viamonte and throughout the plains. The winters, though very cold, are windless, and the salt air diminishes the snow, so that altogether, in his opinion, Tierra del Fuego is a far more hospitable land than the old accounts would lead one to believe.

  Personally, I am partial to bleak places, and since the weather held fair throughout most of my stay here, and the wind was intermittent, his point of view seems very understandable. In its rigorous way, Tierra del Fuego is a varied and beautiful island, far more beautiful than those parts of Patagonia closer to the temperate zones. The Onas who once occupied this land, their primitive natures notwithstanding, gave many instances of their love for it, including the tendency, noted earlier, to die swiftly when taken away. Lucas Bridges describes a touching episode:

  Across leagues of wooded hills up the forty-mile length of Lake Kami, now Lake Fagnano, Talimeoat and I gazed long and silently towards a glorious sunset. I knew that he was searching the distance for any signs of smoke from the campfires of friends or foes. After a while his vigilance relaxed and, lying near me, he seemed to become oblivious of my presence. Feeling the chill of evening, I was on the point of suggesting a move, when he heaved a deep sigh and said to himself, as softly as an Ona could say anything:

  “Yak haruin.” (“My country.”)

  The plane going north from Río Grande skirts the coast: to the westward the land flattens in a broad treeless plain with large pale lakes. Due east, three hundred miles away, lie the Falkland Islands, known to the Argentines, who still claim them, as the Malvinas. We cross the great bay of San Sebastián and the long sandspit of its cape, passing northward to the Strait of Magellan.

  The Strait today is bright blue in the sun, like a broad avenue of color between the dry, barren, cloud-patched coasts of Patagonia. Below, Cape Virgenes, at the Atlantic entrance, and just inside it, inside a sort of hook, what must be the broadest beach in all the world.

  The coast here is bare and gravelly, without roads. From here to the Río Colorado the land is of round gravel, a porphyry shingle in some places fifty feet thick; at the Santa Cruz River this shingle is said to extend all the way westward to the cordillera. A few small streams, and along their banks a sparse growth of dark green; behind the beach, spotted here and there, are the dry beds of ponds, and a live pond, farther on, has the tracks of animals branching out of it like spider legs in all directions. The sheep—if that is what they are—are invisible, however, as are all signs of man. Now, below, the green windy waters of the Río Gallegos; on the far bank the cliffs climb into the badlands of northern Patagonia.

  These Patagonian deserts in the east have a burned, demonic aspect. The sulphurish ponds, margins white with encrusted salts, increase, if anything, the aspect of desolation. A windy day and a broken sky, and now and then, where the sun pierces, a pond glints evilly in an otherwise dark landscape. The clouds do not seem like clouds at all, but like the fumes of subterranean fires. Off to the east gleams the aquamarine of Bahía Grande; the sand and salt deserts contrast sharply. Behind the coast, just south of the junction of the Río Chico and the Río Santa Cruz, is a wasteland of twisted gullies and canyons and broken hills, but farther north the country levels out into the same cold upland desert plateau that one sees to the west, below the mountains. Cumulus clouds scud across the land, trailing black shadows. The isolated port of Saint Julian, tucked into the desert coast, flashes a moment on the sea horizon. The land grows higher, with a scattering of strange dry ponds, like stains of acid.

  Below lies the province of Comodoro Rivadavia, and then the plane drones out again across the open water—the Golfo San Jorge. The ocean is dark and choppy under a high haze of wind clouds. Some time later we moved inland once more, over hundreds and hundreds of miles of barren … the Chubut River and, east of it, the Golfo Nuevo. Again, the ocean and, in a distant haze, the cliffs of the far shore.

  Sliding in off the Gulf of San Matías, the plane casts a tiny shadow on a changing land. There is a scrubby vegetation along the coast, and on the north side of the Río Negro some evidence of man. The improvement is marked, but Darwin was able to write of this place: “The country near the mouth of the river is wretched in the extreme… . Water is extremely scarce, and, where found, is almost invariably brackish. The vegetation is scanty; and although there are bushes of many kinds, all are armed with formidable thorns, which seem to warn the stranger not to enter on these inhospitable regions.” Nevertheless, signs of cultivation increase steadily north to the Colorado, where a few trees occur along the bank and in isolated groves. This is the edge of la Pampa, the land of the horse Indians, including the Tehuelches of Patagonia and, later, the Araucanians. The latter were a sedentary tribe of Chile until the advent of the horse, when they became fierce hunters of the plains; roaming most of Patagonia and the pampas, they made life miserable for the colonists on both sides of the frontier. (The colonists, of course, responded appropriately. Darwin exclaims over the fact that all Indian women over twenty were killed on sight, to which his informant responds, “Why, what can be done? They breed so!”) The Tehuelches are now gone, but the Araucanians, like the Apaches in North America, were never effectively conquered, and still maintain certain rights and privileges in the Chilean lake districts.

  The plane descends slowly, coasting out across the clay islands, like delta islands, of upper Bahía Blanca. On all sides now, the pampa extends away—huge pastel plains, shimmering in the heat, with their solitary cisterns and windmill pumps, and remote houses in little groves of eucalyptus, like citadels, and fat, slow rivers. The pampa is scarcely colorful any more—the gauchos with their bolas and criollo dress are of the past, and the ostriches and other creatures are following them. It is a civilized land, stretching north from Bahía Blanca to the River Plate.

  Notes on the Cities

  This book concerns the hinterlands of South America, and the large cities, therefore, have scarcely been mentioned; despite the homage paid them by the travel companies, they are probably the least interesting aspect of this continent. Many of the smaller cities, frontier towns, and villages referred to in these accounts have a strong regional flavor, and a few—Cochabamba in Bolivia and Tingo María in Peru are two which come immediately to mind—are really very lovely. But of the capitals I traveled through, the only one which seemed to me worthy of a visit on its own merits—in the sense that Paris or Florence or Prague or San Francisco deserves a visit—is not the “Rio” or “B.A.” of the travel posters but the former capital of the Incas, the mountain city of Cuzco, in Peru.

  Lima was the first large city I came upon, and perhaps because I made good friends there who were generous with their time, I enjoyed it very much: it is an open, airy place, with several interesting churches and museums (especially the private Larco Hoyle Museum of Inca and pre-Inca artifacts, including a room of marvelously graphic and often very comic pornographic ceramics), and at the edge of the city one can climb desert mountains or go swimming in the sea.

  Santiago is urbane and pleasant, with its lovely wooded hills rising suddenly in the center of the city like giant rock gardens; Chileans strike one as more friendly and open than most Spanish Americans, and the girls of Sant
iago may be the prettiest in South America. (There are a great many very pretty girls in South America, most of them, unfortunately, afflicted with a traditional ignorance and a passivity of demeanor which, in combination with the whole continent’s alarming ingestion of food, makes their beauty static and short-lived. A partial exception might be made of Brazilian women, but then Brazilians are lively and erratic and, with their generous admixture of many bloods, less inhibited than Spanish Americans, who tend to cling to the old ways as proof of Iberian heritage.)

  La Paz, too, is a sunny, pleasant town; like Lima and Santiago, it benefits from its small size, natural setting, and the open nature of its city planning, rather than from its architecture, which is unexceptional. But its Church of San Francisco seemed to me the most rewarding of all I saw in South America, and its National Museum is most interesting, with extensive Inca, pre-Inca, Indian, and natural-history exhibits, and a clutch of pre-Inca mummies, laughing and howling silently in the cellar.

  South American architecture, in the main, has a quasi-modern, monolithic deadness which submerges the few historic remnants. The heavy hand of dictators—one thinks of the monuments to Mussolini which disfigure Rome—must be bad for creativity, if the heaped-up pretension of Buenos Aires is any criterion; Buenos Aires at its best resembles Paris at its worst, reminding one—despite the noisy Latin jangle of its sidewalks—of the lugubrious bourgeois citadels in the neighborhood of the Parc Monceau. But then, I was stranded for two long weeks in Buenos Aires, and I may very well be prejudiced. To anyone who should find himself in that position I can recommend a first-rate zoo and botanical garden and the famous Natural History Museum in nearby La Plata.