Ushuaia isn't all that different from the woods surrounding it. It grows organically up from the harbor, along the hillsides in horizontal stretches. The huts and houses in various states of construction or decomposition grow and die in upon themselves. Old ones grow additions or brace against larger neighbors with nothing more than a few wooden stilts. Ways are carved through in the ordered fashion of the grid, and re-worked with improvised pathways and meandering wooden stairways. And new roads and new houses are continually pushing out on the sides.
When the sun rose in the morning, the clouds parted just enough, allowing it to wash over the Beagle Chanel and illuminate the entire hillside with a golden light. The vintage Chevy truck in the driveway glowed a National Geographic red, bright and yellow-toned and cast a long shadow over the patches of growth glistening with frost. Miles out to sea, past the shelter of the surrounding islands, really just sunken mountains part of the same chain that runs up the length of the entire continent, was the tongue of the Antarctic cape licking up towards us and pushing the spit of snow and rain against its continental pallet. It felt as though I were still looking at one of those glossy pages in the comfort of my living room. But something had gone wrong, or wonderfully right, so that in the act of tearing the image out stretched and animated its landscape to create a convincing illusion. Only there was no illusion to speak of, this was the end of the world and I was standing on it.
The first day we arrived we hiked in the woods. Dense and overgrown with moss. We hiked straight up the hillside of an abandoned ski run, the steel pillars of the lift acting as distance markers all the way to the top. Feet slipping in mud, dogs running circles around us, up ahead and back to check if we were still coming.
Dark grays and greens, shades of maroon and lilac. And the air, sodden with moisture, then became littered with thick wet snow. We spilled out onto a glacial field, completely flat and bordered by deep growth of spiky conifers. Shrouded in the clouds, only the uncovered rocky outcroppings of the mountains were visible. These jagged shapes continued on, formed into perfect white peaks completely obscured by the cover, they materialized out of the dense white air as the clouds thinned.
Coming down through the woods, without a path and crashing through the dense and brittle branches. Dead, dying, thriving woods, moss and mushrooms. Everything crumbling, brittle with age. Trunks leaning against one another, overgrown with thin hairy moss the color of sage, a milky green. And the smell coming up from the ground, littered with shriveled black little sponges once the color of kogiel mogiel and riddled with holes like nanoprene swiss cheese, was like lakes, like rivers; like summer in hibernation. Everything glowed in the bare light, colors standing against each other and at once melting together into the dimness.
