Road Fever Read Online Free Page B

windshield with the sleeve of my jacket.
    The road was earthen, puddled, and potholed. To the left, mountains rose four thousand feet and more above the Beagle Channel. They were capped with snow, and icy skeins of white ran down the couloirs. There were streams, swollen in the steady rain, that ran alongside the road. Deciduous trees along the creek bottoms were deep into their fall colors of crimson and gold, so that the evergreens among them stood out in bold relief. There was an occasional small lake. The landscape was reminiscent of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State except for the New England intensity of the foliage. In all, this strip of land along the Beagle Channel was a strange mix of those things that are beautiful across the entire northern part of the United States.
    At a place called Rancho Hambre, I turned off Route 3 onto Route J. In Argentina, an
estancia
is what Americans would call a ranch, and a
rancho
is a shack. It seemed appropriate to hit Route Zero at a place called Hungry Shack.
    Along the river bottoms, the grass was golden, but, rising up over a hill, we found ourselves in a strange and spectral forest of leafless trees and hanging moss. Farther on, there were areas of pasture where great flights of geese and ducks were massing for the migration north. Cattle, fat as any in Iowa, grazed among the ducks. Sheep wandered along the road and scattered as the car passed them. They were so robust and heavily wooled that they ran in a comical bow-legged fashion.
    This was all part of Estancia Harberton. Established one hundred years ago, Harberton is the oldest ranch in Tierra del Fuego. We stopped to talk with the manager, Tom Goodall. He was a young-looking fellow with a weather-reddened face and an anomalous gray beard.
    It was like talking to any rancher. Prices were down. Times were tough. Because the ranch was a piece of history, Tom had started tourist trips to the place. Out in the bay, I could see a few small boats and a large flat-bottomed barge. I wanted to ask about the amazing boat that carries ships, but Tom started telling me about the barge. It was handmade. He used it to carry his sheep to pastures on nearby islands owned by the ranch.
    “Don’t you have another boat,” I asked, “one that carries …” And then it occurred to me that the “ships” Veronica mentioned were, in fact, sheep. Sheeps, ships. A boat that carries ships. The barge.
    Tom said the road had been finished to Harberton in 1962. When tensions between Chile and Argentina began rising several years ago, it was thought that a road to the military base farther east and south along the Moat Channel would be of strategic significance. There were three islands just to the south of the base—Picton, Lennox, and Nueva—that were in dispute. Fortunately, a few years ago the pope settled this disagreement between these two largely Catholic countries. The road, Tom said, was no longer a priority. Tensions had eased and work was going slowly. It was about twenty miles to the end of the road.
    I had gotten wet in the cold steady rain and now, approaching the last road sign in the world, the heat from my body had combined with cold, sopping clothes to produce a fog bank that encompassed the entire interior of the car.
    “Uhhh,” the dying beater gasped, flatulently.
    Nineteen miles past Harberton, we passed the military road-crew camp, drove over the last bridge in the world, and pushed on through the ungraded soggy mud. Three miles later, the road ended on a hillock, in a ridge of black mud. We stepped out of the car and sank up to ourcalves in cold mud. Wind-driven rain stung my face. I calculated the road ended at 54 degrees 52 minutes south.
    There was a bulldozer that looked defunct, a small trailer, and a ridge of mud. Nobody was working on such a foul day. Sowerby and I were alone at the end of the road. Directly below the hill, dead ahead, was the sea, roiled and gray. To the right, I could just make out