20,000 Miles South

by Helen Schreider

  It was, however, a hop, skip, and a jump—with Picasso doing all three with equal facility. Having a warped sense of humor, he looked back at me and leered, and then tried to rub me off on the flanks of Evan’s horse. And fences were his special delight—he loved to scratch his sides on them. Sensing my insecurity, Picasso maliciously took advantage of it, but I was not to be browbeaten. Gradually I gained confidence. I even managed to stay on at a canter. The only trouble was that I didn’t want to canter. That was Picasso’s idea.

  When we arrived at the shearing shed, the sheep had already been brought in from the corral, and the men were busy relieving them of their fleece. Entering at one end of the shed, each was bundled in his wool like a 1920 college student in a raccoon coat. At the other end he emerged pink, naked, and bewildered.

  Just before lunch we headed back for the staff house. Confidently I grasped the wisp of mane on Picasso’s neck and swung my leg over his broad back as I had seen Evan do. Picasso snickered. I didn’t know that the horses were accustomed to galloping back to the corral for their special treat of oats, and Picasso was a creature of habit. Moreover, he was like a Sunday driver who can’t bear to be passed. Off we went like a shot. Man o’ War would have hung his head in shame. The starters at Hollywood Park wouldn’t have believed it. Eddie Arcaro—look to your laurels. Picasso and I just couldn’t get together. He went up, I came down, and the meeting was painful. Evan said I spent all my time in the air, but I disputed that statement. I had proof that I had spent sufficient time in the saddle—two dollar-sized blisters on my stern.

  Three days later I was healed enough to think of going to the shearing shed again, this time to join the Gauchos for their morning asado. Arranged in a tepee around a fire that had already burned to glowing coals were ten iron stakes stuck in the ground. On each was skewered a whole side of mutton, roasted a golden brown, juices snapping into flame as they dripped. Wearing baggy bombachas, pants that looked like the opaque counterpart of a harem girl’s filmy costume, the egg-shaped cook was pouring a sauce of wine and garlic over the meat. The tangy aroma made me hungrier by the minute, and I wasn’t the only one. More men rode up and tied their horses to the nearby hitching post, and then sat on their haunches around the fire. Most of them wore accordion-pleated boots, bombachas, and berets, the only kind of hat that would stay on in the Patagonian wind. When the mutton was done, there were perhaps thirty men waiting. Out came long knives from the back of their wide sashes, and each man sliced off a chunk of meat. Placing a corner of it between his teeth, with vigorous strokes he sawed off a bite-sized piece perilously close to his nose. In a few minutes the skewers were bare, and after tasting it myself, I could see why the men averaged daily four pounds of meat apiece.

  Each day we looked for the parts to arrive; each day the bus passed without leaving a package for us. And then it was Christmas. Even in Patagonian summer there was a blanket of fresh snow on the foothills of the Andes west of Leleque. Christmas Eve, along with the staff, we tied white handkerchiefs around our necks and paraded to the kitchen, where, with apple champagne, we toasted to the cook before sitting down to the feast she had prepared. It was a gay evening with Argentine empanadas, English plum pudding, and two huge tender stuffed turkeys. But behind our gaiety was a little nostalgia as we thought of the previous Christmas around the fireplace in California.

  In the days that followed, Picasso and I came to an understanding, Dinah frolicked with a pair of pet lambs, and was bullied into relinquishing her bone by a tame ibis. Evenings in the cozy sitting room we thumbed through copies of Punch or Blackwood’s Magazine, or just sat quietly sipping mate. No one agreed as to whether mate was a sedative or a stimulant, but one thing was certain. It was a favorite way to pass the time, a companionable, meditative custom, almost like passing the peace pipe.

  New Year’s came, just one year to the day since we had left California. Still no parts, but there was another turkey, more apple champagne, and “Auld Lang Syne” in Spanish. Then, like a late Christmas package, the parts finally arrived. Made in Argentina, the replacements looked fine, but after checking the hardness with a file it was with misgivings that I reassembled La Tortuga. I had no choice, and I figured they would surely last the rest of the trip. After almost three weeks we said good-by to our friends of the poplar oasis in the Patagonian desert.

  The sea of land that was Patagonia stretched endlessly, undulating, the sparse shrubbery only a few inches high, shorn by the devastating shears of the wind. Occasionally there was a higher clump of bushes, as if nature, having repented her cruelty, had given a little shelter to the sheep that huddled in the lee. But that same shelter was a death trap to more than one animal ensnarled in the sharp branches. Whitened bones stood grimly upright like Halloween skeletons. On the few scattered lakes fire-winged flamingos colored the sky like a premature sunset, plovers and the rapier-beaked, orange-necked ibis flapped effortlessly in the wind. And La Tortuga purred her even song, shuddering once in a while when a sudden gust slowed her progress or the gravel from her wheels overtook us and rattled over the top. The passing of another car was as much of an occasion as the passing of a ship at sea, and even the lone Gaucho on the horizon was strangely out of place in this land that seemed made for no living thing.

  For four days we continued almost due south. The rain that had been intermittent for so many weeks became a steady unending thing and the dirt road ran with rivulets. Wild guanacos gazed curiously, but at any change in La Tortuga’s speed they bolted and ran leaping away like antelope. As we passed, drab brown ostriches made their ungainly way through the brush, breaking into a wabbling, wing-flapping gait in the open spaces.

  Toward the afternoon of the fourth day the road forked. Hugging the foothills of the Andes, the right branch was the most direct route to the Strait of Magellan—and the most deserted. Pointing to the left branch, the coastal route, a sign listed the more important cities in southern Patagonia, still hundreds of miles apart. For several minutes we sat there. The jeep was running fine. We had planned to take the shortest route, but without knowing why we turned into the left branch. Three days later, one week and eight hundred miles south of Leleque, the transfer case went out again on the outskirts of a one-street town.

  Piedrabuena was like the river that flowed beside it, silent yet moving. With the transfer case emitting a grating clunk we limped through the muddy streets to the Chevrolet garage. Sympathetically the owner-mechanic, Señor Cardenas, cleared a place for La Tortuga amid Model T’s and decrepit trucks and offered all of his facilities for her repair.

  Three blocks away, at the other end of town, we entered a single-story building that said “Hotel.” The lobby was a deserted saloon with a rococo mahogany bar and a big mirror that echoed the green pallor of the walls. Side-stepping the open cellar trap door, we followed the proprietor through a dimly lit hall.

  “You may have our best room,” he said.

  We watched the rain dripping from the ceiling onto the center of the bed. The damp room smelled musty and old, and the high narrow window made it only a little less dungeon-like. Making her customary inspection, Dinah promptly put her foot through the linoleum where it covered a hole in the floor.

  Just in time for dinner, we gnawed on tough mutton in the dining room that sloped like the dizzy room of a carnival. With a grandfather clock that didn’t tick and a caged canary that didn’t sing, we ate to the accompaniment of kitchen clatter and the discordant drip, drip, drip of water falling in buckets placed in strategic spots on the floor. In short, the hotel did nothing to alleviate our depression.

  Glad to get out of the gloom, we went back to the garage and began the dissection. With each bolt I removed, and each time a tool fell into the thick black grease of the bilge, I thought of the last time at Leleque and the time before that in Los Andes. I was in a bitter mood, but I had had enough practice so that the job progressed more rapidly. By evening the transfer case was out. It took only a few minutes to locate the trouble, b
ut more than an hour to clean out the pieces of what had once been two bearings, a shaft, and two thrust washers—exactly the same parts I had replaced at Leleque.

  I asked Señor Cardenas, the philosophical mechanic, where I might find parts.

  “Muy difícil.” He shrugged. “Possibly in Río Gallegos or, if not there, in Punta Arenas on the Chilean side.”

  The next morning I left Helen and Dinah molding in the kitchen, the only warm place in the hotel, while I stood outside waiting in the rain for the bus to Santa Cruz, where a plane would take me to Río Gallegos, two hundred miles to the south. Helen gave me a pathetic smile when I told her not to expect me for a week—what a miserable sentence, a week in Piedrabuena.

  The ancient International truck, with improvised body jammed with bucket seats, was already full, but I talked a mother into letting me hold her child on my lap for the two-hour ride through muddy ruts to Santa Cruz, twenty-five miles away on the coast. Santa Cruz boasted one new building, an impressive paneled wood and fieldstone post office built during the reign of Perón. Covering a whole city block, it would have served nicely for a city twenty times the size of diminutive Santa Cruz. The street that ran in front was a quagmire, as indeed were all the streets in town, and the drivers of the few cars and trucks had to know the way as well as a pilot knows a harbor to avoid sinking axle deep in the many mudholes.

  The airport was three miles from town. The car that the airline office provided had no windshield wiper on my side—for which I was grateful. Zipping up the winding road, skidding sideways harrowingly close to the bank, we arrived in much too short a time at the grassy plateau that served as a landing strip—only to wait two hours for the plane.

  Also waiting was a woolly sheep that passed the time by scratching her ears against a nearby post. Before anyone was aware of it she raised her head and stared northward at the distant speck in the sky. When the DC-3 landed the sheep was the first one there, climbing up the ladder before it was even in place, to receive her customary handout from the crew. After that the passengers could climb aboard.

  In less than an hour I was in Río Gallegos, with its clean paved streets and good hotels. But I felt guilty sleeping so comfortably when I thought of Helen back in Piedrabuena under soggy covers in her funereal hotel.

  As soon as the shops were open the next morning, I started making the rounds. I had learned long ago never to ask for parts for an amphibious jeep. This immediately invoked the answer “No hay.” Instead I solemnly placed the parts on the counter and asked if they had anything that looked remotely like them. The answer was still “No hay But at the second place a phenomenon occurred. They had the bearings! After trying every other place in town for the shaft and thrust washers with no success I was entering the airline office to book passage for Punta Arenas when a man came running after me. I couldn’t believe it. A shipment had arrived on the same plane with me. Although the parts weren’t exactly the same, I thought that with the help of Señor Cardenas, a genius by necessity at improvising, they could be made to work. And with still more luck I was able to catch the same plane back to Santa Cruz.

  It was still raining when the plane took off, and it seemed as if it were forever gaining altitude. As a matter of fact, it never did. All the way back we skimmed over the tops of waves close enough to see the foam on the whitecaps and over land so low that sheep scattered and giant hares scampered for their holes. With the plane shuddering and shaking in the gusts at least half the passengers made frequent use of the paper bags in front of them. Casually the co-pilot explained why we were flying so low. At that altitude the wind was blowing only seventy miles an hour. None too soon for me the Santa Cruz strip came in sight, and it was a perfect landing—until the brakes were applied. The plane did a complete turn, slid two hundred yards through a barbed-wire fence, and ground to a stop. The sheep was a bit confused, but recovered in time to still be the first to greet me as I stepped with relief from the plane clutching my little package of parts. Mission completed.

  The next day and the day after we spent honing, grinding, and cutting to make the odd pieces fit. With pieces of tin can we made the thrust washers thicker, and with emery powder and elbow grease made the shaft thinner. In a record week, thanks to Señor Cardenas and a lot of luck, we had La Tortuga ready for the last two laps: two hundred and fifty miles to the Strait, and then 335 miles to Ushuaia.

  With the green water lapping at La Tortuga’s wheels Helen and I stood on the shingle beach at the narrowest part of the Strait of Magellan. Staring across the three miles that separated us from Tierra del Fuego, we could dimly see the beach opposite, where an oil refinery road led south, and, above that, the glow of burning natural gas that made this truly a Land of Fire. Our phenomenal luck was still with us; for the first time since we reached Patagonia there was no wind, the sun was warm and bright, and the stormy Strait didn’t seem stormy at all.

  Yet we hesitated. Without warning the wind could return, changing the calm water to a maelstrom in minutes. And even though it was calm, a few hundred yards offshore we could see the warning eddies that marked the fast current in the central channel. According to the chart, it was as high as six knots, about the maximum we could hope to tack against—if the motor held out. But everything else in La Tortuga had already broken down, and if the motor did fail we would be carried downstream to where cliffs lined both sides.

  But those were chances we had been determined to take. There was another reason for our hesitation. In Río Gallegos we had been told that the 335 miles of completed road over Tierra del Fuego was just Perón propaganda, that twenty-five miles of it was nothing but a horse trail, that no car had ever crossed the tail end of the Andes to Ushuaia. If we couldn’t reach our goal anyway, should we risk crossing the Strait? Yes. We both agreed. We wouldn’t be satisfied until we had at least gone as far as we could.

  Pointing La Tortuga upstream, for several hundred yards we stayed in the slack water close to shore. Then, sighting on a point of land across the Strait four miles above our intended landfall, we headed at a 45-degree angle to the current. Our plan was to hold that course until mid-channel, where we would come about and use the current to aid us in making the beach.

  Pitching in the eddies, the jeep swung downstream, and I countered with left rudder as we entered the fast current. With the jeep tossing and swerving I jockeyed her back on course, keeping my eyes on the sight. A few minutes later a sharp jolt rocked the jeep. With a forty-fathom bottom we couldn’t have gone aground. A bombardment of jolts followed, and from under the jeep streaked a school of porpoises, arching in unison a few feet ahead of the bow. From the top Dinah’s head switched like a spectator’s at a tennis match as the eight-foot porpoises zigzagged and crisscrossed around the jeep, filling the air with their watery snorts. We were so intent on these black-and-white aquatic clowns that we were in mid-channel before we realized that we had pivoted downstream as if at the end of a string compass. We were still headed toward the point of land we had been sighting on, but we were head on to the current instead of at a 45-degree angle to it. Still worse, we were almost opposite the cliffs, far below the beach where we were to come ashore. I tried to conceal my alarm. The current must be more than six knots, I thought. All I could think of was to get to the other side as fast as possible, hoping there might be slack water near shore. Letting the bow swing around, I floored the throttle and headed directly across current.

  Slowly the cliffs of Tierra del Fuego loomed closer. I thought I could feel the force of the water lessen. About twenty feet from the brown furrowed walls I changed course to head upstream. Nothing happened. The jeep stood still in the current, and though I hated to push La Tortuga I floored the throttle again. Shuddering under full power, almost imperceptibly she began to creep back along the shore. I steered closer until the right wheels were almost touching the steep sloping face of the cliff. We could begin to measure our progress.

  Motor straining, La Tortuga crawled with agonizing slowness the
several miles to the end of the cliff. In the slower water near the gravel bank I could let up on the gas, but at each point that jutted from shore it took full throbbing power to get around it. While two wild guanacos peered from a rise and hordes of red-beaked shore birds squawked into flight, we chugged upstream to the beach three hours after leaving the other side.

  High and dry on the beach where we landed, left there by a thirty-foot tide, was a battered surplus LCT belonging to the oil company. Standing nearby were several men. One in particular seemed very perplexed.

  “What made you think you could cross the Strait in that thing? Don’t you know there’s a ten-knot current?”

  I swallowed hard. “Ten knots? I thought it was six.”

  “Six average, but where you crossed, the First Narrows, it runs ten. Where’re you going, anyway?”

  Still shaken, I almost stuttered, “Ushuaia,” and then explained where we had come from.

  His face softened. “You’re really determined, aren’t you? I’m sorry to tell you that the road is not finished. The road commission is still working on it. But when you’ve gone as far as you can go, come back here. We’ll take you back across the Strait in a barge.”

  Through the courtesy of the oil refinery we serviced the jeep in their maintenance shop and continued south over the same rolling barren plains as in Patagonia. Split down the middle by the Argentine-Chilean border, Tierra del Fuego was the home of some of the largest sheep farms in the Western Hemisphere. After the worst onslaught of rain in sixty years the fences were strung with the half-decayed carcasses of hundreds of sheep that had been caught and drowned in the flooded hollows.

  To reach the First Narrows on the continent we had first crossed into Chile, but once on the island, in order to continue south, we had to enter Argentina again. In accordance with tradition, the connection between the two countries was abominable. In this case we were not even sure it was a road. After we left the Chilean customs house, a muddy trail turned into a pair of grassy ruts, and then disappeared entirely in the middle of a mushy meadow. Turning around, we went back, positive we had followed the wrong cow. But, no, that was the international highway between Chile and Argentina in Tierra del Fuego. Just head off across the meadow, we were told. We did, and promptly bogged down. In just a few minutes a jeep threaded its way through with a practiced manner and towed us out. When we thanked the driver, he said it was his job. “Everyone gets stuck here. But it’s better ahead. Except for a bridge on the Argentine side, that is; it washed out in the last rain.”