The Cusp of Dreadfulness: Fifteen Seasons in Tierra Del Fuego and Patagonia

By Margaret Winslow

It was December 1974 when Margaret Winslow arrived in Punta Arenas, the only city on the Strait of Magellan, prepared to begin her doctoral thesis project. With both excitement and dread, she looked forward to working on familiar rocks in a dynamic region and exploring Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. But first, she had to cross the trackless southern Andes on foot.

In the sequel to her award-winning travel-adventure memoir, Over My Head, Dr. Winslow recounts her ongoing field experiences from the 1970s through the 1990s during intense political paroxysms in Chile and Argentina. Her unforgettable adventures include being arrested and interrogated by the Argentine Navy, a close brush with death on a flight over the Strait of Magellan, and the rescue of an injured child at an isolated farm. Her fascinating narrative includes the frightening details of an assault by a fisherman that hurled the previously intrepid traveler into a state of intense agoraphobia that she had to overcome if she was to survive, return to the wilderness, and work mostly alone.

The Cusp of Dreadfulness continues a geologists recounting of her struggles through the wilderness of southern South America during a time of brutal transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491787410

Margaret Winslow

Margaret Winslow is a field geologist with over thirty years experience in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, where a fascination with donkeys in rural areas evolved into a quest to fulfill a long-forgotten childhood dream of owning one. She holds a PhD in geological sciences from Columbia University and have published over thirty papers in international scientific journals. Her National Geographic–funded fieldwork on earthquake hazards and archaeological settlement patterns in Alaska and Chile is featured in the award-winning PBS series “Fire on the Rim.” Winslow has been interviewed on NPR’s “West Coast Live,” CBS News Radio, and WABC Eyewitness News. She has written two travel memoirs, Over My Head: Journeys in Leaky Boats from the Strait of Magellan to Cape Horn and Beyond(2012),andThe Cusp of Dreadfulness(2016).Winslow is professor emerita of earth sciences at the City College of New York and live in the lower Hudson valley of New York with her oceanographer husband, Joe Stennett. Her donkey, Caleb, boards nearby with fifty horses and ponies, where he continues to steal the show every day.

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Copyright © 2016 Margaret Winslow.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8740-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8742-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8741-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016900587

iUniverse rev. date: 02/05/2016

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Part I: Crossing the Andes 1974–76

Chapter 1 Chile after the Coup

Chapter 2 On the Strait Where You Live

Chapter 3 Flying over the Southern Andes

Chapter 4 Rodeo at Yendegaia

Chapter 5 Backpacking across the Andes

Chapter 6 No Free Passes

Chapter 7 Seno Almirantazgo (Admiralty Sound)

Chapter 8 A Thesis of One’s Own

Chapter 9 The Heart of Tierra del Fuego

Part II: The West Coast of Tierra del Fuego 1976–80

Chapter 10 Patagonian Pilot

Chapter 11 Crossing the Strait of Magellan

Chapter 12 The West Coast of Tierra del Fuego

Chapter 13 Timaukel

Part III: The East Coast of Tierra del Fuego 1981–82

Chapter 14 Fateful Tides

Chapter 15 The Gathering Storm

Part IV: Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia 1986–92

Chapter 16 Puerto Yartou

Chapter 17 Migraine in Blue

Chapter 18 Walking on Water

Chapter 19 Roots and Branches

Chapter 20 Last Camp

Chapter 21 The Cusp of Dreadfulness

Chapter 22 Watching their Flocks

Chapter 23 Departures

Final Note

About the Author

Author’s Note on Location Names

Bibliography and Recommended Reading

In memory of my father, George K. Winslow (1909–1992), whose experiences as a jazz musician on the road during the Great Depression and during his deployment to the South Pacific during the Second World War inspired my pursuit of fieldwork in faraway places

We are all, in our journey through life, navigating towards some special, dreamed-of place; and if for some reason we are thrown off course, or the place itself, once reached, is not what we hoped for, then we must strike out at whatever risk to set things straight.

—Rachel Cusk, The Country Life

Illustrations

(All illustrations are courtesy of the author, except where noted.)

1. Map of the Americas and location of travels

2. Map of southern South America and Tierra del Fuego

3. The author, Tierra del Fuego, 1975. Photograph courtesy of R. A. Baroody.

4. Location of exploration area

5. Relief map with expedition route

6. Loading packhorse at Estancia Yendegaia. From left: Linda Raedeke, Ian Dalziel (behind horse), Ken Raedeke (kneeling), Ron Bruhn, and Leo Serka.

7. Where are we? From left: Ken, Linda (behind Ken), Ron, and Ian.

8. Yet another mountain range

9. Seno Almirantazgo (Admiralty Sound)

10. Localities on Isla Grande

11. Camp in central Tierra del Fuego. Photograph courtesy of L. D. Raedeke Swift.

12. Guanacos, central Isla Grande. Photograph courtesy of R. A. Baroody.

13. Guanaco at a pass in the Paciencia range

14. Western Isla Grande

15. Map of Argentine Tierra del Fuego

16. Map of Patagonia and northern Tierra del Fuego

17. Puerto Yartou. Photograph courtesy of R. A. Baroody.

18. Clastic dike at Puerto Yartou. Photograph courtesy of R. A. Baroody.

19. Author raising corer from peat bog

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The Americas and location of travels

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Southern South America and Tierra del Fuego

Preface

T ierra del Fuego’s hundreds of uninhabited islands endure relentless sieges by vicious winds that roar through the Drake Passage in their wild circumnavigation around Antarctica. Endless winter nights follow endless stormy summer days. Snow, sleet, rain, and sunshine occur every day, in every season. Gales make sun-blinded eyes wince and leave behind heart-stopping double and triple rainbows. The bedrock itself seems to groan beneath the wind’s pressure.

For more than half of more than a thousand days of fieldwork over fifteen seasons in Tierra del Fuego from 1974 to 1998, I worked mostly alone carrying a backpack, compass, rock hammer, and journal. The stories of encounters with Chileans, however, occupied a disproportionate space in my journals. Years later, those stories insisted on being told. Even now, I cherish most the times I sat around a campfire or woodstove with Chilean sheepherders, fishermen, and woodcutters, and I remain astonished by the hospitality and generosity of the rural poor.

The selected stories recounted in this book span from 1974 to 1992, during which abrupt and sometimes brutal changes occurred in Chile and Argentina. People living beyond the end of the road in the pampas, or grasslands, of Patagonia and islands of Tierra del Fuego, however, experienced the upheavals from afar. As in centuries past, fishermen fished and sheepherders herded. A geologist somehow scraped together enough grant money for transportation and food to continue what must have seemed to local people mysterious—and probably useless—fieldwork.

Some field areas I worked in only once; others, several times. To save the reader following fifteen seasons of boot tracks back and forth and around in circles, I have taken the liberty to compress some incidents occurring at a single location into a single story.

But first we have to get there.

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The author, Tierra del Fuego, 1975

Acknowledgments

T he first six seasons in Tierra del Fuego would not have been possible without research funding from the US Antarctic Research Program provided by my doctoral advisor at Columbia University, Ian W. D. Dalziel. Subsequent journeys were supported, in part, by the Empresa Nacional del Petróleo, Esso Interamerica, National Geographic, and the City University of New York.

People who suffered patiently through the earliest drafts of this book include my partner in other adventures Noel Barstow, Deborah Emin at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York, and Sarah Saffian, a writer’s dream editor and guide. Participants in creative writing workshops led by Abigail Thomas at the Omega Institute and Mary Carroll Moore at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center inspired me to uncover my own voice as a memoirist. My husband, Joe Stennett, and my dear friend Bev Houghton read later drafts of the manuscript. In the final stretch, my intrepid writing partners Camilla Calhoun and Valerie Matthews provided critical insights. None of these friends and fellow writers lost faith with my halting efforts to switch from scientific to creative writing. They cheered me on over several years and through many edits of this book. Linda Swift (formerly Raedeke) and I have continued our friendship, and during subsequent adventures and over many bottles of wine, we have reminisced and attempted to correct each other’s memories. Roger Baroody scanned many of the color slides and film negatives of the images that appear here and graciously permitted inclusion of some of his own photographs for this book. Lastly, I would like to especially thank K. Adams for her intricate editing, Dianne Lee, Joseph Long, Teri Watkins, and the rest of the team at iUniverse, who went the extra mile to polish the text and book design so that I could feel proud of the final result.

Prologue

September 1973

"You could do your fieldwork in Ontario, for one, or Wisconsin," my doctoral advisor, Ian Dalziel, offered, thinking, no doubt, of the safety of his first female graduate student. He was discussing various options for a doctoral thesis project with me. I had visited both localities: the land was almost dead flat, and the rock exposures few and difficult to find. Worse, the rocks of Ontario and Wisconsin formed part of the most ancient part of North America. The rocks, therefore, were very old and had been compressed, stretched, and recrystallized over many millions of years, and now, far from any active geologic region, were eroding peacefully into soil. No earthquakes? No volcanoes? No grinding tectonic plates? Boring. Behind Ian’s desk his bookshelves bulged with books on Antarctica and South America. I sighed.

Following my gaze over his shoulder, he turned and said, Well, you know, there’s a whole mountain range whose foothills are very like the Appalachians. As an avid backpacker and budding geologist, I had traipsed over many parts of the southern Appalachians for recreation and to collect data for my senior project at Columbia University. Ian saved the bombshell for last: It’s located at the tip of South America.

Yes! I said, resisting the impulse to jump up and down. I could work on the types of rocks I had already studied, in a dynamic region near an active plate boundary, and explore the almost-mythical places I had read about since childhood: Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. Best of all, it was largely unmapped. When can I leave? I asked.

Part I: Crossing the Andes 1974–76

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Location of exploration area

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Relief map with expedition route

Chapter 1

Chile after the Coup

December 1974

T he snowy peaks of the highest Andes glinted off the left wing in the late afternoon sun as the Braniff Airlines flight continued its five-stop milk run down the west coast of South America. Dark-blue waves of the Pacific Ocean dominated the horizon to the right. With my pencil jerking seismically, I traced the bouncy progress of the plane on the chili-shaped map of Chile, eager to return to earth.

Most alarming to a person who spoke only a few dozen phrases of Spanish, I would have to stop overnight in Santiago, Chile, arriving alone for the first time in a foreign country that had recently suffered a military coup and subsequent purges rivaling the brutality of Franco’s Spain. This was only the second time I had traveled to South America. Six months earlier, I had accompanied a team of geologists traveling down the Atlantic coast via Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, Argentina, where we embarked on a research vessel to map the rocks at the very tip of the continent. My ultimate destination this time was Punta Arenas, the only city on the Strait of Magellan. Unlike the sea voyages of my previous baptism, henceforth my adventures would be on land with feet on nice, dry terra-oh-so-firma. At least I hoped so.

In the late afternoon, the plane circled the scrubby volcanic hills that bulged up between flat, irrigated valleys to land at Santiago’s Pudahuel Airport. Inside the terminal, youthful soldiers with submachine guns flanked the immigration and customs areas. I forced my overdressed, overheated body to shuffle forward and saw an additional barrier to negotiate: the Policía Internacional, not connected with Interpol, but rather the Chilean secret police. They scrutinized my papers, endlessly scouring their lists containing names of people to arrest, hoping to find a near match. Is this you? they asked, pointing at Mary Wilson and then at Mavis Wallace. With waist-length hippie braids, stout mountaineering boots, and a battered backpack, I just had to be a communist guerrilla. Disappointed that the typed names hadn’t transformed into a match, even after endless squinting and tilting of the page toward the dim light, they dumped the contents of my backpack and trunk onto the floor. Like most young Americans, I thought that a big smile and a US passport would dissolve all problems. Taking the men’s disappointed glares as permission to leave, I hastily stuffed my camping equipment and scientific gear into the trunk and backpack and dragged them outside. Welcome to Chile under Pinochet.

I loaded my gear into the back of a taxi and settled back for a long drive into the city center. The route passed small, dusty farmhouses flanked by irrigated rows of green cornstalks and peach trees, resembling the central valley of California. The tiny hotel I would be staying at was on a quiet street shaded by a steep volcanic hill. I gladly escaped into a cramped room, ready for a cool shower and a long nap, but the electricity had failed, and the heat was stifling. I abandoned all thoughts of rest and instead stripped to a T-shirt and jeans and set forth to explore the city.

Jet lag, although it refers to time disorientation from traveling east or west, also seems to have a seasonal component. It’s the disorientation that occurs, even without a time change, when traveling from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere or vice versa. I had left New York’s slushy streets on a bleak December day. Fifteen hours later, I stood in a Santiago street in ninety-degree heat. To make matters worse—and to avoid checking baggage that could be lost—I had arrived dressed like Heidi, sweating through several layers of long underwear and woolens. Why pack summer clothes for an overnight stay in Santiago, I had reasoned, when all my work would take place in Tierra del Fuego, where summer consisted of fierce winds, horizontal rain, and temperatures in the forties?

Downtown Santiago under Pinochet seemed crushed and hopeless in its first summer after the coup. People trudged past with their eyes averted and faces blank. Not even the Chilean paper currency that swirled in the dust devils attracted any notice. I chased after the bills as one-, five-, and even ten-escudo notes settled into the gutters along with the grimy residue of newspapers. I was delighted with all this free money until I noticed some dirty-faced children in tattered clothes picking pieces of fruit peelings out of the gutter. They completely ignored the money. Taken aback, I quickly calculated that one hundred of those grimy escudos added up to an American penny. Since one escudo equaled one US dollar in 1960, according to my old guidebook, 10,000 percent inflation had occurred in fifteen years! I dropped my newfound stash and hurried away, wiping my hands on my jeans.

In the main shopping district, dull gray and brown buildings stood shuttered up to the second floor. The few architectural treasures, such as La Moneda (the treasury building), needed to be scrubbed and patched, as numerous pockmarks from machine-gun fire still marred the walls. An ice-cold shock rushed up my spine at the thought of machine guns spraying real bullets on this very street.

A faint background moan of distant sirens suddenly increased to an ear-shattering howl, seeming to reverberate from all directions at once. Around the next corner, I was swept up by a close-packed crowd that had gathered, quickly and silently, in just the last few minutes. With nerves on full alert, my ears picked up only the shuffling of shabby shoes and terse whispers. The shuffling increased in pace, people pushing and shoving each other as they sought escape down side streets, but army trucks had already parked across the next intersection. I checked my watch. Isn’t curfew three hours away? I did not want to be trapped in the middle of a panicky mob, especially if the soldiers decided to shoot into the crowd. I reversed direction, trying to avoid an encounter with yet another army barricade, but was forced to turn back. Many people were running now toward a shopping arcade. I debated a second before following them, fearing a dead end. Fortunately, it opened to the next street, which was not yet blocked.

I left the city center as fast as I could stride without appearing to flee, but I soon had to slow my pace, not from fatigue, but because I was lost. The street names on the map I carried blurred into hieroglyphics. Panic had rendered me ageographic, a term I think I invented on the spot. I had never volunteered to work in a war zone, especially one in which civilians were placed under siege. I marched purposefully until a familiar street appeared. I dove through the hotel’s front doors just as the doorman, startled to see me outside, was locking up.

More than content to remain locked inside my tiny hotel room for a long, hot night—the electricity was still out—I called the desk manager and attempted to order dinner. After each item I carefully pronounced from the multipage menu, he barked back, "No hay." (There is none.) After a few more attempts with the same result, no hay, I asked, "Well, what do you have?"

"Qualquier lo que quiere, señorita. (Whatever you want, miss.") I suspected that the manager didn’t want to admit to any shortages. Sighing, I played along, proceeding down the list to the chorus of no hay until I finally landed on the last item, a cheese omelet. The manager responded with a cheery "Cómo no?" (Why not?)

The next morning, the lack of electricity drove me outside into the early-morning light. Two tree-covered volcanic peaks pierced right through the middle of the city, one starting at the end of the street. Paths spiraling upward through fog-shrouded eucalyptus trees created oases of relative quiet and clean air. From the top of Santa Lucia, the bare rock and snowfields of the Andes forty miles to the east were barely visible through the thick brown smog. Hundreds of feet above street level and its harried people, I began to appreciate some of Santiago’s modest charms. I reluctantly descended to street level, where the nasty brown smog obscured the buildings and crude-oil–burning buses spewed blue-black plumes everywhere.

I checked out of my hotel early to go to the airport before the day heated up. The next leg of the journey was a flight to Punta Arenas. There I would meet up with two Peace Corps volunteers whom my advisor and one of his postdocs had met. I looked forward with both excitement and dread to our upcoming expedition: to cross the Andes on foot from the Pacific side to the Atlantic through a trackless region of glaciers and fjords.

Chapter 2

On the Strait Where You Live

E ven though the flight to Punta Arenas would remain in Chile the entire time, checking in at Santiago’s regional airport was as complicated as my arrival. Once again, I underwent the same hassle with the Policía Internacional over my camping equipment and hammer. Only when safely belted in my seat and far above the earth was I able to relax. I pulled out several maps and traced the plane’s route. On its way south, the LAN Chile turboprop flew over a narrowing strip of farmland between the snowcapped Andes to the east and the Pacific coast to the west. About halfway into the flight, the Andes crept closer to the sea until it obliterated the flat land altogether. Chile’s shape, long and narrow like a chili pepper, stretches about 2,600 miles from north to south. It retains about the same width throughout its length—averaging only one hundred miles wide from the seacoast to the crest of the Andes—until just north of the Strait of Magellan, where the country’s span from west to east widens to just under three hundred miles.

When Chileans speak of southern Chile, they mean the cool summer colonies of the Lake District, Pablo Neruda’s favorite place, that extend only as far south as Puerto Montt, in about the middle of the country. Magallanes, Chile’s largest, but least populous, province, however, continues another thousand miles farther south, to its abrupt truncation at Cape Horn.

Magallanes Province includes Chilean Tierra del Fuego, a narrow sliver of southern Patagonia, both shores of the Strait of Magellan, and the southern tip of the Andes. Although Magallanes occupies 17.5 percent of Chile’s total area (132,033 sq. mi.), excluding its claims to Antarctica, in 1974 it contained less than 1 percent of Chile’s population, or about eighty thousand people, and sixty-five thousand of them clustered around just one small city, Punta Arenas, my destination.

Before leaving New York, I had studied every book, map, and photograph I could locate about southern South America. I spent many hours sneezing from the dust in the musty stacks of Low Library at Columbia University, carefully tracing nineteenth-century maps on onionskin paper. During my first journey to South America the previous May, I had joined a geologic research team mapping the uninhabited tundra-strewn islands near the tip of the continent. My firsthand impressions of Chile, therefore—like a foreigner who had visited only the Aleutian Islands of the United States—rested on its least typical landscape. Most place names at the end of the continent, I noticed, recorded where European explorers and their ships had passed by, such as the Strait of Magellan, Beagle Channel, Monte Darwin, and Monte Sarmiento. More provocative to me, however, were the ominous or ironic names that seemed to cluster in my future thesis area: Porvenir (Future) was a hopeful name for a town across the channel from Punta Arenas, a town that, according to The South American Handbook, had failed. In tragic Puerto del Hambre (usually translated as Port Famine), the first Spanish colonists starved to death. Bahía Inutil (Useless Bay) appeared to offer a sea passage to the Atlantic but instead formed a shallow cul-de-sac where sailing ships were pinned by high winds with no place to anchor and no room to turn around. The most haunting of all, Última Esperanza (Last Hope or Last Wait) was a narrow, two-hundred-mile-long fjord that promised a sheltered inland passage northward but instead terminated at a narrow, ice-choked dead end. In the coming weeks it appeared that I would be working in places that far-more-experienced explorers had discovered, marked on their maps, and hastily left behind.

Five hours later, the