It’s hard to imagine how the nearly Antarctic tip of South America came to be known as Tierra del Fuego, or land of fire. It’s likewise hard to imagine being so far from home – so isolated – as Ferdinand Magellan and his crew were, sailing through appalling weather where nobody they’d ever heard of had been, five centuries ago. Especially when huge bonfires appeared onshore.
Tribes called Ona and Yaghan kept them constantly stoked for warmth. The Yaghan wore only the scantest clothing despite the cold.
Canoeists, adept at navigating the labyrinthine channels and tributaries around the straits, they hunted the sea and smeared fat over their bodies as protection from the wind and rain. As recently as 1834, on the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, Charles Darwin noted, “these people going about naked and barefoot on the snow."
The Ona lived across the strait, on the island I could see through the spray and mist. The books call them fierce warriors who adorned themselves with necklaces and bracelets of bone, shell and tendon, who hunted rats with bow and arrow, and who, wearing heavy furs and leather shoes, intimidated the bare-skinned Yaghan.
Darwin gave them their backhanded due, calling them “wretched lords of this wretched land.”
According to another early European visitor, life hereabouts consisted of 65 unpleasant days per year complimented by 300 days of rain and storms.
With time to kill, I walked to the water, past mongrels outside a Purina warehouse and put my hand in the chilly Strait of Magellan - right there amid the plastic bags and candy wrappers.
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Punta Arenas was 110,000 people, a proper town with a proper town park just across the street, which was the home to the statue of Magellan and its smooth, often-rubbed toe (conveniently located for rubbing), which was mandatory according to the local lore. 2200 kilometers south of Santiago, you take what you get.
One passenger ship was calling just now. Across the strait, looking just about west to east, low hills rose around Bahia Porvenir, Tierra Del Fuego, home of a village of the same name. I couldn’t make it out.
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Having rubbed the toe we spent the rest of the day driving to Hosteria Lago Gray. And weren’t we the city folk, speeding our petite white Nissan Saloon across 430 kilometers of utter wilderness as if we were in a hurry.
A wire screen over the windshield was to avoid a crack due to gravel, the rental car man made me understand (in Spanish). But no one else had one, so I gathered this really must have been the last car for rent in town.
We looked silly, I thought, motoring off toward the hills. A 1/4 inch mesh of expanded metal, anchored to the window all around. It extended far enough out for the wipers to operate underneath. A foot-square hole was cut in front of both the driver and the passenger with more mesh hinged over it so that the normal position was open from the top, for city driving, but for your serious gravel roads you could pull a string that reached inside your side window and roll the window up real fast to catch the string and bring the panel down, sealing the whole windshield against rocks and providing you with about a thirty percent view of the world in front of you.
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The first 109 kilometers were on blacktop, virtually no houses, virtually no traffic - a bit of Greenland with white wildflowers but no trees. After that the pavement disappeared and after a Mack truck barreled by we battened down the wire hatches.
Eventually a combination of intermittent rain, lack of traffic and squint-induced tension convinced us we really didn’t need our mesh pulled down. Some of the other traffic out here had wire cages, but less than half, and we made it all the way without a crack.
Alternately Greenland and Ireland (a little less green), the landscape rolled by undisturbed by man. Back on pavement. Then just one paved lane for eighty kilometers.
At a place called Reubens, where stood a settlement of a few buildings, the landscape blossomed dramatically into full Tasmania. Trees returned (we were northbound), namely Nire, or notofagus antarctica, the native species, which grows to twenty crooked and branched meters, compacted and dominated by the Magellanic winds. Fields of innumerable tree trunks twisted from the wind. Live trees of two-color green - the needles and lighter clinging lichen.
Rolling hills replaced the horizon-to-horizon flat, back where you could watch sheets of rain approach from miles away, then wash overhead on their march to the other horizon.
- from the eventual book Common Sense and Whiskey by Bill Murray.
(Photo of the Torres del Payne from the Chile Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
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