31.05.2006
On Bilingual Ballots
I've always thought of George Will's columns as a standing reminder of the dangers of overtightening a bow tie, and been content to leave it at that. But occasionally he manages to produce an essay that rises above the very high threshold of provocation, and his Washington Post column last week on bilingual ballots was a case in point.
Will's column questions the logic of offering voters bilingual ballots (which in the American political context means ballots with parallel Spanish and English texts), contending that their use flies in the face of laws requiring naturalized U.S. citizens to be proficient in English as she is written and spoke.
He writes:
"If someone needs a ballot written in a language other than English, that need proves the person obtained citizenship only because the law was not enforced when he or she sought citizenship. So one reason for ending ballots in languages other than English is that continuing them makes a mockery of the rule of law."And further on:
"What public good is advanced by encouraging the participation of people who, by saying they require bilingual assistance, are saying they cannot understand the nation's political conversation? By receiving such assistance, they are receiving a disincentive to become proficient in English."
His argument boils down to two parts: first, that offering bilingual ballots somehow violates the rule of law, and second, that bilingualism attenuates American national identity.
On the first point Will is demonstrably wrong, no matter how you feel about being exposed to Spanish. He omits to mention that entire classes of legal immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship are exempt [pdf] from the language requirement: If you are old enough, and have lived legally in the United States long enough, you do not have to know a word of English (the requirement is 15 years of residency for applicants over 55, 20 years for applicants over 50). You might call this the 'grandma clause' in naturalization law. Applicants who have a mental or physical handicap that prevents them from learning English are also exempt from the language requirement.
Whether or not this is good law is immaterial; it is the law and therefore invalidates Will's argument that any voter requiring a non-English ballot must have cheated his way into citizenship. By presuming to lecture the Attorney General on this point, Will is demonstrating a surprising ignorance of the law whose sanctity he professes to defend.
But you don't even need to look at naturalization law to make a convincing case for bilingual ballots; all you have to do is look at the ballots themselves. Note that the language requirement for new citizens says this:
"Applicants for naturalization must be able to read, write, speak, and understand words in ordinary usage in the English language"
And so here is text from a ballot measure from Harris County, Texas:
PROPOSITION 8 The constitutional amendment providing for the clearing of land titles by relinquishing and releasing any state claim to sovereign ownership or title to interest in certain land in Upshur County and in Smith County
Here is part of a constitutional amendment put to Florida voters:
Proposing amendments to the State Constitution to require the sponsor of a constitutional amendment proposed by citizen initiative to file the initiative petition with the Secretary of State by February 1 of the year of a general election in order to have the measure submitted to the electors for approval or rejection at the following November's general election, and to require the Florida Supreme Court to render an advisory opinion addressing the validity of an initiative petition by April 1 of the year in which the amendment is to be submitted to the electors.
And a paragraph taken from another Florida ballot:
The Medical Liability Claimant's Compensation Amendment Proposes to amend the State Constitution to provide that an injured claimant who enters into a contingency fee agreement with an attorney in a claim for medical liability is entitled to no less than 70% of the first $250,000.00 in all damages received by the claimant, and 90% of damages in excess of $250,000.00, exclusive of reasonable and customary costs and regardless of the number of defendants. This amendment is intended to be self-executing. [YES / NO]These are examples dredged up in a few minutes of Google searching, without making any effort to find difficult language. The excerpts are typical of American ballotese - what is being voted on will go directly into law, so it is written in highly specialized legal jargon.
It's not hard to imagine immigrants (or native speakers, for that matter) who could perfectly well understand "words in ordinary usage" but be completely at sea when it came to making sense of this kind of legalese. Is George Will really claiming that an inability to understand the special legal sense of 'interest' in the first example represents contempt for American civic life?
The insinuation that voters might want ballots in Spanish because they are cheating, lazy, bad people is malicious and wrong. You choose Spanish on your ballot for the same reason you might choose it in an ATM transaction - not because you have contempt for American civil society, but because you don't want to make a mistake. It's not as if we have to look very far back to find an example of a confusing ballot changing the outcome of a national election. People have reason to be careful.
The second argument Will makes - that bilingual ballots are a disincentive to learning English - is even more ludicrous than the first, betraying a complete ignorance of what it's like to live in the United States without speaking the language. If you don't know any English, you are limited to menial, blue-collar jobs, you have to rely on intermediaries for all your interactions with the world around you (try going to a doctor, getting dental work done, opening a bank account, understanding why the doctor and dentist won't see you), you are essentially helpless outside your insular immigrant community, and you are a tempting target for all kinds of scams and needless middlemen who will use your ignorance of the language against you.
The most cursory walk through a Hispanic neighborhood or glance at a foreign-language American newspaper will show you that there is a thriving market for English language lessons. The reason newcomers have so much trouble speaking English isn't because they are lazy or don't care; it's because they have discovered that learning a second language as an adult is very difficult, time-consuming and costly, particularly when you are working full-time at the kind of job that a non-English-speaking immigrant is likely to have.
None of this deters staunch defenders of the Republic like Will, who seem obsessed with the idea of newcomers getting some kind of cultural free ride.
Their linguistic fearmongering is harder to pull it off now than at the start of the last century, when there actually were entire American communities that never learned English and had their own civic conversation, in their own moon language. Curiously enough, these communities are mostly gone today through a remarkably effective assimilatory process called 'having children'. (Will implicitly recognizes this point by not even considering the question of native-born citizens who might want a Spanish ballot). The only groups that have been able to retain their language past the second generation are extremely tight-knit religious communities like the Hasidic Jews or Mennonites, who can harness the mighty power of a sky god to keep the kids isolated and fluent.
When Will laments that immigrants won't be able to understand the American 'civic conversation', what really seems to worry him is that they won't be able to read columns by George Will. And here he has a point. At a national level, the American civic conversation now consists of angry blowhards yelling at each other on television, a timid national press corps in comfortable symbiosis with the party in power, and an electoral system so exquisitely gamed that in any election year only a tiny minority of districts needs political attention. This is not so much a conversation as a monologue.
The place where American participatory democracy genuinely works is at the local level, where people elect schoolboards, aldermen, selectmen, decide on taxes and various ballot initiatives. This is the level where an ordinary citizen can reasonably expect to have his voice heard. Letting new citizens vote on these issues in their native language is not an abandonment of American civic values, but a powerful way of inculcating them in new arrivals, who might have no experience with government institutions that obey the rule of law or are actually held accountable to the people they serve. City and county-level politics are not glamorous, but they feature a system of fair local elections, independent courts and disinterested regulatory agencies that are an impressive achievement of our society.
The fact that local politics works, however messily, and that you have a voice in how your county, school, neighborhood, community and sometimes even state are governed, is the real assimilating force in American democracy. We haven't been able to scale it up to national size very well, but it is alive and healthy in our communities. And at that local level, there are plenty of places where the language of civic discourse is going to be Spanish, or Cantonese, or Yiddish.
If you've gone through the long process of acquiring American citizenship, you've had to sign an affidavit that you are not a Communist or sympathizer, you've promised under penalty of perjury that you will not indulge in drunkenness or immoral behavior while in the United States, you've sworn an oath of allegiance to the country, you've promised to join the military if directed to do so, you've abstained from marijuana, polygamy, illegal gambling, prostitution, and moral turpitude, you've demonstrated to an examiner that you can speak and write basic English, and you've passed a basic test on American history, government, and law. In other words, you've demonstrated a readiness to vote far beyond the one criterion required of native-born American voters - a pulse. The rational argument to make, if you are truly concerned about the tenor of the civic conversation, is that Americans born in the United States should be required to pass the same kind of screening process as naturalized immigrants.
But we're unlikely to hear this kind of bold proposal from George Will. Instead, in a time of intense nationalism, this Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist is fretting to his audience of millions about the dilution of American national identity. With a weekly column in the Washington Post and the chance to speak out on issues of pressing interest to conservatives, such as the government searching the entire population's phone records, an executive branch that believes it has the right to imprison American citizens indefinitely, or one of the many other adventures in government that have made writing opinion journalism under the Bush Administration such an easy and pleasant job, Will has instead chosen to open the nation's eyes to the peril of Latino grandmothers being given a legible ballot. If this is the national conversation he wants us to join, we're better off learning Spanish.
¡Abajo!
permalink28.05.2006
El Chaltén
Just when you thought nationalism had nothing good to offer the world, along comes a wonder like El Chaltén. A town with no conceivable economic or geographic purpose other than sticking it to the nearby Chileans, El Chaltén (Spanish for The Chaltén) is an accidental hikers' paradise in what used to be one of the most inaccessible parts of southern Patagonia. Built by provincial decree in 1985, the town is four hours by jarring bus ride from the nearest anywhere and has no phone lines or ATMs, no library or cinema, just a grid of muddy frontier town streets, steakhouses, hostels, gift shops and a series of trailers mysteriously marked "Argentine Navy".
Chile and Argentina share an enormous 5,150 km border, and along most of its length the official procedure for deciding which country you are in is unambiguous and simple. You wait for it to rain; if the water flows into the Pacific, you are in Chile, if it flows into the Atlantic, you are in Argentina. (If it fails to rain at all, you are probably in the Atacama desert and likely have more pressing problems on your hands than finding a notional geopolitical boundary). But in the Patagonian Ice Field, the water comes down as snow and doesn't go anywhere for thousands of years, making things a bit tricky. There's an awful lot of frozen white stuff here, it's not easy to climb around on, and it's especially difficult to figure out what kind of topography lies buried underneath.
This part of South America is so remote and rugged that it remained a blank spot on the map until after World War II, when a typically meddling norteamericano aerial survey produced the first clear maps of the border region. To everyone's surprise, the ridgeline that had been assumed to separate Chile from Argentina turned out to be only the easternmost in a series of parallel ranges running under the glacial ice. In a humble display of deference to the immutable laws of science, Argentina instantly shifted its border several kilometers to the west and sent gendarmes in to annoy the few Chilean herders it could find on its newly-acquired sliver of icepack, demanding they register at the very distant provincial capital of Rio Gallegos. The herders got upset, some shots were fired, and soon there were loud cries for justice on both sides of the border, wherever that was.
What prevented this - like every previous and subsequent Chilean/Argentine spat - from taking a more serious turn was the colossal hassle of having to go over the Andes in order to pick a fight. Even India and Pakistan, two countries with much larger armies and far greater reserves of mutual hatred, barely manage a few desultory mortar exchanges on their high disputed plateau, let alone a full-scale invasion over the ice. In order to crush the national enemy, a Chilean or an Argentine invading army would first have to cross the ultimate military buzzkill. Short of shipping everyone down to Tierra del Fuego, where the mountains run East-West (which nearly happened in 1978), the two armies don't have many options for getting at one another.
Given the inconvenient topography, the two sides agreed to hand over the question of whose inalienable, indivisible and eternal Fatherland this shard of ice was to a bilateral border commission. Smothering any lingering hard feelings under a thick foam of bureaucracy, the commission deliberated at length before coming to its Talmudic solution, emerging with a border that zipped back and forth across the ice like an angry seismograph trace, at one place deviating some twenty kilometers east to the summit of Mount FitzRoy only to turn around and head right back. But even the border commission was stumped when it came to the area south of the mountain.
And so on hiking maps you will see the fractal-like border fading into a blank stretch of white after the FitzRoy salient, with only a boxed admonition telling hikers to seek permits from both the Argentine and Chilean border patrol before venturing out on the ice. And somewhere in a Buenos Aires sub-sub-basement, a bilateral subcommittee is sitting through its 421st consecutive plenary session, sipping mate and trying to get this sorted out.
Concerned about the wobbliness of the local border, the province of Santa Cruz decided to take matters into its own hands and in 1985 mandated the creation of a town to help assert Argentine sovereignty (a phrase that correlates suspiciously with making people live in icy wastelands). The government duly trucked in all the essentials needed to build a small Argentine mountain town - bricks, sheet metal, steak, hundreds of stray dogs - and the town of El Chaltén was born.
The town has grown and solidified since 1985, in part due to provincial subsidies, in part due to the large tourist market it created by transforming one of the more isolated corners of the Patagonian Andes into a readily accessible trailhead. Climbers especially go crazy over FitzRoy and the surrounding mountains; although they are not extravagantly tall by absolute standards, the harsh weather and smooth rock make the granite peaks very difficult to climb. More people summit Everest in a year than have ever made it to the top of FitzRoy.
Unlike the Chilean side, where the weather is invariably challenging but also of short duration, FitzRoy can go for weeks hidden under steady fog and rain. It has a supporting cast of other mountains, such as Pueyrredón and the elegant needle of rock called Torre, that are equally hard to get on top of. Aspiring climbers come early in the season to camp out at the bottom of the mountain, waiting for a window of good weather in which to make attempt. At the end of the season, they pack up their kit and go home, coming back to try again the next year. Those few incautious or unlucky enough to attempt the climb in poor weather sometimes don't come back.
With all their aggression expended on climbers, the mountains are perfectly civil to hikers, who can go right up to their base in perfect safety, if not always in great comfort. An extensive network of trails zigzags through the foothills here, and on the rare days when things are visible, the views make up for all the soggy waiting. Part of the spectacle has to do with the clarity of the air; the nearest upwind source of pollution is Japan, and if the air is not thick with rain then it is likely to be very clear indeed.
To the south of El Chaltén is a large lake fed by the Viedma glacier, part of the large system of glaciers (including the Perito Moreno), that drains the Patagonian Ice Cap, In its heyday, the Viedma glacier was over a kilometer deep at this point, and extended two hundred kilometers out into the Patagonian steppe, but it been fighting a steady battle of attrition against global warming (the between-ice-ages kind, not the recent anthropogenic uptick) and is retreating at several dozen meters a year. What is left of it is sufficiently placid to allow tour groups to come walk around on top, under the watchful eye of a glaciologist tour guide.
I had never walked on - or even thought of walking on - a glacier in my life, but after the booze-filled glacier cruises of the previous two weeks we were dying to try it. And so one sunny morning found us on a boat motoring its way down the north arm of the lake, threading between first little and then progressively bigger turquoise icebergs. As the boat approached the wall of ice ahead, the crew fitted us with crampons for walking on the glacier. These looked like little foot torture devices turned upside down, with long metal spikes protruding around the perimeter of the sole and heel. They strapped securely onto your boots and made you as sure-footed as a mountain goat.
Disembarking on an undulating stretch of recently-exposed rock, our group walked along the carved flow lines to the point where the ice began. The rock here is high in iron and oxidizes to a beautiful rust color after the ice exposes it. The front of the glacier is a big lip of dirty snow hanging a good half meter above the rock face; it looks like it is floating unsupported above the ground. Seen from underneath, the ice and rock recede into dark blue shadow - you can't see where they touch.
Walking in crampons reminded me of my first experience driving in San Francisco. The minivan I was riding in drove along a level street, turned left, and suddenly seemed to be climbing the vertical face of a building. After topping out at an intersection, it pitched nose-down and sped towards a crosswalk far below, a view of the top of pedestrians' heads filling the windshield. Later I would see buses and trucks perform this nonchalant miracle of traction, too, but I could never get used to it.
The crampons give you this same feeling of defying gravity. Put them on and suddenly you can walk up a forty-degree incline of ice. This is the kind of footwear you fantasize about having on when you are drunk. The only risk is taking a misstep - or building up too much speed going downhill - that results in a rather painful forty-degree fall. The guide showed us the peculiar duck walk you need to move safely across the ice, and ways of arresting our motion before we plummeted into a crevasse and had our motion arrested for us by the glacier. Then we all stepped onto a little staircase courteously hacked into the lip of the glacier for us, and there we were on top of a glacier.
The glacier was not child-safe. The crags of ice only jutted out a few meters into the air, but it was perfectly sufficient to kill you or break bones if you slipped and fell down the wrong side of a slope. The glacier was also surprisingly dirty. There used to be a kilometer of ice here, and all of the sand and rock scrapings it carried had collapsed down into a few meters of remaining ice and snow. In many places there were long linear features of pebbles and rocks lying along the top of the ice. These would form when a fissure opened in the glacier, allowing rocks embedded in the sides of the crack to fall to the bottom. In many places you could still see walls of ice that looked like Swiss cheese, with the larger bits of trapped rock having broken out the side, sometimes helped out by preferentially absorbing sunlight and melting their way to freedom.
There were lakes in the glacier where the meltwater had collected into crevices without draining. The walls were the trademark otherworldly blue color of glacier ice, the water between covered with a protective clear layer of ice you could poke stones through. Photographs can capture the color, but not the strange sensation of looking down into a three-dimensional world of water and ice below, backlit rather melodramatically by light that had filtered down through other gaps.
The physiological feeling of being surrounded by big icy blue things is what makes glaciers so addictive; there is something so unnatural and striking about it that you are constantly operating at a high level of attention. The landscape is familiar from endless winters looking at shoveled snow, but here it is two orders of magnitude larger, punctuated with that strange chemical blue, and you are a small bug walking in the middle of it.
Towards the end of the hike, we learned about the biggest difference between the Viedma glacier and other glaciers along the Patagonian Ice Cap, which is that instead of Old Smuggler you are served Bailey's Irish Cream, poured into little plastic glasses with chunks of sandy glacier ice. The hikers, still shaky on their crampons, were given a cautious two inches, but the tour leaders didn't hesitate to fill their cups to the brim.
More photos here.
permalink10.05.2006
Idle Words Outsourced
I'll write more about it after I've gotten over the shock a little bit. Meanwhile, if any readers of this site live around here, I'd love to hear from you.
You can't fight globalization!
permalink04.05.2006
Las Torres Del Paine
A better name for this place would be Holy Sweet Mother of Jesus National Park, since this is what you will say the first time you set eyes on it. The Torres del Paine is an absolutely ridiculous collection of mountains and lakes squeezed between Argentina and the Pacific ocean in Chilean Patagonia, not far from where Chile turns east at the bottom of the continent. The Torres del Paine are enormous triangles of rock, all that remains of a granitic outcrop that was injected under the earth, like a giant tectonic zit, when this area was still covered in kilometers of ice. Glaciers and erosion have exposed the dome of rock and worn it down to the extremely photogenic snaggle teeth that remain.
There is not a lot that words or even photographs can do to convey what it's like to be here. Many parts of the world have spectacular topography, but few of them offer this kind of sky show along with it. Low clouds that have not seen land since Japan blow in from over the ocean and have their bellies ripped out by the sharp granite teeth. All kinds of swirls and giant structures form, at all altitudes, as masses of air that have fallen out of the habit of stopping for anything run into the immovable wall of the Andes. The pace is terrific; at times the sky resembles time-lapse cloud photography more than anything you've seen happen in real time. The air condenses into a baroque mess and then blows quickly off stage right while new material scuds in from the ocean. It is a celestial vaudeville act.
If you are a wind lover, Torres del Paine will be a dream come true for you. Round a corner unexpectedly and you are perfectly liable to be knocked flat by a tender kiss of air. The wind blows all the time from off the sea, sometimes as a gentle gale, sometimes in more powerful gusts that lift small rocks and animals into the air. Waves forming in the glacial lakes are actually picked up and turned into fine spray by the stronger gusts. Any plant can become a tumbleweed.
It almost never snows at ground level here, but there are glaciers everywhere in the hills. This is country the Patagonian ice field very recently abandoned and would gladly reclaim. Many of the slopes are still finely crumbled slate that has not had time to turn into soil, piled up in little chips lying at the angle of repose. Where trails cut along the slope, the less weathered rock churned up by footprints stands out in a lighter color.
The landscape looks utterly different than Argentine Patagonia, behind the world's largest windbreak just a few dozen kilometers to the east. All of the rainfall that fails to make it over to the Argentine side is squeezed out here. Dampness and fog prevail, and the ground is green instead of desert. The limiting factor for growth is no longer aridity but wind - there is plenty of moisture and even decent sun for the few plants that can keep their grip long enough to enjoy it.
Torres del Paine and the country around it is one of the rare habitable pieces of land that never had an indigeneous population. The very tough hunting tribes of Patagonia would roam through here, but found the place too inhospitable to stay (and these are people who thought Tierra del Fuego was comfy). When whitey came, he wasn't in a hurry to live here, either. It took the introduction of sheep ranching and some serious arm-twisting by the Argentine and Chilean governments (anxious to 'assert sovereignty') to get people to settle here at all. A measure of how remote and forbidding this area is the fact that the entire park - which absolutely screams out "world heritage site" - was a private sheep ranch until the 1960's, when its Italian owner died and ceded it to the state.
The wildlife in Torres del Paine looks like it was bought at a zoo surplus sale - there are flamingoes, foxes, hawks, ducks, guanaco, puma, horses, hares, condor and an elusive and somewhat pitiful animal known as Geoffrey's cat, a racoon-sized dotted predator who spends his days sleeping in old tree trunks, hiding from the wind, and his nights in search of frogs and hare. The European hare is really the most set-upon animal in this whole menagerie; the park's main office has multiple pie charts showing the diet of the various predators in Torres del Paine, and the biggest slice on each shows the same photograph of a very scared and tense-looking hare. Baby guanacoes don't fare well either; nearly a third are lost to puma before they grow big enough to defend themselves.
Condors love this place. The are gigantic birds, with exceptional eyesight that lets them soar high overhead, and a lazy fondness for the kind of high winds that let them soar without flapping their wings. At times they descend low enough that you can see the gray tops of their wings as they bank; most of the time they are tiny black specks, barely visible in the sky. They have a way of flying with their wingtip feathers spread far apart that suggests a fastiduous completely out of keeping with their diet - carrion and the European hare. The condors are known to be a little loose in their definition of carrion - my geologist friend Jill told me a horror story of being dived on by multiple birds as she climbed a steep mountain path, trying to hurry along the cycle of life and turn her into a tasty snack on the rocks far below. Torres del Paine is not easy to reach. You can see the tops of the Torres from near the Perito Moreno glacier, served by a busy airport, but the only way to get to the Chilean park is by detouring far to the south through the Chilean town of Puerto Natales, crossing a flat plateau full of flamingoes and rhea (ostrich substitutes). The trip takes about six hours, including one leisurely hour queueing up first at the Argentine and then the Chilean border posts, to submit to the rigorous inspection protocol each country uses to protect its frontier.
The official border between Chile and Argentina runs along a ridgeline, but each country has prudently built its customs post further downslope. It's still likely to be drizzling and miserable as you queue up in front of each building, but at least you are not standing in the way of several cubic kilometers of grouchy Pacific air trying to get back down to the sea.
Border formalities would be fun if not for the icy rain. On the Argentine side there are three conscripts, a drug beagle, and an old radio. The conscripts struggle with a hopeless Internet connection before giving up and waving everyone through. They have rigged a giant road sign on their side of the border reading LAS MALVINAS SON ARGENTINAS, in the same way a saner country might warn BRIDGES FREEZE BEFORE ROAD. I'm told that every land crossing to Argentina is rigged with these signs, preventing countless drivers from careening off the road due to geopolitical anxiety over the status of the Falkland Islands. The effect is somewhat like bringing a new friend home for Thanksgiving only to have your conservative uncle start ranting at him about politics.
On the Chilean side, there is a very serious man in a jacket reading DETECTIVE who peers at your passport and then sends you to the inspection table. Here condor-eyed agricultural inspectors search your bags for the slightest trace of forbidden fruit or meat. The search is thorough but strangely limited to what you physically bring with you into the building. Apparently the Chilean border service cannot conceive of a criminal mind so devious it would think to leave contraband on the bus.
Not so long ago, Argentina was the most expensive country in Latin America, and Chile was its poorer relation. The roles have switched since Argentina's recent and spectacular financial flameout, although you can't tell this by looking at the surroundings. The Chilean shard of Patagonia is noticeably more ramshackle than the Argentine side, with peeling paint, sagging buildings, and geriatric buses. Nevertheless, after crossing the border into Chile you go from spending Monopoly money to something approaching normal prices. This can come as quite a psychological shock after a few months of two-dollar steak dinners. It doesn't help matters that the Chilean currency is rich in zeroes.
Puerto Natales is the support town for Torres del Paine, full of outfitters, places to rent equipment, and grocery stores. It is a scruffy but extremely pleasant small city. If you have the money, you can reach it in style on a four-day ferry ride down from Puerto Montt (beware, ferry contains Canadians), which weaves through innumerable islands and fjords, passes several glaciers, and looks like a spectacular way to experience the various kinds of horizontal rain Chile is famous for. With less money, you are most likely to arrive in by bus, either from Argentina or Tierra del Fuego.
The demographics of the park itself are interesting. Torres del Paine is a rough two hour ride from Puerto Natales, and its vast internal roads are very hard to negotiate. This - coupled with the fact that the wind could probably lift a small child straight into the claws of a waiting condor - discourages families from visiting the place. The only people you meet are either dedicated hikers or an elderly, wealthy Condé Nast crowd with enough money to afford nights at the Lago Grey or the even more posh Hotel Explora. Of course, these guests still have to face the atrocious park roads (the great equalizer), so few people come here who don't have at least some outdoor bent.
A boat goes out from the Lago Grey hotel to visit the Grey Glacier at the other end of the lake. The water here is filled with glacial flour from the scraping taking place up at the business end of the glacier. The Grey Glacier periodically sends icebergs floating down the lake in an attempt to destroy the luxury hotel; these settle at its southern end like giant Windex-colored boulders. We caught ourselves trying to crop them out of photos, thinking they were blue plastic hangars of some kind before realizing their true nature. Like nearly every glacier in Patagonia, the Grey Glacier is retiring, but doing so in style.
A little Zodiac takes you out to the boat, which then heads up the lake. As we manoeuver past an imposing cliff, the captain taps the "Release Condor" button on the main panel and an enormous bird dutifully takes off from his nest a hundred feet above the water.
The entire boat ride feels this scripted. As we near the glacier, clouds roll in and start dropping rain and sleet on the boat. The ice is half-visible and ghostly through the mist. Then, as we pull within twenty meters of the glacier face (the retreating glacier doesn't pose the kind of threat from calving ice as the Perito Moreno), the clouds open and a lone sunbeam strikes the ice from the side. I turn around to look at a brilliant double rainbow to the south of the boat, and just then I hear a tinkling sound of ice on glass and a soft voice behind me, speaking the four most beautiful words in the Spanish language:
"Whisky o pisco sour?"
Our pilot has climbed up the metal ladder in horizontal rain to bring up a tray of cocktails. At this point I would not be surprised to see a pink-hooved pegasus flying in, bringing sandwiches.
Lacking any kind of camping equipment, I had to stay at the cheapest of the park hotels, a place next to park headquarters that looked like an abandoned summer camp. With autumn coming in, the hotel was almost empty, and had an aura of mystery. If Kafka had been an outdoorsman, this is the kind of place he might have written about. Silent figures would float through in the background, taciturn groundsmen would occasionaly emerge from nowhere, on mysterious errands, and every deserted room felt like someone had just walked out, or was about to return. The caretaker was a grandfatherly, silent man who spent most of his time futzing with the generator out back (turned off at noon, on at dusk). Sometimes he would come in and listen to the CB radio traffic in the lobby, where a fire managed to flicker without giving off any heat whatsoever.
The room ($90, no longer Argentina) was Spartan and contained twin bunk beds and a small table. The only source of heat was a wood stove in the hallway, mercifully stoked to near-red-heat in the evenings by unseen hands. The door left open to let the heat in would be closed by someone as soon as you let it out of your sight. A couple in the room next door spoke softly; I assumed they were father and daughter until I saw them making out on the glacier boat the next day.
The two other, high-end hotels in the park have every amenity, but the only way to reach the outside world from this one was by a scratchy radio link. This gave the place an exciting sense of isolation. I might have expected a fearsome thunderstorm to come through and cut us off, movie style, but even the biggest storm couldn't find a way to linger here for more than twenty minutes before being swept out into Argentina. Liquor bottles on the restaurant shelf carried enigmatic names ("Coq de Lorraine", "Gran Pisco") and a thick covering of dust. Only the kitchen staff broke the Edward Gorey spell, whistling and singing from behind the stove, and setting out little tubes of Sanka in the dining room to fortify the morning hiker.
I had thoughtlessly come without much Chilean currency, and had envisioned myself chopping wood for the next three weeks when this was discovered on checkout, but to my astonishment the affable caretaker accepted a credit card. He then put on his glasses, picked up the microphone and broadcast on the common radio circuit, used by every bus and van between here and Puerto Natales:
ATENCIÓN ATENCIÓN TENGO UNA TARJETA DE CREDITO NÚMERO CUATRO DOS DOS SEIS OCHO...
Someday they will finish paving the new road to Torres del Paine, Puerto Natales will upgrade its airport, and the Uluruization of Torres del Paine will set in. For now, though, it's still enough of a pain in the neck to get to to make you feel like you're alone in the world with this astonishing display of nature. Don't tell anyone.
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