Lower Latitudes 54.8899° S, 67.8349° W
GARY DWYER
Lower Latitudes 54.8899° S, 67.8349° W
Photographs and Text By
GARY DWYER
Published by Ångstrom Unit Works Copyright © 2019 Gary Dwyer. All rights reserved. No Part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
• Every attempt has been made to give credit to all writers quoted in this book. All Photographs and writings not annotated © 2019 Gary Dwyer. ISBN 978-0-9979054-8-9 Cover Photo: Iguasu Falls, Argentina 2019 © Gary Dwyer Gary Dwyer Photography http://www.garydwyerphotography.com http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/478911 http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/dwyergc https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/gary-dwyer/id265388372?mt=11 Other books By Gary Dwyer are available on amazon, blurb, and peecho
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“The distinguishing feature of great beauty is that it should first surprise to an indifferent degree which, continuing and then augmenting is finally changed to wonder and admiration.� Montesquieu
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S
54.89°
67.84°W
Vision Struggles
Places seen, but seldom heard
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2 March 2011 AM - LA time
Warm and cloudy now as we have been sitting for
hours, waiting for the first leg to Miami. Yesterday’s drive down to LA was all the chaos I could bare. My reaction speed on the freeway was right on the edge. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, I finally crashed in the hotel with a shower and a nap. Got up to go to dinner and in the elevator on the seventh floor of the Crown Plaza Hotel at LAX, the door opens and there stands my Hawiian friend Greg Gillette and his son Issac. There are thirteen million people who live in the Los Angeles Basin. What are the odds of running into my college roommate, who lives in Hawaii, had been surfing with his son in Mexico, came north with a few extra days, went snowboarding at Big Bear and then drove the three hours down from the Sierra, finds his way to LAX and opens the elevator door to see his old friend? We were all in shock. Today Issac flies back to his coffee plantation on the Big Island and Greg drives up to SFO on his way to Oregon to see his daughter Lea. We had fun catching up. Greg had recently spent four days in a hospital while they did a tennis ball -sized graft from his thigh to his cheek after the removal of a melanoma. Spending much of your life on a sailboat in the sea has some consequences. The doctors say they got all of the melanoma, but that is what they said last time too. 1 pm now and eastbound to Miami. Almost cruising altitude and overcast. The beginning of March is still winter underneath us on this leg of our route. It feels important to note that some foot pain aside, I am feeling a lot better than yesterday and am looking forward to even more improvement. A lot of it is because I am not driving and some of it is because I am on a plane and someone else is in charge.
2 March 3:15 PM - LA time
Just now crossing into the Gulf of Mexico at the
eastern edge of Texas. It seems inconceivable, but it is nearly six years since Katrina and the subsequent oil spill. As we enter over gulf waters the only clouds below are the long white and orange streamers roaring from the refineries. All I can see from my tiny window are ten long burn-off clouds spewing into the air and making the fuel that allows us to be up here. Sleeping, 4
eating and watching movies, on our way to Florida. The beginning phrase of The Great Gatsby is, “In my younger and more vulnerable years...” And I think of how many ways this can be interpreted. One way is to think of the idea as a delicious and engaging lie. One piece of evidence in support of my argument is the first page of this journal and it is a list of my daily medications and if being on a form of permanent chemotherapy is an indication of being somehow less vulnerable approaching seventy than I am really missing something. The name Patagonia is widely accepted as originating from Captain Magellan’s first sight of a native Tehuelche Indian. The story goes that the crew, from the ship, saw a giant, naked native on the shore, ‘... dancing and leaping and singing, and, while singing, throwing sand and dust on his head’. As they approached the sailors realized the figure was in fact an Indian. Magellan, not knowing what else to say shouted ‘Ha Patagon!’ Meaning ‘Hello big-foot’ given the size of his moccasins, which has given rise to the name Patagonia.
2 March 2007 Miami 7 PM - LA time.
Watching a Chilean family with four kids. The two boys and girls are clowning with two separate video cameras. The mom was using a still camera and is now texting. Dad is quietly reading an English romance novel and is oblivious to the current cinematic gymnastics going on around him. Every few minutes various members of the family clump together, huddle is a better term, around the various tiny monitors to review what they have shot minutes ago. No skill is either necessary or evident on the part of the camera operator or who is being filmed. There is only an obsession to record. Haphazard, accidental, and the terribly recent operate in the absence of skill, invention, intention, or any apparent form of conscious thought. The only thing that seems important is making the images of themselves and then seeing how they look. The dad has put down his book and is now filming too. Everybody is a shooter now. It is only important to shoot.
9:20 AM Restaurant ‘Lil Italy’, Santiago, Chile
I am still a wreck from jet lag, even after spending much of the day napping. I don’t even remember the taxi ride from the airport.. Today, we bought bus tickets to Puerto Varas and that was about all.
4 March 10 am Santiago
A long sleep and a good breakfast make a hell of a difference. We had a nice walk last night and aa chat with a film crew from Warner Brothers. They were shooting a film in front of our hotel with a Chilean crew.
Hillside housing adjacent to the harbor, Santiago, Chile
5 March 11:15 AM, bus station, Santiago, Chile. We are waiting to go to Valparaiso. Last night was wonderful at ‘The Patagonia Cafe. Stuffed trout. Shrimp / avocado salad, sauvignon blanc. We were outside with a great waiter and an agreeable crowd. Then to the taxis. Off to an historic barrio near Buena Vista, Santiago - it was a real study in evolution and contrast. Smog, poverty, stolen tree grates and more taxis than New York City.
Office tower and container port, Santiago, Chile
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Some minor wiring difficulties. I’m Sure it will all be sorted out very soon.
National pride and poverty are sometimes uncomfortably close. 6
Cable car registry book, Santiago
A surprising door mat, Santiago. 7
If it were not for corrugated sheet steel there might not be any buildings in Chile at all. 8
The evening walk to a very posh restaurant run by a Belgian couple, Santiago 9
3 PM Valpariso, Chile - Restaurant Le Filou de Montpelier. And it was jammed.
I forgot my medicine this afternoon and am paying
for it now. Some sort of hypoglycemic reaction is going on amongst all the other shit. I need an alarm that goes off at 1 pm and says, ‘Eat, asshole, eat.’ 7 PM Hotel Vegas, Valparaiso, Chile - Lots of noise from adjacent café, no resting, exhausted. Yes, exhausted in both feet and spirit after a really stupid overdone touristic day Hot, not screaming hot, but where you find the shady side of the street without thinking or discussion. The violence in Jordan and Libya floods the news while I am simply trying to get a few more miles out of this body that is issuing more than a few signs of what the engineers call, ‘deflection approaching failure.’ The simple process of navigating or crossing a busy, chaotic street now requires very focused attention that produces a type of anxiety I have never had before. Before, when I broke a bone, I just assumed it was going to heal, to get better, at the moment there is no indication that my collective and maladies are going to get better at all. The only thing I can hope is that they don’t get any worse, any faster.
Twice this morning our wanderings became questions, searching for a particular church. Two old women and finally a grimy man pouring a few liters of gas into a car, told us to go back. He said, “You are not safe here.” He and the two women saw us as the perfect targets for the kind of crime they live with everyday. We went back the way we came and were thankful for their honest advice and for having survived unscathed. An hour later, walking the streets of our separate and heavily touristed neighborhood with a lot of affluent Chileans and Europeans our walk in the morning of crime and poverty was a world away but we have seen a lot more of real Valparaiso than the average tourist gets close to. The Chilean newspaper says today that 1/6 of the population of Christ Church, New Zealand has evacuated (To where?) after the recent earthquake, while we sit in a hotel aside as seismic zone that had its own ‘Terra Motto’ only a few months ago. We don’t learn very well.
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He said, “You are not safe here.”
After hearing the comment of the man, I took this one quick shot as we turned and retreated quickly back down the hill. In 2014, this entire neighborhood burned to the ground. 2,500 homes were burned 10,000 people had to be evacuated and 14 people were killed.
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Barking dogs and car noise made for a difficult night. Ear plugs for Odile and sleeping pills for me. This neighborhood (Cerro Conception) is a UNESCO world heritage site. Maybe half the houses are quaint, partially restored steep hillside residences. The use of the hills is necessitated by their proximity to the harbor. Beautiful houses of a vanished upper-middle and robber baron class, most of which were involved in the nitrate trade before chemical fertilizers were invented. There is also an enormous collection of tumbled-down houses of corrugated sheet metal covered with an astounding variety of colors. Like Moreno, (in Venice) each house has its own scheme, but if a coat of paint is all that is necessary to get on the UNESCO list, I imagine other towns looking into brushes and rollers. Earthquake is a constant threat and yet the form of most structures is what one might call cheerfully optimistic.
Dinner was at a modernist house renovated into a four room hotel, residence and restaurant. All that was accomplished by a young Belgian couple with an infant. (They had to have millions in backing to pull it off.) Cheerful and energetic and maybe in their early thirties. I can’t imagine what it is like to have that kind of monetary support. I’m sure it comes with some strings, or even really heavy chains.
Seagulls screech and dogs bark Some woof-woof,
but mostly yap-yap-yap on this late sunny afternoon in 33° South. The harbor raging even on Sunday because it is where everything comes to and from in this skinny sliver of Spanish spoor.
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Valparaiso is very, very hilly as well as having those pesky wiring problems 14
A tired apartment entry and a closed storefront with great lips.
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The ‘Arts District’ of Valpariso has some surprisingly good murals. And all the taxis in the whole country are painted this way.
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If you told me this street was in Nova Scotia rather than Chile, I could believe it.
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Valpariso looks quite different when you are riding one of the cable cars instead of climbing the steps.
8 March 9 AM
We are on board a “Cruz del Sur” bus going from Santiago to Puerto Varas. Out the
window there is pine, oak and cypress. The wheat has already been harvested and the corn is next. The bus is about a twelve hour ride and better than flying business class, and at $ 50 US an astounding bargain. Yesterday was spent seeing an open air museum in Valparaiso - too many stairs and a let-down in terms of content. The highlight was a long talk in the evening with our Italian hotelier. The landscape at the moment is so reminiscent of home it is hard to see it with new eyes. The only difference seems to be that the bus is new, clean, comfortable and has stewardesses with snacks and blankets. How refreshing. I slept well last night and now am able to notice sunlight reflecting off the port and sparkles of light bounce off the corrugated steel roofs and siding.
9 March 2:30 pm Puerto Varas
Under scattered showers and sun while I do a little battle with traveler’s diarrhea. I took a bath in the morning and then slept the day away. For the moment, Imodium is doing its good work but I am still as weak as a kitten. Odile is wandering this tidy and organized little town on the edge of an enormous lake with an unpronounceable name and I am too ill to get up and look up the name. The town was started by German immigrants, way before WWII, and Chileans who wanted to promote tourism. The houses have wood shingles and skidding but the still have the ubiquitous corrugated steel roofs. I think the material is so common here is that same reason it is everywhere in New Zealand and Australia and it is because you can get a great deal of it stacked in the hold of a ship, it covers a lot of surface area, can be handled by one person and it lasts a long time. On the advice of yet another kind hotelier, we took a ‘Collectivo’ yesterday because the weather was good. We rode with a lot of locals for about an hour to the town of Frutillar. The buses in Chile are so inexpensive they must be getting support form the government. The trip to Frutillar cost $US 1.50. OK, granted a dilapidated diesel van. Lots of things are expensive here but the buses are amazingly cheap. In Frutillar was the only time in my life when I have been able to look across a lake and see three volcanoes. The only restaurant in town that seemed to be doing any business was “The German Club.” (Really?) and we had the same volcano view at lunch. It is really a one street town on the lake edge. The town had just finished building an enormous music theater, half in the water, in the best view, in the hopes of attracting festival goers and other tourists. I don’t think it is going to work, but I wish them well.
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March in Frutillar, catching what is left of the summer sun. Why bother looking at the Volcanoes. They are always there.
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Frutillar 22
••• You can tell the thickness of hotel walls by feeling the towels. •••
10 March 11 am Partly cloudy and warm(ish).
We are on board a tourist boat crossing Lago Todo Los Santos.
The views of the lake have been spotty but splendid. On this tourist boat there are more cameras than I have ever seen. 300 seats, 400 cameras. There are even a few pro-photographer posers. This cruise boat company (Andino) was started by Swiss immigrants who came her over a hundred years ago. The lake was named by Jesuits who arrived in the 1700’s - in the middle of the Andes! What resourcefulness they must have had! And now, on the upper deck, there are people watching television showing a video of the lake and forest that exists outside their window. The real forest and the real lake.
Volcano Osorno 23
Volcano Osorno 24
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4 pm Peulla - Natura Hotel -
11 March 9:30 am Peulla, Chile
Half way across the Andes. Odile is trying to arrange a room switch as our existing room is so close to the kitchen noise as to be unbearable. We took a long walk along the lake called, or at least pronounced, Na-wellwa-pay and to a waterfall that was dry.
I have had a temporary respite from internal the convulsions of Tourista while Japan has had an enormous earthquake and tsunami and there are tsunami warnings from Alaska to the entire coast of Chile. We are waiting for a bus within site of the Argentinian border, which we walked across yesterday, completely unhindered as there was no one in sight.
N. B. - Here they say about soccer, “That it is not a life or death situation. It is much more serious than that.�
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Our hotel is a Chilean version of the Ahwahnee in Yosemite. A prison for rich people in paradise. The Chilean strong suit is not acoustic insulation as noise is as common as ill-resolved design and indifferent maintenance. So here I sit, within sight of an active volcano, completely astride ‘The ring of fire’, watching clouds glide low over the marshland with cattle lands to the East. Off to my left, above the marsh, across the valley, is a waterfall that in any other place would be considered a miracle. Here, the three hundred foot cascade is simply ordinary - a little autumnal trickle from the glacier clad slopes of the volcano, which sits silently, waiting, while we frail creatures scurry at the base, pretending the fire below will not show its angry breath, not in our lifetime anyway. We love to pretend.
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En Route to Argentina.
A private back road, really back road, where clouds slide down canyons like Sandburg’s “The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.” But this time into green and then, if you wait, more green and then braided rivers, bamboo and Condors. The Spanish called this place after they saw the step terraces of Inca agriculture, and they said it was ‘the steps’ - Andinos, The Andes. It is the end of the season, early autumn when rich, old tourists stumble around at the mercy of their local shepherds and the unnecessary border bureaucrats. They marvel at marvelous scenery looking at the looks and believing everything they hear. The life stories some how important in the immediate and when home will be forgotten as fast as the view from the bus. The reason we travel is to forget.
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The wing span of the Andean Condor can be at least eight and up to eleven feet.
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11 March 3 pm - after a bus lunch and before a four- hour boat ride on lake Na-well-wa-pay.
A four hour boat ride on a lake has a lot to say
about the ideas connected to the romance of travel. The romance part is about the destination for most people. It is where the cameras come out, the bragging rights begin and the misunderstood and tangled things we bring home called memories. The part we don’t talk about much, if ever, is how much time we spend killing time. We don’t so much as kill time, we beat the shit out of it. It is when we are mostly not present. (Like now, on this boat ride.) The water we are riding on is clear and the shoreline entirely undisturbed. It is probably unlike any scene we have ever seen before and yet, after we look at it once it all seems to look the same and we get bored. We begin to stare at the seat back in front of us and we ruminate. We often think about things that have nothing to do with where we are. We are literally out of place. Our friends and loved ones are with us, but they are only in our peripheral vision as the interior landscape begins to speak to us much more clearly than the one directly out the window. Here is an example of how far this process can go. An idea has been roiling around my head for long enough and if I put it down here it might just help me move it from complaint into clarity, or perhaps some other place but at least if I get it out I might be able to move onto worrying about other things: • Thinning hair and receding hairline. (Thankfully not yet gray but the color is a pale nothing in comparison to what it used to be.) • Diminished eyesight. The three levels supposed to be assisted by my blended lenses are only moderately better. The new prescriptions are worse. I am helpless without them. Either the glasses are on my face or they are on the night stand. Cataract surgery is about a year down the road. Night eye drops help, but only a little. • My nose vacillates between a ball of grease and a surface not unlike Mars. Nose and ears are the only body parts that continue to grow with age. It doesn’t seem to help how either one of them function. The enormous zit I got in the Arctic has produced a crater on the tip of my nose that is as least two meters across.
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My dermatologist told me that with my skin type, I should be wearing a Burka. I have white patches on both arms courtesy of a little over zealous liquid nitrogen. But before I get to far down my own personal Tower of Babel, back to the eyes. They are prone (after 40) to what used to be called styes (now chalazion) pockets of pus where tear ducts have been blocked. Occasionally removed surgically, more often heated, punctured and squeezed by me. Ears, aside from becoming grotesque slabs of curly cartilage, seem to be sort of OK. Were it not for the forest, (And I mean grasses,shrubs, under-story, and mixed canopy - the entire forest ecosystem.) that has decided to take up residence and become mature in form, both inside and outside my ears. My hearing is the complicated part of my ears in that it has become more selective. I seem more attuned to the sounds that upset me. Those that really piss me off are astonishingly clear. Just below the lobe of the left ear is a scar from a cyst that was removed thirty-five years ago and it still drains. While I am still on the ears, I might as well address the topic of wax. No one seems to know what it is for or how much is enough. If you dig out a big chunk, is it to be thought of as a gift? Like something you pick out of your nose, you know it is part of you, but what are you supposed to do with it? I have some friends in Nepal who think the most hilarious object from Western Civilization is the handkerchief. They find it really funny that we save in cloth what we blow out of our nose. What they wonder about is, if we carry around this booger ritual device in our pockets, why do we not carry and save our used toilet paper? But I guess I am getting off the track. • Just beneath the nose we find the rotting teeth Outside of what used to be red hair and freckles, (I will get to freckles in a moment.) my yellow and crooked teeth have been evidence of the Irish gene pool from childhood till now. Their continual predilection to either fall out or slowly rot has has paid my dentists childrens tuition all the way to graduate school. Now, or at least recently, the process for reattaching receding gums has been great fun and for the first time the expression, ‘long in the tooth.’ has added unwanted visibility to my fragile fangs. • Freckles are a really ridiculous form of camouflage. Constantly wearing a red jacket would make me less visible, change that to florescent orange and it would still be true. “The kid with the spots,” got me through
school, but after that just sunburn and more freckles. The French call them “rust spots.� Personally, I think I was just standing behind a screen door during a shit storm. I have tried to get them to join together to form a really good tan, but they refuse to move, they just get darker, and like the Irish, have trouble talking to someone outside their village. Forget the fact that both red hair and freckles originated from the Vikings, but put me in a crowd, anywhere, in either hemisphere, and what everyone knows is that I am not a Mexican.
This is the much of the view out the window of the four hour boat ride.
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