Into Thick Air (29 page)

When I wake at dawn to rain battering the roof, I know there will be no bicycle escape from Paso del Sapo. I ask Ms. Sierra to call the local gas station and spread the word that a sick tourist is willing to pay cash for a ride to the pavement at Paso de los Indios. It takes three hours for a pair of Sapo boys with crude tattoos and easy grins to drive me the distance.

There are no Indians in Paso de los Indios, only a truck stop and wool depot and school serving the sheep ranches. There is no river valley. I've arrived during the glory of spring, yet there are only small thorn bushes decorated with plastic bags shivering in the wind. The depot is corrugated steel and big enough for a soccer game if it were not stacked with man-sized
bales of wool, each weighing 260 pounds. There's another stack, too: the skins of foxes, guanacos, and pampas cats—all destined to be collars and cuffs.

As usual, I'm the only guest at the inn, but the adjoining bar suffers no lack of business. Men in black berets and rope-soled slippers raise heavy tumblers of red wine and slap cards onto a stained bar. They regard me with caution. Perhaps I still look dead, although my fever has cooled. The adobe walls, painted the same faint green of the scrub, are sixteen inches thick, and at night I hear nothing in my room but the faint round-the-clock clatter of the diesel generator that electrifies Paso de los Indios. Satellite TV arrived last month, bearing the global gift of Chuck Norris.

I pass on the tube but take a dinner of mutton. In 1930, G. G. Simpson stayed at a mud-brick inn near Paso de los Indios. “Provision for dinner at this hotel consists of a live sheep, and permission to use the stove.”

 

THE EXQUISITE SILENCE of morning can only mean that the wind is gone. But where? Somewhere it waits, ready to pounce on the foolish and bat its victim about playfully before delivering the final, spine-snapping coup de grace.

Such are the deeply wary thoughts of a recovering cyclist, pedaling east with low hopes. Five miles out of Paso de los Indios, the highway slips back into the Chubut River canyon. This far from the storms of the Andes, the river is a thin scribble of water in braided channels between sand islands and willows. To either side are sheer walls built of pebbles and ash that restrain the river within a mile-wide floodplain. Where the road closely approaches a cliff there is a sign advising the tourist:
Photo Panorama
. Some have stopped and spray-painted political war cries on the blameless stone.

I pray, in my godless way, for no wind. Argentines hoping for the unlikely have their own approach: they leave a roadside offering of a plastic water bottle on certain hillocks scattered throughout the country, including one by the Rio Chubut.

The water is for Deolinda Correa. She's not a virgin or a saint recognized by the Vatican. She was a mother, with an infant, trying to reach a
husband who was, depending on the story, either unfairly drafted or unfairly jailed by evil Argentine authorities in 1840. Like Jesus, she suffered in the desert. When she was finally felled by thirst, she gave her life so another may live, which is why her son was found alive—a suckling at the breast of a corpse.

A miracle! say the believers. And, hoping for their own miracle, they leave a water bottle for
The Deceased Correa
. It's a slapdash veneration that ends up looking like a small dump. The shrine by the Rio Chubut is a single candle in a blue wooden box surrounded by an enormous heap of Fanta, Sprite, and Coke bottles.

For my money, I'd rather believe in the blood-sucking
chupacabra
. I'm certainly in the right habitat: few people and plenty of unattended livestock. The
chupacabra
, unlike most large carnivores, has defied extinction and instead recently extended its range over the whole of Latin America, clear up to my Tucson home. So it should be no surprise that I've seen one, with the wings of a bird, the scales of a reptile, and the appalling fangs of a vampire. Or at least that's how it looked in the drawing made for me some years ago by a miner prospecting on the Mexican border. The
chupacabra
had menaced him only the night before. I did not mention that the drawing strongly resembled one of the gargoyles of Notre Dame—how could this lonely miner know of such a thing? But then he shook the drawing in my face and hissed, “This is one fucking bad French bird.”

Now, on the banks of the Rio Chubut, I choose my camp with careless disregard for the
chupacabra
. The real creatures of this world hold mystery enough, dashing through the brush as I lay out my sleeping bag. I catch a glimpse of one. “Elegant-crested Tinamou” says the bird book.
Martineta,
say the Argentines. But it sure looks like a racing chicken with a long neck and a ridiculous plume atop its head.

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 pebbly 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.”