Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [40]
We sat wedged in the corner at a dark table, with Uruguayan waiters constantly tripping over my feet as they passed by on their way back to the bar. Nathan looked pleased. He later suggested that Darwin might have had his evolution epiphany while looking for a drink in Montevideo. “It’s survival of the fittest,” Nathan said. “It’s like some male of some soon to be extinct species crawling through the jungle in one last-ditch, futile attempt to find a female. Maybe it could have been Darwin’s eureka moment.”
In October 1833, Darwin boarded the Beagle anticipating that it would soon be leaving Uruguay for good. But he was disappointed to hear that the navigational charts had not been finished yet and the ship would stay in Montevideo until December. Determined, then, to do something with his time, he decided to ride to the river marking the western boundary of the country. A few days later he arrived in one of Uruguay’s original settlements, Colonia del Sacramento, and found much of the town in ruins. The ancient church at the center of town had been destroyed—it had been used as a powder magazine and was struck by lightning. Darwin walked along the half-demolished walls for a while, pronounced it a “pretty” little town, and left the next morning.
Nathan and I arrived in Colonia early in the afternoon on a bus from Montevideo and found that it was now one of the most pleasant, sleepy towns on the continent. Tree-lined, broken sidewalks funneled visitors down toward the waterfront where the Rio de la Plata lapped gently at a rocky breakwater. The town looked like it hadn’t been touched much since Darwin strolled around admiring the ruins. Walking down the main street, we ran into a hard-partying Australian whom we had last seen days earlier at a Buenos Aires pool table, standing in a haze of cigarette smoke with cue stick in one hand and a liter bottle of Quilmes beer in the other at something like six in the morning. He had been in Colonia now for three days.
“What have you been doing?” I asked, looking to the end of the street and thinking it was an awfully small place to keep him entertained for a week.
“Detox,” he said. “I go to bed early, I sleep late, I go for a walk. It’s just such a nice place to relax after all the partying in Buenos Aires.”
“When are you going back?”
“Don’t really know,” he said. “Maybe by the end of the week. I’ve gotta get back there at some point.”
He agreed to have lunch with us in a shaded sidewalk café on the main drag. Nathan dove into the national dish, steak with ham, bacon, and an egg, and we leaned back into our chairs and felt laziness overcoming us. Colonia was a brilliant place to take a leisurely stroll, and everyone was doing it; families, groups of teens, elderly couples, almost all of them carrying carved, gourd-like containers and hot-water thermoses for their maté, a boiled-grass tasting tea-like concoction which they drank through metal straws. It was late in the afternoon, and the tea hour had arrived.
Maté is an addiction widely popular in Argentina and Uruguay, and its popularity is growing among natural-food enthusiasts in the United States. To prepare it, you pull out a small bag of the herb and pack it into the bottom of your “calabash,” usually a hollowed-out gourd made for maté. Add hot water and a metal straw, pass it around, and you’ve got everything you need for a pleasant afternoon. South Americans drink it straight, without sugar, although it takes quite some time to adjust to the flavor of freshly cut lawn. Darwin, by the end of his journeys through the Pampas, seemed to have grown quite fond of his daily “mattee.”
We saw people slowing up to rest against store walls, pulling thermoses out of backpacks, sharing their tea with friends. It was peaceable, friendly, and relaxed, and after lunch we meandered down to the harbor where we watched the sunset over the still water and admired the sailboats. Groups of people in shorts and sandals were out taking their tea on the decks of the boats, a father and his son were fishing from the end of the