Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [79]
17: AMOLANAS HACIENDA
Darwin Slept Here
But I have too deeply enjoyed the voyage, not to recommend any naturalist, although he must not expect to be so fortunate in his companions as I have been, to take all chances, and to start, on travels by land if possible, if otherwise on a long voyage. He may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers (excepting in rare cases) nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipated.
—CONCLUSION TO THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE
“I AM TIRED OF REPEATING the epithets barren & sterile,” Darwin wrote as he continued his trip north, riding his horse through the desert as the Beagle surveyed up toward Peru and the Pacific crossing. “These words, however, as commonly used, are comparative. I have always applied them to the plains of Patagonia, yet the vegetation there possesses spiny bushes & some dry prickly grasses, which is luxuriant to anything to be seen here.”
I read aloud to Josh as we rode the bus toward the mining town of Copiapó. “Barren and sterile,” I said, looking out the window at the baked earth, cracked waterless ravines, and sparse, stick-like bushes.
“We’ll see if we can help him and think of some new epithets,” Josh said. He deliberated for a moment.
“If a cow died out there,” he said, “it would be parrilla by evening.”
We passed a solitary farmhouse. Heat waves reflected off the metal roof, and a mule chewed on some yellow weeds at the edge of a fence. “It is getting pretty bleak and dead now,” Josh said. “If this was the U.S., they’d have a giant Smokey the Bear sign. Fire danger: extremely fucking high.”
“The whole journey is a source of anxiety to see how fast you can cross the desert,” Darwin declared. And while Josh and I anxiously suffered and sweated in seats on the sunny side of the bus, Darwin dealt with a far more serious problem: His horses had no food. At his campsites he found sticks for firewood but not fresh greenery. And some animals, it appeared, lived on the sticks. Darwin recorded with amazement that the mules used for hauling loads to and from the mines subsisted “on the stumps of the dry twigs of the bushes.” His own horses, pickier or more sensible, didn’t eat for nearly three days, until he arrived at a small hacienda called Potrero Seco in the Copiapó valley. “To all appearance however the horses were quite fresh,” he wrote apologetically. “No one could have told they had not eaten for the last 55 hours.”
The next day, cruising out of the valley in a small rental car, Josh and I passed a bridge-crossing sign at Potrero Seco, in the middle of an expansive vineyard. We pulled off the road and asked a worker in the field if there was still a hacienda around the area, but he looked at us like we were unhinged and said no, there’s just the winemaking house at Cerro Blanco, a few miles up the road. So we got back in the car and made for our original destination, Amolanas, a hacienda at the end of the Copiapó valley where Darwin met an elderly gentleman named Don Benito Cruz. “I staid there the ensuing day & found him most hospitable & kind,” Darwin wrote. “Indeed, I defy a traveler to do justice to the good nature with which strangers are received in this country.”
Darwin had visited plenty of haciendas in his time, but rarely were they labeled on maps. Amolanas was. It appeared to be located in the narrow southern part of the valley, at the end of a twenty-mile dirt-road connector off the main highway. After a familiar hassle with the rental-car company, which involved the saleswoman never having heard of Amolanas (“Where?” she asked), then calling three of her friends to find out if the road still existed (yes, they said, although they differed in their assessments of its condition), we sailed out through the valley.
The scenery looked similar to the Coquimbo valley, but even drier. The river didn’t trickle, it oozed. The