En Los Esteros; or, An Attempt at Profundity

Well, my trusty readers, whoever you may be, you might be thinking: THAT was a lot of fanfare for a short-lived blogging-venture. But, never fear! My travels have continued, and so will the updates.

My whirlwind week in the marshlands of Ibera has come to an end—and to summarize, this swamp of all swamps impressed me far more than I expected it to. There’s nothing sublime about the landscape of a vast bogland, largely because no feature in particular catches the eye. When you look out across it—whether “it” is swampy lake, lakey swamp, grassy marshes or marshy grass—your first reaction most likely falls more into the “huh…” category than the “omg wowww!!” one. Yet the subtlety of this ecosystem gradually becomes one of its most beautiful features: no one element jumps out at you because so many are mingled together, in just the sort of soupy conflagration that entices myriads of animals to set up shop.

I’ve heard Doug and Kris talk often about biodiversity as the measure by which to judge human impacts on the ecosystem, but the idea often struck me as somehow cutesy, and definitely eccentric. Seeing both the quantity and the quality—unafraid of humans, seemingly content—of the wildlife there helped me appreciate how sadly unique places of such richness of life have become.

I took to running out toward the marshes around dusk, not only because the sunsets proved spectacular day after day, but also because the combination of HOT HOT HOT and a decent amount of work made this the practical time to head off. This turned out to be a lucky situation, because if there are sublime moments in this place, they certainly come with the vivid colors and dramatic lighting of sunset. As one might say, the landscape comes alive during these brief end-of-day moments: various animals, from cute-faced foxes (that’s the scientific name, of course!) to vizcachas (stripy prairie dogs) emerge from their nooks to poke around and socialize. The wizened, half-dead, full-of-other-bits-of-plant-life trees look dramatic, and almost spookily human.

The scale of this place, or how a human feels in it, perplexed me. The vastness of the horizontal, spreading out almost terrifyingly far in all directions, gets checked by the very human size of the vertical. Unlike a barren desert, the grasslands surrounding the marsh tend to have enough trees, and large enough ones, that you can’t necessarily see huge expanses in all directions. But few elements of the place tower above you, in the way that forests do, so there’s little sense of shelter or enclosure. Maybe this strangeness of dimensions compounded the usefulness of the horse: the bit of riding I did gave me a glimpse of the different perspective you get when just a little higher off the ground.

On the most blah day I’ve had so far, I headed out on a run but realized I felt more like sitting down and looking around than hithering and thithering about. So when I saw a little plank set across a pretty dinky intermittent stream, I thought: nap time! Safe on the insect-free plank (even though I have a high bug tolerance, I didn’t find lying down in the marshes all that appealing), I listened to how loud it was around me—not at all the silence of the wilderness, but a bustling and endlessly rich cacophony of animal noises. In my just-about-to-dream state of mind, this reminded me of watching the water of a rapid, which seems to be the same, all in one pattern, until you start paying attention more carefully. Then there’s endless variation and unpredictability, but of a sort that you can’t will yourself to pay attention to.

This whole week, I kept thinking back to A.R. Ammon’s fantastic poem “Corson’s Inlet,” even though the esteros of Ibera have absolutely no sand in sight. I’ll stick a few lines in here, because they reappeared in my head as I moved between the exactingly designed buildings and the more chaotic nature of this place.

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

of sight:

Of course, as I caught myself thinking in (vague and less well-said) echoes of this poem, I started wondering how much this particular articulation of encountering natural beauty was conditioning my response to this place. Not that these loops of influence are necessarily bad—I appreciate having phrases on repeat in my head, as well as random song lyrics. Funny to think about, nonetheless.