The old man at the gas station in El Calafate told me the wind would stop sometime after midnight, and that I should drive south then. He didn't say why. He had a habit, I noticed, of giving directions in the form of conditions — if you do this, this other thing will follow — and not in the form of distances. The map he drew for me on the back of a receipt had no numbers on it.
It was the third day of my fourth trip to Patagonia, and I was beginning to understand that the country does not particularly care whether you arrive. There is something specific about the way the southern Andes hold a sky. The light here is not the light of other places. It comes out of the ice and lies down on top of the steppe and the wind rearranges it constantly, pulling pale gold out of nothing in the hour before sunset and then snatching it back. People say Patagonia is empty. It isn't. It is full of weather, which is not the same thing.
I drove south after midnight, as he had said. Route 40 was empty. Once a guanaco crossed the road in the headlights, looking briefly indignant, and once a pickup passed me going the other way at a speed that made the air rock for several seconds afterward. The land was pale silver. I had the windows down because this was Patagonia and one keeps the windows down. The wind, which had been violent all day, had indeed quieted, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the world.
By morning I was at Estancia La Margarita, a sheep ranch turned guesthouse on the edge of the Glaciar Viedma, which is much less famous than its neighbor and therefore much more itself. There is a kind of traveler — I am one of them — who looks for the second-most-famous version of every thing. The unbothered version. The one where the proprietor has not yet learned to perform the proprietor.
You travel for the bread, she said later, or you travel for the photographs. They are not the same person.
María had been awake. I had woken her by parking, but she did not say so. She made me coffee on a stove that took twenty minutes to come up to heat and asked, in passing, whether I had eaten. I had not. She put a plate of bread in front of me with the same gravity that one might put a contract. The bread was warm. Outside, two horses stood very still in the half-light, watching a thing I could not see.
The estancia has been in her family for four generations. It was a working sheep operation until 2003, when a single bad winter killed enough of the flock that the math stopped working. María's father, who had inherited the place from his father, did what people in Patagonia have always done when the math stopped working: he waited. He waited for nine years. In 2012, María came back from her job in Buenos Aires — she had been an accountant, of all things — and proposed turning four of the bedrooms over to travelers. Her father agreed only on the condition that she not put a sign by the road.
There is no sign by the road. To find the place you must know someone who knows someone, or you must have been told, in a gas station in El Calafate, that the wind will stop sometime after midnight and that you should drive south then. María does not advertise. She does not have a website. She has a notebook in which she writes the names of the people who come and the names of the people who told them. The notebook is, by my count, about three quarters full.
I stayed five days. I had meant to stay one. Each evening María went down to the corral with a bucket of corn for the chickens, and each evening I went with her, because there was nothing else I particularly wanted to do. The light at that hour was the kind of light I have spent a great deal of money chasing across other continents, and I never once thought to take a photograph of it. There is a small mercy in finding a place that does not ask you to perform for it. I have been, in the time since, to many other places. None of them have been quite this one.
On the fourth night the wind came back. María said it would. She said it without satisfaction; she was just telling me. We were sitting on the porch with the kind of mate that Argentines drink without explaining, and she pointed across the steppe, where the grass was beginning to lie down in a single direction, and said, "Ahora viene" — here it comes — the way one says it about a guest who has been a long time at the door. By morning the world was being scoured again, and I was in my car, and the light was…
