There is no denying the beauty of Patagonia but a recent visit left me with mixed feelings.
(Title courtesty of Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’)
I should love Patagonia, it has everything I adore: wild beautiful country and wide open spaces, vast lakes and hidden pools, high mountains, rugged plateaus and space to get lost in and leave everyone behind.
I love the serene beauty of the Beagle Channel with its ever changing light and racing clouds, peaks over the water and the luminescent bogs. The sea washes up on unspoilt remote beaches, unchanged since Fitzroy sailed past, beats on rocks where geese wander and swirls through the forests of giant kelp. To walk on a Patagonian shore is to tiptoe through white-aged driftwood and a gallimaufry of seashells.
Even when grey, it has a unique brooding atmosphere and the landscape exudes a timelessness that speaks of our irrelevance. One only has to drive through it to see the many homesteads driven to dereliction, the vast expanses that defy taming and the scars of civilization rapidly being reabsorbed into the land.
The thick beech and nire forests have their own savage stories, twisted trunks and wind shattered trees creating a wildwood. The gales roaring through their branches cause one to brace in anticipation while raindrops glisten on the tiny leaves of contorted bonzai like trees that survive some of of the harshest weather in the world.
Patagonia is a story of survival in the severest conditions and the land echoes this struggle, from the tiny lichen on the high scree slopes of desolate mountains to the dying glaciers that still have the power to awe in their immensity.
And yet… And yet…
It is a frustrating land, a beautiful land that is irresistible and which I want to love so much, but each time I get near, like a chameleon it changes, so a hitherto unknown aspect opens up and I am off on another completely new tangent.
Moods change constantly as does the light, the weather and the temperature. It is difficult to relax as I never know what is coming next, whether to take it at face value or to try and intuit the next change in direction.
Patagonia can never be taken for granted and only with time do I realise that its beauty transends its transgressions, that just being there in itself is sufficient. It is an appreciation of what it chooses to reveal, a willingness to surrender to its whims alone without making demands of one’s own.
… A new moon slices through a clear sky; underneath, a heavy rain cloud broods over a dark mountain, wind blusters around me. There is an allure to this country and I will return.
Maybe I do love Patagonia after all.
