2008 August 18 « a+b ramblings

Having grown weary of the environs of my now-beloved Tocopilla, despite its offering up some sumptuously bleak industrial landscapes for my photographic brain to parse, I drove east back into the desert this afternoon. 30km of winding road cut through the precipitous cliffs and mountains that dumps you out onto the desert floor a couple of thousand feet above the sea.

Actually, it wasn´t so much weariness that drove me on as the early stages of what I´m sure is ¨desert syndrome,¨ a fictional malady coined by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman in his fine memoir about Atacama called Desert Memories. His theory is that the desert induces a kind of mania, a restlessness, a feeling of isolation that enters through the pores and melts into the nervous system. I´ve logged plenty of desert hours myself, in Mojave, across the southwest, Death Valley, etc. But this is different. Something hums under the surface: coexistent anxieties both of staying put and of going anywhere. You can see it in people´s faces.

So what was I seeking on this excursion? Nothing really. Something, I guess. A spot. A landmark. A logical point to get out, stretch and turn around. You see, I passed this entire landscape last night at 10:00 and saw nothing of it. Only the road materializing in my high beams and at one point the ghostly depot of trains that carry processed minerals and ores from the many mines in the area down to the port where they sail to God knows where. So I drove, and I drove, and after 50km of nothing, only power poles and dirt and rocks, I turned around.

30km back toward Tocopilla and, how could I have missed it the first time around, an actual hill. A hill in the desert. Just sitting there, wating to be climbed. I grabbed my book (Robert Fagles´ translation of The Odyssey), a blanket Allison pilfered from our flight from the states, and a bottle of water and headed out.

It was a short climb, about 20 minutes to the top where I plunked myself down in the dirt, cracked my bottle of water and read the entirety of Book 11: The Kingdom of the Dead. It was as Ulysses is conversing with Achilles´ ghost in the underworld that I felt something in my bones. I thought maybe it was my heart skipping a beat, or my imagination, but there it was, persisting, a rumbling coming up through the ground that would shake the acorns from an oak tree. Holy shit, I thought that the earth was going to open up right beneath me and the ghosts of all my old heroes pour forth and start hounding me for a drink of whiskey. And then it all passed. And then it dawned on me that what I had felt was the dynamite blast from a mine many, many miles away. What I had felt in my bones was the seismic concussion of men blowing ungodly tons of rock out of the earth. And there you have it.

And with my last post from this morning still bouncing around in my head, I descended the hill and decided to symbolically reenact those two acts of marking: mining and the creation of geoglyphs. So I began by hunting specimens of a certain volcanic rock that is quite beautiful…the perfect, unbroken ones look like watermelon seeds, almonds and robin`s eggs. Almost perfect geometrical elipses. So I prospected and mined about 20 fine samples and tucked them away in a sack to bring home. And then I made a geoglyph, right there in the desert. The next time someone flies a chopper over that spot, they´ll see a big, fat ¨A+B¨ made of rocks marking the land at the base of my hill. Who knows, maybe it´ll still be there in 1,000 years.

Now it´s 10:00 and I have to get a pizza. More soon…

P.S. A small celebration is in order. My last post, ¨Marks Upon the Land,¨ was our 50th blog post since we first posted at the end of June with our very rough trip itinerary (which basically got thrown out the window halfway through). 50 is a good, round number, just ask Hawai´i. Four out of five of them agree that it equals one half of one hundred.

My Private Reading Hill with Red Blanket/A+B Geoglyph

Fabulous Tocopilla

The Charming Rooms I Stayed In

In its blank, wasted expanse, the desert is a canvas. Under its unflinching sun, the marks we leave have nowhere to hide…

Yesterday I departed the isolated town of Mamina, high in the mountains 70km east of the panamerican highway, and descended upon Humberstone and Santa Laura, the two most intact nitrate ghost towns in El Norte Grande, the name by which Chilenos hail the vast swath of nearly rainless desert that begins a couple hundred kilometers north of Santiago and ends at the Peruvian border.

And so my day began bearing witness to the mining fields — the long, undulating, dynamited trenches cut through the crust of the earth — where from the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century Chile cast its economic lot. The nitrate boom built towns, cities, ports and roads and spawned hordes of industrial millionaires. (Think the gold rush or the railroads in California.) It catapulted Chile ahead of other South American countries in its development and essentially paved its way into the modern era.

Until, that is, a German chemist by the name of Carl Bosch perfected in 1913 the process for producing synthetic nitrate on a large industrial scale, thus crushing the Chilean nitrate industry and Chile`s economy along with it. (All because Chile`s vast fields of caliche, the rock from which nitrate is extracted, belonged more or less entirely to the British. The invention of synthetic nitrate was in essence an act of desperation.)

What`s the big deal with nitrate? Well, it happens to serve two very important functions. One, it is an excellent fertilizer for crops. Two, it is a critical component of explosives. (Again, as Allison would point out, we see that the endeavors of agriculture and war are forever intertwined.)

When the demand for Chilean nitrate disappeared, so did the mining towns and infrastructure that supported the industry. By the 1950s, all but two of the nitrate towns, called ¨salitreras,¨ were abandoned, the mining companies evicting the worker-residents and their familes, many of whom resettled in Tocopilla, Iquique and Antofagasta or other scattered desert settlements.

What remains is a devastated landscape stretching hundreds of miles along the interior of the desert and the shells of Humberstone and Santa Laura, which are now considered patrimonies of humanity and are protected by the Chilean government. All the other towns were scrapped and looted decades ago, and the possessions of the residents of those towns still show up in flea markets throughout the north (Allison and I witnessed this phenomenon with our own eyes in Iquique).

The experience of visiting those ghost towns was haunting. Humberstone specifically got under my skin. Mind you, everything is in a severe state of disrepair, but I spent hours wandering through the town, visiting the theater and the church, and photographing huge lathes and other machines in the wood and machine shops. And then there are the enormous steam-powered turbines in the ¨casa de fuerza,¨ the power house, the heart of this once-great industrial beast. There they sit in sad repose, collecting dust in the dark and crude spanish-language graffiti. ¨Victor chupa el culo.¨ Nice to see that American youth aren´t the only ones with their heads up their asses and no respect for their history. But then again, considering the environmental misery wrought by the nitrate mines, I guess it´s only just that their ghosts suffer such small humiliationsat the hands of some anonymous malcontent.

I left Humberstone and Santa Laura in the late afternoon with another kind of human mark on my mind: geoglyphs. ¨El Gigante de Atacama,¨ The Giant of Atacama, is the largest prehistoric antrhopomorphic figure in the world. There in the desert he sits, drawn by indigenous tribes in sinuous lines of rock on the side of a volcanic hill over 1,000 years ago. The great desert god, staring up at the sky and across the horizon. Wanting to see for just a moment what a god sees, I hiked to the top of the hill and stood above his head and saw the downward curve of the hill and then the flat, sandy plain of the Atacama stretching to the mountain range to the west that, once crossed, plummets to the Pacific Ocean. While there were more unwelcome marks all around me and El Gigante — 4×4 paths cut over the hillside, clearly threatening the integriy of the site – I was utterly alone in that place and could not hear the drone of a single tire on the highway several miles away.

Ah, the highway. That damned, god-forsaken, townless, gas stationless, moonlight-drenched desert highway. But for that story, you`ll have to read my post from last night entitled ¨Rust Never Sleeps.¨ (Which, by the way, was cut short because as I was typing, the old Greek owner of the hotel (called ¨Hotel Atenas¨ — how original) returned and inexplicably started beating the kind hotel manager with a billy club in the lobby, shouting ¨maricon¨ at him and chasing him into the street, never to returm. Needless to say I wrapped up my post posthaste and made a bee-line for my room.)

So here I sit, in a computer cubicle that unnervingly resembles a confession booth, still in Tocopilla, one of the ugliest industrial port towns you might ever have the misfortune to visit save maybe Baku harbor in Azerbaijan, which my good friend Bruce photographed several years ago with his usual postapocalyptic panache. If my ¨plan¨ comes together, I`ll spend today and tomorrow in Tocopilla and the desert to the east using up what little film remains and, if the photo gods smile upon my endeavors, visiting Chuquicamata, Chile`s famous (and infamous) open pit copper mine. At 2.7 miles long, nearly 2 miles wide and 2,800 feet deep, it is the world´s largest. Marks upon the land, indeed.

Overview of the Industrial Facility at Humberstone