Into Thick Air (24 page)

The hill is above the wetlands, connected to the road by a raised isthmus of desert, powder dry. The delta is equal parts water, mud, and reeds, but in truth the northern Caspian gets only about eight inches of rain a year. I ride off, cross-country, and make it halfway up the hill before I notice that this is no ordinary heap of dirt.

It's the ancient shore. The Caspian is a capricious sea, with a sea level that has fluctuated wildly throughout geologic time. I don't know when its waters last lapped up against this hill, but I imagine there's at least a few thousand years of history poking out. Crawling on my hands and knees, I find a tibia from a deer-sized animal, a gleaming mussel, a piece of charcoal, and a pottery shard, presumably from a time long before the communist revolution and the tsars. Suddenly Russian history seems a blink in time, destined to be covered in silt.

And just as suddenly the sun is almost down. I push the bike to the summit for my view of the sparkling Caspian. Instead I see a swamp. I'm not
disappointed—after all, I'm standing on the highest point on the lowest point in Europe. Until the wind saps my heat and I hustle down for the shelter of a single willow tree at the edge of a lily-pad marsh. I put up the tent and fire up the stove for a pot of steaming ramen noodles.

Geese honk overhead in the dying light, and unseen birds clamber through the reeds. I climb into the tent and fluff up my sleeping bag. With my little lantern I study the map and smile. A month on the road. I've grown fond of sweet tea and sunflower seeds. I grew up listening to America's version of the venomous communists, and I came to Russia like a tenderfoot in the desert, seeing signs of snakes everywhere. In the end I found free tomatoes and apples—and a pretty good wedding, too. No love, yes love, the story of life.

For dessert I have a cup of instant “Super Coffee—True American Taste” (made in Singapore) and a shot of Astrakhan vodka (the lowest booze in Europe). The air is literally freezing—my thermometer reads 28 degrees. But I'm pleased. There's something I like about the low points of the world. Gravity rules, and all things come to rest. No farther. This is the place.

—Irish proverb

 

SHUT YOUR WINDOW SHADE, the passengers grumbled on the flight home from Russia. They were glued to the video; I was frozen to Greenland and a flotilla of icebergs sailing off its shattered coast. Trying for a compromise, I covered my head and window with a blanket.
Like a child
, my wife would say when she was wishing I wasn't.

Then I was home, relishing the glow of reentry into the familiar. On the first Monday morning after my return, I trotted outside to the curb with my toddler in my arms, taking care not to catch my bathrobe on the prickly pear cactus. Rudy had wakened only moments before to his favorite alarm, the diesel growl of the garbage truck. Now he stared in astonishment as the hydraulic claw snatched our trash can. He gave the driver an apple, and we scurried back inside for the thrilling ritual of the hissing espresso machine. Then I set him free to wobble and drool where he pleased while I sat on the couch, the late October sun warming my shoulders, and fished for compliments in my e-mails from the Caspian ride.

Some were sweet.

Some were not sweet.

And some wanted advice.

He'd neglected to supply his name. It made no difference: Discovery was no longer sending me fruit baskets. The flood of internet money was drying up, just when the future of my little quest for the low points was at the tipping point—three down and three to go. Recalling the editors' earlier aversion to Africa, I opened my atlas and cautiously prepared and mailed my proposal for the ride to Salina Grande, a pit in Patagonia, the tail of South America.

The place called Patagonia is not a country but a remoteness. It is cantilevered so far into the vast southern oceans that if you sail due west from the Pacific coast you'll simply circle the planet without landfall until you return to Patagonia. In doing so you will have traveled from Chile to Argentina, where Salina Grande was sunk near the Atlantic coast. I decided to do the same: from the Chilean Pacific to the Argentine Atlantic, except that I would go overland, across the Andes.

While I waited for Discovery's decision, my bicycle was stripped to the frame and a new downtube welded in place. When the phone finally jangled with a job offer, it was Sue Rutman of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. She needed a botanist who didn't mind being alone in the desert, somebody to map the vegetation of a half-million acres of people-free southwestern Arizona.

Somebody had to. I pulled the cylinder heads off my derelict Jeep and lugged them to a machine shop for a valve job. A month later I was hiding from a dust storm under a hackberry in Growler Wash. I walked a lot that winter and spring, stopping to poke at slow ants and to mull over
why certain plants lived
here
and not
there
. I slept on the sand under the weightless stars, the only sound the diligent throb of my pulse.

The blaze of summer holed me up at home. Snaggle-toothed Rudy needed a live-in playmate; he was denied the breast, and within hours (it seemed) Sonya was pregnant again. The celebration was doubled after a call from Discovery: Salina Grande was on.

There are guidebooks galore on the Patagonian Andes, detailing the many lodges for those aiming to reel in a trophy trout. But scarcely a word has been written on the Argentine desert between the Andes and the Atlantic, and I considered myself lucky to discover G. G. Simpson's
Attending Marvels,
the account of his 1930 paleontology expedition in Argentine Patagonia.

Now I knew why hardly anyone lived in Patagonia. Simpson wrote of “a barren outer world where the ruthless, the nerve-wracking, the terrible wind blows incessantly.”

The wind is my most feared enemy, and I could only hope that Simpson was exaggerating when he claimed that “some go insane. I cannot erase a horrible picture from my mind—two men in straightjackets lying neglected on the beach, writhing and shrieking. Later they were loaded like two logs into the boat to Buenos Aires. They escaped from Patagonia.”

I was going in. A big box from Discovery arrived, with satellite phone, computer, and digital camera. The gear weighed the usual twelve pounds, but the contract that tagged along had grown. To help translate it, I brought the paperwork over to my friend Jim Boyer, a writer and climber and, at the advanced age of thirty-five, student of law. Before we studied the fine print, we rode our bikes up A-Mountain (aka Sentinel Peak), swooshed back, drained a quart of Pabst, and talked about books and women until, two hours after sunset, I remembered I had a wife and son. The contract could wait a day or two.

Two days later, amid the pines on the north slope of the Santa Catalina Mountains, a piece of climbing gear gave way under Jim's weight. He wasn't particularly heavy, but he was a hundred feet above an outcrop of granite knobs.

A friend rappelled to the scene of the accident and found golden lichen
and purple larkspur, and honeybees gladly swarming on the scatter of Jim's skull.

I was horrified—at the loss, and the way he was lost. I'd long been afraid of heights. For the next month I would wake from falling dreams with a gasp. It wasn't insomnia; it was cold fear and hot tears.

Then it was October, and spring was surely waking the southern tip of South America. At the airport Sonya held Rudy in her arms and number two in her womb. Nobody had to say
be careful
.

 

WHEN I WOKE in the night and slid over to a window seat for a look, we'd already crossed the Amazon and the equator—yet half the journey remained. Surprisingly close to the plane were the ice mountains of Peru, the Cordillera Blanca. This I knew from studying maps with Jim four years earlier, as he prepared to climb Nevado de Alpamayo. Now I sat blinking in the moonlight, thinking of life and death and especially that moment between.

How long will your heart persist beating after your brain is gone? The question was not the stuff of sweet dreams, and in utter self-interest I diverted my attention to the Sky Mall catalog tucked in the seat pocket. It seemed a kind of sacrilege, but it did the trick. Soon I was wondering if anyone actually slipped their credit card into the AirPhone to order a $250 Stainless Steel Kitchen Garbage Can from Denmark while flying along the rim of South America.

I dozed and woke and looked out onto a desert. It was the color of bones, with long smooth ridges and moon-shadowed canyons running from the Andes to the Pacific. I nodded for another two hours, then woke as the Boeing 767 throttled back over a valley of vineyards and eucalyptus muted by a flowing fog. It was morning, and the airport was Santiago's. I changed planes and continued south to Puerto Montt—still Chile, and still between the Andes and the Pacific, but now the mountains were very close to the sea. The land was greener and steeper, with rivers foaming through canyons of black rock. An oval lake lay at the foot of a sleeping volcano shaped like a science fair project.

The clouds suddenly thickened, and the jet landed in a blur of nimbostratus. The air was 52 degrees, and the rain was colder—time for a taxi. A
blue Hyundai took me and my box through a dripping forest and down a hill into Puerto Montt.

The lobby of the Hotel Pérez Rosales was clogged with military men in dress uniform with gold braid looped through one epaulet. The soldiers were reminders of an ugly past. In 1973 Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende, died during a coup led by General Pinochet. Over the next decade, thousands of Chileans were killed by the Pinochet junta, a brutal purge of a democracy made possible by U.S. money and brains. “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist,” said Henry Kissinger.

Anxious for exercise, I went for a walk past old homes with clapboard siding like fish scales. The wind came up, and I ducked into a furniture store that would look like most other furniture stores if it did not possess a gigantic window overlooking the harbor. I took a picture of the many tin roofs in the slanting rain.

An unsmiling man in a navy blue polyester suit appeared. He clutched a walkie-talkie. I gave him the grin of the harmless tourist. He was immune. “Sir,” he said, “it is prohibited to photograph furniture.”

Despite my familiarity with the Spanish language, the Russian security apparatus, and Egyptian customs, I was slow to recognize the danger of being arrested for Chilean furniture espionage. I asked Mr. Security if he believed I was working for another furniture store. He repeated, “It is prohibited to photograph furniture.”

No problem, I said.

I walked out into the mists and wood smoke. I felt like a foreigner, without a name for the hanks of dried kelp sold in the plank-floor market. The dried innards of clams, strung in garlands and hung from rusted hooks, looked like little shrunken heads. Fish hawkers arranged the day's catch and yelled, “
Merluza! Congrio!
” Fish have no eyelids, and although dead, they looked startled to be away from their watery home.

When the tide went out, so did the old people, raking through the muck in search of dinner. On a black sand beach they clomped in rubber boots, drawing rude squirts from the razor clams, which were dispatched by a quick trench with a short-handled hoe. Anything is fair game—keyhole
limpets and mussels, wedge clams and the carnivorous snails called
el loco
—and any restaurant will serve up the diggings.

The meal is called
curantos
, and when it arrived at my table I felt a tad queasy. Surrounded by a wrack of steaming bivalves, the centerpiece was the world's largest barnacle, eight inches of
Megabalanus
. I boldly forked out the guts. Barnacles are related to lobsters, I told myself, but taxonomy meant little to me when confronted with the mucilaginous blob on my plate. I quivered, and so did the barnacle.

My first and last
curantos
. Living off the sea was a Chilean habit, and the tradition lived on in a new way in stores like Piwonka. It was not a grocery (unless you count the sweets) or an automotive store (although you can buy jumper cables) or a hardware store (ignoring the screwdrivers). Piwonka's owner, a well-preserved lady named Elma, revealed without hesitation her simple business plan: “We'll sell anything. It all comes on ships.”