A Home Among Towers

As I write I sit in an exorbitant hotel lounge. There's a Christmas tree with a broken string of lights, a blazing hearth, and a French family playing fuse ball. It's all very incongruous here in the national park. Soon I will have to steal myself for a ten minute hike through a gusty downpour to the tent where I sleep. With a full-sized mattress.

My volunteer stint here in Torres del Paine has been an exercise in strange contradictions and surreal beauty. Along with my fellow volunteers, I've destroyed bridges, analyzed worm census data, pretended to be an endangered deer in front of skeptical Chilean youth, and written found poetry from the back of a whiskey bottle while a band of damp Portuguese read heartfelt verse aloud. I've marveled at the improbable fairy-tale grandeur of this place, what with incandescent glacial lagoons and monolithic granite spears and mid-summer snowfall. I've marveled at my own freedom, at the moon, at the disconnected slide-show of odd and wondrous things that somehow must cohere into the trajectory of my existence.

So, you know, I've been living.

And the holidays approach! I will be 23 in a mere four days! There are a few strategically placed Christmas trees around the hotel, but I can't help but miss the smell of my mother's cinnamon rolls, ritualistic construction of paper snow flakes; stealthy attempts to flock my brother with fake snow. I've never spent my birthday and Christmas away from home before, and it's a lingering sort of homesickness. But we four volunteers are organizing a gift exchange that involves broken tent parts. We discuss our families' holiday traditions over tea, and asked our boss to bring us Santa hats from Punta Arenas. Something festive is happening, and it just might be that I'll grow closer to my family and its rituals through distance.

I'll conclude with a sneak preview of the pictures that we recently uploaded to Picasa. For the full exposition, visit this link.