by Brian Keenan
‘So, Fred, where precisely are you going on that amazing machine?’ I ask.
‘I want to get right down to Tierra del Fuego,’ he says, his voice bubbling with high-pitched excitement, ‘then back across Patagonia and north on the new road, the Carretera Austral, to Puerto Montt.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘Well! Boy! I’ll have to do it in two months – that’s all the vacation I have!’
‘You know, Fred,’ says Bri, ‘according to our books, the wild winds of Patagonia often reach speeds of a hundred miles an hour. Will you not spend most of your time flat on your back – or flying?’
We talk more about our various plans but have to conclude that, though Fred is a lovely fellow, he is clearly barking mad.
My abiding memory of Puerto Montt was the sight as we left: mountainous heaps of wood chips piled up in the harbour. They were so massive that huge trucks drove to the top of them and unloaded. Having driven through the spectacular natural forest of central Chile, this sight was deeply depressing. Twenty-four hours a day every day these trucks arrived to deposit acre upon acre of wood chips en route to the processing plants of Japan. I thought of Neruda’s love of wood and his constant reference to it in his poetry. He writes of ‘the smell of wood with me always now’. I thought he might feel that all the poetry in the world was not worth these mountains of destruction and the memory of that wonderful cathedral in Chiloé made this hideous waste seem all the more blasphemous.
The next morning I stood on the prow of our boat as it moved placidly through the calm waters of Chile’s archipelago. There is something almost hypnotic about travelling through strange waters. Like a dream that possesses you, everything seems to move in slow motion. The cry of a solitary bird cuts through the silence like a scalpel. Your sensory perception becomes finely tuned and only part of you feels human. Other parts seem to be melting and merging with the elemental landscape.
For more than an hour the landscape repeated itself like the wheel of an old projector that has jammed and keeps flicking up the same slide. Mountains evaporated into the mist, the implacable swell of the cold sea and the dark forest echoing endlessly at you.
In such places the monotony can repel you. The eye is forever scanning to find something recognizable, a feature or a landmark that might somehow reveal the place to you. Impatient for stimulus, you want to turn away. But that is the wrong way to ‘see’ things. Such landscape as we were moving through reveals itself at a different, more emotional level. Neruda had isolated the feeling for me in his poem ‘The First Sea’:
I, in the prow, small,
hardly human,
lost,
still without mind or voice,
or any joy,
transfixed by the movement of the water
flowing between the receding mountains –
mine alone were those solitary places,
mine alone that elemental pathway,
mine alone the universe.
I understood this. As I surrendered myself to the world, I seemed to be moving at dream speed. It was an echo of what I had sought in the desert and couldn’t find. Perhaps the passion of the poet’s words here was less urgent and hysterical than his desert adoration. The movement and imagery of ‘The First Sea’ were in perfect tempo with what I was seeing and feeling. It was only when you surrendered and allowed a place to receive you that you began to ‘feel’ it. Perhaps that was the answer which Pablo, like myself, had had to wait to discover.
We awake to a beautiful sunny day and wolf down breakfast from the now operational galley. There is no explanation as to why there was no food last night. We are at the southern edge of Chiloé and, as we look westwards through the channel towards the Pacific, a slight swell reminds us of the mighty ocean out there. Now we are on the water, thoughts of the rollers coming into the beach at Cucao are not so reassuring. Fortunately there are not too many people on board so we presume there would be plenty of room in the life-rafts, if it comes to that.
We explore the ship. At the rear is the car deck, above which a gangway stretches around the ship. There is a sheer drop to the sea some forty feet below and the narrow passage is completely fenced in. We carry on towards the bows, going up and down various companionways until we reach the bridge, where we exchange salutes with the captain and his officers who are snug inside, radar screens and banks of other navigational equipment flickering on consoles around them. Looking aft, we see the heads of other passengers high above us. After a few blind alleys we discover an internal companionway that takes us onto the uppermost deck through a heavy steel storm-door that swings alarmingly, threatening to crush one instantly. There is a large flat area on the port side and we stop to take in the views of mountains and islands, then move around the large funnel to look at the rocky outcrops between us and the ocean. We forget them when we encounter a completely unexpected sight. There is a giant chessboard marked out on the deck. The squares are painted green and white with pieces, two feet tall, to match. It is like something out of Lewis Carroll. It seems quite mad but maybe here, going to a place where physical nature can show great beauty as well as awful strength, human beings need to show off one of their great intellectual achievements. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in Wind, Sand and Stars of coming to wild Patagonia, ‘the most southerly habitation of the world . . . born of the chance presence of a little mud between the timeless lava and the austral ice. So near the black scoria, how thrilling it is to feel the miraculous nature of man!’
The ferry ploughs on, the mountains to the east rising timber-clad and magnificent, and to the west the great Pacific Ocean. What must it have been like for those sixteenth-century crews on their tiny square-rigged ships, after months at sea, facing land like this and having no idea what the interior might contain? A land shrouded in cloud and mystery.
What sort of people would you find here and what sort of people would come? I look at our shipmates and wonder. We have met a couple of young fellows from London, and two Scottish women on their university vacation, but most seem to be travelling alone. Are these seeking escape, recuperation from some other loss, in this wilderness, or are they misanthropes, or outcasts?
During the second day, the captain delivered a lecture on safety and progress so far. Apparently we had been sailing in exceptionally fine weather and making good time. He informed us that all reports suggested that the weather would hold until we entered the open sea of Golfo de Penas, the Gulf of Pain. The midnight navigation back into the shelter of the archipelago promised to be more challenging and we were advised to take whatever seasickness pills we had.
The diminutive officer did not inspire confidence, particularly when one of our travelling companions pointed to one of the narrow channels on the wall chart and asked him where it was in relation to our present position. He answered that he didn’t know and bent down to study the map. I decided to take comfort from the fact that throughout our voyage the land had never been too distant.
It was raining heavily now, and between the squalls a cold wind blew. There wasn’t a lot of sense in going on deck; the landscape was repetitively brutal. I guessed why the sailor had not known where the particular channel was: there was no reason to, for no-one lived there. All the names along the archipelago were only survey points, not the names of real places. Their existence was ephemeral.
I sat back in the lounge and began catching up on a book I had borrowed from John, The Happy Captive, written in 1629. Unpublished until 1863, it was the true story of a young Spanish soldier and his experience as a hostage with the Chilean Indians. Among his tribulations as a captive he describes a journey through the landscape which I could now look out on. He told of savage rain and hailstorms and how he was made to swim across turbulent, rain-gorged rivers; in all this he confirms ‘that the natives are born to water. In its wildest and most dangerous state they have no fear of it.’ I hoped things had not changed since 1629 and that our little officer and his crew had inherited
the qualities of their ancestors. However calm the weather might be now, we knew it could change in a moment, and these waters were a notorious ships’ cemetery.
I soon finished The Happy Captive. It was a slim volume and I noticed that the author’s name was longer than the book was thick. Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan.
To pass the time I looked in the small glass case that served as a library and games store. There were a few boxes of chess and ludo and a couple of sets of Dama, a game which John and I had learned to play while we ourselves were captives. I was tempted for a moment to take it out but the notion passed.
Among the books I found several in German, two in Japanese and five in Russian. Among the English were titles like I Met a Gypsy, The Holyman and the Psychiatrist, The Small Gardener and an esoteric work on Eastern religion. I wondered about them and the kind of travellers who had left them behind. To occupy myself I tried to match the books with those who were sailing with us.
Intrepid travellers make poor conversationalists, I thought. The two dozen or so who were on board seemed a dull lot generally. But as I looked over the faces around me I thought that there were two specific problems that beset us as a group and made for such poor communication. The first was a thoroughly boring and opinionated Englishman who most people avoided like the plague having indulged him once. Anyone he struck up a conversation with soon made an excuse and left. The second problem was obvious: a noticeable lack of alcohol on sale – but then again, as our Englishman considered himself an authority on Chilean wine, no-one wanted to be seen drinking any in case he joined them.
The sun sets behind the archipelago shielding us from the Pacific. Overhead there is blue sky and a full moon shining in the east. The islands are dark above the ominous black of the sea. It is more comforting to look eastwards where the green, timber-covered islets flicker brightly in the late afternoon sun and, on the mainland, the hills rise green to the snow-covered mountain peaks. I experience a feeling of loneliness walking on deck in the cold breeze. But I am also invigorated – excited by the unreadability of the climate.
A sea voyage had never figured in our dreams about the end of the world, yet somehow it seems right that after horses, planes, buses, cars and trains we should be making this leg of the expedition by ship. It has been a very long journey to get to Patagonia, from the captive fantasy through the readjustments of freedom: we have crossed many more horizons than we had ever thought or imagined.
We turn in around midnight as we approach the ocean. A little more swell now but with virtually no cloud and a full moon the sky is magnificent – the islands snug and low. The weather is almost too good to be true. This leg of the journey into the ocean will take some twelve hours and, aware that this area is well known for its foulness, every lurch has me worrying in my bunk that a storm is about to attack. The ship dips and rolls unpredictably and doors in the unoccupied cabins crash back and forth. For someone who wants to be a lone yachtsman as I do, this should be less disconcerting, but perhaps because of some experience of boats I know how quickly things might change. I am aware also that I should be calmer, knowing how lucky we are. To confront the demon that denies me sleep, I go up on deck.
Up high on a foredeck I encounter a young man I have not seen before. He stands, feet splayed and body swaying with the motion, his long dark hair blowing in the breeze as he looks forward.
‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ I say.
He starts a little and turns to me, taking in the newcomer for a moment. He does not smile but says, ‘Yes, is magnificent!’ and turns back to gaze.
I move to lean on the ship’s rail and look down at the white water bubbling back from the bow far below. I turn my body to make a windbreak and light a cigarette. When I straighten, the young man has gone.
The sky has clouded over but enough light remains for me to see the swell and feel the rhythm of the ship’s passage, which is reassuring. Suddenly off to starboard, a wide circle of silver appears on the water: a cloud break letting the moonlight through, like a natural searchlight.
The next morning, the air is fresh and the sky is clouded over as we start across the Golfo de Penas.
The ship’s company is coming to terms with the inevitable bore. An Englishman in late middle age, retired, travelling alone, he descends on the solitary or unwary with unwanted observations or ‘facts’.
At lunch he spots Bri and me drinking some red wine. We have already noticed that he has been carefully managing his own bottle of white. These wines are not expensive and naturally we have shared ours with Fred and another traveller who is sitting at our table. Bob the Bore has conspicuously not done this. Fair enough, like many he may be on a long trip and a tight budget, yet he has made much of sipping and sighing as if he is enjoying some rare vintage.
‘Ah! I see you have the red variety,’ he says loudly to us.
‘Yes.’
‘I am intrigued to discover how the quality varies between the red and the white.’
‘Oh.’
He stands there expectantly, grey hair, grey beard, grey shirt and those trousers that unzip just above the knee to convert into shorts which even I, with my passion for travelling gear, had dismissed as being a crime against fashion.
Brian has a gesture to express pounding rage. He holds his hands as fists close in to his neck. He tilts his head back and flexes the fingers open and closed, describing a goitre of pulsing fury. An effective image, which in years past sometimes made me anxious of an imminent explosion of feeling that might lead him to take on the guards. I can still anticipate the volcanic moves of his emotion and know now that he is tightly coiled. He stares at Bob then suddenly stands up, pours wine into my glass, his own, Fred’s and our neighbour’s. The bottle has a little left and he holds it looking at Bob’s bland face. He moves towards him but continues on round to the next table and graciously offers it to an older man who nods and smiles as his glass is filled. Bri returns and sits beside me. He plonks the bottle down and stares at Bob once more. Bob’s face flickers with something, though he seems unable to realize the slight. He opens his mouth to speak, stops and wanders off.
‘Cheers, Bri!’
‘Arseholes!’
We plod on through the grey day back into the channels between the islands, but there is little to see through the steady drizzle. Boredom sets in as wildness loses its romantic appeal. I turn to a guidebook and find some big facts. This trip from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales, which will be the start of Patagonia for us, is 1,460 kilometres – more than 900 miles. It is the distance between London and Algiers. The lands south of Puerto Montt, the. regions of Aisén and Magallanes, represent a third of all Chile, but only 3 per cent of the population live here. So far this is not surprising. Though it can be beautiful, it is so remote that life must be very basic.
My geographical musings are interrupted by an announcement over the tannoy. People start drifting out of the saloon onto the deck. I catch up with Brian and Fred.
‘What’s going on?’
‘The captain has just alerted us to a ship nearby – a Panamanian vessel, the MV Captain Leonidas or something,’ Fred explains.
Sure enough, when we join other passengers at the rail there is a small ship off to starboard. People are taking pictures and chattering animatedly.
‘What’s the big deal, Fred?’
‘The ship’s aground! It’s been there for thirty years. It looks fine from here, doesn’t it?’
It certainly does. Looking again, I see there is no bow wave but the ship appears complete. I am amazed that it has not broken up in the storms it must have experienced. It gives us all pause for thought – these are treacherous waters. I find Brian watching some crewmen greasing the winches on a lifeboat.
He says, ‘That’ll be my boat! It might be OK for Francisco Nunez de Pineda to explain how Indians were born to water but I’m no Indian.’
We soon lose sight of the stranded vessel and return to the dry saloon. The steward puts on a vid
eo for us: Silence of the Lambs. Just what you need as you go beyond the pale.
Within an hour or so we were anchored off the tiny village of Puerto Eden. This was the first habitation we had seen in days. A line of multicoloured shacks was strung out along the water’s edge. They were barely visible in the mist. Soon a small flotilla of about five yellow rowing boats pulled through the mist and rain towards us. The whole scene could have been a set for Riders to the Sea or a location for one of D. W. Griffith’s bleak films of island life in the 1900s. The harsh monotony of the place was unbearable to imagine. As the rowing boats approached, a massive bull seal rolled through the water between them. I could not imagine living here, and it took too great a mental leap to understand why anyone had called this place Eden!
While we waited, the small boats unloaded half a dozen new passengers and took on supplies.
After dinner everyone seemed to liven up. The new passengers asked us to join them in a game of bingo. At around 10.30, the three feeble disco lamps lit up and Spanish rock-and-roll pumped out at us. The weather had closed in and I feared we would be rocking and rolling all night, one way or another.
I woke at about 7 a.m. and looked out of the porthole. I was exhausted after spending the night clinging to the side of my top bunk. All I could see through my sleep-hazed eyes was a grey sea merging into a grey sky. The emptiness outside and the droning hum of the relentless engines confirmed we were moving towards the end of the habitable world. I lay back to try and find some sleep. I thought of the ancient mariners’ belief in a world’s end, and ships and crews toppling into oblivion.
We are all pleased to arrive in Puerto Natales, our first sight of Patagonia proper, a little town spreading out from the anchorage. There are some large, new, drab buildings but the majority are small and brightly coloured. After days of mountains rearing high from the water, the flatness of the landscape here is shocking, as if it is the unfinished end of a canvas where the artist has painted in the sky and water, the whites and lighter blues but has only just started on the heavier tones of the foreground before filling in the hills.