Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [16]
The bus terminal at modern Port San Julian was an afterthought and, for most, a fifteen-minute bathroom break on the long haul between Buenos Aires and Rio Gallegos, the southernmost city in mainland Argentina. Going north, the bus pulled up at Port San Julian at 2 A.M. and left twenty minutes later. Going south, the bus arrived at 1 A.M. and left after a mere ten minutes.
Darwin called the San Julian harbor “fine,” which, in the tourist literature, local historians had translated to “beautiful.” In the dark the town looked like most other Patagonian towns, all low buildings made of cement and corrugated metal, lit with glowing orange street lamps. I arrived at 2 A.M., one of the more lively times of day, since that’s when everyone was arriving or leaving. The coffee shop in the bus terminal was open and packed, the different bus companies had staffed ticket booths, and cars cruised the streets. Exhausted by a sleepless bus ride, and still not operating on Port San Julian time (i.e. being awake and alert at two in the morning), I lugged my pack down the street to what looked like a hotel (it had a glass front door and a bar), inquired and received a room, locked myself in, and promptly fell asleep for the next ten hours.
When I woke up around noon the next day, the stores were closed, shuttered, and locked, the sidewalks were empty, and the cars and their drivers had deserted the streets. It was Sunday, always a quiet day in heavily Catholic Latin America, but I walked for several blocks without passing a person or open business, arriving after ten minutes at the harbor. A freshly painted replica of Magellan’s flagship, Victoria, creaked and groaned in the wind. Wax sailors hung from the rigging. The harbor extended around the town, which was on a peninsula, and I pulled out a copy of one of Martens’ drawings, labeled “entrance to the harbor at Port San Julian,” and compared the view. The low-profile town did almost nothing to change the scenery overall, ending, as it did abruptly, in the low brown hills which still looked very much as rendered by the Beagle’s artist. The tallest hill, where Magellan put his cross, was visible at the right edge of the drawing. Now called Monte Wood, the summit’s distinctively flat top helped me recognize it instantly, even before I saw the large metal cross poking up into the blue sky. With the entire town closed for Sunday, I decided to do what any nineteenth century naturalist would have, and walk to the top of the distant hill.
One thing I envied about Darwin: Randomly walking places must have seemed quite natural to him. As a product of twentieth century U.S. suburbs, I found it strange to glimpse a mountain, set my sights on it, and just start walking toward it on the most direct, as the crow flies, route. I kept thinking there must be an officially sanctioned trail, or a road somewhere, because that’s all I had known. North American national parks are so crisscrossed by trails it seems no natural wonder exists without a well-marked trail leading right to it. There’s no real need to think about routes, or even to watch your step. But in South America, there are plenty of places—like Monte Wood—where the only way to get there is to blaze your own trail. You learn to appreciate distance that way. You start weighing your desire to experience distinctive parts of the landscape against how long it would take you to walk to them. Months later, back at home, I would look at the hills on the San Francisco Bay peninsula and think, “I could probably be up that and back by lunch.”
The sun burned