The World's Longest Poem, Part 2 -- Atacama Desert
William L. Fox
Photography copyright © Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson and Jacket magazine 2006
Jerry and I fly into Antofagasta at 7:30 a.m. and land on its astonishingly lunar surface. There’s no other airport like it: the blue ocean, the waves on the rocky shore, and then two hundred feet above the breakers the flat gray sands of the Atacama with not so much as a saltbush disturbing its tabular purity. In the background the coastal mountains buck up in a steep 2,000-foot escarpment, just as devoid of life as the flats. This is the driest hot desert in the world, foregoing rain sometimes for centuries.
Jerry negotiates for a red Chevy 4x4 double cab compact pickup with the guy behind the Budget rental counter, and we make it out of town at by half-past noon. We have no idea how long it will take to find the Zurita text--or if it’s possible at all. From looking at Google Earth, we could find tracks that went only partway. And the sands of the Atacama can be unforgivingly soft. As in not giving you up once they have you.
Walking the Poem, photography by Jerry Moore
We intersect the legendary Pan-American Highway at 1 pm, one of the world’s great lines that, when linked up with roads in North America, stretches from southernmost Chile to the top of Alaska. After wandering back and forth on the two-lane highway dominated by long-haul trucks, we turn off on the only decent dirt road heading back west into the mountains. Jerry engages the four-wheel drive.
When we reach the foot of the mountains--the back side of the coastal range--we blunder in a circle, pick up a track, and again follow the logical course over to and down the next valley; then we head up an arroyo and over a small pass to the final valley. There’s the triangular salt pan seen on Google Earth--and the looping berms of the script south and to our left. To the west and over the crest of the coast range, the afternoon fog has come in, the only moisture that touches this land with any regularity.
We park and walk. Jerry heads for high ground to west to see if he can read the poem while I begin to walk the words Ni peña ni miedo-- “neither pain, nor fear.” The desert floor is utterly quiet; there are no contrails, no dust devils, nothing moving at all. The only landscape I can compare it to is the Dry Valleys of the Antarctic, where it has not rained in two million years.
I start at the initial “n” with its long down sweeping frontal stroke, walking gently over the berm and into the text. I had expected a shallow tracing on the desert floor, but the letters are carved one to two feet deep, the berms piled up anywhere from two to four feet high. There’s a little windblown sand on the windward edges, and a bit of cracked mud where there was a shallow puddle of standing water sometime in the last decade. This is a surprisingly robust work and it’s not going to disappear in this hyper-aridity anytime soon, It’s angles and slopes are gentle enough that they work with the environment rather than fighting it. It’s not like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative with its vertical slopes far beyond the angle of repose, hence crumbing relatively quickly under the sparse rains of the Mojave.
As I trace the letters, some taking as long as ten minutes apiece, they rise and fall across this desert page, and I rise and fall with the landscape, walking upslope and down on the alluvial fan. When I cut across to the next word, cutting the grain of land as well as language, I feel as if I’m speed reading. The land turns to prose under my feet.
Next: The New Togographics Redux
Photography copyright © Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson and Jacket magazine 2006
Jerry and I fly into Antofagasta at 7:30 a.m. and land on its astonishingly lunar surface. There’s no other airport like it: the blue ocean, the waves on the rocky shore, and then two hundred feet above the breakers the flat gray sands of the Atacama with not so much as a saltbush disturbing its tabular purity. In the background the coastal mountains buck up in a steep 2,000-foot escarpment, just as devoid of life as the flats. This is the driest hot desert in the world, foregoing rain sometimes for centuries.
Jerry negotiates for a red Chevy 4x4 double cab compact pickup with the guy behind the Budget rental counter, and we make it out of town at by half-past noon. We have no idea how long it will take to find the Zurita text--or if it’s possible at all. From looking at Google Earth, we could find tracks that went only partway. And the sands of the Atacama can be unforgivingly soft. As in not giving you up once they have you.
Walking the Poem, photography by Jerry Moore
We intersect the legendary Pan-American Highway at 1 pm, one of the world’s great lines that, when linked up with roads in North America, stretches from southernmost Chile to the top of Alaska. After wandering back and forth on the two-lane highway dominated by long-haul trucks, we turn off on the only decent dirt road heading back west into the mountains. Jerry engages the four-wheel drive.
When we reach the foot of the mountains--the back side of the coastal range--we blunder in a circle, pick up a track, and again follow the logical course over to and down the next valley; then we head up an arroyo and over a small pass to the final valley. There’s the triangular salt pan seen on Google Earth--and the looping berms of the script south and to our left. To the west and over the crest of the coast range, the afternoon fog has come in, the only moisture that touches this land with any regularity.
We park and walk. Jerry heads for high ground to west to see if he can read the poem while I begin to walk the words Ni peña ni miedo-- “neither pain, nor fear.” The desert floor is utterly quiet; there are no contrails, no dust devils, nothing moving at all. The only landscape I can compare it to is the Dry Valleys of the Antarctic, where it has not rained in two million years.
I start at the initial “n” with its long down sweeping frontal stroke, walking gently over the berm and into the text. I had expected a shallow tracing on the desert floor, but the letters are carved one to two feet deep, the berms piled up anywhere from two to four feet high. There’s a little windblown sand on the windward edges, and a bit of cracked mud where there was a shallow puddle of standing water sometime in the last decade. This is a surprisingly robust work and it’s not going to disappear in this hyper-aridity anytime soon, It’s angles and slopes are gentle enough that they work with the environment rather than fighting it. It’s not like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative with its vertical slopes far beyond the angle of repose, hence crumbing relatively quickly under the sparse rains of the Mojave.
As I trace the letters, some taking as long as ten minutes apiece, they rise and fall across this desert page, and I rise and fall with the landscape, walking upslope and down on the alluvial fan. When I cut across to the next word, cutting the grain of land as well as language, I feel as if I’m speed reading. The land turns to prose under my feet.
Next: The New Togographics Redux
Comment
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Comment by Elena Paroucheva on January 27, 2010 at 10:02am - Great, felicitations!
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