Ruta Cuarenta

In the realm of emptiness, individuality is a debilitating weakness. When faced with the totality of existence in the vast Patagonian steppe, shreds of personal identity, emotions, and ambitions either battle it out with the imposing horizons, or eventually give in; what remains is a humbling sense of the infinity of things, and of the absurdity of our pretentious struggles.

The Patagonian steppe - or the pampa - is an ocean of sand and shrub. Short, thick grasses disperse themselves such that each breathes freely without encroaching on one another's territory. Every so often, the desolation skips a heartbeat and the landscape is interrupted by long, sailing canyons and mesas. Much like long sighs or Pacific waves, beginnings and endings in the steppe do not exist; rather they flow freely from one into the other.

"There is a certain time in the evening," Borges once wrote, "when the pampa is about to say something: it never says it or maybe it says it endlessly and we don't understand, or maybe we do understand, but it is something untranslatable, just like a melody."

Men and women who dare converse this timeless place are also drawn into its confounding puzzles. Whereas in everyday life, things make sense because they are grounded in human terms, the pampa dissolves all sense of self, allowing one to become part of this infinite totality (if he/she hasn't yet gone mad in the process). And after submission to nothing, everything becomes freedom.

The denizens of this wild place know how to harness this freedom. Guanacos roam across the vastness in tight social herds. Much like humans, they laugh with one another, hop, skip, and sing, despite the seemingly measureless pampa. Nandus, an endemic flightless bird and distant relative of the ostrich, gaze out at sunsets and in the right moments, open up their curiosity to bewildered cyclists. Zorros, the elusive andean fox, is also unperturbed by two-wheeled adventurers when returning from its evening hunt. And finally, liberty herself - the Andean condor sweeps across the landscape like a wailing legato.

Thus, in the company of condors, guanacos, sand, and shrub, the only ray of hope connecting me to the human world was the ribbon of road that is known the world over as the Ruta 40 (read: "Ruta Cuarenta"). Its mythology is rooted in the tall tales of gauchos who've labored through the great distances and return to their local drinking holes to cast larger-than-life stories of the Patagonia that is time-less, and in many ways, space-less (although like me, the gauchos surely shed existential tears and hallucinogenic self-doubt and confirmation through the process).

These wilderness-honed gauchos knew one thing for certain: mythology is best experienced in person, not through the cold pages of books nor the virtual cyberlandia of blogs. Much like drinking with Dionysus himself, or sharing glances with Venus, I'd like to think that the Ruta 40 will forever be a myth that many dream of, but few experience.