Now the odyssey we human beings in the “developed world” have embarked upon is almost too darkly insane to contemplate. The scandal of “improvement” has meant that we've reduced the parallel worlds of spirit, imagination, and daily life to a single secularized lump. The process of empire building is a kind of denigration. Nothing that's not nuts and bolts and money-making is allowed in.
My toes curl over the edge of the continent dipping into almost freezing water. The westerlies howl. The sea is all slivers and splints, straits and rocky knobs, shinbones and arm bones, hermit islands jutting into desolation bays, as if the history of this place, with its hundreds of shipwrecks and decimated native cultures, were imitating landscape. Or is it the other way around?
“Kik, kik, kik, kik,” the terns cry. They will feed and rest here for two months before flying north again. Down here, Argentina and Chile are pinched so tightly together there is almost no land, just peaks, sky strips, and rough water. Evening comes late (it's summer, after all), but a storm-made twilight lasts all day.
Looking out over the famous channel, I think of the tectonic convulsions and hard draughts of heat and ice that have shaped this place and the cold-adapted people who lived here; how beauty in both landscape and culture came from those difficulties. I'm wandering around, trying to connect that which is at the end of the world with the way seasons, ice ages, warm spells, birds, and human thought travel in circles.
Darwin saw Yamana canoes crisscrossing the channel and moving though the labyrinth of inlets and islands. The canoes were built to withstand heavy seas. High-sided, they were made of bark cut from the coihue tree using the long leg bone of the guanaco for a saw, and sewn together with whale sinew strung on whalebone needles.
A canoe lasted for a year. The men were stationed in the bow with harpoons and spears to hunt seals, while the women navigated and paddled. Because it was always cold, the children were placed midboat to tend small fires made from dried grass plants, roots up, stuck into a pile of sand. Smoke was seen coming from every canoe in the channel as well as on every strip of sand.
Rain, wind, or snow was constant, but the Yamana went naked, smearing their bodies with seal and whale grease. They said it was too wet to wear clothes. Their ceremonial dances had the sea in them: the shaman wore a headdress of white bird down meant to look like the foam on a cresting wave. When the people danced, they held sticks horizontally and moved them back and forth, up and down, to represent the movement of the sea.
In the mountains behind Ushuaia, the floor of the valley is bog and peat. Yamana canoe portages were made of felled trees. The logs were laid side by side, sometimes for one thousand feet—a shortcut over soupy ground on which they could carry their canoes or simply walk to distant bays.
Back in the mountains the terrain gets rough and the bogs get deeper. Lakes lie between timbered slopes. The Selk'nam and Haush Indians who lived here hunted their way from one coast to the other. Each time they stopped and built a hut to perform their annual rite, the kina ceremony, they said the surface of the ground actually changed: from steep slopes and deep bogs into sunny meadows. It wasn't the spirit doing this, they said, but the ceremony itself that made the earth change.
The Selk'nam had four skies. Each was thought to be invisible and infinite, constituting a whole cordillera. Where they lived was a place of mountains, and they conceived of sky, ocean, and weather as being mountains as well.
The north sky was black, associated with rain, the sea, and the whale. The west was red, made of wind and sun. The east was only a boiling sea, and the south was pure white because that's where the snow came from, and the moon and the owl. These most southerly cultures in the world had winter weather threaded all through them. When asked about who her parents were, one Selk'nam woman said: “I am snow, my mother was wind, my father, rain.”
The life of rocks, ice, mountains, snow, oceans, islands, albatross, sooty gulls, whales, seals, crabs, limpets, and guanaco once flowed up into the bodies of these people, and out came whale prayers, condor chants, crab feasts, and guanaco songs. Life went where there was food. Villages were portable. Food occurred in places of great beauty, and the feedback from living directly fueled their movements, dances, thoughts, and lives.
Everything spoke: birds, ghosts, animals, oceans, bogs, rocks, humans, trees, and rivers; everything made a sound, and when they passed one another, a third sound occurred. That's why weather, glaciers, and each passing season were so noisy. Song and dance, sex and gratitude were the season-sensitive ceremonies that linked the human psyche to the larger, wild, weather-ridden world.
When did we begin thinking that weather was something to be rescued from? Why did we trade in our ceremonial lives for the workplace? Is this a natural progression, or a hiccup in human civilization that we'll soon renounce? The chiexaus initiation ceremony of the Yamana might last two or three months, and the hain initiation ceremony of the Selk'nam sometimes lasted a year, depending on their food supply. In their reckoning, one whale equaled one year.
By the early 1890s vast tracts of Selk'nam and Haush land had been given as land grants by the Argentine government to missionaries as well as land-hungry farmers from the United Kingdom and Europe, who systematically killed, kidnapped, and incarcerated Selk'nam people. One Ona shaman, named Hektliohlh, was detained for years at the Silesean Mission on Dawson Island. When he looked toward his mountain home he said: “Shouwe t-maten ya,” the longing is killing me. Then he died. No pure-blood Ona, Yamana, or Haush are left today.
TORRES DEL PAINE, CHILE
Wild daisies and lenga trees and the winding, milk-green rivers emanating from glaciers. I've been joined by Gary, a friend from Montana, and we are walking. Glaciers have shaped roughly a third of the land area of the planet. How could they not shape the way we move and think, honed as we are, on sharp arêtes, domed cliffs, and the U-shaped valleys between, the floury rivers and string lakes held tight in steep canyons? The southern Andes carry more glacier ice than any other area in the world outside the North and South Poles.
That's why Gary and I are backpacking a seventy-mile circular route in Chile's Torres del Paine National Park. Here the granite batholiths—huge towers—are rock teeth belonging to a wrathful deity from whom perpetual storms spray.
Our backpacks are heavy—mine is fifty-five pounds, and Gary's weighs in at eighty-five. The wind is against us as we head up a steep rise. In my Spanish dictionary the word senda means not only “a path,” but also “a ways and means,” while the masculine, sendero, is only “a footpath”—nothing more. Yet the verb, senderear, means “to conduct along a path,” and also “to attain by tortuous means.” Perfect. We follow the Paine circuit counterclockwise, and as the days go on, I refer to it both as a path that passes with no end in itself and as a circuit of pain. Not just my bodily pain, which at times is considerable, but also the one implied by any circular route consciously taken. Perhaps circle is the wrong word. A wheel with broken spokes might be better, or a body following its feet around.
We walk from Hosteria Las Torres, along Río Paine. The sun slides up vertical sweeps and down into U-shaped valleys, giving itself to unraveling storms. The river goes dark, then brightens to a dull celadon. Storm shadows tint tree shadows. Rain shatters and stutters; guanacos graze. Patchworks of ice—the remains of hanging glaciers—rot away before our eyes. Snow squalls fall flat like bedsheets. As we walk through them, they erase both the sendero and the senda—the path as well as the ways and means. Later, as we go over a pass, an eighty-mile-per-hour wind tips us over. Laughing, we get to our feet and look up: a pair of Andean condors—whose wings, stretched out, are as long as two of me—jump off the cliff above us, a jutting arête, and float effortlessly.
At the end of the first day, before reaching Campamento Serón, we climb onto a flat bench of land, a mesita with foot-wide streams and stacked mogotes—plants that look like huge pincushions made of yellow flowers growing on hills. A herd of thirty loose horses clatters b
y on the trail below, pushed by four pantalooned gauchos wearing neck scarves, dark glasses, and berets. The faster the horses go, the more the men laugh. They don't see us; we climb higher. Finally I lay my pack down, get on my knees, and come face-to-face with a rare Magellan orchid, its slightly curled petals cream, yellow, and veined green.
Gary takes off trotting. Lithe and youthful, he jumps straight-legged from one precipice to another. We met by chance in the mountains of Wyoming and talked for fifteen minutes, then didn't see each other again. I dreamt about him. Same dream each time: he was in a cabin; I walked by outside; he looked at me with his green eyes. Three months later he asked a mutual friend for my phone number and called. Another five months went by and many conversations before he showed up at my door.
My eyes open; Gary is gone, but one, then two, then four condors lift off and soar across the river valley. Their bald heads and white ermine collars move, but not their wings. Instead, they let themselves be moved, using their wings, oh so gently, only to change altitude. To move without effort, that's what I need to learn. I look up and see a scratched mountain memory: a glacier's claw mark across a face of rock.
Gary comes back with a condor feather: a gift for me. It is long and black, its rachis thick and sturdy. Rain comes and continues all night; I dip the quill into it and write.
The gauchos return for more horses, their laughter rising and fading as they disappear. We ponder the word Paine—for the circuit we're walking—is it a Telemache word meaning “blue,” or the name of a Welsh climber who scaled a nearby peak? I know few names here. So many birds, grasses, flowers, mountains, and trees …
Sleep comes easily. I'm still tired from traveling and a recent bout of the flu. In the morning I roll the feather in my sleeping pad, hoist my backpack, and reluctantly hit the trail. Oh, for feathers and wings! Effortless is not how I'd describe my movements in the days that follow. Gary and I walk at such different speeds that I see little of him, and for the first time the age difference between us seems appalling. I trudge and saunter, wipe sweat from my face, and laugh at the poorly working parts of my body, while he's all grace and exuberance. Usually an hour ahead, he comes back and carries my pack the last half mile because he's a fair-minded man and is always looking for ways to make our differences equal. At the end of each day we pitch camp, eat soup, drink tea, share chocolate, and happily compare notes: who saw what flower, grass, waterfall, bee, or bird, and how speed or slowness brought these gifts to our eyes.
UNMARKED
Every day is a circle walked within the big one of the Paine circuit, its outline as unsteady and meandering as our gait. But not as big as the ones the arctic terns, long-tailed skuas, and Baird's sandpipers make. How odd that the northernmost breeding populations of birds are the ones who migrate farthest south.
Once a Chinese Ch'an master asked his head monk where he was going. Fa-yen answered, “I'm rambling aimlessly around.” The teacher asked why, and Fa-yen said, “I don't know.” The teacher smiled. “That's good.”
Farther into the mountains, the river winds in and out and the valleys are white with romero chilco de magellanes— wild daisies. As we tramp up a low pass the wind has its way with us and the slopes of stacked-up mogotes seem to slide. Below, a river valley of Alaskan proportions opens up: braided oxbows glint and spread wide. To the left of the trail, a waterfall's white crest is hidden, its water seeming to pour directly from clouds. At the center of the circuit the cerros are towers of granite whose red shoulders spin like fresh-minted, interior suns pulsing squalls of rain and wind and lobbing heavy-bodied clouds like torpedoes. Here, weather is landscape, and landscape is memory.
We meet four British men on the trail. One of them, Nick Cowles, is a ship's broker who has lived all over the world. He's reeling from the shock of becoming a beast of burden and sleeping on hard ground. Paunchy and gregarious, he's out of shape at only forty-two, but his humor is invincible. He's a novice camper who complains of not sleeping well: “I had to practice lying in a sleeping bag before coming here.”
Nick and I ponder the innocence of Darwin as he explored the Andes. Darwin rode horseback over high passes, slept on cold ground, went hungry, suffered illness, saw condors. The impact of his experience on the sea and on the ground was so immense that once he returned to England, he never traveled again and rarely left home.
Gary and I walk and camp, and walk another day. Clouds roil, rain smacks us in the face, snow bends the corners of sharp-edged mountains. We laugh, walking hand in hand, tilting awkwardly in gusts. Down another daisy-filled, steep-sided valley, oxbows break open into circles, and circles widen into lakes—which drain into oxbows again.
The tenth-century Chinese weather predictor Pu-tai wandered aimlessly through the towns of Chekiang. Asked how old he was, he answered, “As old as space.” When he slept outside during snowstorms, no snow fell on him.
LAGO DICKSON
The route we are walking and the way we are walking it reminds me: there are no perfect circles. We're deviants and eccentrics, but so is the universe we inhabit, and I'm beginning to think that's where we've learned our odd ways. In the early 1900s the Yugoslavian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch updated an old astronomical theory of climate change that linked the onset of an ice age to the periodic changes in Earth's orbit around the sun. Precession, obliquity, and eccentricity: these are what's known as the Milankovitch cycles. Earth is a blue bulb impaled on a stick wobbling around in the galaxy. It spins in the universe en brochette, and every hundred thousand years or so, it corrects its orbit to one that resembles a halo. All this, astronomers say, directly affects our weather, making it hotter or cooling us down.
The tilt of Earth's axis of rotation is “deranged,” they say. I'd call it being a victim of seduction. The electromagnetic-field lines shooting from Earth's hot core lure the axial tilt into aberrant behavior: the straight spine gets bent and the tilt wavers. Ironically, the most deviant behavior—when the rotation swings most widely—brings on climate stability. Winters might be colder, but the summers are hot, so there's more snow and ice melt and no new ice caps can form.
The smaller the degree of tilt, the more extreme the weather. Winters colder, and summers are mild. High-altitude snow-fields don't melt, and glaciers grow big. “Sounds like politics,” Gary complains.
Weather problems start even farther out in space. Earth throws itself at the sun, then makes a hasty retreat. When Earth's orbit around the sun is most constricted, Earth heats up (fewer solar particles to get in the way). But farther out in space, star birth induces the spread of ice, whereas a calm universe sends climate toward warming. Crossing through the spiral arm of a galaxy can stir up cosmic-ray flux, resulting in global cloud cover. Temperatures drop and ice ages begin.
Gary trots ahead and I lag behind. In the distance a two-armed glacier embraces a purple mountain, one white arm on each side. Is the clasp tightening? I wonder. No, it couldn't be. Somewhere in the world, tailpipe emissions are added to the harm from smokestacks, and these swim air and water currents, so that even if we spun though a flux density of volcanic smoke or solar particles, the Earth would only get hotter. A closed circle can be censorious, a dead-ender: trapped greenhouse gases go around and around.
I drain my water jug. Despite my half-assed olfactory powers, I can sense water pushing against a moraine wall a few miles ahead. I'm thirsty, but it will take an hour to get there. Clouds stream over continuously but give no rain. The sky is hard and marbled.
Gary is alternately aloof and passionate, but these days more often aloof. I climb over the split trunk of a lenga tree. Its flesh is the color of cinnamon and burnt orange. So many of my friends have died recently, or are dying, that at times walking this circuit is like being handed from ghost to ghost. Dying is a way of completing a circle. I'm hungry; I'm climbing over bodies; I walk on.
Somewhere along the trail, utterly tired, I stop to lay my pack down and pull out the map. Nothing on it makes sense. Perhaps it is a g
uide for the perplexed and will lead me somewhere new. Maybe not. I look up. A broken branch, old and mossy, has hung its forked arms around the living trunk of a young tree. The trunk squeaks as it grinds against the aging arms of its lover. Tree love. An arboreal song.
Condors leap from cliffs. They're not suicidal, merely going to visit another mountain range. When a condor jumps and flaps its wings, the pressurized air slams against the mountains, wiping mist off, pushing a boat-shaped shadow over our heads. Every brush of a wing has repercussions. A piece of ice calves, a bow wave pulls across a lake; a stone is turned and a river changes course; a dust mote rises into a cloud and comes down as snow; a tree dies and the global climate changes.
It's a lip of dirt and rock, and we're climbing it. On the other side is the anticipated lake. We skid down a steep trail, take off our boots and jackets at the bottom, and lie prostrate in the sun. Laughter wakes us. It's the Brits. One of them is diabetic and the others are joking about the proper procedure if he goes into a coma. “Do we give the shot in his ass or his arm? Do we put a pill under his tongue? And which pill?” The more savage the teasing, the louder the laughter. They are school chums who have known one another most of their lives. For the first time the winds have stopped and the sun is shining. Jokes about mortality fly through the air. Our own and the planet's. I smile without bothering to open my eyes. It's like dying, this healing warmth, this laughter.
NIVEL DEL BOSQUE
Are we the needle carrying a thread around a circle? We nose through el bosque magellenico—a mixed forest of coigue, lenga, and nirre. In a dark valley we come on carpinterías— woodpeckers with red heads and black wing feathers—one on every tree. The canopy throws green sun on us, then green mist and green rain. Looking up I see parts of broken tree branches hanging: a cross, a pair of legs, a torso. Are these the dead and disappeared of Argentina, the bodies of dead friends? Tree line wavers. As ice melts and temperatures rise, the limits of tree growth on a mountain expand. Trees move upward in warm times and down when the earth cools. Scientists are trying to register the tiny shifts in the niches of plants, insects, animals, trees, fish, water, and soil caused by the spikes and jolts in the weather we are now experiencing.
The Future of Ice Page 2