by David Yeadon
We had planned to rest over in Castro, on the Isle of Chiloé (the last town of any size for hundreds of miles), but Peter had lost a key navigational map and didn’t fancy feeling his way through the shoals and islets in a fog.
“Listen, Peter,” I said, “let’s just give it a couple of hours. Maybe it’ll lift, and I’d really like to see Chiloé. After this, according to the map, we’re on our own. How about a few beers and a decent steak?”
Peter looked uncertain. There was something inside him—impatience, maybe—driving him on. I know those sensations well and find I have to fight them fiercely, otherwise my journeys would become nothing but mere mechanics of movement. I played an ace.
“I’m buying.”
That did it. He smiled and nodded.
“Ah—well, that makes all the difference. Now what I see is one of those gigantic Black Angus steaks falling off the edge of the plate, barbecued to a crisp on the outside, blood red in the middle, with a great pile of…”
So we waited and the fog lifted for us. Darwin cursed this place for its appalling weather, the Spanish explorers loathed it, but we’d been granted a period of grace and decided to make the most of it.
Three mottled brown pelicans, saggy-beaked and with enormous wingspans, kept us company as we sailed for shore watching the twin orange and lavender towers of Castro’s cathedral, the Apostal Santiago, rise up among lush green hills flecked with fields, orchards, farmhouses, and swirls of forest.
In such a fogbound, rain-scoured part of the world and on the edge of one of the most chaotic landscape and seascape combinations known to man, it was a delight to see the brightly colored little town edge closer. Startling canary yellows, vivid greens, turquoise blues, pinks, and mauves covered the tiny cottages, scale-clad like fish in wooden tiles, or tejuelas. They use the trunk of the local alerce tree to make these tiles and tradition has it that they bend outward every time it rains to keep the cottages dry and cozy.
The boats—even the people—were clad in the same array of brilliant colors. Chiloén women are notorious knitters—every spare minute they’re sitting on the doorsteps clicking away with their needles, catching up with the local gossip, and producing a boy’s sweater before dinner, when they vanish indoors to prepare their famous empanadas and strange dark stews (cochajvja), whose main ingredient seems to be black Chiloé seaweed, and the most traditional of their island dishes, curante, an odd blending of layered meats and seafood baked traditionally on heated rocks.
We tied up the boat near the harbor, close to a ragtag composition of palafitos, little cabins and houses built on high stilts to compensate for twenty-foot tides. At a dockside bar (bright pink shingles and violet-framed windows) a plump, apple-cheeked waitress was serving huge bowls of soup brimming with clams, mussels, scallops, and fish chunks, served with crisp seaweed cakes. Peter nudged me. “Stop gawking at that stuff. We’re in here for steaks. And you’re buying, right?”
“Right,” I said. He was a stickler for protocol.
We passed a small town market. All dressed in bulky sweaters, the women were prodding through piles of homespun scarves, mittens, and caps spread out on the ground. Others were selecting from fifteen different types of seaweed tied, compressed, bundled, or packaged in plastic bags, depending on the type, and all looking like some illicit haul of exotic jungle drugs.
One old man in a thick drooping leather hat and a woolen poncho sat on a stool presiding over his library of secondhand books and parchment-colored pamphlets. I picked one up with garish illustrations depicting the famous Chiloén legends of sea serpents, phantom galleons, boat-wrecking mermaids, forest trolls, a Dracula-like snake with a hen’s head that lives on human blood, and an enormous plumed horse said to be the favorite form of oceangoing transport for island witches.
On the last page was Chiloé’s most notorious spirit, El Trauco, an evil-eyed and bent-bodied goblin who turns modest maidens into passionate lust-crazed vamps and has been blamed for countless illicit unions and unexpected offspring among the island’s nubile nymphs. One gentleman with a large walrus mustache and wearing a felt Hamburg hat paused to peer over my shoulder at the page, winked, and muttered something that sounded rude in the local dialect. I felt as though I’d been discovered peeping into a pornography bookstore and hastily replaced the book.
We finally found our steaks in a café overlooking the ocean and ate like kings under an unfamiliar blue and almost cloudless sky. Across the scattering of outer islands we could just make out the hazy, ice-flecked summits of the Andes and the volcano of Minchinmávida fifty or so miles to the east.
I could stay here for a while, I thought, exploring the other little towns on this lovely island, each with its church founded by the Jesuits, who maintained strict religious discipline here for two centuries until being harassed and then exiled by Spain’s Philip II. I’d read about the old steep streets of Chonchi, the great Pacific beaches of Cucao, the Spanish fort at Ancud, and the delicious sea urchins of Quellón. Maybe if I could lure Peter on with more promises of steaks and Chilean pisco to wash them down.
But Peter was pining for the ocean again. “Just look at this weather,” he said. “We’ll really zip along in this breeze.” So, reluctantly, I left Castro and “zipped along” with my impatient companion into the Gulf of Corcovado and headed due south toward the Moraleda Channel, the main channel through the Chonos Archipelago Islands. The weather was still kind to us and we meandered through a maze of sculptured islands dotted with coves and secluded beaches. I would have happily stayed for a week or two in each one, but Peter needed to feel movement and the wind in his sails. So we moved on.
It was strange—almost eerie—to see such beautiful places totally uninhabited.
“This should satisfy your lost world lust,” said Peter as we passed by soaring cliffs and through bays edged by straggly woods and tundralike patches of emerald-green moss. (We were to learn much more about these “moss moors” later in the journey. They are not as benign as they look.)
We did spot a small fishing camp on a particularly idyllic stretch of beach at the southern end of the archipelago. Peter agreed to slow his southward rush and we sailed in closer to the island, hoping for an offer of a free meal and maybe even a night’s lodging on firm ground. There were three big tents, ex-army types made of thick canvas, but no sign of boats, people, dogs, or anything. We called out, hoping there might be someone inside the tents, but our voices echoed on the cliff walls and received no response.
I was disappointed. A little relaxation in this lovely camp would have been ideal for this untrained sailor, but Peter was not prepared to invade uninvited. We reset the sails and moved back into the currents of the channels.
Ten days later I wished I’d followed my instincts and remained in the balmy harbor of the Chonos.
The first gale struck us as we sailed alongside the Taitao Peninsula down toward the Gulf of Peñas and it was then that I realized I’d always be a landlubber. If only I’d taken that highway back behind the mountains.
On the second day of fifty-knot storms, broken by strange ominously still periods that only lasted for an hour or so, I was seriously questioning the sanity of this adventure.
It was becoming all too familiar now—the wind shrieking in the rigging, everything soaking wet and with little chance of really drying out, the little craft leaning at a forty-degree angle, and Peter back there at the stern always adjusting the self-steering device, which, in spite of all his innovations, slammed noisily from side to side, threatening—so he kept telling me—the “main casting” (whatever that was).
We always had some jobs to do—tightening the preventer lines, lowering (or raising) the pathetic little pocket-handkerchief-sized storm jib and the more difficult treble-reefed main, and checking the speed indicator, while in the distance marched that endless series of gray-black waves topped with blowing spindrift and angry breaking crests.
Up we’d soar like surfers as the waves hit, and then run down into twenty-foot,
sometimes thirty-foot troughs, looking just like those bleak boggy valleys I’d once hiked across on England’s Pennine Range. All around were moving mountains of surging water. A brief lull in these valleys, a passing moment of calm not dissimilar to an eye-of-a-hurricane sensation, and then the sudden soar up the heaving ridges which left us momentarily perched delicately on the crest, with broad vistas of white angry peaks and ridges all around us.
If only the sequencing of trough and crest had come a little more slowly I might have even enjoyed the calm moments when I felt suspended—weightless—in limbo. But the rhythm was just too aggressive, too rapid. I longed to hang on to a crest and admire the power and monotone beauty of the surging, screaming scene.
But no. Off we went again, roller-coasting from the tops and down into the next trough. And hoping—praying—that we made the subsequent crest before the damned wave broke, blew apart, and crashed down on us like an avalanche. These were the worst moments of all. Waiting for the pounding we’d get as tons of water hit us, the rigging, the deck. And not only did we have to withstand the sudden blows, but we had—somehow—to estimate the extent of the boat’s keeling so that we could try to maintain a relatively perpendicular profile against the tearing, clutching water.
Fortunately, Peter’s little boat was a canny creature. Twenty thousand miles of ocean sailing under his capable supervision had taught her a trick or two. I—nonsailor that I was—always dreaded the out-of-synch wave, a bloody-minded fiend that would crest too soon and hit us broadside before the boat had a chance to heel and shake off the deluge. Or one that would roll or toss her unexpectedly into a trough. Or maybe (my biggest dread of all and one that, to my untrained eyes, seemed almost inevitable) that we’d perform some kind of aquatic somersault as a gang of waves attacked together in a flurry of foul play.
But they never did, and we never did. Somehow that wily little craft seemed to psyche out the spirit and intent of each surge and, except for brief dousings of the cockpit and a back-wrenching lurch or two, she soared up and over and down and out again with the tenacity of a cork in a cataract.
Peter told me later, during a well-earned respite, that he preferred the big storms and waves to the “smaller seas.” “They’re sneakier. The rhythm of waves isn’t so distinct. They get frisky and cheeky—like kids—and you get tossed into troughs so fast the boat doesn’t have time to line herself up for the next bashing. Give me these big sods any day. She always knows how to get through those!”
For three of the last five days we’d been like this—bouncing through the “big sods”—and I could feel the strain beginning to tell on Peter. I always had the option of going below, locking the hatch and lying on the bed. There was nothing much to do aloft anyhow except get soaked, worry about the steering gear and the preventers, and watch for that one rogue wave that might finally do us in. But—in spite of the temptations of the warm and dryish cabin—I normally stayed on deck with Peter. It just seemed impolite somehow to leave all the tension and worry to him.
And as it turned out, it was good that I did.
“Hell ‘n’ fuckn’ damn ’n’ shit,” I heard him shout (his most extensive use of expletives to date, so I knew we had a problem). “Support struts are going.”
“Is that bad?”
I think if Peter were more used to hurling four-letter expletives about I might have been at the receiving end. Instead all I got was one of those belittling “Why the hell are you here?” looks and a rapid-fire rush of technicalities about the preventer lines pulling too hard and the main castings being cracked and goodbye self-steering. He started pulling on tiller lines to reduce the swing and lunge of the gear.
At that moment we had that sneak attack from a wave we hadn’t even noticed. Coming in and cresting prematurely, it caught us both unawares and sent me skidding across the deck until I managed to clutch at a section of rail. Peter wasn’t quite so lucky. He lost his hold on the tiller lines and fell sideways across the stern, hitting his head on some brass fixture near the sail. He reached out in a kind of halfhearted way to grasp for a rail, but then came another crash of seething water and he was spun completely around and sent skittering on his back, blood streaming from a cut above his ear, and down the deck toward the bow…just at the split second that we surged over the crest and down into the next wallowing trough. He was out of control, like a thrown rider in a rodeo, heading so fast for the bow that it seemed he’d go straight through the rail and into the ocean.
Then, like magic, the old slow-motion mind game snapped on like someone had pulled a switch. All this was happening in nanoseconds—it can’t have been more than a moment since the wave hit—but in my head everything became so blissfully calm and silent that I thought I’d suddenly gone deaf. I could see Peter quite clearly even in the thrashing spray, waving his arms, trying to catch hold of something as he slowly spun toward me down the sloping deck. I was clinging to my bit of rail with both hands but felt no strain at all. A moment before I’d been convinced that unless my hands hung on with every sinew I’d be tossed overboard as quickly and neatly as an empty bucket. But now I suddenly felt balanced and perfectly centered in the storm—a sensation I used to get back in high school when I indulged in my favorite sport, discus throwing. There was that wonderful surge of utter certainty, just before a good throw, that everything was perfectly in synch—the speed of the spin, the balance of the discus in my hand, the angle of my arm, and the centrifugal force that would set the discus free, cutting the air like a scimitar, keeping its finely arced flow as it soared toward its apogee and then gracefully spun down through the air to skim the ground in the lightest of landings.
And when the picture in my mind and the reality of the actual flight coincided, I remember the most overwhelming sense of almost spiritual joy, a sense of having become one with that beautifully formed, flying saucer-shaped instrument of mahogany and bronze….
It was the same sudden sensation that I experienced on that chaotic deck. I no longer seemed to need to fight the boat’s surging antics—we were working together, almost glued together, and I was as safe and centered as I would be on my patio back home.
Next thing I knew—and I think I only really “knew” it later—I had let go of the rail not just with one but with both hands and stepped out across the deck, caught Peter’s swirling body by one of his outstretched arms, pulled him easily back to the rail, and fastened his fingers around the steel bars. I helped him stand and spread his legs and then casually reached out for my section of rail and resumed my original position.
The blood was still flowing from the gash in his scalp. I wiped it away and turned to see what the waves had in store for us next. They were still churning and surging (it was hard to imagine them ever being calm again) but they seemed to have lost some of their demonic nature. I was no longer frightened of them. Frustrated, maybe, annoyed by their mindless pounding, but accepting and curiously calm. Again, that similarity to the discus memory; the better the throw—the closer it came to the mind picture and my projected will for its flight—the calmer and more accepting I became. A sense of inevitability surged through me—the discus had flown the way it did because I’d been with it—a part of it—every inch of the way.
And that’s what I sensed about our predicament in those malicious straits. I was no longer fighting, no longer placing myself as adversary. I was a part of it now, as I had been from the beginning but just forgot for a while, that’s all. And we’d be okay. Peter was fine. I was feeling fine. Tomorrow the storm would die down, or maybe not, and either way we’d come out of it and move on to the next series of experiences—as an inevitable and willing part of those experiences.
Then came an odd little bonus. As all these thoughts, sensations, and actions took place in a minute, two at the most (it’s taken much longer to write them down), I felt something else stir deep inside. It was almost like a chuckle, then expanding into a great gush of giggles—not just “mine” but from someone, something, some other
essence within. And a voice—a voice I realized I’d only heard twice, maybe three times before in my life—saying “You have always known this.” And a feeling, like a rush of hot lava, that a valve had been opened, a switch switched, and that the little insight I’d gained from these acquatic antics had been here all along—who knows, maybe even prebirth, deep in the genes or in some implanted library of eternal truths hidden somewhere in the recesses of the brain. The library that we all, to one extent or another, know is there and spend our lives seeking to find and understand, using all manner of exploratory devices—religions, meditations, drugs, “altered-state” exercises—you name it.
Peter must have thought the ocean had finally gotten to me. To him I was a giggling, grinning jackass who’d just done one of the dumbest things you can do on a bucking boat in a maelstrom, which is to let go of a firm hold. But the laughter continued on inside as I listened to my mind and this other new voice chatting away like two old and dear buddies. The inner laughter occasionally turned into outward giggles as the waves crashed down on us and poor Peter nursed his gashed scalp and kept giving me the most curious of glances, which started the giggles all over again.
The storm finally died. A few more hours of declining fury and then the calm of a gray-pink evening while I cooked our first real meal in two days and Peter fixed the struts of the self-steering assembly and grumbled about his cracked casing and broken preventer lines, mumbling things like “One more go-around like this and we’ll really be in trouble.”
He tried to explain what he meant by “trouble,” but it all became too damned technical—all that gobbledygook about mainsheets, cam cleats, halyards, lifts, guys, reefing lines, winches, jibs, vang tackles, spinnakers, stanchions, bilge pumps, goosenecks, binnacles, luffs, clews, daggerboards, gilguys, gunwales, jumper struts, roaches and leeches, mizzens, mousings, boom vangs, and whisker poles. Another language—another level of communication—complete with such strange expressions as aback, abaft, broach, bear away, close-haul, full and by, heave to, kedge off, yaw, and, one of my favorites, wing and wing (which another colleague explained as “sailing before the wind with a jib and mainsail set on opposite sides” and left me even more confused).