Tierra del Fuego

Sketch by Roy Beckemeyer, January 19, 1998, View from Hotel del Glaciar.   Photo of Darwin Range by Pat Beckemeyer, January 19, 1998

From my journal:

"Ten minutes till midnight and it is finally dark. The view from the third floor lobby of our hotel now consists of an arc of blue and yellow lights - the city of Ushuaia - floating in the blackness and marking the edge where the beech-covered slopes of Tierra del Fuego slide into the waters of the Beagle Channel.

Earlier this evening, as I watched the same scene from the hotel dining room, it struck me that these electrical 'fires' that we now use to light up our habitations are reminiscent of the fires that Charles Darwin watched as he sailed in the ship whose name was taken for these waters.

The inhabitants then were known for wearing little in the way of clothing. They did, however, carry fire with them everywhere they went, even in their canoes. As Darwin and the crew of the Beagle sailed this passage they watched fires spring up along the shore as night fell. If they were to return today, they would see that the Fuegians are still faithful to their name. Tierra del Fuego - Land of Fire.

We embark tomorrow for the Drake Passage and Antarctic waters. Have we had enough good omens to insure a safe and just-sufficiently-uneventful passage to thrill us but not endanger us?

Perhaps. The first omen of the day was the wondrous view from the window of our plane as we climbed out of Punta Arenas and crossed the Darwin Range: glaciers and meandering, braided rivers. A scene I never tire of, a scene reminiscent of similar geography I have seen in the southern alps of New Zealand and the Central Range in Alaska.

Glaciers - rivers of ice - the surface cracked and stretched, buckled and compressed, revealing in those distressed patterns the slowly flowing, unimaginably fluid substance: hard, incredibly dense blue ice. Meandering rivers reveal another aspect of fluid flow - energy shifting and swirling - picking up bed loads and laying them down in gravel and sand swaths, forever wandering back and forth across their valleys. Both examples of water changing the nature of our world just as it has for millions of years.

Another good omen: a long-lived rainbow, that for over an hour was a double rainbow, arched over Ushuaia this evening. I was out walking when the sprinkle of rain that presaged the spectacle of light first fell on me and caused me to look up. (Tapped me on the shoulder as it were, as if to alert me to the next act.) The rainbow continued on, through most of my dinner, the right hand end anchored at first in the town of Ushuaia, then drifting slowly out into the channel and up the slopes as it faded away. A definite omen. A definitive omen, declaring treasures to be found in Ushuaia and the waters beyond."

- Roy Beckemeyer, 19 January, 1998