Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  There is no wind. A large animal, unseen but probably a horse, splashes across the river. I sleep, then wake to find the moon down and the stars startling. Were there this many before? The Milky Way arches from horizon to horizon. Looking up at this incandescent donut, anything seems possible, from chupacabras to time itself curved by an unimaginable gravity until it runs in a circle like a snake swallowing its tail. But when I look to the side, at the grasses gone to seed, there is unexpected satisfaction in a world where time runs one way, and tomorrow’s wind can never undo this day of calm.

  COFFEE TIME, and the caracaras are watching me again. I wish they would get a job. Darwin noted that “these false eagles most rarely kill any living bird or animal,” yet they are hardly a cheering presence. They possess several habits whose appeal is likely limited to teenage boys and Darwin, who called them “a bird of very versatile habits and considerable ingenuity.” By “versatile” he means that they like to snack on the scabs on the backs of horses. By “ingenious” he means that the caracara will leisurely watch vultures gorging on a dead sheep. Only when a vulture leaves does the caracara take wing, relentlessly pursuing the vulture until it vomits the carrion—then it’s mealtime for the caracara.

  I have a ham and cheese at the Los Altares gas station/café, a 1960s extravaganza of wood and glass and concrete in a dozen intersecting planes. The man in charge is briskly attentive to his patrons, cruising the dining room with an eye for detail.

  “What is that?”

  He’s pointing at the electrical cord for my computer, which I’d plugged in without first asking.

  “This is not a dump where you can do whatever you like. Do you not have any respect for property?”

  Not enough. I soften him with an apology. He deserves it for doing a bang-up job of running this outpost. It’s swept. All the lights work. There’s a mechanic, dressed in overalls the blue and yellow of the Argentina flag, waiting in the nearly greaseless greasepit for your car to wheeze or knock.

  Locals ranchers, in wool slacks and shoes caked with dung, tank up on gas at two bucks a gallon, then step in to refill their mate thermos. When they spot me they invariably say, Welcome to Argentina! We saw you in the newspaper! They show me the story: a German cyclist is heading south to Tierra del Fuego. Sorry, I say. I’m going to Salina Grande, only a couple hundred miles east.

  Outside, the flag of the Automobile Club of Argentina is beginning to flap in the wrong direction. I hurry to pack, and notice that I’m being watched by a group of young men idling by the gas pumps. Some have asymmetrical faces, permanently quizzical yet at the same time lacking the look of intellect. I’m not sure of them, and fear that some have seen the computer go into my bag, making clear a connection between me and money that I’d rather remain unknown.

  Too late. Here comes the one with a florid face of a boxer, wearing blue plastic flip-flops. He gets what he wants from me: name, origin, and occupation.

  I get the same. Abel Escobar, chief of this eighteen-man sheep-clipping crew and their antique Mercedes bus. I’d seen similar buses, parked near fences draped with drying laundry.

  “We’re all from Rio Negro, in the north of Patagonia,” says Escobar. “Every year we head out in August, and we return in December. We travel the same route, the same ranches.”

  I hit him with a barrage of questions.

  How long to shave a sheep? “Three to four minutes.”

  How much wool? “About four kilos a sheep.”

  How many sheep a day for the crew? “Twelve hundred.”

  Whose clippers? “Ours. They’re in the trailer behind the bus. Each is $800.” Like a proud dad, he shows me a photo of the clipper. It’s like a dentist drill, with an articulated arm delivering the power.

  The men take a picture of me—not the German, but better than nothing. I ask the crew what they do when the season is over. They look to Escobar, who shrugs and says, “No work.” He looks down and toes the gravel and waits for disapproval from the man from the country that never stops working. I tell him that six months is enough.

  “Yes!” cry the men. “Enough! That’s the way to live!”

  Knowing when to quit is an acquired trait in Patagonia. I’m getting the hang of it, pedaling through the morning during the lulls in the wind, and giving up once it really starts blowing. Then I seek shelter behind a boulder that had fallen from the canyon wall, unwrap and eat a rapidly desiccating sandwich, and remember G. G. Simpson again.

  His pilot once tried to land a light plane into a typically fresh wind, and found to his horror that although they could dive with enough speed to approach the runway, when level they could not fly fast enough to reach it. Time after time, the plane would plummet to the end of the runway, only to bob like a bumblebee with its engine roaring as the wind pushed it back before they could touch down. Of course they finally did land. And only one person died.

  I hitch. A 1978 Ford pickup stops. The dashboard is home to socket wrenches, hand cream, and several hundred anxious flies. The driver is a creased and fit man named Mr. Hector Tolosa. He wants to know, “Are you the German?” Sorry.

  In the center of the seat is a tall Basque with a severe expression on a face as long as a goat’s. He wears clean jeans and penny loafers and a silk bandanna held by a silver ring. Yet he is a working man, with a ranch on the far side of the river. When we drop him off he must scull across in a little boat.

  Here the canyon is lava spills over pink badlands. Mr. Tolosa points out a seam of coal. I crane my neck to take in the big fangs of rock under a sky of water colors. Sensing my affection for the land, Tolosa tells me his secret, his hidden canyon from which he pipes in the water to his ranch house.

  A white house with a big garden. An aged, limping lady greets us at the screen door. Tolosa kisses her, and for a moment I ungraciously assume that he married the last woman in Patagonia. “Sir, my mother.”

  Oh. I meet his trusty helper, too, a man so old that it’s unlikely he’s much help. I’m invited to stay, but the story deadline clock is ticking, and I must try for another ride.

  No problem. It’s another 1978 Ford pickup, its windshield laminated with decades of insects. “Are you the German?” Sorry.

  Twenty miles brings us to a gas station in Las Plumas. Two women are enjoying the dusk in the windbreak provided by the station. The younger says that there is no hotel in town.

  The older retorts with authority, “Yes, there is.”

  “Well, it’s not much of a hotel.”

  The building is a Frankenstein of adobe, red brick, concrete block, and cut stone. Dinner is cooking in the courtyard, the eternal flame burning under the splayed carcass of blackened lamb impaled on what looks like a sword. In the bar, a cluster of protein-poisoned carnivores clamor for more vino tinto—until they notice me, after which they fall silent.

  It’s not much of a hotel. I alone sit on the verandah and sniff the moisture aloft on the east wind. It’s the Atlantic Ocean.

  ALONG THE FINAL STRETCH of the Rio Chubut, the valley opens wide and runs true to the sea. To one side of the highway is a pale desert of pebbles and stiff bushes shading the spring yellows of mustards and the curls of heliotropes. To the other side are irrigation canals and alfalfa fields and the town of Dolovan.

  The Welsh built Dolovan. The first of them came in 1865 on the brig Mimosa out of Liverpool. Just as the Chileans welcomed the Germans, the Argentines gave land to the Welsh on the condition they would hoist the local colors. Eager to shed their hated English overlords, by the First World War about three thousand had made the voyage, trying to build a new Wales. Then the Welsh stopped coming.

  I imagine that they built the stern chapel and slow waterwheels. The red brick building straddling a canal surely must have been a mill; today it wears the sign “Oasis Disco.” Hundred-year-old willows give shade to pickups with doors open and speakers thrusting with industrial rap. This is one of the most effective Malusa repellents known, and I pedal on, along the edge of the pebb
ly desert and into thickening humidity. The river valley is bounded by natural levees of low crumbling hills. As the valley widens, so does the road, busy with air-conditioned tractors and cars driving to video stores or industrial parks of giant metal sheds.

  Before leaving home I’d read up on the Welsh and thought I’d invest a day in tracking them down. Now, with eight hundred miles behind me and Salina Grande only a day north along the coast, I’m looking for nothing more than a pit stop.

  But I’m a lucky man. The owner of my bed-and-breakfast in the town of Gaiman is Gwyn Jones, a thirty-seven-year-old in a BBC Radio Wales T-shirt. After I shower off the Patagonian grit, Gywn invites me to boys’ barbeque night. “Bring a knife and a cup. The Golden Rules of the party are no talk about women, politics, football, or the English. And no portable phones, either, or we would never get around to singing our hymns.”

  Welsh hymns, I suppose—something to remind them of Wales, because Patagonia sure doesn’t. The first settlers were led to believe that the valley of the Chubut was rather similar to their homeland. Captain Fitzroy and Darwin, aboard the HMS Beagle in 1832, noted driftwood and wild cattle on the Chubut delta. In the 1862 Handbook of the Welsh Colony, these observations became “tall strong forests,” “luscious pastures,” and “herds of animals.”

  The 1865 settlers found driftwood on a nude floodplain. The Welsh were so ill-equipped for the desert that it took them two years to discover the principle of irrigation. They’d thought the soil was bad.

  Today there are traffic lights at the end of the earth. The lower Chubut Valley is thoroughly inhabited by over 100,000 people. Of these, men surnamed Hughes, Evans, Humphries, and Jones have come to the asado, gathering in a one-room shed with a fireplace, a grill, and a single bulb on a wire. Although most of them are of mixed blood, the flag of Wales is tacked to the wall. A four-liter jug of wine sits on a rough table scattered with breadcrumbs and big knives. Most of the talk is in Spanish, thank goodness. To my ear, the Welsh language is hungry for vowels, and it’s no wonder that nobody but the Welsh are willing to keep the language afloat.

  The sound of knives sharpening on whetstones means that the meat is ready. Gwyn stabs a hunk and points with his dripping blade. “One man—there—is half Tehuelche Indian, and he speaks Welsh. The Welsh probably would not have survived without the help of the Tehuelche. Things went badly at first, and the Tehuelche showed them how to catch animals like the guanacos and rheas. They had to learn to throw the boleadoras.”

  Nowadays nobody hunts with tethered stones. But they are still celebrating their feast with song. The guitar comes out, and after the Argentine ballads come the Welsh hymns. Hallelujah, they cry—and the chorus responds, a bunch of half-breeds singing in Welsh. Maybe it’s just the wine, but tonight that tottering language sounds not just fully alive, but beautiful. It sounds to me like the dream of a Welsh Patagonia came true, and I tell my host exactly that. Gwyn says, “For the moment. Come back in fifty years and see.”

  I keep my true Patagonia thoughts to myself. I don’t want to come back. The winds have pared me down to a single desire.

  PENINSULA VALDÉS is an unlikely piece of earth, shaped like a hatchet. The handle is a narrow neck of sheep land with the strong blue Atlantic on either side. The head of the hatchet is fifty miles wide and fortified with white sea cliffs. It is the last place in South America I would expect to find a great dimple, 138 feet below sea level—Salina Grande.

  Pedaling out from the mainland, I see no hint of a hole—there’s just a thin black road bordered with knee-high bunch grasses, and the expanse of low, tight shrubs beyond. The land is flattish, just sandy enough to have been humped up by the wind into hillocks ten and twenty feet above the horizon.

  With little traffic, I’m free to stop and poke at the dried husk of a tarantula, then stop again to feel sorry for half of a green snake. On the roadside is another sloppy shrine, a mess of water bottles beside a splintered wooden sign that simply says Deceased.

  For the wildlife still alive, Peninsula Valdés is a preserve. I pay the entrance fee at the visitor center, climb the concrete observation tower, and put a peso in the spotting scope. It’s very good, zooming in on the lumps of sea lions hauled up on the sands. Unlike television sea lions, they decline to mate or fight. They don’t even move. Above a little island of rock plastered with guano are thousands of white birds spinning like confetti. They do nothing but mate and fight.

  Once I’m back on the bike, a north wind boots me in the side all the way to the town of Puerto Piramide, tucked in alongside the bay where the handle meets the head of the hatchet. I head for the shelter of the first hotel. The wind huffs all night and into the morning. Breakfast is six hours (the wait staff is very accommodating) of coffee and writing and glancing up to find the sea still troubled by the wind.

  Although the wind will not quit, the asphalt does, only a few miles out of town. I stick to the tracks where truck tires have spat out the gravel. A helpful sign reads Avoid Sudden Turns of the Wheel, and I abide. Then, without my permission, the side wind shifts to my back. The sun, also behind me, floods the sandy swales and even the sheep with a marvelous green-yellow light. I feel the pendulum of luck swinging my way.

  Yet there’s always the suspicion that good weather won’t last in Patagonia. “To this day I don’t know whether I love it with all my soul,” wrote Simpson, “or hate it with all my heart. Or both.”

  A blue truck stops, out of courtesy and curiosity. The bed of the Chevy holds the four-wheeled ATV of a modern sheepman. He’s a smiling dad with two sons who appear to be exact shrunken copies of their father. They want to know where I’m going.

  I tell them: to the lowest point in all of South America, Salina Grande.

  “Yes! It’s forty-two meters below sea level. You must look carefully for the turn, just after you first see the low.”

  The “low” is a great bowl ten miles across, several hundred feet deep, and rimmed here and there with sandy bluffs. The turnoff is obvious. The two-track road is smooth, and soon I’m close enough to see that the bottom of the bowl appears to be filled with the sky. The splendid illusion spurs me on, although there’s no need to hurry. It’s only a few miles, and there’s a good two hours before sundown. A pair of guanacos, slender humpless camels, spy on me, but they’re not very good at hiding. A lime green lizard shoots across the road like a party favor, celebrating my arrival. I take the hint and stop for a festive drink of red wine.

  But like many an excitable man, I suffer from premature celebration. Only a mile from the salt lake, I catch the sputter of a poorly tuned engine. It’s a pea green Peugeot pickup truck. The rancher inside is not smiling.

  “This is private property. A tourist can’t come here.”

  It had never occurred to me that somebody may actually own Salina Grande. I’m too dumbfounded to deliver my life history, and it’s just as well: he may think me a dangerous crank on a whacked-out mission. Instead, I meekly ask Mr. Fernandez for permission to camp by the salt lake.

  “But what if you start a fire?”

  No fires. Promise.

  “If I let one person camp, I’ ll have to let others.”

  I explain that this salt lake is like no other in South America, but he’s already loading my bike into the truck. “You cannot stay here.”

  Can I stay at some other place on Salina Grande?

  “You can go to the next salina—Salina Chica. It looks the same. There are three or four salinas, and they all look the same.”

  He drives me back up to the main road and offers to take me to Puerto Piramide. I decline, saying I’d rather head downwind. The truck heads toward the mainland, the clatter of its diesel engine fading until there is no sound but the wind.

  I figure Mr. Fernandez isn’t the owner of Salina Grande but works there under strict orders to eject all tourists. It won’t be his fault if a single man fails to heed him, and instead finds another road to the Salina, five miles east. Keeping in mind that Mr
. Fernandez may at this moment be preparing his Elmer Fudd musket with a load of salt intended for me, I sweep away my tire tracks at the turnoff. A branch from a shrub with leaves like arrowheads does the job.

  This road is five miles of dips puddled with gluey clay. I charge through, only to bog down in a sand trap. I drag the bike. Nothing can stop me now that I see that the lake at the bottom of the salina is no longer the color of the sky. It’s a shocking pink and blue, and it’s edged in brilliant white.

  I reach the shore thirty seconds before the sun drops below the horizon. The full moon is rising over a shore of pure salt. The pink comes from the sort of algae that gives flamingos their color.

  There is an abandoned saltworks, reduced to foundations, and a wood-slat cabin that rattles and moans in the wind. I find a better camp in a sandy hollow rimmed with plantains, their stalks like cotton swabs. Out of the wind, I devour a ham sandwich and get to work on the wine, then lie back and listen to the whistle of a bird and the slap of waves on the shore.

  Later, my spirit buoyed by the wine, I stand to face the wind and see the moonlight on the salt. I take a stroll, and crystals pop underfoot like glass ornaments. I’m happier than I should be. Patagonia had beat me, from the dripping Andes to the blasted desert. Yet when I turn to see the light from my lantern, I understand that this is my reward—a single yellow flame at the bottom of South America, with Mr. Fernandez nowhere to be seen.

  AFRICA

  Hyenas are ugly animals that smell

  bad and eat animals killed by other

  creatures. They make a sound like

  the laughter of an insane person.

  —Art Linkletter’s Picture