Cycling from the Top of Alaska to the Bottom of Argentina: Shattered Spindle in Chilean Antarctica

I’ve been cycling from Alaska to Argentina [Prudhoe Bay to Ushuaia]. After my third and final Chilean border crossing in Torres del Paine, my bike’s drivetrain had developed a drunk wobble – never a good sign – but outlasted the next 40 miles to Puerto Natales.

When a mechanic there unlocked the cassette, we heard a metallic jangle of splintered pieces hitting the floor. It wasn’t an eje [axle], but his best approximation between languages was “el corazón del hub.” I’d yet to learn the Spanish word for “spindle.”

It didn’t make sense that such a specific interior component could shatter while the rest of its housing remained intact. We dug through a few talleres and tool sheds across town to find Jorge, an ancient but friendly machinist who thought he could fabricate a replica from raw materials. There were several new words to learn here as well. I’d worked with a soldador [welder] back on the Peru Great Divide, but never a herrero [blacksmith]. It took three tries, but Jorge’s replacement fit as hoped the next morning.

Another 150 miles to Punta Arenas, riding through sunsets and sleeping wherever possible. I camped in an abandoned garage one night for shelter from the wind, then used my bike as a stepladder to climb through the rear window of an empty refugio.

A weathered face, a familiar wilderness, pockmarked with fishing huts and scraggy tundra. I’d forgotten all these colors, the same figgy sapphires and sage mosses from my highest mountain passes, like an old shadow that turned left when I went right.

“Of all the things I wondered about on this land, I wondered the hardest about the seduction of certain geographies that feel like home — not by story or blood but merely by their forms and colors. How our perceptions are our only internal map of the world, how there are places that claim you and places that warn you away. How you can fall in love with the light.” – Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise