Chasing Che (9 page)

Our destinations had to be, necessarily, the same, yet I could not follow every mile of their route. Not only were the details vague—even with two diaries for corroboration, I had little more than a list of towns they passed through—but it also seemed pointless to reenact
their every move when it was their experience of discovery that I was after. They were heading into a wild, undeveloped Patagonia, toward a place called San Martín, and I would have to find my own way there.

During that 3:30
A.M
. argument in a tango bar in Buenos Aires, the truck driver and smuggler had dismissed my planned route to San Martín, explaining that the unpaved roads and wild terrain of ’52 were gone, replaced by a paved superhighway lined with convenience stores. Working with my pen and a cocktail napkin, he drew a route that went due south, deeper into Patagonia. It was a divergence from the path of Guevara and Granado—the two G’s, as I was beginning to think of them—but the trucker was sure it was wilder, more the old Patagonia. “You want to see what it was like back then,” he said, “then this is the way. You’ll really be on your own.”

Before I fled my dusty Miramar campground the next morning, headed west and south, I studied the map of Patagonia. The lines that portrayed roads first grew thin, then dotted, and finally petered out in blank spaces, like capillaries disappearing under skin. Of his own departure from Miramar, Guevara wrote, “I finally felt myself wafted away on the winds of adventure, towards worlds which I fancied stranger than they were, in situations I imagined much more normal than they turned out to be.”

That morning, before pulling out of the campground, I took a black marker and wrote the words
YES FEAR
in thick letters across the back of my helmet.

T
here are moments on a motorcycle when all the glory of motion is distilled into one purposeful package. Chasing curves over a swelling landscape, a motorcycle enters the pure expression of physics and is bound to the road in a way no car will ever know. The rider and machine are literally balanced on the infinitely thin line where centripetal force meets gravity. Despite this state of suspended disaster, the sensation of risk is largely a sensation; the motorcycle is in harmony with the road, and risk comes overwhelmingly from other drivers. Any moment of travel on a motorcycle is a light and essential moment, an agile rebuke to a life conducted in one place. The raw force of the engine is not hidden beneath a hood, but alternately purrs and growls a few inches from the knees, demanding the consciousness of power. Sealed behind glass, insulated by climate control systems and music, the driver of a car knows nothing about the directions of the wind, the lay of sunlight, the small changes in temperature between a peak and a valley, the textured noise of differing asphalts, or the sweet and sour aromas of manured fields or passing pine forests. Engaged in all the senses and elements, balanced in the present tense, a rider on two wheels can taste moments of oneness with the road.

Alas, this wasn’t one of those moments. After three hard days and two bad nights I came finally to a sliding, squirming halt in a
thick pebbly gravel at the end of Valdés Peninsula. The truck driver had been right. I was on my own.

National Route 3, as the road south was called, had been pockmarked, scarred, and prone to sudden fits of gravel, all in all a merciless experiment in moving fast down a dangerous yet utterly boring route that lasted hour after hour, morning and afternoon, day after day, interrupted only by brief interludes in hideous gas stations manned by surly men dishing overpriced fuel. This shakedown cruise was pure pain: the new Plexiglas windscreen on the bike proved too short by a few inches, so that a sixty-five-mile-an-hour wind slipped over the top and tugged at my helmet all day, pressing the chin strap into my neck; the tip of my nose burned red and then peeled; my shoulders and behind complained incessantly; I became very dirty. Later I would miss the Ruta Nacional 3, of course, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Patagonia is immense and more impressive than lovely in its austere vastness. With every mile south the land turned a lighter brown. Green grasses faded to tan clumps on a canvas of powdery soil. Where the road cut near the sea I saw a churlish and black Atlantic dressed with constant whitecaps. It was an ever-diminishing landscape: flatter, emptier, windier, a desert without sand, hot by day and cold by night. The last hundred miles out the peninsula were on a loose gravel track that caught the wheels and threw me down twice. I’d topped up my tank in the pathetic town where the gravel began, and each time the bike fell over gasoline trickled out of the carburetors, wetting the stones. The dark stains evaporated quickly in a wind that ripped off the Atlantic at twenty-five miles an hour, an offshore blast that smelled only of fathomless distance, of the great expanse of ocean east toward Africa and south toward the ice.

Valdés Peninsula is a geologic oddity, thrust far into the cold currents of the South Atlantic yet home to the lowest point in South America, a broad, white salt pan some thirty-five meters below sea level that I had passed quickly on my way in. This featureless plain was the dullest tourist site I’d ever seen, but every day a bus pulled to
a halt beside it, disgorging groups of visitors who were expecting the Patagonia of wall calendars. The buses progressed around the peninsula, pausing at ocean vistas and heading always to the north point, where, if you arrived at high tide, you might see one of the local orcas charge the beach, scattering—and only occasionally catching—the seal pups that played tauntingly in the surf. The rest of the peninsula was satisfyingly empty, a landscape without utility poles or houses or pavement.

I’d finally come to a halt at Caleta Gonzalo, a zipper of a bay at the ocean end of the hundred-mile peninsula. Twice a day, Caleta Gonzalo opened along its length and closed again, breathing water in and out in an enormous tidal swing that exposed almost ten miles of mud, then reflooded it. Steep cliffs dropped down to a beach where a dozen obese sea elephants brayed and dozed. Despite the briny stink of the tidal flats, the beach looked attractive. I’d driven back and forth for miles, scaring up a rare Patagonian fox and several loping guanacoes but failing to spot even a single dip or hollow to shield my tent from the wind, nor any man-made structure to provide lee shelter. From on high you could spy the magellanic penguins as they waded into the water and fell over with a cute belly flop. In an instant these waddling land creatures were reborn as subsurface birds, their useless wings now fins that helped them school in speedy flocks through the undersea.

Everywhere, the elements sounded their warnings. A blood-orange light fled the setting of the sun behind me, and the wind already carried a premonition of how cold it would be in half an hour. I needed shelter quickly. Night was minutes away, and in this unpopulated zone I was ready to ignore the No Camping signs sprinkled thoughtfully along the cliff, but I knew why they were really there. At high tide the beach would disappear, and the water came in like a flash flood. If you were asleep on the beach you would never make it. A month before my arrival a careless camper had been killed that way.

I drove south on the bay road, rounding bluff after bluff in search of any sheltered spot, but the ground was flat everywhere and
scoured by the violence of the air. If I’d had a car I could have slept in it, but instead I needed protection from elements that cared nothing for “oneness.”

Hurrying along, I almost passed the little farm nestled in a dell where the cliffs briefly faded away and a cluster of buildings touched the high-water line. There were four sheep ranches on the Valdés Peninsula, and these buildings were an outstation on the biggest, which ran more than 40,000 head.

This is where my filth came in handy. If there was one thing I was learning to admire about the young Ernesto Guevara, it was his unmitigated gall. As story after story in his diary showed, the man was absolutely shameless, a master at the traveler’s art of scamming, borrowing, begging, or otherwise landing accommodation, favors, food, clothes, money, introductions, jobs, dance partners, and liquor. When it came to freeloading, Guevara was a prince. “We aren’t that broke,” he once wrote to his mother after cadging a bed in a hospital, “but explorers of our stature would rather die than pay for the bourgeois comfort of a hostel.”

Menaced on both sides by barking black dogs, I rode down the driveway of the ranch, dismounted, and clapped twice. Then I waited the customary two minutes, the black dogs barking all the while, circling slowly as I stood stock still. I spent the time preparing a little speech. I had to sound needy, yet not desperate. I had to plead for a roof, neither so demanding that I would offend nor so tentative that I would be rejected. I had to balance a humble tone with the subtle implication that I was a person of enormous importance, deserving of aid. For proof of the latter, I carried in my breast pocket a letter of introduction from a New York magazine, ready to spring forth like a passport from the Other World.

When he came out—a fat, greasy fellow in a sun-bleached
PARIS ELLE
T-shirt, his hair wild in the wind—he didn’t wait for my speech. He looked at the setting sun, the distant horizon, and above all the dirt on my clothes.

“Come in, come in,” he said, “you had better spend the night.” His name was Florio, and he had the buttery handshake of a man
who handled sheep. He waved at the dogs, who fell silent, and led me inside.

M
y bed was the floor of the cookhouse. After three twelve-hour days of riding my ugly cockroach of a motorcycle, I slept soundly and long. The broken cement felt like a down mattress.

The hens woke me when they strutted into the shed and bobbed nervously, emitting feed-me clucks. The tin roof played a twangy tune, like an instrument in the wind that had risen during the night. Outside it was blowing hard enough to send an unhappy hen rolling beak-over-talon past the shed from time to time.

Florio listened to the radio, measured the wind, and sent his son David out to tell me that I was grounded. It was gusting to forty-five miles an hour now, and I could not drive. The boy told me this and kept talking. The dam of solitude first leaked and then gushed. Nine years old, living in isolation with his father and 40,000 sheep, the boy needed nothing so much as to speak. As I stood silently with him in the sunshine, both of us leaning against the wind, he unleashed everything at once, a gale of words about the neighbors, who lived an hour away, and the level of water in the well, which was low, and the whales and sharks that came into the bay. He named the starving cats that wandered the yard eyeing the chickens, and explained the work histories of both black dogs, along with the good qualities of various birds, the murderous nature of foxes, and which of every animal that walked or swam was good or bad, which cherished or hated. He talked of the orcas that came into the bay to hunt seals and tasty sea lion pups, and of the tourists who came on great lumbering buses to watch the orcas hunt, and of the water truck, which was three days late, and of the strange English boy he met once at a boarding school, a boy who spoke very oddly, almost as though he had different words for things.

“
Myaw myaw myaw;
we couldn’t understand anything he said,” David explained. The fever or speech ran on, burning at the boy so
badly that he twitched and jumped and jumbled words, hunching down to tell me about the coloration of chicken eggs, then jumping up to describe the stars we would see at night, and the paths of airplanes, and the cost of soccer balls, and his fervent desire to drink Coca-Cola. “I go through mountains of shoes my father says I’m crazy he can’t believe it but I don’t do anything except when it’s raining and the mud gets everywhere and the rain kills the chickens that one lays white eggs it’s the only one the
patrón
comes to visit sometimes and I showed him but if it’s an east wind it’s cold and wet and that kills the chickens or the fox comes and gets them which is why they sit in their bush all night where the dogs don’t chase them I like the cats better my kitten is better will you take a picture of him?”

By my watch he talked for twenty-five minutes without interruption. What finally stopped him was that I belched, and at this he fell over in the dirt and chicken shit and began laughing his head off, the fever of an entire solitary winter broken by a fit of endless giggles. He’d never heard a foreigner belch before. Before he could start talking again, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Che Guevara.

David looked broken by the question. My tone told him it was an adult matter, something serious and from the outside world, but I was mouthing words as meaningless as those of the strange little English boy at boarding school. This was something from beyond the realm of foxes and sea elephant pups and good and bad winds. “Does he play football?” he asked tentatively.

Later I risked the short trip to the north shore, but the orcas never came and the seals sunned themselves unmolested. When I got back Florio was still sitting inside at the same table, his ear tuned to the transistor voice of the world. There was no news from the atmosphere.

I
n the morning I lay on the floor listening to the roof, which struck a lower tone than the day before. The shed was decorated with old
shears and handmade knives hanging from the wall, their rusty points dangling down in the general direction of my sleeping bag. The tools were waiting for October, for the 40,000 sheep to finish converting grass into wool and then to line up in the chutes and paddocks and march in steady panic under these sharpened edges.

Little David came to the door carrying the same message from his father that I had heard in the tin roof: the wind was down in the twenties. David stood just inside the doorway of the cook shed, silent but clearly crestfallen by my decision to abandon him to the sheep and cats and chickens and orcas. He watched with wide eyes as I handled each of my possessions in turn, brushing stray down from my sleeping bag and stuffing it away, nestling my tiny cook stove in a saddlebag, dropping my flashlight into the zippered tank bag that would fit on the bike between my knees, one piece of kit after another. You could carry a lot if you packed carefully.