At Dusk, while Pancho and
Claudio, my guides, were loading the boats, a single planet appeared overhead, a
dim beacon in the dark-blue sky. Wet and cold, I waited at the edge of Lake
Rivadavia, washed by the quiet melancholy that follows a long and glorious day.
Over a half-hour, the sky darkened from lavender through azure to black, and a
host of unfamiliar constellations emerged. When a crisp half-moon rose over the
dark mountains of Patagonia, I felt an icy stab of heartbreak—the pain that must
have hit those three Americans, almost a century ago, when they looked back on
Cholila like this, knowing that time was against them. Leaving this paradise was
tough enough after just a couple of weeks. For three hard-living,
straight-shooting adventurers named Santiago, Harry, and Ethel, who spent almost
four years here, that last night in 1905 must have been painful. Cholila was the
only real home they had ever had, a green valley where sweat, money, and
patience had brought them peace, prosperity, and respect. But they never could
escape completely.
Those weren't their real names,
of course. Horse thieves, bank robbers, and train bandits are wise to reinvent
themselves from time to time, and the trio in question are better known to
history as the charismatic Butch Cassidy, the quick-fingered Sundance Kid, and
the sharp-shooting Etta Place, the most famous criminals of the Wild West. As
any fan of the deservedly cherished 1969 motion picture can tell you, Butch and
Sundance died in Bolivia, guns blazing. (This may even be true.) What almost no
one knows—simply because it was left out of the Hollywood classic—is that from
1902 to 1905, before their fiery end, the bandits were ensconced in the Andean
foothills, where they built a set of cabins, lived large, cultivated a herd of
more than four hundred cattle and a thousand sheep, and, under those assumed
names, tried hard to go straight.
In 1902, Patagonia offered
everything an outlaw could want. In this southern part of a southern land on the
southern continent, there were no big towns, no nosy detectives, no real roads,
and no telegraph cables whispering descriptions of wanted men. Land for grazing
and homesteading was plentiful, the local horses were excellent, and a couple of
pistol-packing American cowboys blended right into the tiny community of North
American ranchers, Welsh colonists, and gauchos—tough Argentine cowboys with
their own outlaw traditions. In Cholila, the three were safe. They should have
stayed here forever.
But only mountains last that
long. When Claudio started the engine, Pancho waved me out of my starlit
reveries and into the back of the truck. Perhaps only leaving a place truly
preserves it. The fishing rods rattled against one another as we drove up the
hill and then rumbled down deserted gravel roads toward the kind of place one
can never really leave.
"My dear friend," Butch Cassidy
wrote to a woman in Utah in 1902, "I am still alive. . . ." Indeed. Datelined "Cholila,
Argentine Republic, S. Am.," his long letter explained how and why he had
vanished into one of the most remote places on earth. He described how the
outlaws had "inherited" some ten thousand dollars each—money withdrawn from a
Nevada bank at gunpoint—and how, enriched by the fruits of their crime, had
headed south into one of the most remote places on earth, taking new names,
looking for a new start.
In Cholila, they finally found
what they were looking for: the ultimate hideout. Four valleys meet here in the
kind of verdant, high-mountain bowl common in Wyoming or Montana (cholila
means "beautiful valley" in the local Mapuche language). On the rolling lower
slopes, the Andean cordillera is forested with conifers and
three-thousand-year-old alerces, a South American sequoia. Higher up, the
mountains show bare shoulders of gray stone, dominated by the 8,200-foot Tres
Picos, where snow is visible even in summer. Icy, deep-blue lakes—among them
Lezama, Pellegrini, and Cisne—drain into a single crystalline river, the
Carrileufu, which meanders down the valley for dozens of miles until it reaches
Lake Rivadavia, at the northern edge of Los Alerces National Park.
Butch was punctuation-challenged
and prone to misspellings, but he described Cholila and all of Patagonia with a
plainspoken passion that had seduced me from thousands of miles, and a full
century, away: "This part of the country looked so good that I located, and I
think for good, for I like the place better every day. . . . The country is
first class. . . . I have never seen a finer grass country, and lots of it
hundreds and hundreds of miles." The winters were mild, the summers splendid,
the grass "knee high everywhere," and there was "lots of good cold mountain
water." Even more important, Patagonia offered space: space to run cattle, space
to build homes, space to live unseen. There was so much empty land here that
Butch predicted it would never fill up with people—not "for the next hundred
years."
I returned one hundred years
after Butch made his prediction, and Patagonia was still a land of hideouts,
hidden valleys, and horse adventures—as vast as the American West but with few
roads, fewer towns, and more scenery than one person can appreciate in a
lifetime. I also found some differences—among them, Latin America's most
accomplished tourism infrastructure. In northern Patagonia, towns like Bariloche,
El Bolson, and Esquel offer some glamour, bustle, and shopping. In southern
Patagonia, a state-of-the-art airport has opened up a whole region of glacier
country to visitors. And Argentina's rattled economy has meant deep discounts
and empty hotels. But the essential qualities that drew Butch and Sundance are
in oversupply.
It is still possible to mount up
and disappear into the mountains. I wanted to escape that way, to ride among
gauchos and live in immense spaces without regard for the law or the clock. This
ambition suffered from only two flaws: I have a great deal of experience with
horses—all of it bad; and gauchos are usually described with adjectives such as
haughty, humorless, surly, silent, macho, and
even murderous. If I was to fit into the world of these famous knife
fighters the way Cassidy did, or to ride like Sundance among modern hard-luck
cowboys, it was time to get in touch with my inner outlaw.
Early on a Saturday in February,
under summer skies as blue as the pale Argentine flag, boys from up and down the
Cholila Valley began to drift south, riding bareback. In Cholila, caballos
still outnumber cars ten to one. They stashed their mounts—Criollo half-breeds
mostly, in a kaleidoscope of brown, gray, chestnut, bay, piebald, and roan—along
the river, then sat down in the dust and talked. Patagonia breeds patience.
From Tierra del Fuego to the
Bolivian border, every town in Argentina has a gaucho festival—or two or three.
The crucial ingredients at these national displays are a massive barbecue (the
famous asado of beef, lamb, and sausage) accompanied by tests of horses
and horsemanship. The Cholila Valley celebration, held in a meadow beside the
glittering Carrileufú, was small and typical. Beef sizzled over a fire, and the
appetizing smoke drew some 150 residents—much of the population—and 40 horses.
By noon, two score of
wild-looking gauchos had cantered into the meadow, with more horses (and dogs)
in tow. It was easy enough to pick them out from the more ordinary citizens of
Patagonia. Gauchos come in all colors—their bloodlines are a mixture of Spanish
and Indian, with an occasional dash of black, Italian, or even Arab—but their
clothing hardly varies. They wear bombachas—baggy, pleated riding
trousers—and flattish black hats. Their ultimate signature is the facòn, a long
knife tucked into the back of an ornamented belt or sash.
Gaucho
derives from an Indian word meaning "orphan," and traditionally the gaucho is an
outcast, a drifter on a horse whose great days are always said to be long in the
past, before fences and cellular phones narrowed the world. Hardened by the sun,
disdained by city dwellers, gauchos are still aloof, valuing independence above
all. They distrust paperwork, towns, and religion. (Nick Reding, author of
Last Cowboys at the End of the World, says a gaucho wedding is nothing more
than saying vamos, or "let's go," to a woman.) If I turned my back on the
row of pickup trucks parked along the Carrileufu, there was nothing at this
fiesta that Butch and Sundance would not have recognized. Even the races would
have been familiar: At one in the afternoon, an elderly gaucho lifted his hat in
the air and the pounding of hooves marked the first start. The course was only a
hundred yards long, and two riders sprinted down and back, the winner of each
heat promoted to the next. The drumbeat of hooves continued until finally a
young man with no hat outgalloped the last competitor to cheers.
One of the gauchos, already
inebriated at 2 p.m., rolled off his horse. Egged on by dogs, his bay mare went
wild—bucking through the meadow, scattering families and throwing hooves at tiny
children. Instantly, horsemanship was no game: Six gauchos leaped into the
saddle and burst across the field. The same hatless boy was first to run down,
bridle, and yank to a halt the bay. The other gauchos tried not to embarrass him
with any praise.
The juegitos, or "little
games," then resumed with a drag race; the gauchos reran the same two-way
sprints, this time leaping off their mounts in the middle to don dresses or
skirts and blouses. This event was organized on the theory—a correct one—that
even the best horse will panic at the sight of a gaucho in a dress. One after
another, the heats dissolved into chaos and laughter as the gauchos hurled their
mounts down the field, struggled into flowery sundresses or flimsy black skirts,
and then, tripping on their hemlines, chased their mounts around the field. The
horses would have none of it. The crowd was delirious.
The asado sizzled, and in
the heat of the late afternoon, some older gauchos sought shelter beneath the
trees along the Carrileufu, sipping Mendoza wine from cardboard boxes. Cholila's
other fiesta had been canceled this year as a result of Argentina's economic
chaos, but in the shade of a beautiful valley, exchange rates and IMF missions
meant little. "What happens in the rest of the country doesn't affect us much,"
an almost toothless veteran told me, handing me the wine. "We live from our own
resources here."
The blast of an accordion
heralded a malambo, the traditional gaucho dance. A dozen adolescents
circled and stamped in the field, the girls in white peasant dresses, the boys
wearing the finely woven belts and black bombachas of their elders. At
sunset, the party began to break up slowly. I complimented a black-clad gaucho
on his horse, and he jumped down and insisted that I ride it. I went around the
field twice, shook hands, patted my steed, and missed Cholila already.
I dismounted into the hands of
Jorge Graziosi, my host at the Arroyo Claro fishing lodge, across the road.
Graziosi collects traditional Argentine saddles and tack, and says that Butch
and Sundance may have left an imprint on today's fiesta. Many of the older
Cholila gauchos—grandsons of the men Butch and Sundance rode with—were wearing
their neckerchiefs tied in a broad triangle, the "bandit" style familiar to any
American child. But in the rest of Argentina, gauchos roll and knot their
kerchiefs. The Cholila men also buckle their spurs across the back, American
style. Gauchos elsewhere tie them with leather straps.
Graziosi bought a ranch here in
1982, fleeing the steady development of Bariloche, Patagonia's main tourist
city. To the south is the vast Los Alerces park, filled with groves of sequoias,
emerald rivers, and rippling ridges. Rolling north is the lightly settled valley
of Cholila, with gravel roads and few telephones. His main guide, Pancho, is a
wry Chilean who had dragged me from river to river all week to catch large
rainbow and brown trout, an arduous routine interrupted only by vast meals and
short naps in the gnarled forests. "I like this kind of life," Graziosi told me.
"We work the ranch. There aren't many people around. No towns with buses, no
telephones. Horses everywhere. It's like living fifty, sixty, or seventy years
ago."
Or a hundred. I drove into the
"town" of Cholila the next day—a cluster of cinder block houses down the valley,
without a restaurant or a hotel but overrun with horses. Three more were tied in
front of the information booth. Patiently waiting amid maps and handicrafts for
the rare tourist, Karina Quintana confirmed what I'd heard: The cabins that
Butch and Sundance built are still standing, albeit barely. "They are in total
disrepair," she said. "They are just falling down." A plan to preserve them as a
museum has been stuck for eight years in the provincial bureaucracy. There are
so few visitors that it costs more to collect an admission fee than the fee
generates. In the meantime, the unprotected site is vulnerable. "Don't tell
people where they are," Karina insisted. Any publicity draws souvenir hunters,
who have already stripped doors, windows, and even pieces of wallpaper from
Butch's rooms. (If you want directions, just ask anyone, but first take a vow of
chastity.)
Before pointing me in the right
direction, Karina brushed off her leather pants, leaped onto the counter of her
booth, and started shooting. She was imitating Etta Place, riding sidesaddle
while blasting pistols at the posse which had chased the gringos out of town
that last night in 1905.
Never mind that Etta always used
a rifle, or that they slipped away quietly. The legend—the myth—was close.
Even with directions, it was
easy to miss the spread. I went half a mile in the wrong direction and entered
the long driveway of the Casa de Piedra, a Welsh teahouse. In this stone refuge
beneath tall conifers, the elderly owners fed me a stream of orange, apple,
chocolate, and dulce de leche cakes, along with the traditional black
torte of Wales. Bruce Chatwin had visited here in the 1970s while researching
In Patagonia; he'd gotten everything wrong, they said. Stuffed with cake, I
nodded and followed a pointed finger toward the cabin, which was almost in
sight. "My grandmother always said that Etta was very beautiful," owner
Victorina called out as I was leaving.
I parked by the road, hopped a
fence, and cut through a field of daisies that smeared my trousers with yellow
pollen. The fugitives had picked their site well: The cabin and two outbuildings
were nestled among trees in a broad, flat valley backed by a steep Andean ridge.
A small river, the Rio Blanco, bursting with tiny trout, caressed a bank behind
the buildings.
A century does real damage. The
main cabin of four rooms had more hole than roof, the doors and windows were
missing. The handiwork of two Americans was obvious in the low structure, built
Wyoming style with chinked logs overlapping at the ends (Argentines build steep
roofs to shed snow, don't chink, and lay even corners). I touched the adze marks
and could smell the sweat and hear the cussing as Butch and Sundance lifted the
timber. Etta's domestic touches are still visible: neat wainscoting and tatters
of wallpaper, pink roses on burlap backing.
When it was finished, this was
instantly the most famous house in the valley. Sundance and Etta had gone on an
international shopping spree and filled the place with fine china, silverware,
furniture, and even special North American-style windows that wowed the locals.
An Italian visitor in 1904 described a scene of frontier luxury, the walls lined
with pictures in cane frames, magazine art, and "many beautiful weapons and
lassos." Butch and Sundance hired gauchos to do the work and, under the
influence of Etta, spent their spare time reading. They also did paperwork: a
maze of purchases and sales, individual and joint stock companies, and a complex
legal claim for homesteading the land. In short, they went straight. When the
governor of the province visited, the Americans threw a fiesta for the valley.
Sundance plucked out Argentine zambas on a guitar, and the governor
danced with Etta before retiring to sleep in Butch's bed.
It has become impossible to
separate Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid. Paul Newman's crafty, garrulous Butch and Robert Redford's
silent, menacing Sundance may have reversed reality. Sundance learned Spanish
and zambas, while Butch suffered in "Single Cussedness" and struggled to
understand the local gossip. Butch made a mistake, lending a horse to an escaped
prisoner: It was an impulsive gesture of solidarity with a man on the run, but
there was a court hearing. The rumors reached Buenos Aires and then New York,
and in 1903 one of the tireless Pinkerton detectives landed in Argentina with
"Wanted" posters in Spanish (Pinkerton had sent them as far as Tahiti). The
pressure began to mount on their idyll. When a bank seven hundred miles away in
Rio Gallegos was robbed by two other North Americans, suspicion fell on Butch
and Sundance. After the holdup a deputy, apparently smitten with Etta, tipped
them off that the territorial police were coming.
Blamed for a crime they didn't
commit, hunted for those they did, Butch, Sundance, and Etta decided not to
wait. They fled Cholila and rode north, outlaws again. The end of their story is
still hotly debated, but Hollywood got it about right: After a botched robbery
in Bolivia, the men were probably cornered by soldiers and killed.
It was easy enough to hear,
above the tinkling of the Río Blanco, the ringing voices and laughter, the sound
of glasses clinking out toasts, even the faint notes of Sundance's guitar. The
windows must have been open, too, on that festive summer night.
Secure," it said in my
Spanish-English dictionary. Seguro isn't much of a name for a horse, and Tommy
isn't much of a name for a gaucho, but Seguro and Tommy took me over the
Continental Divide. By the time we turned down into the valley of Corcovado,
south of Esquel, I'd learned Seguro's bad habits, like scraping me against
trees, stopping for water every five minutes, and lurching automatically toward
home when left undirected.
Seguro did have good qualities.
An Argentine Criollo, she climbed strongly and looked where she placed each
hoof, a vital habit on the almost vertical trails that led us up and over the
Andes. And despite his name, Tommy was all gaucho. He dressed in black (shirt
and hat) and blue (bombachas), spoke little, and kept a straight face
even while watching me mount up. The only thing that made Tommy smile was when I
asked for yerba mate. "Not many foreigners like maté," he said, grinning as he
stoked a little fire to boil water.
We sipped at the bitter green
tea in a small, aged shack high on a ridgeline over the Corcovado Valley. Twin
threads of the Andes ran north for sixty miles. Chile was visible to the west,
the great, flat Argentine Pampas to the east. Trevelin, a sweetly modest town of
Welsh-descended farmers, was on the horizon.
I'd wandered down from Cholila
over the course of several days, passing first through Los Alerces park and the
classic Hosteria Futalaufquen, a grand lodge built in the 1950s to jump-start
Patagonian tourism. Thirty miles from the park's southern exit is Esquel, the
Bozeman of Patagonia, bustling with rafters and backpackers. Esquel was the
scene of the most famous crime the boys didn't commit. Two foreigners had killed
a Welsh shopkeeper named Llwyd Ap Iwan, a murder that Bruce Chatwin blamed on
Cassidy and the Kid. His In Patagonia convinced a generation of visitors
that, contrary to the movie, a posse of outraged Welsh settlers had eventually
chased down and killed the duo here in Argentina.
But Chatwin should have spent
more time fishing. Heading for the notoriously trout-packed Arroyo Pescado one
afternoon, I cut across the old Ap Iwan estate and promptly stumbled on a faded
gravestone. "Ap Iwan," it read, "1909." Butch and Sundance couldn't have done
the deed: They had fled Cholila in 1905, and by 1906 were posting letters from
Bolivia, asking friends in Cholila to sell the remaining cattle. By 1907 they
were probably dead. I celebrated their innocence, however transitory, by landing
seven rainbow trout on the Ap Iwan stream, and then drifted off to sleep under a
Lombardy poplar, muttering "They'll never take me alive" to no one in
particular.
A couple of hours of gravel
south was Corcovado and the Estancia El Palenque. Butch and Sundance had briefly
worked for a predecessor ranch in this area, Pampa Chica, which translates
roughly as "Little Pasture." Tommy (and Seguro) had led me up from Palenque to
just such a little pasture. This clearing was the only flat spot in the steep
terrain, and it was my theory—Chatwin-esque in its inventiveness—that Butch and
Sundance must have ridden these trails. Tommy used his facón to stir tea,
cut bread, chop wood, pick his teeth, and skewer bits of steak. We made it back
down to El Palenque by midafternoon, where owner Jeff Wells was gearing up for
fishing. I strolled up the valley with him to a favorite hole on the Corcovado
River, where Pacific salmon rested under a willow tree. At just thirteen
thousand acres, El Palenque is "quite small" by Patagonian standards, Wells said
in all seriousness. He'd expanded an old farmhouse into a tourist lodge five
years ago, but his passion for Patagonia was more pleasure than business. Like
Butch, he was a Mormon from the American West, and everywhere he looked there
was a distilled essence of home, a dream of the Old West. "That letter is why I
came here," he said of Butch's 1902 missive. "You can still drink from the
streams. The grass is still knee-high."
At the river, thousands of giant
stone flies hatched out of the water, and we stayed until it was too dark to
see.
I finally flew south, to the
region that has changed least since Butch's day, to both the past and the future
of Patagonia. Two immense lakes slid under the wingtips as we approached El
Calafate: first the turquoise-tinted Lake Viedma; and then, after a bleak
stretch of brown tussock, the wind-flecked Lake Argentino, also hued almost
green with glacial melt. The ribbon of rugged Andean peaks was interlaced with
crystalline glaciers. We set down at an inviting new glass-and-steel terminal in
the middle of absolutely nothing. Less than an hour away was the grand Perito
Moreno Glacier, three miles of ice sliding thunderously into a lake. The town of
El Calafate has little to offer except rental cars that take visitors into a
network of small towns, tourist-ready estancias, and national parks.
I headed out in a rented Fiat
toward the trekking capital of Patagonia, the puny town of El Chaltén, cutting
north across the mouths of lakes Argentino and then Viedma. I was on the
notorious Route 40, a gravel track along the face of the Argen-tine Andes where
flat tires and muffler-mangling mounds of gravel are routine. The four-hour trip
took an extra hour because I had to stop to stare at the glaciers so often.
Dating from just 1985, El Chalten has some two hundred year-round residents and
feels freshly carved from the landscape, with tin-roofed houses, wooden
restaurants, and brick lodgings along a tiny valley. Directly above the town are
the needle-sharp peaks of Egger, Torre, and Fitz Roy, which inspired the skyline
logo of the Patagonia clothing company. The surrounding cordillera is filled
with a compact assortment of glaciers, lakes, deep forest, and superb hiking
trails; the scenery and trekking opportunities are the equal of the more famous
Torres del Paine park in Chile, but without the crowds or the trash. The idea of
this outer space ever "filling up" with people is still laughable a century
after Cassidy dismissed it. Within minutes of checking into El Puma, the best
lodge in the valley, I heard the refrain I would encounter again and again: "We
like it so much better than Torres," an American couple told me.
In uncrowded El Chaltén, the
biggest problem was finding anyone to hike with, and I had to set out alone
before dawn on a trail that led me up a twisted canyon and two hours along a
milky river to a cluster of expedition tents. There I joined guide Yamila
Cachero and a Brit, a German, a Canadian, and two Uruguayans for a daylong
assault on the Torre Glacier. We pulled ourselves over the river on a steel
cable, then hiked to the face of black, gravel-strewn ice (glaciers are filthy
at first glance). Once we had strapped on our crampons and climbed on top, we
faced a sea of white rippling moguls, broken and craggy, riven by deep-blue
cracks filled with ice water. A slip was a bad idea. Yamila shepherded us over
the crevasses and then spent several hours on belay, instructing us in the
basics of scaling ice walls with an ax and ropes. The white expanse was really
four separate glaciers that flowed together into a single frozen river,
thundering with unseen avalanches. The ice steadily cracked, rumbled, and
vibrated under our crampons.
The scale of Patagonia has
always impressed me—indeed, it is the central characteristic of the place—but
the next day's trip to Perito Moreno National Park must have been a
hallucination. Route 40 unrolled from the horizon for a full ten hours. The lack
of traffic—a car an hour—was unnerving, and in the solitude, even the static on
the radio had a comforting sound. On a high hill, the Fiat's AM band finally
caught a whisper: "Pops, I'm out of the hospital," a voice said. And then,
"Murillo, I will call Thursday at four." This was a "messages" broadcast, where
families sent missives of startling intimacy over the public airwaves to gauchos
in remote pastures ("Your children need you," I heard once; and "Alejandro,
there isn't anyone else"). The silence that engulfed me in the next valley made
Patagonia a synonym for loneliness. At sunset, a sign for the Perito Moreno park
greeted me—and then nothing. Only six hundred people visited the 284,00-acre
park last year. Eighty percent of it is closed to visitors, permanently, a
wilderness for pumas and condors. There is no infrastructure beyond a single
dirt road, some campsites, and two places to stay, both working ranches.
The first was Estancia Menelik,
where I landed in the midst of preparations for an asado. Inside a tin
wind shelter, manager Augustine Smart, round and red-bearded, was overseeing his
gauchos as they banked a red-hot fire, skewered an entire lamb, and staked it
over the coals. Estancia Menelik is the showcase property of Cielos Patagónicos,
an investor group aiming to save failing ranches—and the gauchos on them—with
green tourism and a dash of development. Smart spoke of Cielos Patagonicos as a
project whose goal was "to conserve the ecology, the history, and the culture of
each place." But part of the funding to save a failing ranch like Menelik might
come from developing two hotels and vacation homes in El Chaltén. Cielos
Patagónicos president Lionel Sagramoso conceded that the Chalten proposal was "a
total real estate investment," but the money raised would fund the group's
conservation mission elsewhere.
Like some locals, Yvon Chouinard,
the founder of Patagonia Inc., is critical of this blend of development and
preservation. "I've made lots of trips down there and I just love that place,"
he says of Patagonia. But the plan to build a lodge outside El Chaltén in order
to fund preservation elsewhere is "horrible," Chouinard says. "Development like
that is something we want to stop." He thinks El Chaltén is already overbuilt
(something of a purist, he calls the adorable town "a horrible, junky, trashy
little place"). He is a board member of the Patagonia Land Trust, which buys up
large estancias in southern Argentina and dismantles rather than develops,
ending ranching and removing fences in the hope of someday converting the land
into national parks.
Around the fire at Menelik, as
we tucked into slivers of seared and tender lamb, this duel between development
and preservation seemed totally abstract. Like Butch, I could not foresee
Patagonia "filling up." The park's six hundred visitors a year don't justify
development of anything. Ten hours from the nearest airport, with snow closing
the roads for two months every year, this region will probably still offer a
terrific hideout for some twenty-second-century Sundance.
The next day, i moved to
Estancia La Oriental, the other lodging in Perito Moreno National Park, where I
slept in a cold but comfortable room, and saw a condor while drinking coffee at
8 a.m. The bird's eleven-foot wingspan was silhouetted against the sky like a
splayed hand as it drifted over the house, into the backcountry. Guanacos—fleet,
short-haired cousins of the llama—galloped everywhere in herds of a dozen or
more. Gray and red foxes slinked through the dry sage grass. Armed with
binoculars, I spent a cold and fruitless morning hiking on the Belgrano
Peninsula, scanning the windfalls of timber for a puma. The population has
stabilized at about twenty-two cats.
The last morning at La Oriental,
owner Manuel Lada just handed me a horse. Like Butch helping that fugitive, Lada
didn't ask where I was going, or why, but simply caught, bridled, and saddled a
chestnut for me at the first suggestion of need. He didn't even know the
creature's name. There were abandoned horses all over the property, and they ran
feral in the park approaches.
No Name took me over a ridgeline
and then across a wet valley to the base of the thousand-foot cliff where that
condor had come from. Dozens of broad white guano stains made it easy to spot,
high overhead, the nests of the rookery, one of the largest gathering sites for
these rare birds in all of the Andes. No Name was jaded from long exposure to
condors; she merely ate her way across the meadow while I waited, binoculars in
hand. After an hour, I was rewarded by the sight of a single condor stretching
its neck, shaking out its massive wings, underlaid with white, and then
awkwardly heaving from the cliff to soar high into the park.
It is still easy to get lost in
Patagonia, deliberately or not, and on the way home I forced No Name down the
wrong path, detoured somewhere, and encountered a wire fence. I dismounted and
put a hand on the steel strand cutting through this immensity, convinced that if
I turned back, we could head wherever we wanted. We'd live off the land for a
while. No one would find us down here, in 1903 or 2003. Overfull with light and
space, I burst into an off-key rendition of "Don't Fence Me In."
No Name snorted with derision, a
throaty sound that flushed a pair of tall brown guanacos from the underbrush a
hundred yards away. They ran and took the fence in a bound, their hooves
clicking over the top wire, thump, thump. Under the tips of my fingers I felt
the instant telegraph of their break for the backcountry.
A hundred years from now, you'll
find them here.
Published in September 2003.
Prices or other information may have since changed.
Fuente: Condé Nast Traveler
Fecha: 2003-09-20