Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [63]
He offered, when the rain cleared, to take us along the Darwin trail. Like Don Carlos, Emer was a lifelong resident who liked talking about the island’s history. But instead of mythology, his preferred topic was island ecology.
“It’s changed a lot, of course,” Emer said. He told us he had been born in Quellón, on the very southern tip of the island, and seen firsthand the changes. In particular, he said, logging and burning had erased the once-forested face of Chiloé, transforming it into pastureland and open space, while salmon farms had polluted the water. “It destroys everything we have,” he said. “But for some people a lot of money means the environment isn’t important.”
He looked outside. The clouds had moved on, leaving the sun shimmering on the water leaking out of the saturated ground. He invited us to come along and walk the Darwin trail.
“Tourism people are always fighting,” he said, putting on a coat. “ ‘Darwin passed through here,’ ‘No, through here.’ One old man is absolutely sure he had Darwin’s footprint. This part here, the elders say there was a trail here, so this is where Darwin went.” We walked along a ridge, with the scientists’ guesthouse on the right and a shallow, heavily forested canyon on the left.
Emer led us past a farmhouse where he told us biologists test different kinds of seeds to see how quickly they grow. We slopped along through the mud and clipped grass, Josh battling away thorn bushes with inch-long auburn thorns that stuck to his pants. We took a turn into the forest. “It’s really difficult to walk through the forest when there’s no trail,” Emer said as we plunged into ferns and bamboo. “Very difficult.”
Emer walked up front with his hands raised to push spider webs out of the way. He occasionally dove into the forest to retrieve some bit of moss or leaf or spider to bring back and show us. As I watched Emer leap into one of the shin-high puddles in search of a kind of streaming algae-like thing he identified as pompón, I felt a happy kinship with Darwin: Exploring a strange new world with a friendly local guide, wondering about the environment, and diving into puddles with reckless disregard for personal dryness in search of an interesting plant specimen.
Darwin was, like all his shipmates, happy to leave the wet and cold. “I believe every one is glad to say farewell to Chiloé,” he wrote in his journal. But he didn’t give up on a place that easily, and he finished off with a more upbeat view: “Yet if we forget the gloom & ceaseless rain of winter, Chiloé might pass for a charming island.”
As Josh and I stood on the ferry that afternoon, looking back over the island shining in the sun, and the rainbows scattered across the sky, and the peaks of the distant, snow-covered mountains, it was hard not to feel a bit reluctant about leaving.
Finally. Score one for the Magic Isle.
12: VALDIVIA
The Apple Story
The uniformity of a forest soon becomes very wearisome; this West coast makes me remember with pleasure the free, unbounded plains of Patagonia; yet with the true spirit of contradiction, I cannot forget how sublime is the silence of the forest.
—BEAGLE DIARY, FEBRUARY 12, 1835
DARWIN SAILED NORTH IN FEBRUARY 1835 from Chiloé to Valdivia, a small town snuggled onto a bend at the confluence of two rivers, roughly ten miles inland from the coast. The Beagle anchored at sea under the ruins of some old Spanish fortresses, and Darwin rode in a smaller boat up the river to the town. He reported that the scenery, apart from a few Indian huts, “is one unbroken forest.” When they arrived in the town itself, Darwin found it “completely hidden in a wood of Apple trees; the streets are merely paths in an orchard. I never saw this fruit in such abundance.”
Josh and I took the bus north from Chiloé and arrived in Valdivia in a hammering rainstorm. We’d been lucky with the weather in Chiloé. We were not in Valdivia.
I read out loud from Darwin’s diary as we passed