Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [70]
Gratz settled back into his chair and started to tell us about the tidal wave that followed the 1960 earthquake, which had been so powerful it lifted livestock out of their fields and tossed them high up in the air. “And there was a cow,” he said. “Moooo, you know?”
He glanced over at Josh, to make sure he understood. Josh nodded.
“And it was launched in the air, like this.”
He paused again, held his hands up and traced an arc in the air following the cow’s trajectory. I was reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Josh looked suitably impressed.
“It’s kind of refreshing to see a bit of fatalism,” he said as we left the museum.
“It’s a jolly fatalism,” I agreed. “It’s like a darkly comic version of Santa Claus.”
“I think in the United States we’ve lost a bit of that,” Josh said. “We’re so afraid of everything, and we spend so much thinking we can prevent and prepare for everything, and sometimes, there’s just nothing you can do.”
In the nineteenth century, the English were starting to feel that they could solve almost anything through technology. This attitude is obviously prevalent in the United States of the early twenty-first century. The earthquake reminded Darwin—as the museum director reminded us—that sometimes people really are helpless in the face of disaster. Although I enjoyed the museum director’s what-me-worry attitude, and his laughing at fate, Darwin reacted much more somberly. He’d “never again laugh” at the power of catastrophe, not after he had thought about it and realized how fragile England’s own infrastructure was.
One of Darwin’s most prized possessions on board the Beagle was a copy of geologist Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The book set out a case for why the earth had been shaped over millennia by the same forces familiar to ninteenth century scientists—erosion, wind, waves, volcanos, and earthquakes. Lyell and Darwin would become close friends after the voyage, bonding at first over the way Darwin set out with such intense interest to prove Lyell’s theories. Lyell in some ways returned the favor, as it was he, more than anyone else, who encouraged Darwin to publish The Origin of Species. But in 1835, still nothing more than Lyell’s number one fan, Darwin was laying the seeds of their friendship in his west coast explorations. After the wonders of rainforests and ostriches on the east coast, Darwin had gone to Chile and embraced geology. It was, he wrote at one point, practically all he could think about. Good thing, because as he headed into the Chilean north, rocks, and the stuff in them, became the biggest story in town.
14: PISCO ELQUI
Demon Cactuses
The foreground is singular from the number of parallel & extensive terraces; & the included strip of green valley abounding with its willow bushes is contrasted on each hand by the naked hills.
—BEAGLE DIARY, JUNE 7, 1835
A FEW WEEKS LATER, JOSH AND I drove east through the Chilean desert in a rented Fiat. We stuck to a narrow cultivated valley along a shallow, gravel-lined river, following Darwin’s trail of geological exploration from Coquimbo. The landscape looked just like the kind of place you’d find a wide-eyed mineralogist racing around, yipping with delight, trying to grab one of everything. It also looked like the kind of place you’d find some fool mineralogist’s bleached bones. Amongst all the rockiness, a few hardy cactuses stuck it out and added a splash of olive to a palette of earthy rusts, yellows, and grays.
Josh, sitting in the passenger seat, hadn’t said anything in about twenty minutes. I glanced away from the road to see what he was doing and saw him fumbling furiously with some radio cables from his backpack. He muttered about short splices and receivers and bent over his cables again with a roll of electrical tape. He twisted a few things together, gently laid the tape over them, and suddenly Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash were singing a duet through our car radio—he had spliced three cables together and turned his iPod into a small broadcasting device.