After a brief respite, suffocating COVID restrictions are back, and to travel beyond the boundaries of my town is to break the law. Almost one year has passed since the beginning of the first lockdown and this is the new normal. Freedom is a distant memory.
The constricting serpent wraps its coils tighter, I feel claustrophobic, trapped, and my mind drifts back to Patagonia once again…Back to the empty plains, soaring peaks, and luminous glaciers.
Back to a barren badland of worn gulches and valleys, something like you’d expect in Arizona or not dissimilar to the eroded landscape of Almeria, here in Spain. Away from the people around my table in the centre of Granada – fewer now than last time, looking more worn, more downtrodden.
Here, in this empty landscape, I not only travel physically but also in time. Scattered across this windswept, almost lunar land are giant ‘pencils’ of rock, randomly placed here and there as if scattered by some petulant god. But these are not pencils…They are trees, ancient araucarias – monkey puzzles.
Nearly a hundred million years ago this barren place was a lush forest, not an empty desert, and these trees were the salad of dinosaurs – some of the largest and most spectacular of their kind like argentinosaurus, perhaps the greatest of all, weighing up to 100 tonnes, and mapusaurus, a formidable predator, perhaps a pack hunter, that grew to around 12 meters in length. Looking at these ancient trees and across this desolate place, I imagine this landscape when life pulsed in these trees, and the awe (and perhaps fear!) -inspiring creatures that shared this ancient world.
Living araucaria trees, unchanged since this time, still grow in lush forests in the Chilean lake district beneath snow-crowned volcanoes. These petrified trees are older than the Andes themselves, which rose later, blocking clouds and rain from this desiccated corner of Patagonia. These landscapes might seem timeless, but time never stops moulding the world around us. We are a mere blink in this planet’s history – but we have so much damage. At least Patagonia still feels wild, but maybe, if I ever return, I shall find it similarly diminished, ravaged by the greedy, in order to fatten bottom lines of off-shore bank accounts.
Four kids, maybe university age, sit at the table next to me. They’re obviously friends, but they barely talk to each other…instead they’re all gripped by the screens of their mobile phones, seemingly hypnotised by the digital universe. The real world, even friends, holds little interest. One of the boys, his thumbs rippling across the screen, types a text, nervously tapping his deck shoes against the pavement. Across the table a girl, attractive, with long dark hair, a blue top, and skin-tight white trousers, constantly takes selfies of herself, pulling her face into cheeky grimaces. She obsessively analysis each shot afterwards. I need to breathe. This world seems to have become so sad.
I think back to a moment, watching the Perito Moreno glacier, its great white snout pushing into a sapphire blue lake. There’s a silence of anticipation with my group, and then a crack and a roaring boom as a huge chunk of ice separates off the main Glacier, crashing in slow motion into the lake. A wave bursts away from its previously still surface. The audience, including me, even though I’ve seen this before, collectively gasp, awed, then silenced by the power of nature. By the power of our mother earth. Our mother which we have made so sick. I need to breathe; I need to escape this constricted prison of the COVID world and be awed by the unrestrained power of nature – the wild. I dream of space. I dream of Patagonia.
Barely a day goes by when I don’t feel a dread within me – a dread that we’ve pushed the world, nature, too far, beyond breaking point. That we’ve set our fate, but whenever I return to the wild, in Spain, Patagonia, or elsewhere, nature breaths life and hope back into me again.
