Paradise has many forms

In Puerto Williams you can eat king crab every day. It’s as plentiful as canned tuna elsewhere. Colts roam the streets, along with free-range chickens, free-range cows and children. Strangers greet passers-by and the principle bar is a tilted German armor ship docked out in the harbor. Even in its desolation, it is impossibly romantic.

As we toured town, my host started most sentences “The problem is...”

Other residents, who were quick with an invitation to tea or a fireside chat, concurred. The population was cut off. Transit (via plane and weekly ferry) was irregular, which made tourism almost non-existent. Fishermen had employment only half the year. Islanders were just now acquiring a subsidy to cut heavy transport costs to bring food staples from the mainland.

Don’t even ask about the dismal male-female ratio (unless you like guys).

Inconvenient, insular and isolated, Navarin Island has suffered dearly. But it is one of the few places I know that willingly takes strangers into the fold. For me, that factor alone makes a world worth preserving, encapsulating, like a near-extinct species in a botanical garden. But this is arrogant outsider talk. Island residents are restless.

I bid Navarinos patience. Though it may happen in slow-motion, the world is coming to their island. For example, just this year, Puerto Williams got its first pizzeria. The crust is doughy and the cheese wilts in goopy slices, but it’s wildly popular. And as you’d expect, king crab comes on top.

not Alice's Wonderland, but worthy

Most people know Navarin Island for the four-day Dientes de Navarino hiking cirucit. But as its trail markings beg repair, a new option is gaining favor.

The trail to Lago Windhond is low and long, passing through crimson and ochre peat bogs and gorgeous stands of dwarfed beech (lenga) strung with fallen trunks. It is mostly an obstacle course, which made me happy to be with Brian, a US backcountry ranger guiding a season in Puerto Williams. He kept his eyes peeled for the few trail markings—posts striped with orange paint or small pink ribbons fastened to evergreen branches.

Redheaded woodpeckers flitted about. Underfoot there were purple mushrooms and wild strawberries, tiny and sweet, peeking out from damp sod. We ate them with the dirt still on. The whole interior and southern edge of the island is uninhabited. Canadian beavers are wreaking havoc, but its wild as it ever was. For five hours we walked without seeing a soul, just the muddy tracks of wild dogs.

Last Stop Puerto Williams

The pilot swiveled around to say buckle up. The Twin Otter was traveling to Navarin Island and Puerto Williams, this hemisphere’s southernmost town, pop. 1,200. The scratchy upholstery was mustard yellow and undoubtedly older than me. An antiquated bell trilled from the cockpit.

“Cake’s ready!” announced a female passenger behind me. Good grief. Were we flying a plane or an Easy Bake oven?

The ride was rough, punctuated by loud pings—ice popping from the aircraft (or so the pilot said). Among the passengers, there was a woman cradling an orchid in her lap, and another recovering from a gallbladder operation she had a couple days before. The other gringo on board was a screenwriter from Scranton.

I couldn’t wait to get there. With its serrated peaks (known as Dientes de Navarino) this rugged island is a hiker’s dream: deep forest, craggy peak and peat bog. But if you grew up here (say, on the Chilean Navy post, which accounts for half the population), in a windy town pocked with cow patties, you might just think it dull.

Its history is anything but. Just north of Cape Horn, Navarin Island was named by sailors. It was the territory of Yaghans, seafarers whose women skin dived for mussels in near-freezing water. Their most famous member was Jimmy Button.

In the late 1820’s Jimmy was a teenager, one of four Yaghans who Captain Fitzroy plucked aboard the H.M.S. Beagle to “educate” in England. Upon their arrival, one died from smallpox. Jimmy would later return to Navarin Island with a missionary in tow but their stores were ransacked by other Yaghans and a few years later—to the dismay of Fitzroy—Jimmy had up and gone native with them.

It was the practical thing to do.

These days the full-blood Yaghan population has been whittled to one, one whose existence invites a sad circus of anthropologists and documentarians to this otherwise forgotten fishing port.