Silent wild

Natural History, April, 1998 by Jim Malusa

Chile's Pan de Azucar National Park is the simplest sort of landscape, where every feature has the clean profile of a paper cutout: a heave of black slabs; a hogback ridge; a naked, scrap-heap mountain standing in its own debris. The park lies at the edge of the Atacama Desert on Chile's northern coast, where the Pacific Ocean rolls in long, gray breakers that smack and foam onto the headlands.

If the bald desert isn't enough to repel visitors, the road there should be. It's lousy. Taxi driver Mario Veracas, who's ferrying me from Chanaral, seventeen miles south of the park, hates the corrugated dirt road that makes his little Chevy shudder and the sun visors flop down and his dashboard Bible skid to the floor. When a deep drift of sand appears, he mutters, "This part is bad," then slows down so much that we can't possibly make it through.

Which is why my first close look at the Atacama is from my knees, digging beneath the taxi. I ask Mario if there are any plants nearby that we could tear up and toss beneath the tires for traction. "Only cactus," he says. "It has not rained in two years." I keep digging. At least I'm stuck where I'd long wanted to go. Deserts are my natural habitat, and the Atacama is the driest of them all.

Some plants and animals do survive in Pan de Azucar and in other relatively "fertile" patches of the Atacama's 54,000-square-mile expanse. Elsewhere, the desert stretches out bone-dry and sterile. North America's Death Valley receives less than two inches of rain annually - a sniffle of moisture - but that's one hundred times wetter than some reaches of the Atacama, where rainfall averages only .02 inches a year, as close to rainless as is known on this planet. Most years there is not a drop. From the perspective of a thirsty animal or plant, there is no rain. The perfect desert.

Mario calls it the "tranquil desert," although after he guns his taxi out of the sand, he's too nervous to drive much farther. He stops, eyes my backpack, and says, "Only nine kilometers to the park headquarters." I get out, shoulder the pack, and leave Mario behind. The afternoon sun is low and swollen, and the fluted stems of cactuses catch halos of yellow light in their spines. I have the road to myself for the next two hours, then stop and make camp amid a jumble of dark boulders. On a planet that I usually experience as buzzing and hopping with life, I spend the night feeling very alone.

A few days earlier, riding on a bus north out of Santiago, I opened the windows as we entered the drylands, and I felt my skin tighten. The tall poplars outside the capital gave way to scrubby acacias clipped into umbrella shapes by hard-luck goats. Farther north, the acacias quit the hillsides to inhabit only the folds between, the sandy arroyos holding buried traces of the last rain. It felt as if we were heading south from Los Angeles to Mexico's Baja California. It wasn't just the bus driver's choice of music - the yelping trumpets of Mexican mariachis. Chile's 2,700-mile stretch along the Pacific is dry toward the equator and wet toward the pole, mirroring the run from the Pacific Northwest to Mexico's Baja. The dark forests of southern Chile hold all the gloom and drip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Central Chile shares southern California's easy weather and groves of exotic eucalyptus. In northern Chile, the desert takes hold.

One reason for the aridity is the cordillera of the Andes, Chile's eastern frontier. With peaks nearly 23,000 feet high, the Andes force winds to cool and drop whatever water they carry onto the mountains, depriving Chile of-rain from the Atlantic. The Pacific, too, offers no relief. Fifty miles off Chile's coast, the Pacific is as much as 26,000 feet deep. The Humboldt (Peru) Current sweeping north from the sub-Pacific Antarctic stirs up the black chill of the submarine trenches. Pan de Azucar is as close to the equator as Miami, Florida, yet the water here is so frigid that the park harbors a colony of Humboldt penguins. Cold water next to warm land doesn't make rain; the fog moves onshore and evaporates like the morning dew.

Equally desiccating is a phenomenon that has its origins in the Tropics, where air billowing over the equatorial zones rises, cools, and drops its rain. Devoid of moisture, the air then hustles along at great altitudes for several thousand miles before sinking; the places this air descends on are among the most arid on earth: the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the Skeleton Coast of Africa's Namib Desert, and the Atacama. It's hard to believe that an invisible mass of sinking air can render the Pacific's rainmaking powers impotent, but it does, sitting atop the cold, persistent fog like oil on water. Along the coast of Peru, north of the Atacama, the Humboldt Current is occasionally displaced by warm currents associated with El Nino. The fog breaks, warm marine air spirals up into thunderheads, and storms begin. But without El Nino, survival in the Atacama hinges on how long you can wait.