Robert Silverberg - How They Pass the Time in Pelpel

“You know,” Dan Britton said, pointing to a particularly sinister-looking ash-gray cactus on the nursery bench, “all these plants have stories, and some of them are damned strange stories. I don’t mean botanical stories. I mean that all these peculiar plants that we grow here in California and that we take pretty much for granted had to be discovered by someone in some nasty corner of the world and collected and brought back and propagated and distributed. And in the process of all that, odd things have occasionally happened to the people who went out and found those plants.” He picked up the ash-gray cactus. It was strange even as cacti go, not only because of its deathly color but because of the glossy black spines, heavy and menacing, running in rigidly aligned vertical rows down its sides. “ Copiapoa cinerea ,” said Britton, “from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. This one and most of the others you’ll see are descended from the parent plants that I collected thirty years ago in the Atacama, between Pelpel and Sabroso. I ought to tell you that story some time.”

Britton is a compact, weather-beaten-looking man who for the last dozen years or so has run a little nursery in Santa Barbara. That’s a quiet town, and he leads a quiet life, selling fuchsias and pelargoniums and chrysanthemums to the local gardeners. But his own enthusiasms run to stranger stuff—proteas and tree aloes and cycads and such—and you can find those things on sale there, too. Now and then he sells one, for in Santa Barbara’s gentle climate you can grow almost anything, and a few people thereabouts like to experiment with horticultural strangenesses. Britton never pushes that sort of merchandise, though. He knows that the people who want exotic plants will find them themselves, and the other kind will only mistreat them anyway. He lets the customers do as they please. I don’t think running a nursery really interests him. Being around plants, yes: that’s what he’s done ever since he was a boy. When he was younger, he had a considerable reputation as a field botanist, venturing into remote and unappetizing places, mainly in South America, and coming back with enough unknown cacti and succulents and bromeliads and whatnot to give himself a distinct, if minor, niche in the history of botanical exploration. That’s all behind him now, of course. He seems content to be keeping the locals supplied with the standard pretty merchandise that they like, and goes his own way in most things.

Business was slow that winter day, and he closed the nursery about half past four. I was staying overnight. We drove in silence past Mission Santa Barbara and into the foothills where he has his small house, modest adobe surrounded by awesome specimens of botanical rarities. On the way in I saw in his cactus garden a giant clump of the ash-gray Copiapoa cinerea that somehow I had never noticed before. Britton nodded. “From the Quebrada Pelpel, east of the town. One of my original specimens, in fact. The Greek told me where to look for them.”

“The Greek?”

“It’s a long story,” Britton said.

He opened a bottle of chilled chenin blanc and we settled on his patio to watch twilight descend on Santa Barbara. An odd winter light made the red-tiled rooftops look almost pink, and fog was beginning to encroach on the harbor. But the air was mild, and the garden surrounding us was lush with blooming things, two enormous aloes sending up giant red spikes and a row of nine-foot-high proteas ablaze with implausibly intricate blossoms and a rare Mexican yucca unfolding a torrent of white flowers. We were halfway through the wine before either of us spoke. Then Britton said, “The Atacama Desert—it must be the driest place in the world. Three, four, five years at a time without any rain, and then maybe an inch, and then dry for two or three more years. But yet there are plants there. They live on the winter fog, the camanchaca, and nothing else.” He looked straight at me, and his eyes are intense and piercing, but he seemed to be seeing through me into a sere and horrid realm of dryness almost beyond my comprehension. “This happened in January or February of 1952, when I was collecting along the South American coast for the university, trying to make some sense out of the genus Copiapoa, which as you may know was at that time very poorly understood and in desperate need of revision—”

My headquarters down there was in Pelpel, a parched little fishing village on the coast a couple of hundred kilometers south of Antofagasta. These days, for all I know, it’s a magnificent resort with a high-rise Hilton and a racetrack and six casinos, but I doubt it very much. Back then it was utterly dismal—a thousand people or so living mainly in tin-roofed shacks. Dust blowing everywhere. The water supply was piped in for a few hours every other day. If you went inland a little way, up on the ridges back of town where there’s a little fog condensation, you found some cactus growing, but in the town itself nothing at all could grow. You can’t imagine how dreary and drab it was. The center of social life was a bleak scruffy plaza that was bordered by a squalid old hotel; and across the way from that a beer parlor and pool hall that was run by a Greek named Panagiotis. The Greek’s place had a loudspeaker that blared music into the plaza every evening, and the big event was the grand promenade: single women going around the plaza in one direction, single men in the other, and eventually some couples would form and go off together for the night, and the next night it would all start over.

I was the only guest in the hotel, and from the way people stared at me when I arrived, I suspect that I was the first guest in seven or eight years. The place was clean enough—an old German woman ran it, and she spent hours every day dusting and sweeping—but the beams were dry and shrunken, the plaster was cracking, the roof was a sounding-board that rattled miserably every time the wind blew. My room was upstairs, and I was delighted to find a shower next door—a shower of sorts, anyway, with an overhead bag and a pull-chain. But when I tried to use it, nothing came out but a trickle of sand. Obviously it hadn’t held water in a long time. Pelpel was strictly basin-and-sponge-bath territory.

But I didn’t mind. I was young and not very concerned with comfort, and I was glad enough to have a roof over my head at all. What really mattered to me were the Copiapoas in the hinterlands, not the luxuries available in Pelpel. And I wasn’t in Pelpel long before I found out where the Copiapoas were.

The Greek helped me. He was the only person in town who showed the slightest warmth toward me. The others simply gave me cold blank stares and tight-lipped scowls, behind which lay an apparent instant hostility that I suppose was the natural response of these hardbitten people—forlorn dwellers in a desolate land—to an intruder, and outsider, a fortunate Norteamericano who had come to them out of the cozy world of hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and Technicolor movies. The fact that I spoke only the most basic Spanish at that time, and spoke it with a California/Mexican accent that must have seemed ludicrous, barbarous, and close to unintelligible to these Chileans, did not make it easier for me to win friends in Pelpel.

At least there was Panagiotis. I thought at first that his friendliness was just a professional trait, the standard good-fellowship that any tavern keeper tends to develop, or else that it was only his irrepressible Greek exuberance that led him to greet me with a big toothy smile, whereas I got nothing but sullen frosty scowls from the rest of them. Probably those factors did figure into it to some degree. But also I think he genuinely took a liking to me—that he saw me not as overprivileged and condescending ambassador from a civilization of unimaginable and unattainable marvels, but rather as I really was, a young and rather shy botanist who was voluntarily making a long uncomfortable journey into their disagreeable environment for the sake of bringing back scientific information. I suppose Panagiotis was clever enough to see that what the others must have interpreted as haughtiness and arrogance was actually just the product of my shyness and my difficulties with their language.