Into Thick Air (28 page)

But the clouds evaporate and the sun returns, dazzling the chop on the lake. I hear, then see a young couple on bikes pumping up a steep grade. Each of us is glad to see another cyclist. They say they're on their way to the United States, and there's no reason to doubt them: Wilfred and Jikke wear biking shorts that can scarcely contain their tanned super-thighs.

I admire their rubber cargo panniers, and Jikke says, “Everything's waterproof—we're from Holland!”

But you sound like an American.

“I was in Tennessee for a year, in the prayer belt. I was in a student foreign exchange program. I lived with huge people. I learned all about fat food. What I like most about America are the fat-free cookies and ice cream.”

When do you hope to reach Arizona?

“July,” says Wilfred. “Is it hot then?”

I' ll pray for you.

The road turns east at last, toward the faraway Atlantic, and within ten miles the beech forest is replaced by grasslands and big hopping hares. Trees persist only along the rocky banks of the Rio Percey, wands of poplar with leaves that flash silver undersides in the wind.

Sunset bloodies the west. In Esquel, a hotel room on the plaza rewards me with a view of the landslide mountains like slag heaps. The writing desk and hard bed are perfect. On the television, the Simpsons demonstrate a remarkable command of Spanish. In comparison, my cultural integration lags: I can't even tame the Patagonian shower, which has five identical knobs. I turn one and a hidden jet squirts me under the chin. With more caution I try another knob, and this time easily dodge the blazing hot water from above. I simplify the situation by assuming there are only two
positions, on and off, for each of the five knobs. This means there are two to the fifth power or thirty-two possible combinations, one of which eventually delivers a warm shower.

The rest of Esquel is welcoming, with curb cuts for wheelchairs and mild-mannered motorists who wait for pedestrians. Mapuche boys hawk newspapers on the street. At an ice-cream parlor there's Cher on the radio, and a young lady wearing the standard ice-cream server smock. Her name is Monica. I ask for a single scoop of “Fruits of the Forest,” then sneak in a question about my hoped-for route through the desert.

“It is very pretty in Paso de Sapo. Lots of rocks, but not many plants.” Meanwhile, she's assembling not a single scoop for me, but a little Matterhorn. When, I ask, was the last time you visited?

“Umm . . . two years ago.” Then she adds, sagaciously for her twenty-one years, “But places like that don't change.”

Paso del Sapo doesn't change because it's a hundred miles off the pavement. I haven't forgotten my accidental self-starving over the pass into Argentina, and the next day I buy pasta, soup, cereal, powdered milk, cheese, bread, and cookies. I pick up fifty aspirin and a tin of hand cream. A bike mechanic oils my chain and envies my tires, each an uncommon 700 x 47. Such things don't come to Esquel. I post a letter in an office with a rattling teletype. In the bank, typewriters clack and rubber stamps thud. Old sounds, like the hoot of the steam train. Once it connected Esquel with Buenos Aires and carried Paul Theroux to the end of his journey from Boston, in
The Old Patagonian Express.
Today it runs just twelve miles, for the tourists.

When I load my bike onto a wooden carriage I'm surprised to see one of the Mapuche newspaper boys on board. He hops off at a place called Nahuel Pan. In Argentina, what little land the Indian is left with is not called a
reservation
; they live on a
reduction
: a picket fence and a half-dozen cabins. The gray-green plain clumped with sheep may be Mapuche land, but it's unlikely. Much of Patagonia is now owned by the likes of Benetton. The Italian apparel company has well over two million acres in holdings, mostly devoted to turning plants into wool—with the help of several hundred thousand sheep.

The train drops me off by the highway. The engine sneezes and huffs away. At the turnoff to Paso del Sapo I bump onto the gravel and ride for a minute before stopping to consider the expanse of sheep-clipped grass and dull green shrubs, each a congestion of bristled stems. Sheep-repellent, probably—but they attract me with the possibility of making first-rate pipe cleaners.

The wind is out of the WNW. That's good. Yet it's forty miles to the next town, Gualjaina, then sixty more to Paso del Sapo. Despite my infatuation with self-propulsion, I'm nervous. After a final look over my shoulder at the last mountains with snow I'll see, I slip my foot into the toe clip and ride, into thick air.

 

ON THE OPEN PLAIN is a gaucho, walking along the road with his head down and into the wind. He's a fine-looking sheepboy, dressed to kill, with a flat-brimmed black felt hat cinched to his chin and a silky red bandanna round his neck, a belt woven of many colors, and pleated baggy pants tucked into polished leather boots.

I ask his name.

“Gustavo.”

Where do you come from?

“Out there.”

Out there I see twists of wind sucking at the dust, and large birds tilting in the wind.

I feel guilty asking him to pause for a photo. Gustavo has no questions, while I suffer the usual city man's hankering for cowboy life—at least as I imagine it. The legendary Martín Fierro sang, “And this is my pride: to live as free as the bird that cleaves the sky.” A century later Bruce Chatwin hitched around Patagonia and was favorably impressed by the gauchos' honest poverty. Aside from their “ponchos, their
mate
equipment, and their knives, the peons were free of possessions.”

Gustavo says good luck and lowers his head and walks on. In ten minutes this shy man is a dot.

For a long time there is nobody but the whiptail lizards. The road is thankfully thin on the gravel. When a Ford pickup finally passes, its brake
lights flash on. It waits in the dust. The driver, who already has one passenger, wants to know where I'm going. “Gualjaina!” he says. “Let me give you a ride up this hill. Then you can ride downhill to Gualjaina.”

Their names are Jorge and Juan. They deliver gas cylinders for stoves, and drive for five minutes before Jorge suddenly slaps the dash and yells, “
Piche! Piche!
”

It's an armadillo trundling across the road. Juan mashes the brakes and we slide to a halt, with Jorge climbing over me trying to get after the creature. Juan is already in pursuit. The armadillo skedaddles through the brush and Juan dives for it. Nothing.

Jorge's lunge is on the money. He cradles the armadillo upside down. It's the size of a football. Topside, it actually looks like a football, except its leathery shell is gray. But underneath it is merely hairy and hence quite vulnerable, with four frantic legs, tiny eyes, and a pointy snout.

“It's a male,” says Jorge. “It's a fat one,” says Juan, and suddenly I know the fate of the armadillo. As Darwin wrote 170 years ago, “It almost seems a pity to kill such nice little animals, for as a gaucho said, while sharpening his knife on the back of one, ‘Son tan mansos' (they are so quiet).”

Jorge finds a saw in the back of the truck and slices the armadillo's throat. Ten seconds of blood darkening the dirt, and the armadillo is still. “Everybody,” says Jorge, “eats armadillo.”

They're nice guys—they don't cut my throat. They drop me off, and a brisk tailwind shoots me toward Gualjaina with such speed that I reach the town's single long dirt avenue well before sunset. I park my machine between a pair of Ford Falcons. Since I'm packing enough food to survive a nuclear winter, it's no surprise that Gualjaina has a grocery filled with all I needlessly carried. To give my visit the appearance of purpose, I buy a beer and a banana. Outside, a mess of children stare goggle-eyed at my amazing bicycle. The store's owner comes out and says, “Travelers are welcome to spend the night at the police station—and they have a shower.”

Thank you, madam. But I seek the company of willows and waterbirds by the Rio Chubut.

Not far from town I help a man put a wheel back on his wagon. It's old and held together with wire. The equally worn-out horse is instructed to
stand still. A silent wife and small dirty children stand by a stack of firewood they've offloaded to lighten the wagon. “
Uno . . . dos . . . tres!
”—and the wheel slips onto the axle.

Camp is where the green river is coaxed into a bend by a cliff of lumpy red rock. I spritz open the beer and wash my feet by poking around the polished stones in the shallows. In the cutting aridity, my feet dry in a minute.

There are many pretty rocks on this earth, but only the rare ones are known as precious. So nice, it is, to be at last in a place where water is precious.

 

THE WIND COMES in the night, at first a hollow roar, then bullying down the canyon and burrowing under my tent so the floor flaps like laundry in a gale.

At dawn the birds are glaring at me, as if I kept them up all night. A lazy caracara, perched on a snag like a claw, waits. The ibises are bashful and fly away, calling out with what sounds like the cry of monkeys in jungle movies. But the nervous teru-teru actually comes for me, shrieking mad and so close I see its red eyes. I win the stare-down: my sleepless eyes are redder.

The wind is on my tail but so ferocious that by noon I can hardly stop, much less turn around. The road never leaves the river for long, and together they drop into badlands of colors like melted purple crayons. In a reedy meander a flock of flamingos sieve the shallows with their big goofy bills. Another bend in the river and the badlands are replaced by seamless bluffs of monolithic ash flows. It's a tough rock: a lone butte stands like a hitchhiker's thumb, in defiance of both wind and river, three hundred feet tall.

The wind is loud. It blows across my open water bottle with a moan that changes pitch with the water level. Only when I get coasting along at 20 mph on a good stretch of road does the wind quiet in my ears, and only then do I hear the wind in the cliffs. Sometimes it is like a waterfall and sometimes like a cutting torch.

When the land fades behind a wall of dust I'm relieved to find an old stable to rest in. I lie back for a minute, counting the fox skins that hang
from a rafter. An hour later I wake to a cry of surprise from a gaucho atop a fine pony. Jammed under his belt is a foot-long knife. I hop to my feet and tell him who I am and where I'm from, and he does likewise. Fermin Espinosa, he says, not bothering to introduce his soundless sidekick, an antique peon with rawhide hands.

“I come from Gualjaina, but now I am from this ranch. The Three Brothers.”

He reconsiders. “No. The Two Brothers.”

He shows me the little ranch house with a beehive bread oven, built of mud. The house is smartly equipped with a windmill for electricity. Switches of poplar, ripped off by the wind, sail past. Some are sliced into kindling by the blur of the windmill blades.

“This wind,” says Fermin, “is just an everyday wind. You should be glad it's not
really
windy.”

The everyday wind is mostly at my back, but it's hard to be glad. Every two or three minutes there is a big blow and I'm not merely shoved along but engulfed in a cloud of dirt and little stones that pelt my back and click off the lenses of my glasses. With this velocity and viscosity, the wind is like water, with sudden eddies and riptides, and it is all I can do to keep the bike on the road. Sometimes I can't. Blown into the desert, I hang on, legs splayed wide like outriggers and feet ripping through the spring flowers in billows of dust and pollen. Easing on the brakes, I stop and suck for air through the bandanna round my face until the wind drops to a mere 20 or so mph.

Late in the afternoon the wind vanishes. The dust settles and from the murk emerges the river canyon, walls of sandstone branded with ripple marks from a now-dead sea. The side canyons, deep in alluring shadow, are fenced off as natural corrals. From the barbed strands the gauchos have hung the carcasses of coyotes—a warning to the enemy of sheep.

The wind returns and carries away all notions of hiking into one of the canyons. All that matters now is reaching what appears, a few miles ahead, to be poplars in long windrows that bow, then relax.

In time-honored rural tradition, most every house in Paso del Sapo looks to be either going up or coming down. Outside a whitewashed church
topped by an ugly concrete bell tower, a gaggle of young nuns tell me exactly what I want to hear: there is a place to stay right next door.

It's a house, a little clean white cube. I knock. The door opens and the matron immediately gestures me inside, saying, “Close the door before the flies come in!”

I'm looking for a room, I say. I'm tired.

She takes a good look at me and says, “You look dead.”

Fortunately, I've landed in intensive care. Ms. Nilda Sierra's two-room inn is a spic-n-span expanse of white tiles. When a fly manages to buzz in, she takes aim with Raid insect obliterator, followed with a spritz of Blue Sea air scent.

On the counter by the register is a sign:
No Torn Money
. I wash my socks in the shower and Ms. Sierra strolls outside with me as I hang them from the clothesline. She's friendly but impatient with my Spanish, preferring volume over clarity when she speaks.

“A man went down the river on a raft a long time ago,” she yells as she hands me a Patagonian clothespin, a clamp with the spring of a bear trap. “He was very fat, and looked like a toad. So came the name, Toad Pass.”

Paso del Sapo. Back inside, she keeps a running tab of my bill, inking a new figure on her palm as I drink and eat. But I've no stomach for my fried slab of meat. During the night I wake a dozen times, stricken with a deadly thirst and rising fever. Ms. Sierra is not exactly sinister, yet as I lie unhappily on the lumpy bed I get the irrational idea that she has stuffed my mattress with dolls.