Day 119

For some reason related to the poetic symmetry of fate, it is fitting that the last speaker of the Yhagan language would live in the southernmost village of the world. The Villa Ukika, with population of 51, is an indigenous village located South East of Puerto Williams, a Chilean village that is in turn South of Ushuaia. Puerto Williams has a population of 3000. It was originally a naval settlement, and the officers of the Chilean navy appear to still constitute the main population here.

The search for Cristina Calderón turned out to be a feat no less challenging than the search of Marie Smith Jones in Anchorage. I had only obtained spotty and vague information as to the whereabouts of “La Abuela” (“Grandma”), as she is known here.

I finally managed to hire a little rubber boat that crossed me from Ushuaia to Isla Navarino in Chile, where Puerto Williams is located. We crossed amidst snow and the frigid wind on the boat that jumped on the waves as if we were horse-riding. We had to make an appointment with two immigration officers that met us at Puerto Navarino (an otherwise deserted spot) in order to get our passports stamped (once again). From there, a van took us to the other side of the island through a dirt road (there are no paved streets or highways here), crossing snow and sleet, until we finally reached our destiny.

I walked into Villa Ukika, which has a spectacular view to the sea and the mountains. The house of La Abuela was in the center of the village. The local butcher came in the middle of the interview to deliver a giant and bloody piece of meat. She explained to me that everyone was related to her in the village: she had six children, thirteen grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren keep coming. Referring to her large family, she said “ maybe I reproduced myself a lot due to the fact that I was practically an orphan”. Her father died shortly after she was born, and her mother died when she was five. She grew up amongst uncles and aunts, as well as her grandfather, who had a special religious veneration for the sun. During Cristina’s childhood, Yaghan culture was already in quick decline. The last Yaghan celebration she witnessed was in 1936, when she was eight years old. Hers was the last generation to learn the language, and her last interlocutor was her sister, who died recently. I asked her if she dreamt in Yaghan. “But of course. That is how I speak to all of them still”.

As it happened to me when I interviewed Marie Smith Jones, I did not know how to pose the question of how did she feel about being the last speaker of her language. But she started talking about it when she spoke about solitude, and about her ambivalence with God. “My daughter committed suicide a few years ago. She took pills. I stopped going to the church, because I thought that if something so unfair had happened, there was no god anywhere. An evangelist came once to my house and tried to convince me to go to church, saying that if my daughter died it was perhaps because it was the best fate for her, that she and I would have suffered a lot otherwise.” Cristina did not buy the argument, and she still never returned to church. However, she somehow regained her faith, although in a personal way and within her own home. “I think that, in the end, we all are alone with ourselves and with God”.

I left her house and saw the sea again, and that powerful and melancholic austral light, the many asleep dogs in the village, and I went back on the dirt road. That last and simple thought that we are ultimately alone with ourselves got me thinking. There is a lot to think about in the next few days and on these pages. But, for the time being, having met Cristina Calderón provided definite closure to my unrest. It closes this long conversation of hundreds of voices that started in Anchorage. My trip had officially concluded.

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Por alguna razón quizá relacionada con la simetría poética del destino, se siente apropiado que la última hablante de los yaganes viva en la aldea más al sur del mundo. La aldea Ukika, con 51 habitantes, se encuentra al sureste de Puerto Williams, un poblado chileno localizado a su vez al sur de Ushuaia. Un transporte en lancha de goma, que me cruzó a la isla. Atravesamos entre la nieve y el frío gélido en la lancha que trotaba como caballo por las olas del canal.  Cristina Calderón, conocida mejor como La abuela, me explicó que en su infancia la cultura yagana iba ya en rápido declive. La última celebración yagán que presenció fue a los ocho años, en 1936. La última generación en aprender el idioma fue la suya, y su última interlocutora fue su hermana, quien falleció recientemente. “Mi hija se suicidó hace unos años. Se tomó unos remedios. Yo dejé de ir a la iglesia.  Creo que todos al final estamos solos con nosotros mismos y con dios”. Salí de su casa y ví de nuevo el mar, y esa poderosa y melancólica luz austral, los perros dormidos en la aldea, y caminé por el sendero de lodo. Esa última reflexión de que estamos ultimadamente solos con nosotros mismos, dicha por la última hablante de una lengua en el poblado más remoto del mundo, me dejó pensativo. De momento, el haber conocido a Cristina Calderón cierra finalmente esta larga conversación de cientos de voces que comenzó hace cuatro meses en Anchorage. El trayecto ha oficialmente concluído.

Day 116

It's kind of a harsh awakening when you have been inside a bus for 37 hours, and suddenly you open your eyes at a place like Río Gallegos.

Río Gallegos is the southernmost city of Patagonia, the legendary region of interwoven mountains, open landscapes, and, they say, mirages. The city was founded in 1884 as a port, a time in which several immigrants from Italy, Spain, Ireland and England started to occupy these lands and raise cattle. It is 12 hours away from Ushuaia, my final destination. In the meantime, I had to make a quick stop here, in this city with curious attributes: gray and yellow colors, a cold wind from the coast that blows tiny black dots that look like charcoal; the city's seaport, at the time deserted, with remarkably low tides, and, without any exception, a dog in every house.

Gradually I've had the impression that I have returned to the beginning of this journey, due to the winter-like feeling of sunlight, the openness of the landscape, and the simplicity of Patagonian houses which bear some resemblance with the Anglo ones (the majority of the old houses that survive from the time of the foundation of Rio Gallegos were ordered by catalogue from Europe, in the same way that modular houses are brought today to Anchorage).

While I was walking around the three or tour semi-lively streets of Rio Gallegos, I went into the Museo Padre Molina, a curiously strange combination of natural history and modern art museum that surely would be liked by people like Mark Dion and David Wilson from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. (Father Molina was one of the first scientific collectors here, and, judging from the fact that this is the only real museum here, probably the last). Although many of the old exhibits seem to be gone, there is an imposing skeleton of a Megatherium Americanus, a “herbivore mammal, measuring more than 5 meters in length. It had strong claws. It coexisted with man. It lived during the Pleistocene. It was extinguished 8500 years ago”.

Day 118

FINIS TERRAE

Ushuaia, September 14, 2006

As a child, I remember reading a traditional Russian fairy tale about a young prince who leaves his kingdom in order to reach the end of the world. When he finally reaches the confines of the earth, he meets an oracle there that unexpectedly tells him about the imminent danger run by his kingdom. He is able to see things very clearly there, and this allows him to save it after he quickly goes back home. When I used to read the story, I would imagine the end of the world as the edge of a cliff after which one would only see blackness and stars. And, incidentally, my first glances of Ushuaia did not differ too much from those early childhood images.

When we reached the edge of the continental part of the hemisphere, the bus boarded a ferry that crossed us through the Magellan Strait from the Patagonia to Tierra del Fuego, a geographic region that is shared by both Chile and Argentina. As a result of this, every Ushuaia-bound bus has to cross the Chilean side first in order to reach the Argentinean side of the island, and this in turn results in a somehow pointless dance of hopping in and out of the bus to do immigration and custom procedures, as we enter, exit and enter Argentina again in a matter of hours). We spent countless hours crossing a completely desolate landscape, without any trees or mountains and populated only by some sort of llamas who would lightly run through the dry bushes. Gradually, after sunset, the landscape started to turn more wintry and blue, while a forest o seemingly petrified black-greenish trees appeared, finally leading to a huge lake surrounded by imposing mountains, which indicated that we had reached the end of the world.

Magellan did not seem to be too interested in this area when he crossed these lands in 1520. They were inhabited by various indigenous groups, amongst them the Yaghan, who would lit big bonfires that would be seen in the distance by sailors and which eventually gave the name of Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) to this island where Ushuaia now stands ( today, there is only one Yaghan speaker left, Cristina Calderón, who lives in Villa Ukika, a small village next to Puerto Williams, south of Ushuaia, and who is the person that I have as mission to meet in order to conclude this trip).

The notion of the end of the world, and the belief in its potential as providing a clarifying perspective of life, is a fertile idea in art, in the realm of the symbolic and the poetic. Ushuaia is the city that occupies the honor of bearing such a symbolism, as the southern-most city in the world (with the exception of Puerto Williams, a town on the Chilean side, just a bit further south, although it is debated on whether it really counts as a city). This has turned Ushuaia into some sort of tourist magnet and it has nurtured an expansion of the city’s commerce and hotels. The cultural life of the city has intensified, and we have had as host both the city of Ushuaia (led by its director of culture, Marcelo Murphy) and the organizers of the upcoming biennial del fin del mundo next year. So I join the ever-increasing visitors to Ushuaia, not precisely to do touristy, penguin-watching expeditions, but rather to find, like in the Russian fairy tale, perhaps a shred of clarity, closure, or perspective—of our continent, in my case. After all, which could be the best place to see things in perspective than the furthest possible vantage point?