Cloud

'… our descent into Ushuaia. We expect to land in approximately twenty minutes. Local time on the ground is nine seventeen am.'

My cheek is cold against the window. I peel open my eyes to see the earth reaching, stretching up through cloud. The plane angles and we glide down into white, emerging above the shoulder of a mountain the colour of thunder, an archaic purple as deep as time itself. Lashes of muddy snow paint its ridges grey. The plane angles again, and we drop down the mountain's steep neck, curve around its shoulder. I touch my palm to the window; the glass is fringed with tiny icicles. I trace the purple body spread out before me with my fingertip.

As we descend, more of it comes into focus, blotches of red earth like freckles. Green trees like pores in the mountain's skin. Breathing, in and out, in and out. My breath clouds the window. I wipe away the white with my sleeve to see the earth unfold into blue. The plane's shadow skims across the water.

The wheels touch the runway. Brakes lock. The pressure eases as we come to a slow roll. I yawn and my ears unblock. I love it when that happens: how you don't realise your attention to the outer quality of the world is less until it is again more. Like heartache, the way it rips you open, exposes you, makes you hypersensitive to the cold, to whispers, to light. I sit back. Maggie's face flashes with the same abruptness as my ears popping and I feel my heart mark itself bright violet against my ribs, the beat suddenly more pronounced.

Outside, as the plane comes to a standstill, the landscape beyond the tarmac takes shape. The first thing I notice are the wildflowers, long stems dotted with pastel pinks, vivid reds, chalk oranges. The second is the grass, green tinged yellow, the coarseness of the tufts, the harshness of it all.

We disembark the plane and as I'm walking across the tarmac, a breath of air sweeps across the runway, grabs me. I shiver, the chill cascading down my spine into my legs.

A woman with silver hair and wide cheeks looks at me and says, 'Feel that?'

I nod, breathe out a plume of white heat. I breathe in. The cold bites my lungs with a rawness I've never felt before.

The woman smiles. 'That's Antarctica.'

***

Ushuaia, where I'll spend the next few days, is a cluster of brightly coloured houses punctuated by grey concrete. Wildflowers push through cracked pavements. The streets crumble at the edges. Unpainted concrete walls are stained with watermarks. Paint peels. And yet the town feels neither half finished nor like it is falling apart; there is only the sense that it is weathered.

My calves are burning from the walk up through town, the ascent from my hotel down on the waterfront having been steeper than I imagined. I sit on a concrete staircase to catch my breath. A local woman passes me with a child on her back. I manage a smile, still trying to slow my heavy breathing. The woman has barely broken a sweat.

Then she is gone and I am alone here, perched on a staircase above Ushuaia. Beneath me are cars and trucks caked with mud. There's the squeals of children playing in an alleyway, the crowing of roosters.

Beyond is the Beagle Channel, today like rippled steel. Beyond that is Isla Navarino, mountains capped with snow that glints yellow in the sunlight. And beyond those brilliant peaks, I know, is the Drake Passage, stretching all the way to Antarctica. In three days' time I'll be pushing out of the Beagle Channel into the blue beyond. Once, land fading from sight felt like home coming into focus. Entering the void. The blue monochrome. But now the blue feels overwhelming. Here. There. Everywhere. In me. Filling my lungs until I'm swollen with water. Ripping open. I feel panic surging through me. My bones feel hot. I can't breathe.

But then a gust of wind steals through the city, rising up the stairs. It seizes me. My sweat cools on my skin. I part my lips. The wind tastes of salt. I breathe in the smells of bird feathers and mud and something else I can't place, something old, something utterly unknown to me.

I imagine that this wind first circled in Antarctica, that it was born out of silence. I imagine how it thickened, changed shape, changed direction. I imagine how it licked the sea, clawed at it, dug up waves from the deep. I imagine how it screamed in the night, shaking sailors' knees.

And as it tears through my hair and up behind me, I find a sense of awe blooming inside my body, a deep and unswerving respect for these coarse grasses, that mother with her child, this purple earth, these people, all these wildflowers.

It's a wild wind. Fierce and bitter and alive. Ushuaia endures.

And in that thought, I find solace. For I too, endure.

***

I spend the afternoon in woods that are unlike any I've ever seen. Spread across the forest floor are fallen trees, the debris so thick in parts, you can't see the earth beneath. Bone white branches lie like a skeleton, like whale bones on a beach, time having eaten away all the flesh and muscle. I think of the wild wind I tasted at the edge of the city, and imagine how it must have devastated these woods, how it would have torn and ripped and splintered.

I pause a moment to consider a tree with a trunk thicker than I've ever seen. I tilt my head back to see it stretching up so high it pushes through the forest canopy, flowering into sky. Then I hear bone branches crunching and turn to see a young couple hiking the trail behind me.

'Hola!' the woman says, beaming in the shadow of the giant tree. 'Sorry,' I say, and then attempt my best Spanish, 'yo hablo inglés.'

'Ah.' The young man laughs. 'No problem,' he says, switching easily into English.

The woman nods at the tree behind my shoulder. 'Impressive, isn't it?'

'I can't believe how big it is.'

'Several centuries old, I'd say,' the man speculates.

I look up again, whisper, 'Whoa …'

'Are you in Patagonia by yourself?'

'Yes.'

The woman extends her hand. 'I'm Luciana, and this is Martin.' I shake both of their hands. 'Oli.'

'Do you want to walk with us?' Luciana asks.

'Sure. Where are you going?' Martin shrugs. 'Wherever we want.' Luciana smiles and kisses him on the cheek. 'Perfect.'

As we walk, Luciana takes Martin's hand in hers, their fingers entwined like tree roots fusing together deep beneath the ground. They're younger than me, but their words twist together as if they've been finishing each other's sentences for decades. Their affection is honest, at once wide open and entangled. There's a knowing. The way that they look at each other. The way they share air, share breath. A wide-open sea, vast and undulating. Dive beneath and it is wildly complex. A seabed of barnacles and abalone shells and fish darting in and out of caves of coral. Perhaps that's what love is. Knowing someone's beneath.

Martin asks Luciana something in Spanish.

'Lichen,' she says.

Martin points to a frilled moss sprouting from a tree trunk. 'Lichen,' he says to me. 'It grows where the air is pure.'

I draw air deep into my lungs. Feel frilled green unfold inside me. The air tastes of water-swollen wood and damp earth. Birdsong drifts through the branches.

'Was there a storm?' I ask.

'A storm?' Luciana repeats, puzzled.

'That blew down all these trees,' I explain.

She giggles. Martin shakes his head. 'These trees would have fallen decades ago.'

'The air keeps them,' Luciana says.

'Keeps?' I repeat. 'What do you mean?'

'Patagonia is narrow, we have the sea on both sides; the temperature is almost the same the whole year round.'

'It's like a fridge here,' Martin adds.

'Exactly—it stops the wood from breaking down.'

Luciana crouches, touches a fallen trunk, peels back a fleck of bark to reveal the damp green beneath. 'Most are still alive.'

'How?' I ask.

'The trees are all together—' she pats the earth '—underneath.' Martin elaborates, 'When one tree falls, those around it feed it through their roots.'

And just like that, the earth seems to move, because I imagine the trees, in their embrace, nourishing each other beneath. The deepest love.

Luciana smiles. 'The forest: it's one.'

***

The afternoon before we're due to set sail, Luciana and Martin pick up Joan and me from our hotel in Ushuaia. Joan is a photojournalist from New York who I met at breakfast when she asked me to pass the maple syrup for her mountain of pancakes. She photographed Antarctica ten years ago and is coming back now to document our expedition. She tells me Antarctica will change me. I wonder about that: if a person can be changed by a place; how a person can be changed by a place.

Now, sitting in the back of Luciana and Martin's jeep, turning off the highway onto a dirt road, I wonder what kind of person I am to begin with. What kind of person I am today, yesterday, tomorrow? I feel the weight of me bouncing in my seat. How do you know? How do you know where you end if you don't know where you start? Can you know?

'Wow!' Joan exclaims, angling her camera out the window.

As the jeep rounds a corner, we see the cliff face drop into a valley. 'What's that?' Joan asks, pointing to a strange path winding through the valley. All along its parched edge, bare trunks stick upright like toothpicks. Other trees have fallen, though they're not the same as the trees on the forest floor. These are bleached white, like bone coral; blood sucked dry, littering the banks of a cracked riverbed in the belly of a lush valley.

'Are they old trees too?' I ask.

Martin shakes his head. 'Beavers. They were introduced at the turn of the century and bred for their fur, but when their fur became harsh and scratchy in the new environment, they were set free.'

'The government has been trying to get rid of them for years because they destroy the rivers,' Luciana says, turning down a steep track.

At the bottom, we park on gravel at the edge of a lake. Emerald, smooth and flat like a sheet of glass.

'See over there?' Luciana says, pointing out the window, across the water. 'That's Chile!'

Chile is towering peaks. Purple outlined in striking violet. Wrinkled earth and strange grooves. Eroded troughs, like someone has sunk an elbow into the sides of the mountains.

We get out of the car. Joan snaps a tuft of wildflowers, then points her lens across the lake. She lowers her camera, turns to Luciana and says, 'I've never seen a mountain that shape before.'

'There was a glacier there, once,' Luciana says.

An impression of a body in the before.

'The last of it melted a few years ago,' Martin says.

'We've lost ten in the last thirty years.' Luciana locks the jeep. 'There are only three we can still hike to.'

'And they're all retreating too.'

I look back to Joan. There are tears in her eyes. 'Imagine if these glaciers were paintings in the Louvre,' she says, 'just melting off the walls. People don't realise this is our history too.' The path we walk from the lake to the Beagle Channel cuts through dense forest. As we walk, Luciana tells me about the beech trees in Patagonia, how it's the small ones that lose their foliage, peppering the forest floor with opal -shaped leaves. There is a leaf in every shade of orange. In fact, though the clouds hanging above are thick grey, I've never walked through such vivid colour. Yellow mosses are fringed with purple. There are orchards in green, blue and white. Black roots and red soil. An Impressionist painting.

'This mushroom, at the right time, tastes like a peach,' Luciana says. 'The Yamana call it sweet sweet.'

'Who are the Yamana?' I ask.

'The First Nations Peoples of this area,' she replies. 'The southernmost people in the world,' Martin adds. 'In their tongue, Yamana means human.'

'Theirs is an incredibly succinct language,' explains Martin. 'They have a word meaning cold in your whole body.'

'And another word,' says Luciana, 'to describe a look between two people, where each of them expects the other to start something, but neither does, because they're both waiting on the other to begin first.'

I see Hugo's eyes, dense black. Sinking into me. I know that look. The blue of desire and longing. The blue of unspoken words. I steady myself against a tree. Feeling the wetness in the bark.

'Are you okay?' Martin asks.

I nod. 'Just a little light-headed.'

'We'll be at the beach soon. We can sit there and have something to eat.' Luciana takes my hand. Her skin is cool like water. We begin walking, still holding hands. I close my eyes a moment, letting her guide me, and listen to the colours of the forest, to the yellow of a cabbage daisy squashed beneath a boot, to the mauve creaks of branches overhead.

I open my eyes, and Luciana tells me about winter's bark, how the Yamana chewed it for its vitamins and used the leaves to brew spicy tea. How they peppered sea lion with its seeds.

We emerge onto a beach of smooth stones. Large rocks at the water's edge are encrusted with mussels. We sit among wildflowers and wisps of grass. Martin hands out cheese sandwiches.

Behind us, the earth is uneven mounds beneath grass, like a green sheet laid over sleeping bodies. Martin tells us that if you dug down into the mounds, you'd dig through thousands of years of history. 'Fish bones, mussels, clothing …' he says, explaining how the Yamana would heap their leftovers in piles that then built up over the centuries.

I touch my hand to the earth and imagine the stories buried beneath.

'The Yamana were a water people, weren't they?' Joan says.

'Yes,' says Luciana, 'they hunted on the channel in canoes, lighting fires in the boats to keep warm while they caught sea lions in nets made of kelp.'

'What happened to them?' I say, though, knowing the truth of the dead trees in the valleys, there is a weight deep inside me, a sad knowing before Luciana even answers.

'Some have survived, but many were wiped out by the Europeans,' she says, gazing out across the channel.

I think of Joan's comment about the Louvre. This is our history too. 'I often try to imagine myself here a thousand years ago,' Martin says. I close my eyes, imagining forests of kelp and sea bugs, spiders and crabs.

'It makes me sad,' Luciana says, 'to know how much is missing.'

'Yeah,' I say. 'And scared for the future.'

Martin finishes his sandwich and goes over to a nearby bush, picking off a handful of berries. He passes one to me. 'There is a saying that if you eat one of these berries, you have to come back to the island.'

I take one and pop it in my mouth. It's as sweet as it is sour.

***

At the end of the trail, there is a lonesome post office, with a sign reading the last post office at the end of the world. I buy a postcard and write:

Dear Mac,

You wouldn't believe the colours I've seen.

Tomorrow, Antarctica!

All my love,

Oli