Patter-Gonia
I
I WOKE up with a start. It was quite still outside. For thirty days I had listened to the laughter of wind — sometimes a faint chuckle, then rising to a roar, catching at the sides of the house and shaking the roof, or pouring like a solid stream across the pampa and thrashing the calafate bushes as it passed by. Sometimes it would rise until it shrieked with cachinnations of a madman. One could not help thinking that the land was holding its sides in mirth over the jokes it had played on mankind. For this was Patagonia, where only sheep and Englishmen seem at home. I threw off the guanaco robes that covered the bed, put on my bathrobe and slippers, swung open the door, and stepped out into the silver of that rare and beautiful thing, a calm moonlit Patagonian night. The ceaseless fret of the wind was gone for this half hour. Lake Viedma still rolled its surf with a roar up the shingle and distantly one could see the sharp tooth of Fitzroy backed by the white of the father of all glaciers. Gaunt icebergs glittered on the pearly lake against the indigo-blue backdrop of the Andes. The words of a man with whom I had ridden a few days before came back to me: ‘Over the hill you’ll see mountains that look like something that ain’t.’
Indeed a certain touch of unreality has always characterized this most southern of inhabited lands. Man has cruised along its shore and it has laughingly played practical jokes on him. After Drake and Magellan anchored on these coasts at Port San Julian they came back with strange tales of Patagonian giants. They had not seen them, although the Tehuelche is a tall Indian, but they found immense footprints, and if a man wears a number twenty-four shoe he must be at least ten feet tall. One suspects there was the merest show of malice in the Tehuelche’s adoption of oversized footwear. But after all, Patagonia did not treat these two explorers too severely, for they both wintered on the coast, probably mightily puzzled when December turned out to be Patagonia’s June. Both of them faced mutinies and had to hang or behead some of their subordinates. These slight incidents, which have troubled historians not a little, are perhaps attributable to a mild strain of madness brought on by the wind whooping in their ears through the long nights of a Port Famine winter.
Or, perchance, the tides that rushed into the inlets shook their morale, for the springs at Santa Cruz rise some forty-eight feet, while they are even higher at Rio Gallegos. Seeing them ebb is like watching the water run out of a very turbulent bathtub after the plug has been pulled. It must have been rather annoying to have beached one’s carrack or galleon (what did they use?) and to have gone off to hunt ostriches or penguins with one’s arquebus, and then to come back and find one’s boat out in thirty feet of very cold and fast-moving water, or careened on a mud flat far from the sea. Even now, with the modern steamers of the Compañía Anónima, one sometimes has one’s doubts with a spring tide racing by and San Julian or Rio Gallegos rising up and down in front of one’s eyes as though it were set on a slow-moving elevator.
After these brave spirits had passed by, the Spaniards seem to have left Patagonia well alone. Its forbidding coast glowered at them out of a sandy blast of bitter wind, and the great pampas of the River Plate were puzzle enough: that great sea of grass, where man was lost for want of a landmark, a treeless land save for the great spreading ombú, where the Indians fought not with spears and bows and arrows like civilized folk, but with three stones tied with thongs that sent such iron-hatted gentry as Lujan of the Mendoza expedition crashing to their death among the creeks of Buenos Aires, and where the early forts were bedeviled with a plague ‘of lions, tigers and ounces,’ was quite enough for them. The iron-shirted conquistadors came after gold, and the pampas played them a sorry joke by presenting them with the finest grasslands in the world. They did not understand, the pampa winds chuckled, and the colonizing of La Plata limped along for a hundred years in tragedy and disillusionment. Only when the buccaneers broke through the Straits of Magellan did Sarmiento try to establish his ill-fated colony near Punta Arenas to catch the heretics before they could pass into his most Christian Majesty’s Pacific Ocean to loot and burn on the coasts of Chile and Panama.
But the derisive snickers of the pampas rose to the demoniac laughter of the Patagonian winds as one crossed the Rio Negro southward, and for two hundred years the Tehuelches rode unmolested across its barren miles. Here is a maze of tablelands, one above another, vast steppes colored orange, crimson, and gold, mellowed by a haze of ever-blowing dust and crowned westward by forbidding cliffs of black lava. The country is a desert, yet day by day black and forbidding clouds rush eastward from distant hills and the sun rarely shines as it should in any well-regulated arid country. Still further west, where the blue Andes rim the sky and the wet winds sweep in from the Pacific, it is another story. There it is always chilly, frost may strike any night of the year, and if at midday it is hot enough for fifteen minutes so that one can comfortably crawl out of one’s usual two sweaters and a sheepskin, it is one of the dog days itself. It is probably such a good sheep country because the sheep have to grow heavy wool overcoats to keep warm, and they make especially good mutton because of the muscular development they get from shivering in the wind after they’ve been shorn. Yes, the Patagonian wind is tempered to the shorn lamb — tempered with the bitter edge of sharp sand to give its blade a bite.
II
While we are on the subject of climate, let us speak again of the wind. When I arrived in that strange town at the crossing of the Santa Cruz, with the euphonious name Paso Comandante Luis Piedra Buena — the Paso for short — one of the local citizens was employed in moving a sand hill from his lot. It was very simple. He took a shovel and tossed the sand into the air, and it flew off to the Falkland Islands a thousand miles away. In exposed places the playful breezes have stripped all the soil away from the surface and left only those pebbles of four inches in diameter and over. Little stones about the size of pigeons’ eggs roll gently along on breezy days, and a Patagonian once remarked to me that in real windy weather it takes six strong men to hold a sheepskin over a keyhole. The French have an aeroplane line down the coast starting from Bahia Blanca and flying a tumultuous thousand miles south over canyon and mesa, stopping at the oil town of Comodoro Rivadavia and then bucking its way south to Rio Gallegos and the Straits of Magellan. It is said the aviators wear spurs to keep the planes from bucking them overboard, and the consumption of paper bags in the cabins is the largest in the world. One of these Aero-postal ships is said to have left the field at Comodoro Rivadavia (soul-satisfying names these Patagonian towns have) and flown desperately for three hours in the wind, only to land ignominiously and dump its prostrate and moaning woman passenger at its starting point. When a plane lands, the ground crew rush out with hooks, stakes, and ropes to keep it from blowing away. To take advantage of the slowing up of a breeze due to ground friction, the pilots fly just above the ground, hopping fences and chasing the guanacos so closely that one can count those with mange. Irigoyen, Aero-postal’s ace, once looked at a weather report from the next station which read: ‘Ground winds 140 kilometres an hour.’
‘We shall have to wait,’ he stated.
Half an hour later came another telegram: ‘Ground winds now 100 kilometres an hour.’
‘Complete calm,’ he said; ‘let’s go.’
Winter comes to this wind-swept land with snow which falls one day and is swept into the canyons on the next, burying the flocks of sheep that cower in the hollows. Always the wind — on the calmest days with soft piping of flute, and on stormy days the great sweep of the brasses and the roar of the drums. But usually one does not fly into this area, for at the northern end of Patagonia the Argentine Government has built a railroad that struggles up desolate sand-swept canyons from the Rio Negro to the most northern group of the Andean lakes. The train staggers up grades and the wind sweeps dust into every nook and cranny. Everything takes on a gray tinge as one drowns one’s sorrows in Baron de Rio Negro and ‘whiskey-soda.’ The dust is chased vainly from point to point by officiallooking gentlemen with feather dusters. In the dusk one comes to the lights of Ingeniero Jacobacci winking lazily in the dusty air, and then the train plunges on into the windy night, the wheels ringing as it winds around the curves. In the morning the canyons are steeper, with little clear water streams in them and the hills faintly green. Castellated and towered walls of tuff blotched green and blue march by. One sights an occasional patch of emerald grass; stunted pines rim a hillside here and there. The train rushes around a curve and there spread in front of one is the great chain of the Andes, snow-crested, and lapped into it the brilliant blue of Nahuel Huapi, queen of Argentine lakes.
And here again Patagonia has its little joke, for Nahuel Huapi is dammed at its lower end by forbidding sterile moraines so that its eastern end is far out on the plain, while to the west it lies in narrow gorges, where ‘the wild cataract leaps in glory’ among the deep green shades of antarctic beech. The great mass of Tronador with its necklace of hanging glaciers looks down upon it all. But this lake region is now on one of the world’s beaten paths. Through Lake Nahuel Huapi and Frias passes the high road to southern Chile — if one can call it that. And American fishermen come south to cast their flies on the waiters of Traful for salmon trout. The Spanish Friars passed by here in early times and must have been awed by the tremendous precipices of Laguna Frias, which rise on all sides to the green and blue snow mountains, if their minds were not set upon more mundane, or possibly we might say more sublime, things; for in the history of their travels they rarely mentioned the scenes through which they passed. Here, too, Patagonian winds chuckled, for statesmen drew the division of Chile and Argentina along the watershed. Just a hundred miles south of the railroad one comes on a settlement, Veinte Seis de Octubre, — yes, the Twenty-sixth of October, — founded by Welshmen, and the inhabitants still talk Welsh or Spanish, and sometimes English.
And hereabouts begin those topographic peculiarities that brought Argentine and Chile almost to the point of war twenty years ago, for the old continental glacier that once covered all northwest Patagonia flung up some dams so that the lakes in the foothills to the east of the mountains perversely drain westward to the Pacific through deep canyons cut through the heart of the Andes. As a consequence, the original boundary of Argentine and Chile made long excursions eastward into the Patagonian plains, and it was only the good sense of the peoples concerned which permitted an amicable settlement on a common-sense basis. But these very geographic complications so embarrassing to governments have resulted in some of the world’s least known but most glorious scenery. Only at its northern end at Nahuel Iluapi is it known by even the most adventurous tourist, for southward there are few roads, and most of the sierra country can be reached only on horseback.
As one travels along the barren foothills, one passes a series of long narrow lakes stretching from behind humpy moraine dams on the plains westward along fjord-like winding arms deep into the misty recesses of the mountain. Often at their western ends deep green glaciers, cavernous and crevassed, pour their ice streams into the blue-green water, and icebergs drift down the lakes pushed by the ever-blowing wind. At the eastern end of these lakes the hills are barren and forbidding, the grays and tans of the sands and shales blending sombrely with the black of basalt, but westward where the rain is driven like a spray from the distant Pacific the deep green and bronze of the antarctic beech contrasts with the sea-green of the glaciers, the light gray and white of the snow-frosted granite peaks, and the purple of the lake. Sometimes when the mists drift down and the sun filters through them there is a pale overcast of blue-gold haze such as that with which Maxfield Parrish endows his paintings.
III
The Andes themselves, a ragged tumble of peaks hedging about a great mound of ice, the Continental glacier, are fretted and carved into myriad forms. From Tronador, the Thunderer, with its hanging girdle of glaciers, and the perfect cone of Osorno so like that honorable mountain Fujiyama, southward to the spine-like pinnacle of Cerro Fitzroy towering above Lake Viedma, and massive Sarmiento guarding the Straits of Magellan, one sees a glittering panorama of faërie peaks. The dust of travel, the long road from the coast, the ceaselessly blowing winds, are forgotten in the spell of their presence. And perhaps the wind chuckles a little sardonically as one passes the great bouldered sentinel on the last dusty moraine and stops, spellbound, gazing down Lake Argentino to the tumbling glacier and its rampart of castellated peaks. I have heard the winds whisper from a dust-whirl: ‘So, you cursed all these dusty miles. See what I had concealed behind them!’ Then, perhaps, it has come back, shaken a calafate bush, and whispered in one’s other ear of the salmon trout that leap out of the Rio Leona in silver arcs or dash like golden arrows in Lago Traful — for here is some of the world’s best fishing.
The lakes of southern Patagonia are hard to reach, for it takes two days of dizzy flying from Bahia Blanca and then a hard day over the roughest of roads, past the spot where Captain Fitzroy of the Beagle turned back to Santa Cruz with his young assistant, Charles Darwin. And it may well be that thinking of the riddles of this strange land led that quiet, studious young man along the ways of thought which transformed the scientific theories of the modern world. Here at Punta del Lago one may rest in a boliche hidden behind the shingle beaches of the lake and run by a Dane named Boderson, whose father-in-law from Holstein has an orderly German garden, sheltered from the wind by tamarisk and poplar, where he teaches the tow-headed Boderson children.
Strange are the plants of this land, tor most of them are not green, and even after the snow melts in the spring the landscape is only faintly tinted. On the plains one finds a lush growth of brown grass, which the sheep cannot eat because it is too sharp for their insides. It never turns green even during the rains, but remains a spiny tan tussock. The sheep feed on low-growing leafy graygreen plants that appear like domeshaped cushions on the pampa. The most important shrub is the mata negra, which is black. With it one finds the calafate, a deep-green tall relative of our barberry, whose blue berries stain the lips of all Patagonian children, and which has given rise to the local proverb, ‘He who has eaten of the calafate always returns to Patagonia.’ In the mountains the trees are mainly a small-leaved beech which retains its leaves through the year, but changes to a greenishcoppery color in the fall, and looks at a distance like a conifer. About Nahuel Huapi the Araucanian pine grows. Around the haciendas one usually finds windbreaks of poplar and tamarisk, often planted in the shape of an arrow to split the wind, and in their shelter flowers flourish, so that often one is surprised to find a beautiful patch of garden behind a ranch house.
Coming out from Santa Cruz one may see the few animals that Patagonia boasts, chief of these being the guanaco, which one might describe as a motheaten camel without a hump. It has its little Patagonian peculiarities. It apparently likes to drink sea water. Darwin noticed this, as he did another of its strange habits — that of depositing its dung always in the same pile. Someone has facetiously suggested that the Indians trained it to do this so that they could use it for fertilizer. Unfortunately for this very erudite theory, the Indians raised no crops.
One of Patagonia’s little jokes in the animal line is the tuco-tuco — a blind mole-like animal which one very rarely sees, but which murmurs its cry of ‘tuco-tuco’ ceaselessly underground. Darwin, sleeping on his saddle blanket, complained of its waking him at night. The native Patagonian hare is not of the rabbit family at all, but is an agouti. He is rabbit-shaped, with a black and brown coat, but with a peculiar unrabbit-like nose, and a walk or lope instead of the rabbit’s hop. He usually weighs about twenty-three pounds, and his size has given rise to many stories of how the new Scotch sheepherder had such a hard time getting the last black lamb into the pen. Someone imported the European hare, and it now is seen everywhere south of the Rio Negro. The mountain lion has been nearly stamped out by the sheepmen.
The most characteristic small fourfooted animal is the armadillo, that curious survival from bygone geological ages, which scuttles for his hole along the road. These little animals are at least partially blind and are easy to catch. Roasted in the shell, they are not unpleasant to eat. Their curious heads resemble that of a gaunt cow with floppy ears. Occasionally deer are seen in the mountains, but as a whole four-footed animals are scarce, while exactly the reverse is the case with the birds, and they are a strange assemblage.
They begin with the Patagonian ostrich or rhea. Now I always thought the ostrich was a hot-desert animal, but here in the bitter breezes this immense race horse of a bird exists and seems to thrive. His gray fringe of feathers cannot possibly keep him warm and his skin is covered with bumps that look like glorified goose-pimples — the kind you find on your ostrich-skin pocketbook. And, by the way, the Tehuelches use his neck skin in toto to make tobacco pouches, while the dust in all Argentine trains and houses is stirred up and redeposited by feather dusters made of Patagonia’s ostrich feathers — they are not the handsome kind. Possibly this tropical bird keeps himself warm by running, for neither fences nor hills halt his stride.
One’s ideas of suitable birds for a snowy, bitterly cold clime receive some further blows, for among the beeches that cluster about the foot of the glaciers one finds a green and red parakeet, while hummingbirds fly in the snowstorms, and pink flamingoes hunt shrimps in the icy lakes. For the hunter there is the martineta, a beautifully mottled partridge, beloved of the Argentine, pickled in vinegar; the Falkland Island geese, almost too tame to shoot; and the beautiful black-necked Magellanic swan.
Such are to-day’s animals. Yesterday’s were stranger, and much that we know of them is due to two famous Argentines — the Ameghino brothers, and to that poker-playing scientist, Hatcher of Princeton. These ancient animals run all the way from the strange dinosaurs to the armored club-tailed armadillos (glyptodonts) whose bony tail reminds one of the spiked mace of a crusader. Of all this weird collection, one has a strange interest — the great ground sloth, a clumsy beast about eighteen feet long that must have weighed upward of a ton. He is remarkable because in southern Patagonia he seems to have lived in caves with men. In these caves remains of the ground sloth are intimately mixed with the spear and arrow heads and ashes of fires of the prehistoric Patagonians in such a way as to lead to the belief that the occupation was joint and that the sloth was n’t dragged in after a successful hunt. What these people did with their huge pet is still a mystery. Someone has suggested they milked it! At any rate it is still a Patagonian riddle and it eventually led to the most famous and successful Patagonian practical joke.
For the dwellers in these wind-swept wastes join in with the winds’ mirth. Perhaps, like Dunsany’s two burglars who jimmied the gates of heaven and found only blue sky, blazing icy stars, and roaring satiric laughter, these people, baited by the whistling wind among their painted hills, have come to regard life as one of the Universe’s jokes. One trick Fate played on the Patagonians was to send a rather subdued-looking American scientist from Princeton to collect fossil bones of the strange animals the Ameghino brothers had been describing. He came for a few months, stayed three years, and taught the Patagonians poker. The professor passed through every hamlet from Bahia Blanca to the Straits; the lessons were always the same, — perhaps, being a geologist, bluffs were his specialty, — but as a rule the loose change of the community passed on to the bone hunter to be spent on science. When the famous night finally arrived on which Hatcher was to leave San Julian the whole countryside dropped in to exact revenge. The game started early and was one of those friendly Western games with everyone’s sixshooter on the table. The stacks of pesos in front of Hatcher climbed up and up until he was almost hidden behind them; the whistle of the steamer sounded down the harbor. Hatcher announced that he must go. Someone suggested they would not let him. He picked up his gun and his pesos and backed through the door with a ‘ Good night, gentlemen! ’ No one made a move. The wind whooped round the eaves and Patagonia went back to its sheepshearing with a wry smile on its face.
It is in this same San Julian that one runs into the world’s most original hotel. The proprietor sleeps with a string tied around his toe and leading out the front door. When you pull it, he jerks a cord that unlatches the door and you walk in and select any unoccupied room that suits you — meanwhile disturbing several slumbering tenants in your search. At the end of the week you make your own bill out for what you think you owe and pay it. You serve your own drinks and usually when you leave you find a large sticker on your suitcase proclaiming that you‘ve stopped at the ‘ Hotel Majestic, San Julian, The World’s Worst.’ Its owner was once approached by some local magnates with seals and badges and a certificate from Buenos Aires appointing him to office as marine boiler inspector. He faithfully visited the first Anónima ship that called at the port and was led under the boiler through such clouds of dust that he nearly choked to death, and finally, after being nearly baked with the heat, signed a certificate of inspection for the ship’s captain. When he applied to the government for his fees he found no one had ever heard of the office or the appointee and San Julian rang with laughter.
But the most successful joke pulled off in Patagonia had almost international repercussions. Some inventive genius from the oil town of Comodoro Rivadavia visited the region of Lago Buenos Aires in the most isolated part of the Cordillera. When he returned home he told a tale of seeing mysterious monsters rising from the lakes and of finding immense footprints in the new-fallen snow. Some of the men from the camp embellished the story further and finally, amid suppressed laughter of the old-timers, ambitious greenhorns organized an expedition to pursue and take the fabulous monsters. Their progress was followed by a ripple of laughter across the windswept pampas, and Patagonia sat down to enjoy its mirth, when suddenly it was struck dumb by a rumor that it could only half credit; men swallowed hard and tried to look solemn: a New York expedition was coming to hunt the monsters!
The reception committee is said to have been of unprecedented size, the expedition was greeted with the greatest courtesy and solemnity, the elephant guns were examined and praised, and the tall tales of the dinosaurs of the Andes were carefully extended and enlarged upon. The expedition started to the wilds and the coast rang with Homeric laughter; men in the bars from Bahia Blanca to Rio Gallegos toasted the success of the expedition and writhed in helpless mirth. To have on one’s fellow Patagonians was worth while, but to be able to pull the legs of these smart New Yorkers — ah, that was rare indeed. What the New Yorkers said about it is not in the record, but we can well imagine. After all, perhaps when they had seen the titanic beauty of Lago Buenos Aires they forgave the tellers of fables.
These people are a strange mixture — English, Welsh, Scotch, mixed with the Gaucho of the northern pampas. Hard riders, hard drinkers, hospitable, good friends, and among the healthiest of people I have seen in South America. Nowhere else do the children look so healthy. Nowhere else do men seem so robust. Yet no writer on Patagonia but has complained of the ceaseless wind and the squalor of life there, and no man that I have ever talked to who has lived in Patagonia but loves the land. Perhaps the explanation lies in a remark of Stefansson’s, that only on the pathless plains are men free. After all, the breath of freedom is that which makes life worth living, whether it be to the Englishman on the distant sheep camp, the Gaucho riding up to the boliche with his knife in the back of his belt, or the Gallego driving a train of immense twowheeled carts across the pampa.
As I look back at Patagonia I see the silver bow of a leaping trout in the Leona, the blue and green of the mountain lakes, the snow-capped peaks, the green of the glaciers, and the far varicolored steppes of the high pampas, the boliche behind its arrow of poplars, and above it all I hear the ceaseless laughter of the wind. The dust and the bitter cold vanish, for one loves a laughing land even if that laughter be at times sardonic. Yes, I have stained my mouth with the blue of the calafate berry and I shall return to a land of strange enchantment!