Bleak lives

Although I've traveled a fair amount, there remain a number of large blank spaces on my travel map.  One of those spaces is Patagonia.  Unlike other blank areas -- say, Oklahoma -- the term "Patagonia" sometimes tempts me because of the spectacular hiking at the far southern tip of the South American continent, in both Argentina and Chile.  I came close to signing up for a Patagonian hike during this coming January, but backed off finally for various reasons.

Patagonia is a large area, of course.  It includes much, much more than the portion of the Andes where so many trekking companies organize hikes.  Most of the region consists of flat plains, grass-lands, and desert -- the pampas.

Looking for a good travel book to read, this past week, I happened on Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, the first successful book by perhaps the first great travel writer since World War II.  Unfortunately, Mr. Chatwin has diminished my interest in hanging out in Patagonia for any length of time, although I still wouldn't mind spending a week or two trekking in the southern Andes.

Chatwin tells us of a grandmother's cousin, Charley Milward, a sea captain who lived the last years of his life in Punta Arenas, Chile, and who claimed to have discovered a perfectly preserved brontosaurus  Chatwin recalled seeing a tiny portion of the beast's alleged hide as a child.  The ostensible purpose of his pilgrimage in 1974 was to learn more about both Charley and the brontosaurus.

The last chapters of In Patagonia recapitulate the sad life and career of Charley, and offer some insights into the true identity of the "brontosaurus."  It's an interesting story, but almost an afterthought to the rest of the book, a last-minute attempt to fulfill the promise of the opening chapter.

The bulk of Chatwin's book is a series of vignettes of human lives, from the days of the Spanish conquest up until the twentieth century.  He tells his tales as he travels -- largely on foot or by hitchhiking, talking to locals living in great isolation -- from the Rio Negro in the north to the Straits of Magellan in the south. 

Patagonia, at least as described by Chatwin, was until recently dominated by European landowners (especially the British) -- marginalized men at home who came to Patagonia to seek their fortune.  The Spanish-speaking Argentines and Chileans -- so far from their national capitals -- play a minimal role in his narration, and the indigenous Indians appear as little more than nameless serfs.

It is lives of those European emigrants who most pique the author's interest.

I've heard speculation that suicide rates on the American West Coast are unusually high, because Easterners, tormented by failure and personal problems, kept moving west to build new lives.  When they reached the Pacific, unable to escape their own weakness of character, there was no place to go but the grave.  Similarly, as viewed by Chatwin, Patagonia is now, and always has been, a place where Europeans come to escape their own incompetence and/or bad luck, and where they find only ultimate disaster.

His stories are often amazing, sometimes humorous, sometimes gruesome, sometimes frightening.  They virtually always end in despair, loneliness, self-recrimination, bitterness, hopelessness, futility, and -- ultimately -- madness and/or death. "Bury me not on the lone prairie," is the final wish -- literally or metaphorically -- of so many of his characters.  They rarely get their wish.

I may still visit Patagonia, someday.  I still have Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express to read, possibly as an inspiration, although Theroux's travel narratives usually produce their own sense of depression.  Mountain Travel/Sobek and other trekking companies offer marvelous, expensive treks with names like "Patagonia: Trekking the Paine Circuit," illustrated brilliantly with beautiful photographs.  Those itineraries are tempting.  But they would not show me the "real" Patagonia. 

Not, at least, Bruce Chatwin's Patagonia.  Similarly, I'd love to visit and hike the mountains of Jackson Hole National Park.  That doesn't mean I'd care to hike across the Wyoming steppes, hanging out in small town bars and hearing stories of the bitter, lonely lives of its residents.  But that's another hike that, for Chatwin, would have been food for literature.