Landscape with neutrinos

(Spanish version)

Some time ago, being a post-doc in California, I used to take long trips across the USA in my red-arrest-me, not-so­easy-rider Kawasaki Ninja. I went south to Baja and east to the Rockies, north to Washington and all the way up to Montana and then to Utah. I saw a lot of scenery. And I met a lot of people.

One of them was a Navajo indian that I will call Geronimo. He was an old man (probably as old as fifty, a Methuselah for the kid of twenty eight I was then). Geronimo was thin and muscular, dry as the painted desert. He had black, humorous eyes and a degree in Anthropology. During the summer, he earned a living selling pottery and souvenirs.

We sympathized. I spent almost a week in the reservation, hiking during the day and hanging around with him on eve­nings. We shared reservation typical food (pizza), reservation typical drink (Budweiser) and some medicine herbs that I will not describe here. One of those nights, Geronimo showed me a little portrait that he kept in his caravane, not for sell.

It was called, “Landscape with Apaches”. The art was nai­ve. Simple, clear curves and bright colours. A line describing the horizon. A small rock. A small cactus. Nothing else.

Obviously, what gave sense to the picture were the invisi­ble Apaches. One had to imagine them, impossibly crouched behind the ridiculous little stone, marvelously hidden by the meagre bush. The portrait payed homage to what the Apaches once were, and Geronimo still was, in his own way. The silent people, who could all but vanish in the landscape, who could be the landscape.

Today, the memory of Geronimo and those Apaches comes to my mind, fresh as the morning breeze of those remote sum­mer days of 1988. Here is another portrait, very different from the one he showed me, and at the same time, very much the same.

There it is. The photograph shows a building, stocky, me­tallic, vaguely futuristic. It has a bit of a hangar in it, a bit of a factory. It’s a space ship and also a wreck, marooned in the ocean of ice which surrounds it. Looking carefully, it is possi­ble to distinguish a brush of orange light in one of the lower windows, betraying a spark of life inside it.

The ocean that surrounds the building is the Antarctic plain. We are exactly in the Geographic South Pole, the mythic pla­ce discovered by Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott. We are very near the scientific base that carries their names. We are at the very end of the world. Nothing but frozen silence for thousands of miles around us.