The Promise

Armed with extra cash obtained yesterday from a bank machine, I was off these couple of days later toward my destination of the ecological marvel – scarcely two decades old – called the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, or “Ecological Preserve of the Southern Slope.” I caught the local bus #140 downtown and got off at Viamonte – near the offices of Félix Luna’s magazine Todo es historia (Everything Is History) – to drop off a complimentary copy of my bilingual novella, A Bride Called Freedom, which was inspired by Luna’s poem “Dorotea, la cautiva” (Dorotea, the Captive); in exchange, the attending secretary gave me a copy of the magazine’s latest issue, while I also puchased a couple of past issues.

Outside again in the brisk air, I wandered aimlessly for a bit, hesitating over the best route to the Costanera Sur. Finally, irritated and a bit hungry – the cold wind beginning to sap me of energy, accentuating aches and pains –, I stopped in a café called Los Leones (The Lions) and had a hot chocolate, a plate of albóndigas (meatballs), and a flan. Afterwards, the waiter directed me to that old beach resort, the great Río de la Plata that once sustained it having now receded to beyond the ecological preserve that it borders. I was on my way and not long in arriving at one of the old docks, site of the retired Frigate President Sarmiento. The ship was named for Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who aside from being arguably the country’s greatest president, was first and foremost a school teacher, and founder of the nation’s public schools. According to my guidebook of the historical districts, between 1899 and 1934 the President Sarmiento was buque escuela, or “school vessel,” for the Argentine Armada; and until it was retired in 1961, having navigated over a million miles, “it acted as an ambassador of the country in the world's most diverse celebrations.” At present it is a floating museum.

Two views of the retired Frigate President Sarmiento.

It would have seemed disrespectful to Sarmiento himself were I to have passed by without paying a visit, so I climbed aboard and paid my five pesos. My main interest, however, remained the ecological park. After ascending and descending a pair of narrow metal ladders, looking about and snapping a few pictures, I was on my way again. I crossed the Bridge of the Woman, a sleek structure of white steel and wooden planks for a walkway, with a rotatable section to accommodate passing ships which is sustained by six hundred meters of cables. Beyond that, it was not much further to the park's boundary itself, where I found myself strolling along an extensive and wide sidewalk (traversed by joggers and dog-walkers with, on leashes, four or five dogs per person) watching and snapping pictures of the variety of birds, which dotted what the map in the brochure I would pick up on the way out calls Coypu Pond (a coipo or coipu being a regional species of beaver).

Bridge of the Woman, viewed from the ship and from close-up.

Dog-walkers on the edge of the ecological park.

Borderland between city and park.

The reflection of the sun in my viewfinder left me blind, so I shot my pictures rather indiscriminately, unable to distinguish very well what images I was getting. At one point there were a couple of young men scattering bread into the water, and a flurry of what appeared to be black and gray ducks and white seagulls fighting over the food. What struck me most, besides the birds, was the rugged pampean landscape on the other side of the water, the scrubby brush and trees that for all their plainness impressed me just then as incredibly beautiful, some of the swampy bottom growth plainly visible well into the shallow pond where clustered and solitary birds, long-legged or lying low, stood or floated in motionless tranquility. Unfortunately, the water at this borderland was littered with bottles and other garbage, but the horizon did seem to promise a better and more pristine reality.

Winter vegetation across water in park proper.

Across Coypu Pond, signs of nature and industry.

Seagulls and ducks fighting for bread; more birds of Coypu Pond.

Descending a flight of steps from the poplar-lined promenade above, I approached a pond-level area (framed by Romanesque pillars and statuary) which must have been the heart of the old balneario or resort, which from 1918 until the late '50s, according to the guidebook, was visited by multitudes of port-city dwellers who came to bathe (at least in the early years) in “the still-clean waters of the river.” I observed a man in t-shirt and shorts feeding what I took to be a beautiful white swan. I tried to take their picture, but they kept moving. By the time I had repositioned myself and begun to shoot, the swan flew away. The white-haired gentleman, smiling humorously at me, asked if I had gotten the picture. He tried to entice the bird back, then, but it wasn't hungry any longer and wouldn't accommodate me.

The old balneario, viewed from inside the park.

That was okay. I took advantage of the gentleman's advances to inquire a bit about the best way into the park itself, and toward the receded river which I was bound and determined to get a glimpse of. Before I knew it, he was borrowing a pair of sweat pants and a windbreaker from some friends who (soaking up the afternoon sun) were lounging about mostly naked on the concrete. Without any intention on my part I had picked up a free tour guide. We were on our way at a refreshingly brisk pace, and in scarcely a moment were on the other side of the water. For my own part I felt completely re-energized and had no trouble at all keeping pace with him. The soft earthen paths inside the park cushioned my feet and, together with my cane, kept me and my bum hips fairly sailing along, delighted by the chance encounter.

Coypu Pond as seen while crossing into the park.

Tegu Lizard Path in mid-afternoon light.

This, roughly, is how the park (which did not exist thirty years ago) came to exist in the first place, and then to be protected from the undiscriminating encroachments of Progress and Civilization. In the beginning it was a landfill project, designed (I am taking this part from a brochure) as a development project that consisted of “gaining land [from] the river” by means of moving dirt and debris from demolition and highway-building projects to create embankments, inside of which silt from the river was added and water drained. In the end, the project (with its projected construction of buildings and designed parks) was abandoned, though intermittent “land-filling and debris dumping” continued until 1984. “Since then, different plant communities started to develop spontaneously from seeds present in the silt, windborne or dispersed by the animals. By providing refuge and food, plants helped animal populations to settle in.” It became an ecological preserve on 5 June 1986, by decree of the Buenos Aires City Council.

Carlos, my silver-haired and amiable guide, stood there at the juncture of the short access road that we had followed into the park and the Camino de los Lagartos: the Path of Lizards, or Tegu Lizard Path, which ran parallel to Coypu Pond and (on the path's other side) Laguna de los Patos, or Duck Pond. He spoke to me not only of the park itself, the way that its ecosystem arose spontaneously from the accidental convergence of human intention and natural subversion, but of the sort of people who have made it their sanctuary and of the broader history of the nation and its river. As for the people, they were largely a group of regulars like himself, who came there on a daily basis (for hours at a time) to enjoy its peace and tranquility. “Nothing will happen to you here, nothing!” he insisted, lamenting that so many tourists skirt around the edge of the preserve and, for fear of being mugged, shy away from the greater experience of its depths.

A glimpse of Buenos Aires from this accidental nature preserve.

So it is, anyway, that the great city designers' plans were brought to nought in this southern slope. Or rather were they brought – through no design of their own – to something quite different (and surely much better!) than anything they could have anticipated. “Accomplished without the intervention of any human planning,” as the editors of the newspaper the Clarín write in their travel guide, “the ecosystem of the Preserve of the Costanera Sur is the only one in the city's recent history in which nature has developed spontaneously.” It struck me as Carlos and I began walking along the lizards' path (in the summer they practically own it, he says, sunning themselves freely, oblivious to the incursions of these upright mammals) – it still strikes me these three months later as I write these words – that the very existence of a park such as this, especially in contrast to the disaster of the Riachuelo which I had observed a pair of days ago, is a distinct model of ecological hope for our fragile planet. I wonder, sometimes, if it isn't just a matter of our getting out of the way – and staying out of the way long enough for nature to take over – when our mechanistic systems of economics and technology collapse under the weight of so much unsustainability?

Perhaps there is more hope than in our most pessimistic moments we ponder. Yet it all seems so dependent on the collapse of at least the major scaffolding of our species's immense hubris and practically unbounded ambition. Something of this thought has been with me ever since I read, so many years ago now, then-United States Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Al Gore's ecological treatise called Earth in the Balance. I admired the book, and the uncommon political intellect that produced it. But I didn't really think his proposals followed the book's reality to its logical conclusion: that we were going to have to totally re-imagine our civilization if it and the planet both were going to survive in anything resembling the way we knew them.
These were, of course, and largely remain, the idle thoughts of a global spectator, too caught up himself in the hustle and bustle of labor and largely unfulfilled yearning that for the most part remains the human condition. I am sadly aware of how little I have actually done, or have the practical knowledge or energy to do, to put myself and my family (let alone my community, my nation, my world!) on a path remotely approaching sustainability.

Another cityscape.

The editors of the Clarín reveal, in an attractive two-page spread of map, inset photographs, and economically chosen words, something of the biological diversity that inhabits this spontaneously created ecosystem. There are, first of all, the lagunas and bañadas, the ponds and swamps, which are rich in animal and plant life and are in general rather shallow, varying in size according to the season of the year and the state of the rains.

The Spanish words themselves intrigue me. Bañada comes from the verb bañar, to bathe, which I suppose has to do in this context with the marshy land itself which is “bathed” by the water. But laguna, so common in Lucio Mansilla’s 1870 classic Una excursión a los indios ranqueles (without which my own novella could not have been imagined), is of more particular interest. Eva Gillies, in her otherwise masterful translation of it [A Visit to the Ranquel Indians, University of Nebraska Press, 1997] let it beguile her into embracing the false attractions of an apparent cognate, “lagoon,” which in English is really a protected, fresh-water cove off of an inlet of salt-water sea. This had been a matter of some geographical confusion for me when I first read the book in Spanish, wondering how lagoons had found their way so far inland – until I finally discovered that the meaning was really more akin to the Spanish lago, or “lake.” Yet now, looking over the preserve's propagandistic literature with the map's handy translations of place names, it occurs to me that even then I was wrong about that word: a pond is what Mansilla must have meant when he wrote the word laguna; though some of the bodies of water that in my own southern Indiana we call lakes (one “Tipsaw Lake,” for instance) are in fact little more than glorified ponds, so that to some extent I suppose it is a fairly subjective linguistic question as to which word best fits the object.

Then there are the cortaderales, the thickets of sharp-leaved bulrushes that are home to a wealth of rodents, like the famous coypu (which to my eye, though scarcely glimpsed in the narrowly clipped photograph, more resembles a North American prairie dog than a beaver), not to mention snakes, insects, and small birds. There are the plumerillos, or plumeritos, not mentioned in this particular guidebook except in the map: the Camino de los Plumerillos, or Pampa Grass Path. I don't know how precise a translation “pampa grass” can be (if I understand correctly, there are various pampa grasses, just as there are North American varieties of prairie grass), but it seems an apt approximation. My Diccionario del habla de los argentinos (Dictionary of the Speech of the Argentines) defines it as a bush or shrub of the leguminous variety, at its full height standing about two meters, with “big leaves and flowers with long staminal filaments which, according to the species, are red or whitish.” In any case, as the name suggests, they do look rather like plumas, or feathers: plumes – perhaps not unlike the “amber waves of grain” in the song of my own American soil. They will stick out sometimes from the cortaderales themselves, reminding me vaguely of the cattails that I would see growing along the river banks near my paternal grandmother's house out in the backwoods of Perry County (despite the cattails’ very different heads – more solid, dense, dark brown clusters of flowers like a chimney sweep’s bristly instrument).

Gull Pond, another of several lagunas – or lakes, ponds.

Among the trees are ceibas, willows, and river alders or alisos, their seeds brought in on the river or on the wind and forming small thickets, establishing new outposts for a typical flora of the Paraná River basin along which I spent my first journey in Argentina. The picture in the guidebook shows a pretty red flower scattered throughout the leaves of one such tree, but this was not the season to observe them in the wild, nor am I sufficiently versed in such botanical marvels to distinguish between one species and another.

The birds include a certain cardenilla, a small songbird with red beak and crown, white neck, belly, and legs, and a black strip across the eyes (between beak and crown) and across its black feathers and tail. I don't know what to call it in English, but according to another of the brochures I would pick up, it is a close relative of the cardinal, the state bird of Indiana. The colors, according to Clarín's most informative guidebook, “fulfill the function of intimidation, seduction, or camouflage.” Other birds include migratory species and the aquatic variety such as I had already seen dotting Coypu Pond. Among them are herons and coots; there are also, as I previously noted, swans, even a “singular black-necked swan.” If memory serves me well, the one whose picture I tried to take was purest white.

I have scarcely scratched the surface of the preserve's life forms. The brochure of aves describes eighteen species and allows for there having been identified over two hundred species in varying numbers and at different times of the year. Among those cited are seagulls (which I have already noted), hawks, and a local species called maca, recognizable in the summer for a crest of white feathers on its face. Those are just the birds. Another brochure describes ten species of reptiles and amphibians, including the “agressive and poisonous” yarara grande (“If you come across one of them maintain a prudent distance. Don't try to capture it or kill it; it will surely escape upon hearing noises.”), a pond tortoise, a golden lizard, a couple of varieties of frogs, and a cave toad which reproduces after rainy periods in spring and summer and then retreats to “caves” which it digs with its rear legs. Insects include butterflies, flies, mosquitoes, bees and wasps, ants, langostas (“locusts,” entomologically speaking; rather than “lobsters” as more commonly rendered – also correctly – in Spanish textbooks); there are also cockroaches, mantises, black beetles, and more. Two additional brochures describe in comparable detail the plethora of land and riverside vegetation.

Pampa grasses with their feathery plumes.

We turned right off the Path of Lizards onto the Camino del Medio, the Middle Path that bisects the preserve roughly in half and cuts between Gull Pond with its surrounding marsh land and Duck Pond with its own. Further along there were the ample stretches of pastizal or grassland, stretches of cortaderales and plumerillos, beyond them at some distance a stretch of alder forest. In the further distance, at each different angle, the magnificent skyscape of the city itself, at once majestic and fragile from the perspective of a natural world that almost seems to engulf it.

And then, not so far of a walk at all, there was that great river that stretches out before you like a sea, indistinguishable from the mighty Atlantic Ocean that it empties into. What a wonder! I had Carlos snap my picture there, with a shoreside tree (perhaps a ceiba, judging from the sketch in one of the brochures) framing the right side of the scene, behind me the horizonless river, its choppy seas lapping at the rocky shore. I have another picture of Carlos, further right on a grassy spot before the rocks start, sporting black pants and a blue and red windbreaker, arms thrown behind him and squinting into the sun and wind; behind him in the distance, toward the left, is a ship, enroute perhaps to Montevideo far beyond where we can see.

The Río de la Plata; the author posed beside it.

Brett Alan Sanders Biography

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