It wasn’t home-sickness so much as a growing realization of the distance one had travelled in mind and time and an awareness of the emotional distance involved. Suddenly Patagonia slammed itself into me in a way I least expected. This was only a small episode in my life, yet, in these few weeks, Chile had consumed me utterly. It had infiltrated and taken possession of my every emotion. I had experienced joy, contentment, exhilaration. I had known fear and fascination in full and equal measure. I had had to deal with anger, resentment, boredom and exhaustion all trying to crush my sense of purpose. I had also had my challenges and disappointments. But now I was beginning to feel that I had lost contact with another part of my life, a vital and sustaining part. In the quiet splendour of Patagonia, here in these ‘capes of exile’, I was feeling desperately exiled myself.
I was beginning to wonder if this was the unconfessed impulse that drives travellers ever onward. All those echoing thoughts and feelings that centre them are perceived as a dead-weight to their expressed purpose. And when people talk of being more afraid of failure, as I myself have done, than having a purposeful sense of achievement, are they not voicing their fear of this siren-like attraction back to familiar places and the comfort of loved people and other things? If it is in man’s nature to desire to possess everything he loves, then it is inevitable that it is beyond his capacity to achieve it.
My musings were beginning to send me into sentimental overload. When we reach the point of our desired destination, we often feel that it is not the place of fulfilment we had imagined. Perhaps we carry that destination within us. It’s always there, and everything else is a corollary or mirror image of it.
But reason and emotion are the poet’s media. I was too tired for reason and too hungry for emotion to attempt to reconcile their wondrous opposition. But when a man is hungry he must feed himself. He must nourish his capacity for emotion. I prepared a swift fax to send home from the hotel before we departed into the wilderness once more.
Dear Sweetheart,
I have been reading Neruda’s love sonnets today in the hope that I could crush away the distance between us. But instead their passion swept me away. They are a heady aroma of the heart’s desire, and a perfume of loneliness lifts from every page.
I thought I would send the book to you but decided to keep it with me. It lets me hold you close, and I can smell your hair.
I am thinking of you always and love you with a depth that all the oceans and mountains that separate us cannot fill.
What do you think of SANTIAGO for a name!
Brian
The morning vista from my bedroom window stunned me for some moments. Like pillars holding up the morning clouds, the twin peaks of Cuernos del Paine and Torres del Paine ascended in stark contrast to the low, rounded foothills below. In scale and relief they were a visual paradigm of Patagonia and could be seen from virtually any point in this paradoxical landscape. I couldn’t find the words to explain the sense of awe this vision prompted in me. Instead I lifted the phone and called John.
‘Take a deep breath and look out your window, then take another one!’ I said before replacing the receiver.
Our boat trip to the Grey Glacier had to be postponed. Powerful and sudden winds known locally as the ‘williwaws’ sent billowing clouds of spray clawing skyward as they streamed across the area’s many lakes. The winds are constantly moving and circling the hills in this region like a pack of preying wolves. Suddenly they flow up and over the Cordilleras, descending ravenously on the landscape below. Arising with little warning, their power and the immense volume of driving spray create conditions too treacherous for any kind of vessel.
I had seen something like this once before while walking along the famine road in the Doolough valley in Co. Mayo. An occasional pillar of spray like a miniature tornado was tossed up from the lough water by the crosswinds that had become snarled up in the valley. I remember thinking then how understandable it was that rural people were so religious. But this fierce ballet of wind and rain and rock drained me of such notions. I fell back on Hudson’s words about an elemental animism that would not fit so neatly into the compartments of human reason. I thought of Moses questioning God, ‘Who shall I tell them you are?’ To which he received the reply, ‘I am that I am.’ Patagonia seemed similarly iconoclastic.
Denied the boat trip, John and I were hiking as close as we could to the glacier. In the distance the shimmering topaz of the vast expanse of frozen water confronted us. I had to remind myself how all the laws of physics were stood on their head here. This eternal wall of water had, after all, broken open granite mountains. Evidence of epochs of glacial sculpting was everywhere around us. Granite intrusions pressed into darker sedimentary rock and were then capped by even darker rock. In the early morning and evening light these rock formations seemed to take on their own inner Technicolor glow. Around us the small opalescent fragments of icebergs had broken free from the glacier wall and we stood watching their cumbersome movement. The sun was shining through the gnarled branches of ancient beech trees. The last red and yellow ragworts burned like sparks in the gold and green bushgrass. I felt again that we were standing in that symphonic paradox that this strange land threw up at you. In this intense place I felt all the power of Neruda’s words.
I am surrounded
by a fortress
of most desolate moors.
The arriving wind
whistles in a thousand towers
and from the toothless cordilleras
falls the metallic water
in a swift thread
as if it were fleeing
from the abandoned sky.
All words die and everything dies
and all in silence and cold, stuff
of death and the sarcophagus.
In the full light shining, a river runs,
far from the stoniness,
and, hardened by gloom, the snow,
falling, takes itself off from dying
and dies as it falls
from the cruel heights
where it was sleeping;
yesterday, shrouded
today, lover of the wind.
Horse-riding jolted us out of this soporific intensity. McCarthy and I went sundancing across the golden pampas with exuberant yells and whoops. Our enthusiasm was unquenchable. We thought we could conquer the hills towering above us. We had, after all, conquered the Andes.
At the end of one day’s ride, we watched a huaso bringing in a herd of horses. Some of them were straying from the main body of the herd and he was constantly forced to pursue and bring them back, only to have to repeat the task. Butch and Sundance set themselves up as outriders, preventing further strays. Herding these wild horses back to the corral was childishly exhilarating.
Our final Patagonian adventure was to be a long five-hour trek over the mountains to a high lake. Over dinner and drinks we talked about it with the excitement of fools.
During the night I wake with a feeling of unease. The wind has not ceased howling around our exposed lakeside hotel since our arrival. Such has been the noise that, even though we have separate rooms, I am still using my earplugs at night. As I come fully awake and cautiously sit up in bed I am aware of a soft light coming in around the curtains. I check my watch. It is 2.30. I take out the earplugs and then realize what is bothering me. It is completely quiet! Suddenly I remember people telling me of the night of the great storm that hit Britain while we were in Beirut. How the morning after there was an eerie calm that belied the devastation outside. With some trepidation I go to the window and pull the curtain open a little. Like a small child catching his first sight of a Christmas tree, I gaze in rapture at the vision before me.
The sky is clear and full of stars. The moonlight is so bright that I am dazzled by its reflection on the lake’s still waters. Beyond and rising with fantastic clarity are the Torres. Until this moment I have only caught glimpses of them as the clouds raced past but now I see them in all thei
r glory; massive buttresses rising to support the heavens. I stand for a while gazing and grinning then go back to bed laughing to think that our luck has come good once more. We will have fine weather for our expedition tomorrow.
The day was bright and mild as we set out and, with a steady confident pace, we were soon in the foothills of the cordillera. Our guide, Moncho, eyed us with wry humour and suggested we take the quick way over the top rather than the long way around. We agreed, and Moncho had us all dismount. He needed to move the saddles forward and tighten the girths. With a final instruction to give our mounts a loose rein, we were on the way to stake our claim in the lake-clotted hills.
As the incline steepened, the horses’ heads dipped perilously, and we leaned forward and clung tightly to the pommel of the saddles. The climb seemed endless but when we turned to view the sheer mountain, my confidence evaporated as quickly as the weather in this place changed. I realized to my terrified astonishment that conquering the Andes had not conquered my fear of heights. The path here was only about a foot wide, and many hundreds of feet below us lay the valley we had galloped across. My childish thrill of yesterday was now a distant memory.
My horse’s name was Rabbit and I prayed furiously to every god I believed in and others I didn’t, that both me and the horse would be transformed into such an animal so that we could scamper into a hole somewhere. There was a big enough hole of absolute panic opening up inside me. Moncho made precarious hairpin turns around gullies so deep that had I fallen, I thought I would be falling for ever. The lather on the horses’ shoulders and hindquarters was matched by the fear lathering up in me. Turning one of the hairy bends and facing upward into an even more sheer climb, Moncho stopped and nonchalantly lit a cigarette. For some minutes he puffed away while we lay on our mounts’ necks dreading that the horse in front would shy back and send us toppling into oblivion. Butch and Sundance might still be galloping down on the pampas below but up here two jellies were shivering on horseback. Finally Moncho moved on and we followed with some enthusiasm. But it was primed by panic, not confidence. When you confront something dangerous for the first time, anxiety is compounded by fear of the unknown. But when you know from experience how frightening something is, the second time you encounter it, it is doubly terrifying. All through the climb I kept remembering the old horse from San Pedro de Atacama who had shown me the way. So I put my faith in Rabbit. With blind faith tempering a yellow streak that skittered nervously up and down my back, we finally made it to the top.
Soon we were cantering and galloping through the hilltop glades and open spaces. The autumnal colours and the silence around us acted like a kind of balm, broken only by a distant boom.
‘Avalanche,’ said Moncho, pointing across to the far-off mountains. The resounding paradox of Patagonia was declaring itself again.
We soon found our lake and enjoyed a picnic lunch washed down with fine Chilean wine named after the 120 patriots of Bernardo’s Revolutionary Brigade. Even O’Higgins was in these hills with us.
We rode for several hours through the idyllic woodland. In the high, bright light everything shimmered as if a film of crystal had been gently blown across it. This was not colour you merely observed. This was colour which enveloped you. Sitting motionless in the saddle with the horse moving beneath me was, I imagined, what it was like being an artist’s brush moving gently from palette to canvas.
We were headed towards a high hill ranch where horses were broken and grazed for the summer months. As we emerged from the woodland and descended into the small valley bathed in mountain sunlight, I looked at John. He looked back at me and we both stared at the long, low, wooden ranch house and the horses grazing in the meadows beyond. This was it. This was our yak farm!
We rode into the place as if entering a dream. For me, everything seemed to be in slow motion. We dismounted and unsaddled our horses, then removed the bridles before shushing the animals onto the pastures surrounding the place. Everything was perfect, idyllic.
John and I investigated the farmstead separately. I would have loved to have spent the night there and to have seen it at first light, but it wasn’t to be. We were due to leave our horses here and travel back by jeep. As I looked into the shed, stables and outhouses and poked about the skeletons of rusted machinery, I began to feel strangely sad. It was a passing thing, but I felt it powerfully. It was not just that this was the end of our Patagonian trek, it was also the end of the dream that had sustained us, even though like all dreams we knew it was an impossibility. But could it be? Here we were standing in the reality and the impossibility.
I walked around the place peering in every corner, taking in everything, smelling and looking and touching. My sadness was strangely adolescent. I didn’t want the dream to end, though I felt I was standing in a place and a moment where dreams could come true. It was almost a post-coital kind of experience, full of urgent wonder that was too soon over. But memory is the great minder and I told myself that I could dream this dream again, because I knew it was real.
We left our horses with Moncho and travelled back to our hotel. On our way we witnessed a double rainbow, God’s ancient promise. Everywhere abounded with animal life. Gorgeous pink flamingos frilled the water’s edge. Further on, condors wheeled in search of food, and everywhere along the rough roadways, guanacos stood and eyed us imperiously. Perhaps they live only under the rainbow and are immune to the disturbing harshness of their homeland. There was no denying that this was Neruda’s ‘Bitter territory’.
The day we left our hotel, several of the staff told us that they too were about to go away for a while. When I asked why so many were leaving at one time, one of them asked me if I knew who was coming the next day. I did not and was very surprised to learn that the new guest was to be General Pinochet, which had caused much distress and anger among the hotel staff. The management had responded by saying that those who felt they could not stay during his visit could return home until he had left, and that their jobs would be waiting for them when they returned. I looked at the faces of the workers who were loading their luggage along with ours. There was anger, confusion, distaste and barely concealed hatred. Some of them spat as the general’s name was mentioned.
I remember thinking as we set off, that although on the day we had arrived we had watched two pumas, an extremely rare sight, the day we were leaving we missed the biggest puma of all.
We fly to Puerto Williams in a little twenty-seater plane whose pilots, in their leather jackets, look straight out of Biggles. Most of our fellow passengers seem to be locals. In the departure lounge we met a nice old fellow called Fichou, from Montreal. He seemed very happy to meet English-speakers, having been travelling alone around South America for two months, without any Spanish. He told us that he left his native Romania for Canada twenty-seven years ago. He has a high, piercing voice with a heavy mid-European accent and a big, hooked nose. His only luggage is a couple of plastic bags, one of which contains his video camera.
I can see him now talking to a woman in dark clothes, an occasional squeaky word reaching me over the roar of the engines. After some sign language they change seats so that he can point the camcorder down through the little porthole at Tierra del Fuego far below us. I cannot imagine he will capture much of the place.
The land is a vast expanse of pampa crossed by meandering rivers that often have formed ox-bow lakes. For mile after mile there is no sign of humanity save for one isolated farmstead to which there is apparently no track. There are wide swathes of red, perhaps heather, much grass, woods and areas of burned or decayed trees that look like spilled matchsticks. These are spooky and disconcerting; in some places the devastated acres, some bleached trunks still standing, others lying higgledy-piggledy on the ground, suggest the aftermath of some cataclysm, a disaster of awful power. I have that feeling, which I have had often in Chile, that while human beings can make efforts to control, tame and use this place, clearing forests, marking boundaries, their influence here is only
transitory. As I think of this, I spot a squall of wind chasing across the surface of a small lake, like the whirlwind on the dune outside Iquique; a spirit hurrying with some mysterious purpose.
We descend and bump through cloud in among the peaks. There are boats in the channel below us.
‘The Beagle Channel!’ I call to Brian behind me. He nods and smiles and leans to look down when we bank and start bucking for the final approach to Puerto Williams.
In the small airport lounge, big heaters going full-bore warm the family reunions and prepare those waiting for the return flight to Punta Arenas and the heat that lies to the north.
The end of the world is far more welcoming than I had expected, a little like Scotland, with a bright blue sky framing black clouds over the mountains to the south. The town looks neat across the small bay; regimented rows of cream bungalows with blue and green roofs. The only discordant note is on the seafront, which is dominated by a large warship and two, quite black, fast patrol boats, mean-looking machines, and a fisheries patrol vessel.
Fichou is now filming everything madly with his camcorder, doing a running commentary in French. ‘Maintenant je regarde la ville de Puerto Williams.’ He pans round: ‘Ici mon ami Brian. Il est un Irlandais . . .’
We share a taxi with Fichou to the Hosteria Wala, a large modern hotel that appears deserted but for the manager. Although they serve only breakfast we decide to stay here but Fichou, who is on a tight budget, elects to go to a cheaper establishment in town.
We return there and drop Fichou off, having arranged to meet the next day. We have some lunch in the one restaurant, Los Dientes de Navarino, named for some vicious-looking peaks to the south. The lunch is solid – soup of vegetables and spaghettini and a lump of fatty meat followed by the same meat with peas and spuds. All in all, rather reminiscent of Jihad fare. It is filling nonetheless.