Close to the Edge
A Day in Puerto Williams, the Southernmost City on Earth
How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candle-light?
Yes, and back again…
If your heels are nimble and your toes are light,
You may get there by candle-light.— Unknown (1801)
“Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They’re always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.”
— J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953)
“Indeed the planet gets smaller every day: wild, salient, and lonely corners are more and more difficult to find… Our original plan was to spend only three months in Tierra del Fuego before sailing back to the tropic, but soon the magic of these places (where the mountains and the sea mingle in symphony of rare perfection, where there is silence and solitude for those looking for them and where the animals are not yet scared by man) won us over, and we stayed…
A long stay in Puerto Williams cannot but leave very pleasant memories, thanks to the kindness of the people and the slower pace of life, free as it is from the accelerated burden of modern civilization.”
— Mariolina Rolfo and Giorgio Ardrizzi, The Patagonia & Tierra del Fuego Nautical Guide (2004)
Found, timeworn, at a coffee stand outside the ferry port in Puerto Williams, January 2024
Down there at the very bottom of Chilean Patagonia lies Puerto Williams, lonely and windswept, glittering in the thin sunlight that glazes the tangled waterways of Tierra del Fuego. It is situated around a little sheltered bay and stubbornly — but proudly — faces north, towards every other city in the world.
Puerto Williams is a true port, full of entry and departure points that shuffle travelers in and out and north and south through land, air, or sea. Its waterfront accommodates steely Chilean gunboats, complicated-looking Antarctic research vessels, fancy pleasure schooners from the tropics, and transient supply freighters from distant worlds, all separated by a few long and sturdy docks stretching out into the channel to anchor the big luxury cruise ships that are too big to get any closer. Two trailheads at the back corners of town send hikers out into the island beyond to explore. Of course there is an air strip in Puerto Williams too, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, bewitched, exhausted (or some spellbinding cocktail of all three) by the journey there — slowly floating through narrow untouched alleys of tumbling glaciers and clean thrusting peaks on a boat of some kind being the preferred method of approach.
The day before arriving in town I boarded the Yaghan back in Punta Arenas with a mixed group — locals, foreign explorers in colorful windbreakers, and a few civil servants heading off to blustery outposts at the bottom of the world. “Please do have a safe journey, Dios te bendiga,” said the friendly-eyed mechanic who opened the gate, with a sincere shake of the hand, before sending me on my way. The first day of that trip was in fact safe, but silver with rain and hard to see much of anything besides the hull of the boat cutting through ink-black water. It was all geographic romanticism, sailing south in the Strait of Magellan on the first Friday of a new year, and everyone preferred the warmth indoors except for myself and an enthusiastic Peruvian birdwatcher — we stood outside together silently for hours, rain-whipped and happy. But then the peaks loomed up out of the fog and sharpened, extending their mysterious invitations. The sky cleared and the deck was rarely empty until we reached Puerto Williams 30 hours later as an ice cold midnight sunset melted down the channel behind and everyone scurried off into town.
The lodging that night felt like a mirage. Just a few minutes walk from the port (as nothing is more than a few minutes away in Puerto Williams) I found the lovely Cecilia’s place, “El Padrino,” a tidy plot of land sheltered between the trees and the industrial yards, with a drooping blue cottage and a howling wood stove that was piping hot and on all night. Pans in the kitchen rattled around as a group of Quebecois cooked omelettes at 2:00am like a team of hurried Manhattan line cooks. Talk of today’s and tomorrow’s travel plans slingshotted around the room. Further restless expeditions were planned by new and fleeting friends. Dirty hiking boots littered the floor. Beatnik belles-lettres from roving writers (Kerouac in French translation, London in Spanish) were present on the communal bookshelf. And framing the big single window were a pair of wilting turquoise shutters, they opened up into the garden where a kaleidoscope of colorful tents glowed under an austral moon, which by then had come up nasty and full.
At sunrise it was immediately clear why the hikers make an effort to come here — the sharp Dientes de Navarino peaks appear behind the hills, with a little menace, but urging one to come on in and find out for themselves. I didn’t have enough time to go that day so toured the town instead. I read a tattered nautical guide at a coffee stand for two hours. I had a beer at 10:45am and watched a cruise ship refuel. I went and saw the Micalvi, a century-old German exploration vessel which now rests, half sank and redolent of adventure, in the lagoon. Its low interior ceilings are cloaked with bright flags and mementos from more recent worldly excursions that stopped here (“the first Russian transocean voyage made with three dogs and two children,” one boasts). I wandered around further and found many melancholy gentlemen with ancient windblown faces sitting on their porches, and also found that not much moved in Puerto Williams, besides an occasional stray dog or wild horse. Those were usually defecating on the sidewalks, sleeping in the sun, or quietly gazing off into eternity — like everyone else in town.
Below the 35th parallel (northerners can think of such faraway outposts as Cape Town, Auckland, or Santiago) there is not much land to block or disrupt the wind, so Southern Patagonia is hit hard by the westerlies rioting around the open oceans down there. Joan Didion or Raymond Chandler may have found some allegory hiding in the gusts of these winds, some clever generalization of human existence to be uncovered in their agnostic violence — aligning them with strange local happenings or portentous warnings of events yet to come. “October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously… every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows,” writes Didion of Los Angeles. “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen,” adds Chandler. To me the winds just feel dry, cold, strong, unrelenting — difficult but perversely enjoyable to withstand on the exposed deck of a small boat, completely in their tempestuous grasp while sullen glaciers look on and the albatross perform their serene acrobatics above. But a few of Didion’s simple, spooky words still ring in my ears as the weather pounds the Yaghan and we drift past Ushuaia: “The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”
If you prime your mind just right — like Didion or Chandler might have done — certain quietly unsettling suggestions become easier to spot. An orchestral version of Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely plays in the swanky hotel lobby bar while a group of wealthy older travelers headed to Antarctica meet each other over cocktails. A muted television screen behind them broadcasts horrible images from distant wars, while some in the group merrily discover that their nieces study together at Stanford and that the Silversea is adding a week to its Norway fjord cruise this summer. Pleasant mountaintop reveries on Patagonian hikes are shattered by immediate temperature drops of ten degrees that ice the spine and twist the nerves — delivered by the westerlies detonating through the valley. Returning to civilization after a week in the wilderness, my phone buzzes with alerts of remote humanitarian emergencies and news that the Doomsday Clock will soon be adjusted, to reflect just how close we actually are to the end of the world (it’s currently 90 seconds to midnight here on planet Earth). A gardener in Puerto Williams shares that in the last few years the wildflowers just haven’t grown like they used to. On the Yaghan’s return trip northbound to Punta Arenas — which I watched peacefully and breezily depart from the docks — a passenger had a heart attack and passed away. Those late-night twilight hours at 55 degrees south, when fast-moving clouds are stained with deep reds and pale golds and the sun takes three hours to set, are just like anything else: beautiful in one set of mind, spooky in another, guided along either by divine hands, sinister inertias, or nothing at all. I’m not sure which is worse.
Travel can seem insignificant or selfish these days on our restless and often vicious planet — subsumed as it is in angers, conflicts, and disillusions. The truths of the world’s confusions are harder and harder to find, and its roster of deteriorating or protracting crises grows with each passing week. Most are difficult to have any real dialogue about, without isolating a new friend, offending an existing one, or ending a conversation completely. And the winds… those winds down in Patagonia are a reminder of the real delicacy of our existence, more fragile with each passing day that we are generally terrible to each other. And places like Puerto Williams give you the chance to escape the world, or to think about its troubles more deeply. The old traveler Bruce Chatwin wrote: “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are… the drinker drinks; the devout prays; and the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.”
Just how close to the edge are we, anyways?
/S
Punta Arenas, January 2024
