Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [65]
“Somehow,” Josh said as we left, “I think that guy is behind us cackling like mad.” We bent over and leaned into the wind and splashed toward the street. A fire alarm went up across the river, followed by cathedral bells ringing.
“I wonder if the cathedral is on fire,” I said.
“I think anything on fire would be pretty quickly put out in this weather,” Josh said.
“I was thinking we might warm up first.”
Josh switched to his radio voice, a more melodious, rhythmic version of his normal wisecracking. “And about halfway through the trip,” he joked, “Eric came out in favor of church burning.”
We waded down the street to the corner, where a bus for Niebla promptly picked us up. The bus radio played Lionel Richie’s “Dancing in the Streets.” We drove along the river, gray and confused, with whitecaps like the ocean. The rain slammed the side of the bus so hard we couldn’t see out the windows. At the end of the line, the driver indicated we should get off. “Where’s the fort?” I asked.
“Oh, just up the road a bit,” he said, without any hint of the malice such understatement implied. He jerked a thumb back where we had come from.
We set off walking. “I think he meant just a block or two,” I said, trying to keep Josh’s confidence up. After two blocks, I said I figured it would only be a short bit more. After a short bit more, we ducked inside a convenience store to ask directions and linger for a bit while drying off. I looked at Josh. He hadn’t brought a hood with him—“I thought it would be too much of a hassle to pack,” he explained—and water had collected in a pool on the collar of his jacket and was running down the back of his neck. His thin, nylon pants stuck to his legs, defining the contour of his knobby knees. Water rushed inward from there and drained down into his waterproof hiking boots. He had his head down and wore the same expression as a horse when it’s waiting out a storm in an open pasture. Little drops of water dripped off his nose and beaded around his cheeks. He looked absolutely miserable.
It was my turn to cackle. “Just at the top of this hill,” I promised.
We found the fort on a high bluff overlooking the river and ocean. It looked about the same as it would have in Darwin’s time, except that one of the stone buildings had been converted into a museum. A guard, huddling away from the rain at the entrance, took our entrance fee and asked us not to walk on the ruins. We promptly crossed over to the old guard house, skipping most of the fascinating but wet outdoor foundations. Inside, we found maps and flags and a small replica frigate. Although it mentioned nothing specific about Darwin’s visit, a text display suggested the fort had been mostly left alone from the time of Cochrane’s assault until restoration efforts in the 1900s. An elderly eight-pound cannon rusted in place, still pointing out at the spot near the opposite riverbank where the Beagle had anchored. We watched through slits in the walls as the wind and rain sped by like jet blasts. A few feet of grassy bluff beyond the fort tumbled into the heaving gray ocean, which dissolved into the equally gray sky.
“I saw a painting once that looked like this,” Josh said. “It was called ‘Vert igo’ and it had a naked woman standing at the end of a pier, and the ocean and sky blended together. ”
“Well,” I pointed out, “they don’t blend together perfectly because you can see the whitecaps on the ocean.”
Josh looked around forlornly. “And I don’t think a naked woman would survive very long out here,” he said.