Patagonia. Part 2: Calafate
Calafate—its name taken from a berry indigenous to Patagonia—is not much more than a tourist town. Although its history extends back to the 19th century, it has grown considerably in recent years from an explorers outpost into a hub of hotels, tourist agencies, bars and internet cafes. Among everyone we met, we did not meet anyone who claimed to be from Calafate. The city is almost entirely populated by entrepreneurs and tour guides transplanted from Buenos Aires or nearby provinces.
As soon as I got off the plane, I realized I'd never felt so far away. I didn't even feel like I was on the same planet. I've been further from home than Calafate, but I'd never been so close to the end of the earth. I don't know enough about meteorology or geology to explain how a place only 1300 feet above sea level at a cushy 50° north of the South pole could be so inhospitable. I honestly felt like I was on the moon, but a moon with grass and water and an endless blue sky.
There was a time when I hiked up Mount Timpanogos in the light of a full moon. My eyes had adjusted and I found myself in world colored in slate and chalk, in a dead valley below a ashen peak under a granite sky. This is where the song comes in: Turquoise Hexagon Sun (right-click and "save target as" if you're on windows or option-click if you're on a Mac). Some of my favorite music sounds like it was written on another planet, but the song I'm providing as the soundtrack to Calafate is far more interesting, it comes from the world you see when you look into a reflection in a lake. It is the world beyond the image you see framed in the water, a place unfurnished by your imagination, distant, wide, and empty. It's the world I hiked through that night, and it's the world I encountered in Patagonia.
The ground was wet, the air cold and dry. Wind ripped across the plains and over broad lakes, unhindered by any trees. Sunlight flooded the landscape at shallow northern angles. And so there was nothing but light and earth and wind for as far as I could see. The Andes lined the western horizon.
I walked around the town as often as I could, cursing the unmixed concrete and bundled rebar lining its borders. Although our hotel and most other places were careful to economize by using florescent light-bulbs, the streets seemed over-lit at night, I couldn't escape the glare of the tiny town on foot. One day, I'll go back and rent a car or a horse and ride far out into what should be some of the purest night available in the western hemisphere.
Returning from an excursion on our last afternoon in Calafate, we rode through the residential part of Calafate as our tour bus dropped everyone off at their different hotels. I looked up from my book and watched children play in yards in front of shoddy homes. Up and down the hills above the main strip with the hotels, we passed through the steep neighborhoods of the people who left their hometowns to run this frigid little outpost. We passed a mechanic's, we passed a small locals' bar, we passed small stores and closed down businesses. We drove past a church that said Jesucristo es la respuesta, and I thought, "it's true!"
This neighborhood sat on the hills above a valley that would be called a sea if it were on the moon. The Andes had already cast their shadows over the lake below.
—November 14 2004