Into Thick Air (26 page)

Lies, all lies. There is no dry season, only a less-wet season. Each year brings 160 inches of rain—yet I, too, stand patiently on deck and wait for Osorno to reappear. So does Mr. Hideo (“It rhymes with video!”) of Osaka, who faithfully records the waterfalls that slide out of the mountain clouds, sluicing down gorges directly into the lake.

At the far end of the lake is an old hotel, three stories of stucco under a hipped roof that would not look out of place in the Black Forest. In the tastefully rustic lobby, a tour group of California oldsters swaps stories of “treks,” which I believe are “hikes” in places where people don't speak English. One sturdy fellow is crazy for Argentine Patagonia.

“The archaeologists find dinosaurs out there, you know. It's better than the Gobi Desert. They've just discovered that very big dinosaurs, say forty feet long, come from eggs no longer than
this
.”

He holds a thumb and finger five inches apart. The audience, not clear on the concept, listens for the import of these five inches.

“That's not nearly as big as you'd expect from a forty-foot dinosaur!”

“Eighty feet!” interjects another man.

“Yes, eighty feet—that's even more amazing.”

But it's not as amazing as the sudden flood of sunlight through the windows.
I ignore the little fact paddling around in my brain—160 inches of rain—and give in to the urge to leave the hotel and find a camp.

A kind waitress wraps up two ham-and-cheese sandwiches for me. That should do me for dinner and breakfast, then I'll pedal over the Paso de Pérez Rosales into Argentina for lunch on the shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi. The pass is only 3,300 feet above the Pacific—hardly a workout for a real he-cyclist.

The road is deep black gravel peppered with smooth cobbles, and I must deflate my tires for traction. All is gorgeous for about ten minutes, the snowfields bronzed and the waterfalls so high and thin. There are several abandoned homes and apple orchards, so somebody must have stood here in the sun and thought: this is the place. A pasture to park a cow; inviolate citadels above.

Where did the settlers go? Insane, I'd guess, from the drip and plop of rain. The clouds, loitering on the summits, spill into the valley and hasten the coming of night. With the pastures now behind me and forest on all sides, I'm lucky to find an open spot on a gravel bar above a looping stream, and get my tent up just as the rain comes down. The hell with flood danger: I'm dry for now.

The first sandwich is gone in thirty seconds. I'm eyeing the breakfast sandwich when I remember my Emergency Soup. I fire up the stove and open the tent zipper for a bit of fresh air. Mosquitoes sneak in, and while I'm slapping about my ears, the noodles boil over and a cloud of steam fills the tent. My glasses instantly fog over. I grope for the roaring stove, kill the flame. The mosquitoes are thrilled by the mist and resume the attack. Lacking repellent, I rely on an internal remedy: a half-liter of red wine.

Two hours later, life is much improved. The rain's stopping. The stream purls by with restless liquid sounds. Frogs croak amiably, hoping to get lucky. And when I open the tent and look to the sky I see that my night wish has been granted. Above the Andes is a terrific blaze of stars.

 

IT'S AS COLD as a meat locker in the morning, yet bordering the stream is a shock of bamboo twenty feet high. During a walk that will be shorter than anticipated, I discover that bamboo is friendly only when encountered
post-harvest in Polynesian restaurants. Living bamboo is impenetrable.

The rest of the forest is a confusion of moldering logs and a tangle of creepers encircling the lichen-mottled trunks of the beech trees called
Nothofagus.
Duck under a branch, and with the faintest vibration the dripping mats of moss release a thousand droplets. It's always raining in this rainforest, and I bet the first Europeans to come this way must have despised this wall of murk as much as I do.

They were Spaniards. They weren't sure where they were going, but knew what they hoped to find. It was 1621, and the legend was already a century old.

In 1528, Francisco Cesar and fifteen men set out from somewhere in the moist heart of the continent, to find a city where the roofs were plated with pure silver. Another account has Cesar setting out with four men in search of the “White King,” an uncommonly generous ruler who made gifts of gold and precious stones. The details vary, but the ending is the same: the survivors laid eyes on an “Enchanted City.” They swore it was true.

It sounds like nonsense, but only a few years later Pizarro proved that the Incas certainly had gold and knew a thing or two about master-planned communities. As the years passed the legend of the Enchanted City swelled and metamorphosed into a place where even the furniture was gold. Some called it El Dorado.

That was enough to propel Diego Flores de Léon and a crew of forty-six from the Pacific into this canyon. I imagine they avoided the bamboo by thrashing up the flood channel of the Rio Peulla. Perhaps they rested here. They would ultimately fail in their quest, but at least they could have enjoyed this excellent camp, with a flattish rock for a seat where I eat my slim breakfast. I'm not game for another walk in a place where you stumble in the dimness and try to guess whether that orange blob is a fungus or a slime mold. Too wet to catch fire, this forest simply grows deeper and blacker until an old tree dies and falls over and creates an open space in the canopy.

But not on the ground. Mr. Darwin, always ready for an alternative to being seasick aboard the HMS
Beagle
, penetrated the forest near Puerto Montt and encountered “a mass of dying and dead trunks.” “I am sure,” he wrote, “that often, for more than ten minutes together, our feet never
touched the ground, and we were frequently ten or fifteen feet above it, so that the seamen as a joke called out the soundings.”

I've got it easy: a road along the canyon bottom, without traffic. The clouds are back, low and gauzy and clinging to the canyon walls, but it's not raining. I pedal and stop where I please, keeping an eye out for a hummingbird called the green-backed firecrown and its favored treat, the drooping blooms of fuchsia. Instead I find a marvelously hairy tarantula and the utterly smooth trunks of a myrtle tree. Both spider and tree bark are the color of cinnamon.

The only bird I recognize is the caracara, a kind of falcon that has abandoned the hunting lifestyle in favor of the already dead. A large and patient bird, it sits on a branch and stares at me with head cocked. Waiting.

I wait. I want it to fly away, so I can snap a photo.

The caracara waits. With dark wings folded over its white body, it's a dignified character, not counting its huge horrible bill that appears dipped in blood. I wait until I remember that I don't have any lunch, and that the caracara is hoping that I am lunch. I throw a rock. The caracara takes wing, slowly and audibly, with a span roughly equal to the length of my bike.

The bird is waiting just around the corner, where the single rutted lane abruptly leaves the river bottom and switchbacks up to the Paso de Pérez Rosales. It's almost noon and the sun has struggled free, yet the day is still cool and I'm panting little clouds of vapor as I climb. Work makes heat and I strip off my shirt. Well short of the summit I experience what marathoners call “hitting the wall,” the overwhelming urge to stop moving.

I stop. Digging through my panniers in search of food, I find only an ounce of grated parmesan cheese and immediately pour it down my throat. It's like eating sawdust. Two minibuses carrying ferry passengers trundle past in the opposite direction. The tourists gawk. Some, in an apparently reflexive action, videotape me. They' ll regret it. Glistening with sweat, my beard flecked with cheese, I look like I've been pursued by bloodhounds for a week.

Running out of fuel is a rare and unwelcome experience. I look down as I push on, thinking of anything but the mountain—old girlfriends, new candy bars, and a salt lake called Salina Grande. I nearly miss the sign at
the summit saying,
Welcome to Argentina
. Semidelirious but still in the saddle, I keep moving.

After all, I have my own foolhardy quest. And my own tale, which I swear is true, of the far side of the Andes:

 

“DO YOU KNOW WHY there are no blacks in Argentina?” asks Alfredo Pentke.

He runs the Hotel Puerto Blest on Lago Nahuel Huapi. The hotel is a thirty-room wooden three-story from the early 1900s. The tourist season begins next month, and I alone am seated for dinner. Pentke has joined me and soon revealed his German ancestry. His hotel is hidden fairly deep in the backcountry, and I've no idea if he is a friendly Nazi or a history buff.

“There are many blacks in our neighboring countries. But here in Argentina they were killed by the wars and the gauchos. The gauchos hated them.”

The gaucho is the Argentine cowboy, the free-spirited redneck of the pampas and Patagonia. That they might have terrorized black people is entirely believable if you've read Jose Hernandez's 1872 Argentine epic poem,
The Gaucho Martín Fierro
. Stiffening his resolve for a knife fight against a man darker than himself, Fierro recalls:

I expect Pentke to carry on in this vein, but he has other ideas. He orders a bottle of Humberto Canale Cabernet. “It's local, good, and only four dollars a bottle.”

A mushroom omelet is served by a proper waiter. Pentke tells me proud tales of his family, and I do the same. He asks of the flowers in the Andes, and his curiosity warms me. Steak and fries arrive. Pentke pours another glass of wine, pulls his chair closer, and tells me of Argentina's troubles over the past century. It's a frank and generous recounting, with a single exception. Pentke makes no mention of the decade that began with yet another military coup in 1976. Like the Pinochet in Chile, it was the worst of times.

Leftist rebels kidnapped or assassinated those on the right. The military did the same to the left, but with a martial zeal for torture and execution that made them far more effective. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people were “disappeared.” The word is exactly right, for many were pushed out of planes over the Atlantic, their arms and legs churning uselessly until they hit the water and truly disappeared.

Dessert is peaches and cream and the clink of spoons on china. The military ruled, says Pentke, until “the Malvinas disaster brought a new call for elections.” The Malvinas are forsaken islands of rock and bog, thinly peopled and hundreds of miles off the coast. The British call them the Falklands and have claimed them as their own since 1833. The Argentine military invaded in 1982, hoping a surge of patriotism would bolster support. They were wrong. Hundreds died on both sides. Argentina lost.

“It was very bad for the Argentine military,” says Pentke, finishing off the wine with a smile that suggests that what is bad for the military is, in the end, good for Argentina. Today, the most sadistic and least cautious officers from the Dirty War are “behind bars, or in America, or staying low.” After several presidents and economies staggering under inflation of up to 3,000 percent, Argentines are still searching for stability, for money that doesn't fade to nothing by year's end.

Then they can come here, to the Hotel Puerto Blest, where dinner ends with a lute and a recorder on the stereo. I climb the stairs to the final bath of the day, with the window open to the shush of an unseen waterfall.

 

THE FERRY TO Bariloche is a big boat, a hundred-foot catamaran powered by twin 900-horsepower Detroit Diesels. The same informative sign assures
the passengers that the
Condor
is built with “nine watertight compartments.” If this stirs sunken memories of the
Titanic
, you can ascend the carpeted spiral staircase to the bar and soothe your nerves with a shot of Old Smuggler whiskey.

Plenty of passengers do. Late in the afternoon, they're no longer awed by the dark mountains ramped with pointed trees and snow, and not bothering to video the waterfalls that crash down every valley and dive into Lago Nahuel Huapi. The mood on deck turns contemplative, which is similar to bored except under pleasing circumstances. The sky is a firm blue. My bicycle is lashed to an anchor on deck. Eastward, the land dries and the forest opens in the rain shadow of the Andes. The snowfields shrink until they persist only on the shady south slopes.

Bariloche is a high-dollar resort of bombproof chalets behind one-ton gates, where not-thin people in velour warm-ups jog or at least shuffle. For the proletariat, a package tour parade of double-decker buses runs between the Wonderland Hotel and Little Red Riding Hood Ceramics. In the town center the preferred building materials are timber and stone, a rustic motif so pervasive that even the phone booths are miniature log cabins.

Bariloche is the first place I can buy Captain Black pipe tobacco. It's where I slip under the covers at night with a small contented smirk that means:
Ha!
No more rain. It's where I rise in the morning, attempt to touch my toes, then snap open the blinds to see that it's still not raining. It's snowing.

The streets are swept clear of humans. The snow soon turns to rain, and the rain itself gives up when the clouds are flung to Paraguay by an extraordinary wind. The telephone lines tremble and thrum, yet as soon as the sky is clear the brave folk of Bariloche emerge. A girl wearing a relatively aerodynamic beret is the only person I see attempting a hat, and she loses it before my eyes. It sails the length of a city block before it touches down. She doesn't bother to chase it.