Into Thick Air (27 page)

I'd read that the furious Patagonian wind blew out of the west. Usually. Today it's out of the northwest. This works while pedaling south, out of Touristland and into a place where the people are darker and the cars are
older. The dump is announced by thousands of plastic bags snagged on fences and bushes, snapping like white flags.

It's easy to surrender when the road kinks west and into the wind. I'm aiming for the Atlantic, but the Andes won't cooperate. “Seventy kilometers per hour—very strong,” says Roberto as he helps me load my bike into the trunk of his '89 Falcon. It's blue, like the sky is until a fresh regiment of clouds pours over the spine of the Andes. The sun is snuffed out and the land falls colorless.

Only ten minutes later the wind is fading, and it's good-bye to Roberto. The road turns south to hug the shore of a slender lake. Far above the water a toothy ridge of rock and ice rakes the clouds, which move so quickly it's impossible to know what's coming, sun or storm. All I can do is watch when a burst of wind and rain skids down the mountainside on the opposite side of the lake, a gray smear that bends the trees and spills onto the water with a sudden froth of whitecaps. The sound, a not-unpleasant whoosh, reaches me well before the wind itself.

Which arrives first as a tremble that may simply be my own fear, then a cold shove in the side that tilts but does not topple me. I squint at the Andes in shadow, at the ranks of dark pyramids ranging from hard black to rain-dulled gray. Beautiful and dreadful, they'll be at my side for the next two hundred miles.

A stranger arrives. His name or business must not be asked, nor must he ask yours, unless there is some very good reason for doing so. He must be invited into the home and must at once be offered mate.

—G. G. Simpson,
Attending Marvels:
A Patagonian Journal,
1934

THE LODGE COOK, oblivious to the cruel rain, is sweating over the stove. His name is Oscar, and he uses one hand as an ashtray and the other to hold the cigarette, stir a magnificent stew, and pick up from time to time what looks like a bonsai coconut with a silver straw to suck on.

It's not a coconut. It's a
mate
, which is pronounced “mah tay” and
literally means “gourd,” but more loosely describes the tea in the gourd,
yerba mate
.

I stick with a
café con leche.
Most Argentines insist
mate
is better. It provides not only a zesty pick-me-up but also sweet dreams. And unlike coffee,
mate
is often shared among friends in a communal gourd. I'd like to stick around and wait for the cook to offer a sip, but the rain stalls and I jump on the bike for my escape.

The Andes are still buried in storm, but still I make thirty miles. The rain piddles on my tent through the night. In the morning a blizzard is on my tail as I pant up a long grade to a another split-log tourist lodge with a perfect curl of smoke from the chimney.

A tour bus from Buenos Aires stops and the people pile out with their personal gourds and thermos jugs. They file in and beg, “Bathroom, where's the bathroom?” Increased urine output is another consequence of
mate
, but is generally construed as simply keeping your kidneys alert. On the other hand, these tourists are weak-bladdered seniors and may be more interested in
mate
's alleged benefit of shrinking hemorrhoids while boosting the immune system. The gourds are passed among friends who take a sip or two on the slender
bombilla
before passing it back to be refilled from a thermos, swirling the mess of leaves. There are no tea bags. Some straws are filigreed silver with gold tips and some are gleaming stainless, but all are flattened and perforated at one end, to act as a filter.

The tour bus driver calls them away with a toot of his horn. It's still snowing. I read the provincial newspaper while sipping a coffee and enjoying its proven effects: trembling jitters to keep warm and oral pleasures such as a distinctive breath odor and, if I drink enough, a brown tongue. It tastes good, too.

Mate
is said to warm you on cold days and cool you on warm days, an apparent contradiction that would be appreciated under the schizophrenic skies of Patagonia. When the clouds suddenly vanish I valiantly pedal on, but only ten minutes later I'm stung with sleet. I duck under a tree and waterproof my gear with plastic bags. Within a half hour I'm sweating madly under glorious sunbeams, and I need to stop and strip off the raingear and find a drink at the Cascada de la Virgin. A curio shop and waterfall in one,
it has yet to open for the season. I ask the caretaker for water. He takes me to a spigot I hope is tapped into pure Andean spring water. (Although I smoke and drink, occasionally without bothering to get off the bike, I suffer healthy urges.) I fill my bottle and drink deeply before I notice the spinning clots of green algae. I ask, Umm, what's this? He looks and shrugs and says, “It's nothing. The water is clean.”

It's downhill into the valley of El Bolson, whose welcome sign proclaims itself an “ecological community.” It's the sort of place where people prefer their
mate
with a simple reed for a straw, paying homage to the native Guarani who first plucked
yerba mate
, the leaves of the holly tree called
Ilex paraguayensis
.

It's a friendly valley. I stop to watch a soccer game, taking a seat on the single long plank that serves as a grandstand. The satin-shirted players sprint through clouds of dust—it's hardly rained here. Who's playing? “Union del Sur and El Galpon,” says my neighbor, passing me a quart of Schneider Beer. I drink, hoping the alcohol kills the algae from the Cascada de la Virgin.

At the grocery I stock up on apples, wine, instant cappuccino, soup, and an intriguing candy called Trembly Bichos, which means “trembling bugs.” The check-out man is sharing a
mate
with a man named Nicanor, who tops it off with hot water. He recognizes a curious man and offers me my first
mate
.

The poorest gaucho would rather be trampled by his dearest sheep than drink from a Styrofoam
mate
. This taboo may collapse with time, but the gourd remains the traditional favorite. It may be intricately carved with geometries reminiscent of a Navajo blanket, or it may be jeweled like a Faberge egg. Some are painted with kitsch, or rimmed with sterling silver, or entirely sheathed in aluminum.

Nicanor's
mate
appears to be wrapped in leather. There is so much
yerba mate
in the gourd that it looks like a green froth of lawn clippings. It's not sweet. It's nearly astringent. Nicanor looks for approval. “Pretty good, eh?” Yes, I say, I like it. He smiles broadly and reveals pretty good teeth. “It's best when you drink it like this, from the testicle of the bull.”

My Spanish fails me. I try to say, Sure, that's why it's still warm—but
give up and only manage, You say this for fun? Nicanor slaps his thigh and takes the
mate
and says, “Look, here are the wrinkles!”

I can't argue: I've never been close enough to bull testicles to make a positive identification. But, I say, I thought
mate
was a gourd. “It
is
a gourd,” says Nicanor. “The testicle goes around it, outside, to make it impermeable.”

I believe him—but, I ask, couldn't you use intestines? Stomach? “No,” is the definitive answer. “Bull testicle is the best.”

He sees me off with the standard Argentine good-bye: “Luck. Good Luck.” And it works. I find a perfect camp along a buttercup path. The Trembly Bichos are gummi bugs, which I like very much. The lullaby of a creek. And waking to see my favorite morning star, the sun.

It's time for a cup of coffee.

 

THE SCATTERBRAINED BIRDS know this much is true: it doesn' t rain in paradise. A goose honks from the blue heights, a woodpecker spears a luckless grub from the bark, and a leggy plover called a teru-teru circles and cries out something that does not sound like
teru-teru
.

A call of pleasure, I guess—but then it dives at me and the bike. I forgive the nuisance. On this Sunday morning I've the blind cheer of a born-again Christian who sees everywhere the splendid handiwork of God. The long valley is tightly bounded by mile-high ridges, frosted with snow and so steep that the only way up is vertical rock or rubble chutes clinging at the angle of repose. Nothing lives on this moveable mountainside; the big fans of debris reach down to the very edge of the forest, the tall tight cones of somber green.

Where the slope gentles to something flat enough to cultivate and inhabit, the valley is bright with the baby greens of spring—the leaves of the skinny poplars that line the irrigation ditches. The water is shunted to little farms of black furrows flecked with young crops. Presumably the harvest is bound for the roadside stands of Bio-Andes Organic Vegetables.

Only two paved roads run north-south in Patagonia: one along the Atlantic, and this one. The Sunday drivers pilot thirty-year-old Ford pickups and burbling eighteen-wheelers and Mussolini-era Fiats. Traffic is tolerable,
the heavens unblemished, and the teru-terus gone. Yet when I reach the junction with the scenic long-cut to Esquel, I pause. The detour is a hundred miles of dirt road striking off to the west, back toward the black peaks streaked with snow. The wrong way, of course, but the map shows the road eventually turning south again, alongside lakes I imagine as reflecting pools of the mountains. And although just yesterday morning I was cursing the Andes, today their beauty convinces me to take the long way to Esquel.

The hard-packed dirt road is excellent. It runs past split-rail corrals and through cattle pastures growing nature's answer to greedy cows: low tight mats of poisonous locoweed, pincushion grasses, and the clawed stems of roses.

A wrong-way wind picks up, fluttering a tattered shirt that's hung on a stick crucifix wired to a fence. I'm not a superstitious man, yet this Jesus scarecrow coincides with the road going to hell: deep gravel and steeply banked corners. Gravel is the worst: the slightest deviation from dead straight and the front wheel becomes a rudder. Just as a sailboat doesn't work in reverse, a bike cannot steer with a front rudder, which will promptly become a plow. To avoid being tossed over the handlebars I must keep the front wheel straight and light, shifting my weight behind the seat, all the while pedaling madly.

The gravel alternates with smooth stretches, luring me on into a forest of cypress and mushrooms. Very pretty, but the road is a trap, like falling for a woman whose sole unmentionable habit is not fully revealed until after the wedding. The wind swells and the road becomes a chattering washboard. Sitting is a nonstop spanking. Standing catches the full force of the wind. The only option is to pedal with head low and rear up, the profile of a pissed-off Arizona stinkbug.

The bike is taking it badly: one of the cargo panniers is rattling to pieces. I stop to fix it, in a brake of willows along a blackwater creek. A sweating horse is tied to a tree, and a gaucho is crouched by the stream. He can't hear my hello over the wind roaring in the trees. Oblivious to my presence, he palms up some water to slick back his dark hair.

I ride. Near a lonesome cabin a big hound charges out of the scrub. I
leap off and drop the bike and grab some rocks. The beast halts under the dusty pines. I'm panting with adrenaline and anger. I don't want to hurt man's best friend. I want to kill him. Recognizing this subtle sign of exhaustion, I soon stop for the night. But my sleep is haunted by my friend Jim Boyer. He's falling again. And again.

There's no wind in the morning when I push on, but the road is lousy and Jim won't stop dying. The things I cherish about cycling—the time to think and an always open window on the world—have turned on me in this particularly unkind way: the gleaming summits of the Andes remind me of nothing so much as places to freeze and fall and be finished. Unable to shake the dead, I avert my gaze and pedal until I'm rescued by the living.

 

THE FIRST VEHICLE to pass in three hours is a big-windowed Fiat van. Once I'm inside, the outside world collapses to a moving picture beyond the hypnotic swing of the pine-tree air freshener hung from the mirror. My rescuers are a pair of tour guides with a single client in tow, the seventy-four-year-old Alberto. He grins and says, in English, “I speak English like Tarzan speaks Spanish.”

Then says nothing more as we cruise pass the skinny lakes I'd so desired. The van halts, and the trio invites me on a walk into the “Thousand Year Alerce Grove.” The rugged bicyclist is too beat to move. “Nature,” wrote the poet Charles Simic, “is that which is slowly killing me.”

They return in thirty minutes. A guide lights a smoke and explains why Alberto is still grinning: “We saw the giant woodpecker. Extraordinary. It was only ten feet away, and we got beautiful pictures.”

Well. The van is very nice.

“Would you like some water? It comes from the Andes.”

It's only a fifteen-mile ride, but it's nice to have company. The only thing better would be the company of a child, and that's exactly what I get when I'm dropped off at Bahia Rosales Lodge. There are no tourists on a Monday in November, only the delightful couple running the place, Viviana and Luis de Uriarte, and their toddler, Santiago. I recover—in bed, or eating stew, or sitting in a rattan chair and writing by the light of an unfrosted bulb—then continue south, along the pebbly shore of Lago Futalaufquen.

The dirt road is smoother but steeper, bulldozed through crumbling yellow sandstone and sooty volcanic bluffs. To the west, storms over Chile struggle to clear the Andes. When they finally push into Argentina, the clouds come with fantastic speed for something so big, a steely corrugated roof a hundred miles across. The little swallows, hardly a calm bird in the best of circumstances, duck and hide. I stop and brace for the wind, murmuring what has surely passed the lips of every Patagonian:
Not again.