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Westward from Austin, Texas
Monday, 28 May 2007
There is a monument to the mustang in Austin, upon its side can be found an inscription:
A man was only as good as his horse, and a man without a horse was no man at all.
Time and again I have felt acutely that America is no place for people without their own transport. In most lands the ancient art of walking slowly will get me around town, show me what i want to see. Not in the USofA. It had been another highlight of Austin to find a big organic supermarket within walking distance. But these opportunities present themselves only rarely.
Instead I have the greyhound. And the further west this trip takes me the more things seem to go awry with this great, gruff American institution. Buses fill up and break down. In Wichita Falls at 2am a bus driver, spoiling for a fight, tells a kid to pull his baggy pants up, and when the kid shows disbelief bordering on attitude, the driver kicks him off. The bus station is closed and the guy is very stranded for the night. Those of us on board put our heads down and pretend the stupid altercation didn’t draw our attention. I don’t want to be left in that pit.
But, despite the powerlessness, the cramped confines, the awful smells and the wrangling for space with the overweight (leg room vs butt room, and the legs never win), the greyhound has been integral to this trip.
It has shown me a side of the USofA I wouldn’t have seen in my own vehicle, and that the mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly educated world of couchsurfing can’t access. The greyhound is blue collar transport. The people telling their stories talk about parole officers and pastors, about unemployment and relocation. The real America, that mythic, elusive idea, is probably closest to realisation right here on an overnight bus ride cross country.
I spent probably a solid day’s worth of time greyhounding across Texas. And it wasn’t just the theatre within the bus that was striking; the full immensity of Texas was rolling past the smeared windows. It was magnificent.
The greeness of the gulf coast I have already mentioned: the long grey road rising high over the bayous on long concrete legs, while all around the green of the gulf coast was insinuating itself into and around everything, pulling billboards to the ground, breaking apart old cars, consuming old country houses. Water streamed by, brown and rich and busy.
I saw my first oil derrick in amidst the greenery. Like awful steel growths, little clusters of these will turn up anywhere there is crude to be extracted. In farms or towns, in the empty countryside, in the green of the east or the yellow of the west, there will be derricks, groups of them monotonously nodding and dredging up the thick black blood of Texas.
Austin squats over land much more like the great big openness of Nebraska. Though the town is green and hilly the land around it is yellow, with gently rolling hills. Cows are scattered over the terrain, in loose groups miles from the nearest fence or farm or farmer. Occasionally a proud herd of Texan longhorn cattle can be seen, with those mighty and distinctive handlebars set into their docile brows.
To move on further west i had to go into and out of Dallas. Monstrous Dallas, which I saw only by night, green and gold lights shining out of black edifices. The blackness of Dallas is expanding, engulfing neighbouring towns. It is devouring Fort Worth, just as Houston is feeding on all its neighboring towns, assimilating them into its massive girth.
Beyond Dallas and Fort Worth we begin to roll into desert. The derricks are still about, turning rust-brown even in the dryness. Restless horses stomp through huge empty paddocks. We fly past thousands of cows packed into dusty pens and I imagine that these will soon be fed into the great steak machines powering the people of the south. Elsewhere, in the gaps between cow, horse, farm, farmer and derrick, families of graceful pronghorns are nibbling on the endless yellow fields. They are trespassers, but how could they ever be policed and kept out of these sprawling, endless properties?
Once and only once, I see a pair of cowboys riding out into the ridges, their dogs at their sides, their tall hats casting taller shadows.
Further on, up into the panhandle of Texas, the cities have receded and we enter a truer emptiness. Into this vast tableau things enter one at a time. A single windmill. A single heap of old cars. A single horse. A single house. A single windmill. The scene is yellow, but there are patches of green and purple glass blooming over this. Without them all concept of distance would be lost. Even so it remains difficult to apprehend.
The bus rolls on, its passengers doze. Time also becomes difficult to apprehend until the sun sets purple or rises red. The night is an inky blue with strange shadows upon it. People disembark and I sprawl out. People embark and I contract against the window. Stories end and stories begin.
On the horizon are ridges, and the distinctive flat-topped silhouettes of desert mesas. They begin to loom and multiply. New Mexico is approaching, the land of enchantment.
Austin, Texas
Thursday 24 May 2007
‘Keep Austin weird’ the bumper stickers and technicolour t-shirts proudly proclaim, but such sloganeering is unnecessary; Austin couldn’t be anything but weird. Four days about town is a tumble through the Texan looking-glass.
Despite being the warm, gooey, liberal heart of a vocally Red-publican state, Austin is proudly proudly Texan. More than one Austinite had me pause while they pointed proudly up one of the many flag poles. Texas, I was told a number of times, is the only state allowed to fly its flag at the same height as the USofA national flag.
A condition of Texas joining the USofA was that it retain the right to secede from the union at any time.
The Texas state capital building is in Austin, and a colossal thing it is, enormous white dome sitting atop a great pink granite building. Inside an enormous crest commemorates the six flags that have flown of Texas: the French flag, the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States, and the United States. The flags, the secession clause, the enormous portrait of Davey Crockett on the lobby wall – it is clear that Texas is a state that values its independence highly.
So when the revolution comes, will independence be bought with the pistols of Texan mythology or the bags of cash of Texan reality?
Austin, like Houston, is awash with money. The university of Texas is a massive institution. Its prestigious research centre boasts (i think) the first ever photograph anywhere, as well as an original Gutenberg bible. These are items with no cultural heritage in Austin. But they are a part of the great American buy-up of global culture.
To feel the full weirdness of Austin, though, I stepped out of the institutions and walked about town. Like all of Texas, Austin is a diverse place. The myth of the white macho frontiersman has long faded from the earth. Today Texas attracts a smorgasbord of international cultures. And while people of all shapes, colours and sizes are pulling on fancy leather cowboy boots, it is Texas that is being shaped and moulded by this international richness. My friend Nazanin, who I was in town to visit, is a proud member of the Persian-Texan community. It is a rich and poignant paradox, that Iran and America can meld so effortlessly on the streets of Austin, while remain at such stubborn loggerheads in the strange world of diplomacy.
In the evenings a crowd gathers, tourists and locals rubbing shoulders on the bridge at the edge of downtown. It is a polyglot group, English and Spanish in equal portions, and a smattering of Asian and other European tongues sliding between these. The people have turned out to see Austin’s bat population take to the air. Beneath the bridge hundreds of thousands of tiny bats are crammed into humid little crannies, waiting for the sky to darken. Bat colonnies have been fostered in town for over a century, their original purpose to protect the citizens from insect-borne Malaria. But again, the wild frontier days are long gone. Now the bats are a part of the rich and proud local mythology. When the sun is down they pour forth, a river of shapes in motion, flitting over the sluggish green river below. They move too fast to be individually distinguished, but appear first as a flow over the river and then as a haze over the trees. then they are gone into the darkness.
Bats, pride, multiculturalism. These are a part of the Austin backdrop. What fills up the hours of the day?
The particulars of Austin life are hard to define. In the evenings 6th street explodes to life and music thumps through the air. Rickshaws zip from club to club. And yet despite the energy most people are sitting languidly, enjoy Austin’s signature live music, eating, drinking and being merry.
It takes up a surprising amount of time, eating. The food is excellent, but again expectation-defying. No sign of Texan BBQ or obscene slabs of meat. But a plethora of vegan options, enormous organic markets, and Tex-Mex fare thats puts to death my fear that all American culinary institutions are marked by blandness and greasiness. It has taken almost two months for me to quell that fear.
I arrived in Austin on a Thursday evening, and Nazanin casually mentioned that there was a vegan hot dog eating contest on the Saturday. The stars and dates could not have aligned better. This was to be the centrepiece of my time in the capital, and the highlight of my foray through Texas.
What better crystallisation of the weirdness of Austin, then a vegan hot dog eating contest? A quintessential American idea – stuffing ones face with dogs – inverted and gone green, healthy, socially-responsible, maybe even ironic?!
The Austinites turned out in force, and they brought their tattoos with them. The hobo-punks were well represented, and one of them entered the doubles contest with his dog, who wolfed down six franks. The rocker kids were there and their star massacred 13 dogs, guzzled cloudy hot dog water and then threw up on stage. A plethora of photographers and film-makers stalked the crowd and filmed the guy in the super-hero get-up, who was disqualified for smuggling dogs. The vegan fire-fighters were invited as special guests. The hippies waited around and requested leftovers.
Having sniffed out a free meal, I entered into the singles contest, intending to polish off three dogs or so and then retire. But the roar of the crowd and the mound of lukewarm dogs on the plate before me aroused something deeper. Can I say the spirit of Texas was upon me?
One two three dogs slid down easily, and i knew I wasn’t going to win, but couldn’t very well walk away now. I had had my meal but there were another ten minutes on the clock. four and five and i was enjoying myself and hadn’t forgotten to use my napkin or chew with my mouth closed. Six and i had to adjust my posture somewhat and chew more thoroughly. seven and there was little point in stopping now with the time more than half gone, but the rock guy next to me swigging hot dog water made me a little queasy. Eight and my stomach was hurting but the mouth and hands were unrelenting. Nine and i wondered for the first time how such an act of gluttony fit with my vegetarian principles. Nine and a half and i had forgotten principles and had my sights set on double digits. Ten and i felt triumphant and very very bloated, but there were still some dogs on my plate, and the crowd was counting down. Ten and a half and numbers became irrelevant and my stomach became the distressed centre of the universe. The countdown concluded. I was too tired to stand but too sore to sit. The winners were awarded and I smiled and wanted to sleep. The winners, both in the double and singles categories, were not the big-talkers or face-stuffers. they didn’t throw up or look troubled. They received their prizes and disappeared into the colourful crowd.
The fullness passed and I would eat again. i had surprised and vindicated myself. I had crossed over and entered into the looking glass of Austin, found it to be weird but deeply pleasing. I had contradicted and surprised myself, and done so vibrantly and theatrically. And that I think was my most profoundly Texan moment, a mouth stuffed with ketchup and veggie-dog, not sure why I was doing what I was doing but determined to see it through to the end, to enjoy it and be proud of it.
How does any of that typify Texas? or Austin? It doesn’t necessarily, but after all my time in Houston and in Austin I still feel confounded by the richness and weirdness of Texas, a land that conforms to its own myths at the same time that it flips them round or shatters them. I had hoped to glean some special insight in America by coming here. And while there were fleeting moments of apprehension, usually with a full mouth or belly, I think I only really began to skim the surface of an impossibly rich and diverse state, with enough ingredients to constitute its own nation many times over.
The revolution is coming..
Houston, Texas
Tuesday 22 May 2007
I had originally deviated south from my classic east to west trajectory so I could experience Texas. New Orleans, Alabama – these had all been arranged around the grail of the south, which was Texas.
Greyhounding out of New Orleans and the verdure of Louisiana, I was tantalised by ideas of cowboys, Cadillacs, oil wells and rednecks. All that stuff that makes up the mythology of Texas. But the fecund green of the deep south didn’t stop at the state line. And there were no broncos or stage coaches or tumbleweed to greet me. There was just more green, and bloated clouds roiling and boiling overhead.
Great grey strips of road had been raised up on tall legs over the fickle bayou waters. These strips merged with other strips, becoming wider and wider, carving greater chunks out of the green until eventually there was no green. Just endless lines of grey, intertwining and converging on Houston.
First came the greasey auto shops and shiny machinery dealerships. Then came the franchises, squatting over huge parking lots; Burger King, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box, KFC, Walmart, Walgreens, Home Depot. Then came the planned, leafy nieghbourhoods, hidden from our greyhound behind high fences. Then came the first business district with its attendant hotels. Then came more franchises. It was all Houston, but downtown, central Houston was still a long way away. Long grey miles intervened between it and me.
Alex, the gal kind enough to host me, lived in one of these well-planned, reclusive little neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Houston. The bus into town took well over an hour, and passed four separate Hooters franchises.
Downtown, when it finally emerged from the nest of highways over, under and bypassing each other and stacked three, four or five high, was an impressive skyline. Narrow skyscrapers gleamed in the leaden light, all glass and steel like mirrors. Smooth, shiny edifices that reflected endless repetitions of the other skyscrapers. A skyline communicating the brashness of new money and the high-gloss veneer of success and prosperity.
The downtown streets were quiet. An underground mall that connected many of the main buildings meant the majority of workers didn’t need to take to the streets at all. From carpark to desk to food court to desk to carpark. Outside it started to rain. Grey clouds reflected in grey steel.
This was not the mythical Texas I had been desiring. This was the reality of oil and industry in the south, creating billions of dollars, but not yet the sophistication to know what to do with this money. Houston is a city that seems to be casting glances north to the impossibly big brothers of Chicago, New York and DC. It has the money to rival these cities, to put itself on the global map. It just hasn’t quite figured out what that involves yet. The trappings of wealth, the glamour labels and names and brands have arrived, but they are everywhere and their prevalence here makes the city seem soulless and generic.
Caught between the greyness of the city and the greyness of the sky, I lapsed into apathy and discontent. The money of Houston has brought big name and big price tag art to the city. It, like the rest of America, is full of art plundered from the rest of the world. I saw none of it. I spent long hours wandering nondescript neighbourhoods looking for signs of life, but found few. I ended up walking the same streets over and over, and wondering, what am I doing here why did I come to Houston to Texas to the USofA? I reached my limit of bad American food and spent hungry hours unable to find fresh food or cheap food or even tasty food. Mind and stomach grumbled to one another.
In amidst the endlessly repeating blocks and unvisited galleries, though, I did find a few special places. Some of that idle money had found creative outlets. In close proximity: the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, St. Basil’s Chapel. Three quirky little havens against the grey, even if, in the case of the Rothko chapel, the walls of the space were lined with fourteen immense canvases painted entirely black. A different kind of grey, then; this was a meditative greyness. A carefully curated and designed greyness, built to house abstract expressionist canvases, or restored thirteenth century Cypriot art, or very contemporary Catholic icons. And in the stillness and the contemplative greyness, I pondered Houston and my trip.
I just wanted to see a few cowboys.
Alex had some consolation for me. She took me to see the Wild West. Which is a bar, in greater-Houston, its car park full of pick-ups, its neon sign sitting atop a barn of a building. Inside the waitresses called us darlin’ and couples two-stepped around a dance floor. There were moustaches and there were patterned boots and there were big hats. It looked like the real Texas, that is, the imaginary Texas I had been craving. Couples of all ages were a-twirling and a-stomping. And they were laughing. And I was laughing.
I had wanted to see the ridiculous in Texas, and it was here. But it wasn’t in the people enjoying themselves, it was in the fact that there have to be special bars, like museums, dedicated to this sort of thing. Places to preserve and perpetuate the old, time-honoured, empty myths about the exotic folk of Texas. I don’t know whether Texas was ever like this, but it definitely isn’t any more. There is a huge gap between the image of Texas and the reality of Houston.
I’ve been asked many times by the people I’ve met about the outside, international image of America and Americans. My snappy reply is that when people think of Americans, they picture Texans. Its partly the result of the jocular president, and partly the result of a deeper, ingrained racism that envisages yankees as cultural barbarians, as an upstart nation wielding too much power (this attitude is usually most fervently clung to by citizens of nations no longer at the height of their power. It looks a lot like jealousy), as a bunch of brash cowboys, dropping bombs, driving big cars and chasing dollars.
Houston was by no means the highlight of my trip, but it did shatter for me some of the illusions that should have shattered long ago. Texas isn’t the romantic, western frontier i had hoped it would be. And its not a den of warmongers and oil barons. In amidst the bland concrete blocks of Houston are, for instance, some of the most advanced medical facilities in the world. Houston feels like a city undergoing a crisis of identity, seeking to reinvent itself outside of most of the stereotypes nurtured at home and abroad. It is the same ardent spirit seen all over the states, and especially throughout the middle cities. Cleveland, St Louis, Memphis – all have their demons and stereotypes to throw off. In Houston the money and the desire are there, the rest will come.
The grey miles knot themselves together and snake out in all directions. The Greyhound follows an impossibly convoluted route out of the city and away. The sky clears and the immensity of Texas remains before me.
New Orleans, Louisiana
Friday 18 May 2007
My southward flow ended where many paths seem to end; in New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi delta, the great river reaching its terminus and dissipating into the gulf.
Dissipation is an important idea in this city. It is a city that, one way or the other, has the ability to destroy a person. As well as to revivify. Old and well-worn tales tell that in the early days of the settlement here the high water table meant that interred corpses would from time to time be washed out of their holdings and slither into the streets. Now all tombs are built above ground. The corruption and mortality and absurdity of this city…
I was shocked by the number of tourists soaking up the flavours of the restored French Quarter. I hadn’t seen so many tourists, nor such a tourist industry anywhere else in the USofA. But here they were, seeking their own forms of dissipation. I was left with little choice but to also dissipate into the crowd.
So Phil the tourist, adrift in New Orleans. He walks the French Quarter, up and down. And despite the souvenir shops and tacky, hokey displays of decadence, the beauty of the area is clear to see. The city feels old in a way that no other city in the USofA feels old. Here is an escape from the single, thin layer of history that seems to bother the Americans so much. Here is the natural evolution of architectural style, through the influence of the French and then the Spanish, then America, both confederate and union. Here is escape from the pretense of neo-everything style. New Orleans doesn’t need to pretend to be of another style. It is its own style, mimicked and evoked all over the country and world.
The tourist takes coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, a crumbling old place, the terrace littered with spills of icing sugar from the over-sweet snacks served. Fine old Louis Armstrong covers are bawled and ad libbed to the delighted audience.
He stands on the banks of the muddy Mississippi and shudders at the idea of death by water. The French Quarter is just beyond its banks.
He sits down with a Tarot reader with hopes of another insight into a curious old belief. The first card, the centre card, is the world, and that seems fitting, but after that comes a jumble of cups and pentacles, the tower, the devil, the joker, the sun. The reader is poetic, but has drawn no great conclusion when she talks of journeying and change. Nor when she explains that the cards can be read infinite numbers of ways, that she hates the tower but that it can be associated with new beginnings. The tourist gives up trying to have a real conversation about tarot, forgets completely the configuration of his cards, and walks away with the world at his centre.
He walks from his lodging, a little out of the French Quarter and downtown, past gorgeous homes. Some have arcane symbols sprayed on them, the work of rescue teams. Most are beautiful, with porches supported by elegant pillars, small balconies of intricate wood or metal, and yards full of fountains or statues or flags or cats. There are houses painted in all colours. Fluorescent, eye-hurting yellow. But always the cracks in the paint are fast to emerge, and vines creep up walls and into these cracks. There is decay, even amidst the bright colours, tropical gardens and sunshine.
And eventually he comes to Bourbon St, one of the most infamous streets in the world. Though the original French name has somewhat more grand connotations, the present-day meaning is a perfect fit. Bars sell straight onto the street, and at all hours there are revellers seeking dissipation in the depths of those long plastic cocktail glasses.
Most won’t realise this, but you don’t even need to be drunk to feel the effects of Bourbon St. The street itself is drunk, soaked with thousands of spilled liquors. The crowds wheel and spin and the odd motorcycle plows through. The street itself seems to lilt and lean against the fine old wooden walls around it. From terraces people cheers and gibber. On the streets there are tap dancers and musicians and people falling over and people shouting drink offers. Music blasts from every bar at every hour. It is madness and dissipation. The bars seem to twist and turn forever, humble old fronts concealing vast dungeons full of partygoers. There is garbage everywhere.
And when the tourist is done with these sights, he rents a scooter and buzzes out of the downtown area. Flying along narrow streets and over bridges above treacherous canals. There is another face to New Orleans, and it reveals itself most confrontingly in the old Ninth Ward.
The city is doomed, really. It must have seemed that way from the start, when the strategic importance of having a city at the mouth of the Mississippi was sufficiently worthwhile for its forlorn occupants to weather hurricanes and floods, yellow fever epidemics and the odd half-hearted invasion. It still seems so today, with huge resources being poured into the construction of levees and canals to keep the capricious waters at bay.
The Ninth Ward is or was a working class neighbourhood built behind such a levy, in a plain that sat several feet below sea level. When hurricane Katrina hit it wasn’t the fury of the winds that levelled the entire precinct, but the inexorable, encroaching tide of waters, that spilled their confines and rushed the houses waiting below.
Now the tourist can zip through the abandoned streets, nodding to the few other tourists tiptoeing through the neighbourhood. There isn’t much left here anymore. Many of the destroyed buildings have been bulldozed, so that the few that remains suddenly have entire blocks to themselves. But some houses remain, leaning at sickening angles, or collapsed beneath the weight of their own roof. Others have been swept up and deposited on top of cars or other houses. A couple have been rebuilt, but more remain as the waters left them, their insides dragged out and displayed indecently. A caravan lies twisted and crumpled on its side. Rusted, windowless cars are buried under mounds of debris and wreckage. Stricken boats now sit on the sides of dry and eroded streets, where they were tossed by the receding tide.
The tourist is staying with volunteers, a few of the huge army of outsiders that have descended on the town intent not on dissipation but on reconstruction. Most of those he is staying with are moving on now though. There is a feeling of disappointment in the air. While these people labour and sweat over the forgotten neighbourhoods, the city itself, particularly those in power, are watching the French Quarter and counting the tourist dollars. There are no monuments or memorials or museums to Katrina or her victims in that Quarter.
So it is left to the outsider, but not the tourists, to reconstruct lives, to disentangle the long threads of corruption and bureaucracy that encumber every process. And they must face the people of New Orleans, too, who are consumed by another kind of disconsolation. Living in a doomed city, a city of dissipation, what incentive can there be to rebuild when all eyes are on the French Quarter and when the hurricanes and the waters will inevitably come again?
The tourist zips back down town and returns his bike. He passes some streets of freshly painted and newly rebuilt houses, splendid in blues and reds and greens and purples. They are success stories, surrounded by ghettoes, surrounded by empty, obliterated space.
Back on foot he wanders the picturesque streets, that have apotheosed completely since the hurricane. His camera is always out. The city is doomed to die a hundred ways, its culture is rich with fatalism, in its witchcraft and voodoo and baroque Catholicism and hedonism. But it is fated also to be reborn and to rise again from the mud and rubble, thrusting through the grime and filth and corruption and apathy to become again and again the seductive, exotic queen that it is.
The tourist wishes to come back, to see how this city has changed, how it rises and falls and rises and falls. But he is glad to be away from it now. He has his own fate, the world is at the centre, and he would not dissipate completely, yet.
The story goes that while working for an English newspaper, Bruce Chatwin interviewed the designer Eileen Gray. They discovered a mutual fascination with Patagonia, and the 93 year old Gray told Chatwin to go there for her. Two years later he arrived in South America, quitting his newspaper job with a telegram; “Have gone to Patagonia”.
Chatwin makes no mention of this story in In Patagonia, the book spawned by the trip. Instead he chooses for his mythic start a piece of Brontosaurus skin (which actually came from a Mylodon, some sort of prehistoric giant sloth) in a cabinet in his grandmother’s dining room. The skin was from Patagonia, and among other things he was going to Patagonia to claim his own scrap of Brontosaurus.
These multiple origin myths are pretty characteristic of Chatwin’s storytelling. He doesn’t try to resolve his narrative into a series of certain events; he’s not too concerned with definite facts (which is probably why he has been accused of distorting and fabricating details of the book). Instead he explores possibilities, gathering local myth and opinion and adding his own theories. He traces, for example, the path of Butch Cassidy through Patagonia, visiting the cabin he lived in, talking with people with hazy memories of the outlaw. Eventually the path starts bifurcating; perhaps Cassidy died in Bolivia (the official line), perhaps he survived, perhaps he returned to the US, perhaps the whole fatal shoot-out was fabricated. The possibilities multiply and Chatwin explores them all, leaving them side by side, a whole Patagonian mythology.
There is an immense amount of research and reading behind the novel. Chatwin very rarely speaks of himself (somewhat ironic given the personal mythology he built for himself), but it’s clear that he is a tireless explorer and investigator. Aside from knowing of virtually every book, poem and journal ever to mention Patagonia, he chases down a wealth of extra colour and detail for every one of his stories and characters. Even the most minor figures, mere asides within the stories, are fastidiously researched: “The rest of Harry’s career was predictable. He went to the war, joined a fast set, married three times and ended up in England, the secretary of a golf club”.
Chatwin apparently adored Jorge Luis Borges (more mythology), and although Borges gets no mention in In Patagonia, his influence is thick within Chatwin’s style, particularly within some of the stories. Like Borges, Chatwin explores an idea and then begins to twist it, taking it to extremes, probing the possibilities. Writing of a a secret cabal of male witches in Chile, he finishes with “No one can recall the memory of a time when the Central Committee did not exist. Some have suggested that the Sect was in embryo even before the emergence of Man. It is equally plausible that Man himself became Man through fierce opposition to the Sect. We know for a fact that the Challanco is the Evil Eye. Perhaps the ‘Central Committee’ is a synonym for Beast”. Borges would have been proud of such a paragraph.
In between the witches and the mylodons, Chatwin manages to weave interpretation of Shakespeare (“into the mouth of Caliban, Shakespeare packed all the bitterness of the New World”), a Patagonian genealogy for Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, political intrigue, isolated Welsh communities, plenty of murders, noble savages, an El Dorado myth, Charles Darwin, water tigers, a Patagonian unicorn, Francis Drake and Ferdinand Magellan; the whole Patagonian pantheon.
In another of his books (Utz), Chatwin writes about collecting and obsession. Certainly with In Patagonia he is collecting the stories of Patagonia, going to great lengths to uncover them, studying and pursuing them obsessively. This is not your standard travel writing, Chatwin is telling other stories instead of his own. Perhaps he is stealing them too, or at least re-appropriating them. Still, his fascination with Patagonia makes for brilliant reading. Chatwin lived a vibrant life, full of adventure and controversy, but he knew enough to know that he didn’t have to create his own stories in order to write a great book. There are enough myths and stories preserved like that scrap of brontosaurus, that just need to be unearthed in order to enchant again and again.
Chatwin eventually tracks down his Mylodon cave, finds a site still littered with perfectly preserved evidence of the ancient beast. The cave is, like all of Chatwin’s subjects, and perhaps like all of Patagonia, a strange place where reality and myth overlap. Chatwin pilfers a few impossible Mylodon or Brontosaurus hairs and it is hard to know whether this is myth or history or possibility or fancy, but that is the whole point. Whatever the Mylodon was, it exists today as many possibilities, as a series of forking paths. Wandering these paths doesn’t bring much resolution, but that doesn’t really matter. It is in the possibilities that the fascination lies.
