Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [25]
Yes, they assured me, they had hotels. They asked if I would like them to call the hotels for me. I said sure. One woman picked up the phone and called four different places, all of which were full or closed. She slumped back in her chair, causing the hinges to squeak. “That’s every hotel in the city,” she said. “All full.”
She fidgeted with some papers on her desk and then said I’d probably be able to find something in the only other nearby town, the oddly named Cmte. Luis Piedrabuena, on the north bank of the river. I thanked her and went back out to the car, hopped in, and started driving again. The highway, shining with reflected late afternoon light, crossed over the river on a long, high bridge, then a short series of side roads curled back to Piedrabuena, just upstream from the delta.
The town looked about the same as Port Santa Cruz. Same brick-and-metal housing, same manicured median strips. This time, the medians had pine trees and bathing nymph marble garden statues. As the sun started to set, I walked down to the poplar-lined river’s edge. Two things noted by Darwin—the speed of the current and the color of the water—appeared to be accurate still. The color was a milky, minty green, sediment-rich and turbid. In the river’s middle, it flowed around the same thicket-covered sandy islands that had caused the Beagle crew a headache.
“We tracked but a short distance,” Darwin wrote on the second day of the trip, “for there are in this part many islands, which are covered with thorny bushes, & the channels between them are shallow, these two causes hindered us much.” I peered into the fading evening light and thought, “Check.”
Another major nuisance for the Beagle crew manif e s ted itself to me in the alta peligro (high danger) sign on the riverbank warning against swimming. The river’s swift current meant the Beagle sailors were not able to row their whaleboats up the river and had to pull them instead, the entire crew taking turns in the yoke. Dragging against the river they managed only about ten miles a day, according to Darwin, who made sure to emphasize that “every one” (his italics) took a turn pulling. The excruciatingly slow pace ensured plenty of time for studying the repetitive scenery.
I spent that night in a completely deserted hotel, a low, cement building in which, after I received my room key, I never again saw the receptionist. I woke up when it was light out and found a hotel employee smoking a cigarette and reviewing account books in the lobby. He nodded a curt goodbye as I carried my pack out to the car.
I had to backtrack a bit to the southern edge of the river to get to the turnoff for Provincial Route 9, the road that started about fifteen miles inland and extended west all the way to Lake Argentina and the tourist town, El Calafate. I had been making armadillo jokes and feeling end-of-the-earthish on the main paved highway out of Rio Gallegos, but now, as I turned onto the washboard dirt route, I felt like I was leaving the world entirely behind. The sky turned dark. Only a narrow band of blue at the horizon slit the heavy gray above. The clouds had the effect of dimming the lights across the plains, turning green bushes black, so it looked as if a fire had consumed the entire area. Guanacos, sheep, and rheas milled about alongside the road, clearly not used to cars. I had to honk them off the road in places, and many of the rheas would run along the road just in front of me before peeling away at the last minute. I had enough time to pull out my camera