Pictures!

 Dear Readership,

Nathaniel and I have collaborated to create a Picasa page documenting our experiences in South America. The first album, "Mint Binge," has just been uploaded, and it can be viewed at the following link:

http://picasaweb.google.com/N.C.southernexposure/MintBinge#

In other news, I am glad that the miners have been freed from the bowels of the earth. I ask myself whether any Chilean will be able to discuss any other topic for the next three months, or whether the local news will ever stop broadcasting the story of "LOS 33 MINEROS DE CHILE."

Life is good. Tomorrow I'm going to explore ancient forts and visit the Beer Museum.

Love, and thanks for reading,
Caitlin

Nostalgia is a strange loop.

Lumaco has changed a lot since I lived there five years ago. There’s a new municipal development across from my family’s tiny carnicería—before there were just tufted hills. There’s a new upstairs to my Chilean house, with rooms for boarders and a vaulted view of this rapidly growing rural village. There are fine lines around my host mother’s eyes, internet access in my host-home, and a supermarket.

Some things haven’t changed, though. Bread is still cooked in a wood-fire oven and served with avocado and cheap tea. The television is still incessant in its broadcast of tacky music videos, and roosters still crow outside of my window. Lumaco means “water of the trees” in the language of the native Mapuche people, and Lumaco’s brown river still bustles through on its determined course through the pine forests Southern Chile.  I don’t think it ever noticed my absence, or cared that I returned.

One evening I went running alone on the same gravel road where I always used to run, back when I was a lost seventeen-year-old feeling trapped in spiritual gridlock of small town life. Drunkards wavered to their countryside homes as the sun wavered on the horizon, and my lungs filled with the rich scent of wood-smoke. It was just like I remembered, except for this time everything was on my own terms.

Nathaniel and I went to Lumaco last weekend, and, over extended broadcasts of the Chilean Miner Rescue Mission, I tentatively reformed my connection with the dreary lost loving place that I once called home.  I had been afraid of returning to such a complicated nexus of memory, but Nathaniel played my host brother’s guitar and we drank tea and laughed and talked about the moon. I relaxed and flirted with some kind of atonement.

I was glad to get on the southward-bound bus, though, and watch Lumaco’s hills melt back into memory. I don’t want to live that life, and I never did. I prefer to carry it with me as I move, buried somewhere deep in my strange mosaic of self. Now I’m hoeing thistle and collecting alien-brain seed pods outside of Valdivia (see Nathaniel’s post for details), and the journey continues to evolve.

Tonight, I think, I will toast my tea evolution of journeys.  And to the color of Chile in the spring.

Tusks and Other Muses

"I came here to count the bells

that live upon the surface of the sea,

that sound over the sea,

within the sea.

So, here I live."

--Pablo Neruda

We are now in Valparaiso, a beautifully graffitied  port town built on impossible hills. During the past two days we have visited two of Pablo Neruda's three Chilean abodes. Neruda is one of my favorite poets, and it was like a fairytale to explore his eclectic decor and strange collections that included, but were not limited to, carousel horses, figureheads, and snail shells. He also had a fondness for colored glass and bells and green ink, but most of all he loved the ocean. Both of the houses we saw had panoramic vistas of the Pacific in all of its bone-chilling deep-blue grandeur. It was not hard at all to imagine a poet inspired.

But maybe his secret was the narwhal tusk. Neruda kept a 2.25 meter tooth of a narwhal whale, along with a historical painting of the fanciful beast. Strange man. He wrote beautiful things.

And now we're going even more austral. I spent a semester as an exchange student in Chile when I was seventeen, and we're going South to go visit my host family in their small small village of Lumaco. I'm kind of nervous to reunite with a universe that I left behind five years ago, but it should be interesting.

(I also wanted to mention that co-conqueror and travel friend Nathaniel is also keeping a blog. For a completely different perspective on our ramblings, visit nathanielgoessouth.blogspot.com.)

Santiago, Chile

I am here, staying with a wonderful French-Canadian professor. His apartment is on the sixteenth floor, and from the balcony you can see Santiago sprawling beneath snow-capped peaks that fade in and out of the smog. Boys perform improbable juggling feats at stoplights, impressive colonial architecture stands alongside ugly urban development, and there's a bite in the early-spring air. The biggest flag ever billows over the Chilean treasury--it is at least the size of 16 queen-sized beds, I'd say, although Nathaniel puts it in the twenties.

After spending the day meandering through downtown Santiago, we returned to our kind host's lofty apartment. As I made myself a cup of espresso, I thought about the fact that I'm going to be on this continent for eight months. I didn't have a paper to write, I wasn't late for anything, and I was pressing finely ground coffee into an espresso maker with the back of a spoon. The mountains watched through big glass windows, and everything was beautiful.

GOING SOUTH ...almost.

I got up at 3:30 this morning, and showed up at PDX ready to board a flight to Santiago, Chile. When I scanned my passport, however, my travel information didn't pop up. The lady at the front desk looked confused. She scurried to consult her supervisor, and after much hushed conversation around a computer, the solemn supervisor approached me.

"I hate to tell you this," she said, "but your flight doesn't exist."

I didn't know this was allowed. Hell, I didn't even know this was possible. Flights aren't like fairies--they don't go away if people stop believing in them... do they?

After sitting dejectedly by the baggage drop-off station listening to terrible terrible tinny classical music for four eons, and after almost crying to the nice Southern man who was the spokesperson for Avianca airlines, I was put on a different flight that supposedly does exist. It leaves tomorrow. Ostensibly.

And then I will be in Chile. I'm meeting my college-friend Nathaniel there, and then together we will conquer the entire continent of South America. And by "conquer" I mean "meander through," "get lost in," and "harvest the vegetables of." Our plans now are almost laughably vague (see the map I've included with this post). We're planning of traversing Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia, but I think that this is the sort of journey that evolves.

So check back soon! I know that my posting has been meager lately, but now I'm having a proclaimed adventure and will strive to be a reliable bloggist.

On that note, onward and southward I fly!!!! Hopefully.

The Windmill Explained

A 'windmill' (n.) is a machine which converts the energy of wind into rotational motion by means of adjustable vanes called sails. The main use is for a grinding mill powered by the wind, reducing a solid or coarse substance into pulp or minute grains, by crushing, grinding, or pressing. Windmills are common in Holland. If you want, you can purchase a 20 foot Aeration Windmill System on Amazon.com for $1,957.95.

Beyond these facts, the windmill has fabulous literary connotations. Perhaps you've heard of the English idiom "tilting at windmills." This expression is derived from an episode in Migues de Cervantes' seminal novel Don Quijote. In common parlance, "tilting at windmills" means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting futile battles.

I chose to title my blog "Tilting at Windmills" for two reasons: (1) because the idea of 'fighting futile battles' (or the noble quest toward that which cannot ultimately be attained) seems to be telling of the human condition and (2) because Carleton College--the institution where I got my undergraduate degree--is partially powered by a windmill. (Technically I think it's a wind turbine, but it's the same principle really.)

Of course I've graduated from college now, and I no longer can observe the steady whomping of a windmill slicing the sky. But I still think that it's beautiful (and noble) to attempt impossible tasks, to reach beyond yourself, to express that which evades language. Although I often feel like the process of chasing the impossible crushes me into minute grains, I think it means something.

So, although I'm no longer in the wind-ridden Flat Place, perhaps the metaphor still stands.

Yesterday waiting to buy movie tickets--

Me: I can't get a student ticket anymore!! Weird... Dad, I'm unemployed!

Dad: No, you're not unemployed.

Me: What? I mean, my summer job is over. I don't have a job.

Dad: Yes, but in order to be unemployed you have to be actively seeking a job.

Me: Oh. What am I then, if I'm not unemployed?

Dad: A weasel.