Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [73]
“It’s beautiful,” Josh said. “I wonder about the origins of these, that they’d have such different sediment levels.”
“I wonder that Darwin didn’t mention it,” I said.
“Unless it wasn’t this way in his time,” Josh replied. “It would have to be something at the source, unless it’s so polluted now that it’s changed color.”
We picked up a few rocks and skimmed them across the surface. Our tiny splashes carried up in the air and hung like whale spouts while the current raced on by. The sun sank lower and disappeared behind the mountains. With their heavy bases, glowing sandy coloring, and sharp peaks, the mountains looked a bit like Egyptian pyramids, if only someone had seen fit to come along and plant grapes in the desert of Giza.
Once again, I found myself walking in Darwin’s footsteps, watching another sunset from a place largely unchanged since his time (except for the yoga). As Josh and I laughed and compared skipping rocks and delighted in the last remnants of the day’s sun, I realized that finding Darwin sites had taken on another level of meaning for me. There’s a danger in labeling someone a genius; it makes them inaccessible. Darwin the Genius is beyond the reach of sympathy. But Darwin the person—the one who stood and watched the sunset over this same river, the one who would happily join in with Josh and I in skipping rocks—well, he was a lot like us. He was us. His career-crowning idea of evolution by natural selection is a triumph of human achievement that sprang from the perfectly achievable endeavors of careful observation, meticulous note-taking, and joyous, boundless curiosity.
15: ANDACOLLO
The Gold Mine
I was glad to take the opportunity of weighing one of the loads, which I picked out by chance. When standing straight over it, I could just lift it from the ground, the weight was 197 pounds. The Apire had carried this up 80 perpendicular yards, by a very steep road, & by climbing up a zigzag nearly vertical notched pole.
—BEAGLE DIARY, MAY 12, 1835
BY THE TIME DARWIN REACHED the Rio Claro in northern Chile, he had been away from home for more than three years. He had been living rough for those three years, sleeping half the time on a cramped ship, the other half on hard ground. Although his pronouncements about enjoying the freewheeling gaucho lifestyle and sleeping in random pastures continued, he was growing weary, and wrote in a letter home, “I am tired of this eternal rambling, without any rest.” He had dealt with traveling’s evil trifecta of food poisoning, insect bites, and theft. As much as he was tired of sleeping on the ground, it was impossible to sleep in houses because of the fleas, those “ravenous little wretches” who left his “whole shirt punctured with little spots of blood” and his skin “quite freckled with their bites.” He had logged thousands of miles on horseback and hundreds more on foot.
But Darwin’s curiosity persisted. Many Chileans seemed surprised at his geological explorations. “This was sometimes troublesome,” Darwin wrote. “I found the most ready way of explaining my employment, was to ask them how it was that they themselves were not curious concerning earthquakes and volcanos? Why some springs were hot and others cold? Why there were mountains in Chile, and not a hill in La Plata?” More than any single quote from his journal, more than any scientific discovery from the five-year voyage, this one paragraph is the reason Charles Darwin discovered what he did and is celebrated today. He loved studying the world around him and wanted to explain what he saw. He had the courage to ask.
Even Chileans who believed that geological study was useful had trouble believing Darwin’s motivations for sniffing about. He must be searching for mines, many concluded. That’s what nearly all of the other gringos in northern Chile were doing. A man out wandering