Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [27]
“What?”
I tried again. “The Beagle, with Charles Darwin and Robert FitzRoy, came this way. I’d like to see where they went.”
“Oh,” he said. He displayed zero curiosity about this exciting historical event that had taken place on his property. “Fine. Go ahead.”
I lingered for a few seconds to see if a lunch invitation was forthcoming, but the boss sat back down and resumed his paperwork.
“Thanks,” I said.
Carlos led me back out of the house. I got in the car and drove down toward the water, and parked at a wide spot in the road where it seemed like I’d be able to hike a short distance to the river bank. A few minutes later, while I stood contemplating the dry, chalky plains around me, Carlos drove up, waved, honked, and sped past on his way to tend the sheep. Even after the truck had disappeared over a hill, I watched the plume of dust rising in the air that marked its journey across the ranch. I set off walking, lost sight of the river for a few minutes, then stumbled over a small rise and down a gravel bank. Up close, the river looked about the same as it did in Piedrabuena. Still green, still moving fast. At ten miles a day, Darwin would have seen essentially the same scenery every day for two weeks. On the fourth day of the trip, he wrote, “The country remains the same, & terribly uninteresting.”
Two weeks later, he wrote again, “The country & its productions remained equally uninteresting.”
A few hours later, back on the main route, the setting sun dropped below the Corsa’s small visor. Light streamed through the windshield and made it hard to pick out the worn path through the road. Rocks bounced and rattled off the bottom of the car, sounding metallic pings, like a squirrel firing pine cones at an aluminum roof. I slowed down to cross a metal-pipe bridge and saw an unmarked, car-width dirt path heading off to the right, in the direction of the water, which had disappeared behind a small ridge.
I had a few hours remaining before it got dark. I pulled off to see where the less-traveled road would take me, and it dropped directly down to the river (green, fast, etcetera) and emerged at a huge, flooded 90-degree bend in the water, part of a series of switchbacks that extended to the horizon, where the river swept behind a mountain and disappeared.
Near the end of his Santa Cruz expedition, Darwin wrote: “The river here was very tortuous . . . which sadly interfered with our progress.” After following a relatively straight river for the entire day, this was clearly the first part where it had been anything approaching tortuous. Looking at a map later, it was actually the only part that was winding.
The thought slowly sunk in: Darwin walked here. Leaving the car next to a small patch of scrubby bushes, I decided to walk as well. A freezing wind gusted out of the northwest, and except for the ululations of the guanacos, it was very, very quiet. Bleached bones lay strewn across the ground: leg bones, jawbones, the ribcage of an ostrich, piles of femurs and tibias, even a bloodstained pair of guanaco molars.
The plain was absolutely deserted and likely unchanged in the last 180 years—if not the last 1,800 years. With little effort I pictured a group of bored, frustrated Englishmen hiking along the river’s edge, hauling boats. Darwin walked out in front, sometimes up along the cliff, scouting and looking for guanacos to shoot. His boots would have scraped the tough yellow grass and sunk into the chalky soil, leaving strong prints in the ground. Rheas and guanacos would have watched warily from the hilltops, wheeled, and scattered as he approached. Dust would have swirled and settled on his jacket, his gun, and his hair. The rest of the crew would have trudged behind him, wishing they were back in the King’s Head or Goat & Feathers or whichever old English pub they favored, cracking dry jokes about sporting pursuits and women.
I followed my imaginary Englishmen out along a 40-foot-tall