Junkie

Cabeza de Indio (indian´s head), View from close to Cabeza de Indio, El Bolsón... and My feet at the top of the 20km run to Refugio Dedo Gordo and back before turning my ankle

I am shaking. I feel weak all over as I roll down the dirt road. Frested valley and grey rocky clear river on my right and snow topped Patagonian peaks in front of me, to the south. But scenery does not make me shake... only caffeine and adrenaline and I have had no caffeine since yesterday... It must be adrenaline then, an aftershock of my traverse of the little path under an overhung rock outcropping that is Cabeza del Indio.

The train wound up switchback after switchback until the rock face where the path traced the cliff some zero to 3 and a half feet from its edge. Sometimes there was space here for one person to pass another on foot but on two serarate sections if you dropped a line from the edge of my handlebar of my mountainbike it would have to be 60 feet to reach the earth... and the other side? rock wall.

Now as I roll down the hill the adrenaline is everywhere in my body, warm, jittery and excited, but almost weak. So i begin to look for more before it has even flushed from my veins.

Later, I did find some horse trails that traversed the mountainside...sometimes windy and narrow but always quite smooth with packed dirt. A lot of fun, and fairly untechnical. There as I sped down a path among thorns, my breathing rapid (its not the effort its the adrenaline) I see yellow everywhere about the path so I stop...yes, a gift. Ripe and fallen yellow plums litter the ground. And you do not here, have to search to find fruit, like berry picking among the thorns... no here one must avoid the ripe plums so as not to step on and crush them. So I stop and grab a few handfulls. Am I greedy? I sit there supported by my bike frame, in the hot Patagonian sun and eat plums of the same colour, little suns.

I throw another easy few handfuls in my bag and continue.

Hours later I am sitting here in the sade of a mountain: still, unwavering, unshaking (if you allow me to employ this fabricated word) - and I am referring both to the mountain and to my body.

After I close this book I´ll be in search of the shakes, so IU´ll set up my stove and boil water for mate.

A photo and a fall: Two lessons I should have learned a long time ago!

I embarked on another trailrun yesterday to another refugio near el Bolson (an Argentine hippie town with artisans and vegetarians as well as dreadlocks and slacklines... and lots of weed). The run was extremely steep, and infact I ran very little of the ascent, it was more of a fast hike as it was probably 30% gradient at least, most of the time! I got to the top, of course out of breath, drank a glass of water and kept going higher to a few lookoutpoints from which you can see the Andes, stretching south into the heart of Patagonia.

I thought I would take a picture, a photo, something to remember my time at the top of the world so I setmy camera up for 10seconds and took some self portraits up on the rock, in the cold sun. Upon looking at the photos I was taken aback, my face is fat!!! So if my regimen of running and getting back in shape was ever going to flop it was given new wind! I should have known because there is a woman close to my heart who, in her youth travelled to france. Upon her return, after many baguettes with jam, she also had a chipmunk face... dear mother, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN!! Now, not only my physical status but also my diet are going to have to change!!!!

We were small seven and five perhaps, in the quiet forest on a lake. They told us don´t run in the forest, you could trip and fall and out here, its dangerous, out here in the abandoned lakes deep in a remote forest, please, just walk. But there we were on the rocks eating dinner and I can´t even remember what excited her little seven year old blonde hair, her little rosy cheeks, but she ran and in a moment those cheeks had blood pooring down them from the gash in her forhead. DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!

As I descended through the forest, the massive trunks and mud, the emerald streams that stroke the round rocks as they plummet to the valley things were blurring, that is, the slope is so steep here that it islike playing a videogame with your whole body as you descend extremely fast, unable to slow down dodging trees, roots, rocks, streams, rounding corners and then, a shot of pain in my ankle. I drop to the forest floor, the wise trees are looking over me. Are the disapproving? I got up among the wise ancients, the knowing thousand year old trees... they have seen more than this! And I putpressure on my left ankle - a shot of pain and I am 9km from the bottom... So I stretch it out and limp/walk/run my way to the bottom and it doesn´t even feel so bad. The mate that I drank at the top and adrenaline dull the pain but as soon as I stop at the bottom I seize up and the swelling starts: DON´T RUN IN THE FOREST!!!
Needless to say, when this sprained ankle clears up (I am hardly limping today but it will be at least a week before the pain goes I´m sure) I will continue to run... but more carefully.

I should have learned from my mother and my sister, but instead I needed a fall and a photograph!

Handcuffs, rain, and tourism

I left Valdivia, I left behind, as always, someone that I will miss. I got the bus to Osorno and from their a comfy, double decker bus to Bariloche Argentina.

The boarder guard sits down with the poorly stamped passport in his hand. He looks sorry, regretful. "Do you have a spouse here?"
"No...why?"
"Well, we are going to have to solve this some way..." He reaches over to his friend´s waist and pulls out a set of handcuffs saying, "this will solve the problem." And then he laughs and tells me he is only joking.

A scare. I was malinformed when I first arrived in Santiago so I had a resident permit but not my resident number (the final step) So I left Chile 3 days after I was supposed to (3 months would have been Feb 13 and I left Feb 16) so, thinking he was doing me a favour the Chilean boarder guard stamped my passport with Feb 13. So when I arrived on the night of february 16 at the Argentine boarder, they asked me when I left chile and I had to tell them that very day... causing more problems...

Later at the end at 1030pm I met an Australian/French couple and an American guy - none of us had Argentine dollars at the bus station at this time, outside the city of Bariloche - after some negotiation we payed the cab in Chilean pesos and we began looking around in this apparently touristy town for a hostel. This fact was confirmed: we walked for 2 hours and asked at every single hostel - all were full; it was raining, we were tired and it was the next day... we finally woke a woman up who rented rooms, only after having contemplated accompanying the drunk and homeless in the central park under some trees, and trespassing on private property... in the end we paid the 15$ each for a less than satisfactory room...

Bariloche is like Pucón in that it crawls, especially at this time of year, with tourists from Europe and North America. Off-putting. But again, it is touristy for a reason. So yesterday I took the half-hour bus trip to Cerro Catedral ski centre at about 1000m. (It used to be the biggest ski centre in South America but has been overtaken by one in Mendoza Ar. and various in Chile in the last decade.) When I left, with my American companion Jeff, it was windy and cloudy with sun peaking through like spotlights to illuminate the rocky peaks and the specks of snow that remain from the summer, and to glisten off the massive glacial lake.
I was wearing tights and a tshirt and had a rainjacket and long underwear layer in my bag along with water and some food. I ran the trail, that ran 10km along the edge of the mountain, looking down on a river and two glacial lakes in the midst of towering rocky peaks, through a burn and up up up to a rock and wood refugio above the treeline. The last three kilometres began to rain and get much colder, and when i got to the Refugio I was wet and quickly became cold. I drank and ate and sat among the dirty climbing and mountaineering bums in the refugio, playing cards and drinking mate. The rain reached torrential status and then backed off - I took this opportunity to start my 10km descent. The rain only increased and the steep sections became very dangerous to walk let alone run. In the end I probably ran about 3/5 of the 20km and the other 2/5 were a brisk walk or an almost crawl on the slippery mud... that was yesterday... today I am sore but have escaped Bariloche and my penthouse hostel with panoramic views to come to this campground in El Bolson, an area renowned for its hippies and its lowkeyness - it still has a touristy feel but is much smaller and lacks the glitz and the polish. (streets, save three, are unpaved) My campground is at the foot of a huge rocky ridge of mountains that rises behind me to block out the sun and accross the river and the small town another ridge of mountains, the Andes, runs, snowspeckled into the distance...
Thats where I´m at now
ciao

Some new poetry, and another entry (below)

Eulogy for 8 drowned in the bay

When the sigh escapes,
When the birds appear and disappear
In the same exhalation of breath -
The sound of green, the sound
Of a full forest a million mountains
That sustain relentless snows
And the naked sun

A mouth opens and in goes
A desert - in go a hundred billion
Grains of sand and four bleeding hearts
And a white washed church, a sunbleached temple
Where the life giver never came
But by the hands of a thirsty tongue

Awe. The heartiness of stupidity.
Wills like iron break and
Crush the brain to a small pea,
Picked from a fruitful
Garden; and then a storm,
A walloping enough to suffocate
A child and her family,

And the boys are drinking
And all that escapes is a sigh

Markets

The fish market smells
Like the sea, it heaves with
Life and the death of salt,
And tamed sealions.

The fruit market
Smells like the sea,
Inundated by scales
And flying machetes and guts
But brilliant - it is vibrant
And you almost smell through
The screams, the sun and the
Ripe fields, a pulse and rhythm

The Museum

Fabric and boxes
Were never here before the waves shook
Everything into a brakish cauldron,
Fabric and boxes and paint and frames
Replace the elaborate barrels and concrete
That slipped into the sea where
A tour boat stands, sits, rests,
Or is it dead? When did they tie it up
For the last time and wait for hands and stones
To smash the many windows? Was it then,
When the engine room rusted with
Urine and graffiti, when all the lines
Went stagnant?
It sits there, a white green rust,
A skeleton like the tombs and forgotten bodies
Under a shaken earth, where glass stands
Reflecting a city

Arcoiris: Three Haikus from a stormy room

Torment

Curtains fly inside
To a wind that drowns my thoughts
Disturbing live wires

The Room

Light, smoke and my mind
In the middle of the room
Where a forked bough stands

Sounds

This house like an amp;
Speakers tapped into hours of
Rain and electric wind

Finally, some pain!!!

The sun is out, I have gone from my farm, my idyllic (sp) world of steaming homemade apple pastries (from the apple tree outside the yellow house) for breakfast and long chats in a stinky cheese room. I have left, I have said farewell but not goodbye, because there are more stories to be told in the garden and perhaps, just perhaps, another few games of chess with a customs officer in a village in a massive green fjord where the many sealions swim about. Maybe I will come back to share with my friends, to learn. But I think that my time with the axe is over.
Let me explain. Last weekend I went into town again, into the grimy, stinky and fairly sketchy town of Puerto Montt, to read and write emails, to recieve some mail and so on... Upon my return the same saturday I saw in the bus station Wiley, the WWOOFer who had only one week earlier left to return to Santiago, 12 hours on the bus. He was suffocated by the city, drowned in the time that that others were lost at sea forever, Wiley was trapped by the heat and the buildings so he hopped on a bus and came back. COMPANY!!!
The next day we wandered down the rocky beach in the wind and rain around the steely sea and the deep green hills. We saw a Whimbrel (one of the birds that my Alaskan and Canadian friends were studying!!! I almost felt proud to identify it - it was all alone) and dolphins cutting about the bay. After a packed and stinky bus along a gravel road that hugged the steep green, after the bus rolled down a hill, packed, backwards because the engine failed, after the driver made another run at it and everyone´s petrified glances moved about from eachothers eyes to the cliff and the sea a hundred feet below, after all of this, we arrived at literally the end of the road. To go further south in Chile you must take a ferry, so we bought some cheesy empanadas and some sodabread and we hopped the rusty ferry to the next little village really just for the trip. We sat on the side of the boat marvelling at the fjord that at its end becomes the Valle Cochamo (a place the call the Yosemite of Chile for its landscape and its climbing) and when we arrived in the village of Puelche we disembarked and walked up the hill past the customs office. There the officer was cleaning some mats, whacking them with determination against the stone wall and as we passed he looked up and simply asked, do any of you play chess. I jumped at the opportunity, Yes I said. So we went into his freakishly clean building (the man works 16 hour shifts but there is nothing to do but clean and study chess problems). I controlled the game, I was on my game. I had seen a dangerous position he was in but i didn´t think anything of it because I was so ravenously on the attack... three moves to checkmate. I moved my queen into position - and indeed out of position as it was guarding the line that he had. We didn´t even bother finishing the game because we both knew he had me in two moves and there was nothing to do about it.

Sergio was his name (not to be confused with Checho) - the man talked to us about chess problems and historic games, and then he launched into a chess metaphor on life and existence: impressive at first, then confusing, then basically incomprehensible. His ideas about northamerican society are scewed and contradictory; after lamenting the selfish, power and money hungry attitude that seems to be human nature, he immediately praised western culture for throwing their children out the door (here everybody is a "momma´s boy or girl" and they get pregnant and married or not and continue living at home - at once beautiful to see close family units and also sad to see dependence and at times a sort of a leech behaviour). He ranted about how this, everything that he has materialy is his and belongs to him, he worked for it and it is not his childrens.
Then he paradoxically invited us in to his room and fed us and told us we can come back at any time, like children...BIZARRE and mildly hipocritical - we walked back to the ferry with our jaws on the floor. To get back to our farm we hitchhiked with a couple from Austria and Italy. Great people!
The next three days we worked clearing bush for a road - about 100m by 3 m and the chainsaw didn´t work so we did it all with axes and machetes (while nowhere close in skill to Checho, I´ve become handy with an axe!) These days were full of stories and indeed a collection of short stories is brewing so when I have written more I will post them but it was breathtaking and my respect for Checho has only grown with our talk about death. His views are decidedly (without conciously being so) buddhist. He spoke of all living things, and how we will all return to the same place, the earth from whence we came. He spoke of the respect and love we must have for everything around us and of the uselessness of material posessions in a world where only interaction and introspection can bring happiness...

I left, that familiar lump again in my throat, but this time smaller - I am, I think, becoming accustomed to this finally - is this good or bad I don´t know...

Now I am in Valdivia and after arriving here a few days ago I saw a sign for a 7km running race... Finally!!! I had complained to Wiley that I was lacking motivation to run (perhaps a canine issue) but missing the feeling of being active and in good shape. So here was the kickstarter. This morning, race day, I woke up to sun, wind and a bit of chilliness - perfect for a race and perfect for tights. I was expecting slow and rather uncompetitive race -I was mistaken. I came in about between 15 and 18th somewhere with a time almost 4 minutes off the winner at about 25mins and god was it painful, as I have run no more than an average of once per week for these three months, and thats generous!! I got to know some of the guys after the race, all very nice and welcoming - some of them are going to qualify in Pucon this month for the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii - no wonder!!! It feels good to do this and I have made a commitment to run now as I start to move south - in place of hiking I am going to run trails, where there will be no dogs! I don´t normally do this sort of thing but I bought a running backpack so that I could be comfortable with all my stuff like water and food and whatnot - it will be an interesting adventure.
Those plans that I mentioned last time, I am heading, in the next month, south toward Puerto Natales and after that no idea!!! Until next time, from a sunny Valdivia, where the massive sealions beach themselves under the stench of the seaside fishmarket, adieu

New photo plan

Here´s the plan: if you want to see photos email me and I will give you the password. I have posted 33 more of my favourite or notable photos and I will put some on the blog as well. A blog is coming in the next few days!

In the shadow of another Volcano

Try to imagine this: you wake up and your wooden house is like a microphone, better, a speaker for the wind and the rain. you feel for split seconds, like the house will collapse in on you. All alone, no one around. Warm sleeping bag. you look at the clock and it reads 7:34... you are going to be late so you drag your lethargic body closer to the howling Pacific ocean, out of bed as you dress yourself. You throw flour and water and salt in an old pot and knead it to a dough, squash it flat and put it on the fire to make some rudimentary chapatis.
Rubber boots, rain jacket, dark sky. Goats are gone and havent been milked in 24 hours - you need to find them and herd them back into their barn.

This was me: so Checho (Sergio) and I got on their tails; we tracked their footprints and their droppings. We walked all the trails and even through thick rainforesty bush. This was where they spent the night - droppings and the strong smell of goats. After two hours of tracking we finally found them. We spent the rest of the day weeking an overgrown garlic field in the scorching sun and making sharp creamy goats milk cheese from the lat, eventual morning milking.
Checho has been the sole worker on this farm for 2 decades. But I could quite literally write a book on him. I wont right now but sufficed tro say that a grade 5 education seems to be sufficient to see the inequality in the world, the corruption of governments and corporations, sufficient to keep bees, to manage tourist cabins, to farm, to fish and weave fishing nets from plants that grow in the field (befor the age of plastic!!) to build close to 10 houses singehandedly,to be compassionate and to raise some of the most polite, sociable, fantastic, well adjusted and musical kids around. And thats not an exhaustive list! I could listen to this guy for hours. He is, despite, or perhaps as a result of his bizarre superstitions, one of the greatest story tellers Ive ever met. Working with Checho is like being at an Arlow Guthrie Concert all day long!
But Checho is poor. He also understands that this country is built to keep the poor poor and make the rich richer. But in rural Chile the first thing you do is you shar. At lunch time Checho and I wander down the hill to the shore of the pacific ocean, to his red Alerce shingled house and I sit in the wood fire heated kitchen with the family - standing out but also fitting in. I with the little boy Daniel and we all laugh together, all seated around a little table and a hot meal. When there is meat or fish I don{t eat it but I try not be be a bother - I simply pick it out (its probably from next door).
Living in a house by myself, (the farm owner Matias old house, also built by Checho) - a house full of revolutionary magazines, vestiges of a fighting past, red student publications and pamphlets on sustainable organic agriculture; drums, flutes, guitars, amps, bases, tamborines; paintings and colourful shawls and old single-lense reflex cameras - living here I realize finally and with clarity that I need other people. Coming home after working all day to an empty cavernous, quiet house is heavy and depressing...

Yesterday after work I walked through the fields and picked fresh cholards, zucchini, garlic, chives and lettuce. With the flour I bought at the bottom of the hill I made little pizzettes (pizzas) with roasted zucchini, chives and fresh goats milk cheese.
Other days ive spent hours picking blackberries in my front garden, to make a sort of jam and fresh peas, well, they seem to be a different species from the frozen variety!!

Anyway here in Puerto Montt, a grimy port town, I am spending one day to catch up on emails etc. I spent the night at a pension (a sort of cheap hostal) where the old man has offered me work (and has told everyone he meets about me). He has also suggested that I work on the Navimag ferry going south, which could sounds like a good idea... but I have other plans...And Ill tell you waht they are...

Later