Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [4]
I also hoped that setting off on such a trip while I, too, was in my mid-twenties might allow me easier access to Darwin’s emotions while observing a continent amid fitful, often violent, transformation. Even in the 1830s, the places the Beagle dropped anchor were in the midst of a transformation—facing floods of immigrants, the rotten last years of colonial governments, expansion of grazing land and mining, the resulting pressure on traditional nature and culture, and wars between settlers and indigenous people. Darwin was tossed into the middle of this with little context from his English education. Now, as these same areas face new pressures—globalization, economic woes, environmental degradation—and with my own education having offered little in the way of background, I hoped to employ the same curiosity to better understand what, exactly, is at risk.
It’s hard not to be sentimental. In 1835, you could toss a Galapagos iguana around a few times to see what would happen. Right now, you’d leap for the tail and probably end up with a restraining order. In Darwin’s era, rolling boulders off a cliff to see how much noise they’d make was high sport. Right now, touching the sacred parts of a national park and disturbing others’ wilderness tranquility gets you raised eyebrows and a ranger-escort to the front gate. Even in a generation, things have changed d r amatically in South America. Water is dirtier. Slums are growing. Habitats are disappearing. Iguanas, tortoises, fish, and just about every other kind of flora and fauna are declining.
The early twenties are a time for worrying about risk, loss, and the past. Little wonder, I think, since when you finish college you suddenly realize the huge number of things you could be doing with your life. Like Darwin, a lot of twenty-somethings simultaneously calculate the trajectory of the safe route, and then run off screaming for variety. My own quarter-life crisis wasn’t just a panic about choosing between options, it was a panic about when or even if I might have that variety of choice again. I grew up during perhaps the most pampered, materialistic time in American history, and then hit adulthood and realized that my generation was going to make less money than our parents did, with fewer work opportunities for lower pay, and that I live in a world in which the United States is not the world’s only superpower, with looming repercussions for deferred decisions on climate change, Social Security, and tax cuts. That’s why decision-making morphs so easily into fretting about losing our youth while we are, in fact, living it. I’m told this mania wanes when you hit thirty, and it certainly did for Darwin, who, upon touching land in England again at age twenty-seven, had permanently cured his wanderlust.
A note on organization: Rather than belabor all the overnight bus rides it takes to actually follow Darwin around (although I should mention that overnight buses in Argentina are sweet—roomy reclining chairs, snacks, movies—while buses in Brazil are scary—crazy drivers, frequent crashes, and movies like The Matrix, full of noise and mayhem), I’ve split the story into three thematic parts. The first looks at how Darwin the naturalist and geologist saw South America’s east coast, from the jungle of Brazil to the plains of Patagonia. The second tracks his forays into politics and culture as he railed against slavery, rode with gauchos, and studied Native Americans. The final part follows Darwin up the west coast in a more chronological fashion, taking into account what he’d learned and how he’d changed, and leading northward into the Chilean desert where both he and I chose to end our overland travels.
In picking Darwin sites to visit, I tried to look for significance beyond science. To compare modern Rio de Janeiro to the green world that inspired Darwin to write, in his autobiography, that nothing can “exceed in sublimity the