Summer Christmas wishes

Just a couple of days ago we received a wonderful piece of California by mail. From some good friends who love Disneyland and--apparently--also enjoy dressing up in Hawaiian print shirts for photo shoots with Mickey Mouse. This is the second time I'm receiving hilarious family picture cards in the mail all the way to Patagonia. The cards always a funny allusion to summertime. I love it so much that we've been thinking how sappy good it would be to send our family and friends something similar. Though we are way too late to do anything in time for Christmas and don't really have people's addresses to send real mail, something may be in the works. Stay tuned...

Summer has sprung, mostly. The mornings have been sunny and calm, with gusts picking up before noon, when the gray moves in and moves out fast as the wind sometimes with rain, sometimes without. Temperatures have been in the high 50s, sometimes low 60s, you know, T-shirt weather. As I write this the guy with the weed whacker is grinding down our forest of weeds with a tremendous buzz. (The organic grasscutter sheep deal fell through.) Lawnmowers aren't here yet, so if anybody is ready for a career change, I'm sure you could come down here with your John Deere and make a small fortune mowing weeds.

Serkan and I leave tomorrow to Torres del Paine where we'll be working together. We'll spend Christmas eve there, but hope to be back in time to make a some phone calls to the motherland on Christmas day. Happy holidays & love.

Los blue jeans

The days have been beautiful here, sunny, almost windless and warm enough to go outside with just a sweater. Because of this I’ve been walking around a lot instead of taking the colectivo type taxis, which pick up various people and drop them off in the center or wherever the passengers want along the colectivo route, for only .60 cents! On election day, which was Sunday, the town was eerily quiet. The only cars around were those of carabineros. Two police officers parked alongside a long grassy walk nudged at a drunk (passed out in a fetal position near an unbroken swingset) with their feet similar to how one might pet a mangy dog or test to see it's still alive. I guess this is a pretty typical sight. Though today--with the blue skies and emptiness, and the fact that nobody can buy liquor on election day until the last vote is cast--it felt somehow more poignant and ironic.

It was one of those days. Feeling simultaneously far away from home and at home. Flashes of home swoop in on me often. When I look and I am surrounded by sky, whose multi-layered cloud texture has the most character of anywhere I've ever been. The mountains, yet snowcapped, jag into it, jutting up straight from the sea. On a clear day on the right hill, you can see all of this. And I think, wow, I live here. Cool. But the distance is wrought with ambivalences. Sometimes I can describe them perfectly, to myself at least. Other times, like right now, I can’t even imagine my way back inside of them. Liquid flighty moments. Drippy and on air at the same time.

Maybe the other side of the flux is a pull to usefulness, which has something to do with how at home I feel. I'm a bit of a vagrant. This is a vagrant land. People come and go (including us), so developing close friendships proves rather difficult. Finding my niche of purpose would raise my comfort. Of course, right now I'm in between jobs. Relieved to have ended one and not sure which basket to put my eggs in for the next one. It's a tentative space. For the most part Americans feel defined by their jobs. I mostly refused to let this happen to me in the States (especially in my early years of employment as a administrative assistant or glorified secretary). What made this refusal easiest though was that I was always working to pay for school. In that way I still identified myself with some role: that of a student. Each part of living, a means to an end. Just living and being--outside of roles--well... it's still a struggle.

In the mornings I try to write my way back into an old niche. It's like putting on an old pair of jeans. They still fit and sometimes they are surprisingly comfortable. Other times, they're too big and I need a belt or they are recently laundered and I can hardly button them up. It's impossible to tell how they look.

Housekeeping

Shortly after 5 a.m., the clouds seem higher than they are, and more dispersed. All orange-bellied with neon-bright underscores. I steal peeks of it through the big bedroom picture window and jump back under the covers to try to sleep some more, but it’s useless. Instead I squeeze some sunniness into a cup and drink fresh grapefruit-orange juice for a pre-breakfast snack.

We have been busy getting the house in order. Making it livable. Serkan had found this furnished place for us to live before I arrived. Of course, when we returned to Natales from Ushuaia about three weeks ago, I was excited to see our new home. It is by far the best place I’ve lived in Puerto Natales. But that first night my nerves were on edge and I actually cried to see the condition of our new place—which if you compare it to other houses here, it really wasn’t bad at all. We arrived here around midnight after 15 or so hours on a bus with a long snowy delay at the Chilean-Argentine border because of Chilean government workers being on strike (again). We hadn’t eaten for the last 10 hours, so we were pretty much starved and exhausted.

So I lacked imagination that first night, while Serkan with his infinite patience, comforted me. I’m sure being back in the super comfort of the U.S. didn’t help me feel less overwhelmed about all the work this place would need. But we woke up the next morning, ready to tackle house work. Sanding, painting, scrubbing, spraying insect killer, unpacking boxes and bags. It’s been an ongoing project, but it finally feels like home. No more salmon pink walls in the bedroom or diarrhea yellow in the bathroom. No more horrifying lace curtains stuffed with earwig eggs and exoskeletons.

I’ve been pretty obsessed with insect prevention. When we first arrived, hundreds of Patagonian pill bugs would appear inside the tub just about every morning. And elsewhere of course, but not in such huge quantities. Luckily, these insects don’t creep me out that much. But getting rid of them and vacuuming up their dried-out shells was a daily affair for a while. Their colonies have dwindled though we have not obliterated them. I’ve vacuumed and cleaned places in this house that haven’t been cleaned in years, if ever. I’ve scrubbed with bleach and worn through several sponges and gloves and practically erased my own fingerprints.

All this in preparation for the tijeretas (earwigs) that are sure to arrive around February. These silly little bugs have me in a panic. I have nightmares about them, even though I’ve only seen one live one since we got here. When they come, they get into everything. They show in the food containers, in the teapots, in the mate bombilla, in the washing machine, sometimes even in the bed. When sipping mate during a major tijereta infestation, the critters get sucked up through the metal straw, and suddenly a skinny wiggly thing is crawling on your tongue. Thank goodness this hasn’t happened to me yet! But, yes, I am mildly obsessed. They’re not here yet, and we’re doing everything we can to make sure they don’t come. Now that the inside is clean, we have a pretty big yard to tend to. Some friends bought a little black lamb, an organic lawnmower, so we’re hoping to fatten him up for a few weeks. (And, no, this lamb is not going to be eaten for Christmas dinner.)

It may sound weird to have to do all this to a place that we are only renting for probably less than a year. But that’s how the houses are here. We are really lucky to have found a well-furnished house with heaters in every room. Some places you rent here might not even come with a kitchen sink. The fridge, stove, kitchen and bathroom sinks are still considered furniture, something that renters supply themselves. That said, I haven’t seen a rental that didn’t come with at least one heater. And it’s cold enough here to live without a fridge. I hope it doesn't sound like I’m complaining too much, because really I just want to give some context.

After all the poison, paint and love we’ve put into this place, it truly feels home. It’s our little nest and I love it. I have a sturdy writing desk where I’ve started to work in the mornings. I rough sanded it to get rid of the pink paint splats and to give it a rustic look, filled it with family and travel photos, and topped it all with a square of glass.

Reflections on Patagonia

Cucciolo is the name written across the top tube of a 1940s bicycle in the window of Ramos Generales, a panaderia cafe in Ushuaia, Argentina. The bike dons a cucciolo motor, from the earliest motorcycle days. Stump footrests have replaced the pedals, but everything else about this little puppy (which is what cucciolo means in Italian) is bicycle. Prison pajamas in bumble bee colors and long-john style down to the box weave and flimsy little cap hang flatly against the wall and stop the bike in its tracks. Against the black and yellow stripes leans a shovel. A long toothy saw, rusted and rough to the touch, fences in these antiques wherein tripacks of Cape Horn beer crop up within the frame like flowers.

It's taken me almost three years of living in Patagonia to make it down to Ushuaia, self-proclaimed southernmost city in the world: population 60,000, in case you're wondering how much it takes to make a city. I came here to meet up with Serkan on his trip and we've been reunited for a couple of days after we parted ways in Santiago, where I headed north to visit family and friends for a few weeks and he--more responsibly--headed south to start working and find us a flat.
I have missed him madly, but even so I found leaving this time sadder than other previous times. Maybe it is the family growing, kids growing up and new babies on the way, or that all of my friends are starting to make families of their own. Or maybe just that I have grown into the idea of having a family. For years I didn't know how to have a family. Now I feel it surrounding me in a way that I could easily describe as cozy, comforting.

Even though I haven't actually been to my new home in Puerto Natales yet, I am starting to feel back to normal here. It's always strange to arrive to Punta Arenas again. And every time I do it, I'm perplexed and exhilarated, simultaneously feeling at home yet light years away. This time I am here with my husband, so I need probe no further. And yet...

There is something beyond that fact that welcomes me home, but I can never quite pin the feeling down. Is it where I've come to grips with all my past sadnesses and let them go? It was the first place I visited when I started traveling in South America, straight to the farthest point possible. But it just as easily could have been Machu Picchu, the salt plain, the jungle or the desert if it weren't for the weather. It was March and, so, autumn. I'd chosen to travel on March 17, St. Patrick's day, you know, for good luck. The Patagonia season ending, my trip beginning. The distance, the seasons, time flipping over on itself--all of it is somehow symbolic, which I of course don't need to say.

So I still don't know what is so welcoming to me in this utterly inhospitable landscape? This desolate beauty so far off the grid. It toughens you a little, increases everyone's sense of loneliness, so while the buildings are wretched and the people usually unreliable, a sense of community pervades. Happiness is easy. Life is simple. And joy just is. Fleetingly, sure, but so are our moments--our presents. In more developed places happiness tends to be complicated, as it often assumes that we have to get such and such thing before we can be truly happy.

The pampas on the three-hour busride home from the airport are utterly barren. Yet pink flamingos fish gracefully in rain lakes and boggy puddles. Lovestruck caiquenes (Upland Geese) pair off and mate year after year--unaffected by the violent winds. Trees can't grow on the plain yet a random mix of cameloids and big exotic birds abound.

As much as I sometimes whine about it, I also love coming back here. Somehow it represents freedom. Freedom from what? I suppose it's something like freedom from myself. We're the only ones who truly have the capacity to commit ourselves to bondage. We are our own captors. The prison pajamas stare me down, their pattern mirrored by the teeth in the saw, the spokes in the bicycle wheel and the window reflecting passersby back to themselves. Sometimes they see through the display, and our eyes may meet before one side of the glass looks shyly away--beyond it all and out to the sea.

Journey's end...

We all get a little tied up in the regime of dailiness even if every day is exactly different. For the last month, the days of our eastern European honeymoon wore us onward. The rigmarole of entering a new city, figuring out how to get around, foraging for meat-free food, and finding lodging in hostels or with friends for 11 countries of time becomes routine. Leaving becomes routine. Departure is my favorite part of being on the road. No, being on the road is my favorite part of being on the road, and the first step of this requires departing. Destination: known, occasionally in advance. Though arrival is a slippery process and somehow the knowns wiggle around a little and always change.

This is going to spiral into another meditation on home, and it feels like there's not much discovery in that at present, for me or for you. Each day, I find, to be a shawl that I worm into or strip off depending on how chilly it is. Maybe the unworn days wear me and carry me forward and I suppose I hope they do. Increasingly I need to layer the days on for fall, the loose yellowing leaves feathering down and the gusts that scrape them red like a rake against each other and the asphalt.


Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria. Last stop before the night train to Istanbul.