Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [61]
The dunes reached back about a quarter of a mile from the beach, and Josh and I stumbled across the hard black sand. Bits and pieces of trail wound through the sparse vegetation and dipped into swampy puddles in the low areas. The flat spots in the dunes stretched off in a shallow valley that had the style of post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland paintings. Stunted, blackened plants curled over like burned stumps amid the wind-swept sand and a few large, drab-olive plants that looked like four-foot-wide maple leafs growing out of the ground. For Darwin, this would have felt like reaching the end of the world again, yet another place like Tierra del Fuego or the rainforest to reinforce how far he was from England. For us, still only four days removed from home, and an hour-long bus ride from pizza restaurants and Internet cafés, it felt a little different.
When you’re traveling, sometimes you want so badly for your own trip to fit into everyone else’s trip. Josh and I wanted the Chiloé National Park to feel foreign and lost and isolated, the way it had for Darwin. We wanted the Magic Isle to show up and earn its title. Darwin wanted Patagonia to feel vast and romantic and exciting, the way it seemingly had for other travelers. Well, you can’t always get what you want. Sometimes it takes a while to sort out your own mind, as it did for Darwin in Patagonia. Sometimes, modern life just hoofs right up and moos in your face, as it promptly did to Josh and me.
After a last small rise in the dunes, the beach sprawled out in front of us, a long sandy crescent stretching off into a cloud of spray flying off the backs of the breakers. Tugged by a serious rip current, the tidal zone frothed in a confused, seething jumble of foam. I poked around at the top of the dunes, analyzing the currents and the waves and the types of breaks. Josh interrupted my contemplation. “Say,” he said. “Are those cows?”
I looked in his direction and saw him crouching, sneaking up on a brown and white heifer for a picture. The cow was standing, looking moodily at Josh and slowly masticating a bit of sandy grass. “What are cows doing on the beach?” I yelled back. “Are they actually eating this stuff?” I kicked the stiff, reedy grass, which brushed off my boots and refused to be trampled. Josh ignored me. He had spotted a solo cow trudging down the beach and chased after it to get that perfect, paradisiacal vacation shot of hoof prints in the sand on a lonely beach. The cow obliged by walking slowly, swaying a bit from side to side as if lovesick and distracted. I trailed along, noticing more cows concealed behind every dune. Sometimes they reared up out of nowhere, hidden perfectly by the shifting sands and camouflaged by the gray landscape. It was entirely, completely ridiculous.
So much for isolation and magic in this corner of the island, I thought. One myth of Chiloé deflated.
We tried again the next day. Josh was eager to visit a small town on the opposite shore of Chiloe called Quicaví. Supposedly this was the headquarters of a cabal of witches. How the witches fit into the rest of the island’s mythology was never made entirely clear to us; they weren’t exactly a part of the strange creatures stories—after Trauco and Fiura, witches just sound so . . . normal—but then, they weren’t exactly separate. Some books blended the two, claiming that the witches used another Chilotan legend, a ghost pirate ship known as Caleuche, as their chariot. Don Carlos attempted to explain it to us by saying that people in different parts of the island celebrated different things, which ended up sounding like people just kind of told stories of whatever personal superstition they felt like telling. “Go to Quicaví and ask them about Trauco!” he said. “They don’t know!”
But they did have the witches. Bruce Chatwin, the author of In Patagonia, reported staying in a hotel in Rio Gallegos that was full of workers from Chiloé, and they told him all about it. Chatwin said there was a group of witches called the Recta