Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [24]
Darwin had stabbed right at the heart of the Patagonia conundrum: When romantic dreams lead you out to wild open spaces, you soon realize that they’re wide open spaces. Often vast and desolate. The scenery gets monotonous in a hurry. And by April 1834, as they approached the mouth of the River Santa Cruz, Darwin’s initial excitement had been tamped down by a year-and-a-half’s worth of walks on the “terribly uninteresting” Patagonian plains. Halfway up the river, he wrote in his journal, “The great similarity in productions is a very striking feature in all Patagonia. The level plains of arid shingle support the same stunted & dwarf plants; in the valleys the same thorn-bearing bushes grow, & everywhere we see the same birds & insects. . . . The curse of sterility is on the land.”
Inaccurate as natural history-minded Argentines like Pablo Walker found this, the woman in the car rental agency didn’t seem to disagree. She tried to talk me into a nice plane ride to El Calafate, the lovely tourist destination on the lake where foreigners could speak English and be understood, and see big glaciers, too. I explained to her that I was trying to follow Darwin’s path up the Santa Cruz and that to do so I would need to visit Port Santa Cruz, the town at the river mouth, and then drive from there along the river until I got to Lake Argentina, just past where the Beagle crew turned back. She tried again.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to go to Piedrabuena?” she asked. “It’s a bigger town. It’s very nice. And the national park, Monte Leon, is precious.”
I persisted.
“At least,” she said, “let me call and make sure that road still exists.”
Half an hour later, I was in the car, a silver Chevrolet Corsa notable as one of the American cars that you cannot purchase in America, most likely because Americans in big trucks would accidentally drive right over them without noticing. I turned the ignition and puttered out of the rental car lot while the woman waved after me and called “Good luck!”
Ten miles into the drive, I turned to counting dead armadillos for amusement. I started telling myself jokes—dead armadillo jokes. (“Why did the armadillo cross the road? It didn’t—it got hit by a truck before it got there.”) The horizon—stretched across a dry, flat, endless expanse —flickered, like a mirage. The road ahead met the sky to create another mirage effect, so the roofs of approaching cars came into view several seconds before their lower halves did. Rheas picked along the fences at the highway’s edge, and grazing guanacos darkened the horizon. Sheep and birds gathered around trickles of mud, reveling in the moisture.
My arrival at Port Santa Cruz six hours later did little to dispel my feelings of adventuring off into the middle of nowhere. The town had a population of about 4,000 on the southern edge of a fairly wide delta. It looked like an unfinished housing tract—manicured grass and fountains enhanced the median strip of the main street, but the houses emptied into dirt lots strewn with trash. The buildings on the outskirts of town were often half-completed, exposed brick and mortar with wood-shingle roofs. I drove straight to the edge of the estuary. The ebb tide exposed a huge stretch of black sand with rivulets of water draining back into the river.
A rough paved road ran parallel to the water’s edge and into the town’s municipal tourist office. When it comes to places to stop first in small Patagonian towns, travelers are a bit starved for choice. I tended to end up in tourist information offices, just as a way to confirm that, yes, there was actually a town here, and yes, it was the same town I had been trying to get to. Which the covey