My clothes are not in my house. I wander around these cold-looking, heated rooms in longjohns. I get close to the door and I cannot go any further. Custom Custom Custom. I feel the less and less accepting eyes. A law of proportions - further from my bedroom, weirder looks.
Cannot go to work, cannot change that the water cut out last night. This is not a physical reality, but a social. Think about that for a moment. I have no pants, longjohns and tights are the name of the game but unless Im running or skiing, forget it...
I have to sit here, read about civilizing missionaries and the savages of this land, and watch the tour de france... a mixed sentence... A freedom so limited that it is constricting... but imagine this for a moment that you are trapped, mobility 20 meters in any direction, but there are no physical boundaries, none! The land the mountains the sky the sea are the apparent limits but you try to move and the eyes stop you, like lazer beams. Not even eyes, just thoughts and social constructions...
Maybe what we think is freedom is not at all... Maybe this virtual, socail fence surrounds us to limit our capabilities...Think about that...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Notable changes
I have always felt it curious but not unnatural, that as one´s surroundings and routines begin to stabilize, to become more predictable, one enters into a rhythm that does not allow for a creative process. Routine becomes stronger, harder and less permeable until, while in some other time change was every second, change becomes almost impossible - one becomes rigid.
I hardly want to admit that I am writing in this vein (sp?) that is that given all the changes that have happened in the past week, things that have built up, exploded, fallen and melted away. But it is true.
After more than a month of "pelotudeando" (rough translation: fucking around) with the club Andino, I finally gave a class to a young physed teacher. An hour and a half, it went well. We shook on the agreement. It wasn´t until after though that I realized that I would only give a class if Santi (the full time instructor)was already giving one, or was absent... prognostic...bad... Then I saw the list of classes and saw that the first class was a "test" and I would not be paid for it... so I confronted, very politely and logically Pablo, the guy who hired me. And he sent me a rather vitriolic email telling me he was tired of my complaining and my confrontation and he was getting to know my personality pretty well and he didn´t like it!
Recap: Pablo invited me to be an instructor, told me he would have equipment for me (I had to buy my own), he encouraged me to change my flight etc. and then didn´t want to pay me the class...
Thankfully though, I went up the the club the next day to train and nobody seemed to care - the people I had begun to make friends with were just as nice and jolly - I was told by a friend that Pablo is a bitter, egotistical guy...
So I made my way to the Winter sports centre Las Cotorras, beside the ski centre. When we drive in in the morning, the mountains are painted pink and purple with the sunrise and in the deep valley clouds obscure everything, sitting there under the sky-scraping coloured peaks so that when we emerge from these clouds it is like a dream, a crisp perfect dream that is blurred and almost forgotten in the morning. I have been there this week, with the rain, the rain that washes away and softens the trails. Yesterday could have been a summer day in Ushuaia...17 degrees!!! at least three maybe four days of the past week and a half I have trained in short sleeve shirt and no gloves... turns out that this time I picked the right place because Las Cotorras is the only xcountry trails with snow... all the rest have closed...
And today? more changes! I woke up with a stomach ache called in sick to work and now it is snowing a blizzard!!!
There is a David Bowie song about Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes - And that song is playing in my head. And I´m taking a day off from work and training (im sort of burnt out) and just sitting around watching the tour de france and preparing for the english classes im giving in the hostel...
These are the rapid succession of changes that solicited this blog - a rather boring one at that.
a note for skiers - yesterday the wind was so strong (they closed the downhill centre, must have been gusting close to 100km/h) that I had to offset into the wind on the flat!! and coming back the other way I free-skated, no poles!!
I hardly want to admit that I am writing in this vein (sp?) that is that given all the changes that have happened in the past week, things that have built up, exploded, fallen and melted away. But it is true.
After more than a month of "pelotudeando" (rough translation: fucking around) with the club Andino, I finally gave a class to a young physed teacher. An hour and a half, it went well. We shook on the agreement. It wasn´t until after though that I realized that I would only give a class if Santi (the full time instructor)was already giving one, or was absent... prognostic...bad... Then I saw the list of classes and saw that the first class was a "test" and I would not be paid for it... so I confronted, very politely and logically Pablo, the guy who hired me. And he sent me a rather vitriolic email telling me he was tired of my complaining and my confrontation and he was getting to know my personality pretty well and he didn´t like it!
Recap: Pablo invited me to be an instructor, told me he would have equipment for me (I had to buy my own), he encouraged me to change my flight etc. and then didn´t want to pay me the class...
Thankfully though, I went up the the club the next day to train and nobody seemed to care - the people I had begun to make friends with were just as nice and jolly - I was told by a friend that Pablo is a bitter, egotistical guy...
So I made my way to the Winter sports centre Las Cotorras, beside the ski centre. When we drive in in the morning, the mountains are painted pink and purple with the sunrise and in the deep valley clouds obscure everything, sitting there under the sky-scraping coloured peaks so that when we emerge from these clouds it is like a dream, a crisp perfect dream that is blurred and almost forgotten in the morning. I have been there this week, with the rain, the rain that washes away and softens the trails. Yesterday could have been a summer day in Ushuaia...17 degrees!!! at least three maybe four days of the past week and a half I have trained in short sleeve shirt and no gloves... turns out that this time I picked the right place because Las Cotorras is the only xcountry trails with snow... all the rest have closed...
And today? more changes! I woke up with a stomach ache called in sick to work and now it is snowing a blizzard!!!
There is a David Bowie song about Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes - And that song is playing in my head. And I´m taking a day off from work and training (im sort of burnt out) and just sitting around watching the tour de france and preparing for the english classes im giving in the hostel...
These are the rapid succession of changes that solicited this blog - a rather boring one at that.
a note for skiers - yesterday the wind was so strong (they closed the downhill centre, must have been gusting close to 100km/h) that I had to offset into the wind on the flat!! and coming back the other way I free-skated, no poles!!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Something from the other side of the world
The last few days I have been skiing every day, having interesting rides with interesting people up and down the mountain. A few more highspeed crashes (have to work on my stepturning!)
I have mainly been walking up the mountain though with the pink sunrise, crack of dawn, orange and salmon hues, peach paints the jagged monte Olivia with its blinding white teeth. Sometimes I ski with my head down, puffing away, thinking about technique and strides, weight over the ski, kick, push down and back, hips forward... and then I look up and realize that really none of this matters. Recently I was talking with a good friend of mine and I told him that if I wasn´t amazed with the world at every instant, then I was not paying attention or not fully using my senses... Moments like these...
But I would like to talk a moment about something that is happining in Canada. Again, I am amazed by the world, in this instance it is negative. Toronto. G20 summit. Protests, riots... riot police...news.
What is the news about. The news covers the people dressed in black breaking windows and lighting cars on fire. I have my doubts about these people. I think that they have been placed there by corporate people and governments to distract people from the real issues. (which would not be abnormal, it has been done and proved before).
But really, none of this matter, whether they were placed there by people in whose interest it is to distract people from problems, or whether they are anarchistic (which in itself is impossible given true roots of anarchism) or whether they are simply hooligans is absolutely unimportant.
It is absolutely embarrassing that the powers that be, the media and every person who swallows this ridiculous propaganda is paying so much attention to these few people. In doing so we are complicite, indeed we are guilty of the very crimes that are being committed behind those closed doors, we are taking a side. We are protesting about a small childs screams instead of noticing that it is screaming because it has been left out in the cold and abandoned.
From this moment on I refuse to talk about the few people throwing molotov coctails or breaking windows. Instead I will engage in conversation about massive privatization, corporate socialism (my term to describe the action of governenments using taxpayers money to bail out massive corporations). I will talk about government overspending on security, on paranoia and racial profiling, on restriction of human rights to protect capital. I will talk about corporate negation of human and environmental rights. But please to not ask me to be distracted by videos of petty vandalism when people are dying in the street of hunger.
That is all
(Please excuse this apparently irate diatribe...In reality, I am not fuming, I am simply being firm in what I consider to be a horribly disproportionate evaluation of current events)
I have mainly been walking up the mountain though with the pink sunrise, crack of dawn, orange and salmon hues, peach paints the jagged monte Olivia with its blinding white teeth. Sometimes I ski with my head down, puffing away, thinking about technique and strides, weight over the ski, kick, push down and back, hips forward... and then I look up and realize that really none of this matters. Recently I was talking with a good friend of mine and I told him that if I wasn´t amazed with the world at every instant, then I was not paying attention or not fully using my senses... Moments like these...
But I would like to talk a moment about something that is happining in Canada. Again, I am amazed by the world, in this instance it is negative. Toronto. G20 summit. Protests, riots... riot police...news.
What is the news about. The news covers the people dressed in black breaking windows and lighting cars on fire. I have my doubts about these people. I think that they have been placed there by corporate people and governments to distract people from the real issues. (which would not be abnormal, it has been done and proved before).
But really, none of this matter, whether they were placed there by people in whose interest it is to distract people from problems, or whether they are anarchistic (which in itself is impossible given true roots of anarchism) or whether they are simply hooligans is absolutely unimportant.
It is absolutely embarrassing that the powers that be, the media and every person who swallows this ridiculous propaganda is paying so much attention to these few people. In doing so we are complicite, indeed we are guilty of the very crimes that are being committed behind those closed doors, we are taking a side. We are protesting about a small childs screams instead of noticing that it is screaming because it has been left out in the cold and abandoned.
From this moment on I refuse to talk about the few people throwing molotov coctails or breaking windows. Instead I will engage in conversation about massive privatization, corporate socialism (my term to describe the action of governenments using taxpayers money to bail out massive corporations). I will talk about government overspending on security, on paranoia and racial profiling, on restriction of human rights to protect capital. I will talk about corporate negation of human and environmental rights. But please to not ask me to be distracted by videos of petty vandalism when people are dying in the street of hunger.
That is all
(Please excuse this apparently irate diatribe...In reality, I am not fuming, I am simply being firm in what I consider to be a horribly disproportionate evaluation of current events)
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
there she goes...
Yesterday I got a lift up to the refuge with a snowboarder, about my age. He is the son of Chileans and, like all Argentinians and Chileans, he was keen to point out the differences between the two - in this case he favoured chile... its curious, there seems to be an national inferiority complex for both countries, but it becomes complicated down in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia because of the mixing of the two sides and the fact that nothing belonged to nobody, even 50 years ago... it was just Patagonia.
Santi, the full time instructor was up there and after i did some work on technique and a few sprints we went for a ski together... he skating slowly, and i huffing it on my classic skis with no track... Like the two other days that I had been up, the snow sparkled heavily on the trees and the mountain faces and the first climb out of the refuge gave a magnificent view of the celestially white teeth of Monte Olivia and the harbour with the container ships, and there across the Beagle Channel, on Isla Navarino (Chile) against an increasingly pink sky the jagged peaks of Dientes de Navarino.
Yellow light: here,in winter the sun comes up at 10am and goes down at 5pm and never goes much more that a few fingers above the peaks - it sheds a beautiful yellow ray on everything - like sunrise or sunset...but all day.
Santi and I came bombing down a big descent and as we came back into the "stadium" (I´ll call it that, its just a big field with a tracked loop and the refuge) he pointed out the place where the snowboarders and skiers from the ski centre just above, come down in the evening - gliding right into the city. So after our ski, we went back up, this time through the deep powder and the trees, to the track that they take - BACKCOUNTRY on CROSS COUNTRY SKIS! It wasn´t as hard core as it sounds, but it was good fun.
Rain, the slap of tires on wet pavement and a gentle drizzle. Grey. Is this it? I wake up thinking that it simply must be snowing on the trails almost half a kilometer above. I watch the england-slovenia game (although Slovenia is my mother land, I cannot negate that England plays a good and exciting game wins deservedly and keeps me pinned to the television and not thinking about the rain outside!) After the game, i grab my ski stuff, a yoghurt and an apple, throw everything in my bag and start the walk that so far I have done with a sort of ancy sensation that I´d rather just be skiing. At the base of the mountain where the switchback road starts, it is still raining, more like drizzle, not even, a cloud, we are in a cloud. Fewer people are going up the mountain i suppose because of the weather but after a few minutes a car driven by two guys my age (I found out later) picks me up. The car, which I assume belongs to one of the parents, is freshly smelling of weed! These guys are really good guys. They ask me what im doing, they seem grateful and surprised that I speak spanish. One of them used to xcountry ski and asks me if I will compete in the Marchablanca - yes.
So in Canada were you there for the olympics? did you compete there? - A laugh... no, Im not anywhere near that level - And how old are you - 22 turning 23 - and you are just travelling the world, instructing - not really, just travelling, this is a way to be able to ski - Amazing what you are doing! Amazing! when dyou turn 23 - July 4th - Awesome, man, you won´t be working the next day, we will pick you up at your hostel for a party!!
I am not sure if they will... and im not sure that I want them to, but great guys! The sort of people that might be looked at with scorn, snowboarders, potsmokers, perhaps unemployed living with their folks... i don´t know... but I´m not stupid a can tell a good human being when I feel one...
While changing and getting my skis ready (I refused to put klister on and opted instead to do doublepoling and other poling exercises and intervals) in the refuge I drank a few mates with Aimé the refugiera. As I finished my intervals Santi, el Mudo and a guy from the local team came...
I then did some hill work, that is down hill - took a massive highspeed crash (seems I´ve forgotten how to step turn at highspeed) All this in a tshirt and tights and rain. About a hundred metres above you could see that the trees were blanketed in snow...almost almost almost!
Yesterday Aimé, Lucas (her partner) and Santi and I talked about the club, their low prices, the low interest in crosscountry skiing and the sparse resources... this is not the gatineau park...lots of problems!!! I would like to stay out of the politics of this place... because there appears to be a lot of politics (some people thinking others are snobby...etc.) but it would be great to help raise interest -
Interesting how people (the rather repulsive middle class) don´t mind paying almost 2000 pesos (around $500) for a season pass at Cerro Castor (the downhill ski centre) yet the very members of the xcountry ski club balk at the suggestion of raising the season pass price from 80pesos to 160pesos because they say people will stop coming... it appears the base is not good...
and so on...
It feels amazing to ski every day!
Santi, the full time instructor was up there and after i did some work on technique and a few sprints we went for a ski together... he skating slowly, and i huffing it on my classic skis with no track... Like the two other days that I had been up, the snow sparkled heavily on the trees and the mountain faces and the first climb out of the refuge gave a magnificent view of the celestially white teeth of Monte Olivia and the harbour with the container ships, and there across the Beagle Channel, on Isla Navarino (Chile) against an increasingly pink sky the jagged peaks of Dientes de Navarino.
Yellow light: here,in winter the sun comes up at 10am and goes down at 5pm and never goes much more that a few fingers above the peaks - it sheds a beautiful yellow ray on everything - like sunrise or sunset...but all day.
Santi and I came bombing down a big descent and as we came back into the "stadium" (I´ll call it that, its just a big field with a tracked loop and the refuge) he pointed out the place where the snowboarders and skiers from the ski centre just above, come down in the evening - gliding right into the city. So after our ski, we went back up, this time through the deep powder and the trees, to the track that they take - BACKCOUNTRY on CROSS COUNTRY SKIS! It wasn´t as hard core as it sounds, but it was good fun.
Rain, the slap of tires on wet pavement and a gentle drizzle. Grey. Is this it? I wake up thinking that it simply must be snowing on the trails almost half a kilometer above. I watch the england-slovenia game (although Slovenia is my mother land, I cannot negate that England plays a good and exciting game wins deservedly and keeps me pinned to the television and not thinking about the rain outside!) After the game, i grab my ski stuff, a yoghurt and an apple, throw everything in my bag and start the walk that so far I have done with a sort of ancy sensation that I´d rather just be skiing. At the base of the mountain where the switchback road starts, it is still raining, more like drizzle, not even, a cloud, we are in a cloud. Fewer people are going up the mountain i suppose because of the weather but after a few minutes a car driven by two guys my age (I found out later) picks me up. The car, which I assume belongs to one of the parents, is freshly smelling of weed! These guys are really good guys. They ask me what im doing, they seem grateful and surprised that I speak spanish. One of them used to xcountry ski and asks me if I will compete in the Marchablanca - yes.
So in Canada were you there for the olympics? did you compete there? - A laugh... no, Im not anywhere near that level - And how old are you - 22 turning 23 - and you are just travelling the world, instructing - not really, just travelling, this is a way to be able to ski - Amazing what you are doing! Amazing! when dyou turn 23 - July 4th - Awesome, man, you won´t be working the next day, we will pick you up at your hostel for a party!!
I am not sure if they will... and im not sure that I want them to, but great guys! The sort of people that might be looked at with scorn, snowboarders, potsmokers, perhaps unemployed living with their folks... i don´t know... but I´m not stupid a can tell a good human being when I feel one...
While changing and getting my skis ready (I refused to put klister on and opted instead to do doublepoling and other poling exercises and intervals) in the refuge I drank a few mates with Aimé the refugiera. As I finished my intervals Santi, el Mudo and a guy from the local team came...
I then did some hill work, that is down hill - took a massive highspeed crash (seems I´ve forgotten how to step turn at highspeed) All this in a tshirt and tights and rain. About a hundred metres above you could see that the trees were blanketed in snow...almost almost almost!
Yesterday Aimé, Lucas (her partner) and Santi and I talked about the club, their low prices, the low interest in crosscountry skiing and the sparse resources... this is not the gatineau park...lots of problems!!! I would like to stay out of the politics of this place... because there appears to be a lot of politics (some people thinking others are snobby...etc.) but it would be great to help raise interest -
Interesting how people (the rather repulsive middle class) don´t mind paying almost 2000 pesos (around $500) for a season pass at Cerro Castor (the downhill ski centre) yet the very members of the xcountry ski club balk at the suggestion of raising the season pass price from 80pesos to 160pesos because they say people will stop coming... it appears the base is not good...
and so on...
It feels amazing to ski every day!
Monday, June 21, 2010
Long time no post...
It is really about time that I wrote something. So here goes:
When I arrived in Ushuaia it was warm, 10 degrees maybe. But in the past few days it has been snowing loads and I bought some 1980s or 90s classic skis/boots/bindings/poles... the poles are too heavy but everything else is actually quite nice quality.
I have spent my days, these past few weeks wandering around this town, at times throwing myself at the enthusiasm of World Cup season in Argentina and at other times running into the mountains to escape this ravenous, unthinking fervour for national sport, that, like someone once said, is so similar to blind support of national militaries... it really defies logic.
I have made some good friends here, we just sit around drinking mate and talking about everything (the cold, world cup, historical blindness of Argentinians with regards to the Falkland islands - a very touchy topic, cultural norms...)and me just waiting, and waiting for the snow to come. Before it came, I would run up to the bottom of the ski centre, the bottom of the chairlift, hoping that at this altitude there would be snow - no.
Finally the other day after 24 hours of snow, my friend Steve and a Falklands Islands charter yacht skipper Chris, and I went up to the ski centre - me with my boots, Steve with his split board and Chris with his backcountry skis. We all trudged up the run, full of feet of powder, and they drank mate with the refuge man at the bottom of the glacier while I trudged down again. For me this was a way to calm my nerves, as I had been getting ancy because as great as running and aimlessly sitting around infront of the worldcup games drinking strong espressos or round after round of mates is, i wanted to ski!
The cross country ski trails are about a 35-40minute run from my hostel (where I am paying 300 dollars to stay for the month, breakfast included). So when I started to walk up with my skis the other day I was happy when a father and his two daughters stopped at the base of the hill and offered me a lift up the 5km of switchback. Now that I left my skis in the cabin though, its not so obvious so today I stuck my thumb out - equally as easy.
I am recovering slowly from an injury I sustained while playing football (soccer) with a friend of a friend. football is life here, it is part of the culture. All the guys who played, it was like a game of pickup hockey in Canada - that is, lots of slightly overweight middleaged men who actually play quite well - and after? we all went upstairs, many smoked and almost all drank... ring any bells!!!??
On my way down from the ski centre that first day of snow, I stopped in at the xcountry ski refuge and met Pote (Estéban) the refugiero. Having never met him we chatted for 2 hours, drinking mate by the window, by the wood stove watching the snow cascade out of the misty sky. He is a mountaineer as his in Ushuaia for that only. He says that people are materialistic and shallow here in Ushuaia. Houses are dilapitated because nobody really wants to be here, they want to make money and drive their fancy cars back to their houses in the north... He says in the north, people are poorer, kinder, more generous, warmer...and far less materialistic... but im not trying to rag on the Fueguinos (people from Tierra del Fuego). So far my experience has been beautiful and especially the families and the people who xcountry ski are fantastic!
More later... now, to bed
When I arrived in Ushuaia it was warm, 10 degrees maybe. But in the past few days it has been snowing loads and I bought some 1980s or 90s classic skis/boots/bindings/poles... the poles are too heavy but everything else is actually quite nice quality.
I have spent my days, these past few weeks wandering around this town, at times throwing myself at the enthusiasm of World Cup season in Argentina and at other times running into the mountains to escape this ravenous, unthinking fervour for national sport, that, like someone once said, is so similar to blind support of national militaries... it really defies logic.
I have made some good friends here, we just sit around drinking mate and talking about everything (the cold, world cup, historical blindness of Argentinians with regards to the Falkland islands - a very touchy topic, cultural norms...)and me just waiting, and waiting for the snow to come. Before it came, I would run up to the bottom of the ski centre, the bottom of the chairlift, hoping that at this altitude there would be snow - no.
Finally the other day after 24 hours of snow, my friend Steve and a Falklands Islands charter yacht skipper Chris, and I went up to the ski centre - me with my boots, Steve with his split board and Chris with his backcountry skis. We all trudged up the run, full of feet of powder, and they drank mate with the refuge man at the bottom of the glacier while I trudged down again. For me this was a way to calm my nerves, as I had been getting ancy because as great as running and aimlessly sitting around infront of the worldcup games drinking strong espressos or round after round of mates is, i wanted to ski!
The cross country ski trails are about a 35-40minute run from my hostel (where I am paying 300 dollars to stay for the month, breakfast included). So when I started to walk up with my skis the other day I was happy when a father and his two daughters stopped at the base of the hill and offered me a lift up the 5km of switchback. Now that I left my skis in the cabin though, its not so obvious so today I stuck my thumb out - equally as easy.
I am recovering slowly from an injury I sustained while playing football (soccer) with a friend of a friend. football is life here, it is part of the culture. All the guys who played, it was like a game of pickup hockey in Canada - that is, lots of slightly overweight middleaged men who actually play quite well - and after? we all went upstairs, many smoked and almost all drank... ring any bells!!!??
On my way down from the ski centre that first day of snow, I stopped in at the xcountry ski refuge and met Pote (Estéban) the refugiero. Having never met him we chatted for 2 hours, drinking mate by the window, by the wood stove watching the snow cascade out of the misty sky. He is a mountaineer as his in Ushuaia for that only. He says that people are materialistic and shallow here in Ushuaia. Houses are dilapitated because nobody really wants to be here, they want to make money and drive their fancy cars back to their houses in the north... He says in the north, people are poorer, kinder, more generous, warmer...and far less materialistic... but im not trying to rag on the Fueguinos (people from Tierra del Fuego). So far my experience has been beautiful and especially the families and the people who xcountry ski are fantastic!
More later... now, to bed
Monday, June 7, 2010
uneditted short story by Liam Walke
The Ristretto
He walked up Avenida Errazuriz from the Costanera where the Magellan Strait was real, a windy blue against the sunlit clouds. Left on Nogueira and thats when the rain started. It was one of those rains forced out of the black and driven down into the sidelong yellow sun; that pulses, abates, and then seems to attack again. He thought about the seam, there must have been a fissure between this rain that had just reached his face, making him pull a black hood over his wool covered head – between the rain and the snow. A seam... or two. One seam is simple to explain he thought to himself: one substance, one thing, one material stops at the moment or spatial point when another begins... but this border, because he was inside the border, where both snow and rain swirled around, driven here and there, giving form to the wind.
Thats right, he thought, as he reached the Plaza de Armas with its stately buildings, its stone and cement facades; dear colonial memories – thats right, wind is the arm of the artist, the delicate creative hand, snow and rain the paint-dipped brush and sun the colour, blackclouds the inverse canvass upon which reality is drawn, instant to instant.
His mind had drifted though, he was trying to work out something else in his head: two seams. Or better, a wide ample corridor, like these spacious avenidas, where one thing peters out , diminishing to nothing, while another starts, crescendos and eventually takes over. Rain ends, snow begins and sooner than later he thought pulling his collar up against the buffetting wind, sooner than later this rain will end and all that will be left in the sky for my eyes will be snow. I will simply fall out of the border into a new pure reality. But he thought again... no this is all so subjective and absurd because what is the difference between rain and snow. The smallest, the most infinitely tiny fraction of one degree of temperature. And imagine! The topographical and anthropologic and mamalian (at least) history of a planet was decided upon that! Ice ages, glaciers, avalanches, extinctions! He spun with the snow... is that the difference then, from one side of the seam to the other, one gzillienth of a degree? But so much more complex than that, he thought, squinting into the parabolic lane leading past Nogueira and the treed Plaza de Armas with its several hundred year old trees dominating the mosaic of stone slab and tile paths crossing like capillaries over the square – the white of an eye. The parabolic lane white, wet and flashing with the entire sun.
Yes, better to not occupy one´s mind with frivolities, mere mental gymnastics. Better to think of the task at hand. All he wanted, all he had wanted all morning; the whole reason to leave the house was for a good espresso in a warm cafe. He drew his hand out of his pocket into the cold, pulled his jacket and sleeve of his right hand up to look at his watch. Sunday, 11:21am. Street and sidewalk wet. A pidgeon. Nests, way up, especially as he got away from the central plaza, nests of powerlines emenating in four directions, heaving in the heavy and changeable winds. One, he realized as he reached Av. Cristobal Colon, was hanging, released somewhere, lloosened like a severed limb. Not one cafe was open, not one store. Ah yes, the farmacy is open, Cafe del centro, closed, and five minutes ago Cafe Colonial, closed... he shook his head. Turning right onto Av. Colon, down toward the straits where a rainbow painted the black clouds with ROYGBIV( thats what they always taught us in school, he thought, smiling weakly to himself) down the empty wide avenue, the snow started again, no rain, just frigid wind and white swirls like in those artsy films, no wait – like in holleywood blockbusters when it rains giant chunks of fluffy white and they blow the cotton around with a giant fan! Imagination. But is the fan and the fake flakes any more absurd than this? Here he was at the end of the earth, empty streets, not a soul, Europe, snow falling from his feet into the sky and blown in every direction, driving down in between his collar and his neck, landing frigid on warm skin. Sun, at midday hardly risen and blinding off the thousand windows and the wet carless streets – ok two policemen sauntering the street in their green and their wooly russian hats. And not one cafe open! What do these people do!?
His awe was overpowered by a feeling of sudden and absolute absurdity. Back to the Costanera Magallanes and past an open casino like every casino in the world, tinted glass, slots..etc. another cafe, History Cafe, barred, shuttered. Left down Errazuriz and the sign came into view, the ocean calmly violent behind it. Hotel Ritz. A false climax of ridiculum. But he didn´t know then, then it was the height.
A run down white facade of cement, paint cracking from overexposuere to the salt and the relentless winds and to the right, orange construction fences. To the left that sun! Blinding the road. Absolute irony that sign was. Was it possible, he thought standing in the funnelling breeze, that I am the only person in this town? No, that can´t be, but am I the only person who finds this reality unreal and impossible? We are back to the cliched and laughably basic question, he thought smiling not quite laughing to himself, of what is reality? Everything had been bizarre quite literally from the blue sky (when it was visible) to the blue sea, but most especially his sense of time; that time that passes so slowly in the present but by some curious refraction or a weird and stupid law of physics compresses imperceptibly. He thought of something that Abraham had explained to him about time and existance like a worm... and he modified it in his head. We travel down this “line” we call him, thinking that we should be able to then see its entirety strung out behind us, from some vantage point above, like a god. But really when we look back we are looking back at a cross-section of the worm with no sense of depth, or time, no linear qualities, simply events superimposed upon eachother. This made sense to him now, but he was straying from his point again... but it doesn´t matter, he thought, I´m just thinking to myself, I am allowed to go “off topic”... but what was it, ah yes, what is reality? Maybe it is just any combination of any number of events or facts or things superimposed on one another. From some angles of experience and circumstance they must look like they line up to constitute something that the observer would deem worthy of the term “reality”. Yes. But from another angle another set of events and pasts this superimposition looks contorted, disproportionate or simply “unreal”. He thought of some Dalí paintings he had seen in a museum in Europe and he revised his thought process. No, sometimes its not just unreal but “surreal”, this is pleasing to the senses. He gave a satisfied hmf. Yes. That must be it.
Naivity. How he described his train of thoughts after the episode that he saw as he turned the corner onto Bories after an hour of vacilations and white and black, yellow, blue, colonial mansions, birdsnests of tangled wires, manicured parks and garbagy squaller blown around by the wind.
The wind was coming up again. And so was the cold snow. And so was the flag. He now recalled, as the two police officers in their russian hats passed him for the third time, that he had been whistling some stately sounding invented tunes and hearing brass in his head. This explained it. Reality. It had all been subconscious and the band had been playing while he wandered down Pedro Montt past the victorian wool-boom mansions.
Now. Voices. Snow. Robot. Move heads down. Hands up. Flash of dull light on the blades. The robot paused, massive in the soaking street in all the eyes and ropes holding back the phantoms and the trees from its sacred pole. The trumpets! The trumpets! The brilling brass and the beastly clicks. Those trilling trumpets the bombing basses and a tear. One tear in one eye, lonely, singular not plural. Wet eyes everywhere the beast has been, this machine is turning heads to a pole. One. Two. Three. Four. I declare a war. No. Not yet. Please. But save this country, boys in black, save this country lads, when they do decide its just to fight.
For now, the snow flows out of the sober sky. I mean undrugged and full of shades that blow the fabric around. Eyes. Thump, thump. Feet march the splashing wet pavements and the boys in black are empty and everyone is full.
He watched all the emotion in their eyes, it was flowing from a dry source, being sucked out of the boys in black, the beast that worked with the swinging saber and the fat mans baton. Empty. It all ran like poison into the spectators until they could no longer bear it, full, satiated, bloated with what they were supposed to feel, until it poured out their eyes in a salty mess. And their mouths in otherwise uncomprehensible verbal spasms. The old man to the left, maybe a grandfather or a shop owner, or an erstwhile gaucho with his black beret, or maybe all of those things or none of them. His face was worn by the sun and the wind and his eyes were wet. He seemed to grow, not in stature but in saturation and suddenly as the flag reached full height it escaped him. An orgasm of emotion he could not hold any longer... the old man ejaculated “VIVA...” but that was it.
He finished it but our traveller did not hear. Our wanderer´s ears shut, it was too much, no more trumpets no more stupidly dressed frilly xylophone man, no more falsely happy (or truthfully happy) marches. But he did not close his eyes. Silence and snow. And two hundred red hands with their thousand white knuckles. Here and there he could sense a struggle to maintain in step. Those leathery boots. With a vociferous voicing, a scanty, stout and boisterous verbiage (is this possible?), plainly he could see (but not hear) the beast turned, and marched across the top of the Plaza de Armas. They were playing, legs up, bayonnettes to the sky. But no sound was coming from the burly men and their brass bells. Not his “reality”. It could not be he thought as he watched their calculated formation make an over-complicated manouvre, a navy 180 degree turn at the corner of City Hall to double back to the flag. All this sensorial distortion in one day. Not one cafe open! And now this!? This calamatous culmination of stupidity, an apex of absurdity, something that could not possibly be happening. The flag was flying, city hall in front, plaza de armas behind, depending on your vantage point. The black machine with the hundred white heads and the organized cacophony of clamorous marches and clicks and taps of its many guns and arms. He stood reeling in the street, shivering.
Expression is like a circle, went his thoughts. No, emotion is like a circle that is, if it only has two dimensions. If not it would be a sphere – but no, thats foolish, anyway we need (we?) to define our terms (our?). This is only a model. So that circle maybe the ends don´t quite meet but this was it, in front of him, a demonstration of the circular nature of emotional extremes. Machine of boys in black, no expression and no emotion. Drones (He excused himself this horrible cliche, so often thrown around without much meaning at all – but he allowed himself its employment because his was well thought out...his tenuous conclusion.) They were empty of emotion and their faces showed it. But the spectators are saturated with emotion, perhaps as a direct result of the object´s emptiness. A sort of super-saturation that incites otherwise socially unacceptable behaviour, that happens without the notice of those present. That is, he drew himself up, back straight, shoulders back, that is (with an aire of finale) they are also expressionless, blank drones (another cringe) like those holleywood zombie movies. Expressionless but brimming with emotion, but no sign, only in the cracks with a tear of a verbal spasm or weakening of knees. Tongues lolling out of their heads and eyes gazing up to the flag. Essentially, that the empty and the full of emotion are both expressionless, the line refracts and bends around to almost – save for the one tear – touch. And why is something empty able to provoke so much emotion? Because...because...wind blew snow around, and bits of garbage, white garbage like giant snowflakes. They are all actors in a play, a giant theater and each knows their part, spectator, character, musician, music...etc. And me? he thought. What am I if “all the world is a stage”? He stood there, hands freezing. A light fixture, but only one, and almost imperceptible to the other observers of the spectacle. But I must also actuate some sort of distortion in the present reality, I must change it because... etc.
The street was still full of the robot and its admirers, and they were still empty when he turned his back to head east on Bories.
Fog was it? A mirage? No. It was a few people and a lit sign that peeked out from under a brown awning. Open: Cafe Tapiz. Back to reality he said to himself with a smile. Wait...reality? A coffee.
He opened the door to the warm smell of strong espresso and chocolate. Bag down, jacket off, “what can I get you?” “a ristretto please” he said automatically, then looked up, “yes, a ristretto please.”
He took out his raggedy notebook and began to write. When he finished, he stood up, stretched and sat down again at his desk, the sidelong sun split by the cross on the single pane window, from which a draft was coming, much stronger in the beastly gusts. The wood in the window traced with delicacy and perfection the lines that divided his room into four unequal quadrants. When he finished reading what he had written, he reached out, grabbed a now cold ristretto and drank it in one shot. Then he began to rip pages out of the notebook. He tore up his week and threw it in the plastic bin at his side. Otherwise it wouldn´t be worth it.
He walked up Avenida Errazuriz from the Costanera where the Magellan Strait was real, a windy blue against the sunlit clouds. Left on Nogueira and thats when the rain started. It was one of those rains forced out of the black and driven down into the sidelong yellow sun; that pulses, abates, and then seems to attack again. He thought about the seam, there must have been a fissure between this rain that had just reached his face, making him pull a black hood over his wool covered head – between the rain and the snow. A seam... or two. One seam is simple to explain he thought to himself: one substance, one thing, one material stops at the moment or spatial point when another begins... but this border, because he was inside the border, where both snow and rain swirled around, driven here and there, giving form to the wind.
Thats right, he thought, as he reached the Plaza de Armas with its stately buildings, its stone and cement facades; dear colonial memories – thats right, wind is the arm of the artist, the delicate creative hand, snow and rain the paint-dipped brush and sun the colour, blackclouds the inverse canvass upon which reality is drawn, instant to instant.
His mind had drifted though, he was trying to work out something else in his head: two seams. Or better, a wide ample corridor, like these spacious avenidas, where one thing peters out , diminishing to nothing, while another starts, crescendos and eventually takes over. Rain ends, snow begins and sooner than later he thought pulling his collar up against the buffetting wind, sooner than later this rain will end and all that will be left in the sky for my eyes will be snow. I will simply fall out of the border into a new pure reality. But he thought again... no this is all so subjective and absurd because what is the difference between rain and snow. The smallest, the most infinitely tiny fraction of one degree of temperature. And imagine! The topographical and anthropologic and mamalian (at least) history of a planet was decided upon that! Ice ages, glaciers, avalanches, extinctions! He spun with the snow... is that the difference then, from one side of the seam to the other, one gzillienth of a degree? But so much more complex than that, he thought, squinting into the parabolic lane leading past Nogueira and the treed Plaza de Armas with its several hundred year old trees dominating the mosaic of stone slab and tile paths crossing like capillaries over the square – the white of an eye. The parabolic lane white, wet and flashing with the entire sun.
Yes, better to not occupy one´s mind with frivolities, mere mental gymnastics. Better to think of the task at hand. All he wanted, all he had wanted all morning; the whole reason to leave the house was for a good espresso in a warm cafe. He drew his hand out of his pocket into the cold, pulled his jacket and sleeve of his right hand up to look at his watch. Sunday, 11:21am. Street and sidewalk wet. A pidgeon. Nests, way up, especially as he got away from the central plaza, nests of powerlines emenating in four directions, heaving in the heavy and changeable winds. One, he realized as he reached Av. Cristobal Colon, was hanging, released somewhere, lloosened like a severed limb. Not one cafe was open, not one store. Ah yes, the farmacy is open, Cafe del centro, closed, and five minutes ago Cafe Colonial, closed... he shook his head. Turning right onto Av. Colon, down toward the straits where a rainbow painted the black clouds with ROYGBIV( thats what they always taught us in school, he thought, smiling weakly to himself) down the empty wide avenue, the snow started again, no rain, just frigid wind and white swirls like in those artsy films, no wait – like in holleywood blockbusters when it rains giant chunks of fluffy white and they blow the cotton around with a giant fan! Imagination. But is the fan and the fake flakes any more absurd than this? Here he was at the end of the earth, empty streets, not a soul, Europe, snow falling from his feet into the sky and blown in every direction, driving down in between his collar and his neck, landing frigid on warm skin. Sun, at midday hardly risen and blinding off the thousand windows and the wet carless streets – ok two policemen sauntering the street in their green and their wooly russian hats. And not one cafe open! What do these people do!?
His awe was overpowered by a feeling of sudden and absolute absurdity. Back to the Costanera Magallanes and past an open casino like every casino in the world, tinted glass, slots..etc. another cafe, History Cafe, barred, shuttered. Left down Errazuriz and the sign came into view, the ocean calmly violent behind it. Hotel Ritz. A false climax of ridiculum. But he didn´t know then, then it was the height.
A run down white facade of cement, paint cracking from overexposuere to the salt and the relentless winds and to the right, orange construction fences. To the left that sun! Blinding the road. Absolute irony that sign was. Was it possible, he thought standing in the funnelling breeze, that I am the only person in this town? No, that can´t be, but am I the only person who finds this reality unreal and impossible? We are back to the cliched and laughably basic question, he thought smiling not quite laughing to himself, of what is reality? Everything had been bizarre quite literally from the blue sky (when it was visible) to the blue sea, but most especially his sense of time; that time that passes so slowly in the present but by some curious refraction or a weird and stupid law of physics compresses imperceptibly. He thought of something that Abraham had explained to him about time and existance like a worm... and he modified it in his head. We travel down this “line” we call him, thinking that we should be able to then see its entirety strung out behind us, from some vantage point above, like a god. But really when we look back we are looking back at a cross-section of the worm with no sense of depth, or time, no linear qualities, simply events superimposed upon eachother. This made sense to him now, but he was straying from his point again... but it doesn´t matter, he thought, I´m just thinking to myself, I am allowed to go “off topic”... but what was it, ah yes, what is reality? Maybe it is just any combination of any number of events or facts or things superimposed on one another. From some angles of experience and circumstance they must look like they line up to constitute something that the observer would deem worthy of the term “reality”. Yes. But from another angle another set of events and pasts this superimposition looks contorted, disproportionate or simply “unreal”. He thought of some Dalí paintings he had seen in a museum in Europe and he revised his thought process. No, sometimes its not just unreal but “surreal”, this is pleasing to the senses. He gave a satisfied hmf. Yes. That must be it.
Naivity. How he described his train of thoughts after the episode that he saw as he turned the corner onto Bories after an hour of vacilations and white and black, yellow, blue, colonial mansions, birdsnests of tangled wires, manicured parks and garbagy squaller blown around by the wind.
The wind was coming up again. And so was the cold snow. And so was the flag. He now recalled, as the two police officers in their russian hats passed him for the third time, that he had been whistling some stately sounding invented tunes and hearing brass in his head. This explained it. Reality. It had all been subconscious and the band had been playing while he wandered down Pedro Montt past the victorian wool-boom mansions.
Now. Voices. Snow. Robot. Move heads down. Hands up. Flash of dull light on the blades. The robot paused, massive in the soaking street in all the eyes and ropes holding back the phantoms and the trees from its sacred pole. The trumpets! The trumpets! The brilling brass and the beastly clicks. Those trilling trumpets the bombing basses and a tear. One tear in one eye, lonely, singular not plural. Wet eyes everywhere the beast has been, this machine is turning heads to a pole. One. Two. Three. Four. I declare a war. No. Not yet. Please. But save this country, boys in black, save this country lads, when they do decide its just to fight.
For now, the snow flows out of the sober sky. I mean undrugged and full of shades that blow the fabric around. Eyes. Thump, thump. Feet march the splashing wet pavements and the boys in black are empty and everyone is full.
He watched all the emotion in their eyes, it was flowing from a dry source, being sucked out of the boys in black, the beast that worked with the swinging saber and the fat mans baton. Empty. It all ran like poison into the spectators until they could no longer bear it, full, satiated, bloated with what they were supposed to feel, until it poured out their eyes in a salty mess. And their mouths in otherwise uncomprehensible verbal spasms. The old man to the left, maybe a grandfather or a shop owner, or an erstwhile gaucho with his black beret, or maybe all of those things or none of them. His face was worn by the sun and the wind and his eyes were wet. He seemed to grow, not in stature but in saturation and suddenly as the flag reached full height it escaped him. An orgasm of emotion he could not hold any longer... the old man ejaculated “VIVA...” but that was it.
He finished it but our traveller did not hear. Our wanderer´s ears shut, it was too much, no more trumpets no more stupidly dressed frilly xylophone man, no more falsely happy (or truthfully happy) marches. But he did not close his eyes. Silence and snow. And two hundred red hands with their thousand white knuckles. Here and there he could sense a struggle to maintain in step. Those leathery boots. With a vociferous voicing, a scanty, stout and boisterous verbiage (is this possible?), plainly he could see (but not hear) the beast turned, and marched across the top of the Plaza de Armas. They were playing, legs up, bayonnettes to the sky. But no sound was coming from the burly men and their brass bells. Not his “reality”. It could not be he thought as he watched their calculated formation make an over-complicated manouvre, a navy 180 degree turn at the corner of City Hall to double back to the flag. All this sensorial distortion in one day. Not one cafe open! And now this!? This calamatous culmination of stupidity, an apex of absurdity, something that could not possibly be happening. The flag was flying, city hall in front, plaza de armas behind, depending on your vantage point. The black machine with the hundred white heads and the organized cacophony of clamorous marches and clicks and taps of its many guns and arms. He stood reeling in the street, shivering.
Expression is like a circle, went his thoughts. No, emotion is like a circle that is, if it only has two dimensions. If not it would be a sphere – but no, thats foolish, anyway we need (we?) to define our terms (our?). This is only a model. So that circle maybe the ends don´t quite meet but this was it, in front of him, a demonstration of the circular nature of emotional extremes. Machine of boys in black, no expression and no emotion. Drones (He excused himself this horrible cliche, so often thrown around without much meaning at all – but he allowed himself its employment because his was well thought out...his tenuous conclusion.) They were empty of emotion and their faces showed it. But the spectators are saturated with emotion, perhaps as a direct result of the object´s emptiness. A sort of super-saturation that incites otherwise socially unacceptable behaviour, that happens without the notice of those present. That is, he drew himself up, back straight, shoulders back, that is (with an aire of finale) they are also expressionless, blank drones (another cringe) like those holleywood zombie movies. Expressionless but brimming with emotion, but no sign, only in the cracks with a tear of a verbal spasm or weakening of knees. Tongues lolling out of their heads and eyes gazing up to the flag. Essentially, that the empty and the full of emotion are both expressionless, the line refracts and bends around to almost – save for the one tear – touch. And why is something empty able to provoke so much emotion? Because...because...wind blew snow around, and bits of garbage, white garbage like giant snowflakes. They are all actors in a play, a giant theater and each knows their part, spectator, character, musician, music...etc. And me? he thought. What am I if “all the world is a stage”? He stood there, hands freezing. A light fixture, but only one, and almost imperceptible to the other observers of the spectacle. But I must also actuate some sort of distortion in the present reality, I must change it because... etc.
The street was still full of the robot and its admirers, and they were still empty when he turned his back to head east on Bories.
Fog was it? A mirage? No. It was a few people and a lit sign that peeked out from under a brown awning. Open: Cafe Tapiz. Back to reality he said to himself with a smile. Wait...reality? A coffee.
He opened the door to the warm smell of strong espresso and chocolate. Bag down, jacket off, “what can I get you?” “a ristretto please” he said automatically, then looked up, “yes, a ristretto please.”
He took out his raggedy notebook and began to write. When he finished, he stood up, stretched and sat down again at his desk, the sidelong sun split by the cross on the single pane window, from which a draft was coming, much stronger in the beastly gusts. The wood in the window traced with delicacy and perfection the lines that divided his room into four unequal quadrants. When he finished reading what he had written, he reached out, grabbed a now cold ristretto and drank it in one shot. Then he began to rip pages out of the notebook. He tore up his week and threw it in the plastic bin at his side. Otherwise it wouldn´t be worth it.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
new unedited poetry
Disturbance
In a moment this will all shatter
With my thoughts,
Those planets;
The dreamy orbs glittering rainbows
Like farewell flags, twinkling masses
Of galactic mist will
Melt into the scepter mountains
That sit like giants by the water,
Never thirsty.
It will all sizzle away in a
Cerebral synapse – POOF!
But the blue-bleeding ocean machine
In the sky will just effervesce,
Yes! Bless with cerulean rays
A circle that shatter with my thoughts
Dawn: or a reminder that wakes us from chronic repeating amnesia
What is not:
A pragmatic sun
Is incognisant of our carpe diem,
It does not set out to conquest,
Only to wake again
To the almost imperceptible beings
Cracking eyelashes
And petals, chirruping in song
Not a battle cry,
Not a fighting march,
This simply is.
Not rare,
Neither un-coveted by the senses,
It does not exude resilience
What is:
This is presence…
The dawn is an explosion,
An exaltation
Of birth.
It is an exhalation
Brimming with fortresses
And birds.
The after twilight hour
Fills with scalpels of
Subtle blizzards of light.
New love calms
The bucking morning with
Mists and mirrors and
Aviators talk to me,
When they see
My warm breath
Disintegrate in the light.
Repetitive reincarnation
In a moment this will all shatter
With my thoughts,
Those planets;
The dreamy orbs glittering rainbows
Like farewell flags, twinkling masses
Of galactic mist will
Melt into the scepter mountains
That sit like giants by the water,
Never thirsty.
It will all sizzle away in a
Cerebral synapse – POOF!
But the blue-bleeding ocean machine
In the sky will just effervesce,
Yes! Bless with cerulean rays
A circle that shatter with my thoughts
Dawn: or a reminder that wakes us from chronic repeating amnesia
What is not:
A pragmatic sun
Is incognisant of our carpe diem,
It does not set out to conquest,
Only to wake again
To the almost imperceptible beings
Cracking eyelashes
And petals, chirruping in song
Not a battle cry,
Not a fighting march,
This simply is.
Not rare,
Neither un-coveted by the senses,
It does not exude resilience
What is:
This is presence…
The dawn is an explosion,
An exaltation
Of birth.
It is an exhalation
Brimming with fortresses
And birds.
The after twilight hour
Fills with scalpels of
Subtle blizzards of light.
New love calms
The bucking morning with
Mists and mirrors and
Aviators talk to me,
When they see
My warm breath
Disintegrate in the light.
Repetitive reincarnation
Puerto Natales to Puerto Eden and back
We finally left Puerto Natales the 21st of May and sailed through the impossibly narrow Paso White flanked by granite and ice, towers of rock. We had a nice tailwind the second half of the day and we were doing 7-8kts for a few hours anyway. The next day was pivotal... good weather, as in, light winds forcast for the next 36 hours. So we motored and sailed from 8am to 5pm the following day, about 31 hours straight and we covered 140 miles putting us within a comfortable two days of Puerto Eden (a trip that we thought would take us 2-3weeks was going to take under a week. Plans only changed a bit:
* * *
Diary entry from May 25
While radioing the passing Navimag ferry on our way to Canal Wide (to find out about schedules for my return to puerto natales) we made the faux pas (sp?) of staying on channel 16 (which is the channel used only for hailing a boat, you are then supposed to go to another channel to talk). When we finished talking though we heard a familiar voice hailing the Persimmon... It was Bob again!!! we must have passed him on our night sail and he was some 20miles behind us. As a way of waiting up for Bob we decided to do the remaining 15 miles to the closest anchorage as opposed to our original plan which was to continue another 10 miles... we also decided to go to Glaciar Pío XI, Latin America´s biggest glacier, measuring more than 3.5km wide and 50 meter tall face. It flows like an icy tongue out of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. That night Bob didn´t show up until 2am so I only saw him this morning at breakfast - everyone was genuinly happy to see eachother... but in the end Bob decided not to come to Ventisquero Pío XI with us. If that were the case I would have been able to sail with Bob for a day or two but instead we arranged to meet in Puerto Eden in two days.
The sun lifted, shedding a curtain of yellow light all over the mountains and the wind blew lightly out of the north. Sailing would have taken us days so we motored straight into the wind. The first few hours were relatively uneventful if you don´t count the white white cony and humpy mountains, whose perfect reaching peaks found refuge in the pancake clouds. From 18miles (thats around 32km) we could already catch a glimpse of the glacier!! thats how big it is, the size, they say, of Santiago!!! At about five miles out, when it looked like surely we were at its doorstep as we threaded our way dodging crystaly ice in the water, giant aqua blue bergs and small dark pitted groulers, the efervescant sun spewing its own royal blue through the prisms of ice. This is when the dolphins came. There were at least 10 dolphins, some babies as well. For almost an hour as we motored to the gargantuan face through the graveyard of fallen ice walls, floating in an ever more serene channel, the dolphins swam with us, showing off; jumping 2, 3, 4 at a time, fully breaching out of the water to show their entire bodies, weaving, splashing cutting lines around the entire boat, swimming on their backs and on their sides to show white bellies.
All this with the backdrop of an ever growing (only for our own eyes) glacier. We hit a few growlers on our way in, shuddering the boat to a halt... soon after we arrived at the wall, the ever-low sun began to set over this continental filed of ice, this slowmotion river, a tummultuous mass of icetowers that flow down from the conical and sharktooth mountains for thousands of years. I climbed the mast and I could hear the thunderoush treacherous cracks of ice and could see small chunks, and at the end a shack or cottage size chunk, cleaving off and tumbling into the glassy water, throwing up waves, like mini tsunamis.
The left edge of the wall had a blue spot that I have never seen, this magnetic blue that drew my eyes into the layers of thousand of years of ice. A blue, a holy, unroyal story, untellable and absolutely uncomprehensible but fully alluring. I was sucked into a cavy crachy layered mess of blue, a glassy, steepled moving castle, no a mobile city of ice that has watched everything for millenia!!!
The funny currents, created by the meltwater (I presume) we could see move the glassy crystally shards of ice, blue and orange now with the parting sun, crimson on a mirror float and flow on a swell. Froim time to time a crack and a few chunks of ice would come of the wall and crash into the water beside the wall´s pitted foundation. Mario and I got off the boat to stand on a floating piece of ice. Alone, on a piece of floating frigid water...nothing around but currents and water and a golden sun in the swirling mirror of the city of ice... At night I made potato gnocchi and a simple tomoto sauce with grated romano...mmmm... and then a clear sky in winter, in patagonia... and a full moon...life does not get much better than this!!!.
...
When we got to Puerto Eden, Bob was already there and we hung out a lot, playing chess and baking brownies (for Bob´s birthday) and talking about life and pacifism (and its effectiveness, or ineffectiveness) about free will, vegetarianism, about Ulysses (which i was reading on the boat) and literary criticism... HEAVY SHIT! but lots of fun. There was a bit of drama at the end, shortly before I left but we all left on a good note. I thanked them all for everything and for challenging my opinions, which I realized had become a bit stale and I believed them just because I had always believed them.
* * *
Puerto Eden has few people, maybe 50 or so. 6 of them are pure blood Kaweshkar indians... probably 20 are police and armada and the rest are fisherman. We brought our laundry for a woman, Doña Patricia to do, and we just hung out, not really chatting much, just there, in her house drinking mate and here and there saying something of little consequence. She kept inviting us back to hang out. In our search for diesel, which we finally found, we went to the house of Manuel Maldonado, and after this I confirmed to myself that this was stepping back in time. This man´s house, among the squalor of rotting boardwalks and abandoned shacks, and little habited houses that have no telephones, could exist in Las Condes (the rich neighbourhood of Santiago) He has satelite internet and longdistance phone as well as satellite tv. He has all the trappings of a modern "home". After talking a lot with the police guys (a bunch of really cool, down to earth guys that were welcoming and interested) I found out that Don Manuel is the defacto owner of the town. He owns a fish farm in Puerto Montt and the means to transport everything that is fished in Puerto Eden to P.Montt to be sold. He buys everything that has been fished at 2000pesos the kilo and sells it in Puerto Montt at 7000pesos the kilo...
Like a step back in time.
* * *
Now I do not want to dwell on this but my last 24 hours after a surreal goodbye to my crew and captain, were tumultuous and costly to say the least. I was assured by my friends at the police station in Eden that I would not have to pay the "gringo" price on the ferry. (The Navimag charges foreigners the 300 dollars US from Puerto Eden, which is the price from Puerto Montt ie. they charge about 4 times what they should.)
I got on the ferry and the policeman talked to some guys he said would talk for me and I was brought to the room to pay. I explained that I had no credit card(a white lie) and only 40,000 pesos (about 80$, the truth). They after speaking with the captain they kindly made an exception for me. After writing an authorized reciept the captain asked for my passport. I asked him why but didn´t really think twice because chilean authorities are more than anal when it comes to foreigners´movements within the country. As night fell he returned my passport to me and I spent the rest of the time hanging out and playing chess with some young guys fromt he armada. When we arrived after 24 hours of navigation I was told to go to the bridge and was met by 3 intimidating International Police force officers. They wanted to know what I was doing in Chile, where I was going, they searched all my bags. Let me say I was angry and I let them know that they were being unreasonable in treating me like a criminal and that it was not fair. They phoned their headquarters to check up on my visa and seemed to be surprised to see that it was indeed registered. Then they asked me where I was going, I said Ushuaia, they said how, I said by bus, they said so you have money, I said in my bank (BIG FUCKING MISTAKE!) They said thank you and went to talk to the captain. They then escorted me to the office and told me that I had two options, pay the remainder of the 300$ or not and have my name in all the police stations so that I would be unable to leave the country. At this juncture I truly lost it, because I felt cheated and tried to explain that I would not have even gotten on the boat had I not been offered the discounted rate, I can not afford this. They lied to me and on top of it all they were patronizing me. In the end, after considering a few options that could have got me off but also could have ended in much more serious legal consequences I decided to swallow my pride, and my sense of justice, and my rationality and just pay the money. The man at the desk was very surprised when I came in very calm and appologized for my behaviour and gave him the cash.
I´m just glad thats over, but it was a bit of a nasty note to end on... next step... I don´t know... I´m waiting for snow in Ushuaia and meanwhile going to try to get back in shape after my sedentary month and a half on a boat!
Until next time...
* * *
Diary entry from May 25
While radioing the passing Navimag ferry on our way to Canal Wide (to find out about schedules for my return to puerto natales) we made the faux pas (sp?) of staying on channel 16 (which is the channel used only for hailing a boat, you are then supposed to go to another channel to talk). When we finished talking though we heard a familiar voice hailing the Persimmon... It was Bob again!!! we must have passed him on our night sail and he was some 20miles behind us. As a way of waiting up for Bob we decided to do the remaining 15 miles to the closest anchorage as opposed to our original plan which was to continue another 10 miles... we also decided to go to Glaciar Pío XI, Latin America´s biggest glacier, measuring more than 3.5km wide and 50 meter tall face. It flows like an icy tongue out of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. That night Bob didn´t show up until 2am so I only saw him this morning at breakfast - everyone was genuinly happy to see eachother... but in the end Bob decided not to come to Ventisquero Pío XI with us. If that were the case I would have been able to sail with Bob for a day or two but instead we arranged to meet in Puerto Eden in two days.
The sun lifted, shedding a curtain of yellow light all over the mountains and the wind blew lightly out of the north. Sailing would have taken us days so we motored straight into the wind. The first few hours were relatively uneventful if you don´t count the white white cony and humpy mountains, whose perfect reaching peaks found refuge in the pancake clouds. From 18miles (thats around 32km) we could already catch a glimpse of the glacier!! thats how big it is, the size, they say, of Santiago!!! At about five miles out, when it looked like surely we were at its doorstep as we threaded our way dodging crystaly ice in the water, giant aqua blue bergs and small dark pitted groulers, the efervescant sun spewing its own royal blue through the prisms of ice. This is when the dolphins came. There were at least 10 dolphins, some babies as well. For almost an hour as we motored to the gargantuan face through the graveyard of fallen ice walls, floating in an ever more serene channel, the dolphins swam with us, showing off; jumping 2, 3, 4 at a time, fully breaching out of the water to show their entire bodies, weaving, splashing cutting lines around the entire boat, swimming on their backs and on their sides to show white bellies.
All this with the backdrop of an ever growing (only for our own eyes) glacier. We hit a few growlers on our way in, shuddering the boat to a halt... soon after we arrived at the wall, the ever-low sun began to set over this continental filed of ice, this slowmotion river, a tummultuous mass of icetowers that flow down from the conical and sharktooth mountains for thousands of years. I climbed the mast and I could hear the thunderoush treacherous cracks of ice and could see small chunks, and at the end a shack or cottage size chunk, cleaving off and tumbling into the glassy water, throwing up waves, like mini tsunamis.
The left edge of the wall had a blue spot that I have never seen, this magnetic blue that drew my eyes into the layers of thousand of years of ice. A blue, a holy, unroyal story, untellable and absolutely uncomprehensible but fully alluring. I was sucked into a cavy crachy layered mess of blue, a glassy, steepled moving castle, no a mobile city of ice that has watched everything for millenia!!!
The funny currents, created by the meltwater (I presume) we could see move the glassy crystally shards of ice, blue and orange now with the parting sun, crimson on a mirror float and flow on a swell. Froim time to time a crack and a few chunks of ice would come of the wall and crash into the water beside the wall´s pitted foundation. Mario and I got off the boat to stand on a floating piece of ice. Alone, on a piece of floating frigid water...nothing around but currents and water and a golden sun in the swirling mirror of the city of ice... At night I made potato gnocchi and a simple tomoto sauce with grated romano...mmmm... and then a clear sky in winter, in patagonia... and a full moon...life does not get much better than this!!!.
...
When we got to Puerto Eden, Bob was already there and we hung out a lot, playing chess and baking brownies (for Bob´s birthday) and talking about life and pacifism (and its effectiveness, or ineffectiveness) about free will, vegetarianism, about Ulysses (which i was reading on the boat) and literary criticism... HEAVY SHIT! but lots of fun. There was a bit of drama at the end, shortly before I left but we all left on a good note. I thanked them all for everything and for challenging my opinions, which I realized had become a bit stale and I believed them just because I had always believed them.
* * *
Puerto Eden has few people, maybe 50 or so. 6 of them are pure blood Kaweshkar indians... probably 20 are police and armada and the rest are fisherman. We brought our laundry for a woman, Doña Patricia to do, and we just hung out, not really chatting much, just there, in her house drinking mate and here and there saying something of little consequence. She kept inviting us back to hang out. In our search for diesel, which we finally found, we went to the house of Manuel Maldonado, and after this I confirmed to myself that this was stepping back in time. This man´s house, among the squalor of rotting boardwalks and abandoned shacks, and little habited houses that have no telephones, could exist in Las Condes (the rich neighbourhood of Santiago) He has satelite internet and longdistance phone as well as satellite tv. He has all the trappings of a modern "home". After talking a lot with the police guys (a bunch of really cool, down to earth guys that were welcoming and interested) I found out that Don Manuel is the defacto owner of the town. He owns a fish farm in Puerto Montt and the means to transport everything that is fished in Puerto Eden to P.Montt to be sold. He buys everything that has been fished at 2000pesos the kilo and sells it in Puerto Montt at 7000pesos the kilo...
Like a step back in time.
* * *
Now I do not want to dwell on this but my last 24 hours after a surreal goodbye to my crew and captain, were tumultuous and costly to say the least. I was assured by my friends at the police station in Eden that I would not have to pay the "gringo" price on the ferry. (The Navimag charges foreigners the 300 dollars US from Puerto Eden, which is the price from Puerto Montt ie. they charge about 4 times what they should.)
I got on the ferry and the policeman talked to some guys he said would talk for me and I was brought to the room to pay. I explained that I had no credit card(a white lie) and only 40,000 pesos (about 80$, the truth). They after speaking with the captain they kindly made an exception for me. After writing an authorized reciept the captain asked for my passport. I asked him why but didn´t really think twice because chilean authorities are more than anal when it comes to foreigners´movements within the country. As night fell he returned my passport to me and I spent the rest of the time hanging out and playing chess with some young guys fromt he armada. When we arrived after 24 hours of navigation I was told to go to the bridge and was met by 3 intimidating International Police force officers. They wanted to know what I was doing in Chile, where I was going, they searched all my bags. Let me say I was angry and I let them know that they were being unreasonable in treating me like a criminal and that it was not fair. They phoned their headquarters to check up on my visa and seemed to be surprised to see that it was indeed registered. Then they asked me where I was going, I said Ushuaia, they said how, I said by bus, they said so you have money, I said in my bank (BIG FUCKING MISTAKE!) They said thank you and went to talk to the captain. They then escorted me to the office and told me that I had two options, pay the remainder of the 300$ or not and have my name in all the police stations so that I would be unable to leave the country. At this juncture I truly lost it, because I felt cheated and tried to explain that I would not have even gotten on the boat had I not been offered the discounted rate, I can not afford this. They lied to me and on top of it all they were patronizing me. In the end, after considering a few options that could have got me off but also could have ended in much more serious legal consequences I decided to swallow my pride, and my sense of justice, and my rationality and just pay the money. The man at the desk was very surprised when I came in very calm and appologized for my behaviour and gave him the cash.
I´m just glad thats over, but it was a bit of a nasty note to end on... next step... I don´t know... I´m waiting for snow in Ushuaia and meanwhile going to try to get back in shape after my sedentary month and a half on a boat!
Until next time...
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Navy
I am unsure whether these boys have a sense of irony, I certainly hope so. In the bible of cruising in Patagonia Giorggio says that Natales is a horrible place for any sort of personal yacht, motor or sail. There is no jetty, no peir, no marina for private yachts. However after a nice chat with the Armada guys (the navy) after they told us we could not be at their peir, they sort of just shut their mouths and let us stay there three nights.
Today is the 19th of May, two days and counting until el 21 de Mayo, the anniversary of a naval battle in which, like he explained to us as we stood in the white office, backs to the sea, Chile won against Peru and General Arturo Pratt (a national hero) died. This means that we have been surrounded by navy boats, the rumbling engines of grey and black boats, massive guns that move at 30kts through the water and can hardly be seen under the grey sky. All the boys on board are young, idealistic, brainwashed perhaps, very polite and nice. It seems they don´t fully understand what they are undertaking, what they participate in...
As the patrol boat that was docked next to us pulled away this afternoon, all the young boys wore lifejackets as they were politely given orders to cast off lines. As they steamed away into the mountains triumphant music blasted on their speakers, orchestral, battle music. I look over to Ian, we are on the deck and I look at his smiling face and say, I hope those boys have a sense of irony...
O no, this is serious stuff he says, they take this very seriously... He is right and on our port side there is a jetblack cruising gunboat also rehearsing presumable, and some bigshots are off the boat. The speakers blast tinny naval marches over the hoisted flags and the little white caps and all the boys march, they stop, they stand at attention, bayonnets in the air, they march, they stop, always looking forward, never to the side, looking down a tube to the boat, to the black and the flags, to the massive guns...
I think it was the bigshots, but as soon as that excersise started we were advised to leave the jetty. We checked in at the Armada office and were told by the innocent little boy that he would see if we could stay - we all agreed that something much more powerful must be watching over his shoulder... thankfully we have basically all our chores and errands done and are ready to leave early tomorrow morning.
I´ll be disembarking in Puerto Edén, a port on an island, a habited village connected to Chile only by the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales - there is no road connection nor airport... lets hope I don´t miss the boat!
until next time
and not to forget, more photos on www.flickr.com/photos/44544772@NO3/
Today is the 19th of May, two days and counting until el 21 de Mayo, the anniversary of a naval battle in which, like he explained to us as we stood in the white office, backs to the sea, Chile won against Peru and General Arturo Pratt (a national hero) died. This means that we have been surrounded by navy boats, the rumbling engines of grey and black boats, massive guns that move at 30kts through the water and can hardly be seen under the grey sky. All the boys on board are young, idealistic, brainwashed perhaps, very polite and nice. It seems they don´t fully understand what they are undertaking, what they participate in...
As the patrol boat that was docked next to us pulled away this afternoon, all the young boys wore lifejackets as they were politely given orders to cast off lines. As they steamed away into the mountains triumphant music blasted on their speakers, orchestral, battle music. I look over to Ian, we are on the deck and I look at his smiling face and say, I hope those boys have a sense of irony...
O no, this is serious stuff he says, they take this very seriously... He is right and on our port side there is a jetblack cruising gunboat also rehearsing presumable, and some bigshots are off the boat. The speakers blast tinny naval marches over the hoisted flags and the little white caps and all the boys march, they stop, they stand at attention, bayonnets in the air, they march, they stop, always looking forward, never to the side, looking down a tube to the boat, to the black and the flags, to the massive guns...
I think it was the bigshots, but as soon as that excersise started we were advised to leave the jetty. We checked in at the Armada office and were told by the innocent little boy that he would see if we could stay - we all agreed that something much more powerful must be watching over his shoulder... thankfully we have basically all our chores and errands done and are ready to leave early tomorrow morning.
I´ll be disembarking in Puerto Edén, a port on an island, a habited village connected to Chile only by the Navimag ferry from Puerto Montt to Puerto Natales - there is no road connection nor airport... lets hope I don´t miss the boat!
until next time
and not to forget, more photos on www.flickr.com/photos/44544772@NO3/
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Some more diary excerpts
Just to get the feeling:
May 6
We set out with a little wind on our bow and a low cieling. We followed a pod of whales in the distance until a giant humback surfaced 1-2 boatlengths off our starboard beam. Snow had almost reached the sea and with this scarry background we sailed as best we could tacking up the Magellan (our 3rd day). The wind died completely and we had a current against us so we motored for a few hours (in this area of the world you have to take every opportunity to move forward because prevailing winds are very strong and dead against you...) Soon after though, we were able to continue sailing. No close calls this time (the day before we tacked about 1-2 boatlengths from a rock islet evading narrowly a huge disaster) but I went up on deck to un hook the genoa sheet fromt he forestay while tacking and at the moment I got up there it unhooked itself, slapping me in the face-head knocking my balaclava, which was perched on my head, into the Magellan... goodbye!
At around 3 or 4 o clock, the wind picked up such that the boat was heeling alot especially in the gusts which were over 25 knots and the chop got short and steep. Down under it was very difficult to walk with only one reef in the main sail and a full genoa. I got thrown in a gust - my hand grabbed the wooden rail of the bookshelf and my face in the same moment struck the back of my hand. If not for the hand I would have lost teeth for sure. In any case the taste of blood lingered in my mouth for a few minutes...
The wind having reached in excess of 25kts we had to reduce sail, so I went up to put a reef in the main and as I stepped out fromt he dodger (the sort of wind and water sheild int he cockpit) I got swamped and completely drenched by a wave that washed over the boat at that moment! I got up to the mast and started working, clutching something (the winch handle or the mast) at all times so as not to be launched into the salty sea! The wind, in its gusts, whistled int he rigging and waves crashed over the deck, washing spray into my face... We left Bob behind this day (Bob was a Australian singlehander who we spent a few nights with in an anchorage waiting for good weather - we would later meet him for another night).
May 7
...The prognostic was for 10 to 15 knots all night so we thought we could almost make the beginning of the Smyth Canal by the next evening, some 60miles in a straight line. As we got ready to go the weather was still very bad... williwaws (cold air that is pushed up over a mountain and plummets down in jets at extremely high speeds) were making our dinghy fly around like a kite, literally, outside so Mario and I went out to tie it back on the deck of the boat. A gust almost flung it, and us into the water but we held on. We managed to get it on deck but suddenly a williwaw ripped through the cove at probably 70-80kts. The Persimmon, swinging at anchor heeled over, with no sail up, at probably almost 30 degrees, making a mess of the food we were preparing below. Water sliced and lined having been thrown by the wind in black and white, deafening, screaming in my ears and in the rigging. Mario and I on opposite sides of the boat ducked, flattening ourselves down against the dinghy. The wind went up my nose, it blew so hard I could not think and I was almost lifted off my feet and off the dinghy on which I lay. When it passed we looked to leeward in the fading light to see a swirling tornado-like spectre white and dynamic, twist its way down the bay, spray given form...
We set out at 22:30. Ian and Katya were on watch from 11 to 2am so Mario and I tried to get some shuteye. My shoulder (which I injured the day before and am still recovering from - this was the first and worst day) was so bad that I could not sleep. I could not find any position that was not excruciating. After 2 hours I came out and sat there at the table, forced to explain to Ian and Katya what was up (i don´t like to complain and had just kept my mouth shut). I took an anti inflammatory (very uncharacteristic for me) which did nothing but when my watch came at 2am the wind started to pick up. I couldn´t do anything with my left arm and apart from the massive seizing pain that it gave me at rest, supporting any weight with it was even more excruciating. Instead they made me go to bed but I was unable to sleep because of my arm and with the rising wind, up to 30kts and over 2meter seas I was being thrown around like a ragdoll in my bunk. I came out again at 530am to violent pitching and a defeated feeling in the air. Current against us, wind at 30kts, gusting 40kts on our nose, an unenterable cove (in the dark) zero progress and three hours until daylight meant we had only one option: we had turned around and were headed, no sails, no motor, downwind and with the current doing 7kts. I was nauseous with pain (the worst I have felt in my memory) and the pitching was making me seasick. I was sent to bed again at 6am and at about 7am I somehow managed about 2 hours of sleep waking up at 9 to coffee and a boat our home, secure in the same cove we left ten hours before. Distance travelled: 28miles Net distance covered: 0 miles. Morale: shit. Pain: unbearable.
May 6
We set out with a little wind on our bow and a low cieling. We followed a pod of whales in the distance until a giant humback surfaced 1-2 boatlengths off our starboard beam. Snow had almost reached the sea and with this scarry background we sailed as best we could tacking up the Magellan (our 3rd day). The wind died completely and we had a current against us so we motored for a few hours (in this area of the world you have to take every opportunity to move forward because prevailing winds are very strong and dead against you...) Soon after though, we were able to continue sailing. No close calls this time (the day before we tacked about 1-2 boatlengths from a rock islet evading narrowly a huge disaster) but I went up on deck to un hook the genoa sheet fromt he forestay while tacking and at the moment I got up there it unhooked itself, slapping me in the face-head knocking my balaclava, which was perched on my head, into the Magellan... goodbye!
At around 3 or 4 o clock, the wind picked up such that the boat was heeling alot especially in the gusts which were over 25 knots and the chop got short and steep. Down under it was very difficult to walk with only one reef in the main sail and a full genoa. I got thrown in a gust - my hand grabbed the wooden rail of the bookshelf and my face in the same moment struck the back of my hand. If not for the hand I would have lost teeth for sure. In any case the taste of blood lingered in my mouth for a few minutes...
The wind having reached in excess of 25kts we had to reduce sail, so I went up to put a reef in the main and as I stepped out fromt he dodger (the sort of wind and water sheild int he cockpit) I got swamped and completely drenched by a wave that washed over the boat at that moment! I got up to the mast and started working, clutching something (the winch handle or the mast) at all times so as not to be launched into the salty sea! The wind, in its gusts, whistled int he rigging and waves crashed over the deck, washing spray into my face... We left Bob behind this day (Bob was a Australian singlehander who we spent a few nights with in an anchorage waiting for good weather - we would later meet him for another night).
May 7
...The prognostic was for 10 to 15 knots all night so we thought we could almost make the beginning of the Smyth Canal by the next evening, some 60miles in a straight line. As we got ready to go the weather was still very bad... williwaws (cold air that is pushed up over a mountain and plummets down in jets at extremely high speeds) were making our dinghy fly around like a kite, literally, outside so Mario and I went out to tie it back on the deck of the boat. A gust almost flung it, and us into the water but we held on. We managed to get it on deck but suddenly a williwaw ripped through the cove at probably 70-80kts. The Persimmon, swinging at anchor heeled over, with no sail up, at probably almost 30 degrees, making a mess of the food we were preparing below. Water sliced and lined having been thrown by the wind in black and white, deafening, screaming in my ears and in the rigging. Mario and I on opposite sides of the boat ducked, flattening ourselves down against the dinghy. The wind went up my nose, it blew so hard I could not think and I was almost lifted off my feet and off the dinghy on which I lay. When it passed we looked to leeward in the fading light to see a swirling tornado-like spectre white and dynamic, twist its way down the bay, spray given form...
We set out at 22:30. Ian and Katya were on watch from 11 to 2am so Mario and I tried to get some shuteye. My shoulder (which I injured the day before and am still recovering from - this was the first and worst day) was so bad that I could not sleep. I could not find any position that was not excruciating. After 2 hours I came out and sat there at the table, forced to explain to Ian and Katya what was up (i don´t like to complain and had just kept my mouth shut). I took an anti inflammatory (very uncharacteristic for me) which did nothing but when my watch came at 2am the wind started to pick up. I couldn´t do anything with my left arm and apart from the massive seizing pain that it gave me at rest, supporting any weight with it was even more excruciating. Instead they made me go to bed but I was unable to sleep because of my arm and with the rising wind, up to 30kts and over 2meter seas I was being thrown around like a ragdoll in my bunk. I came out again at 530am to violent pitching and a defeated feeling in the air. Current against us, wind at 30kts, gusting 40kts on our nose, an unenterable cove (in the dark) zero progress and three hours until daylight meant we had only one option: we had turned around and were headed, no sails, no motor, downwind and with the current doing 7kts. I was nauseous with pain (the worst I have felt in my memory) and the pitching was making me seasick. I was sent to bed again at 6am and at about 7am I somehow managed about 2 hours of sleep waking up at 9 to coffee and a boat our home, secure in the same cove we left ten hours before. Distance travelled: 28miles Net distance covered: 0 miles. Morale: shit. Pain: unbearable.
Monday, May 17, 2010
a few photos, more to come before I embark again
The Persimmon lies in the bottom left corner
Seno Pia glacier and some cool mossy things at Caleta Brecknock, before entering the Magellan Strait
Photos of Caleta Brecknock where we went for a nice walk on one ofthe days waiting for bad weather to blow over
Williwaw on the left (gust of about 60-70kts (over 100 km-h) and below a double rainbow, honestly a dime a dozen with the crazy changeable weather
Coming out of Seno Pia the Darwin Range of Tierra del Fuego
Yendegaia where Jose and Anamy live, only accessible by boat!
Snow in Puerto Williams on Georggio´s boat (the italian man who wrote the 1000plus page patagonian cruisers bible - we chilled with him - a professional musician we could hear him practicing scales and playing studies every day!)
Williwaw on the left (gust of about 60-70kts (over 100 km-h) and below a double rainbow, honestly a dime a dozen with the crazy changeable weather
Coming out of Seno Pia the Darwin Range of Tierra del Fuego
Yendegaia where Jose and Anamy live, only accessible by boat!
Snow in Puerto Williams on Georggio´s boat (the italian man who wrote the 1000plus page patagonian cruisers bible - we chilled with him - a professional musician we could hear him practicing scales and playing studies every day!)
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Futility
Is the name of the game, this game, the game of trying to put into words what can only be experienced in life. James Joyce said that "the fall" came not when Eve ate the forbidden fruit but when humans began to use language. When we began to use more than simple grunts of effort and groans of pleasure. That is when we limited ourselves. Lately I have been feeling very limited by language and my human ability to express.
We sailed away from Puerto Williams almost a month ago now with snow and gale force winds. Our motor died and we had to find an anchorage in the dark...
We have traversed canals, the massive Darwin range of Tierra del Fuego looming all around us, white and blue. Sneaking into a protected by we have struck ice, of the many chunks that had calved off of a glacier right in front of us that ran into the sea. Glaciers that flow and cling off mountains and pour off of the humpbacked hills and mountains, snowy peaks that feel dipped in frost, dusted. A land, this land that has scared spectres and ghosts for thousands of years so that the only thing that remains is the wind, the scraping bare, horrible, lifegiving wind that twists trees and gnarls branches. And water a bed of water, a bed of fresh sweet liquid that permanently pours off of the faces of green metre-thick moss and delicate flowers, sweating rocks and horrible faces.
Instead of writing all my diary entries which could prove to be very tedious for the both of us, I will instead post some of my poetry and maybe a few "extraordinary" experiences (as if not all else is also extraordinary!)
Mostly what is fresh:
May 11
... Today we left Puerto Tamar, the western end of the Magellan strait, rounded the cape of Tamar into the huge mouth, open to the massive poorly named Pacific. What we experience was a dreamy sun, and dreamy rocks, hard as the sea and the wind, the angelic sun cutting luminescent coins from the glowing black clouds. All these words are just words. they cannot ever paint the gold on the water like shards of stainedglass or broken ice on the mountains of rolling water, folding into themselves and into the sweating rocks that hump the horizon and trace their green veins and capillieries from a celestial blue and black to the forever grey ocean...
We sailed all day at 5kts and when the wind began to die, fade fast into the endless brine and be sucked up in the calm swell... at this moment we were doing 2kts...but within 5 minutes the water was black with wind shadowing the exploding sun. White conches broke the dark water with heaven , with white. A forest of surrenders, white flags. We bore off and reached in 30kts of wind, with one reef in the mainsail and a reduced genoa until the mouth of the Smyth Canal where we found a land of enchanted orange flowers growing on meters of soft moss and a thousand homeless rocks. we squeezed into bays where we broke the obscure mirror sending our wake to the edge, fast, feet away by the draped stones, draped in green and turquoise grey full of twisted branches beaten for thousands of years by the real winds these jets that buffet everywhere always forever.
Ah, and all under a yellow hue, in a world squeezed from a tired lemon and left to glow, black and yellow quiet and full of trolls and one eyed unicors and the wet dark smell of moss. All that was left for us was everything in the world, the sunset painted on the first clear sky in weeks and cypress silloittes creeping out of the whispery quiet walls around our anchorage.
...
The next day we reached with only our staysail in 30-40kts gusting over 50 at 5-7kts and only went twelve miles when the wind shifted against us we pulled in and anchored.
...
The next day...views have been spectacular. the sun made vegetation very green, vibrant instead of the customary dull green. And the afternoon lifght was almost pink. We saw another whale that lumbered on majestically down the channel. Tere is something honouring and awe inspiring about being in the presence of such a beast! As usual, light and its absence makes the difference. Weather, clouds and precipitation mix with light and dark and the result is a cosmos of contrast and sweeping colours. Going through Paso Victoria we looked back at Seno Union, a spectacular mix of mountian silouetted land falling into the misty yellow light pouring out of a hole in the clouds... And then dolphins. We saw them in the distance on our port side so we rushed up to the bow and I stood on the prow right on the anchor hanging my body over the rail. But the dolphins, 3 of them, waited up, they could hear if not feel our escitement. They swam, crossing and twisting, sinchronizing and braiding their lightning paths in the bowwave. We yelled and called in excitement. they got ahead and doubled back to play in the bow wave again. They did this for probably ten minutes...
The following poem was inspired by my diary entry from may 11... thats why there are so many similarities...
The Beginning
You win this one
My bare teeth are
Pointing to the sky
And into the rascally rollers
Lines that are circles
Pry my awe, they pry my jaw.
You terrible bed of undulating shards!
You cracking beasts of lore!
No, no.
I win this run,
The cutout cloud prints sliced by the sun
Mountain jaws, the bareback humpback rotten hills
A bird, a kelp gull
Basks in the endless zephyrs til a downdraft
Flaps its wings.
Careen, float, in and out
With your brazen beak
Your weightless curves, searching
With beady eyes the fish famished waves
For a feed -
Goodbye gull! Goodbye you lonely floater!
I will never see you again -
Into the trough
And over a salty crest that saws the sky.
Horizon? Horizon?
I must have coughed or choked
On my own surprise.
Waves to slow my blood, accelerate the heart,
Explode into the sky by the tower...
A tower! A tower!
A howling sillouette, a plaster
Sculpture that becons the birds
And the brimming well of brandishing swords,
A beacon to boats,
A harlot of the standing silent swell
The answer comes to me:
This unicorn and this lemon sky;
These pink bells and 442
Different colours that whisper to me
From sponges, from river corners.
Twinkling dewy mosses
Drip with imagination and slimy lichen,
Protective rusts in the rotten childhood hideaways,
Laberynths of humanless fairytales,
Sopping twisted trees and green,
Green, green, green!
To me, into my wiley world
Of moss and stone
It is not a game!
This is not a game!
Untitled
I
I want to be where
Nobody sees me
Where I fly beneath senses
And everyone is muted
By grandeur.
Domes loom, domes punch the sky;
Rocks fragment the clouds and
Only rusty greens
Crawl up the granites, rusty capillieries
On the glowing, shining stones -
Shine on you wet rocks, where
Veins of minute crystals vapourize
Like a misty spectre
A spectre? A ghost? A phantom? No!
No spirits fly these winds,
Only mist and brine
Because the wind has haunted these rocks
And they never wanted, never loved,
Just blown away and lonely in the echoes.
II
Don´t be afraid grey lines,
I will remain here forever to see you ,
Even if every whisper says im dead
And the rain and the sparrows and gulls ignore me
I shall stay to watch all your shades
From which your tears pour onto the frost
Like morning petals.
Don´t worry grey lines,
You will never be forgotten,
Even if its only my humid bones
Where you engraved your name
Every second for months
And the blubbery backs of whales.
I feel your pulse
From this shell that bobs
Up and up and screams through
Cables and cuts through like knives and butter
Past the penguins and the seals.
Puerto Williams
There are little pebbles, echoes of a stone
That wait eternities or seconds for the sun to loosen
Rivers in the mountains,
For a trip to the sea, a one way ticket
To a channel that leads nowhere;
The grey street water
Feeds children´s breath for as long as
We can remember - as long as houses and
Planes last at the end of the earth
And the crumbling white mountains and the dogs.
A clown show and a circus of wild men
A clanging of metal and dacron in the wind,
A rumbling of engines, a gurgling of water
And a short everlasting snow in the sunchilled -
A goodbye under a bright black sky that
Sears the sea with white flecks and whips it
In our way
We sailed away from Puerto Williams almost a month ago now with snow and gale force winds. Our motor died and we had to find an anchorage in the dark...
We have traversed canals, the massive Darwin range of Tierra del Fuego looming all around us, white and blue. Sneaking into a protected by we have struck ice, of the many chunks that had calved off of a glacier right in front of us that ran into the sea. Glaciers that flow and cling off mountains and pour off of the humpbacked hills and mountains, snowy peaks that feel dipped in frost, dusted. A land, this land that has scared spectres and ghosts for thousands of years so that the only thing that remains is the wind, the scraping bare, horrible, lifegiving wind that twists trees and gnarls branches. And water a bed of water, a bed of fresh sweet liquid that permanently pours off of the faces of green metre-thick moss and delicate flowers, sweating rocks and horrible faces.
Instead of writing all my diary entries which could prove to be very tedious for the both of us, I will instead post some of my poetry and maybe a few "extraordinary" experiences (as if not all else is also extraordinary!)
Mostly what is fresh:
May 11
... Today we left Puerto Tamar, the western end of the Magellan strait, rounded the cape of Tamar into the huge mouth, open to the massive poorly named Pacific. What we experience was a dreamy sun, and dreamy rocks, hard as the sea and the wind, the angelic sun cutting luminescent coins from the glowing black clouds. All these words are just words. they cannot ever paint the gold on the water like shards of stainedglass or broken ice on the mountains of rolling water, folding into themselves and into the sweating rocks that hump the horizon and trace their green veins and capillieries from a celestial blue and black to the forever grey ocean...
We sailed all day at 5kts and when the wind began to die, fade fast into the endless brine and be sucked up in the calm swell... at this moment we were doing 2kts...but within 5 minutes the water was black with wind shadowing the exploding sun. White conches broke the dark water with heaven , with white. A forest of surrenders, white flags. We bore off and reached in 30kts of wind, with one reef in the mainsail and a reduced genoa until the mouth of the Smyth Canal where we found a land of enchanted orange flowers growing on meters of soft moss and a thousand homeless rocks. we squeezed into bays where we broke the obscure mirror sending our wake to the edge, fast, feet away by the draped stones, draped in green and turquoise grey full of twisted branches beaten for thousands of years by the real winds these jets that buffet everywhere always forever.
Ah, and all under a yellow hue, in a world squeezed from a tired lemon and left to glow, black and yellow quiet and full of trolls and one eyed unicors and the wet dark smell of moss. All that was left for us was everything in the world, the sunset painted on the first clear sky in weeks and cypress silloittes creeping out of the whispery quiet walls around our anchorage.
...
The next day we reached with only our staysail in 30-40kts gusting over 50 at 5-7kts and only went twelve miles when the wind shifted against us we pulled in and anchored.
...
The next day...views have been spectacular. the sun made vegetation very green, vibrant instead of the customary dull green. And the afternoon lifght was almost pink. We saw another whale that lumbered on majestically down the channel. Tere is something honouring and awe inspiring about being in the presence of such a beast! As usual, light and its absence makes the difference. Weather, clouds and precipitation mix with light and dark and the result is a cosmos of contrast and sweeping colours. Going through Paso Victoria we looked back at Seno Union, a spectacular mix of mountian silouetted land falling into the misty yellow light pouring out of a hole in the clouds... And then dolphins. We saw them in the distance on our port side so we rushed up to the bow and I stood on the prow right on the anchor hanging my body over the rail. But the dolphins, 3 of them, waited up, they could hear if not feel our escitement. They swam, crossing and twisting, sinchronizing and braiding their lightning paths in the bowwave. We yelled and called in excitement. they got ahead and doubled back to play in the bow wave again. They did this for probably ten minutes...
The following poem was inspired by my diary entry from may 11... thats why there are so many similarities...
The Beginning
You win this one
My bare teeth are
Pointing to the sky
And into the rascally rollers
Lines that are circles
Pry my awe, they pry my jaw.
You terrible bed of undulating shards!
You cracking beasts of lore!
No, no.
I win this run,
The cutout cloud prints sliced by the sun
Mountain jaws, the bareback humpback rotten hills
A bird, a kelp gull
Basks in the endless zephyrs til a downdraft
Flaps its wings.
Careen, float, in and out
With your brazen beak
Your weightless curves, searching
With beady eyes the fish famished waves
For a feed -
Goodbye gull! Goodbye you lonely floater!
I will never see you again -
Into the trough
And over a salty crest that saws the sky.
Horizon? Horizon?
I must have coughed or choked
On my own surprise.
Waves to slow my blood, accelerate the heart,
Explode into the sky by the tower...
A tower! A tower!
A howling sillouette, a plaster
Sculpture that becons the birds
And the brimming well of brandishing swords,
A beacon to boats,
A harlot of the standing silent swell
The answer comes to me:
This unicorn and this lemon sky;
These pink bells and 442
Different colours that whisper to me
From sponges, from river corners.
Twinkling dewy mosses
Drip with imagination and slimy lichen,
Protective rusts in the rotten childhood hideaways,
Laberynths of humanless fairytales,
Sopping twisted trees and green,
Green, green, green!
To me, into my wiley world
Of moss and stone
It is not a game!
This is not a game!
Untitled
I
I want to be where
Nobody sees me
Where I fly beneath senses
And everyone is muted
By grandeur.
Domes loom, domes punch the sky;
Rocks fragment the clouds and
Only rusty greens
Crawl up the granites, rusty capillieries
On the glowing, shining stones -
Shine on you wet rocks, where
Veins of minute crystals vapourize
Like a misty spectre
A spectre? A ghost? A phantom? No!
No spirits fly these winds,
Only mist and brine
Because the wind has haunted these rocks
And they never wanted, never loved,
Just blown away and lonely in the echoes.
II
Don´t be afraid grey lines,
I will remain here forever to see you ,
Even if every whisper says im dead
And the rain and the sparrows and gulls ignore me
I shall stay to watch all your shades
From which your tears pour onto the frost
Like morning petals.
Don´t worry grey lines,
You will never be forgotten,
Even if its only my humid bones
Where you engraved your name
Every second for months
And the blubbery backs of whales.
I feel your pulse
From this shell that bobs
Up and up and screams through
Cables and cuts through like knives and butter
Past the penguins and the seals.
Puerto Williams
There are little pebbles, echoes of a stone
That wait eternities or seconds for the sun to loosen
Rivers in the mountains,
For a trip to the sea, a one way ticket
To a channel that leads nowhere;
The grey street water
Feeds children´s breath for as long as
We can remember - as long as houses and
Planes last at the end of the earth
And the crumbling white mountains and the dogs.
A clown show and a circus of wild men
A clanging of metal and dacron in the wind,
A rumbling of engines, a gurgling of water
And a short everlasting snow in the sunchilled -
A goodbye under a bright black sky that
Sears the sea with white flecks and whips it
In our way
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Puerto Williams
I am now in Puerto Williams, Isla Navarino. We are leaving today and from now on no internet contact, just glaciers fjords and storms. I hope all is well and when I can I will post more photos on Flickr - by the way this is the link, without having to sign in you can just look at the photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44544772@N03/
News to come in 2-4 weeks! now to the high seas!!!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44544772@N03/
News to come in 2-4 weeks! now to the high seas!!!
Monday, April 19, 2010
Backcountry to the sea.
I just climbed a mountain in the snowy cold Ushuaian backcountry. We hiked in, bushwacked through a valley and above the tree line and skirted our way around the scree of a mountain, camping high up near a lake. The next day we awoke in the dark and after a hat breakfast we began the ascent. Up up up the snowy scree and rubble to where we thought we could access the peak - but a cliff got in our way, close to the summit so we had to give it up and climb the mountain next door. Bizzarre clear skies, white mountains all around, a ton of adrenaline as some of this should have been climbing but with such loose rock its impossible to put protection in... so we had to be very careful. Last night we came back, tired, wet and muddy, showered and had a big potluck at the clubhouse with all the french and italian sailors. Today we are finally leaving for the sea, the ocean voyage, with a quick stop in Puerto Williams (Chilean customs). More news to come, bon voyage a tous!!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Voyage
This will be short. Ushuaia, the most southern city in the world, is beautiful, surrounded by mountains, built on the slope of the base of snowy peaks, it has a sheltered harbour on the Beagle Canal and in the distance across the channel the Dientes de Navarino loom large and to the right the massive Darwin range towers in the distance.
I will be back in June to teach cross country skiing with the Club Andino and do some randonee/backcountry skiing in the mountains as well as perhaps some iceclimbing and light mountaineering if I´m lucky... but first...
I am going to crew on a 40ft sailing yacht, owned and captained by an Australian man who has been sailing, solo and crewed in every corner of the world for the past 9 years. We are heading to Puerto Montt, the same route as the Navimag ferry, through massive fjords, past untouched, and indeed unseen glaciers, deserted bays in the rain, wind, snow... i have no idea what it will be like, I cannot even imagine, but at the end I will post a big blog!
This, for me is a dream, an opportunity of a lifetime and a peice of what is becoming a perfect puzzle of a chapter of my life! I am now hanging around Ushuaia, buying gear (rain stuff and rubber boots, thick socks... - as there is a lot of waiting in the cold storm stay weather) and buying books for all the down time.
The voyage will last, with many days for exploration and storm stays (waiting for better weather, because in these thousands of islands and narrow passages you cannot sail in very bad weather nor at night, so progress is very slow) - including all this it could take almost 3 months maximum to arrive in Puerto Montt. I will likely hop off in one of the few ports along the way (really there are about three populated ports on the rout before Chiloe) with a total of 3weeks to a month and a half on the boat.
More news to come.
I will be back in June to teach cross country skiing with the Club Andino and do some randonee/backcountry skiing in the mountains as well as perhaps some iceclimbing and light mountaineering if I´m lucky... but first...
I am going to crew on a 40ft sailing yacht, owned and captained by an Australian man who has been sailing, solo and crewed in every corner of the world for the past 9 years. We are heading to Puerto Montt, the same route as the Navimag ferry, through massive fjords, past untouched, and indeed unseen glaciers, deserted bays in the rain, wind, snow... i have no idea what it will be like, I cannot even imagine, but at the end I will post a big blog!
This, for me is a dream, an opportunity of a lifetime and a peice of what is becoming a perfect puzzle of a chapter of my life! I am now hanging around Ushuaia, buying gear (rain stuff and rubber boots, thick socks... - as there is a lot of waiting in the cold storm stay weather) and buying books for all the down time.
The voyage will last, with many days for exploration and storm stays (waiting for better weather, because in these thousands of islands and narrow passages you cannot sail in very bad weather nor at night, so progress is very slow) - including all this it could take almost 3 months maximum to arrive in Puerto Montt. I will likely hop off in one of the few ports along the way (really there are about three populated ports on the rout before Chiloe) with a total of 3weeks to a month and a half on the boat.
More news to come.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Trekking log: Torres del Paines
The Crazies
After much negociating and I think a valid attempt at penetrating further into the park, I gave up. Without a guide or a packraft, Glaciar Tyndall and Geike are virtually inaccesible...a guide offered me half price (you have to pay for a boat, horses, permission to be on private land..) at 200,000 pesos - about$400 - thats the sort of clownery we are dealing with!!!
Anyway after paying an arm and a leg to get into the park, get the shuttle bus and take the ferry to the start of the trek I met a freindly Swede named Henrik. We were going to the same place and we were both going quite fast. So we hiked the 15 km up to Campamento Guarda, pas the Glaciar Grey Camp (where you have to pay!) We set up our stuff and then we continued with just food and water another 6km up the trail. This section wound up and down the rocky shore of tLago Grey along and above the glacier. I ran this section and consequently got some pretty funny looks fro uninitiated tourists!!! Henrik ran part of it too and what we saw was spectacualar. Everything is so whit that the littl black rock of the moutnains in the distance that does appear, does so lika a mirage in the sun, it looks like smoke. The massive blue white glacier went as far as the eye could see, feeding into the Campo d Hielo Sur (aside from the poles the largest section of continental ice in the world! The white peaks and the misty clouds surround. As we went up, the glacier infront of us, we saw and heard a massive chunk of ice the size of a house or perhaps larger, break off and splash into the lake, slow motion! Day 1 27km
On the way down the next day we there were chunks of ice, iceburgs, floating surreal blue in the grey water, against the dark clouds and the deep gren forest...The rest of the day was rather uneventful, again we just went very fast, doing 22km or so before 2pm. Then we set up at Campamento Italiano (where there is a mouse problem!!) and we ran up tthe Valle Frances.Fom there we ascended to Campamento Britanico and the lookout in the heart of the valley. We said we´d meet up at Britanico as I was running and Henrik was not. I ran past the burning fall colours, up, up the steep rock, past the massive Cerro Paine, little talked about but massive and impressive, big blue glaciers hanging off its jet black and jagged faces. The clouds were high so everything was visible; past the thick permanent snow that pads the glaciers and peaks I arrived at Britanico and i sat down to grab a handful of GORP. I waited probably 10 minutes befor a) starting to get cold andb) starting to get a bit worried as to the whereabouts of Henrik. I didn´t let myself worry though but as I was getting clold I started to head up to the mirador (lookout). Just as I left I saw three people we had both passed on the way up so I asked them if they had seen Henrik... no they said, only when he passed them with me... Ok now I started to worry. I ran down instead, winding through the rocky and muddy singletrack through twisted trees, about 15 minutes before I arrived at a river crossing where the trail was not overtly obvious... there I saw Henrik - even in that moment he was lost. He had got the the river crossing, not seen the trail, seen an alternate one that went up the riverbed and taken that for 20minutes. When he realized that it was not the trail he started to come down to look for the proper one but said he had passed this point already and not seen the trail... lucky he didn´t turn out a statistic!!!
So we both headed up to the mirador, a decision I am glad I mad. On the right and behind are the bicoloured cuernos (horns) tan coloured granite topped with jagged mudstone and dipped in snowy frost. To the left a huge black mountain and one of the frosted Torres followed by a line of jagged snoy super crisp peaks in front and below this ring of rock and ice a belt of fiery fall colours lighting up the valley. All the peaks looked like they had been put in the freezer. Misty snowy frosted and crisp! In the valley you are absolutely surrounded by rock walls that flow into one and other - multicoloured and gigantic. Its almost a full circle as if you are in the embrace of God Herself. Day 2 29.3km
Today was spposed to be short, only 21 km but with the fatigue of the other days it was the hardest. This side is like a highway in April - I cannot imagine what high season in Jan-Feb is like - suffocating I imagine! Some Americans, Brian and Emily, had a frisbee so we played on a rock/mud plateau under the shadow of rocky faces and a smiling glacier... now dinner. Day 3 21km, tired as shit!
4am wakeup call from the Americans. I pack up my sleeping bag, mat, warm clothes, stove and breakfast and am walking by 430am. I could see Emily and Brian´s headlamps ahead of me as I laboured up the steep trail. I caught them after ten minutes and as our headlamps are made for seeing around the campsite and not seeing far ahead we lost the trail. (On coming down I have no idea how because it was very well marked and extremely well travelled...but alas.) We scrambled up the rocky loose morrain to a point probably 150m above the glacial lake that sits at the foot of the Torres. It started to rain as I took out my sleeping bag to get ready for breakfast and sunrise at the Torres...oops didn´t think of that! They made coffee, I made some killer oatmeal and we watched the sunrise and the massive obelisks of rock! Unfortunately due to cloud cover we didn´t get the show of colours you see in photos, but beautiful nonetheless. We were the only ones up there. Indeed, on our way down, in the light we saw, at the foot of the lake about 20 people who hadn´t lost their way - I think it was better that way though we had it all to ourselves ina matter of speech. We came down, I said goodbye to my companion, Henrik drank so mate with the americans and we headed out toward Campamento Japones. We walked an hour by the winding grey glacial river , past the forest and changign leaves, sometimes skirting the river within inhes and others climbing the scree morain for views of the valley. We said goodby at Japones and they turned back. Now I was by myself. I began my run/hike up further into the forest, then above the forest, scrambling over rocks on the bed of a stream. Then I crossed a riverbed of sedimentary bedrock that was steep steep. With the water and the rain that was now gently falling I would have been a splat on a rock without my hiking poles! I wound my way around and up the base of the huge mouintain, past the colours, the black charcoal coloured rocks , the granite, into the misty Valle del silencio...
Solitude
All this sound; it is the fault of the rocks, that break the silence in every way. For the water that falls from the silent blue glaciers wouldn´t make a sound were it not for the rock that it drills and slaps and flows over, tumbling to an invisible river that rushes below. The wind would be silent too were it not for the towers of granite that stood thousands of years of ice that now whistle and the wind that howls through cracks and past million year old edges; and my feet, were it not for the remnants of endless rock slides would flow silently in the air... but instead they upset the stones that line this pat, wrapping around the mountain between colous and clouds that sit in this dead valley. Ia m alone in this valley. I run, scramble, walk, with care, make my way deep into its heart, around the back of the torres. Only climbers come here and its not climbing season so I am alone with the rock and ice, the clouds and the wind and I feel wonderfully tiny and insigvificant, that black dot that drags itself about the earth, but just a dot, as I sit snacking, in my foul-weather gear on a massive granite boulder.
I run down, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, endorphins flowing through my veins, making sounds sharper, colours clearer, and making the rain the clouds the countless glaciers and incomprehensible rock formations more beautiful... and I a alone.
On my way down I met two people coming up...my whole human body was broken. The aloneness that I felt, the beautiful solitude so rare in this park of 200,000 visitors each year, was shattered not by presence, but by my knowledge of human presence (of course they did nothing to bother me, just said hi and passed). My solitude smashed, like a bottle on the balck rocks under the glowing manderin canopy.
I scramble down the riverbed and into the windy mud/sand pack narrow singletrack where I fly, navigating some hairpin turns using trees to slingshot myself around the bend by grabbing it as I go. The river is crisp sounding, flowing over the rocks and everything is on fire. I love Patagonia. This night I cook by myself under the shadow of the Torres. The next day I walk out under a raining and then completely revealing sky. And that is it.
After much negociating and I think a valid attempt at penetrating further into the park, I gave up. Without a guide or a packraft, Glaciar Tyndall and Geike are virtually inaccesible...a guide offered me half price (you have to pay for a boat, horses, permission to be on private land..) at 200,000 pesos - about$400 - thats the sort of clownery we are dealing with!!!
Anyway after paying an arm and a leg to get into the park, get the shuttle bus and take the ferry to the start of the trek I met a freindly Swede named Henrik. We were going to the same place and we were both going quite fast. So we hiked the 15 km up to Campamento Guarda, pas the Glaciar Grey Camp (where you have to pay!) We set up our stuff and then we continued with just food and water another 6km up the trail. This section wound up and down the rocky shore of tLago Grey along and above the glacier. I ran this section and consequently got some pretty funny looks fro uninitiated tourists!!! Henrik ran part of it too and what we saw was spectacualar. Everything is so whit that the littl black rock of the moutnains in the distance that does appear, does so lika a mirage in the sun, it looks like smoke. The massive blue white glacier went as far as the eye could see, feeding into the Campo d Hielo Sur (aside from the poles the largest section of continental ice in the world! The white peaks and the misty clouds surround. As we went up, the glacier infront of us, we saw and heard a massive chunk of ice the size of a house or perhaps larger, break off and splash into the lake, slow motion! Day 1 27km
On the way down the next day we there were chunks of ice, iceburgs, floating surreal blue in the grey water, against the dark clouds and the deep gren forest...The rest of the day was rather uneventful, again we just went very fast, doing 22km or so before 2pm. Then we set up at Campamento Italiano (where there is a mouse problem!!) and we ran up tthe Valle Frances.Fom there we ascended to Campamento Britanico and the lookout in the heart of the valley. We said we´d meet up at Britanico as I was running and Henrik was not. I ran past the burning fall colours, up, up the steep rock, past the massive Cerro Paine, little talked about but massive and impressive, big blue glaciers hanging off its jet black and jagged faces. The clouds were high so everything was visible; past the thick permanent snow that pads the glaciers and peaks I arrived at Britanico and i sat down to grab a handful of GORP. I waited probably 10 minutes befor a) starting to get cold andb) starting to get a bit worried as to the whereabouts of Henrik. I didn´t let myself worry though but as I was getting clold I started to head up to the mirador (lookout). Just as I left I saw three people we had both passed on the way up so I asked them if they had seen Henrik... no they said, only when he passed them with me... Ok now I started to worry. I ran down instead, winding through the rocky and muddy singletrack through twisted trees, about 15 minutes before I arrived at a river crossing where the trail was not overtly obvious... there I saw Henrik - even in that moment he was lost. He had got the the river crossing, not seen the trail, seen an alternate one that went up the riverbed and taken that for 20minutes. When he realized that it was not the trail he started to come down to look for the proper one but said he had passed this point already and not seen the trail... lucky he didn´t turn out a statistic!!!
So we both headed up to the mirador, a decision I am glad I mad. On the right and behind are the bicoloured cuernos (horns) tan coloured granite topped with jagged mudstone and dipped in snowy frost. To the left a huge black mountain and one of the frosted Torres followed by a line of jagged snoy super crisp peaks in front and below this ring of rock and ice a belt of fiery fall colours lighting up the valley. All the peaks looked like they had been put in the freezer. Misty snowy frosted and crisp! In the valley you are absolutely surrounded by rock walls that flow into one and other - multicoloured and gigantic. Its almost a full circle as if you are in the embrace of God Herself. Day 2 29.3km
Today was spposed to be short, only 21 km but with the fatigue of the other days it was the hardest. This side is like a highway in April - I cannot imagine what high season in Jan-Feb is like - suffocating I imagine! Some Americans, Brian and Emily, had a frisbee so we played on a rock/mud plateau under the shadow of rocky faces and a smiling glacier... now dinner. Day 3 21km, tired as shit!
4am wakeup call from the Americans. I pack up my sleeping bag, mat, warm clothes, stove and breakfast and am walking by 430am. I could see Emily and Brian´s headlamps ahead of me as I laboured up the steep trail. I caught them after ten minutes and as our headlamps are made for seeing around the campsite and not seeing far ahead we lost the trail. (On coming down I have no idea how because it was very well marked and extremely well travelled...but alas.) We scrambled up the rocky loose morrain to a point probably 150m above the glacial lake that sits at the foot of the Torres. It started to rain as I took out my sleeping bag to get ready for breakfast and sunrise at the Torres...oops didn´t think of that! They made coffee, I made some killer oatmeal and we watched the sunrise and the massive obelisks of rock! Unfortunately due to cloud cover we didn´t get the show of colours you see in photos, but beautiful nonetheless. We were the only ones up there. Indeed, on our way down, in the light we saw, at the foot of the lake about 20 people who hadn´t lost their way - I think it was better that way though we had it all to ourselves ina matter of speech. We came down, I said goodbye to my companion, Henrik drank so mate with the americans and we headed out toward Campamento Japones. We walked an hour by the winding grey glacial river , past the forest and changign leaves, sometimes skirting the river within inhes and others climbing the scree morain for views of the valley. We said goodby at Japones and they turned back. Now I was by myself. I began my run/hike up further into the forest, then above the forest, scrambling over rocks on the bed of a stream. Then I crossed a riverbed of sedimentary bedrock that was steep steep. With the water and the rain that was now gently falling I would have been a splat on a rock without my hiking poles! I wound my way around and up the base of the huge mouintain, past the colours, the black charcoal coloured rocks , the granite, into the misty Valle del silencio...
Solitude
All this sound; it is the fault of the rocks, that break the silence in every way. For the water that falls from the silent blue glaciers wouldn´t make a sound were it not for the rock that it drills and slaps and flows over, tumbling to an invisible river that rushes below. The wind would be silent too were it not for the towers of granite that stood thousands of years of ice that now whistle and the wind that howls through cracks and past million year old edges; and my feet, were it not for the remnants of endless rock slides would flow silently in the air... but instead they upset the stones that line this pat, wrapping around the mountain between colous and clouds that sit in this dead valley. Ia m alone in this valley. I run, scramble, walk, with care, make my way deep into its heart, around the back of the torres. Only climbers come here and its not climbing season so I am alone with the rock and ice, the clouds and the wind and I feel wonderfully tiny and insigvificant, that black dot that drags itself about the earth, but just a dot, as I sit snacking, in my foul-weather gear on a massive granite boulder.
I run down, heart racing, adrenaline pumping, endorphins flowing through my veins, making sounds sharper, colours clearer, and making the rain the clouds the countless glaciers and incomprehensible rock formations more beautiful... and I a alone.
On my way down I met two people coming up...my whole human body was broken. The aloneness that I felt, the beautiful solitude so rare in this park of 200,000 visitors each year, was shattered not by presence, but by my knowledge of human presence (of course they did nothing to bother me, just said hi and passed). My solitude smashed, like a bottle on the balck rocks under the glowing manderin canopy.
I scramble down the riverbed and into the windy mud/sand pack narrow singletrack where I fly, navigating some hairpin turns using trees to slingshot myself around the bend by grabbing it as I go. The river is crisp sounding, flowing over the rocks and everything is on fire. I love Patagonia. This night I cook by myself under the shadow of the Torres. The next day I walk out under a raining and then completely revealing sky. And that is it.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Footnote to crossing the border
As I had mentioned, I crossed the border on foot at the end of March from Chile Chico to Los Antiguos (Arg.) Everything that I own was on my back and the sun shone down from the blue sky and the crazy wind blew in my face. I began to sing to myself La Frontera by Lhasa de Sela. I heard it once on CBC at work and I know no other music by Lhasa but this is a spooky beautiful song. I will post the lyrics if I can find them, and my own (albeit amature) translation. I can´t explain my reasons for travelling and the feeling that you know you have to go, even though you love, better than this song:
Hoy vuelvo a la frontera
Otra vez he de atravesar
Es el viento que me manda
Que me empuja a la frontera
Y que borra el camino
Que detras desaparece
Today I return to the border
Once again I must cross
It is the wind that sends me there,
That pushes me toward the border
And that erases my path
That behind me disappears
Me arrastro bajo el cielo
Y las nubes del invierno
Es el viento que las manda
Y no hay nadie que las pare
A veces combate despiadado
A veces baile
Y a veces...nada
I drag myself under the sky
And the winter clouds
It is the wind that sends them
And nobody in the world can stop them(clouds)
At times it fights mercilessly (the wind)
At times it dances
And at times... it does nothing
Hoy cruzo la frontera
Bajo el cielo
Bajo el cielo
Es el viento que me manda
Bajo el cielo de acero
Soy el punto negro que anda
A las orillas de la suerte
Today I cross the border
Under the sky
Under the sky
It is the wind that sends me
Under the steely sky
I am the black dot that moves
On the shores of fate
Excuse the horrible translation but... that will have to do. Although my english version is not half as poetic one gets the idea and I must say that as I crossed the border this song and everything it means colonized my body and my mind and my spirit and I felt close to its heart.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Firsts (and some new unedited poetry)
Soundtrack
The Weird Sisters
Lhasa
Bob Dylan... still
Coldplay
Pink Floyd
I arrived in Chile Chico after what I thought was a tu7multuous ferry ride 2 1/2 hours accross Gereal Carrera. In the open part 5 or 6 foot waves threw spray around, enough that water dripped in the van door! Jarek and I bought groceries, petrol, tried to phone a guy who was said to have gone down the river Jeinimeni but couldn´t locate him...
Maria at tha ample hospedaje mad us a big lunch and we chatted and relaxed for an hour or so. Then we started surveying. at 4:30 we left the Land cruiser and after scrambling up and down impossibly steep sandy pampa and negotiating nearcliffs and rocky riverbed we arrived back at the vehicle at 9pm in the dark, with one headlamp and a gps to guide us.
Next day I wait while Jarek sorts out his life, all his stuff. He essentially travels with everything he owns in his vehicle - paragliding, pacrafting trekking... for months. So at 1pm we finally get going and after parking the vehicle and having a quick lunch we continue surveying. For 7 hours we survey and at the end we have surveyed 20 km in total. We walk back to the vehicle but the last 3 km we hitch a ride in an estancia owners truck. Red and green cliffs drop down to the river far below, cleaving the dry pampa in two, Argentina on one side and Chile on the other. River below, with bizarre cliffs of mud and almost-sedimentary rock and to the left mars-like protrusions of red rock from the eery green pasture. And above, shadowy lenticular clouds sit like looming pacific tornados. And the wind is howling.
At times, as we slid down impossibly steep sandy banks I was reminded of my childhood at our grandparents cottage when Maura Stephan Monica and I would slide down the sandy banks off the dirt road from the cottage - they seemed so big then and it didn´t matter that we got so dirty.
We camped by the river and the next day set out at 11:30 to finish surveying, as the rest of the river runs right along the road, within one kilometer. This part we surveyed much more easily and by 5pm we reached Lago Jeinimeni in the park, among the red and green and rusty mountains. The road into the park would be absolutely impossible without a massive 4*4 vehicle - we cross rivers and its like a mountain not a road.
I had never been in a packraft so we ran the first 4-5 km of the river that evening to get me used to the feeling - the level was very low so we were hitting our asses on rocks alot especially so high up the river where no rivers have joined yet. As we sat by the fire drying our stuff two trucks pulled up full of American and Argentine fisherman. They turned out to be suuper nice and they ended up shuttling us back after day two. They found us on the dark road under the patagonian moon on the dark pampa, wet and tired after 8 hours of paddling down half the river. We bumbed our way down between the cliffs and scooted through canyons. As we passed more and more confluences, the water got bigger and bigger - more fun less bumping asses. After this day, I had sunstroke, a sore shoulder and was beat tired. We listened to Bob Dylan (at my request) in the truck with Taylor and Pedro under the dark sky on a black road winding through the immense pampa. There may have been one moment where we were all secretly singing "...and how does it feel to be onyour own..."
We ate in silence under the shadow of the dark mountains and we went to bed. The next day, after lots of laughter and some warm goodbyes we left, hitting the water where we had taken out the day before, at the late hour of2pm. A little 13 year old boy from the estancia where we parked the vehicle came down to watch us wet up and set out. Long day. Bigger water. Not as bumpy because of the bigger volume but sometimes a bit scary. I) had some close calls, got pinned on some boulders and filled with water but never flipped. Even at one point got pinned, filled with water and spun around backwards in some big stuff, but i recovered and got to shore via an eddy and emptied out!
Once the canyon opened up into an ample river valley things were more fun, it was like being at a water park!The last ten km was less turbulent. We reached the bridge just before the river empties into Lago General Carrera and we packed up at dark and hiked the 8km into town, wet, tired, with all our gear! At 200m from the hospedaje two vehicles pulled over... the fisherman!!! bad timing though it would have been better if we didn´t have to walk the 8 km! As we traversed the final 4 km into town invisible dogs barked and growled at us prompting us to pick up sticks and stones for security. One even appeard under the cloud and the pitch black and the one flickering street lamp to bark and menace in person at the queer sight that we were... but we were fine and arrived for a warm shower a huge meal and a comfortable bed!
The next morning I bought lunch and we left the hospedaje to hitch back to the car... who should go by us not 100m from the hostel but the fisherman going to fish for another hour before their return to Coihaique. We jumped in the back of the pickup with three dogs, two coolers and a ton of fishing gear and went halfway, before they decided they didn´t have time to fish and had to drop us. We walked 8km and then got a ride the last three or so to the car, ate and came back.
In the end it was the first time I had ever packrafted! We were the first people, as far as we know, to go down the Jeinimeni from ist source at Lago Jeinimeni all the way to the mouth at General Carrera. 60km of pure class III which is not hard but there were essentially no breaks so it was right tiring! Its not as crazy as it sounds but its probably alot more fun than it sounds! A BLAST!! and lots of great scenery and people as well as some really cold water and some intense surveying!
Yesterday I walked across the Chilean/Argentine border, only getting a ride the last three kilometers to Los Antiguos where I got a bus to Rio Gallegos and from there to Puerto Natales. I have begun the pilgrimage that 150,000 eco-blind tourists do each year. I am in the goretex mecca of south america and I will soon be in one of the most famous national parks in South America, Torres del Paine. Hopefully i can locate the beaten track, and get off it!!!
As I walked in the heat of the pampa I sang Lhasa de Sela´s "La Fronter" (The Border) in my head - a beautful song - look it up on Youtube!!!
Poetry.
A question for the wind
I ask the wind about those white bones
That scatter the sandy ground, and about
The sun that beats the neverending pampa
Till it goes red and green and mars-like;
I ask the wind about this canyon,
That cleaves deep into the green plateau
And about these forgotten sheep, mummified
And parched by the cracking heat and a red sunset
Creeping to the cliffs and falling down the mud;
I ask the wind about the golden grasses,
Sparkling each morning with dew like delicate eyelashes
Until they dry and become mirrors to the sun,
Tufts exploding from the sand and the low thistles;
I ask the wind about the permanent wind
And to all this it howls; it whispers; it coos
And it cries; it even screams sometimes in the rocks
But it never answers me
The Antioasis*
There is nothing out ther:
An endless string of white towers
And a universe of parched tufts of grass
All shades of burnt, where except for fence posts
That run the endless sleepy road, direction does not exist
Under a baby blue, a steel-speckled sky
Oh, and the rusting skulls of sheep
Forgoitten on the plateau unable to hid from the sun,
And the rotting carcasses of cars dead of old age,
A spot on the universe, a spot on this exhausted land.
* * *
When there is nothing everything is garbage
Because everything pollutes nothingness.
There there is a petroleum antioasis in the flat plateau
When lines of poplars and pines like weeds
Are the only break in the rusted corrugated metal
And sloppy red hollow bricks,
When a disorganized mess of rusty oil barrells
And containers mar the incomprehensibly human
Grid on a star gazing pampa and old toothless men
Bored, even of the bottle and burnt from the long sun
Pace 20m sections of stupid perfect sidewalk
Between bricks and garbage and a coke bottle
And when this antioasis is ringed and cordoned
By inhabited enclaves of junk and barbed wire
Where remnants of millions of plastic bags cling to its teeth
And suffocate this place so all you can do is
Watch the shimmering lights move slowly out like ants
To smaller oases on the infinite flat,
When all there is to wait for in the day is
The swirling dust, and a few dollars, you just
Numbly stare at the ass in front of you, even if its not
Beautiful - or a better thing would be to look for a street
At the right moment, that runs east-west
And watch the sunset in colours (the only colours out here)
And the rising paper moon - A real oasis
In the human zoo
*The antioiasis is not counterculture. It is just a metaphor - the worthless pollutes the priceless.
Rio Gallegos
Even with my caffeine vertigo
When I stumble like an uncertain sea
Over the highway bridge, the overpass
With the balance of a drunkard,
Even my wavering legs can see its flat and stretches
As far as the (yes) the I can see,
And the long morning sun casts my shadow forever on the pavement,
I can´t see the end of this Galician waterway
That seems to stretch north to North into
A gamut of dzzying directions that spin the board
Underneath old rolling cars and poplar trees and the fresh crisp sunrise air
The Weird Sisters
Lhasa
Bob Dylan... still
Coldplay
Pink Floyd
I arrived in Chile Chico after what I thought was a tu7multuous ferry ride 2 1/2 hours accross Gereal Carrera. In the open part 5 or 6 foot waves threw spray around, enough that water dripped in the van door! Jarek and I bought groceries, petrol, tried to phone a guy who was said to have gone down the river Jeinimeni but couldn´t locate him...
Maria at tha ample hospedaje mad us a big lunch and we chatted and relaxed for an hour or so. Then we started surveying. at 4:30 we left the Land cruiser and after scrambling up and down impossibly steep sandy pampa and negotiating nearcliffs and rocky riverbed we arrived back at the vehicle at 9pm in the dark, with one headlamp and a gps to guide us.
Next day I wait while Jarek sorts out his life, all his stuff. He essentially travels with everything he owns in his vehicle - paragliding, pacrafting trekking... for months. So at 1pm we finally get going and after parking the vehicle and having a quick lunch we continue surveying. For 7 hours we survey and at the end we have surveyed 20 km in total. We walk back to the vehicle but the last 3 km we hitch a ride in an estancia owners truck. Red and green cliffs drop down to the river far below, cleaving the dry pampa in two, Argentina on one side and Chile on the other. River below, with bizarre cliffs of mud and almost-sedimentary rock and to the left mars-like protrusions of red rock from the eery green pasture. And above, shadowy lenticular clouds sit like looming pacific tornados. And the wind is howling.
At times, as we slid down impossibly steep sandy banks I was reminded of my childhood at our grandparents cottage when Maura Stephan Monica and I would slide down the sandy banks off the dirt road from the cottage - they seemed so big then and it didn´t matter that we got so dirty.
We camped by the river and the next day set out at 11:30 to finish surveying, as the rest of the river runs right along the road, within one kilometer. This part we surveyed much more easily and by 5pm we reached Lago Jeinimeni in the park, among the red and green and rusty mountains. The road into the park would be absolutely impossible without a massive 4*4 vehicle - we cross rivers and its like a mountain not a road.
I had never been in a packraft so we ran the first 4-5 km of the river that evening to get me used to the feeling - the level was very low so we were hitting our asses on rocks alot especially so high up the river where no rivers have joined yet. As we sat by the fire drying our stuff two trucks pulled up full of American and Argentine fisherman. They turned out to be suuper nice and they ended up shuttling us back after day two. They found us on the dark road under the patagonian moon on the dark pampa, wet and tired after 8 hours of paddling down half the river. We bumbed our way down between the cliffs and scooted through canyons. As we passed more and more confluences, the water got bigger and bigger - more fun less bumping asses. After this day, I had sunstroke, a sore shoulder and was beat tired. We listened to Bob Dylan (at my request) in the truck with Taylor and Pedro under the dark sky on a black road winding through the immense pampa. There may have been one moment where we were all secretly singing "...and how does it feel to be onyour own..."
We ate in silence under the shadow of the dark mountains and we went to bed. The next day, after lots of laughter and some warm goodbyes we left, hitting the water where we had taken out the day before, at the late hour of2pm. A little 13 year old boy from the estancia where we parked the vehicle came down to watch us wet up and set out. Long day. Bigger water. Not as bumpy because of the bigger volume but sometimes a bit scary. I) had some close calls, got pinned on some boulders and filled with water but never flipped. Even at one point got pinned, filled with water and spun around backwards in some big stuff, but i recovered and got to shore via an eddy and emptied out!
Once the canyon opened up into an ample river valley things were more fun, it was like being at a water park!The last ten km was less turbulent. We reached the bridge just before the river empties into Lago General Carrera and we packed up at dark and hiked the 8km into town, wet, tired, with all our gear! At 200m from the hospedaje two vehicles pulled over... the fisherman!!! bad timing though it would have been better if we didn´t have to walk the 8 km! As we traversed the final 4 km into town invisible dogs barked and growled at us prompting us to pick up sticks and stones for security. One even appeard under the cloud and the pitch black and the one flickering street lamp to bark and menace in person at the queer sight that we were... but we were fine and arrived for a warm shower a huge meal and a comfortable bed!
The next morning I bought lunch and we left the hospedaje to hitch back to the car... who should go by us not 100m from the hostel but the fisherman going to fish for another hour before their return to Coihaique. We jumped in the back of the pickup with three dogs, two coolers and a ton of fishing gear and went halfway, before they decided they didn´t have time to fish and had to drop us. We walked 8km and then got a ride the last three or so to the car, ate and came back.
In the end it was the first time I had ever packrafted! We were the first people, as far as we know, to go down the Jeinimeni from ist source at Lago Jeinimeni all the way to the mouth at General Carrera. 60km of pure class III which is not hard but there were essentially no breaks so it was right tiring! Its not as crazy as it sounds but its probably alot more fun than it sounds! A BLAST!! and lots of great scenery and people as well as some really cold water and some intense surveying!
Yesterday I walked across the Chilean/Argentine border, only getting a ride the last three kilometers to Los Antiguos where I got a bus to Rio Gallegos and from there to Puerto Natales. I have begun the pilgrimage that 150,000 eco-blind tourists do each year. I am in the goretex mecca of south america and I will soon be in one of the most famous national parks in South America, Torres del Paine. Hopefully i can locate the beaten track, and get off it!!!
As I walked in the heat of the pampa I sang Lhasa de Sela´s "La Fronter" (The Border) in my head - a beautful song - look it up on Youtube!!!
Poetry.
A question for the wind
I ask the wind about those white bones
That scatter the sandy ground, and about
The sun that beats the neverending pampa
Till it goes red and green and mars-like;
I ask the wind about this canyon,
That cleaves deep into the green plateau
And about these forgotten sheep, mummified
And parched by the cracking heat and a red sunset
Creeping to the cliffs and falling down the mud;
I ask the wind about the golden grasses,
Sparkling each morning with dew like delicate eyelashes
Until they dry and become mirrors to the sun,
Tufts exploding from the sand and the low thistles;
I ask the wind about the permanent wind
And to all this it howls; it whispers; it coos
And it cries; it even screams sometimes in the rocks
But it never answers me
The Antioasis*
There is nothing out ther:
An endless string of white towers
And a universe of parched tufts of grass
All shades of burnt, where except for fence posts
That run the endless sleepy road, direction does not exist
Under a baby blue, a steel-speckled sky
Oh, and the rusting skulls of sheep
Forgoitten on the plateau unable to hid from the sun,
And the rotting carcasses of cars dead of old age,
A spot on the universe, a spot on this exhausted land.
* * *
When there is nothing everything is garbage
Because everything pollutes nothingness.
There there is a petroleum antioasis in the flat plateau
When lines of poplars and pines like weeds
Are the only break in the rusted corrugated metal
And sloppy red hollow bricks,
When a disorganized mess of rusty oil barrells
And containers mar the incomprehensibly human
Grid on a star gazing pampa and old toothless men
Bored, even of the bottle and burnt from the long sun
Pace 20m sections of stupid perfect sidewalk
Between bricks and garbage and a coke bottle
And when this antioasis is ringed and cordoned
By inhabited enclaves of junk and barbed wire
Where remnants of millions of plastic bags cling to its teeth
And suffocate this place so all you can do is
Watch the shimmering lights move slowly out like ants
To smaller oases on the infinite flat,
When all there is to wait for in the day is
The swirling dust, and a few dollars, you just
Numbly stare at the ass in front of you, even if its not
Beautiful - or a better thing would be to look for a street
At the right moment, that runs east-west
And watch the sunset in colours (the only colours out here)
And the rising paper moon - A real oasis
In the human zoo
*The antioiasis is not counterculture. It is just a metaphor - the worthless pollutes the priceless.
Rio Gallegos
Even with my caffeine vertigo
When I stumble like an uncertain sea
Over the highway bridge, the overpass
With the balance of a drunkard,
Even my wavering legs can see its flat and stretches
As far as the (yes) the I can see,
And the long morning sun casts my shadow forever on the pavement,
I can´t see the end of this Galician waterway
That seems to stretch north to North into
A gamut of dzzying directions that spin the board
Underneath old rolling cars and poplar trees and the fresh crisp sunrise air
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Trekking log - March 17 to 20 paraphrased.
We left our extra gear, what we did not need for the trek, unguarded in the driveway of the hostel we had stayed at in Coihaique...Patagonia Hostel, run by an amazing German couple. (the man spent 2 months on the northern icefield of patagonia and has decided that GoreTex is shit - his two month expedition which saw more than 6 meters of snowfall and at times winds of 300km per hour used no goretex at all - just light plastic waterproofs - he says goretex is for taking your dog for a walk - or I suppose for colder conditions - but pure wet... plastic is the way to go!!) With our gear we left a note saying we would return in 4-5days. After 3 stops to by high energy, light weight food we walke out of town and hitched the 95 Km to the trailhead in a pickup driven by a young couple who themselves had hitchhiked almost 1000km to Coihaique and only there had rented the pickup for better access to the area. We were dropped off in the middle of the highway, at the trailhead with a light rain. They wished us good luck and continued south. The first day was uneventful and untechnical - it was long, following a 4*4 trail, cows, 4 or 5 river crossings, mud, forest, rain and a few moments of confusion as to where the trail continued.
Day two when Olivia and I awoke we both contemplated seriously (and embarrassingly) turning back. It had rained all night and everything was wet. When you looked outside you could see nothing, just fog and clouds and the quiet green and black of the trees. We thought it would be all pain and no gain so we decided to leave the tent with our stuff in it and just take the necessaries for a day hike. 20 minutes into the hike the clouds parted to allow us a view from the riverbed of towering mountains of red and black, their peaks blanketed with snow, and the snowy red pass at 1300m that we were to cross. We changed our minds. We turned back, packed everything up and left at 11am - late. We climbed in the lenga forest until the trees ended giving way to rough big scree. the trail was marked by piles of rocks. Tough going in the rain, fog, and increasing cold. We reached the snowy pass and trudged further up craggy cavy crumbly peaks closed us in on two sides and clouds infront and behind... We stopped to eat at the top but a thick cloud began to close us in so we had to move. Descending the meltoff stream that at times ran underneath the permanent snow, we navigated down an extremely steep section of loose rocks. Finally stopping to eat we were greeted and welcomed by a sudden parting of clouds. Across from us, almost directly a massive glacier revealed itself. Blue, black, white. Sun shone off its surfaces and the shimmering water that flowed down the steep craggy rocks that gripped the glacier. Black clouds with a blue glacier and fiery white water on rock. Then below us, something I have never seen, with the rain that suddenly began to pound down, a brilliant rainbow - all is a gift!
At the end of the day Olivia fell in the river so we finished quickly and spent the rest of the day/night in the tent as the rain continued.
Day 3 we awoke to what we thought was a blue sky...not so! It began to rain as we started the hardest day of the trek, up, up, up through lenga forest again and into a rocky section. We met an israeli couple and did a small hike up to a sudden vista of spiky spires, a hanging glacier that melted away to aquamarine pools in the black rocks a few hundred metres directly below our feet. We came down and had to cross another river, this time it was my turn for a soaker... only two hours into the day!!! Again we climbed big rocks, scree, up, up, up over and around a turquoise lagoon. Across from us was yet another glacier, clinging apparently precariously from the rock face and flowing in cascades down to the lake below. To the right we could se clouds that whisped mysteriously and vaguely about the black spires of Cerro Castillo (literally Mount Castle) curling up the faces of the silouetted moutain sides and swirling through the massive river valley. Far far below you could see the snaking silvery river we had traced as well as the snowy 1300m pass from yesterday. Everything appeared and disappeared in moments. We climbed up straight past the huge glacier covered in snow on our way to over 1600m, chased by an ominous cloud, wet snow and strong wind. Rocks were getting slippery. Over the pass and into the flat section at 1600m, a sudden silence acosted our ears, indeed our beings. No rushing rivers running from the glaciers to fall on rock and water, no wind no snow, no rivers, no rumbling of avalanches... a deafening silence when all you can hear is the earie (sp?) sound of your breath heaving and your heart pounding. Past the precipice of black rocks, of red rocks, purple rocks, rusty rocks, green rocks, past our martian horizon black clouds. And to the right a stone spire pearcing the same clouds that covered and discovered it. As suddenly as the silence came it was cracked by a ferocious wind and an immediate cold. We had to go. We started the impossibly long (we couldn´t have known it then) descent of loose rock almost straight down the face at more than 45degrees. Then into a river bed with walls of earth on either side. Some dangerous, precipitous forays into the forest, more steep rock. More than anything it was mentally and emotionally exhausting because more than two hours before we reached a campable sight, we thought we were "almost there". There was one moment on the face of this rubbly mountainside that a cloud closed us in... this is a very earie feeling because you cannot tell where you are, there are no points of reference. All you see is fog/cloud and the rocks directly beneath your feet. Nothing else... up the mountain a few metres grey cloud, down the mountain and along the face ten metres of rocks and then pure fog.
The saving grace you might say was that the sun did accompany us the last few hours and dried wood enough so that after half an hour of trying we were able to start a fire. We hung up all our wet clothes and sleeping bags and boots even the tent fly to dry. At night the stars were amazing so we went to the nearby riverbed with our sleeping bags and just lay there infinitessimally (sp?) small.
Day four was uneventful. After a halfhour confusion of direction in which we almost went back up the mountain by another trail (our map was shit) we descended down the side of a canyon and into the Rio Ibañez valley where the trail meets another 4*4 trail of about 6km that brought us back to Villa Cerro Castillo on the Carretera Austral. In the middle of the road, outside the restaurant where we ate some wonderful sandwiches (this restaurant is two buses put together, painted with the colours of the rainbow and attended by a sunny woman named Sole.) In the middle of the Carretera Austral, lending creadence to the fact that not only is this road almost deserted but we are in offseason, was a dog, sleeping! In the restaurant we met a man, don´t know his name. He asked us where we were from... Canada and France we said. What part of Canada? Ottawa. NO??!! I lived there two years! and then he recited his address. He went to Brookfield highschool and then Rideau Highschool!!! He said ottawa and Canada were the best places he´d ever been!!!! Coincidences are crazy. In the middle of offseason in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Patagonia, in south of South america, a man whose father worked at the Chilean Embassy in Canada and went to a highschool that I played soccer against!!!! BIZARRE!
WE finished our sandwiches and hit the road, hoping to get back to Coihaique. The rain started. Up the road a pickup pulled over and four people got out and were watching us for a time. Then they whistled and motioned for us to come so we grabbed our bags and went over... who was it? None other than Felipe and Lorena, the couple that had dropped us off at the trailhead. It was like seeing old friends!!! A smile broke onto my dirty and tired face! we got in and they drove us to Rio Blanco, chatting joking, and even sleeping (not them, just me!) , where we almost immediatly got another ride with some builders right to the street where the hostel sits! We were welcomed with smiles and chatter, and tea and beautiful beds!!!
Now I´m waiting for Jarek to do some backcountry stuff in some unknown, relatively unvisited and remote national parks here in the south, weather permitting!!! WOOHOO PATAGONIA!!!
Thats it from me and you can see photos of ice climbing, glacier stuff and a few inadequate photos of the Cerro Castillo trek.
Until next time
Ciao
Day two when Olivia and I awoke we both contemplated seriously (and embarrassingly) turning back. It had rained all night and everything was wet. When you looked outside you could see nothing, just fog and clouds and the quiet green and black of the trees. We thought it would be all pain and no gain so we decided to leave the tent with our stuff in it and just take the necessaries for a day hike. 20 minutes into the hike the clouds parted to allow us a view from the riverbed of towering mountains of red and black, their peaks blanketed with snow, and the snowy red pass at 1300m that we were to cross. We changed our minds. We turned back, packed everything up and left at 11am - late. We climbed in the lenga forest until the trees ended giving way to rough big scree. the trail was marked by piles of rocks. Tough going in the rain, fog, and increasing cold. We reached the snowy pass and trudged further up craggy cavy crumbly peaks closed us in on two sides and clouds infront and behind... We stopped to eat at the top but a thick cloud began to close us in so we had to move. Descending the meltoff stream that at times ran underneath the permanent snow, we navigated down an extremely steep section of loose rocks. Finally stopping to eat we were greeted and welcomed by a sudden parting of clouds. Across from us, almost directly a massive glacier revealed itself. Blue, black, white. Sun shone off its surfaces and the shimmering water that flowed down the steep craggy rocks that gripped the glacier. Black clouds with a blue glacier and fiery white water on rock. Then below us, something I have never seen, with the rain that suddenly began to pound down, a brilliant rainbow - all is a gift!
At the end of the day Olivia fell in the river so we finished quickly and spent the rest of the day/night in the tent as the rain continued.
Day 3 we awoke to what we thought was a blue sky...not so! It began to rain as we started the hardest day of the trek, up, up, up through lenga forest again and into a rocky section. We met an israeli couple and did a small hike up to a sudden vista of spiky spires, a hanging glacier that melted away to aquamarine pools in the black rocks a few hundred metres directly below our feet. We came down and had to cross another river, this time it was my turn for a soaker... only two hours into the day!!! Again we climbed big rocks, scree, up, up, up over and around a turquoise lagoon. Across from us was yet another glacier, clinging apparently precariously from the rock face and flowing in cascades down to the lake below. To the right we could se clouds that whisped mysteriously and vaguely about the black spires of Cerro Castillo (literally Mount Castle) curling up the faces of the silouetted moutain sides and swirling through the massive river valley. Far far below you could see the snaking silvery river we had traced as well as the snowy 1300m pass from yesterday. Everything appeared and disappeared in moments. We climbed up straight past the huge glacier covered in snow on our way to over 1600m, chased by an ominous cloud, wet snow and strong wind. Rocks were getting slippery. Over the pass and into the flat section at 1600m, a sudden silence acosted our ears, indeed our beings. No rushing rivers running from the glaciers to fall on rock and water, no wind no snow, no rivers, no rumbling of avalanches... a deafening silence when all you can hear is the earie (sp?) sound of your breath heaving and your heart pounding. Past the precipice of black rocks, of red rocks, purple rocks, rusty rocks, green rocks, past our martian horizon black clouds. And to the right a stone spire pearcing the same clouds that covered and discovered it. As suddenly as the silence came it was cracked by a ferocious wind and an immediate cold. We had to go. We started the impossibly long (we couldn´t have known it then) descent of loose rock almost straight down the face at more than 45degrees. Then into a river bed with walls of earth on either side. Some dangerous, precipitous forays into the forest, more steep rock. More than anything it was mentally and emotionally exhausting because more than two hours before we reached a campable sight, we thought we were "almost there". There was one moment on the face of this rubbly mountainside that a cloud closed us in... this is a very earie feeling because you cannot tell where you are, there are no points of reference. All you see is fog/cloud and the rocks directly beneath your feet. Nothing else... up the mountain a few metres grey cloud, down the mountain and along the face ten metres of rocks and then pure fog.
The saving grace you might say was that the sun did accompany us the last few hours and dried wood enough so that after half an hour of trying we were able to start a fire. We hung up all our wet clothes and sleeping bags and boots even the tent fly to dry. At night the stars were amazing so we went to the nearby riverbed with our sleeping bags and just lay there infinitessimally (sp?) small.
Day four was uneventful. After a halfhour confusion of direction in which we almost went back up the mountain by another trail (our map was shit) we descended down the side of a canyon and into the Rio Ibañez valley where the trail meets another 4*4 trail of about 6km that brought us back to Villa Cerro Castillo on the Carretera Austral. In the middle of the road, outside the restaurant where we ate some wonderful sandwiches (this restaurant is two buses put together, painted with the colours of the rainbow and attended by a sunny woman named Sole.) In the middle of the Carretera Austral, lending creadence to the fact that not only is this road almost deserted but we are in offseason, was a dog, sleeping! In the restaurant we met a man, don´t know his name. He asked us where we were from... Canada and France we said. What part of Canada? Ottawa. NO??!! I lived there two years! and then he recited his address. He went to Brookfield highschool and then Rideau Highschool!!! He said ottawa and Canada were the best places he´d ever been!!!! Coincidences are crazy. In the middle of offseason in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Patagonia, in south of South america, a man whose father worked at the Chilean Embassy in Canada and went to a highschool that I played soccer against!!!! BIZARRE!
WE finished our sandwiches and hit the road, hoping to get back to Coihaique. The rain started. Up the road a pickup pulled over and four people got out and were watching us for a time. Then they whistled and motioned for us to come so we grabbed our bags and went over... who was it? None other than Felipe and Lorena, the couple that had dropped us off at the trailhead. It was like seeing old friends!!! A smile broke onto my dirty and tired face! we got in and they drove us to Rio Blanco, chatting joking, and even sleeping (not them, just me!) , where we almost immediatly got another ride with some builders right to the street where the hostel sits! We were welcomed with smiles and chatter, and tea and beautiful beds!!!
Now I´m waiting for Jarek to do some backcountry stuff in some unknown, relatively unvisited and remote national parks here in the south, weather permitting!!! WOOHOO PATAGONIA!!!
Thats it from me and you can see photos of ice climbing, glacier stuff and a few inadequate photos of the Cerro Castillo trek.
Until next time
Ciao
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