F I V E
We checked our dew collectors at 6 o’clock the following morning. They were shallow pits we’d dug in the dirt the previous evening and covered with plastic sheeting. A canteen was placed below the middle of the sheet, weighed down with a stone and punctured with a few holes. A small gulp of water sat in the canteen.
Not wanting to be thought a complete novice in desert survival, I had also dug a second hole that I’d peed in before covering in plastic. This one did not have holes punctured in the sheet because while water condenses on the top of the dew-collecting sheet and dribbles down to the holes, it condenses on the underside of the sheet when urine evaporates. It was with some satisfaction that I noted my urine recycling had produced a little more water than the dew system. The water in my canteen didn’t look like urine. I smelt it. It didn’t smell like urine. I put the canteen to my lips. It didn’t taste like urine either.
‘What about some breakfast?’ Zeus asked as I put down my canteen. ‘Bacon, eggs, hot coffee?’ He suggested with a broad smile. I couldn’t believe my ears. It sounded as if, having survived the midnight march, I was to be rewarded. My one and only meal was going to be a proper one. Despite having not eaten for 26 hours, I didn’t actually feel hungry, but saliva started to flow in my mouth when Zeus mentioned breakfast.
Eagerly, I followed the commandos as we marched across the arid landscape towards where we’d left the vehicles the previous evening. I was feeling much better for having had a few hours sleep and was egged on by the prospect of something serious to eat.
More fool me. Breakfast it was, but both bacon and eggs were conspicuous by their absence. Breakfast on a Chilean commando desert survival course was a sort of maize paste made from toasted flour mixed with a lot of sugar and a bit of water. It tasted like glue, but I ate it anyway.
I didn’t finish the course. Despite the general principle that survival in the desert with minimal food and water means you sleep during the day and do things at night, Zeus explained that sometimes daytime marching was a necessity. So we were going to do some of that too.
It wasn’t as bad as during the night in that we didn’t have to wear our packs and at least I could see, but the down side was that it was very hot. Physically, I think I could have kept going, but after the first two hours my mind was telling me otherwise. The commandos just kept walking because that was their job, but in my case I was able to ask myself why I was doing it. I had come out here with these guys to see what it was like when it got really very dry and you get weak from lack of inputs. I thought I’d seen that by now. I felt like shit. I couldn’t see the point of doing any more. So I stopped.
I resumed my quest for a town or village that was drier than Arica instead, since this was what I was really here for. It wasn’t on the Plain of Patience because no one lived there, but Zeus recommended I try the area to the north-west. I consulted my map and plumped for a chain of settlements strung out along a road that ran inland from Antofagasta.
The map I was using was accurate. There was a string of towns along this road, but I’d made the false assumption that where there was a town there would be people, some of whom may be taking meteorological readings. Not so in this part of Chile. The towns were all abandoned.
There was a signpost to the first one I came to along Ruta Nacional 25. It said Oficina Concepción. But Oficina Concepción was no more. It was just a collection of crumbling walls and deserted streets, discarded shells of buildings that had once been useful but were no longer. Faded signs on adobe walls indicated where people had once queued at the bank or come to drown their sorrows at a bar.
The trail of abandonment continued, town after sorry town, rejected and left to crumble in the dust. Their populations had absconded and their few trees left to fend for themselves, most now just skeletal outlines against a barren horizon. I came across a cemetery, forlorn and abandoned beside the road, line upon line of crude wooden crosses in the sun-baked ground, their crosspieces creaking in the desert wind. Most of the graves had long since been neglected, but a solitary red plastic rose, though faded pink in the Atacama sun, offered a secluded splash of colour to the sun-bleached wood and dun-coloured sand.
‘Office’ was the curious name given to these mining camp towns, industrial settlements created with the sole purpose of excavating sodium nitrate for sale as fertilizer. The name was a reference to the offices of the purchasing agents who bought everything mined within a certain radius. At the height of the nitrate boom, there were more than 300 industrial and housing installations dedicated to the extraction and exploitation of this mineral in the world’s driest desert.
The salt of the Atacama became known as white gold and it turned the barren north into a new California. The white gold boom blossomed between 1880 and 1914. In 1913, Chile supplied 90 per cent of the world’s total volume of nitrogenous fertilizers. But the First World War crisis and the development in Germany of synthetic nitrate spelt the beginning of the end of the boom. Half the oficinas were closed. Most of the rest gave up during the world economic crisis of 1929.
Today, there is just one left. I had almost given up hope of finding it when I reached the welcoming arch over the road into María Elena. Its founding year, 1926, was imprinted at one end of the arch, the year 2000 on the other, the entrance to a town of more than 7,000 people living in a 1920s timewarp.
A faded air of grandeur pervaded the whole settlement, with its wide dirt streets and grand teatro sporting life-sized stuccoed miners on its sturdy walls. The theatre’s construction had been financed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer no less, an MGM picture palace in the middle of the desert, put up for the miners to watch the latest Hollywood releases in an era when world-renowned artists came to South America only to perform in the oficinas.
In the hostel where I stayed they had lost all the keys to the rooms. There was no point in fitting new locks, the woman on the desk told me, because no one was sure how much longer María Elena would continue. Rumour had it that the town would be closed the following year. I got talking with the cleaning ladies one morning, and they expressed dismay at the prospect. Two of the four women had been born here, and they had nowhere else to go. These women emitted a palpable sense of pride in their town, and leaving or not they still polished the parquet floors until they sparkled every morning.
Elsewhere, though, I detected a feeling of resignation. Although it was nearly Easter, no one had taken down the Christmas decorations hanging above the town’s one small supermarket, appropriately named El Salitre (The Saltpetre).
I asked the chief administrator of the mine if the rumours I’d heard of the town’s imminent demise were true. Marco was a cheerful, swarthy figure with short grey, kinky hair and dark glasses. He sat in his office pulling on a Kent cigarette, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt with the logo of the mining company on its pocket.
‘Those rumours have been circulating for ten years or more,’ he told me. He sighed, ‘I honestly don’t know whether they are true or not,’ he added, in a tone that convinced me of his sincerity.
Marco’s office was a friendly mess. His wide desk, which looked as if it dated from the 1920s, was swamped with mining reports and correspondence that only just left room for a large computer. The shelf behind Marco’s head was lined with photographs of his family and the walls with old prints of English hunting scenes. María Elena had been established by a British company, he told me. The town’s layout had been based on the Union Jack, with streets radiating out from the central park to mimic the flag, some with English names like Calle Wilcox and Calle Edwards. The British had run the mine for a dozen years before selling out to a local company.
When I told Marco of my quest, and posed the question about meteorological data, his reaction was immediate and positive. He leapt out of his chair and dug deep into another pile of papers that swamped an auxiliary table to one side of his office.
‘Here!’ he cried with glee, and thumped five bound volumes onto the desk in front of me. I
opened the top one and leafed through its pages. Typed tables of wind speeds, temperature, relative humidity and numerous other variables cascaded before my eyes. I turned to the next green folder and flicked through that. My heart started racing. It was certainly the sort of thing I’d been after.
As I looked through the five-volume report, Marco gave me a brief run-down of his personal history. ‘I was born near here,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt that it’s the driest part of Chile. The only green thing I ever saw before I left here was an army uniform.’
I was only half listening. The report I had in my hands detailed the climatology of the region surrounding the Salar de Atacama. It had a wealth of detail, but as far as I could make out, the area it covered did not include María Elena. The Salar de Atacama was some distance away to the east. I found a map. María Elena was marked. I flicked through the contents pages of each volume, but couldn’t see any reference to the town. The nearest place with data seemed to be a place called Coya Sur, but it was only a few kilometres from María Elena.
‘The last rain we had here was in 1992,’ Marco was saying. ‘It caused chaos. Roads were washed away, the electricity was cut, houses were flooded. Rain is unusual here, so nothing is designed to cope with it.’
I had found rainfall averages for the meteorological stations mentioned in the report. They were all low, but none lower than Arica. I was now looking for data from Coya Sur. The cleaning ladies I’d spoken to in my hostel had mentioned the same 1992 storm. They had laughed on remembering it. Then one of them became serious and said that it was the same year that General Pinochet had come to visit. ‘The rain washed his footsteps away,’ she added.
I had found some stuff from Coya Sur, but the data was incomplete. I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. ‘There doesn’t appear to be any data from María Elena itself,’ I said to Marco.
‘I have that here,’ he replied, turning to face his computer. My heart missed another beat. Marco opened the Excel program on his computer and started flicking up all sorts of graphs of various meteorological phenomena that he said were for María Elena. I looked closely at the screen. At the bottom of each graph, the station stated was again Coya Sur.
‘Where is Coya Sur exactly,’ I asked.
‘It’s the mine itself,’ Marco said. ‘It’s where the meteorological station is.’ It was another situation like Arica, the observing station being a few kilometres out of town.
‘How long have they been taking measurements there?’ I asked.
Marco paused, his finger on his computer mouse. ‘About five years, I think,’ he answered. ‘Wait, I have it here.’ He clicked and another chart came up labelled Cantidad agua caida. It was indeed the precipitation record. The chart was blank but for a single line. In the last five years, Coya Sur had recorded one rainfall event. A small note in a box arrowed from the peak said it had occurred on 15 May 2000, when 0.9 mm of precipitation had fallen at 3 o’clock in the morning ‘I remember that one,’ Marco said pointing to the screen. ‘Lots of people were scared because they see rain so rarely. Everyone woke up to watch. It was very exciting.’
But it was no good to me. Most climatologists say that 30 years of data is the minimum required to define a climate. Five years was simply not enough. I knew that a 30-year run was what I was after.
I was feeling deflated when I left Marco’s office. He had given me the five-volume report to take away and read, but I already knew that it didn’t contain what I was after. Marco had suggested I go and ask the town’s mayor if he could help me, although I wasn’t very confident that I’d get anywhere.
But I found the office of the mayor, another kindly man who was equally eager to help. He confirmed that there was no meteorological station in María Elena.
‘Although this place was founded in 1926,’ he told me, ‘up until 20 years ago, it was a private town, run by the mining company. My post was only created 20 years ago, when a municipal authority was established.’ He looked at me seriously. ‘The authorities in Antofagasta don’t really care about this place,’ he said. ‘They assumed that the mining company would take the meteorological readings, so they didn’t set up their own government station. In fact, the mine only began making observations five years ago.
‘Antofagasta decided to establish a station in Quillagua instead,’ he went on, ‘a small village of only 200 inhabitants. They simply ignored this town of nearly 8,000 people. Other towns have stations,’ he said sadly, ‘Sierra Gorda, Baquedano, but nothing in María Elena.’
‘And how old were these other stations’, I asked. Between 30 and 40 years old, he told me. I asked him how I might get to look at their records. The mayor said they came within his jurisdiction, but that the records would be held in Antofagasta. He said he’d telephone and ask for them to be sent. ‘Someone is coming up from Antofagasta tomorrow,’ he told me, ‘I can ask them to bring what records they have.’
I returned to the mayor’s office the following afternoon, and true to his word the mayor handed me a thick plastic folder full of records. They covered the three stations he had mentioned, Sierra Gorda, Baquedano, and Quillagua. A covering letter on government notepaper, from the director general of the Direccion General de Aguas – ii Region, detailed the data enclosed. Sierra Gorda’s records dated from 1974, Baquedano’s from 1963 and Quillagua’s from 1969. I flicked through the report as the mayor continued his somewhat sorry tale of neglect from the previous day.
‘I hope you find what you are looking for there,’ he told me. ‘It would be good for this area if it were to get the record of driest place on Earth because our government prefers to forget this region.’ María Elena was the last of 300 saltpetre mining towns and the region represented a pivotal part of Chilean history, he said. ‘Fortunes were made here,’ he told me, but the region was now being consigned to the rubbish dump of history.
I had already flicked through the records for Sierra Gorda and Baquedano. The data were just exactly what I had been searching for, annual precipitation totals since records began. Unfortunately, Sierra Gorda’s station had been running for less than 30 years, so it wouldn’t be able to lay claim to the record. The data for Baquedano covered a sufficient length of time, but I saw immediately that they had received too much rain to make a bid to rival Arica as the driest town on Earth. Quillagua, however, was a different story. The records looked good. The rainfall amounts were very small. I couldn’t wait to get out of the office and look more closely at the data in my hand. I thanked the mayor for his help, and promised to let him know the results of my investigation. He wished me luck, and told me again how good it would be for his region if it were to hold the driest place on Earth title. ‘It would put the spotlight back on a forgotten part of Chile,’ he said.
Back in the hostel, I settled down to look more closely at what the mayor had given me. The covering letter was important, because it certified that the stations I had data for were official government installations, and thus their readings could be assumed to be reliable. I quickly looked again at the records for Sierra Gorda and Baquedano confirming that they had no chance of beating Arica as the world’s driest inhabited place.
Then I turned to Quillagua. The records started with annual summary sheets of precipitation by month. The top page started at 1998 and continued to part way through 2001. Every monthly summary box on the grid had a dot in, the sign for no rain according to the key at the bottom of the page. The amount of precipitation was zero for all these years.
I turned the page. The next one covered the years from 1982 to 1997. The last time it had rained in Quillagua was in 1992, nearly a decade before, when 1 mm had been recorded in May. I assumed it was the same event that had washed away General Pinochet’s footsteps after his visit to María Elena.
Other than this entry, all the other years showed rows of dots for zero rainfall, except for 1984 when 0.4 mm of rain had been recorded in June and 0.2 mm in October of that year. Quillagua was certainly a very dry place. That was just t
hree rainfall days since 1982. I turned to the next page.
Rainfall-wise, this page continued in the same vein. Absolutely no rain had been recorded at Quillagua in the years 1969 to 1981. But there was a problem. The record was blank between March 1975 and May 1978. I flicked through the rest of the sheets. There were annual summaries by month that showed the recordings for every day. Sheet after sheet was blank, indicating no rain. I came across the sheets for 1984 and 1992. These confirmed that the three rainfall events I’d picked up in the annual summaries were indeed just three separate events. Since 1969, it had rained three times in Quillagua. On 7 June 1984, 30 September in the same year, and on 28 May 1992. Except, that is, for the missing years. There were daily summary sheets for 1975 and 1978, but each had just a few months of recordings. There were simply no sheets at all for 1976 or 1977.
Mildly perturbed at the missing years, I nonetheless decided to add up what I’d got. The records began in June 1969, so I started with the first complete year: 1970. Over the period 1970 to 2000, 31 years, I had 27 years of data once I had omitted the years that were missing. In 27 years, Quillagua had recorded a grand total of 1.6 mm (0.06 inches) in precipitation. The average annual amount therefore was 0.06 mm (0.002 inches). I did the sum again. There was no question. Quillagua’s average annual precipitation was 0.06 mm. I flicked through my notebook to get the figure for Arica, although I knew it already. It was 0.8 mm (0.03 inches), a whole order of magnitude larger.
A mixture of glory and pain came over me. Quillagua definitely looked like a drier place. And not just a bit drier but a whole order of magnitude drier. But the record was still only for 27 years, not the magic 30 years, and it wasn’t continuous. So close to the record, and yet so far, it seemed.
Going to Extremes Page 13
