If there is any road not traveled, then that is the one I must take.
Edward John Eyre

In Patagonia the wind is a living thing. It blows with relentless force from October to March-in author Bruce Chatwin's words, "stripping men to the raw." The wind shapes everything, including attitude when you've leaned into it all day. A regional obsession, it's the subject of constant conversation. How can you not talk about the wind when it chases you? Bullies you? And causes other paranormal phenomena-parked cars hopping around, birds flying backward, trees growing horizontally, and words spoken but not heard? Cycling? Forget it! This is the roaring forties and furious fifties-latitudinally speaking. Welcome to Patagonia.

 

This is big sky country, South America style. Driving west across the Patagonian steppe, I chase the horizon smack into the Andes Mountains, boasting the highest peaks in the world outside the Himalayas. Along the way I pass several estancias, or sheep ranches, oases of green in the buckskin-colored bush country, overdomed by a faultless blue sky. For a week I have fled the wind by day and gazed at the Southern Cross at night. I am alone, better to commune with the inner self. The solitude is occasionally broken by a lonesome gaucho, sitting saddle and herding sheep, a last vestige of Patagonia past.