Johanson starts the book by discussing how NASA uses Chile's Atacama Desert as a testing ground for equipment they send to Mars, as the aridity, soil chemistry and the levels of ultraviolet radiation. But the book isn't really about that.
Johanson does spend a fair amount of time describing what traveling up and down, back and forth, through the Atacama does to him. The way it dries out his lips, the way his skin cracks from the wind and the sun, the way his eyes bulge and sinuses bleed as he travels into the high mountain regions of the desert. But the book isn't about how empty the Atacama is, but how much there is there, and how much a part of Chile's history it is.
In that regard, it was a fascinating read for someone that doesn't know a whole lot about Chile beyond what I picked up in the those books about the (U.S.-orchestrated) fall of the Allende government in the 1970s. Especially in regards to the various Indigenous peoples that lived there long before Europeans ever showed up. The oldest known examples of people mummifying the deceased are from the Chinchorro people in northern Chile, who were doing so at least 7000 years ago. The increased rains brought about by climate change are steadily unearthing new mummies. Some whose faces were preserved as is, others were painted with red clay or blue, while some are adorned with masks showing a variety of expressions.
(Also, the mummification seems to have started during a period when their was high infant mortality because the river they were living near and drinking from was extremely high in arsenic. Now, the people who still live there have an inherited tolerance for arsenic.)
Earlier in the book, and further south, he travels to the eastern border, to a town beneath a mountain called Licancabur, and meets with a married couple who are of the Likan Antai. One of the things they describe is that they have constellations made not just of the stars, but of the darkness between the stars. Like, negative space constellations, each meaning something different, and the intensity of the message depends on how well-defined they are.
There were a lot of passages and experiences he relates like that. Maybe they're old hat to those more versed in the history Latin America, but it was all new to me. And there's also more recent history, like the struggles of the workers of the European-owned mines to unionize in the early 20th Century, or a particular coastal town known for a brutal prison that future dictator Augusto Pinochet commanded earlier in his career, and which he'd later use to disappear dissidents once he rose to power.
Or, on a somewhat lighter note, how the British who came looking to mine nitrate (guano) passed along the concept of elevenses, except Chileans have turned it into a late afternoon meal called "once" (Spanish for thirteen), with regional variations in what sort of foods you have with the tea. The tea may also be spiked with something stronger, as that's apparently what the miners did on the sly back in the day.
The other part of the book, interwoven with Johanson learning about this vast desert in a country he's lived in for 7 years, is him trying to figure out what he's going to do. He settled here with the boyfriend he met in New Zealand, after years of a vagabond, traveling writer lifestyle. But is that what he really wants? Is he doing this desert expedition to better know his partner's home country (and the country Mark is descended from, though he was born in the U.S.), or is it a way to start breaking ties by putting distance between them?
I'm not sure that aspect of the book works as well. Maybe because it's such a personal thing for him, it feels like he struggles to describe what he's figuring out as he goes along. Or maybe it's me, as it doesn't really resonate. I'm a solitary sort, certainly more than Mark, and also not the type to just travel to a country with whatever money I've got and see how long I can stay there. The particular push-and-pull he's feeling doesn't necessarily strike a chord. I can't see how what he's seeing and experiencing in the Atacama is tipping the scales one way or the other for his decision.
Also, because he's trying to set the stage for that theme of the book, it takes a while before he actually gets into the desert. Initially, he's discussing mass protests in the capital where he and Felipe live, started by a student protest over increased metro fares, that help to oust an ineffectual, billionaire friendly president. The hopes of getting a new constitution, one voted on by the actual people of Chile, instead of one created by a handful of economists who thought neoliberalism was the cure-all, are impeded by the strain of enforced isolation and confinement, not to mention the economic pressure, brought on by COVID.
All that's important for establishing Johanson's state of mind. The fear, the stress, the uncertainty about his future, and why he takes the opportunity to flee into what appears from the outside (even within Chile) a forbidding and lifeless desert. A place where you can get out of the house, and not have to worry about social distancing, because there's hardly anyone around. A place well-distant from many of those concerns, because there are more immediate ones. Like if there's going to be water for your well if the aquifers keep getting drained to mine lithium.
But it did leave me wondering, initially, when he was going to start talking about the desert in his book about the desert. FYI, it's 57 pages in, about 20% of the way into the book.
'The horizon broadens as I veer slightly inland near Totoral, offering more sand and less rock, more shrubs and fewer cacti. Where it was once a study in the color brown, now everything is blazingly white. The aridity hits me at full force, and it becomes a stupefying drive. There are no dust balls rolling across the road, as in the American Southwest; rather, it's a raw rugged nothingness with only the sunlight to hold things together.'
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