The winter voyage to Veracruz took almost a month at the worst possible time of year, and when they reached the port, after they made their way between rows of Maximilian’s French soldiers, they were stunned by color and heat and smell; dizzy with rum and thick coffee, the strangeness of citrus and snapper and tamales and avocados. Walton could not adjust to the idea that the air could be wet and hot at the same time, outside of a mine. He drank too much and found the women’s houses near the harbor, while Christopher, during calm evenings in the arched courtyards and gardens near churches, talked to priests and gardeners, and worked on his Spanish. He began to enjoy chilies.
They traveled south to Chagres and walked across the Isthmus. Bugs and greenery fascinated Christopher—he would happily have stayed in Veracruz for the rest of his life, muttering about the female shapes of orchids—and terrified Walton, who preferred his claustrophobic environments rocky and sterile. At the Pacific coast, they continued south to Chile to visit their friend Woolcock at the Cerro Blanco mines, landing at Valparaiso and moving back up the coast before crossing the Atacama. They passed evidence of ruined towns and of the tsunami that had hit far south thirty-three years earlier, after the earthquake Charles Darwin observed on February 20, 1835:
The motion made me almost giddy: it was something like the movement of a vessel in a little cross-ripple, or still more like that felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid.
One wave-drowned village was still marked by the stubble of its cathedral and the shell of a boat deposited far inland, and as they walked through the ruins toward a northbound coach on February 21, 1868, the brothers felt the sharp tremor of a new event. The driver screamed and the horses bolted. The Remfrey brothers waited some hours, in the company of untroubled locals, before a fresh driver came by.
The quake made an impression on Walton: the ruins glowed in the light of a moon he remembered as full, and this was the beginning of his obsession with a seasonal, tidal theory: he believed the moon exerted pressure on the bumpy skin of earth, pulling it like taffy. Christopher suggested coincidence, or God, and Walton called God lily-fucking-livered, and the brothers had an argument so profane and violent that the offended driver ordered them out of the coach, marooning them for a day with a flask of water and some corn flatbread.
After a third coach found them, and they continued across the plain of the Atacama, they observed dried wrapped bodies, exhumed by the wind. Walton had a fever, and he assumed this was a vision (he assumed as well that he had consumption—he’d managed to talk Ellen into a show of affection before he left, arguing that she was leaving soon, anyway, in a more complete sense, and didn’t she owe herself all possible experience?), but the driver said these mummies did exist, and were in fact ancient. Though Christopher was a rational Methodist, he also had a fever, and the barren air beat at his reason. He fell to remembering horrible stories he’d been told in the Redruth workhouse: the bucca trying to mate you or kill you deep in the mine, Blunderbore eating you on the path out, piskies fucking with you everywhere. Christopher did a passable job of delivering these stories in Spanish, and they were once again put aside to await another coach.
Sometimes Dulcy thought of checking the date of that earthquake, the phase of its moon, the notion that Chile had drowned cities or mummies or any of it. But if she looked into it, she might hate Walton more than a quarter of the time, and abandon him, and be left with herself.
Walton and his brother spent the summer—the winter—at Cerro Blanco, helping Woolcock install hoists and man engines, playing cards, two of them whoring. When the Remfreys sailed north again in July, Christopher told Walton he’d decided to join up with a group of Cornish engineers in Mexico, and Walton said good-bye to his brother in Panama City. He boarded a Pacific Mail steamer named the Golden City and arrived in San Francisco on the evening of October 20 with 305 other passengers, 152 sacks of mail, and some 8,000 packets of fabric, food, and hardware.
Walton found a rooming house and headed out for oysters and fried salmon, apples and whiskey and women. He was up at eight the next morning, having coffee and side pork and biscuits with a lucky double-yolked egg while he considered the street scene on Sansome and his plans. Should he make his way to Nevada, where he had a captain’s job with a silver-mining crew, or should he risk a delay for another happy night of love?
Then every pigeon in the city flushed straight up, the air buzzed, and the shaking began. The street split, and the glass window by his table shuddered and dropped, and the frame grocery across the street folded like a piece of stiff fabric. People in the harbor swarmed uphill, screaming; people on the hill ran down. Walton stepped through the now-open window of the restaurant, walked up to the moving crevice in the street, and stared down at breathing rock. Until that moment he’d thought that his hangover had taken hold, or that he suffered from mal d’embarcation instead of mal de mer. He thought at first he would be sick—this all happened in forty-five seconds—but then he felt as wonderful as he had for a few glancing moments the night before, in the grip of a big blond woman. And he could talk about this experience, which he did on a daily basis for the next three and a half years.
In early 1872, Walton left a captain’s job at the Mary Harrison mine in Mariposa County, California, and headed east with a group of friends to Inyo and a new silver claim. Two months later, on the night of March 26, they were well underground, but Walton was off shift, playing poker on a warm spring night, under a waxing moon. Their valley had begun blooming: redbud and poppies, wallflowers and shooting stars; they played on the porch of one of a half-dozen wood and adobe shacks in a wide clearing, surrounded by overhanging cliffs, and Walton was losing, having not yet gotten a feel for the game. He never would get a feel for the game, but on this occasion he was suddenly unable to feel the floor of the porch: he and the other men were spilled onto the dirt in front of it, and they watched as the surrounding frame houses hopped “like frogs ”—though unlike frogs they shattered on landing—and their adobe neighbors crumbled, and boulders sent down from cliffs grumbled by in a sudden game of giant’s marbles. Everything that hadn’t shattered or rolled had moved some dozen feet, including the town’s four trees, and Walton gained a tighter grip on his own version of God.
Years later, in a spa library, Dulcy read John Muir’s account of the same night in the Atlantic :