by Tim Cahill
The officers, it seemed, were worried about our personal safety. The pass dropped off into the Atacama Desert. There were gas stations along the way, but they were widely spaced and, in any event, were not open at night. If we continued on, we would run out of fuel and find ourselves stranded in the desert.
It seemed best to show the officers our auxiliary fuel tank. I opened the camper shell and pointed out dozens of quart bottles of water. I climbed up over the mess of duffel bags and knelt on a box of milk shakes that hemorrhaged a thick, gloppy, pinkish-strawberry gruel all over the narrow single bed where our clothes were piled.
Clearing away some of the mess, I showed the officers the extra fuel tank. It was a long metal box set against the front edge of the truck bed, and there were two short boxy legs that ran down the side of the bed. The tank was baffled, that is, designed so that fuel wouldn’t shift when we took the Sierra through sharp turns. The auxiliary tank held ninety gallons and fed directly into the factory-installed tank that carried thirty-five gallons.
Five or six policemen stood outside the shell, shining their flashlights inside. We were carrying, I said, over two thousand miles’ worth of fuel, which was more than enough to get us through the worst of the desert. I could hear muffled conversation behind the lights that blinded me, and I dug out several of the strawberry milk shakes that had not been crushed. Garry had already handed out lapel pins and was insisting that the man who seemed to be in command come with us to Alaska.
The officers said we could pass. Just as we were about to leave, Garry had an idea. We gave them the pot we had thought we could use to cook food. It was just rolling around in the front of the cab and had become a complete nuisance.
The officers thanked us. One of them, friendly and serious at the same time, warned us that the Atacama Desert was no place for a breakdown.
Garry drove in silence, but the atmosphere in the cab had warmed considerably. Confrontations with police always charged us up, brought us together. We had to work on the act, smile, read our audience, and, together, convince these men with guns to drink milk shakes and advertise Canada on their uniforms.
“Yow!” Garry shouted.
“Yes indeed,” I said.
It had been four or five hours since our blowup, and I was already refining my plans for the finish. I wouldn’t actually punch Garry Sowerby. I’d slap him, once, moderately hard: that’s for La Serena.
“I couldn’t,” Garry said, “get those guys to understand. You got up and we were out of there in ten minutes.”
“Thank you,” I said, formally.
We were running down a long steep slope, in the fog, directly into the Atacama Desert.
* * *
THE GREAT SOUTH AMERICAN DESERT is a long narrow strip of land stretching from the Pacific Ocean inland a hundred miles or so to the snow-capped Andes Mountains. The desert begins a bit north of Santiago and pushes up along the coast of the Pacific all the way through Peru and into Ecuador. The driest, the most hostile land is the Atacama proper. It is located in northern Chile, approximately between Copiapó and Arica. There are regions in the six or seven hundred miles of Atacama Desert that average a mere inch of rainfall a century.
About six in the morning, Garry, who had discerned, over the past few days, that I was a passionate fan of sunrises and sunsets, woke me in the false dawn. We were absolutely alone on the road, driving through a flat land of dirty gray gravel, and there was a strange, thin fog on the road ahead. It caught the color of the rising sun, all pinkish pastels that became a feverish red, and the two-lane blacktop desert road ahead disappeared into what looked, for a moment, like a slowly rolling bank of blood.
I was drinking my coffee—we were putting four and five spoonfuls of instant into a single cup lately—and Garry started telling me a wake-up story.
“I went to this big party in southern Austria once,” he said. “It was a joint publicity stunt to promote the Guinness Book, the Austrian tourist organization, and Lufthansa airlines. Anyway, they invited about sixty Guinness Book record holders and sixty members of the press.
“I got an invitation. Turned out I was in Scandinavia, promoting Motorola, the company that provided mobile phones for us on the Africa-to-Norway run. I was driving the Volvo, Red Cloud, that Kenny and I took around the world. So I thought I’d motor down to Austria for a free party.
“Well, southern Austria is beautiful, and the party went from one resort to another: breakfast here, lunch there, dinner another place. One or two of the record holders would do whatever it was they did at each place: the lowest limbo dancer, that kind of thing. Everyone was carted around in buses, but I had a car, so I ferried a lot of the press and the Guinness people.
“There was one guy from one of the English tabloids who always came along. Then we developed an inner circle. It included a French guy who had eaten an entire airplane. It took him two years, but he ate the whole thing. I asked him, ‘What’s the worst part of a plane to eat?’ and he said, ‘The tires are terrible.’
“Then, let’s see, who else was there? Oh, the smartest man in the world. And a guy from East Germany who rode the world’s smallest bicycle. He carrier it in a briefcase and was always trying to ride it whenever anybody from the press was around. Guy had a goatee, one of those little pervert beards that East Germans always have. Oh, and there was a woman fire-eater who could apparently eat fifty flames in one sitting. When she did it for us, she was wearing a real bad wig. I figured it was asbestos.
“And the giant was there. Can’t forget the giant, the tallest man in the world.”
I was warming up to the story. “How big is the tallest man in the world?” I asked.
“Well,” Garry said, “he wasn’t the tallest man in the world. He was the tallest man in the British Commonwealth.”
“How tall is the tallest man in the British Commonwealth?”
“I don’t know,” Garry said. Five eight, five nine.
We were into the red fog then, but it was curiously dry and left no moisture on the glass of the windshield.
“Actually,” Garry said, “the giant was somewhere well into the seven-foot range. Near to eight feet. And I remember I was in the rest room standing next to the guy from the tabloids who was complaining that they didn’t invite the sexiest woman in the world, because he wasn’t getting laid at all. Then we heard this huge crash, and it’s the drunken giant. He came up to the urinal, put his forehead on the tile, moaned a little, and Tim, this guy let one fly you couldn’t believe.
“So the giant stumbles back out to the bar, and I turned to the reporter and said, ‘Don’t feel bad: you got to hear a giant fart.’
“That was the last night, and everyone was getting drunk, at least the inner circle that traveled in Red Cloud. I was driving, careful about drinking, but when we got back to our hotel, the manager opened the bar for us. You have to imagine the scene: me, the guy who eats airplanes, a drunken, staggering giant, all led by the smartest man in the world.”
“Did the smartest man in the world seem particularly bright?”
“Oh yeah,” Garry said, “he didn’t drink.” There was a pause. “But he did hang around with us, so that made me suspect him.”
“Anyway,” I said, “you’re in a bar in southern Austria after-hours, drinking with giants and tire-eaters.”
“Right. There were bottles of schnapps, a lot of toasts, and I tried to keep up with the giant, which was a bad mistake. I stumbled up to bed, called Jane in Canada, and, I don’t know, I fell asleep on the phone. Woke up and the phone was lying there beside me, off the hook.
“So that morning, I didn’t feel good at all, and the last thing we had to do, we had to ride this bobsled gadget on rails. Everyone said, ‘C’mon, you’re the big driver, go faster.’ So, of course, I flipped the thing over and broke my finger. When I got back to the hotel, they gave me a phone bill for four hundred dollars.”
The story brightened my morning considerably. I thought: how could you slap a
guy who hangs around with drunken giants? Who pays $400 so his wife can listen to him snore for several hours?
It was my turn to drive the good straight road.
The Atacama—the whole of the coastal desert—seemed at first a baked mud flat: cracked, dry land, totally devoid of vegetation. The wind sent forty-foot-high dust devils spinning into the distance. Sometimes I saw five or six of them dancing their dizzy fandango over the desert floor.
There were occasional low, rocky ridges separating the larger valleys and plains. Each sterile expanse of flatland was different. There were a few areas of shifting dunes, but most of the valley floors were cracked, flat, black mud plains or fields of dark gravel. One of the more fascinating valleys consisted of nothing but tufts of dried mud. The tufts looked like something that would happen if you put Vaseline in your hair, twisted it around, coated the whole affair with mud, and carefully blow-dried the resultant mess for a couple of decades. All we could see, off to the horizon in every direction, were these strange, twisted, dusty tufts.
The mud—mud that forms those strange tufts—is created during the spring runoff, when streams plunging down the western slope of the Andes pour onto the Atacama plain. Some of the water runs underground, and every few hundred miles there is an oasis. Much of the water comes down in thin, flat sheets. Most of it evaporates rapidly.
The Atacama is a high desert. The bulk of its arid plains stand somewhere near 2,500 feet, so it is not particularly hot. It is, in fact, the coolest place in the world at the latitude. The average summer temperature in the Atacama Desert is sixty-five degrees.
During most of the year, and especially during the warmer months, a cold, dirty fog hangs over the sand and gravel. The mist, called the garúa, rises up over the coastal headlands from the Pacific Ocean, where a cold Antarctic current—the Humboldt Current—sweeps northward along the rugged coastline. It is the interaction of warm air and frigid water that conspires to blot out the sun and cool the land.
The fog passes over the desert and rises into the foothills of the Andes, where it settles in hollows or on ridges. In these perpetually fog-shrouded areas, small stands of trees, called lomas, literally drink the curiously dry and sandy-colored fog from the air.
Occasionally, the spring runoff may uproot entire lomas and deposit them below in an arid salt pan, where the fallen trees are covered in mud, then buried under several feet of wind-blown grit and sand. People dig up these trees for firewood. The Atacama is the only place on earth where people mine wood.
WE PASSED THROUGH the mining town of Antofagasta in the dry fog that was now a sandy gray color. A beachfront road ran along the Pacific headlands, and I could see the working of a large port below. There was a small park where the city had attempted to grow bushes and trees with some small success. We passed a large soccer stadium and a twenty-story-high office building. On the way out of town, the house’s began to look like U.S. tract developments, circa 1951: ranch-style buildings with sliding glass doors. One of the doors was festooned with decals: colorful pictures of Snoopy, the dog in the Peanuts cartoon.
On the rise leading to the outskirts of the town, we passed an area where the houses were nothing more than tumble-down metal sheds.
“The arse,” Garry muttered, “has dropped out of the living accommodations.” His voice was hoarse from lack of sleep and he seemed depressed.
Men in threadbare jackets, dozens of them, walked down the hill toward some common job. They walked with their heads down and didn’t speak with one another.
Back in the desert, we saw a house made from blocks of earth that seemed to have been cut right from the ground. When you build your house out of dirt, you are not expecting rain, ever.
In the distance, atop the highest hill that flanked the road, I saw my first hallucination. But no: it was real; I was sure it was real. Twenty miles out of Antofagasta, in the Atacama Desert, atop a high, rocky brown hill that rose above the arid, pebbled plain was something that looked as familiar as a recurring dream.
“Garry, you see that?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“A billboard.”
“What does it say?”
“Can’t you read it?”
“I wonder if I’m hallucinating.”
“It says, PEPSI COLA.”
“That’s what I thought.”
I wondered if this was the driest place in the driest desert on earth. The billboard—it was the only roadside billboard in the whole Atacama—was new and it stood out against the ocher landscape and gray fog. It was the most effective piece of advertising I had ever seen in my life.
“I want a Pepsi,” I heard myself whine and realized, in that moment, why all billboards should be banned.
Garry said, “Well, we have our choice of water or milk shakes.” He was definitely feeling low, and it occurred to me—after reviewing our various ups and downs to date—that Garry’s spirits tended to sink just after sunrise. I hit the low point on my roller coaster a couple of hours before the sun set.
At 7:12 that morning the fog let up and we passed over the Tropic of Capricorn. I stopped to get breakfast—beef jerky and milk shakes—out of the camper shell. Garry came out and we sat on the tailgate: a sit-down breakfast. There was a fetid sour-milk smell inside the camper shell.
I made an attempt to haul Garry out of his morning funk by asking about his family.
“Ahhh,” he muttered. Then: “I feel a little guilty talking about Lucy all the time. I have another daughter. And, oh man, after she was born, I just felt so down and bitter and guilty and dirty …”
We sat in silence, chewing the beef jerky that was making both of our jaws ache.
“I never told anyone this,” Garry said. “Not even Jane.”
He looked stricken.
“I knew, when Natalie came home,” he said, “that I would never love her as much as I love Lucy.”
The land all around was flat and sandy gray.
“I think every father feels that way about his second child,” I said. “It’s natural. I don’t care what parents say, an infant doesn’t have much in the way of a personality.”
“No lights on,” Garry said, “no one home.”
“And everyone feels guilty and no one says anything, so you end up feeling that there’s something wrong with you. When there isn’t.”
“I guess,” Garry said. He was sounding a little brighter. “And Natalie is almost six months old now. Just before I left for this trip, it really started to happen. I began to see who she is, to get to know her. A couple of times, Jane and I would be in bed, and I would hear her fussing in her room. Jane’s exhausted, and it’s my turn anyway, so I go check on Nat. But she’s not fussing at all. I can see her in the night-light. She’s smiling and laughing and looking at her feet, her hands. This wonderful little baby, my daughter, lost in infant ecstasy.”
I glanced over and caught Garry smiling.
“Let’s play some music,” I said.
We had two audiotapes. Each of us had thought the other was to bring tapes, so all we had was a tango that I had bought in Argentina, mainly because I wanted to study the lyrics. Garry, I knew, was pretty sick of that one. The other tape was something Garry had put in the cassette in Canada and forgotten about. I thought we should dine alfresco, to music, and put Garry’s tape on at full volume. George Jones and Merle Haggard were singing a mournful duet about lost love and loneliness: “She’s out there somewhere, looking for me …”
We drank our milk shakes and stared out into the lifeless world of the Atacama Desert.
THE NEXT TOWN was Iquique. In 1835 Charles Darwin visited the port city of Iquique and traveled briefly inland, into the Atacama. Darwin, as always, took copious notes, and wrote that he was getting pretty damn tired of the adjectives barren and sterile.
Ironically, it is the ocean that has left the land so dry and lifeless. The same icy current that sends its dirty fog rolling over the sand also creates an impenetr
able high-pressure dome over the land. Pacific storms, moving in from the west, bump up against the dome and skitter off to the north or south. The strongest of the storms slide up over the dome, like a skier over a mogul, and dump their moisture on the slopes of the Andes. It is this perpetual high-pressure ridge that has parched the Atacama over the centuries. Indeed, there are small areas in the desert where it has never been known to rain, where nothing grows and nothing lives. Nothing.
The Atacama makes Death Valley look like a zoo set in a botanical garden. During a Death Valley summer, there will be coyote tracks in the central valley, and burros beyond counting feeding on the sage of the higher hillsides. Compare this to the observations of Clement W. Meighan, an archaeologist who has done fieldwork in the Atacama. During a month at one site, a list was compiled of animals seen. The list consisted of one bird and one butterfly, both transients on their way from one oasis to another. The one permanent resident of the camp was a spider. There were also “a few flies.”
When you get down to counting flies, there’s not much life around. What there is, is death.
The first of the mummies discovered in the Atacama Desert were thought to be a thousand years old. They were found several decades ago by an iron-willed renaissance Jesuit, Father Le Paige, who often took payment for marriages and baptisms in archaeological artifacts. Father Le Paige has passed on to his just reward, but his collection can be found in the museum at San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in the heart of the desert.
Deserts are attractive places for archaeologists because of the excellent preservation of the sites and artifacts. Even bodies.
Recently, anthropologists from the University of Tarapacá in Chile discovered ninety-six mummies near the town of Arica, on the border between Chile and Peru. Some of the remains were eight thousand years old, three thousand years older than the mummies of Egypt.
The oasis-dwelling people of the ancient Atacama—Atacamanos—apparently used pelican beaks to strip the corpses of flesh. The abdominal cavities were emptied, filled with feathers, and the long bones of the arms and legs were reinforced with sticks. It is thought that the bodies may have been placed upright in the village in a macabre ritual. For burial, the corpses were wrapped in layers of cloth, the finest closest to the body, the coarsest grade on the outside. The dry desert air preserves fatality, and autopsies performed on rehydrated mummies have pinpointed the causes of deaths that occurred at the dawn of civilization. The autopsies have also revealed some puzzling stuff. What to make of this knowledge: 25 percent of the ancient desert people, it seemed, suffered from chronic ear infections.
