The End of the World as We Know It

In case you were wondering, the spare tire from a Russian made 1987 Niva station wagon doesn’t work on an Argentinean made 1990’s Ford Ranger King cab truck. We learned this the hard way. After exploring the sendero bosque encantada (the enchanted forest), a lovely trail off the top of the pass through a wood, fern and moss grotto of elfish character that ended in an ice choked cirque lake surrounded by glaciers and their cascading waterfalls, we arrived back to our rented truck only to find a nail stuck deep into the flat left rear tire. It was late, we’d already driven 4 hours and had another 4 to go to Coyhaique. Now I’m not a mechanical engineer, but changing a tire on a rutted dirt road in the middle of a Patagonian forest is right up my alley. But this wasn’t to be. The tool that lowered the spare tire from under the truck bed to the ground snapped leaving it impossible lower our spare tire despite many ingenious and thuggish attempts to do so by me and the few passerbys that tried to help.

Skye said, ‘it isn’t an adventure until something goes wrong’ – referencing Yvon Choinard’s timeless quote that I love to repeat myself… usually cozy around a campfire telling stories with a glass wine in hand. Luck would have it, that just in our moment of darkness – almost now literally – Ingrid and Lorena, two women who work with Doug and Kris Tompkins’ Conservacion Land Trust drive up and proceed to help us. This is where the Niva spare tire comes in. We first drive an hour to Puerto Cisnes – a small village built around salmon farming, which is now in dire straits due to the collapse of the salmon farming industry in south Chile. There a friend of their friend Juanito, takes us all over town looking for a five lug spare. There are many dogs in Puerto Cisnes, but not many spare Ford tires. So we settle for the Niva, which the owner insists has been used on a Ford Ranger previously.

At 9:30pm we see the futility of the Niva fix – its far larger than the ford. So we take the still flat tire, throw it in the back and drive here to Coyhaique, arriving at almost 2am. Yesterday I spent the whole day fixing the tire, broken tool and the cemented spare tire lowering device.

In the backdrop to all this adventure, a tragic story of deep suffering continues to unfold north of us. Over two million people are without homes, almost 800 people have died, many more are missing. Every radio and television station is on full time moving cameras and microphones from city to city, village to village in sad story after sad story. Now supply chains are becoming stressed throughout Chile. Stuff isn’t flowing by road or boat like it normally does. Yesterday diesel was unavailable in Coyhaique. Many people are advising us to go to Argentina to get fuel and food. There is a clear feeling of the fragility of the human techno-industrial endeavor and that ultimately earth’s timeless systems dominate. When the ground you stand on isn’t so solid after all, it can almost turn you into a Buddhist.