Heart like a closed fist - Last Hope Sound

Puerto Natales is a foggy, windswept town perched on the furthermost reaches of Chilean Patagonia, teetering on the edge of a solid continent before the broken sprinkling of islands that make up Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire. It’s as far from home as I could conceive of, and so I have come to find myself, one rainy Sunday, wandering the streets. The town is bathed in a strange grey Magellanic light. A ghost town, ruled by stray dogs who loll royally on footpaths, trotting down the streets with some secret purpose, heads held high.

Clinging to Seno Ultima Esperanza (Last Hope Sound), this town is barely more than a ramshackle collection of pastel-painted corrugated iron shacks, paint peeling, blistered by the wind. The mostly single-storied houses sit square on the road, their large front windows permitting residents to peer out into the quiet streets and watch time pass by. Each house has some variation of handmade lace curtains. Fences lean forward, tilted to the street, as though too weary to hold themselves upright, choosing instead to slump.

The city is a salt-encrusted relic of its frontier maritime past, when missionaries and treasure hunters sailed down into the unforgiving landscape of glaciers, jagged mountain peaks and ferocious winds to try their luck at a better life. There are pockets in Patagonia of German, Scottish, and Croatian descendants, those that managed to eke out a living on sheep estancias at the expense of the native populations, who were summarily wiped out by war and disease – an all-too-familiar tableau played out in three acts the world over.

Chilean writer Francisco Coloane described the early settlers as “courageous men whose hearts were no more than another closed fist.” But an echo of poetry must have remained with them, for who else would call this isolated, relentless province Ultima Esperanza? Hope prevailed, as it always does.

It prevails in the black-rimmed eyes and pierced ears of giggling goth schoolgirls, in their Catholic tartan skirts. It’s there, in the shy beret-wearing and moustachioed old men, with their carefully-selected ties and vests. It blinks out owlishly from behind the round-framed glasses of the abuelas, their faces splitting into dazzling smiles when wished good day. In those smiles, hope prevails, clearly, brilliantly. A hint of the fortitude of their forbears.

Fitting, that the mascot of this town is the now-extinct milodon. The giant ground sloth is as slow-moving as the tectonic plates that underpin the glacial change of this sleepy region, steeped in time. A statue stands at a roundabout on the town’s outskirts, patrolled by those ubiquitous stray dogs, looking out to across the splintered islands of the Magellanic Straits to the eternal and unchanging sea.