Into Thick Air (30 page)

Welsh hymns, I suppose—something to remind them of Wales, because Patagonia sure doesn't. The first settlers were led to believe that the valley of the Chubut was rather similar to their homeland. Captain Fitzroy and Darwin, aboard the HMS
Beagle
in 1832, noted driftwood and wild cattle on the Chubut delta. In the 1862
Handbook of the Welsh Colony
, these observations became “tall strong forests,” “luscious pastures,” and “herds of animals.”

The 1865 settlers found driftwood on a nude floodplain. The Welsh were so ill-equipped for the desert that it took them two years to discover the principle of irrigation. They'd thought the soil was bad.

Today there are traffic lights at the end of the earth. The lower Chubut Valley is thoroughly inhabited by over 100,000 people. Of these, men surnamed Hughes, Evans, Humphries, and Jones have come to the
asado
, gathering in a one-room shed with a fireplace, a grill, and a single bulb on a wire. Although most of them are of mixed blood, the flag of Wales is tacked to the wall. A four-liter jug of wine sits on a rough table scattered with breadcrumbs and big knives. Most of the talk is in Spanish, thank goodness. To my ear, the Welsh language is hungry for vowels, and it's no wonder that nobody but the Welsh are willing to keep the language afloat.

The sound of knives sharpening on whetstones means that the meat is ready. Gwyn stabs a hunk and points with his dripping blade. “One man—there—is half Tehuelche Indian, and he speaks Welsh. The Welsh probably would not have survived without the help of the Tehuelche. Things went badly at first, and the Tehuelche showed them how to catch animals like the guanacos and rheas. They had to learn to throw the
boleadoras
.”

Nowadays nobody hunts with tethered stones. But they are still celebrating their feast with song. The guitar comes out, and after the Argentine ballads come the Welsh hymns.
Hallelujah
, they cry—and the chorus responds, a bunch of half-breeds singing in Welsh. Maybe it's just the wine, but tonight that tottering language sounds not just fully alive, but beautiful. It sounds to me like the dream of a Welsh Patagonia came true,
and I tell my host exactly that. Gwyn says, “For the moment. Come back in fifty years and see.”

I keep my true Patagonia thoughts to myself. I don't want to come back. The winds have pared me down to a single desire.

 

PENINSULA VALDÉS is an unlikely piece of earth, shaped like a hatchet. The handle is a narrow neck of sheep land with the strong blue Atlantic on either side. The head of the hatchet is fifty miles wide and fortified with white sea cliffs. It is the last place in South America I would expect to find a great dimple, 138 feet below sea level—Salina Grande.

Pedaling out from the mainland, I see no hint of a hole—there's just a thin black road bordered with knee-high bunch grasses, and the expanse of low, tight shrubs beyond. The land is flattish, just sandy enough to have been humped up by the wind into hillocks ten and twenty feet above the horizon.

With little traffic, I'm free to stop and poke at the dried husk of a tarantula, then stop again to feel sorry for half of a green snake. On the roadside is another sloppy shrine, a mess of water bottles beside a splintered wooden sign that simply says
Deceased.

For the wildlife still alive, Peninsula Valdés is a preserve. I pay the entrance fee at the visitor center, climb the concrete observation tower, and put a peso in the spotting scope. It's very good, zooming in on the lumps of sea lions hauled up on the sands. Unlike television sea lions, they decline to mate or fight. They don't even move. Above a little island of rock plastered with guano are thousands of white birds spinning like confetti. They do nothing but mate and fight.

Once I'm back on the bike, a north wind boots me in the side all the way to the town of Puerto Piramide, tucked in alongside the bay where the handle meets the head of the hatchet. I head for the shelter of the first hotel. The wind huffs all night and into the morning. Breakfast is six hours (the wait staff is very accommodating) of coffee and writing and glancing up to find the sea still troubled by the wind.

Although the wind will not quit, the asphalt does, only a few miles out of town. I stick to the tracks where truck tires have spat out the gravel. A
helpful sign reads
Avoid Sudden Turns of the Wheel,
and I abide. Then, without my permission, the side wind shifts to my back. The sun, also behind me, floods the sandy swales and even the sheep with a marvelous green-yellow light. I feel the pendulum of luck swinging my way.

Yet there's always the suspicion that good weather won't last in Patagonia. “To this day I don't know whether I love it with all my soul,” wrote Simpson, “or hate it with all my heart. Or both.”

A blue truck stops, out of courtesy and curiosity. The bed of the Chevy holds the four-wheeled ATV of a modern sheepman. He's a smiling dad with two sons who appear to be exact shrunken copies of their father. They want to know where I'm going.

I tell them: to the lowest point in all of South America, Salina Grande.

“Yes! It's forty-two meters below sea level. You must look carefully for the turn, just after you first see the low.”

The “low” is a great bowl ten miles across, several hundred feet deep, and rimmed here and there with sandy bluffs. The turnoff is obvious. The two-track road is smooth, and soon I'm close enough to see that the bottom of the bowl appears to be filled with the sky. The splendid illusion spurs me on, although there's no need to hurry. It's only a few miles, and there's a good two hours before sundown. A pair of guanacos, slender humpless camels, spy on me, but they're not very good at hiding. A lime green lizard shoots across the road like a party favor, celebrating my arrival. I take the hint and stop for a festive drink of red wine.

But like many an excitable man, I suffer from premature celebration. Only a mile from the salt lake, I catch the sputter of a poorly tuned engine. It's a pea green Peugeot pickup truck. The rancher inside is not smiling.

“This is private property. A tourist can't come here.”

It had never occurred to me that somebody may actually own Salina Grande. I'm too dumbfounded to deliver my life history, and it's just as well: he may think me a dangerous crank on a whacked-out mission. Instead, I meekly ask Mr. Fernandez for permission to camp by the salt lake.

“But what if you start a fire?”

No fires. Promise.

“If I let one person camp, I' ll have to let others.”

I explain that this salt lake is like no other in South America, but he's already loading my bike into the truck. “You cannot stay here.”

Can I stay at some other place on Salina Grande?

“You can go to the next
salina
—Salina Chica. It looks the same. There are three or four
salinas
, and they all look the same.”

He drives me back up to the main road and offers to take me to Puerto Piramide. I decline, saying I'd rather head downwind. The truck heads toward the mainland, the clatter of its diesel engine fading until there is no sound but the wind.

I figure Mr. Fernandez isn't the owner of Salina Grande but works there under strict orders to eject all tourists. It won't be his fault if a single man fails to heed him, and instead finds another road to the Salina, five miles east. Keeping in mind that Mr. Fernandez may at this moment be preparing his Elmer Fudd musket with a load of salt intended for me, I sweep away my tire tracks at the turnoff. A branch from a shrub with leaves like arrowheads does the job.

This road is five miles of dips puddled with gluey clay. I charge through, only to bog down in a sand trap. I drag the bike. Nothing can stop me now that I see that the lake at the bottom of the
salina
is no longer the color of the sky. It's a shocking pink and blue, and it's edged in brilliant white.

I reach the shore thirty seconds before the sun drops below the horizon. The full moon is rising over a shore of pure salt. The pink comes from the sort of algae that gives flamingos their color.

There is an abandoned saltworks, reduced to foundations, and a wood-slat cabin that rattles and moans in the wind. I find a better camp in a sandy hollow rimmed with plantains, their stalks like cotton swabs. Out of the wind, I devour a ham sandwich and get to work on the wine, then lie back and listen to the whistle of a bird and the slap of waves on the shore.

Later, my spirit buoyed by the wine, I stand to face the wind and see the moonlight on the salt. I take a stroll, and crystals pop underfoot like glass ornaments. I'm happier than I should be. Patagonia had beat me, from the dripping Andes to the blasted desert. Yet when I turn to see the light from my lantern, I understand that this is my reward—a single yellow flame at the bottom of South America, with Mr. Fernandez nowhere to be seen.

—Art Linkletter's
Picture
Dictionary for Boys and Girls,
1961

 

“SO WHERE ARE you headed off to this time?” asked Dr. Pellerito. “Step on the scale. Let's get your weight and height.”

Djibouti, I said. It's in Africa, a little country between Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

“Africa? Malaria everywhere. One hundred fifty-five pounds—same as before. AIDS, too. Even the monkeys have AIDS. Five foot ten. Good.” He gestured to a chair. “Have a seat and tell me what you need.”

Dr. Pellerito's little office was packed with pharmaceutical samples and leaning towers of magazines ranging from
Sports Illustrated
to
Diabetes Self-Management.
A plastic fig tree languished in a corner. The walls were shingled with snipped-out cartoons taped atop older cartoons taped atop the oldest cartoons.

We talked about malaria. Dr. Pellerito, looking professional in his white lab coat and neat beard, listened carefully and said, “So you don't like the Lariam? It's the antimalarial recommended by the County Health Clinic.”

Yes, I said, but it gives me nightmares. I'd much rather try the new drug, Malarone.

“OK with me.” He found a pad and pen advertising Zoloft and figured how many Malarone to prescribe. “Twenty-five. Alright—what else do you need for Djibouti? What about wild animals?”

Not many, I hope. I only worry about the hyenas.

“Well, a hyena can eat you.”

I' ll carry a pointed stick.

“They run in packs. You might get the first, but others will be right behind.”

He was right, but he was being playful, too. He took my blood pressure. “I don't know how you do these trips, but I suppose you're used to it, camping alone all over the world. How do you pick these places like Djibouti? Are you carrying something for dysentery? Amoebas?”

I checked my kit and said, I've got some Flagyl, but isn't that for
Giardia?
The lowest point in Africa is in Djibouti, a salt lake called Lac Assal. It's like Death Valley, except deeper: five hundred feet below sea level. And it's right on the coast, where the Red Sea opens into the Indian Ocean, across from Yemen. The sea doesn't rush into the pit because they're separated by a volcano that last erupted in 1978. Can I take Flagyl for amoebas?

“You can, but the dose is tripled.”

How do I know if I've got
Giardia
or amoebas?

“That's right—you won't know. Why the low points? Most people go up, not down—or is that your point? Something different?”

Actually, something warmer. Someplace I can ride my bike. Unless I've got dysentery.

Dr. Pellerito discovered a cache of the anti-diarrheal Imodium. He gave me enough to plug the Nile.

“That should do it. What about the roads in Djibouti? Do you have any general antibiotics?”

I checked my kit. Nope, I said. I don't expect many paved roads. There's only one city.

“How about some Ciproflaxin?” He tossed me a box of two five-hundred-milligram pills. Then another box. “Do you have a rearview mirror?” Another box.

I stuffed them into my kit, forgetting to ask the dosage. I said that I had a mirror, but I survive by assuming that
nobody
sees me.

“That's what I do when I'm jogging. Need some antibiotic cream? Band-Aids?”

Sure. Thanks.

“I wouldn't turn down free Band-Aids, either.” The sterile-until-opened Band-Aids were relics; the wrappers immediately peeled apart. Dr. Pellerito knew I didn't care. He wrote a prescription for my bee-sting allergy injector, shook my hand, and said, “Djibouti. You're set. Have a good trip.”