In its vastness and scale, Patagonia equates with wandering. Just being there made me feel mysterious dependencies and yearnings. I eased into my rootlessness and felt free to wander at will all over my geographic and psychological map. In this uprootedness, I felt calmly dependent on my inner being– this my flawed hunk of humanity that flowed out of the armature of my spinal cord and made me feel whole. Where others yearn for the safety of comfort, I realized that I live for the open road, the expressiveness of an unknown face yielding many truths. And I think to myself, there is no greater glory in the world than witnessing the spectrum of human complexity in one’s wanderings.
I have read of monks in Japan (perhaps in Pico Iyer), who wander inhospitable terrain, enduring harsh elements and the rigors of a self-imposed discipline. Instead of shying away from it, they do this to meet suffering face-to-face. This is the only way across, from what I recall. I am no monk and neither do I endure suffering in my travels. I practice openness and a curious searching for how others make sense of their lives. I want to know the storyline that defines other travelers. Their truth confirms my own narrative: a story of early grief that put me forever on the road for how and why people choose the story that they want to live.
For this journey, here is the trajectory—from Cincinnati via New York we travel to Santiago, Chile. Thenceforth, we take a smaller plane to Punta Arenas at the bottom of Chile. In Punta Arenas (aka Sandy Pointy), we load onto buses—us humans and our 23 kgs of luggage each, and munching on our eggplant and cheese baguette, we journey to Puerto Natales and Puerto Borias. Puerto Natales is the capital of the Ultima Esperanza (Ultimate Hope) province and was ‘discovered’ on Christ’s birthday, 1894. This is deep in the heart of Chilean Patagonia and still considered to be civilization.
Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon this area in the 1520s, putting it on the map of the world with the waterways linking the Atlantic with the Pacific in South America. The Straits of Magellan—this line of water—is the mark of Magellan’s insolence. That this man would refuse to give up on his wanderings and the ‘known wisdom’ of other discoverers, and that he would press forward on a hunch despite the specter of death, is why the Straits exist.
As if an omen, pedigreed dogs wander motorways in Puerto Natales, skulking in between fast-moving cars and buses. They hide in plain sight for fear of being trapped. To what end will they go to avoid domesticity? How did these pedigreed dogs get to the streets in the first place?
Just like Antarctica, Patagonia is brutally honest and unfathomable. It seeps under your skin and overcomes you. You come here not merely for a hiking trip, or to attend to Chatwin’s “God of Walkers,” but to confront yourself head-on, just like our suffering monks in Japan. There is no escaping unless you are on the other side of the experience.
In preparation, I had read Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, published 1977. This book is a model of where an obsession will take you. Chatwin came here presumably to write an innocuous article for an English newspaper; he ended up becoming mesmerized by Patagonia’s geography of feeling. Chatwin writes of the harsh truths of everyday life in Patagonia through the stories of the Welsh, German and Croatian immigrants who wandered into this landscape and made it their own. It’s always the human stories intersecting with the mercurial landscape. But the humans are the only ones who can attempt at self-knowledge in the context of this vast natural canvas. They are critically dependent on the natural world that surrounds them. The landscape, on the other hand, doesn’t care. It is quintessentially agnostic: a theater for the unfolding of countless human stories.
Patagonia gets its name from its original inhabitants, a race of giants called Patagonians who were over 7 feet tall, our well-informed lecturer, Rodrigo Perez Diop, tells us. When the British colonists came, the made-up name persisted. The original Patagonians came from four distinct tribes—the Tehuelches, the Selknam, the Kaueshka, and the Yamanas—whose genealogic variety were added on to the Croatians, British, Welsh, French, and other immigrants who followed. As a result, Patagonia exists as a diverse United Nations of sorts. (The Historical Museum in Puerto Natales is a treasure house on everything Patagonian. https://torresdelpaine.com/en/tourist-attraction/puerto-natales-municipal-historical-museum/)
Darwin called the region “scarcely passable” and perhaps unknowable. Melville used the term ’Patagonian’ as an adjective for the “outlandish, the monstrous.” Shakespeare’s Tempest is thought to have been influenced by Magellan’s trip report. And Jonathan Swift’s Brobdignagian giants are said to be modeled on the Tehuelche Indians who once inhabited Patagonia.
Through my eyes, Patagonia looks sparse– in truth, it is fat with the bounty of nature: copper, tin, silver, gold, and natural gases. Hugging the Magellan Straits, a spit called Fire Island, which is potentially flammable, bulges over thick with veins of underground gases.
We see a variety of birch trees lining the pampas middle ground: nirre and koi. They are bent almost at 180 degrees by the intensity of the Patagonian winds, almost parallel with the land on which it stands. In these parts, you can tell the weather by reading the Andean tarot cards: the Andes mountains in the distance. Where there is smoke and a whiteout on the horizon, you know that the weather is worsening.
The barren, monotonous landscape is home to animals that camouflage readily: the guanaco—ostriches revered in Chile but gunned down in Argentina as a pastime. The South Andean deer, the Patagonian mara, the sea lion, the Chilean flamingo, the upland goose, the austral pygmy owl, and the crested caracara. This is the natural bounty of the Chilean Patagonia and chief of them all is the Andean condor. It circles overhead relentlessly. The world’s biggest bird of prey, the Andean condor’s wingspan measures a whopping 10 feet. Associated with the sun, the condor is thought to be the ruler of the upper world. Through our time in the Chilean Patagonia, we see bus drivers and tour guides pay homage to this being. Always, there is an upward glance and a smile, a silent prayer of humility.
On a cold October day, we take the 21 de Mayo ferry through the fjords to Bernardo O’Higgins National Park on Ultima Esperanza. Everything here is a reference that serves as a reminder of Chilean history. On May 21, 1879, Chile won a decisive naval victory in the Battle of Iquique in the War of the Pacific. A series of naval and amphibious strategies defeated the armies of Peru and Bolivia. Bernardo O’Higgins, after whom this large natural reserve is named, freed Chile from Spanish rule in the Chilean War of Independence. A founding father, O’Higgins became the first Supreme Director of Chile, heading a fully independent Chilean state.
Bolstered by the importance of O’Higgins, we proceed on our hike through the park named for him. It is cold and a steady rain makes the granite path slippery. On a sunny day, this walk would be termed an easy one; today it is rife with impending disasters. But these are ancient paths that have been crisscrossed by travelers from Juan de Ladrilleros (1505-1574) who was the first to cross the Magellan Straits in both direction to Lady Florence Dixon, (1857-1905), the English explorer who went through these parts and wrote two books about it.
Like the landscape, the Chilean fjord system is also vast. Wikipedia informs that Chile has at least 43, 471 islands including almost 4000 of them that are significant in size. They are a series of punctuation marks that lead us in and out of the southern waters. Gabby, our guide, tells us that the Patagonian archipelago is land, sky, sea and wind. The wind is the main protagonist here—the driving force, it lurches and blusters and knocks us off our feet. It throws people off the ledges of mountains, cracks open windows of cars, and upturns big buses like toys. In a moment, things turn on account of the wind. But a complete whiteout will lead instantly to blue and streaky skies. Lenticular clouds are common in the aftermath—pillowy clouds resembling a giant shoe, an UFO, a stack of pancakes. A reminder of familiarity in an otherwise hostile environment.
An exploration of the Torres del Payne (pronounced pie-nay) or the Blue Tower follows. This was declared a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978. It has three horns and the metaphoric peaks—together constituting the 120-million-year-old Payne massif. Brilliant blue lakes and lagoons, cascading rivers, and roaring waterfalls overcome our senses. The double and triple rainbows cascading over the valleys. And then the wind, reminding us of the swift changes in nature.
The bigness of this world demands a singular approach from me: That I let the answers to my questions come to me. I am at the Singular Patagonia in Puerto Boreas. Here, we have met pastry chefs from Bretagne who have settled in Patagonia via Marseille and Morocco. We have met the whole gamut of humanity here: mountain climbers, archeologists, sea farers, climatologists, anemologists (those who study wind), artists, and ritual seekers. All seem bent on creating an ideal society in Patagonia
