The Last Word On Nothing

This post originally appeared May 3, 2018

The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe saw in pelvises and skulls the curves of desert hills. But the Atacama is more naked still than the Southwestern deserts she loved. “When you think of desert, probably you think of Sonora or Chihuahua,” a Chilean biologist recently told me—the vast, brutal deserts of northern Mexico. “They are forests compared to Atacama.”

Pause and listen for a moment: Where does the sound you hear arise? In most places, it comes from life and water. Voices and the growl of cars. The burble of rain and rivers. The rustle of leaves. In the Atacama, what sound there is comes from wind. What life there is goes underground: Spiders lizards birds, finding homes in the cool dark of holes. When Rudulfo Amando Philippi, a German naturalist, made a famous expedition across this desert in the mid-19^th century, he improvised by sheltering in the shadow of his mule.

But at night, the Atacama does have a song, and it comes from the sea to the west, on the other side of the mountains. The first time I heard it, on a two-week expedition, I was up later than my five companions, laying alone on a fin of earth, trying to make sense of the Southern Hemisphere Milky Way. I thought the sound was a fox, because it was series of three weird barks, descending, somewhere on the western horizon. When it came again the next night, a single hoarse call and closer now, it was clearly a bird. One call, then nothing more, as if the world had been silenced by the fog rolling in. But soon, deeper in the desert, the call came each night in stuttering flocks of sound at two or three in the morning.

This essay originally ran November 11, 2015, and is reappearing here as part of Atacama Week.

Rain has been falling on the driest non-polar desert in the world, famous for parts of it not seeing a drop of rain for centuries. The Atacama Desert in South America is caught in the rain shadow of the Andes on one side, and cold dry air washing in from an Antarctica ocean current on the other. This year, el Niño is on. Warmer waters are pushing against the West Coast of South America allowing rain to come to a rainless place. Last March, seven years of rain in a place that averages less than 4 millimeters a year fell overnight.  The result has been an explosion of wildflowers, their seeds waiting in the hard dry soils for this very moment.

In August even more rain fell and a second even wilder bloom followed. A barren country where you can walk for days without seeing an ant, a fly, or a blade of grass erupted in a gloriously obscene display of flora.

I know the place in its other state: death. I went there for the desolation. I was writing about projections billions of years in the future when the sun begins to expand in one of its final acts. Naked under this searing light, oceans would boil away. The surface of the Atacama is all that remained, a barren floor of salt pillars lifeless pans. It was my end of the world.