I heard a siren a while ago. It surprised me; I had forgotten sirens. It also reminded me to listen more closely to this new/old swirl of sound all around me. Horns honking, motors roaring, dogs barking, and the hum of human voices (laughing and talking) grounding and punctuating it all. Voices. Voices. My own and others. Only the creative meyeowling of Cat is missing. I miss the pup. He is now happily in Texas – nuts chopped off, lounging like a prince on beds inside the house and gobbling down packaged catfood – visiting Patti and her family.
I compare this now world of sound with the wind/water music of the island. Patti calls the island Solidad, and that seems like a good name to me too. It has no “real written on the map” name. Since it lives just to the south of a larger island called Owen Island, I sometimes think of it as Son of Owen… or perhaps Daughter. Mostly though I like to remember it through its own language rather than through my own. It is its own place and better left without a human imposed name. I have been gone a month now and I miss it there – a lot.

The last report I sent you was the End of the Year Report written two months ago just before Patti arrived to the island (Some of you didn’t receive it until a month later when we returned to Puerto Natales since Patti was crunched for time before she came out to the island and didn’t have a chance to send the report to everyone. If by chance you didn’t receive that last report and would to, please let me know.) so maybe I’ll pick up the story there.
In the days before Patti arrived I was both eager to see her and very sorry to see my time of solitude coming to an end. I kept counting the days; first until the final day of my year, and then until she would actually arrive. Time flew. I was fearful -with good reason - that I would slip off center and neglect my daily practice of meditation, exercise and thanksgiving. Become tangled in daily doings and get caught up in chatter. Forget to daily open and reopen heart and body and mind to the world of matter and spirit just as it is. Wham. It was not a slow process at all. The slow process is now learning to remember to integrate solitude with society. Ah but I’ve lost the thread of the tale again.

Last month on the Island

On the appointed day (arranged via satellite phone) the Chilean Navy arrived in a fairly wild sea with Patti on board. I ran out in the inflatable to pick her up. Half way there the outboard died and left me floating and yanking futilely on the starter cord until I realized the fuel line had come loose. Ah. After a wet ride I arrived to the side of the navy boat and we loaded the stuff Patti had bought for me and for herself. Then she slithered down and into the inflatable. The navy left and we toured around a bit to give Patti a quick sense of the place. Then ashore where Cat was waiting. “Holy shit, what’s this? Another human being? I thought there was only one of them.” Took him a few days to get used to her, but then they became good friends. Also, he stopped yeowling once he heard voices inside the cabin when he was alone out on the porch. A blessing.

Video
Patti brought a major surprise with her when she came. In Punta Arenas (the city of about 100,000 with an airport some 150 miles south of Puerto Natales) she by chance (read fate) met a couple of guys doing a documentary on a South African millionaire who is funding a project to clean up trash around the South Pole (I think I got that right). They got to talking and when she told them what she was doing, they suggested she get a video camera and tape and shoot some footage of the island, the cabin, my daily doings and my perceptions of this and that. Patti immediately recognized that this was exactly what she should do, zoomed out to the duty free zone, and arrived at the camera store just after they had closed. Pausing only to take a breath, she started to hammer on the door and got them to open back up to sell her a video camera and 32 hours of tape. She arrived to the island with no idea at all whether I would be willing to be taped.
Oh yeah! As soon as she told the story and asked how I felt, I recognized that this was a perfect next step in the project. Since the beginning, I have intended to include an audio (story telling) component, as well as the written part, in the Ph.D. thesis. I took a cheap tape recorder with me to the island, but only used it very briefly since the quality turned out to be so bad. Video seemed like the perfect tool. And not only as a means of recording my perspective and feelings etc at the end of the year, but also as a mirror within which I could see myself reflected back onto myself and so gain a whole new angle of vision. Wonderful indeed.
We began to shoot… or rather, Patti began to shoot and I began to talk. In fact, I seldom shut up – whether or not the camera was rolling. This startled Patti since she had expected to find a semi mute recluse and had planned to hardly talk at all for the first week or so. Instead she found a raving jabberbox. So much for cool calm and collected. Hi ho. And we shot and shot and shot. Patti turned out to be a natural behind the camera: good eye for framing and angle; delicacy of perception; smooth transitions and zooming; a rock steady hand/body over extended periods of time. As usual, I pretty much took over the whole thing even though I tried not to be too abusive and demanding. Happily, we both agreed on what needed to be shot and we both think we really got some neat footage. Pretty hard not to. The place is just incredibly beautiful.
Irony. For the first week Patti was there, the weather was amazingly warm and sunny. Well shit, this would never do. For a year I’ve been writing about how tough the climate is, and the video footage will show only warm sunny days. Huh uh. No worries. The lull lasted a bit less than a week and then the wind and rain came raging in again. Cold. Wet. Windy. My sister, Peggy, wrote me recently that she didn’t really get an accurate picture from the reports I’ve sent out during the past year of how extreme the weather down here really is. It was only when she watched a National Geographic documentary of the area and saw the rain falling horizontally that she finally got a sense of it.
In any case we shot and shot: daily activities such as fishing, hauling wood, dragging the boat up, working on the outboard, sky fishing in the roaring wind, and, of course, philosophizing/storytelling on and on and on. We wanted to get it all shot in a couple of weeks if possible so as to have a few days rest and relaxation before we had to start tearing down the cabin. It was tiring, but went really well over all. One thing that I found especially interesting was the change in how I responded to being in front of the camera. At first it felt perfectly natural. I was just telling my story and it was emerging on its own without concern for effect or appearance. But as the days and hours in front of the lens went by, a subtle shift took place. I began to feel like an actor concerned with my image - my external appearance. In conjunction with this shift, I started to lose my sense of steady centeredness. Felt a bit hollow and less real. And this after just a few hours of playing the actor. An actor portraying my own life to boot. Weird shit indeed. Two questions arose. The first is of course the obvious one about how professional actors and actresses manage (or perhaps don’t manage) to maintain some sense of their own inner reality when they are so constantly in the limelight both on the set and off. The second question is probably just as obvious, but I’m not often aware of it since I/we are so constantly ‘on stage’ in our lives - always projecting an image for those around us at the cost of our own deep sense of self - that it seldom really gets asked. How can I/we live in the social whirl(d) and not get so caught up in the dance that we lose track of our own inner rhythms? One answer is, I think, doing with less… in almost all aspects of our lives: less money; less excitement; less peer respect; less. This, it seems to me, opens up the space to explore who or what it is that craves more of everything and why. It is, in part, this exploration that keeps the home fires burning. La la la.

Boatworks

On the second day of Patti’s visit we took the inflatable over for an afternoon cruise along Staines Penninsula. Gorgeous day. The next day we went further afield across the channel to the east and up into a fiord to the foot of the southern Andes. At the furthest point from camp, I got a nasty sense that the motor was really beginning to malfunction. But, I’d been having that sense on and off for the past year. (You might remember from previous reports that the motor and I had been having intense, anxiety producing discussions ever since the inflatable flipped over in the wind not long after I reached the island and the motor was submerged in salt water.) We started back and when we were still four miles from home the motor started to seriously miss. I didn’t dare shut it down to tinker with it and we just kept limping along and hoping we would get back. Luckily the weather remained calm, and after more than an hour of wondering whether or not we would make it, we crawled back to our beach. The motor died and never ran again even though I worked on it quite a bit during the next few days. Once back here in Natales, I took it to a mechanic and it turned out to be a blown head gasket. Amazing that the motor made it through the whole year and just after the navy brought Patti in, it died. At first I was pretty upset that Patti wouldn’t get to see more of the surrounding area, and that we wouldn’t have the boat for more of the video, but then I realized how lucky I’d been that the motor hadn’t died sometime during the previous months when I was miles and miles away from camp. What a blessing. Trust the process.

Tearing it Down and Cleaning it Up.

We finished shooting most of the footage we wanted by March 1st and received word that the navy would be there to pick us up on the 15th. Ouch. That was really the crunch day when life would change big time. I had no idea. We relaxed for a few days and shot some beautiful footage of storms and sea otters and light on the sea and mountains and then started to pack everything up.
It was really tempting to leave the cabin just as it was since the national parks service had told me I could. It would have been so much easier to just pack our stuff and go. Also, I’d put a lot of effort and time and caring into building the cabin, and had come to love the place as home. But I had a deep sense that the right thing to do was to clean up the site and leave the island as much like it had been when I got there as possible. To give it back to itself and to the creatures living there. To remember that I had been a guest there among the permanent (?) residents and not the owner. But I was very glad that I’d at least been able to share it with Patti and had a video record of it.
And so we began. Packed up all the stuff we didn’t need and cleaned out the porch. Closed in the porch and moved to there (kicking Cat out in the process). Then we tore down the cabin except for the porch and set up the tent on a temporary platform of 2x4s and plywood with a tarp over the whole area. Then down came the porch too. During this whole time the weather was foul and it rarely stopped raining which led to grumbling and anxiety on my part that we wouldn’t get it all done in time and that we wouldn’t be able to burn all the lumber. But we were really lucky and got two almost rainfree days just when we needed to burn. Huge fires took care of all the wood and plywood etc. Patti did a great job of keeping the fires roaring and both days we just got everything burned before the tide came up and put out the last of the coals. She stripped down to her sports bra and, drenched in sweat and semi-cooked by the heat of the roaring flames, looked like a serious peasant woman or one of the minions of hell. Once everything burnable was burned, I went down to the burn site and scoured the area for all the screws and nails. We ended up with 10 big nylon bags of trash (mostly plastic I had either picked up from beaches where it had floated in from the shipping lane 20 miles to the west, or had generated during the year, or the plastic tarps I’d used to cover the shelter. What a huge, very muddy, exhausting job it all was. And as a going away present, the wind shifted and started blowing directly onto our beach from the south. It had only blown in from that direction three or four times during the whole year, and then only for a day or so. But this time it howled in and kept on blowing day after day. It just wiped us out, but we had to keep going to be ready for the navy.

Last Day

We got word from the national parks people that the navy boat would be there at noon on March 15th. We would be ready. All we had left to do that morning was take down the tarp, unhook the propane tank, roll up the tent and take down the temporary platform. We got started about 8 AM and figgered we had plenty of time. But at 9 AM the navy boat came into view. A new storm was brewing and they wanted to get back to Puerto Natales before it hit. The second lieutenant in charge of the landing party told me that we only had an hour and twenty minutes to get off the island. He said that they would just take Patti and me and the important stuff and leave the rest behind. “Huh uh,” I said, “we need to take it all with us since I don’t expect to be back.” “No,” he repeated, “we only have an hour and twenty minutes and then we have to go.” I said I was pretty sure we could get it all aboard in that time if we hurried. They could start carrying it out to the boat in their inflatable and I would get the tarp down and the platform taken apart.
We started to zoom. He helped some, but mostly the enlisted men were just super. We were all just rushing to get everything packed up and carried out to the navy boat about a quarter mile off shore.
All during this time the second lieutenant kept saying that we would have to leave some of the stuff there. I kept saying no. The discussions got more and more intense and confrontational until I flat out told him that unless everything went including all the trash, then I just wasn’t going either. He said his orders were to take Patti and me and the most important stuff and he was going to obey his orders. Patti was great. She told me to do what I needed to do and if they left me there, she would go with them and find some way to come back and get me. This was a real gift of support. I knew that if they did leave me I would be in a bad way since all the food and camping gear was already on the navy boat. The second lieutenant kept talking on his radio and said that the commander of the boat wanted me to come out so he could talk to me face to face. I almost went for that one, but then realized that once I was off the beach I would have no way to insist that they bring everything. I asked for his word that he would bring absolutely everything, and he agreed, but at the last moment I just had the sense that leaving before the beach was completely clean would be a major mistake. I told him that we only needed a few more trips to finish taking everything and I would go with the last load and talk to his commander then.
That’s when things got pretty nasty for a while and I finally held out my hands and said that with total respect for him and his point of view, I had to honor my commitment to God, to nature, to myself and to the national parks service to clean up the beach before I left. That if I left a bunch of trash behind my whole project would be meaningless. That the only way I would go before the beach was clean would be if they hand cuffed me and took me by force. He backed down, but said at least that we didn’t need to take all the lumber that had been the tent platform. It was time for some compromise (even though I hate like hell to ever give in) so that we could all feel ok about the situation. I said we had to take out all the plywood etc, but could leave the few 2x4s since they were just raw wood. But that we needed to put them up in the woods where they would rot quickly and so that if any one else came by (pretty damn unlikely) they wouldn’t have to look at stuff I’d left behind. He agreed.
Finally all the trash was aboard and Patti and I went out with the last load. Once on board the commander greeted us very politely and I apologized for the corner I’d put him in. Everyone cooled down and we got underway. The storm never materialized and the whole trip back to Puerto Natales was flat calm. Patti smiled at me and said, “Welcome back to the world.” She was a bit upset that she hadn’t video taped the confrontation, but I think it is just as well. It was, I think, more than anything a misunderstanding and overall a fairly minor part of all my interactions with the Chilean Navy. They have been very helpful, and it would have been much more difficult and expensive to get to and from the island without their support.

The Social Whirl(d)

We arrived to Puerto Natales after dark and the crew unloaded all our stuff onto the dock and covered it up in case of rain. We were just wiped out. A man from the hostel where Patti had stayed before coming to the island was waiting at the dock and took us up. Nice surprise. We stayed there for about 10 days getting used to being in town again.
Cat stayed with us in the room. He was very good considering that up til then he had had total freedom to roam the island and hunt and fish too. But jeez, switching him over to packaged catfood sure caused him to shit a lot. Truly amazing amounts for an animal his size. The smell was also pretty amazing. Woof. I went around and round about whether to give Cat to the national parks people who wanted to take him to a new site they have in an isolated place or to ask Patti to take him with her to Texas. I finally decided to send him north and hope he would make the trip and the change of environment ok. So far so good.
Patti flew away from Punta Arenas and I wandered around the “city” getting my mind blown. Then I went by the radio station to say hi to a friend whom I met last year while I was preparing to go to the island. He invited me onto his evening talk show and also suggested I go to the local TV station. I went and they taped an interview. Have no idea how it came out since I returned to Puerto Natales that same night and the channel from Punta Arenas is not available here. Once back here the national parks people asked me to give the local reporter for the Punta Arenas newspaper an interview and I agreed. Very good interview I thought and the article in the paper was well done and captured the spirit of the project well. Even made the front page of the paper with a photo spread, so I was famous for my 10 minutes or so. Then the national parks office from Punta Arenas called to ask where the local reporter for the national newspaper could contact me since he had seen the article in the local paper and wanted to do a piece as well. He called and wanted to do an interview over the phone, but I declined and we agreed to meet when I next go to Punta Arenas. Whee, so I might get another 5 minutes of fame too.
Pragmatically, it might have helped me to get my residence papers straightened out. They had expired four months ago (I couldn’t leave the island to renew my visa) and I was here completely illegally. When I went to the immigration office, they were very friendly and curious about my time on the island. They straightened everything out with no problem at all. I just had to go over to Argentina for a day and come back into Chile on a 3 month tourist visa. Imagine being 4 months overdue on your visa in the USA. Hell, they would probably just shoot you and be done with it.
So now I sit here in the kitchen of this pension and write to you all. I’m fasting today for the first time since I left the island and my head aches. I have neglected exercising and shoulders and neck are tight and sore. But little by little I am reestablishing my daily practice of meditation, thanksgiving and exercise. It is cold and gray out. Winter closing in. My room has no heat, but then I only pay $4.50 US a night to stay here and use the kitchen to cook. I like it here. It is quite peaceful now that the tourist season is over and I am the only guest. In front there is a butcher shop that they’ve just reopened for the winter. They also have a farm where they raise pigs and chickens. So I get wonderful meat and fresh free run eggs. I’ve been working with the mechanic on the outboard. It is taking a long time. We have to send for the parts to Santiago and wait for them to arrive and then send again for the correct parts once they send down the wrong ones. Still, neither of us is in any great hurry. He is burned out after having worked nonstop all summer on outboards and motorcycles. So we work a bit and talk a lot.
Have been to the dentist and had a couple broken teeth pulled. One of the front ones is now loose too. I chew like a bunny rabbit missing half of its front choppers. Not a pretty sight. Bummer. I imagine I will soon be wearing false teeth. My mother warned me to take care of my teeth, and now I pay the price for being neglectful. I‘m losing more and more body parts as time passes and starting to look pretty derelict indeed. No wonder none of the local women gaze at me with longing. After my last visit, the dentist invited me to his home (right next to the office which is nice since while I was in the chair his grandkids came in to visit for a while and see what was going on; imagine that happening in Canada or the US) for drinks and a bite to eat. Yummy. Imported Dutch beer, Cornish hen eggs, lemon-cooked meat, olives and hot sauce. He pointed out that I was actually treating him since it was my money he used to buy the goodies. I sure like the people down here.
Being amongst peoples again has its down side though. I caught my first cold in a year while I was in Punta Arenas to see Patti off. And now I’ve had the shits for a couple of weeks which never happened on the island. On the other hand, dentists and doctors and drug stores are just a step away and glory be I saw a real turd today for the first time is some while. Life’s small joys continue to be important.

Deneal Amos and 9-11

When Patti arrived to the island in February, she brought in the first news of the outside world I’d had in over a year. She told me two things on the same evening; one touched me much more deeply than the other. Deneal Amos had died almost a year previously. This was a blow to both of us since we had known him for a long time and both felt close to him. He had been a strong presence in our lives as a spiritual guide and as a source of strength and comfort. We knew that if things ever got really rocky, we could always go to Deneal’s and we’d be welcomed there. Now he was gone and it seemed to me like there was a hole in the world where he had been. It felt strange not having known for so long, especially since as part of my practice I’d sent him loving/kindness meditation each day. But even more perhaps, there was a sense of a passing on of the torch. As long as Deneal had been alive we could somehow shift the main responsibility for maintaining a living spiritual practice in the world along to him and to others like him. Now it is time to grow up, to pick up the burden, and to assume that responsibility for ourselves. It is time for all of us to do our part to keep our awareness of Spirit alive in our lives; to remember that beneath the often intense surface conflicts we are all one, all manifestations of the same deep flow of Life. If I have learned anything of importance in solitude it is how empty and futile life is without a spiritual grounding – however Spirit manifests itself to each of us. Now comes the difficult part (for me); bringing it back into everyday life.

Patti also brought news of the events of September 11 of last year. When she told me, my response (as I now remember it) was pretty much “Uh huh.” It didn’t strike me very deeply at all. In fact all the Activities of humanity seemed no more than a vague smudge on some far horizon. From where you are sitting, and even from here where I am sitting in this small pension at “the southern end of the world,” no more than a hundred miles from where I was during the past year, the “island” and all the remote corners of the earth where we humans have not yet left our mark seem somehow distant and unreal; a fading remnant of a world that once was. And yet, when I was there, especially during the last months, that remote region of nature was the ancient center of the world and all the frantic activity of human society – the swarming masses and cities and highways and pollution and endless frothing news reports seemed like an ethereal dream. So the news that one or even several of those phantom buildings among so many millions had been bombed just didn’t really mean much in the whole endless flow of the universe. “Oh yeah?… that’s interesting.”
I still really have no information of those happenings except for what Patti has told me and through some conversations with people down here. One of the most surprising and suggestive things to me about all of this is that after having lived alone in the wilderness for a year exploring solitude, the thing that many people seem most interested in is not what I might have learned of value there, but rather how hearing about 9-11 affected me. And also, how having been isolated from the events as they were happening might give me a unique perspective on the world as it is today. This interest seems odd indeed, and has, perhaps, affected me more strongly than anything else.

Since I’ve been asked repeatedly, here are some observations (unlikely original or particularly profound since I am no political guru):

1. Everybody dies. There always has been and as far as I can tell always will be suffering in our lives.

2. It is always a tragedy when 3000+ people are killed. Killing other people is probably never justified.

3. Many more people than that die each day through unnecessary starvation or preventable disease throughout the world. More people probably die in the First World each day in auto crashes and from drug abuse etc. Most of these deaths go unremarked and usually seem as unreal to most of us as 9-11 seems to me.

4. In conversation with people down here - (People who are not wild eyed radicals, but middle class educated people: a radio station owner, national park officials, doctors, an ex policeman/now hotel owner, a college professor, etc. People from both sides of the political spectrum defined very crudely by me as supporters or opponents of General Pinochet.) - the general opinion I hear is that while terrorism is abhorrent, the USA is not blameless. It has interfered for many years with the internal politics of sovereign nations throughout the third world in the service of its own economic interests - sometimes benevolently but more often supporting murderous dictators or directly bombing civilian populations. Now the piper is beginning to demand payment. Countries without the military power to confront the US directly have no choice but to resort to terrorism. Most people here feel the reason this event has had such an impact is not because of the deaths or the terrorism, but because of who was on the receiving end of it. The notion that the USA is the innocent “good guy” and Afghanistan the “evil doer” doesn’t make sense except to north Americans plus some Europeans and other wealthy trading partners.

5. The news media is largely responsible for whipping up public alarm. It is their livelihood. (There is also, as always, some question as to the motives of the wealthy owners of the news media.) Remember: the cold war, the missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, the oil crisis, herpes, and more recently AIDS (which while still a very serious problem is seldom talked about any longer), etc., etc., etc.. How frantic we were all encouraged to be at the time, and yet how vitally important (in the big picture) have any of those crises really been?

6. Life (and death) has continued and will continue on and on and on. Perhaps not just the way we would like it to be, but on and on non the less

7. There is a suggestion that we have now lost our innocence. Huh? How could we have been innocent after Vietnam, learning of CIA involvement in Central America, the revelations of the First Nations Peoples in Canada and the Blacks in the USA, the Gulf War, not to mention the development and use of nuclear weapons. Any innocence we still pretended to have came at the cost of burying our heads in the sand. And this is just from the perspective of the North American generation I belong to. From the perspective of Chile, the time of lost innocence, if there was one, must have come years ago with the ascension to power of General Pinochet and all that that implied.
.
8. It is disturbing (if I have it correctly) that ALL BUT ONE of the Members of both US Houses of Congress voted to give George Bush - a noted Hawk and certainly not the most intelligent president the US has ever had – sweeping power to use at his own discretion without further consulting Congress in dealing with Afghanistan. To me, this sort of mindless panic seems a more serious threat than the actual events of September 11th.

All this has caused me to wonder why there has been so much apparent panic around the events of Sept 11th. I understood it a bit better in talking with a university professor from Holland. He pointed out that at the actual time of the bombing no one knew what was happening or to where it might lead. E.g. nuclear holocaust. This does make some sense - sort of… Until one begins to question just which of the “Powers” capable of triggering a nuclear war might have been responsible for the Sept. 11th attack? A pretty unlikely scenario it seems to me from here. And, if whoever was responsible had the nuclear capacity to actually bomb the US, why didn’t they use it at the time?
When looking at the actual physical threat more closely and calmly, it mostly fades into a smudge on the far horizon. It seems to me that it is the psychological threat to the north American illusion of security and stability that has been the source of the panic. The dream that “it can’t happen here.” But this sort of bombing and much worse has always been part of the political and cultural landscape in the majority of the world. It is now our turn to recognize the reality of life as it is.
(The mechanic who is repairing my outboard motor is, perhaps, the most intelligent person I’ve spoken with here. He is certainly the most mentally agile and self-reflective as well as being a very gentle man. He has worked as a motorcycle mechanic all over Chile and also briefly in Mongolia, Africa and Europe. When I asked him about 9-11 and the US response, he smiled and shrugged and said it is the law of the henhouse. Huh? Those chickens at the top of the pecking order and roosting on the top rungs shit on those below them. The world has always been this way and probably always will be. Like it or not, it is just the way things are.) It doesn’t look to me like that is the only way things are, but that aspect of life seems as real as anything else.
Perhaps a deeper source of the fear and panic is the exposure of our false belief that “Our Social Structure” is somehow permanent and thus more real than is the endlessly changing and uncertain flow of life… and death. Along with this belief (and craving for security) comes an Us and Them fortress mentality and the projection of our own fear and insecurity and hatred Out There onto those Evil Others. We do it to Them, and They do the same thing to Us. (For many people in the world, the US is the Evil Doer.) We could respond by looking into our own hearts and thus try to understand and acknowledge our own part in the escalating violence of the world and attempt to build bridges of understanding. To pause and take as large a step back as we are capable of and attempt to dis-identify with “our own side,” to actively try to imagine how it would seem to us if all our positions were reversed and we were the Afghanistan people and they were us. To try to remember that we are all, in spite of everything, in the same soup of life together and that each of us is a manifestation of the underlying All. But sadly, and possibly suicidally, it seems as though we are, at least for the moment, choosing a different route.
In the meantime, life here in southern Chile seems much the same to me. If I hadn’t been told about 9-11, I very much doubt that I would notice any difference between the world here as it is now and as it was before I went into solitude.

Fishing

One of the desires that kept nudging me during the year on the island was to go trout fishing while I am still down here. Patagonia is known for its Brown Trout. Three weeks ago I went up to Torres del Paine National Park 200 km (120 miles) north of Puerto Natales for a couple days and did a bit of fishing up there. Caught one nice trout, but it was truly lazy and offered no real fight at all. I let it go. Then I went with the national parks people up along the coast north of where I had been on the island. I had a chance to do some fishing at the base of a waterfall where the river flowed into the sea about 400 km (240 miles) from here. Caught 3 small coho salmon. This really surprised the park people because no one has ever caught salmon in that region before. Salmon are not native here. The locals began fish farming in Puerto Natales some 20 to 30 years ago. Some of the salmon, of course, escaped and there has been a wild population near Natales ever since. Now, apparently, this introduced species is spreading throughout the whole region. This is, I suppose, bad news ecologically, but somehow it makes me personally quite happy. Strange. If it were some sort of “trash fish” that was spreading, I would not be happy about it at all. Perspective and greed.
I’ve also been fishing closer to Natales. Last Friday night I decided to drop by the local Fishing Club for a beer and to see if I might catch a ride to the area down the coast where we went salmon fishing a couple weeks ago. No one was in the club when I got there, but the man who runs the restaurant suggested I return in a couple hours for the meeting when they would talk about the weekend fishing plans. I went back and they were planning to go to a lake about an hour drive from here to fish both Sat and Sun and sleep over Sat night since this was the last weekend of the fishing season. Unfortunately my sleeping bag was locked in the CONAF bodega for the weekend, and since they were short on vehicles, I said I would pass. But, happily, one man was going for both days, and coming back to town Sat night. So I caught a ride with him.
We got there at noon Saturday and the fishing started at one thirty. It was a tournament with rules etc.. All fishing was from the shore where there was a drop off into deepish water not too far out. But Christ it was windy; blowing straight onto the beach. Made fishing cold and tough. We were all scattered along the water edge casting out and reeling our lures back in. Guy to my left caught a nice trout. Guy to my right caught a nice trout. I didn't even get a strike. Shit. Just like two weeks ago when I fished for salmon all day in the ocean and had no action at all even though everyone else caught something. Them Canadians is bad fishermens. I was standing there shivering in my waders, up to my knees in the icy water (half wet since I’d slipped and sort of fallen in), waves banging against my legs, trying to cast into the wind, surrounded by 17 other guys. I was just thinking about how much I didn't like this kind of fishing, when wham, a strike and a big trout on the line. A real fight since my rod, reel and line are so lightweight. Landed a beautiful brown trout. Kept fishing and an hour or so later another strike and in came a smaller but still nice trout. Something inside called me to let it go which I did much to the amusement of the other guys who thought I was a bit odd.
They all quit fishing at 6 PM (tourney rules) but since I was not a real participant, I stayed out for a while longer. The wind dropped some and the water settled a bit. Sun was setting, I was really cold. All alone with the lake and sky to myself. ‘Just one my cast,’ I told myself and then I’ll go in, too. Wham! Another big trout, and this one really fought hard. Much harder than the others. It jumped at least half a dozen times and each time I almost had it in, it took off stripping line from the reel, rod bent almost double. I finally landed it and decided to keep it too.
Now for the long walk back to camp. But, miracle... my ride, knowing about my leg, drove down to fetch me. Happy day. By the time we got back, everyone else had weighed in. They weighed my fish: each was just under 3 kg (bit over 6 lbs.); the one I let go was probably about 2 kg. All of them were bigger than any trout I’d caught before. I would have won first prize for most total weight if I had kept the third one. Glad I let it go. What a fabulous day fishing. I gave one of the trout to friends here, and have been eating the other one for days now. One more meal remains. Yum.
Then we all ate barbecued meat and boiled potatoes and drank beer and wine. Really neat guys. Was very fun indeed, but was glad to head home at 10 PM. It was so different from how I usually go fishing – alone and in silence. Fishing is for me primarily a solitary spiritual activity, but this was all about social interaction and having fun together. The competition for who caught the most and biggest fish was the center around which trophies were awarded and all the other activity revolved. We went back on Sunday and I took the inflatable kayak. Flat calm day. No wind at all. We all fished and fished and between us only two fish were caught. No strikes at all for me. No matter. Lovely day. I paddled all over the lake and down to visit with the pink flamingoes the presence of which so far south really surprised me.

Huh?

Yesterday I saw a couple of things that tickled me. I was coming out of the transport company clutching the replacement head gasket for the outboard that had just arrived from Santiago via airfreight. As I emerged, a young couple was approaching. But when she asked him which door to go in, he pointed to the one next to where I was. This surprised me somewhat since that glass door had heavy bars in front of it. But she reached right through the bars, pushed the door open, and then… yup, tried to walk in as though there were no bars there at all. She was pretty embarrassed when, upon banging into the barrier, she realized what she had done. We all had a fine laugh about it. So nice to not be the only spacecase in the world.
Then a few minutes later I passed a house with a sheep grazing the lawn out front. I’ve seen the sheep there before and have been a bit surprised to see that it is never tied up. Just as I was passing by, the front door of the house opened and a women stepped out. I asked if it was her sheep and she agreed that it was. I asked if it didn’t run away and she said that no it was part of the family. Then I was really startled when she opened the door further and called to the sheep. Now this was, you understand, not a cute little baa lamb. This was a large sheep with a full crop of dirty, strong smelling wool on board. A big animal. The sheep came to her call and passed through the front door and into a well appointed suburban living room complete with knickknacks, easy chairs, sofas etc. Very odd indeed this world of people.

And Now?

What’s next? I don’t know for sure yet. I have lots of work ahead of me on the video and thesis etc. Also there are many folks I would like to spend time with. But I am still in no hurry to leave this quiet corner of the world and head north into the hurly burly. People here frequently ask me how long I expect to stay and I always say at least a couple of weeks… but I have been saying that now for over a month. So who knows. Still, it is cold and gray today. Windy and rainy. Winter is coming on and the warmth of the north country is calling my name.

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