Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  The Palmer doubled Cape Froward, rounding the southern tip of South America, and bore off northeast up Famine Reach to the roadstead at Punta Arenas. Captain Bouziga brought the ship up gently against the west side of the city’s concrete pier, as softly as a parent might put a hand to a child’s face. (When we departed Punta Arenas for the Weddell Sea five days later, the ice pilot for that leg of the journey, watching Bouziga ease away from the pier using only the Palmer’s bow and stern thrusters, then align the nimble ship in the strait before he brought the main engines on line, said, “My God, you could waltz with her!”)

  There are few places better than this area of South America in which to dramatize succinctly the slow disintegration of indigenous societies in the Americas, the dismantling of their spiritual and economic cultures, including the ones living here in the nineteenth century, people widely regarded then as the most primitive in the world. Collectively referred to as Fuegians, they compromise the Kaweskar (or Alacaluf), the Yámana (or Yaghan), and the Selk’nam (or Ona). Each of those traditions, each one’s singular idea of what being human meant, fell apart because no one of these cultures could cope with the colonizer’s culture (a culture shaped by someone else’s idea of what being human meant), which was imposed on them “for their own good.” No pitched battles were fought. There is no history of guerrilla warfare to chronicle, and few anthropological efforts were made to understand how any one of these three tribes conceived of itself in the world. Each eventually became another torn prayer flag, snapping in the wind over burned ground.

  Raspail gave this familiar story of unraveling a cosmopolitan context in Who Will Remember the People…, eschewing the usual indictment of Western civilization and concentrating instead on a more relevant point—the way local geographies are heedlessly torn up in order to make room for more efficient, more economically viable cultures. To his credit, Charles Darwin, who sailed these waters aboard the Beagle in the austral summer of 1832–33, speculated that only the thinnest veneer separated some gentleman walking briskly down Lombard Street in London one mid-nineteenth-century morning from some Yámana, Selk’nam, or Kaweskar hunter making his way through the bogs and dense beech forests here. In the egalitarian gaze of Charles Darwin, the two were brothers, not, as some then held, different species.

  During the days we were docked in Punta Arenas, often when I was out walking the streets and alleys of the city, I could not clear the images of these native peoples from my mind. What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of.

  * * *

  —

  AS SOON AS we came alongside the quay and cleared Chilean customs and immigration, the cooks went ashore to secure fresh vegetables and the ship began taking on fuel. At the airport we dropped off members of the Palmer’s shakedown crew, their tasks aboard the ship now completed, and picked up air freight for the Palmer, including “absolute essentials” (as the manifest had it) that had accidentally been left behind in Louisiana. The ice pilot, a German, flew in from Frankfurt, accompanied by Peter Wilkniss, the head of Polar Programs at the NSF at the time. Walter Sullivan, a seasoned reporter from The New York Times, accompanied them. The haste and intensity with which we were gearing up to sail for ISW had an imperative about it and an otherworldliness that appeared to mark us all as we went about our chores in port. Others, the residents of Punta Arenas, were all the while painting their houses, driving city buses, changing diapers, making love, or reading magazines at trestle tables in the library. But we, in just a few days, were headed for Antarctica!

  In our own eyes, at least, weren’t we more like Ferdinand Magellan and the crew of his Concepción than the stevedores on the quay below us, staring up at the bridge of the Palmer with their looks of mild incomprehension? Or was it bright-eyed envy?

  I was nearly beside myself with expectations about what we would witness in the Weddell Sea, and with feelings of privilege about being given a berth aboard the Palmer.

  * * *

  —

  AHEAD OF ME when we came into Punta Arenas was an awkward task I’d volunteered for at the start of the voyage. About a hundred people, with return addresses all over the world, had sent the Nathanial B. Palmer’s owners letters of request, asking that the ship’s seal be stamped on an enclosed 3×5-inch card and mailed to them from Punta Arenas in an enclosed self-addressed envelope. I thought I would learn something uplifting from the accompanying letters, but most of them, as I interpreted them, were handwritten pleas expressing a desire to be relieved of chronic loneliness. I understood now what the captain had meant when he told me in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, as the mailbag arrived, that he wanted it thrown overboard. It was presumptuous, of course, for me to judge the correspondents in this way, but dozens of letters into the process, I began to see these hopeful writers as people who’d lost a sense of purpose in their lives, to see them as correspondents who desired some tangible proof of their presence in the world.

  I spread the letters out on a table in one of the wardrooms, organizing them so I wouldn’t misplace anything, and began stamping each card carefully with the ship’s official seal. I’d earlier set aside the American dollars and the international postal coupons that had accompanied the letters of request, to cover the cost of Chilean stamps. After I’d sealed all the envelopes and put the correct postage on them, I asked the captain what I should do with the money left over, about US $70.

  “Throw it overboard,” he said.

  Ashore, on my way to the post office, I decided to deposit the money in a donation box at the cathedral. I was passing through an open-air farmers’ market on my way to the church when I saw a Chilean couple and their child coming toward me. They looked robust and handsome together. The woman was holding the hand of a girl about three or four; the man had a large bundle strapped across his back, and a small cardboard suitcase in his right hand. The woman also carried a large bundle on a shoulder strap, held close to her side. Their jet-black hair, dark brown skin, and simple cotton clothes suggested they were full-blooded Indians, perhaps Selk’nam, arriving in Punta Arenas from some outland settlement much smaller than this city.

  It was the look of innocence in their faces, the wonderful air of expectation about them and their cautious movement, the couplehood of them, that stopped me in the street.

  I would like to say that in that moment I had the presence of mind to take the $70 out of my pocket and hand it to them. To say to the three of them, formally and respectfully, “Para ustedes, de la Madre de Dios,” like a messenger, and then to walk away. But I didn’t. I gawked at them as they passed me by. And then it was too late.

  * * *

  —

  I POSTED THE MAIL, put the money in the poor box at the cathedral, an embarrassing act of indifferent generosity, and went off to look at the neighborhoods of Punta Arenas I’d not yet seen. A short distance from the center of town I came upon a large house, open to the public. It seemed strangely familiar to me, a house not fully incorporated into its surroundings. A patrician residence. Once the home, I speculated, of wealthy Europeans, people afraid of losing touch with Europe, its cultural history and ambience. It reminded me of the casa del Indio in my stepfather’s family.

  Inside, I learned the home had once been the residence of the Braun-Menéndez family, scions of one Don José Menéndez. In the late nineteenth century, Señor Menéndez was operating two sheep ranches in Tierra del Fuego, one on either side of the Río Grande, a river that flows into the Atlantic. These two huge estancias were about 100 straight-line miles southeast of Punta Arenas, on the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego. I was c
urious whether this Don José might be a member of the branch of the Menéndez family that was linked by marriage—as the Brauns were linked by marriage to the Menéndezes here—to my stepfather’s family in Asturias. My stepfather had often spoken to me with great respect of a “José Menendez” he had known as a boy. But I could not find any information in pamphlets at the house or learn anything from the docents.

  The furniture, the art, the appointments and embellishments—all were beautiful. Everything here was meticulously ordered.

  I walked from the Braun-Menéndez house to Hotel Cabo de Hornos, the town’s major hotel, for lunch. Many of Punta Arenas’s well-dressed businessmen and merchants appeared to take their midday meal here, men who had adjusted well to being neither European nor Selk’nam but something else. I liked Punta Arenas. As we’d approached the town at sunrise that morning, with the Southern Cross fading away directly overhead, I’d found the sight here of hundreds of bright pastel homes rising in tiers up the hillsides from the waterfront very appealing. And the lobby at the Cabo de Hornos, with its between-the-wars architecture and heavy furnishings, felt very accommodating. I sat in one of the chairs reading for a couple of hours after lunch. Some people offered a polite nod as they passed.

  I liked the setting so much I almost inquired about a room, and later daydreamed of settling in here at some time in the future to write a novel like Raspail’s.

  I would write the story of the biblical Samaritan again. He’s someone who feels we are living in the last days of human restraint, and in the last days, too, of the northern bald ibis of the Ethiopian highlands and the spoon-billed sandpiper of the Chukotski Peninsula. He sees thievery, indifference, and suffering in every direction, but in his own small world he decides to help, not to turn his back. His life will become more painful, more compromised than he had imagined, and he will disappear into anonymity. In writing him as a character, I’d use as a guide the remark Camus made after he wrote The Plague, that Earth is all we have, that there is no other sanctuary.

  Over lunch I consider the traps his story presents, with his efforts and naïveté. Maybe I should get a room at the Cabo de Hornos and learn to sail instead, ply the waters of Tierra del Fuego, hope for mostly good weather, and ignore the trouble to the north. But this image of disengagement does not have the pull I still feel toward Zagajewski’s “mutilated world.” I am still alive, sitting here in the restaurant, and want to be an emissary for all of its life, even if that idea has now become obsolete.

  * * *

  —

  ONE AFTERNOON THE CAPTAIN asks me to put on a pair of slacks and a dress shirt and join him, the first mate, and the chief engineer. They’ve been invited to have tea with the captain of the Irbenskiy Proliv, moored opposite us on the quay. The Irbenskiy Proliv is a Russian fish-processing ship, out of Murmansk. It has been in port for two days, refueling and provisioning, perhaps taking advantage of the hospital. The rust, the patched hull, the badly damaged deck crane, the paint peeling off the superstructure, all point in one direction: We who sent you do not care about your fate. Just bring back the fish.

  Before we sit down for tea, the captain of the Russian ship gives us a short tour, mostly of the engine room, perhaps because our chief engineer is along. Its narrow passages and grime-encrusted bays are lit by a few bare incandescent bulbs suspended at the ends of wires descending from gloom in the deck braces above. The room has more the feeling of a machine shop, with its metal lathes, drill presses, and welding table, than an engine room; and where one might expect to see a compact display of LED lights and computer screens bright with panels of digital information and schematics, there is only the proletariat bulk of aging machinery, the handles and edges of which, here and there, had been polished to gleaming by the swipe and grip of human hands. At several spots below the waterline the sea is spraying in between hull plates. The hammer of diesel generators makes the heated air seem even closer around us, and the metal shavings and welding slag, the tools lying loose on the oil-slickened floor, speak of constant labor, of endless maintenance.

  We’ve brought some gifts. Medical supplies, some storm gear, rubber boots. Articles of clothing. A chocolate cake one of the Palmer’s cooks has made. The tea is good. We drink from glasses in silvered tin holders, each designed with scenes from Russian folklore in filigree. When we finish, one of the Russian officers motions for us to take the glasses and the ornamental holders with us. A gift. They give us each a brand-new pair of white cotton work gloves.

  While we are still in the wheelhouse, the captain ushers us outside, onto the starboard wing bridge, to point out that the railings there are made of wood, and that the floor is also wood. Very reassuring, he says, to step out here during a storm, to feel the wood.

  We say a cordial goodbye, everyone shaking hands. On the gangway the captain says to me over his shoulder, “These guys have nothing. Nothing.”

  On the pier he turns to address the three of us, saying, “None of us has the balls to sail with that ship.” He speaks as if we should feel ashamed, not lucky.

  I don’t want to go back aboard the Palmer. Instead, I walk into town. I sit in a restaurant with my coffee and write in my notebook about the Irbenskiy Proliv, what I saw, the particulars of it, so I won’t forget. Our captain, a veteran of Vietnam, had invited me, as I saw it, to accompany him on a personal errand, a ceremony aboard the Irbenskiy Proliv about mutual respect and generosity, which I was not entirely sure I understood. I want to thank him again, and ask his permission to write about it.

  In a bookstore on a side street in Punta Arenas the next day I find what I am looking for, a used copy of Robert Cushman Murphy’s Oceanic Birds of South America: A Study of Species of the Related Coasts and Seas, Including the American Quadrant of Antarctica, Based Upon the Brewster-Sanford Collection in the American Museum of Natural History. It is a two-volume work, “illustrated from paintings by Francis L. Jaques, [and with] photographs, maps and other drawings.” Published in 1936. Twelve hundred and forty-five pages. I buy the volumes and also a more manageable popular guide to the birds of the Southern Ocean.

  I’ll offer the captain the popular guide, to place among the books he keeps handy on the bridge, and give him Murphy’s Oceanic Birds of South America for the ship’s library, which he’s asked me to help him develop. He’ll like Murphy’s prose. It is conversational, the tone informed but not recondite. The book provides a thorough answer to anyone with a serious question about oceanic birds. When we were entering the western end of the Strait of Magellan, Captain Bouziga had asked me about kelp gulls. There were flocks of them wheeling around us at the time. He said he’d heard that kelp gulls will drop clams on the sea ice from fifty feet in the air to crack them open. Might we see that on our trip? I answered him as best I could, the short answer being yes, but who knows whether we’ll see them farther south, after we enter the ice.

  Now I can hand him Murphy, who has fifteen pages on the kelp gull.

  When I get back to the ship, Russell is taking a nap. I put the books on the bridge with a note for him and then ask the second mate, who has the watch, what the weather is looking like for us in the Drake Passage. We go over the weather faxes together. At that moment, he says, there were only five-foot swells, and it looks like the pressure cells south of us are stable. But he shrugs off any certainty. He hopes for good weather, but the waters of the Drake are notoriously rough. Squalls and worse come in from the west with little warning. He’s seen sixty-foot seas there.

  We are scheduled to sail in two days.

  * * *

  —

  THE CHIEF ENGINEER and I take a cab into town one evening with a few others from the engine room to have supper. Afterward, he invites me to accompany them to a nightclub members of the crew have been frequenting. I decline, sheepishly. The invitation is a sign of the crew’s genuine acceptance of my presence on the ship and I am reluctant to say no at this point in
the voyage. I know an invitation to accompany them to a club like this is not commonly offered to an outsider. I say it’s late, thank them all, and wish them a good evening. As I turn for the ship, the first mate comes up to me and deliberately shakes my hand. I don’t know what for, perhaps to release me from my embarrassment. Or to emphasize that the degree of their acceptance is unwavering.

  The Palmer is docked at the far end of a long pier. A crewman is on watch at the top of the gangway, to make sure no unauthorized person comes aboard, and that everyone who’s gone ashore is back before the watch changes at four a.m. He checks off my name. I say good night and am turning away when out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of a tall, well-dressed man in a dark wool overcoat coming up the gangway hesitantly. He is hatless and the unbuttoned overcoat flares to reveal a white shirt open at the throat and a pair of charcoal trousers.

  “¿Señor López?”

  I gesture toward my chest. “¿Sí? Soy Señor López, pero mi español es pobre. Pocos palabras solamente. Digame, do you speak English?”

  “Yes, I do. And your English has improved. The accent is better.”

  “I see. Yes, thank you. Uh, do we know each other? I’m sorry, perhaps I should recognize you. The light here is not very good.”

  “Do we know each other? Well, yes. A few years back we used to have lunch together every week or so. At the university.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is actually my first time in Punta Arenas. I’ve never been to the university.”

  The man looks about as if trying to get his bearings, and now seems a little more irritated than confused.

  [“You’re making me look like a fool, you know, in front of this American crewman. I don’t understand the reason for your rudeness.”]