Castaways
Juan Fernández“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.”
Arthur Eddington
“Jamon y queso?” Asked the pilot, handing a sandwich back from his cockpit. He had five sandwiches. They were all ham and cheese.
“Gracias.” I said, taking another for Robyn, impressed with the bloodstains of the maraschino cherries embedded in the white bread.
“De dónde vienes?” Asked one of the other three passengers sitting across from us, in the back of the old Cessna. Where are you from.
“Canadá.” I said. “Y Ustedes?” And you.
“Somos Españoles.” Said another. Spaniards.
“Están muy lejos de España y Canadá, muchachos.” The pilot said. And he was right. We were a long way from home.
The morning had started early, on the tarmac of Santiago’s Aeropuerto Los Cerillos. An old Cessna 206 sat under the company’s logo. ‘Cuando pasa el tiempo no hay lugar demasiado.’ When time flies there’s no place too far.
“It might be too far.” Said Robyn. “It’s only got one engine.” When the pilot arrived with the sandwiches, he made a quick circuit around the plane, and motioned for us to find seats.
“Vamos.” He said, taking his own. An erupting cloud of blue smoke from the cowling filed the flight plan. “Tres horas. Seiscientos kilómetros. Tal vez.” Three hours. Six hundred kilometers. Maybe.
The twice-weekly flight sometimes located the island, sometimes didn’t, if the weather even allowed it to get that far. We climbed out across the frigid Humboldt Current, six thousand feet over the jagged spine of the Andes. It occurred to me that we were only the second generation to have seen clouds from above, as well as from below. If the droning engine noise hadn’t made conversation futile, the white faces and knuckles of the Spaniards wouldn’t have produced much anyway.
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