Patagonia is immense and more impressive than lovely in its austere vastness. With every mile south the land turned a lighter brown. Green grasses faded to tan clumps on a canvas of powdery soil. Where the road cut near the sea I saw a churlish and black Atlantic dressed with constant whitecaps. It was an ever-diminishing landscape: flatter, emptier, windier, a desert without sand, hot by day and cold by night. The last hundred miles out the peninsula were on a loose gravel track that caught the wheels and threw me down twice. I’d topped up my tank in the pathetic town where the gravel began, and each time the bike fell over gasoline trickled out of the carburetors, wetting the stones. The dark stains evaporated quickly in a wind that ripped off the Atlantic at twenty-five miles an hour, an offshore blast that smelled only of fathomless distance, of the great expanse of ocean east toward Africa and south toward the ice.
Valdés Peninsula is a geologic oddity, thrust far into the cold currents of the South Atlantic yet home to the lowest point in South America, a broad, white salt pan some thirty-five meters below sea level that I had passed quickly on my way in. This featureless plain was the dullest tourist site I’d ever seen, but every day a bus pulled to a halt beside it, disgorging groups of visitors who were expecting the Patagonia of wall calendars. The buses progressed around the peninsula, pausing at ocean vistas and heading always to the north point, where, if you arrived at high tide, you might see one of the local orcas charge the beach, scattering—and only occasionally catching—the seal pups that played tauntingly in the surf. The rest of the peninsula was satisfyingly empty, a landscape without utility poles or houses or pavement.
I’d finally come to a halt at Caleta Gonzalo, a zipper of a bay at the ocean end of the hundred-mile peninsula. Twice a day, Caleta Gonzalo opened along its length and closed again, breathing water in and out in an enormous tidal swing that exposed almost ten miles of mud, then reflooded it. Steep cliffs dropped down to a beach where a dozen obese sea elephants brayed and dozed. Despite the briny stink of the tidal flats, the beach looked attractive. I’d driven back and forth for miles, scaring up a rare Patagonian fox and several loping guanacoes but failing to spot even a single dip or hollow to shield my tent from the wind, nor any man-made structure to provide lee shelter. From on high you could spy the magellanic penguins as they waded into the water and fell over with a cute belly flop. In an instant these waddling land creatures were reborn as subsurface birds, their useless wings now fins that helped them school in speedy flocks through the undersea.
Everywhere, the elements sounded their warnings. A blood-orange light fled the setting of the sun behind me, and the wind already carried a premonition of how cold it would be in half an hour. I needed shelter quickly. Night was minutes away, and in this unpopulated zone I was ready to ignore the No Camping signs sprinkled thoughtfully along the cliff, but I knew why they were really there. At high tide the beach would disappear, and the water came in like a flash flood. If you were asleep on the beach you would never make it. A month before my arrival a careless camper had been killed that way.
I drove south on the bay road, rounding bluff after bluff in search of any sheltered spot, but the ground was flat everywhere and scoured by the violence of the air. If I’d had a car I could have slept in it, but instead I needed protection from elements that cared nothing for “oneness.”
Hurrying along, I almost passed the little farm nestled in a dell where the cliffs briefly faded away and a cluster of buildings touched the high-water line. There were four sheep ranches on the Valdés Peninsula, and these buildings were an outstation on the biggest, which ran more than 40,000 head.
This is where my filth came in handy. If there was one thing I was learning to admire about the young Ernesto Guevara, it was his unmitigated gall. As story after story in his diary showed, the man was absolutely shameless, a master at the traveler’s art of scamming, borrowing, begging, or otherwise landing accommodation, favors, food, clothes, money, introductions, jobs, dance partners, and liquor. When it came to freeloading, Guevara was a prince. “We aren’t that broke,” he once wrote to his mother after cadging a bed in a hospital, “but explorers of our stature would rather die than pay for the bourgeois comfort of a hostel.”
Menaced on both sides by barking black dogs, I rode down the driveway of the ranch, dismounted, and clapped twice. Then I waited the customary two minutes, the black dogs barking all the while, circling slowly as I stood stock still. I spent the time preparing a little speech. I had to sound needy, yet not desperate. I had to plead for a roof, neither so demanding that I would offend nor so tentative that I would be rejected. I had to balance a humble tone with the subtle implication that I was a person of enormous importance, deserving of aid. For proof of the latter, I carried in my breast pocket a letter of introduction from a New York magazine, ready to spring forth like a passport from the Other World.
When he came out—a fat, greasy fellow in a sun-bleached PARIS ELLE T-shirt, his hair wild in the wind—he didn’t wait for my speech. He looked at the setting sun, the distant horizon, and above all the dirt on my clothes.
“Come in, come in,” he said, “you had better spend the night.” His name was Florio, and he had the buttery handshake of a man who handled sheep. He waved at the dogs, who fell silent, and led me inside.
My bed was the floor of the cookhouse. After three twelve-hour days of riding my ugly cockroach of a motorcycle, I slept soundly and long. The broken cement felt like a down mattress.
The hens woke me when they strutted into the shed and bobbed nervously, emitting feed-me clucks. The tin roof played a twangy tune, like an instrument in the wind that had risen during the night. Outside it was blowing hard enough to send an unhappy hen rolling beak-over-talon past the shed from time to time.
Florio listened to the radio, measured the wind, and sent his son David out to tell me that I was grounded. It was gusting to forty-five miles an hour now, and I could not drive. The boy told me this and kept talking. The dam of solitude first leaked and then gushed. Nine years old, living in isolation with his father and 40,000 sheep, the boy needed nothing so much as to speak. As I stood silently with him in the sunshine, both of us leaning against the wind, he unleashed everything at once, a gale of words about the neighbors, who lived an hour away, and the level of water in the well, which was low, and the whales and sharks that came into the bay. He named the starving cats that wandered the yard eyeing the chickens, and explained the work histories of both black dogs, along with the good qualities of various birds, the murderous nature of foxes, and which of every animal that walked or swam was good or bad, which cherished or hated. He talked of the orcas that came into the bay to hunt seals and tasty sea lion pups, and of the tourists who came on great lumbering buses to watch the orcas hunt, and of the water truck, which was three days late, and of the strange English boy he met once at a boarding school, a boy who spoke very oddly, almost as though he had different words for things.
“Myaw myaw myaw; we couldn’t understand anything he said,” David explained. The fever or speech ran on, burning at the boy so badly that he twitched and jumped and jumbled words, hunching down to tell me about the coloration of chicken eggs, then jumping up to describe the stars we would see at night, and the paths of airplanes, and the cost of soccer balls, and his fervent desire to drink Coca-Cola. “I go through mountains of shoes my father says I’m crazy he can’t believe it but I don’t do anything except when it’s raining and the mud gets everywhere and the rain kills the chickens that one lays white eggs it’s the only one the patrón comes to visit sometimes and I showed him but if it’s an east wind it’s cold and wet and that kills the chickens or the fox comes and gets them which is why they sit in their bush all night where the dogs don’t chase them I like the cats better my kitten is better will you take a picture of him?”
By my watch he talked for twenty-five minutes without interruption. What finally stopped him was that I belched, and at this he fell over in the dirt and chicken shit and beg
an laughing his head off, the fever of an entire solitary winter broken by a fit of endless giggles. He’d never heard a foreigner belch before. Before he could start talking again, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Che Guevara.
David looked broken by the question. My tone told him it was an adult matter, something serious and from the outside world, but I was mouthing words as meaningless as those of the strange little English boy at boarding school. This was something from beyond the realm of foxes and sea elephant pups and good and bad winds. “Does he play football?” he asked tentatively.
Later I risked the short trip to the north shore, but the orcas never came and the seals sunned themselves unmolested. When I got back Florio was still sitting inside at the same table, his ear tuned to the transistor voice of the world. There was no news from the atmosphere.
In the morning I lay on the floor listening to the roof, which struck a lower tone than the day before. The shed was decorated with old shears and handmade knives hanging from the wall, their rusty points dangling down in the general direction of my sleeping bag. The tools were waiting for October, for the 40,000 sheep to finish converting grass into wool and then to line up in the chutes and paddocks and march in steady panic under these sharpened edges.
Little David came to the door carrying the same message from his father that I had heard in the tin roof: the wind was down in the twenties. David stood just inside the doorway of the cook shed, silent but clearly crestfallen by my decision to abandon him to the sheep and cats and chickens and orcas. He watched with wide eyes as I handled each of my possessions in turn, brushing stray down from my sleeping bag and stuffing it away, nestling my tiny cook stove in a saddlebag, dropping my flashlight into the zippered tank bag that would fit on the bike between my knees, one piece of kit after another. You could carry a lot if you packed carefully.
“This is the airplane that brought you here,” he said. I turned and saw he was pointing at one of the last things I packed, the book of outdated hotel listings and dubious restaurant recommendations that was supposed to be guiding me across South America. It lay open to the very first page, an advertisement for SAETA, the Ecuadorean airline. Like all airline ads it showed a clean jet rising up in a blue sky. I told David that I had come on a different airplane.
“From where?” he said. I turned to the map of Argentina in the guidebook and showed him the Valdés Peninsula and how it lay far to the south of Buenos Aires.
“Is Buenos Aires in your country?”
This was serious. I unpacked my big map of South America and explained that Buenos Aires was in his country, while mine lay still farther to the north. He pointed to the north of Argentina: “Here?” Farther north, I replied. He looked slightly defeated by the news that there was more than one airplane, but I gave him a set of batteries for his transistor radio, which had died months ago. Now, like his father, he could have a one-way conversation with the world. I said good-bye to Florio, who looked relieved to see me go and asked that I send David a book, which I did.
Driving out the peninsula, the wind knocked me over twice more, sending me into knee-scraping mounds of pebbles. When the bike blew over the second time the windshield cracked. Gasoline leaked from the carburetors again; I watched the liquid evaporate from the stones in horror, quickly righting the bike each time but losing several pints that I could not afford to lose. Yesterday’s trip to the north shore suddenly seemed a foolish waste of fuel. I hit the reserve tank with an hour still to go. Somehow I made it to the steep ridge of hills at the neck of the peninsula, but the motor began to cough and hesitate on the way up the last hill. I threw the petcock from Res. back to Auf and got one last burst of power that pushed me up to the crest at a wobbly five miles an hour. It was two paved miles from there to the gas station, but all downhill, and I eventually coasted into the little settlement of Puerto Pirámides like some pathetic bicyclist. I mailed a postcard to my girlfriend and bought a vanilla milk shake and a full tank of gas, and then sat on a chair on the beach drinking the milk shake, watching the tide surge right past the No Parking signs, up and over the legs of the chair, and while I sipped my milk shake the water ran forth and back beneath me, chilling the aluminum. I said over and over to no one in particular that this was a very fine town indeed. Six days, and already I was talking to myself.
Several weeks evaporated in a selfish blaze. I rode west, up the Chubut Valley, heading toward the Andes and circling slowly north toward San Martín. The valley was a green ribbon in a red world. The wind blew so strongly that I began to read the landscape of low mesas for its aerodynamic qualities. Wherever a break appeared to the south—a wide arroyo or an expanse of unvegetated sandy stone between hills—the wind would be waiting in ambush. I learned to hike out like a sailor in a small boat, shifting my weight almost off the left side of the bike and stretching that knee wide to give me some balance and control. I managed to stay upright through several days of travel up the valley, but once, when I dismounted to take a photograph, a gust carried the bike right off its kickstand, snapping the right mirror and cracking the windscreen again. I put some duct tape on the Plexiglas fault lines and had the mirror welded back on in a truck stop.
The towns here were settled in the last century by wandering Welshmen, a breed celebrated in Bruce Chatwin’s legendary In Patagonia. The Welsh had come to this land to escape the English imperium then obliterating their homeland, and Chatwin’s 1979 book had painted a melancholic portrait of a lost colony, a dying experiment in national survival. South America had been home to many such experiments: defeated Confederate soldiers built a slavers’ colony in the Brazilian interior; and the flatlands of Paraguay had been settled by blue-eyed Mennonites fleeing modernity. Chatwin’s book had the odd effect of fetishizing exactly what the Welsh had been fleeing: their Englishness. The valley now attracted tourists who studied the red-brick houses, walked through the small-gauge railroad tunnel the colonists had dug, and visited an excellent little museum full of agricultural implements from the Industrial Revolution. These were all emblems of European culture, and it was their situation in this distant land that created such an appealing contrast.
I wasn’t sure what there was to mourn. The Welsh had come, and built, and never disappeared. Their language had mostly died out, but the original colonists had always been eager to find their place in this new world. They had studied Spanish and posed for photographs clutching the blue-and-white banner of their new homeland, proudly Argentine. They themselves had not died out but merely changed, and this was a triumph, not a failure. Chatwin’s book had infuriated some of the remaining Patagonian Welsh, and even two decades later the Buenos Aires Herald, the English-language paper in the capital, carried occasional acrimonious letters accusing the author of condescension. In Gaiman, I ate cake in a red-brick teahouse run by a white-haired matron who inquired hopefully if I was myself Welsh. We spoke in Spanish, naturally.
At the head of the Chubut Valley the Andes appeared, looming sharply in the distance. The green suddenly spread out, filling fields to the horizon. I followed the smell of rain up into those mountains and began to dissolve myself in their waters for days at a time, fishing pole in hand. I slept on the ground, alone in valleys and forests or sometimes in small campgrounds where kids from Buenos Aires tugged guitars at night and hiked by day. The waters absorbed whatever was put into them, an alchemy that transformed a thousand wants and a million particulars into one constant. For days and then weeks, I passed ten or twelve hours a day immersed to my waist in water that was cold and clear like iced gin. It flew through fuming channels, it swirled over deep bubbled pools, it gathered in slow wide draws running green with weeds, it curved left and right, and if you climbed up a stream, slowly shuffling over the rocks to keep your footing in a pair of cheap sneakers, you would move up from pool to pool during the course of a day, stopping sometimes to drink straight from the waters or to pull one lonely sandwich from the sling over your shoulder, and eventually when you looked up from reading th
e stream you would see that your eyes had climbed level with some vast sheet of a lake, as though you were now a fish yourself, rudely waking to the dry world.
Rivers cut through the dust, and I simply disappeared. I remember nothing of three days spent on one river except that once, as I stood immersed in a deep bend, hidden by the bank, a pair of silent gauchos cantered by herding a dozen unbridled chestnuts and leaving a fine golden dust suspended in the sunset long after they passed without noticing me. When I slept by a ford, with my head against a tree, I was awoken twice in the night by wet horses tromping blithely on each side of my prone form, their hooves scattering dust in my face as water rained from their bellies. There was that afternoon when I taught a dozen lonely Korean teenagers—youth missionaries carrying the word of Christ through Patagonia—how to fish. But mostly there were hours and days of silence, punctuated by a passing gaucho tipping his hat or a nun filling a water truck or a violent explosion of small life. A cloud of ducks settling into a run around me; a hooked rainbow trout yanking and leaping angrily; twenty thousand nymphs clambering up through the water column one noon and floating past or lodging on my legs, struggling to shake off their own skins. I cupped one of these struggling shape-shifters from the passing river while the trout slapped at the surface around me, feasting without mercy on the helpless. The black nymphal shuck split open, and a tan caddis fly emerged, fluttering unsuccessfully at first as its wings dried, but eventually achieving its first flight and ascending from the pool in my palms toward a brief residence in the sky.
I often returned long distances through the woods at ten or eleven at night, trying to follow the Southern Cross toward my camp and wade fast rivers in darkness. These were the moments of hard alertness within my calm joy; to mistake one crossing in the moonlight for another, to pick the wrong footing in the boiling, chest-deep currents, to be swept alone from a deep rapid in the dark, all these were possible a dozen times each night. But the waters did not betray me.
Chasing Che Page 7