Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [80]
At roughly the right spot near the end of the valley, a dirt road branched off to the farms and houses of the “Amolanas Packing Co.” The road wound through a few vineyards and emerged at the spillway for a massive gravel dam on the river that had created a sterile-looking lake. Heavy sediment had turned the water a still, opaque green. We wound away from the lake and into the mountains. The road turned chalky, and without air conditioning we faced the choice of breathing heavy dust or roasting ourselves.
The road got narrower and kept climbing. Soon we were hugging a cliff edge with the tires struggling for traction in the loose dirt. Dust swirled inside and outside the car. We passed the skeletal remains of a dump truck that had jumped a switchback and crashed down into the next one. Its engine had popped through the grill. A few minutes later, as we inched along next to a fairly sheer precipice, I looked at the road ahead and saw a reincarnation of the dead mining truck bearing down the hill toward us. “Hmm,” I said.
Josh, already nervous from the lack of traction and the steep drop-off, looked up. “What?” he asked.
I pointed out the red metallic glint of the truck as it wriggled along the switchbacks and blind curves above us.
Josh wiped his hands on his forehead and dropped our map. There was barely room for our small sedan to grip the road, squeezed as it was between the drop-off and the sheer bluff rising up a foot from my window. “Don’t look down,” I advised Josh.
“I’ve been looking down for some time now,” Josh said. “Do you think they have the same rule in Chile about whoever’s uphill being the one to back up?”
“Probably not when mining trucks are involved,” I suggested.
We rounded a bend and saw the truck blocking the entire road one hundred meters in front of us. It would be a long, hazardous job of negotiating switchbacks in reverse to get out of the canyon. I spied a spot where the road got wider, halfway between car and truck, and I gunned the engine, allowing us to perch jauntily on the uphill side of the road while the mining truck, its oversized tires hanging off the cliff edge, cleared us with six inches to spare. The driver gave us a dirty look. I waved back.
“I don’t think my heart could take any more of that,” Josh said, trembling. He switched to his radio voice. “As I wiped my sweaty palms, I wondered whether Eric understood the full direness of the situation.”
“I thought I saw you wiping your palms,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure at first if the map was making them wet or if I was making it wet,” he said. “But it was me.”
“I suppose the nice thing about being on the driver’s side is that I can’t really concentrate on the cliff edge.”
“I concentrated enough for both of us,” Josh said.
A nagging thought I’d been chewing on for the last few miles, à la Darwin’s horse gnawing its post, suddenly revealed itself.
“I don’t think Darwin would have come this way,” I said. “He never mentioned leaving the Copiapó valley, and we’ve clearly done that.”
We had gained maybe one thousand feet in elevation. Darwin’s description of Amolanas didn’t include anything about hiking in the scorching desert.
“I think,” I said, “I have a pretty good idea what’s actually at the end of this road.”
A few minutes of driving later, the road flattened out at the mountaintop. Three more mining trucks idled there, waiting to pick up loads of rock. I swung our car around, hopped out, and ran up to one of the trucks as the driver leaned out the window.
“Hey,” I said. “Amolanas is a mine, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. He looked at me with a strange expression, as if to say, “Obviously.”
I ran back to the car. “Sorry, Josh. We didn’t need to come up here after all. And now we’re going to race back, quickly, before that mining truck gets in front of us.”
We scurried off like roaches fleeing the light and just