I’ve been reclined in bus seats for over 1,500 kilometers. The one-lane dirt road seems to go on forever and time seems to be standing still. To my left is the vast Atlantic Ocean. To my right are endless rolling foothills covered with sheep. The old man sitting beside me still can’t grasp the concept of snowboarding and why I do it. He thinks I’m crazy. Maybe I am? The bus roars to a stop at the shoreline of a rocky beach. Icy blue water separates where I stand and where I’m going. I’d given up asking “how much longer and how many hours?” a long time ago. Even longer ago, my flight arrived in Santiago, Chile, from Canada and I’ve been grinding deeper south ever since.
“When does the boat come?” I ask the bus driver. “When it gets here!” he tells me in fast Spanish as he makes a dash from the bus to a small building and out of the howling cold wind. What I thought was a boat is actually a barge that crashes right onto the beach. No dock. Just a huge loading ramp that falls to the shoreline as the boat reverses back into the water. I make my way to the deck. Water is everywhere from the swells that rock the barge and I am soaked. I head below, where a lady behind a counter is selling grizzly old hot-dogs, and I sit on a bench to watch through a porthole window the water rise and the view of the land give way to blue water. I can see why so many boats in the past have sunk in this area. The Strait of Magellan is inhospitable, and shivers runs down my spine as the boat tugs toward the island.
—From The End of the World, Spencer Francey’s account of his latest journey to Tierra Del Fuego