Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [13]
When he did call, around 9 P.M., it was to tell me that four other tourists had come by. Perez sounded about as surprised as I was about this. We were on for penguins.
In the morning, the hotel called me a taxi, which dropped me off at a dock at the edge of town. I stood waiting to see what kind of fellow tourists had arrived and enabled me to go on this boat ride. People who spend a lot of time in obscure corners of the world may be able to anticipate what kind of travelers are around in remote places in the low season and have their own private transportation into town, and those readers may be nodding and starting to smile now at what seemed like the cosmos choosing to have a bit of fun with everyone. Well, I didn’t know what to expect. I tried to tick through the list in my mind: no one young, certainly, because they would have arrived on the bus. Europeans or Australians on a guided tour? Wealthy Argentines who had access to a private car and decided on a whim to visit Port Desire? I mean, who (other than Darwin-fan-writers) rents a car in Patagonia? And then comes to a place like this?
Across the highway, a white sedan pulled up and two upper-middle-aged couples got out. They looked like cruise ship passengers: oldish, whitish, dressed in obvious western-traveler duds. They crossed the road and introduced themselves in halting but competent Spanish. Picking up their accent, I asked where they were from, and they turned out (of course!) to be Mormon missionaries from California. They talked for a generous while about their travels and their missionary work, which they were on a break from, but their sons, who were now in Buenos Aires, were still working at it and evidently really enjoying it.
I started to think I was going to be in for a very strange boat ride when I told them what I was doing here.
Which, evidently, was their cue to ask.
“So,” said one of the two men, who I’ll call Jim. “What brings you to Port Desire?”
This is the thing about missionaries: I’m fairly suspicious about them. Not that I find Mormonism in any way exceptional or offensive, but I just don’t much like the idea of evangelical anything. So I worried about what they’d say, and then I thought about it and worried more about what I would say. Introducing the subject of Darwin into a crowd of missionaries seems like an activity fraught with conversational peril. Darwin means evolution, and evolution, in my experience, is not something that you can casually discuss with people who are zealous enough to be missionaries. So I picked my words carefully and said in the most inoffensive way I could think of that I was retracing Charles Darwin’s footsteps.
There was a longish pause. I shuffled my feet and triple-checked the buckles on my lifejacket, and then, to my surprise, they nodded politely and said what a wonderful thing it was that I was getting out in the world and that they hadn’t known that Darwin was so young on his trip. We all smiled weakly for a while, and then they changed the subject to birds, at which they were quite expert.
Perez, who had been off fiddling around with ropes and things, came back around this time and helped us up the plank and into the boat, which was some form of g l orified zodiac. Jim, standing in the bow of the boat with a camera, started to point out different varieties of birds to his wife with a really impressive, encyclopedic range. “There’s a red-legged cormorant!” he said. “You’ll never see one that close!” As everyone else noticed the red-legged cormorants nesting in the pink cliffs, he moved on to regular cormorants and night herons and white-legged somethings-or-others and lots of other birds I didn’t recognize. “Finally!” he exclaimed at one point, gesturing at his camera, “a picture of a white-legged-something-or-other!”
His enthusiasm was infectious. I forgot Darwin for a while and grabbed my camera. Penguins nested in crevices halfway down the pink cliffs,