Chasing Che (13 page)

Disaster struck. Waiting at the post office was a letter from Chichina. She broke off their relationship, firmly and completely. Guevara was devastated, utterly shocked that, just because he had abandoned his medical studies to run off to points unknown with no fixed schedule or planned return, his girlfriend would desert him. He began to have hallucinations; at night he saw her green eyes glowing in the dark and could not sleep.

There was nothing to do but apply the geographical cure, and the boys threw themselves into the complicated crossing to Chile, which involved a series of seven lakes connected by short land hops. Brokenhearted, and therefore without pride, Guevara waved his medical credentials around and pleaded poverty; the ferry captain gave both men free passage in exchange for working the bilge pumps, and La Poderosa was lifted on board.

I knew that it was going to be hard, forty-four years later, to convince the ferry captains to even talk to me. In 1952 the ferry route was the only route, and the boats carried cargo, people, animals, anything that could fit. Now the trade was all in tourism. I’d been over the route years before, coming the other way. It was a staggering set of views, worth it despite having to constantly shuffle from bus to boat to bus to boat to bus to boat to bus, all the while being instructed by a tour guide with a microphone to “sing your national song” for the rest of
the passengers. A series of Bolivians, Germans, Chileans, Danes, and Frenchmen had belted away, even during lunch, and the thought of repeating that day now made my imminent rejection bearable.

“Use the road,” the clerk at the ferry office said dismissively, just as I’d feared. They wouldn’t even consider taking my bike. The schedules were too tight, and there was no loading or unloading facility for cargo on the high-speed catamaran ferry that ran out toward Chile each morning. Cargo went on the road, a well-maintained gravel track that shot over the border to the north of here and that hadn’t existed in 1952. You could get to Puerto Montt in Chile in half a day on the northern route.

But I turned south. I was still laboring under the impression that bad roads were going to teach me something important about South America in 1952. The quick, modern route would never inspire the same idealism in me that Ernesto had found on his road. Perhaps my motives were not so purely spartan, either; the truth was that, like the two young men I was following, I simply wanted to see wild things. The south promised adventure, which is why Guevara had come this way in the first place. On my map I noted obscure gravel roads that crossed the border at several points, and I connected a set of these dotted lines over the fold of the map, into Chile, and eventually to Puerto Montt. It looked like it could be done in a few days and would be as wild as anything Guevara and Granado had found during the several days it took them to complete the Seven Lakes route. They’d gone bushwhacking, hiked a mountain, and just ridden around looking at stuff, so I figured I might as well do the same. This southern route followed rivers and lakes, and there would be some fishing along the way and then at the end a ferry up to Puerto Montt, almost like the boys had done on boats plying the more direct line.

In the end it took a few smoky days to reach the border. Several forest fires were burning out of control on the dry Argentine slopes of the Andes. I spent my last night in Argentina sleeping beneath a burning mountain, the sky a mass of low clouds underlit with orange. In the morning I left behind a tiny Argentine border post and passed through several miles of no-man’s-land. The road went down and
entered a dense, temperate rain forest of gargantuan ferns and thick-leafed lenga trees. It began to rain, an indication that I was probably in Chile. The border post soon appeared, and after completing reams of paperwork to obtain a permit for the bike, I was forced to drive it through a trench filled with yellow disinfectant solution, like a sheep at dipping time. A strutting Chilean
carabinero
impounded some bread and cheese I was carrying and then looked at the back of my helmet.

“What does it say?” he demanded.

I translated the words
YES FEAR
literally, and he stared at me. “You know,” I said, “like the surfers.” He kept staring. “The ones with the
NO FEAR
T-shirts,” I added. “Only, I
am
afraid, so …” Eventually he gave up staring. Some things don’t translate.

The rain kept up, but there was no place to stop, and I rode along happily, down and up, but mostly down. The rivers were narrow and fast, filled with white flume, and I saw two salmon leap a cataract, their wet bodies twisting through the air in tandem. A few miles farther downstream I crossed the Futaleufú River on a tiny bridge named after a military officer. Sealed up in my rain gear, I saw a quick view of a microbus parked at the side of the river and a pair of kayakers loitering in an eddy, waiting to descend. By afternoon I had reached the Carreterra Austral, the only north-south road in these parts. The road is somewhat famous in Chile: it was pushed through the deep forests of the south on the personal orders of General Augusto Pinochet and was always cited as an example of his good works for the nation. Having overthrown the country’s elected president in 1973, killed more than 3,000 of his countrymen, and ruled Chile despotically for seventeen years, Pinochet should get credit for every single thing he deserves. Unfortunately, the road proved to be the same mixture of mud and gravel as the roads in Argentine Patagonia. The main difference was that on this road the bridges were all named after military officers martyred at the hands of the leftist guerrillas that Pinochet claimed he had saved the country from. Since the guerrillas were few and inept, there were actually more bridges than officers, and so even sergeants and a few privates ended
up being honored in outsized plaques attached to unimpressive one-lane bridges.

I was singing to myself, as usual. I started with “
Bee hon sha pon
” but then, inevitably, “
La cucaracha
” began to wend its way back inside the helmet. The road was empty, and there were few vistas in the rain, so I tried to distract myself from singing by composing some notes about Chile in my head. There were always lots of these mental gymnastics on the road. Sometimes if I didn’t want to sing I’d compose indignant letters to the editors of various newspapers, or deliver nonsensical commencement addresses and rambling Nobel acceptance remarks.

I’d just fixed on the metaphor of Chile as a land of holes in the ground, of anonymous graves and buried secrets, when I struck an actual hole in the general’s road. I was thrown hard to the left, over-corrected to the right, and shot sideways into the bushes at thirty miles an hour, shattering the windscreen, snapping off various bits and pieces of the motorcycle, and cracking a rib.

Lying on the ground in the rain with the motorcycle on top of me, I smelled smoke and listened intently to sounds: the way each droplet of rain singed into steam when it struck the hot motor; the way the turn signal clicked aimlessly, as if we were going somewhere; the way the tires of a truck splashed through the mud as it passed above me on the road.

Two minutes later the truck came beeping backward down the road and stopped. A man I cannot remember and his beautiful daughter, who I can, came down the embankment, tied a rope between the bike and the truck’s bumper, and then dragged the machine slowly up to the road. We propped the bike on its kickstand and banged on various bent pieces with hammers. I threw the shards of the windscreen into the bushes. After a few minutes the man apologized and said he had to make it to Argentina by nightfall.

I thanked him, and he stood there looking at me. “You know you are bleeding,” he said.

After he left, I plucked one of the mirrors out of the undergrowth and looked. It was true. A small trickle of blood ran down my
forehead. I grazed my fingers across the outside of the helmet, which showed only a tiny scratch where I had smashed face-first into the gravelly root ball of a gargantuan rain forest bush. Somehow the force of the crash had passed cleanly through the hard outer shell, two inches of foam insulation, and the lining without damaging a thing, and then broken my skin instead. I pulled off my gloves and found another cut, a bloody scrape on the back of my left hand. There was only a faint scratch on the outside of the glove. My raincoat was ripped through on the left side; the leather jacket underneath had suffered a heavy scrape but held. The skin under there was unmarked, but beneath that something was clearly wrong. I couldn’t think or move much, and I was having trouble breathing, but it wasn’t bad for a motorcycle crash.

Alberto and Ernesto had gone down some thirteen times by this point. I stood in the middle of the road, in the rain. This was an empty quarter of South America. No one approached from either direction. For a while I wandered around, collecting the broken and muddy possessions scattered across the scene, trying to fit shattered pieces of plastic together, or tie things up, or tape them closed, or wipe them off.

But mostly I just stood there. Once in a while I would shuffle over, turn the key, and look to see if the little diode came on.

F
ive days and a hundred miles later, the little green fishing smack backed away from the rocks and, turning east, began to plow up the fjord on rough seas. Like most working boats, this one had too many useful qualities to have any elegance at all. A modest sailing mast speared the deck, but diesel engines did the pushing, and the passengers crowded onto benches in the converted hold.

The surface of the fjord was black and blue like a bruise, and as we pitched heavily away from the ocean the prow slammed showers of spray up and over three Chilean police officers. I stood with these men in featureless green uniforms, their collars turned up against the cold. Eventually a few guitarists in dark glasses and wool sweaters joined us. The cops tried to shield their pistols and the musicians their guitars, but we all got a little wet. I managed to avoid vomiting yet again, at first because the pain in my ribs made it unthinkable and then because the sea grew easy as we moved deeper into the fjord and the walls closed in. Although the cliffs rose almost straight from the water, green vegetation covered them like a carpet. This was temperate rain forest, a confusing mix of conifers and deciduous trees grown to eerie proportions. The climate was soggy and, above the water, so densely green that neither brown earth nor gray stone interrupted any but the very steepest slopes.

We passed sea lions loitering on smelly boulders, and skin divers taking shellfish from the bottom, and long pens of farmed salmon.
After an hour the boat grounded on an unprepossessing mudflat at the head of the fjord, a gentle green cirque of mountains and trees. A blue tractor rolled out of the woods, came slowly across the flat, and began to load up with boxes of supplies that we passed down from the boat. A little path led up the mud. The score of musicians clambered down from the bow, distributed their instruments, and then marched in a ragged column toward the woods. I followed their laughing progress up and into the tree line, beneath a high gate made of hewn poles. A sign over our heads read
REÑIHUÉ
.

“R
egion X,” the bureaucrats in Santiago had labeled this paradise. They did not mean to capture the mystery of the place in that blank name; they were simply extending the system of Roman numerals that the Pinochet dictatorship had superimposed on Chile’s ancient provinces. The tenth region was where the great forests began, a narrow wilderness of old trees, forgotten islands, and saltwater fjords. The forests of Region X held most of the few remaining groves of alerce, the towering, talismanic trees of the deep south that were sometimes more than two thousand years old. The wood of the alerce—properly named
Fitzroya cupressoides
after Captain Fitzroy, commander of the
Beagle
, which carried Charles Darwin through these parts—is endangered in most parts of Region X.

But not here, in the curious little kingdom of Reñihué. I had come following the musicians, who had come following a man, who had himself come following the trees. It was the man, named Douglas Tompkins, who brought us all here with his love of the vast southern forest and his fortune that was even vaster. Founder of the North Face and Esprit de Corps clothing companies, Tompkins had grown disillusioned by the retail world. In 1990 he sold out his share of the business to his ex-wife and her partners for over $150 million. In 1991 he began buying land in Chile. The purchases were done quietly at first, and before anyone had quite realized what Tompkins was doing, he ended up with a thousand square miles of spectacular
forested terrain that literally cut the country in two, running from the sea to the mountainous border.

If Chileans were surprised to find a foreigner controlling so much land in their midst, Tompkins’s next move astonished them: he announced he was giving the land away. The “ranch” would become a 700,000-acre national park called Pumalín, or “mountain lion,” a legacy of the public, preserved forever. He was paying for an environmentally sensitive infrastructure of trails and campgrounds for visitors, and the park land itself would be turned over to a nonprofit foundation run by a board dominated by Chileans. The reaction to this generous, farsighted offer was pretty much what you would expect: Tompkins was accused of being a “secret Jew” (he isn’t Jewish) founding a new Israel, or of being some kind of pseudo-Nazi, or of planning to build a nuclear storage dump on the land, or of being a closet communist. A former defense minister called Tompkins “irritating and out of place.”

The majority of Chileans were not openly hostile to Tompkins, but there was widespread befuddlement at the idea that a wealthy man would give away huge tracts of land. Philanthropy is a weak tradition in Chile, and landholdings have always been the measure of wealth in Latin America, the determinant of status, even of identity. You were a landowner or you were nothing. You did not simply give away land. There
had
to be some other motivation for the curious gringo’s actions, it seemed. And, in fact, there was. Tompkins wasn’t simply giving a national park to the people of Chile. Just as his enemies feared, his plans were much more radical than that.