The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe saw in pelvises and skulls the curves of desert hills. But the Atacama is more naked still than the Southwestern deserts she loved. “When you think of desert, probably you think of Sonora or Chihuahua,” a Chilean biologist recently told me—the vast, brutal deserts of northern Mexico. “They are forests compared to Atacama.”
Pause and listen for a moment: Where does the sound you hear arise? In most places, it comes from life and water. Voices and the growl of cars. The burble of rain and rivers. The rustle of leaves. In the Atacama, what sound there is comes from wind. What life there is goes underground: Spiders lizards birds, finding homes in the cool dark of holes. When Rudulfo Amando Philippi, a German naturalist, made a famous expedition across this desert in the mid-19th century, he improvised by sheltering in the shadow of his mule.
But at night, the Atacama does have a song, and it comes from the sea to the west, on the other side of the mountains. The first time I heard it, on a two-week expedition, I was up later than my five companions, laying alone on a fin of earth, trying to make sense of the Southern Hemisphere Milky Way. I thought the sound was a fox, because it was series of three weird barks, descending, somewhere on the western horizon. When it came again the next night, a single hoarse call and closer now, it was clearly a bird. One call, then nothing more, as if the world had been silenced by the fog rolling in. But soon, deeper in the desert, the call came each night in stuttering flocks of sound at two or three in the morning.
This essay originally ran November 11, 2015, and is reappearing here as part of Atacama Week.
Rain has been falling on the driest non-polar desert in the world, famous for parts of it not seeing a drop of rain for centuries. The Atacama Desert in South America is caught in the rain shadow of the Andes on one side, and cold dry air washing in from an Antarctica ocean current on the other. This year, el Niño is on. Warmer waters are pushing against the West Coast of South America allowing rain to come to a rainless place. Last March, seven years of rain in a place that averages less than 4 millimeters a year fell overnight. The result has been an explosion of wildflowers, their seeds waiting in the hard dry soils for this very moment.
In August even more rain fell and a second even wilder bloom followed. A barren country where you can walk for days without seeing an ant, a fly, or a blade of grass erupted in a gloriously obscene display of flora.
I know the place in its other state: death. I went there for the desolation. I was writing about projections billions of years in the future when the sun begins to expand in one of its final acts. Naked under this searing light, oceans would boil away. The surface of the Atacama is all that remained, a barren floor of salt pillars lifeless pans. It was my end of the world.
Note: This post originally ran Dec. 7, 2018, and is being resurrected for Atacama Week.Please consume extra water and enjoy.
Driving in a foreign country is a good way to turn your head inside out. It shakes the cobwebs and forces you to rearrange the heavy furniture of your mind. You need to make room for thoughts such as 10 mil is how many pesos is how many dollars? And what is the phrase for a full tank of gas? And if I put my backpack and jacket in the passenger seat, and adjust my hat on them just so, will the miners in that truck behind me be fooled into thinking I’m not alone?
I have always liked driving, especially when I have good music and a long enough trip for my thoughts to really open up. It is like a form of meditation, in that it’s both exhausting and refreshing. Driving in a foreign country, where you barely speak the language, is like competitive-level meditation.
I did the most intense driving of my life earlier this year, on a road trip up and down the coast of northern Chile. I wrote a lot about it in this essay, which published last fall, so please go read that. But I’ve been thinking a lot about all the other absurd driving I did on that trip, all by myself in the oldest and most barren desert on this planet.
After my stay in Salar Grande, in the northern reaches of the Atacama Desert, I drove an hour in the wrong direction to avoid revisiting a horrific switchback to get down the coastal range. The road was paved to accommodate the nearby salt mine and trucks traveling to and from the coastal town of Iquique. It appeared to be in need of shoveling: Salt blown from speeding trucks blanketed the edges in a fine white powder like snow. I saw a billboard that read, in Spanish, “Out here, the only thing that should speed is the wind.” Trucks hurtled past.
On the coastal road from Iquique to Antofagasta, the focus of my fear alternated between the very rare appearance of other, potentially dangerous drivers and the road itself. As I drove through road cuts blasted off the side of the Andes foothills, weird rocks towered above me. It felt like I was driving on the Moon. At times, I negotiated the sides of cliffs whose faces dropped a thousand feet to the sea. After every ascent and descent, I pulled over to wipe my soaking wet palms, and to shake out my aching wrists. “Is There Life on Mars?” David Bowie sang to me.
At one point, after a couple hours of driving south, I needed a break. I needed to smell the ocean, mere feet to my right. I pulled over to the shoulder, parked my silver SUV on the sand, and walked a few feet. I was completely on my own. I saw nothing alive—no gull, no driver, no seaweed, no plant. I stared at the Pacific and felt my chest tighten. I was thousands of miles from my family, and I have never felt more alone.
The ocean was loud, dashing against dark rocks, and within a minute I felt like its rhythm was a part of me. It was going to swallow me and the sun was going to drive me mad. I strained to see anything else alive, some sign that I was still on Earth, but I saw nothing but sand and blue.
I squinted for a minute. The entire planet looks like this, from a great distance. From the Moon, you can make out the continents, patches of brown and green beneath a light frosting of clouds. But the general impression of Earth is one of blue and white. Ocean and sky. Our blue marble.
I listened to the Pacific and took a step forward. I was on Earth. I was so lucky to be here. So goddamn lucky I suddenly wanted to scream. Do you know how rare it is to have a planet covered in water? How precious it is to get out of the car, walk a few feet, and touch the ocean? It was the deep blue of my daughter’s eyes. This water is flowing through me, through her, through all of us here, together. Is this enlightenment? I thought to myself. I don’t know enough about Buddhism.
It was hard to get back in the car after that. But I feared that if I didn’t, the Pacific would rise up and consume me, swallow me whole before I had a chance to tell anyone I saw it. I had to tell her what I saw.
After a few minutes I trudged back to my silver SUV, my most prized possession for those two weeks, with the possible exception of my sunglasses. La Cochita Plata carrying a sunburned bodhisattva.
The next day, I drove through a copper smelting plant and past plentiful sleeping street dogs. I stopped at the turnoff for a famous geoglyph, a gigantic carved-Earth artwork made by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita. It is so vast that it is visible only from above. Only from the air, or maybe space — where the landscape resolves into a world, a whole planet whose only borders are water. On the ground, you would not make much sense of the curved letters. They spell Ni pena ni miedo. No shame; no fear.
I kept driving.
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Image by the author
Title: After Pablo Neruda (If you don’t read the poetry of a country before you visit, what are you even doing?)
Today is the autumnal equinox, the last partial day of summer and the first partial day of autumn—at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern, today is the vernal equinox, the last full day of winter and the first partial day of spring. (Yes, I know, a swath of the Pacific Ocean abutting the International Date Line, including the Aleutian Islands, Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and French Polynesia, experienced the equinox very late yesterday [local time], but they’re just being difficult. Besides, the equinox, when the Sun passes precisely over the equator, happens everywhere on Earth at the same moment: 9:05 a.m. Universal Time.) For the purposes of this post the distinction between autumnal and vernal equinox—Northern and Southern Hemisphere—is one worth making, because where I spent my summer vacation this year was Chile.
When I told a friend that I would be traveling to Chile because it’s home to some of the world’s greatest observatories, she naturally asked, “Why Chile?” Because, I explained, the calm and dry air of the Atacama Desert makes Chile just about ideal for astronomy. “But,” she said, after a little reflection, “doesn’t the sand get in the gears?”
I don’t know much about geology, but I do know that deserts are defined by their aridity, not by their Lawrence-of-Arabia duneness. The South Pole, for instance, sits in the middle of a desert, which is what makes it, too, an impeccable place for astronomy. But I learned to empathize with her cluelessness, because once I got to Chile, I realized I didn’t know what kind of landscape to expect, either.
Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language.
Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic early expressions of desire, “Love,” and “NO!”, and “I” and “Want.”
Most of us probably remember our first word in our native language, but I doubt many of us can remember a time when we knew so few words that we had to expand their definitions to cover an entire universe of necessary expression. When the word “Mom,” depending on how we said it, had to stand for everything from fear to hunger to whatever as-yet-inscrutable emotion was blowing through us.
I know I don’t remember. I work with words for a living. When I want to say, for example, that I’m cold, I have dizzying array of synonyms and phrases to call upon, each with different connotations and levels of extremity. I could be chilly or frigid, freezing or frosty, even glacial, hoary, icy, wintry, or just plain numb-lipped-club-footed-broken-fingered cold.
Then, I spent two weeks in Chile’s Atacama Desert this January. Only
three of my five companions spoke English. When they talked among
themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of
them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is evenworse for
outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds
whose meanings I could only grasp at based on context and hand gesture.
Or from incessantly badgering the English speakers to help me out.
In a celebration of a weird place few people go, except, apparently, People of LWON, we bring you Atacama Week.
The Atacama Desert is not a popular destination-wedding spot or a favorite girls’ weekend locale. I doubt anyone has thrown a bachelor party in the Atacama–although NOW I’ll bet someone will–and it’s rarely picked for family reunions (just TRY to get good catering on that blasted sand dune) or even interventions. It’s used, more often, in films as a stand-in for Mars.
The People of LWON are a quirky bunch, and it turns out at least five of us have visited this hyper-arid plateau on the Pacific coast of South America. Fortunately, being committed scribes, our intrepid travelers then put fingers to keyboard and waxed poetic. Or at least they jotted down a few notes about the place, notes they were willing to share with the rest of us.
We’ve lined up our favorite Atacama-related posts for this first sizzling week of July, only partly because none of us feels like writing something new. It’s also because, as it turns out, this dry-ass place is full of surprises. So please sit back, blast the AC, and enjoy!
The kids across the street are my special little pals. They climb all over me and believe the lies I tell them. We wrestle, take walks, get ice cream, talk about poop. I really love these two little guys—I’ve known them their whole lives–and I think they love me, too. It would be interesting to know if, while cuddling these cuties, my hormonal oxytocin—associated with maternal bonding–clicks up a few notches. Their own mom, though careworn, still gets that softness about the eyes and mouth when her boys are being especially cute. (I might call it her “oxy smile” if the term didn’t suggest something else entirely.)
Then, as the boys get tired or hungry and start to bicker and whine, I plant a last peck on each warm head and get the hell out. In my [relatively uncluttered] home, I wash the sticky from my hands and lie on the couch in just a tee-shirt, no dropped Legos pressing against the backs of my legs. I pour wine. My motherly instincts turn to the dogs. The quiet is our blanket.
By now you’ve probably heard about author Naomi Wolf’s fateful radio interview on the BBC. Perhaps you’ve heard the interview itself, though if not, you might want to skip it—especially if you’re a writer who traffics in facts and has ever had to cite one. It’s gruesome listening.
Wolf was publicizing her book about the English government’s attitude toward homosexuality in the nineteenth century, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love. The persecution, she said, included “several dozen” executions for the crime of engaging in homosexual acts.
“I don’t think you’re right about this,” presenter Matthew Sweet said. At the time, he explained, the term “death recorded” would have referred not to an actual death but to a judge’s decision to decline to pronounce a death sentence.
The silence that followed, you might imagine, was the sound of an author seeing her career flash before her eyes. (Her U.S. publisher has announced a delay in the Stateside publication, originally scheduled for this month.)
I haven’t been hearing a lot of the kind of Schadenfreude that usually attends an author’s fall from grace, presumably because of the nature of the error. Wolf hadn’t committed a conscious subterfuge, such as plagiarism. She hadn’t bent statistics to her own advantage, a charge she has, in fact, repeatedly faced throughout her career.
Instead, she’d made an understandable mistake, one that any author might make.
