we sit here, stranded

Somewhere on a balcony of a slightly decaying building in northeast Argentina sit my two hiking shoes, shoes that I tried on in Steven and Julia’s living room last November, Steven assuring me, in his way, that spending more on shoes than usual was a sound decision for this trip. Shoes that just a few days ago hiked through a ravine near San Lorenzo and around a mountaintop in Salta, that have been on horses in Arequipa and motorcycles in Karnataka and bikes in more places than I remember, have climbed up steps and trails and crooked streets at Macchu Picchu and Darjeeling and Hanoi and southern and northern Chile and Sapa, Vietnam and Sorrata, Bolivia and southern Mexico, that have been strapped ceremoniously, unconsciously to the outside of my pack before each bit of movement. And before my last long bus ride of this entire journey I forgot them. The first large item I’ve left anywhere on this trip.

A few nights before, late–it always being late, me always being awake–on the bus from Còrdoba to Salta, my second to last long bus ride on this journey, I sat in the first seat on the top level of the bus, huge windows all around me, and stared out at the thin blanket of clouds that didn’t quite hide the full moon and the endless plains stretching out under its gaze. I contemplated the last seven months of movement and thought that this might be a time for conclusions, for large and weighty and thoughtful reflections on the meaning of all of this, particularly because I’m going so soon ¨back to my life in Seattle,¨ as I’ve so often said recently.

But I realize that I’m not going back to my life. This is my life. As I said to Allison a few weeks ago, walking through the metro station in Buenos Aires, I’ve ceased being surprised by the newness of everything around me. Not that I’m ¨at home in the world¨ or wholly comfortable or bored, but just that not knowing what tomorrow will look like, where I will sleep or what I will eat or who I will meet is so thoroughly commonplace that I can’t fully imagine living with constancy any more. But if this is my life of course I realize I haven’t given up the other one; I have two parallel lives, and one of them happens to have the advantage of my physical presence at the moment. And I’m rather unnerved about jumping from one to the other so soon, even as I’m happy it’s happening.

Yes, this is my life, and life seems to be something about which we have innumerable small insights without arriving at any conclusions. Instead of conclusions, then:

I do have other shoes. And they and I have been blessed these past two months or so to have so many people to walk beside. After an incredible month in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina with Annika (PHOTOS and PHOTOS and PHOTOS), Allison showed up at the airport in Buenos Aires, two hours late and grinning exactly as I knew she would be. We just hugged and laughed for a couple of minutes before we could say anything at all, and within minutes it felt like mid-December–the last time I saw her or any of our people in Seattle–was only a few hours ago.

And in her organized way, she immediately adjusted to Buenos Aires life, content to eat dinner at 10 pm and sleep until 10 am, two things I’ve never known her to do in Seattle. And together we discovered more of Buenos Aires, Tigre, Plata and Iguazu Falls (PHOTOS and PHOTOS and PHOTOS), and then, suddenly, she was back on a plane. Somehow I feel less capable of describing what I’ve seen lately than I did in the first months of my trip, as though the sheer volume of places I’ve been is making it impossible to give detailed accounts of the most recent ones.

A week ago in Còrdoba, I wore a pair of shoes I bought in Buenos Aires to take a tango lesson with Divya. It must be a marker of what this trip has done to me that I didn’t find it surprising that Divya (the friend of a friend of a friend whom I met and became instantly close with in Chennai all those months ago) should show up in Buenos Aires, by way of Brazil, at the end of my trip. Together we went to Rosario, Cordòba and an odd little German village outside of Còrdoba (and more PHOTOS), walking the streets, watching children dance in the plazas, riding bikes, eating meat, flying a kite, and talking about our respective trips, mine ending, hers beginning. And of course I was the better tango dancer, even if Divya is the professional.

And the other shoes, the ones that I’m wearing now in Buenos Aires, have had a short life. Annika walked patiently with me into at least two dozen shops in Peru and Bolivia, as my other street shoes were coming apart at every seam. Usually this involved the salespeople laughing as soon as I told them what size I was looking for, since (apparently) no one in South America has large feet. On our last day in La Paz we found a pair, which I’ve worn nearly every day since. And I will wear them these next few days in Buenos Aires, the place in which I’ve spent more time than any other on this trip. I will visit the few museums and cultural centers I’ve yet to see; I’ll go to my favorite bookshop and restaurant; I’ll buy some wine; I’ll go back to the nature reserve I’ve visited three times; I’ll read another book and visit the theater again; I’ll have my last awkward conversations in Spanish before I trade them for awkward conversations in English; I’ll walk again all the streets I walked with Annika when we first arrived a month and a half ago. And then I’ll go home.

 

cuando llegare (PHOTOS)

since I stopped posting photos to my Flickr account, some deeply exciting samplings from the past few months can be found here:

ARGENTINA – Che, Coke, Kites, Bikes, Yalla

ARGENTINA – BA for the People (part I), remind me (part II)

ARGENTINA – Iguazu Falls

BOLIVIA – (just a few) de bolivia

PERU – the lost shots from Peru

PERU – some favorites de peru (or, ormigas, amis and translation)

 

not my own

¨I know that [this] is quite ordinary.  I am not the only [person] to seek [something] far from home, and certainly I am not the first.  Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.¨

       - Jhumpa Lahiri, from ¨The Third and Final Continent,¨ Interpreter of Maladies

 

the same side as you

The two little girls bounced through the subway car passing out little cards as though their hair weren’t matted to their heads, as though they wore shoes, as though the dirt all over them were simply a part of their costumes for some game or errand that took them from person to person from car to car. There eyes told other stories than their motions, of course, and we took out a little bit of money to give them–nearly nothing. The smallest one, no more than four or five, pointed to the sack of food we’d prepared for our lunch. We pulled out a package of biscuits and handed it to them, but she was persistent, shoving the cookies back into my hand and poking out her finger again to indicate she wanted the oranges instead. It was the first time in all these months that I’ve encountered street children demanding fruit rather than money or candy. And of course we gave them the oranges.

And the next day we saw the same little girls, this time with others. One, perhaps six, sank to the floor and pressed the coins to the metal beneath her and issued a kind of controlled tantrumwhile a boy with her tried to give her his bread; the smallest boy sat calmly on the seat next to me, oblivious to the scene, and turned to smile and ask me for some change. And these are like the boy we saw a few days before, singing for change in the subway with a gorgeous broken wail, stamping his feet and pressing his lungs against the roof of the car, against our faces and the noise and the inevitability of everything around him.  And I wondered about the group of kids we met in Cuzco, all tiny and wearing the same posture and tattered clothes and grins as these girls; I stood outside the store with them, picking them up above my head with one hand again and again while Annika went inside to buy them food. So many kids in so many cities that it seems glib to mention them–sifting through piles of trash, serving food, carrying buckets, selling gum, mending clothes, huddling together or alone or with parents, performing circus routines and flashing smiles or masks of smiles. And I realize that the more present they all are in my life the easier it becomes not to think much about them.

Perhaps this will be one of the measurements, part of the index of this trip, even as I resist trying to measure and index.  But it could be instead the music I´ve listened to, all the sad Americana that somehow has seemed precisely right for my movement.  Or instead I could mark these months by something like the number of times I’ve pinched my finger in the old belt I’m wearing–a belt borrowed from Sachin in Mumbai, my fingers pinched as I closed the clasp just south of Darjeeling, again in an alleyway outside of a rural train station in Vietnam, again in some place I’ve forgotten in Bolivia, again in a cinema bathroom in Buenos Aires.  But a more interesting index will be the one I can’t piece together, that refuses me. 

And I’m alone again. Annika is gone; Allison is gone.  And the rhythm of this trip, of me moving about and waking up and eating and thinking without someone next to me, has begun to take shape again, even if it will be dissolved in only a few weeks, when I return to another life, or a new one, one that I don’t know how to think about right now.  But today I’m walking around Buenos Aires, in the sun, listening to the music coming out of my headphones but not impatient for it to reach my ears, trying to be vulnerable to what’s around me.

 

en el pasado I (entre Evo y Cat Power)

We couldn´t exactly see President Kirchner through the mass of banners and flags above the crowd, but we knew we were less than 100 meters from the spot where she stood speaking to the tens of thousands of Argentinians around us. We strained to hear some of what she was saying, occasionally clapping along with everyone else when we did, but mostly we just marveled at the number of people in and around the plaza, the children and grandmothers and unions and bands and parties bleeding out of every adjoining street, beating drums and chanting or listening intently or drinking beer or making their way through the crowd, holding hands, like us.

But that is not a beginning. How did we get there and with whom? Perhaps this is better: Our last bus ride in Bolivia, a brief and brutal trip from Tupiza to the border town of Villazon, the bus opening itself, as always, to a crush of sturdy coca-chewing old women with bowler hats, impossible loads folded into vibrantly colored, dust-covered blankets, children sleeping on the floor or standing between their parents’ legs, men with sacks of bread the size of my backpack, small dogs and the occasional llama. The windows refused my advances and we weren’t sure whether it was a good thing, whether the smells and the dearth of air inside were preferable to the dust outside. I asked the man in the aisle cradling his toddler son if he wanted our seats and couldn’t make out his response. He had soft eyes and fingernails and a manner of crouching that bespoke the kind of labor I might know as an interval and he will know for a lifetime or more. I wondered what manner of distances separated us. We smiled at his son and he smiled back.

But Bolivia is a country about which I’ve written nothing. I haven’t described here crossing the border from Peru and spending a week in La Paz. I haven’t mentioned the gringo coke bars or the club owner with all the plastic surgery or the graffiti in the streets or how stunning it is to look down from above a city that is so vast you feel like it must be a diorama, a miniature. I met my friend Marissa there and walked the streets for days, eating at an Israeli restaurant and talking to shopkeepers about Evo Morales. Then I changed direction again and crossed back into Peru.

(A moment of linearity: I went from Cuzco and Machu Picchu to La Paz, but then I decided I needed to go back to Peru, so I pushed and pulled myself back through the grueling bus trips and the shuffling and stumbling at the border to land in Arequipa, back with Samantha, Cornelia and Annika for a few days. And then it was La Paz all over again, this time with Annika, after Sam and Cornelia headed north for Ecuador.)

The last bus ride was not the worst, but I suppose there are several contenders. Just before I ate the bread and cheese from the bus station on the way to Tarija, I had been thinking about just how well my stomach has fared in South America, how I was likely to go home without the kinds of problems I had early in my trip. Three hours later I was convulsing violently on an 18 hour ride in a (literally) freezing bus with no bathroom. Annika kept trying to give me another jacket, since I didn’t have nearly enough clothing, especially since my only pair of long underwear disappeared in a lavanderia, but I knew that if I moved I would be sick. When I couldn’t bear the cold any longer that’s exactly what happened.

But that bus trip nearly didn´t happen; after hiking in Sorrata, in the mountains north of La Paz, we were trapped in the city for an extra 30 hours because all of the major roads in the country were blockaded by protesters. Three or four days later, on another icy bus ride–for which I was again unprepared–we stopped by the side of the dirt road at four in the morning a few meters ahead of another blockade. Annika and I left the bus and walked to the road block, where we found mostly old women sitting around small fires in the brutal cold, their faces and dress and determination directly out of a traveler’s fantastical ideas about the ¨authentic¨ Bolivia. We wanted to sit with them, to ask them about their protest, to feel the fire and smell the smoke of their pipes. We stood there for a few minutes, shivering, and climbed back into the bus where it wasn’t much warmer. By six the teenage conductor told all of us–four backpackers and a bus full of locals–to get out of the bus. We asked how we would get to town and he said, in Spanish of course, ¨with luck.¨ We walked two kilometers in the cold as the sun started to appear; then some men in a pick-up stopped and told us to climb in the back. They dropped us at a hostel where two hours later rocks broke our windows as we slept–the protesters marching in the street did not want to see any businesses open during the general strike. The only problem that posed for us was that at first no one would sell us food. Every business in town was boarded shut and padlocked, but eventually, after a few hours of something like mild desperation, we found a few tiny tiendas that would let us in when we knocked, so we managed to feed ourselves.

 

drippin´ pitch and made of wood (as DG might write)

This journey has been one of translation, an occupation I´ve found to be lacking in linearity, one without the trappings and predictable achievements of other occupations.  My translations do not consistently or inevitably improve; my skills are not becoming finely honed.  At times I´m comfortable in the discomfiting task, speaking so often–nearly always, actually–in Spanish or in English with non-native speakers.  And then I´m suddenly back to stumbling through every pinched and contorted phrase.  Perhaps it´s because the plane on which translations occur is never an even one.  In fact, it´s never even the same plane from one translation to the next. 

All of which is to say that I can hardly speak English these days.  But at least I understand German.  Or so thought Annika, Cornelia and Samantha on our trek to Machu Picchu.  When they spoke to each other I read their body language and tone so well that I often knew what they were saying and about whom, so at first they were convinced I´d studied some German.  And now I need to study English.  I find myself producing constructions I never would have made in the past, like ¨I took the water on my face,¨ or, ¨My heart is broken for Lebanon,¨ or, ¨I go downstairs and shave.¨  I can´t complain, but I also can´t help but wonder what my students will think this fall when I attempt to masquerade as a teacher of English Composition. 

But for now I have no students.  I have a little under two months, a little more of Bolivia, a little bit of money, and the vast expanses of Argentina.  I have the regret that I can´t afford a plane ticket to Ecuador, Venezuela and Colombia.  I have vivid and even precise memories of some of the earliest days of my trip.  I have a few more pounds than I had when I left the states.  I have a traveling partner, for the time being.  I have less than ten days to make it all the way to Buenos Aires.  

But more of Peru: in the jungle we walked for days with our guide, Abraham, speaking to him in Spanish and working to speak to each other in English–with me typically translating the English of the other two Americans on our trip to the Swiss and German women who found me easier to understand.  We picked avacodos and half a dozen kinds of fruit directly off the trees.  We crossed rivers on cable lines above the water.  And then Machu Picchu.  And then back to Cuzco, to the hostel where Jose-Mar, probably 13, seemed to always wait for me only so he could yell, ¨YED, YED, BAILE, BAILE!,¨ to get me to dance a little bit .  And then La Paz.   

 

 

that place where you go

It might have been because we were all a bit exhausted from a day of mountain biking and two days of trekking–though the trekking was completely ¨flat,¨ as our guide would always say as he indicated a steep incline with his hands–but once we entered the gates at Machu Picchu, sweating profusely even in the pre-dawn cold from the steep hike up the hill, we followed a sign for ¨Cerro Machu Picchu¨ and just kept going up.  A little over an hour later, after a brutal climb, we stopped well above the clouds and discovered that we´d been climbing up and away from the ruins themselves.  As we turned back and starting climbing down the clouds finally began to clear and we saw below us Machu Picchu.  If I were a religious person I´d be tempted to draw on the language of religion; suffice it to say, it was stunning in a way that I didn´t quite believe it could be, given all the tourist hype that surrounds the site.  We stood aghast for some time and then made our way down to join the crowds, about the time the tourist buses began to arrive full of the folks who didn´t want to leave Agua Calientes at 4:30 in the morning.  For now, I´ll leave it to the realm of the visual.

 

 

things will be much easier to say

Before the Ormigas, there was Paul. Paul has vision trouble. He can no longer accurately read the lyrics of the Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie songs he´s transcribed onto scraps of paper in order to practice his English. He finds it difficult to apprehend street names on maps. When he looks at a Cathedral he can only see the laborers who cut and placed the stones. Paul can be forgiven such problems, given that he´s nearing seventy and has slept on the streets in nearly as many countries as he has years.

For two nights in Cuzco I left the hostel to go out and then returned to talk with him, knowing I´d regret it if I didn´t. He talked for hours; I listened and occasionally interupted him to attempt to get a word in or to quibble with his characterization of some particular group of people. He doesn’t trust groupings of people or organizations or organization as such, actually. When he first went home to France to collect his pension they asked how it was possible that he had worked so little in his life. The passage from Marx on the lumpen proletariat kept creeping through my mind–the alluring bit about the “swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars and other flotsam of society” that don’t make any sense in terms of the traditional working classes (and, Marx thought, in terms of the potential for revolution). Paul doesn’t seem to fit at all, and I kept thinking that he has some vitally important sense of the world that would reveal itself if I just listened long enough to his stories about islands and mountains and Indian philosophy and hitchhiking and free food and temples and sleeping under staircases and getting knifed in Mexico. I also kept wondering how someone who trusts the world so much–trusts it enough to give himself over to it, to let it take him where it likes–can distrust it so thoroughly, perhaps so much that he can only be alone in his life.

Those first two days, I walked up into the hills away from the tourist center. I tested my foot; I tipped my hat to old people like a caballero, like a child; in the altitude I breathed as heavily after a few minutes as I would during a three-hour hike with Brad at home. I remembered that I do my best thinking while walking. I wondered whether the waiters in the tourist restaurants are potential revolutionaries. I read more American fiction. I contemplated Arundhati Roy’s assertion that a novel is the opposite of an atomic bomb. I thought about the Incas, about how utterly improbable was there existence, how utterly improbably is our own. I talked for awhile with two small kids in the hills and made them promise to try to do good things in their lives before I gave them some platita, then I felt like a missionary.

And then I met Samantha, Cornelia and Annika, just in time to dance all night for Sam’s birthday before we left to trek to Macchu Picchu.

 

NB: Pop Star Sightings, the Politics of Intercontinental Self-Exposure, Peruvian Kids, Buicks, Wastrels and Diminutive Jeds…

Not necessarily in that order. 

* It´s happening.  Again.  Twice today I looked down to find my fly wide open.  If you have friends in South America, please send them an official ¨Please watch out for gringos exposing themselves in the streets¨ warning, since I don´t think we can trust the State Department to get on this one.  Vigilance is key.  Meanwhile, I´m looking into whether my zipper respects certain imaginary national boundaries.  So far, it´s victims reside only in India, Vietnam and Peru.  Updates forthcoming when (in)appropriate. 

* Martina´s roommate apparently told her after our one meeting that she thinks I look like Justin Timberlake.  This provided me with a far bigger laugh than the ¨Rooney Face¨ comments I got in India (particularly now that Rooney and Co. just kicked Messi and Barca out of contention, for those sad souls paying attention).  Don´t worry: we are seeking medical attention for the poor woman, whose problems, I suspect, extend beyond eyesight.

* I don´t know if it´s just that Chilean kids hate me, but in my 12 hours in Peru I´ve already become interesting to children again, so at least I know I´ll have someone smiling at me.  And, for that matter, I can´t help but notice that–already–my conversations with people in Peru have a bit warmer tone than my typical conversation in Chile, and not simply because the Spanish here is mercifully slower and less full of modismos.  It´s not that I found (my incredibly limited and non-representative experience of) Chilean people to be unfriendly, but most of the people I spoke with were not terribly interested in gringo Jed, to say the least.  (In that sense, actually, they seem rather like Americans.)

* It´s already clear that I could have stayed here three times as long as I did in Chile for the same amount of money.  If I can manage to forget those three recovery weeks, do I get a refund?

* A few vitally important photgraphs to add to those that I posted yesterday.  These are from my last (and probably best) week in Chile; Martina and I stopped our conversations long enough to take these in the salt flats:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* I crossed the border this morning in a car that reminded me very much of the archaic, giant Buick boats that each of my older sisters had the displeasure of using when learning to drive.  But instead of my sisters, the car, which I suppose you could call a collectivo but it felt more like a weird underground ride service run by an off-kilter but harmless neighbor, held two Brazilians, a Chilean woman, a lovely and glowing American woman smuggling eggs in her pockets and heading for the jungle, the friendly, fast-talking driver and one me, just after another overnight bus trip and 45 minutes walking around the bus station deciding whether to pay the expensive Chilean bus prices or brave the border and Peruvian buses on my own.  (Two notes: 1) I did the latter, and 2) I´m guessing that´s the only time you´ll find me describing an American I meet on this trip as ¨lovely and glowing,¨ unless of course Allison forces me to write about her after she makes it to Argentina.) 

* Seven hours, five police checks, and another long bus ride through improbable deserts later, I arrived in Arequipa, Peru.  Already I love it, even if there are plenty of tourists.  As I began to write this post, the power went out for several blocks, the first time that has happened to me since India.  I walked out into the street and stood for a long time on the corner staring up at a perfect sliver of moon as people skirted past me in the dark, the taxis honked, the shopkeepers lit candles and the music kept playing in the distance. 

 

despues (para continuar)

Photos, then text…

Last night, without any planning or close to enough warm clothing, we hopped on a bus that took us into the desert´s back roads outside of tiny San Pedro de Atacama.  There we found a French astronomer with a good sense of humor and bad politics–Martina later told me my face went from an enormous smile to dead serious the instant he made a joke about Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales–who used a laser pointer that appeared to actually reach the stars in order to teach us about a sky that can´t ever be seen from the hemisphere where I´ve spent most of my life.  We listened, we followed the outlines of constellations, we looked at Saturn and Mars through gigantic telescopes, but mostly we just stared up at more stars than I´ve ever seen at once.  He gave us warm jackets and hats, taught us more in two hours than I learned in a semester of college astronomy (though I admit I didn´t quite attend all of the classes back then), and reminded us how impossibly small we all are. 

Something worth remembering, especially as I´m coming out of some strange and difficult weeks.  I´ve been tempted, in so many of these last days, to look forward to a time when I´ve placed this last month into a narrative, when I´vesecured for it an order and rationale–as we do–to help me imagine that a few weeks spent recovering from a careless accident in the most expensive small town I´vevisited on this journey was in fact a positive occurrence, that it enabled so much.  But even before the astronomer, the past week–my first without the giant boot–at the coast and in the desert had begun to convince me that my trip is alive again. 

Allende loves my boot.  Valparaiso helped.  The morning I arrived I walked into another protest, the scene a familiar one, with water cannons and armored trucks chasing students in the streets.  This time I avoided jumping into the middle of things.  I suspect that carrying out running battles with the police in the street is tough when you can´t run. 

Two days later I found a very different protest when I came down from the impossibly steep hills in one of the city´s ancient ansensores.  Some university students/musicians took over the empty second floor of a corner building downtown and put on a concert to raise money and protest the cutting of music programs.  I found a spot in a doorway to listen and watch the reactions of the midday rush hour crowd, including a few truckloads of day laborers who started cheering and dancing when they stopped below the open windows. 

¿Como?  I stayed with Ben, a friend I met in Pucón several weeks ago, in a room immediately above the base of the Asensor Reina Victoria, which also happens to be an outdoor party spot for an enormous crowd of street drinkers, so my sleep had an impressive soundtrack.  Getting me there took some effort, though: Ben is French with decent Spanish and very little English; Martina–whom I also met in Pucón–is Italian with good Spanish and even better English; and I´m a gringo with a little Spanish (and no Italian or French).  So the three of us exchanged many text messages and phone calls before I finally made my way to Ben´s place, and poor Martina did most of the work.  My first night in town, Martina and her Colombian roommates came over to cook some serious Italian food and we had a blast.  It´s so interesting–and frustrating–to be in this seemingly vast in between space with my Spanish.  I´ve definitely surpassed the hordes of gringos who don´t care to speak Spanish and seem to avoid it as much as possible, but I´m still not very capable of carrying on complicated conversations.  At dinner that night and at so many other times, I can follow the conversation with some effort, but if I´m going to participate I have to plan in my head what I will say, to visualize the string of words piece by piece.  Usually by the time I do the conversation has moved on and I´ve missed another four or five sentences.  If nothing else, at least this is forcing me to listen more and talk less. 

Maitencillo.  My last days con la bota took place in Maitencillo, a gorgeous seaside town north of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar, where I met my friend Danica and her friends for a birthday party, some booted dancing, some (rather slow) walks on the beach, and Chilean food courtesy of Danica´s Chilean ¨parents,¨ all of which provided just the right motivation to get me out of Pucón.   

Oswaldo.  In the five hours we spent together, we talked constantly, though his English is slightly worse than my Spanish.  He works 14 hours per day, first at a doctor´s office in Villarica and then in his own little Kinesiology practice.  He´s hoping to have enough money soon to quit one job and spend more time with his three young sons.  He wants to open a clinic for the poor.  He has good taste in futbol clubs.  His aunt and uncle and several other relatives were founding members of a leftist party that fought a guerilla war against Pinochet´s regime.  Most ended up dead or in exile–some are still afraid to return to the country, even with Pinochet dead–which might account for his desire to stay away from formal politics. 

In five sessions of physical therapy he helped my foot enormously, made me begin to feel like I might actually return to my usual mobility, storming across campus with more bags than I can carry.  On my last visit, he invited me to stay with his family should I ever return to Villarica, and he told me that his talks with me have convinced him to take English classes.  I told him that if I ever have a home, he and his family should come and stay.  We each tried, in the other´s language, to communicate how much we enjoyed our time together, both sure that we would be great friends if geography and language and an endless string of constructed, imaginary and murderous boundary lines were not conspiring against us. 

Neruda.  On the eve of May Day, I sat next to Neruda´s house and grave at Isla Negra, which is neither an island nor black, and watched the ocean until I knew I had to walk–with my slow half-limp–to the bus stop if I was going to catch the bus back to Valparaiso.  I thought about Neruda dying just months after the coup, after Kissinger and Pinochet and the boys began they´re work.  I thought about where I would go next, about what I would do back in Seattle.  I reminded myself of all I could think to remind myself.  I missed everyone and felt good about missing them.  I was happy to be alone and wished I wasn´t. 

 Sand and Salt.  Martina and I came north–one of us by plane and the other via a 22-hour bus trip–on Friday and have spent each day since visiting surreal salt flats, moon-like valleys, 4000-meter high lakes, and much else that I don´t find myself capable of describing.  Tonight I will get on another bus.  With any luck, I´ll be in Peru in 24 hours, my boot still in a bag at my side until I can find a clinic that will take it.