Letters From the Road – Cabo Polonio
A slice of life on the road in Uruguay from M Shane Aquârt. Shane is an artist, and sometimes writer who is from, and lives in the Caribbean. He and part of his family visited Uruguay in 2023.
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The phrase ‘we’re not in Kansas anymore’ seemed kinda apt …
The Cabo Polonio national park’s ingreso; a low-slung concrete building with lots of windows and a low sloping, moss covered, shingle roof, in a rural setting, down a long straight sometimes dirt road, about two hours east and down from Jose Ignacio – well east and up and down, ‘cause the road goes up and around the Laguna de Rocha before coming back down/up again – ‘cause you’re headed North; to one side the tickets and administration, to the other the shop and café, and the buses to Cabo Polonio.
Later, somewhere near the town of Rocha, driving along between an avenue of trees, the country looked very familiar, and we said so to each other – we’d never been to Uruguay before – “Oh yes, remember, we saw it in that movie, the Uruguayan one, the one with the long-distance horse race.” She was right.
It may be hard to call this an adventure, but I suppose it was, it is … I mean to take an adventure, to have an adventure, I think, means that you have to do something unusual, and there has to be a sense of hardship, and a hint of the unfamiliar. In this case we had little idea what was awaiting us at the end, it was all kind of a sketch, and not the full picture; we knew that it would be remote, we weren’t sure how off the grid it would be – water, light, food, services, groceries even; we were so far out of ‘season’ that who knew what was open in a town of about 70 people - and having just left the literal lap of luxury everything after that was going to have a sense of hardship!
So there at the park, you park (your car), and you take a 4x4 ‘bus’ – a double-decker ex-military heavy duty truck, outfitted with simple Eames style plastic benches, institutional - top, bottom, and in the middle - first along through farmland, on a compacted dirt road between fences, ochre dust raised, then through a manned gate that marked the edge of the park, and into the pine woodlands, the sand road; the loose sand road, the low scrub bush savannah, the sign that said ‘Monte Psamofilo’, and finally the dune meadows, at the edge of the sea, and out onto the Playa del Sur.
A heron flies by.
There’s the carcass of a dead sea lion or seal, am not sure which, both exist here, high up the beach, half buried in sand. Had the sea been so savage as to drown a seal and throw his body to the scavengers at the edge of sea grass meadows.
The sea, the ocean, seemingly unending and blue-grey, easy flowing and ebbing today, a light breeze - there’s nothing for two thousand miles until you hit Tristan de Cunha, which is almost straight out, as the crow flies (if he could) in the middle of the South Atlantic - and the playa wide and tan.
You drive out, and along the hard packed beach, and there, in the distance, as you come out of the dunes the white walls of a scattered ‘hamlet’ on the low rise of the cabo, to your right, the lighthouse behind them at the point, all start to come into view. And beside you as you drive along that ‘wide tan coloured beach’, are a few small shacks, scattered amongst the dunes, and the grasses beside it, almost hidden, hunkered down as if they are bunkers awaiting a war, awaiting a seaborne invasion force.
The idea forms in your mind, from seen photos of Greek villages, white and blue and scattered across sunny sere hillsides, it takes shape in your mind as a certain idyll - and then you are back into the dunes again, no nearer to that hillside than before …
The whole ride is about 20 minutes.
There’s another carcass of a dead sea lion, and one of a penguin.
Cabo Polonio, when you get there, is not the Greek idyll that you imagined on your approach, no man it is not; it is though, instead, a funky-cool, rustic, remote, clean, sometimes ramshackle, sometimes very ramshackle, but real, very real, interesting, true feeling, fishing-village-cum-surfer shack paradise, surrounding a lighthouse, beyond the park, by the sea, at the edge of the cape, and perhaps the edge of the world.
The wifi password for the house is al fin y al cabo – ‘to the end and to the cape’ … and that, my friends, is it.
It is a village of two sides; the South side of the cape, with its small ‘villas’ scattering across the slight, stoney, hillside, like a ‘fancy’ Suburbia – relative to the village – but undelineated, without fences, walls, or gardens, as if the territory were held in common – and the North side of the cape, sloping down to the old fishing village, which is cheek and jowl, with its sand roads and rustic shacks, that curves away, slowly, getting less and less densely ‘housed’, more and more as if deserted, wilder, as it runs up along the beach northwards; all this with the faro, the lighthouse at the apex; the hamlet, the fisherman’s village, spreads out along the shore of the Playa del Norte, and the suburbia, overlooking the Playa del Sur.
The bus stop – el terminal – is two separated rooms surrounded by a raised wooden deck, the whole thing looking like a pair of shipping sea containers, but made of wood, is at the town centre. It had a high front facing wall, and a pergola extending over the deck; the wall looked like it had had a mural, but that was mostly gone, maybe the remains of a large, red apple on the left. The bus-truck made una vuelta and dropped us off. There was no one to take away. It left.
The town centre is geographic, I think, rather than a place ‘where all the action happens.’
The house we were in, El Palacio de la Luna, shares the apex with the lighthouse and we had to walk there; there are a very few vehicles on the Cabo, none of them is a taxi, and if there were, what you really require is probably a donkey cart – later in the stay we took a tour of the lighthouse, climbed to the top and took in the view all around … miles and miles of beautiful emptiness in all directions.
People I have met along the way have always talked very fondly of Uruguay; people would say things like: “If I didn’t live here (where they had come from) I would live in Uruguay”, “2nd best country in the world”, the first being their home; a friend called it ‘that gentle country’ but in Spanish, and maybe it wasn’t always that way in its evolution, maybe it has some skeletons in its closet – I was, by chance only, reading Bartolome Las Casas (‘catalogue of misery and greed’) A short account of the Destruction of the Indies … I won’t catalogue that misery here for you – but it was that way now; rare in Latin-America, same-sex marriages, abortion, and cannabis are all legal, the church although existent seems less oppressive as does the state; people seem kind and caring of each other, humorous, warm … I think, having done so, that to listen to former Uruguayan President José Mujica, in any interview, is to get a sense of the place – the Uruguay we experienced really sounds like he’s speaking ‘it’.
Uruguay has 3.4 million people in 68,000 sq miles, a smidge smaller than Scotland, with the population of Wales … it’s a pretty empty place.
And here there are less than 90 permanent residents, a mixture of young surfers and old salts. It is July, and in the midst of the Southern winter, and, at this time of the year, there are a very, very few tourists, and not everybody else who lives here is home. Three young people with backpacks, and the vibe of the hippie 60’s in their ways, although, given their ages, maybe even the parents hadn’t been born so far back as in the 60’s, one young guy who checked into the hostel de los lobos, two others were met by friends … and us, a modern blended family of four.
A man comes to meet two of the other passengers, he comes with a wheelbarrow for their luggage, their backpacks. They go left, and we, we step off the raised wooden deck and go right.
A man from Chicago, whom I didn’t count because of his transience, also got off on the bus; but he hadn’t come to stay - he had sat behind us. He was fascinated, and in awe on the drive in, it was written all over his face. When we arrived, he went off by himself for a walk around; we saw him again, and again from different angles; from the windows of the house after we checked in, along the beach as we walked back into the hamlet, and as we sat for a drink at the Lobo Hostel.
As the sun began to set, the edge of day, softening light, he walked down the ‘main’ road past where we were sitting. He’d seen the sea lions. He was headed back to the station for the last bus out.
“How’d it go?”
“Oh man, I just came for the afternoon, you know, to check it out, you know.” He touched his peaked cap “The sea lions are amazing, I just saw them, they’re a big colony. I’m definitely coming back tomorrow.”
He never came back. Had he, we would have seen him, the hamlet is that small.
If you wanted to, say, get away from the world, to be in space, and air, and calm, and love, and gentleness, and vibes, Uruguay could be the place for you to go … and if you wanted to get further away and deeper into that vibe, to kind of concentrate the vibe to its essence, you might go to Cabo Polonia in the ‘depths of winter’.
There was definitely some sort of gentle ohm thing going on here, what they call the Buena Onda … the place suited Uruguay, or Uruguay suited the place.
I said, ‘depths of winter’ – but in truth Uruguay has an average temperature of 65 degrees F, ranging normally between 45 and 85 F, and the climate is oceanic, moist, modulated and relatively warm – it is not cold, it is moderate, but for the most part tourists don’t come in the ‘depths of winter’. We were alone there.
From the bus stop we walked for about 10 minutes, first on a raised wooden walkway, the wheels on our bags rattling like an old train, then on to a sand road, the main road running through the centre, Calle Central (it’s hard to drag roller bags on a sand road) and past the Hostel el Lobo, which by the way has patatas bravas to die for, and where we came back to for dinner.
Then a right turn at Joselo’s little restaurant, through what seems like someone’s duck paddock (lotta ducks and not much road) cum chicken run cum dog kennel, littered with white feathers, but which is really a marked road on the map (on a grass track), and then slight left up a hill and with the lighthouse on your right, between pastures of rough grass to the ingreso del faro …
El Palacio sits alone (but not very alone, just with more space , defined space, around it) on a hillock on the edge of the sea, facing east from the kitchen window, across the rocks, out on to the sea, and west from the living room across the village and up the Playa del Norte all the way to the sunset and the wandering dunes.
The house is made of cut stone and concrete. A white roof, white pillars, the French-mustard coloured stone, wide windows, white shutters and a deep red floor, that I think you would call oxblood.
We opened it up. We looked it over. I made coffee. I looked in awe at the view. P unpacked us. I walked around the house out on to the ‘front’ lawn facing the sea, took a photo to capture its soul and make it last longer.
The house was cold because it is concrete and stone, and because it is winter, and because the heating is rudimentary. The house is basic - its amenities are basic; simple, but complete. It is a pretty comfortable basic - but the space that the house occupies is not basic, it is far far far from that; it sits amongst some true beauty – it has two bedrooms and a gas heater. It has cellular wifi, a small gas stove and a moka pot for coffee! It has a living room with a large table, a sofa, chairs, music, a bookcase, an old fireplace that is blocked off, and a large window facing west. It has running water from a tank. It has electricity from solar. It has hot water from solar.
Cabo Polonio is off grid but it is not off world.
At the shop back by the bus stop, I had snapped a photo of the modern Red Bull cooler in the very old-fashioned looking space and sent it to my friend, a Red Bull distributor: “Red Bull,” I said, “even at the end of the road.” He replied “…it could be the beginning of the road and not the end, depends on how you want to look at it …”
The house comes with meals, but we needed wine and water, sin y con gas, and bread and breakfast and chocolate and coffee … and and and … the shop has everything; it takes Visa …
It is as I have said, Cabo Polonio is ‘off the grid’ but it is not off of this world.
El Templao, the grocery shop, is set up like a wooden floored ‘alley’ inside a high roofed shed that is like a barn. The ‘alley’ down the middle is surrounded by display cases, behind which are shelves of goods. It is well stocked. The owner serves you everything from behind the horseshoe of cabinets: aged cheeses, nice selection of wines, fresh breads, hand-made ready to cook pizzas, fresh vegetables, canned food … if you’ve seen a western movie you’ll get the vibe of the shop, you can picture sod-busters coming in for a bag of flour and a hard candy, ranch hands on their day off loitering on the stoop … the only things you help yourself to is the breads and the vegetables, both either side of the door.
There are curios up high, because the shop is also a museo, and some in the cabinets.
I read a quote online from its owner, Francisco Lujambio “This place is doomed to success.” … he means the village, but he is also talking about his shop. It is a great shop.
We had passed a shack on that first trip from the station to the house, eh, just off the side of the sand road through the middle of town, it was down a lane of grass, and it was named ‘el Viejo lobo’, the old sea lion (also wolf, but that’s what they call the sea lions here, notice that a lotta things are named Lobo), with a brightly painted, multi-coloured corrugated zinc roof.
As we passed, I had seen the man, whom I took to be its owner; he looked like a salty old sea dog, skin like leather, burnished – what a great word that is – and with a yellowed-grey beard, his eyes shining out of the dark tan, like jewels on a rich girl’s ear lobe …
You see the fishing boats pulled way up on the beach – on the flat wideness of Playa del Norte, to the edge of the dunes, with logs to hold them straight on their keels, at the end of the day – and then, in the mornings they’re gone out to sea, replaced on the beach by the old 4x4’s that have dragged them to the surf, but it is as if a transmogrification has taken place in the hours of darkness, like the story of Ladyhawke, where neither car nor boat, cursed, can see each other but for a fleeting moment at dawn and dusk as they change being.
Later on, on a walk out, on another day, I snapped a photograph of one; a 1970’s Toyota FJ 40, with a wooden staked pickup bed, because I was pretty sure I would draw it.
The village was settled by fishermen; it is said that the first permanent European settlers came way back in 1735, after the wreck of the ship Polonio, in a storm; some of the survivors taking up their lives there as fishermen, and hence the name – these are the histories you read, but who knows, they can change with the telling of who was here when – but it really came into its true being as a seasonal village for whaling and sea lion exploitation – the loberias zafarales – for blubber and furs/skins; There was even a small oil and canning factory there, and later, the lighthouse… It thrived for a while in the 1800’s.
“How small the Caravels were that crossed the Atlantic and intruded into the even-ness of the history on the other side. How few the men in those small vessels, how limited their means, how barely noticed. But they went back. [And when they did] They changed the world in that part forever.”
V.S.Naipaul
There’s whale bone in the front garden of El Palacio, pockmarked, old, worn, on the seaside, just the house side of the rocks, in the long-ish grass. There is a whale’s bone in the garden, in case you weren’t listening. That must be a sign of an adventure! Something you don’t see every day.
There was a Kakelugn, a ‘Swedish fireplace’, in the house, to which I added wood and lit a fire, and a portable gas heater, and I light that too - but the concrete, and the stone had a chill ingrained into it, that, like a ghost, was hard rid from the house. Back home to rid a house of a duppy, a spirit, you enter through the front and you close the door behind you. You open the back door; then starting back at the front door, you move systematically, pouring white rum into the corners of each room, closing each door as you leave it, or blocking the threshold with rum until you have driven the duppy from the house through the back door.
And then you close the back door.
The house had no back door (or no front door, depending on how you looked at it) and so, unable to drive it out, the cold stayed in the stone.
The hosts had made us food, a large torta and salad, and they bring it, and another cylinder of gas for the heater. We leave the fireplace burning, put the torta in the fridge and we head back to the Lobos Hostel and bar for some wine and beer and the patatas bravas that I mentioned before.
The village, the hamlet, was mostly empty; the people who lived there were mostly home, the shop was open, some of the restaurants, like this one, still cooked your food, even though they were empty of custom, most were closed.
In the Summer 2,500 people a day come on the buses, some to stay, some just tripping through – what a horrid madness that must be.
It is so peaceful now. It is so cool.
I like patatas bravas and these were very good patatas bravas.
The hostel is funky, brightly coloured wood, in a dustied patina kinda way; rustic, ramshackle chic, the bottom end of wine bottles and white cement make up the wall, but it suits the place, eh, nothing wrong here, just a simple place, doing what it says on the box.
Mismatched furniture outside, tables and chairs, some coloured, some not, a firepit, a walk-up window bar; we sat at a wood table, levelled its legs, feet in the sand at the table, some wine, some beer, some water and settled in to wait for some food.
I drink a tall, cold, Norteña in a tall, cold, glass. I am thirsty. They only have red wine and beer. Others have the red wine. I order us a second round of patatas bravas and some bottles of agua mineral.
They, the government-they, pipe electricity all the way to the lighthouse; the lines cross the dune meadows, pass the pine trees, and go on for miles. But, as if the faro were some greedy feudal-alien entity, there is none for the houses, none are provided for from the grid, it is only for the constant needs of the lighthouse, for the ‘nation’, and the ships that pass … but it’s not that, eh, the little hamlet lives on solar, on wind, on propane cylinders, on candle light and kerosene lamps; the odd generator rumbles from time to time, but not constantly, and the peoples seem to like it that way, they want it that way, they don’t want the grid, and the things that might come with that …
The things that come with that.
The quiet encompasses; it envelopes, and then it releases, it draws out, it suspires and then transpires, and when it does it takes your tensions away with it.
The lighthouse was built in 1881. In 1976 it became a national historical monument. The waters and currents around the cape are said to be treacherous, and before the building of the light many ships were wrecked; one myth says that, off the cape, compasses would turn as if possessed and captains would lose their way and flounder in rough seas against the islands and islets and rocks.
The walk ‘home’ is toward the lighthouse – you already know this if you’ve been paying attention at the beginning – and then at its ingreso turn left instead and into El Palacio’s ‘garden’ … you can’t get lost.
That first night at the house, the sky was full of stars close enough to touch; I spotted Scorpio, low in the eastern sky, and said so – no amateur astronomer, but the sky was so ‘open’ and you could see it so sharply that even with a rudimentary knowledge of what a constellation look like you couldn’t help but know the things when you saw them. It had been a long time since I’d seen the sky so open, so unhidden – I grew up, half of my life to date, half in and half out of the ‘bush’; in the bush the sky was always open, the nights very dark. I am a ‘city’ boy now.
I feel like the night belonged to a song like “Season of the Witch”, not for its lyrics, no man, ‘cause aint nobody here to look over your shoulder at. No, but for its ‘thing’ its dum dum dum dum, dum dum dum dum; “when I look out my window”
But before darkness, day ends; day ends, and it ends at first spectacularly in a glow of the orange they must have dreamed of when they named it orange. I chop the wood. I light a fire in the fire pit, which had once been the rim of a heavy truck tyre. I worry about the sparks catching the dry grass on fire – if that happened the whole fishing village would burn. The orange softens to a yellow, which greys slowly, and as it does it lifts a blue into its place, like a curtain drawn from the bottom; the lighthouse pierces the sky – it’s beacon now lit. It isn’t rotating, its glow is soft – the wind has risen, it is chill, but not cold, the blue deepens, darkens
“…where there was the final melting of the transition between two great colours”
Gustav Flaubert
And then, in the full richness of an illuminated ink, only slightly troubled by the soft glow of the lighthouse, Scorpio appears in the full of the sky.
The shower has running water, and it is warm. I’m looking forward to it. It had been a long day.
You stand in the shower stall, and there you stand in a wide, blue, plastic tub, while you bathe, and in doing so you collect your ‘grey water’, to use to flush the toilet. I wash myself and my underwear and socks – there’ll be no other chance for laundry. In the kitchen there is no hot water, so I boiled some on the stove to help wash the dishes. We use water sparingly because it hasn’t rained and so they bring it to us and pump it into the tank. You use bottled water for food and drink.
The window in the kitchen faces east. Below it, in it, against it, is a high-top table. On the table ‘they’ had put out a bottle as a ‘vase’; a Vermut Flores Rosado. A vermouth medium pink colour, redolent of a Chinese spice market with added floral notes; syrup with complex spice and a marvelous play between bitterness and sweet – and, in it, a sprig of a purple leafed plant, that I think is a coleus but don’t really know, is growing away as if the bottle, as a growth medium, were made for it. Someone had found the binoculars and set them out, there are things in the sea to see. There is another small table and four chairs in the room, on it sits a bowl of fresh fruit: oranges, apples, bananas.
In the mornings I stood in that window, in the kitchen, early, facing east, everyone else still abed, wiped the condensation off the window-pane, and watched the dawn happening: dawn, starting with a yellow line at the horizon, as if an architect had placed it there, straight and even; this is the end of what you will see, almost the colour of a parakeet, against the blueprint of the dawning world. Day came slowly. It had a process.
I had a process; I brushed my teeth, I bathed, I dressed, I lit the stove and put the kettle on. I filled the Moka pot with water and coffee, and I put that on. I lit the oven and opened the door, to warm the room. I drank cold water. I waited.
Then, coffee made, I would take that and a piece of chocolate, walk outside to feel the fresh chill air and watch the day resolve itself from the entanglement of night. Surprisingly 45F isn’t as cold as one feels it should be, ‘cause the wind is warm (ish, very ish)).
I would drink in both things.
But that was then and this is now – outside the fire glows and inside the fire glows, and candles flicker. A soft overhead light in the living room. We gather, we talk, we read by soft light, we draw, we think, we love, we dream.
“There is no electricity. Oil lamps, torches, fires and candles are burning everywhere. What their glow picks up out of the darkness is flickering and wobbly … an eye glitters, a hand emerges … nothing connects, nothing arranges itself, can be composed as a whole.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Beds call our names, eh, but we ignore them for a while …
The window in the mornings faces east. Below the window at the bottom of the garden, through the fence – there is no gate – there is a bench at the edge of the pebble beach. When you look back at the house you feel that there must have been a door in the wall before, because the red steps lead up to the wall from the lawn – if there was no door you don’t need the steps. But there is no door.
The surf is boulder strewn and hard rock, this yellow granite, and beyond out in the sea, 30 yards from shore, a low rock islet acts as a reef between the house and the big sea.
I come back to the bench in the mornings, or the red steps, as I had on the first night. I would have a coffee and I sit. I would see the view and hear the sea.
Six months later, down in Devon, I was reading Antoine Saint-Exupery’s descriptions of time in Patagonia (which this is not), with the river Dart as my view, and the idea of it brought me right back there to that bench.
And, when I sat on that bench its peace brought me back to six months before, to sitting on a stone, alone, but for P, far above Pheriche, but below Everest, in a narrow, empty, empty valley, next to a rock-strewn stream, in Nepal; she was collecting pebbles in the blue-blue stream, I was just sitting … being.
And sitting on that rock, brought me back to being on a horse, miles from anyone, at the edge of a jungle, just me, the horse, and two dogs … at a crossroads, both metaphorical and actual.
The quiet encompasses.
And then as the morning lengthens, I light the gas heater and move it around to warm the bedrooms. I take P coffee in bed. I dream of poems by Pablo Neruda.
“Cuerpo de Mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos
te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava
y hacer saltar el hijo del fundo de la tierra. “
Pablo Neruda
In Colonia, five days before, I had sat in the wingback chairs in the little living area of our room, overlooking El Charco and worked. At Sacromonte, in the hills of the cordelera, my ‘desk’ at a table, had looked out from the cabin, the whole front of which was bronze-mirrored glass, over the wooded hillsides, like the Provençal garrigue, and to the vineyard and the hill, and the bosque.
At El Palacio I sat at a large table in the window that faces west. It is I believe meant to be the dining table when the house is full. It has a view of the ramshackle-cute little hamlet, and to the right of it the curve of what seems like a never-ending beach, wide and blonde-tan, and looking colder than it actually is, with the wandering dunes far far down the curve of sand. It’s like the desert has come to the sea, like in Namibia maybe, but it’s not a desert really, it is the edges of a pine forest, it is the seagrass meadows … it had all once been the sea, and who the fuck knows, very soon it may return to be the sea again.
Inspiration flows with the energy filtering through a place like this. You could sit in ‘this’ window and write the world changing novel you always dreamed of.
I was sitting at that desk ‘yesterday’ - everybody else out wandering. I was drawing a commission I needed to work on - when a rufous-collared sparrow came in through the open door to say hello.
There’s this lovely ‘internet’ word; seatherny: the pleasure/serenity one feels from listening to bird song.
I’ll write you a list of some of the birds we have seen, you can consider it part of the story:
- Southern Lapwing – the national bird of Uruguay
- Crested Caracara - they have a pointy piece of feathers at the back of their head, which is kinda like a Uruguayan bird fashion thingy, ‘cause several local birds have it!
- Brown and yellow marsh bird
- Rufous Hornero - cinnamon coloured, with a weird kinda walk and also with the two sticky uppy bits of feather: they build nests out of grass and clay
- Cattle Tyrant - with a big yellllllow chest
- Cocoi Heron - which wins for best name
- Monk parakeets - noisy, same birds I think that nested by Sunset House back home
- Snowy Egret - white
- Rufous-collared sparrows - also with the pointy crest thing
- Kingfisher - I feel it may also have had fluffy hair feathers
- Ducks - M asked if some ducks taste better than others. I didn’t know.
- Tropical Kingbird
- Narrow-billed woodcreeper
- Burrowing owls
- and dead Penguins - never a live one.
Behind me ‘today’, as I was working, I could hear the sea lions calling “pwwwwwaaaaaalla …” Earlier M and E had been standing in the kitchen window coooohing over a sea-lion pup they could see on the rocks. There is a wide hatch above the sofa in the living room, so that you, in the living room are connected to the kitchen, and standing anywhere, in either room, you can see the views both east and west.
There was a large colony of sea lions below the lighthouse that was our next-door neighbor – the lighthouse is run by the Armada Nacional, the navy. It costs 25 pesos to visit and climb the 132 narrow steps to the top.
Although you could glimpse the odd sea lion from the house, we went to see the colony proper … even before you see them, when the wind shifts, you can smell them, and the stagnant pools, and defecation, on their rocks and know that they’re there. It is a beefy smell, same as a cow pen.
The Cape or Cabo is a bolder field tossed on hard granite base, the same yellow as the stone of the house. The light house is above you and below you the sealions.
We climbed the rocks and looked out to the turbulent sea where currents mixed over small, low rock islets.
And then we walked on into Suburbia. Suburbia, and the cape is grassed, not like the sea grass meadows, but grass-grass, and you can tell the grassland has been used for a long time; it has been sculptured by animals. The houses here are scattered in a way that seems haphazard, but which must have some order that I didn’t understand; they are all empty, all closed up. There were signs of life further down the hill toward the South beach. Up here there was a closed school and a theatre … at the point there is a statue of ‘the last Charruà woman’ – in 1831, after a natural decline in the face of European disease and then a campaign of eradication, the Charruà in Uruguay, were extinct – the last four of the tribe shipped off to Europe as a curiosity – any Charruà found in Uruguay today are said to have come from Peru. The Cabo is shaped much like the head of a hammer, the lighthouse at the centre and then a point to the north and a point to the south, and from each the curve of a beach.
The following day M and I walk way up the looooooooooong, long North beach, that I could see from my ‘desk’, to the wandering dunes, way in the distance. We started at the point near the house, walked around the rocks and past La Perla, which was closed – the ‘it’ spot of the summer season – past the carcass of a dead seal.
And in the sea, the sea lions are swimming out and around the point at the same time.
Then, later, far up the beach, there they were there feeding just offshore from where we were stood, popping up in little dives, ‘turtling’ to breathe and look around, sounding and surfacing, and we stayed, breathed, and watched them.
Had they followed us around the point, from El Palacio, and the lighthouse, or had we followed them: who knows which is the true story.
It was here, then, on the way up the beach, near the Casa Beleza, that I had photographed the FJ 40 that I would later draw.
About four miles further up this beach is the Cerro de Buena Vista, the Buena Vista Hill – we don’t go that far, because we didn’t know then that it existed, if we had, we would have – which once served as the boundary between land ‘given’ to Spain and land ‘given’ to the Portuguese, at the treaty of Madrid. It is the highest point on the dunes.
We only walked about half that distance to the beginning of the wandering dunes, the dunes of the Cabo, which come right down to the beach and the edge of the sea. We climbed the dunes and again looked out to sea. We looked inland as well, to the pine trees in the distance, but then back to the sea.
It calls to you, even not as a seafarer, it calls to you like open land to the west. It is how it must have happened, men and women, walked and dragged and carried, and came and stood at the ‘end of the world’ and looked out and felt it call them to go and see what was out there; were there dragons, did it go on forever, did gods or monsters have their homes, were there more men ‘like me’.
They saw the birds go and they longed to follow.
“What is a woman that you forsake her.
And the hearth fire and home-acre,
To go with the old grey widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in –
But one chill bed for all to rest in …”
Rudyard Kipling
The beach as we walked up it was (littered is a big word, maybe) scattered with carcasses of sea lions, seals, and penguins, some recently dead, some long dead. The one by La Perla was just the first. Things die at sea and are washed up, it is natural – in other places they are cleaned away before we see them, but this place is wild – but the quantity of deaths is unusual – 400 plus seals and sea lions in just a few weeks found along the coasts, and all tested positive for bird flu, which would also explain the penguins.
It, the beach, was even more empty that day than previous ones, except for one lone man on a bicycle. But he came later, stopping every little while to cast from his long fishing rod. He caught nothing.
On our way back from our wander, M and I walk through the village; we pass two women squatting along the verge, cutting the grass outside their place, at the side of the road, with a pair of ordinary scissors. They are young, pretty, dark haired, - they say hi, we say howdy … but we all do it in Spanish. They are both happily and completely baked, it was there in their eyes, and so the exercise of cutting the grass, with the ordinary scissors, must have seemed very soothing to them at the time. It seemed a soothing idea to me, I wanted to sit with them and talk and cut, and I wasn’t stoned.
‘We would have to leave soon’. I could have stayed longer and worked in that window, I wanted to stay longer and work in the window …
Fires are burning outside and in, the lighthouse is lit up, the sky is mellowing through its shades of dusk, all very charming.
The quiet encompasses.
Abrazos,
Shane
PS: Sitting in Jamaica, later - it is how we travel home, Montevideo to Panama City, Panama to Montego Bay, Kingston to Grand Cayman - I realise I miss Uruguay: P and I had a chat in MBJ airport, waiting on our bags, and I said,
“I had this thought to myself, after we’d been to Nepal, and again there in Cabo Polonio, early one morning … ‘what’s all this travel for? What’s its purpose?’”
I said to her that I’d written that sentiment, those words, in my journal.
She said, “Maybe we do it to enrich our knowledge, to give us new perspectives on life.”
I didn’t disagree with her, but answered “Yes, but what do we use that new knowledge for, I mean if we keep it to ourselves, if we don’t use it, what’s the purpose in the knowledge?”
But anyhow, that’s all beside the point because I realise, I miss Uruguay …
“People dying for a cause, do they do that anymore, isn’t everybody just narcos … you’ve got to participate in history, got to participate in your time.“
John Lee Anderson
M Shane Aquârt, is a Jamaican born, now Caymanian artist, and sometimes writer. Shane has been influenced by his Caribbean underpinnings, an itinerant life of English boarding school, Canadian high school, US college experiences, and moving between his parents in Belize and Jamaica.