In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin

I am going to do something different. I am going to tell you a story, in three parts.

Part one:

It was after discovering Chatwin that Anne decided on Chile. That landscape is littered with young people accordingly influenced, the naïve and the idealistic. It goes like this: They read In Patagonia, fancy themselves full-throated adventurers, ready a rucksack–as Chatwin called it–and head south. “Gone to Patagonia,” Chatwin wrote his boss. Anne was in New York, studying the culinary arts. She loved the city honestly for all the right reasons. Yet, her studies complete, she set out, full of cloudless spirit. That she met Franz, a fishing guide, and married and came to live in Patagonia is worth mentioning. Of greater interest, though, is how she unraveled on the isolated island they called home.

* * *

“We have a problem,” Anne said.

Franz looked up from the boat. He was burdened with gear. His client, Gino, stepped to the dock. “Boungiorno, Anne,” said Gino.

“Boungiorno, Gino,” she said. “And how was your day?”

“Buono. Extraordinary.” Gino smiled broadly. He had had a good day on the Rio Plano. He caught many fish, including a brown trout that was possibly the largest trout he had ever caught, including his record fish in New Zealand.

Anne said she was delighted for him. She patted his shoulder as he walked past, his waders chaffing. He waved to Giovanni who, having returned earlier, sat in front of the lodge smoking a black cigarette. Franz looked at Anne.

“We have a problem,” she repeated. He glanced at his client, now out of earshot. “Yes?” he asked. “Are the dogs okay?”

“The dogs are fine. I don’t think it is a serious problem, but it’s a problem, nonetheless.”

Franz handed her the fly rods and stepped onto the dock. It was an hour before sunset. The mountains were in shadow and the lake was calm, the sky a royal purple. The last boat was heading across the water to the lodge. The engine whined. The other boats were in.

“I got an email. Iridium is going out of business. We’re going to lose our connection.”

Anne and Franz had only a satellite phone with which to connect with the world beyond the mountains, to family, to the travel company that booked the fishing clients and arranged their arrival and departure, to the store in Porto Monte that filled their monthly orders for food and supplies. It was a link upon which Anne grew increasingly dependent as the weeks and months of fishing season stretched out.

“Like I said, it’s not a big problem.” She was calmer now that Franz was home. He studied her. Her companions during the day, the dogs, came over the hill to greet him. She slipped her arm through his and they walked toward the lodge. Franz looked at the sky. “No clouds,” he said. “Should be a good day tomorrow.”

* * *

One night Anne grew troubled in her sleep and fell from the bed, hitting her head on the table. Franz slept soundly through the incident, worn out from his struggles against the wild currents and eddies of his guided rivers. She told him she had rolled over in her sleep and fallen off the bed. But in truth she had had a bad dream in which a train came at her out of a night horizon, quiet until upon her, then rushing at her like a hungry thing alive, loud and earth-heavy. She threw herself to the side, out of its path. She did so just in time, the hot engine lurching past. But she fell from the bed and hit her head. She was embarrassed by the dream and did not tell Franz. Her bruise was noticeable in the morning, and she remained in the kitchen while Marie waited on the clients.

- end, part one-

Torres del Paine, Tierra del Fuego

So it begins…

The above image is Torres del Paine National Park, Chile, Tierra del Fuego. It is a misty focus of my possible next adventure. The genie is out of the bottle.

This torment. I know the beast well–thought I’d tamed it into a corner. Return from an adventure and start thinking about the next one. That is the torment. Specifically, there is nothing of substance in the works, just the cranky wheels turning between my ears.

I was in Tierra del Fuego maybe ten years ago. I was chasing trout, measured there not in inches but in pounds. It’s the end of the earth, the last stop before slipping on the ice of Antarctica. It was Magellan who named the island, Land of Fire. From his ship he observed the fires of the Yaghan indians. It is estimated that the Yaghan ancestors settled the island around 8000 b.c. There remains today but one full-blooded Yaghan, Cristina Calderón, born in 1928.

The Yaghans survived on sea-lions which the men hunted. The women dove from canoes into the frigid ice-strewn waters to forage the sea bed. In this manner these people existed for thousands of years. But they could not survive being “discovered” by the Europeans. Captain FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle captured three Yaghans on that vessel’s maiden voyage. He decided to return them to England, where they were to be taught “English..the plainer truths of Christianity..and the use of common tools.” They were to be trained as missionaries and would be returned to save the souls of their brothers and sisters. It was the second voyage of the Beagle, including onboard a young scientist, Charles Darwin, that delivered them home. A year later, the Beagle returned once again and found only one of the Yaghan-missionaries remaining. He “had not the least wish to return to England.” No report on souls saved or lost remains.

How can one resist the pull of such a place? Legend claims that if a person eats the Calefate berry they will return to Tierra del Fuego. And, yes, I ate the berry. It is just a matter of time.

The Great State of Maine

We moved to Maine three years ago this week. As I’ve observed previously, place matters, though I did not understand that truly until settled-in here in the northeast. (In a society where transience seems valued, such musings must seem quaint.) Of the world places I’ve seen, Maine is favorite. That I’ve seen a lot of the world, makes Maine the more significant. I’m not going to attempt to explain it. Ineffableness is how the important things are best realized.

There are other places that pique my interest. Colorado is such a place, as is Montana and Wyoming. Mountains and rivers, remoteness, low population, challenging weather–these are factors in favor of a place. A consideration of my travel resume reveals my interest in places appealing to the few. A family member, upon hearing of the minor hardships endured in Nepal recently, asked why I wouldn’t rather go to a place like Hawaii. That question obviously cannot be answered as it requires of the asker an impossible comprehension.

My father, who is ninety years old, still talks about living in a cabin aside a river in Alaska, where he will fish for his dinner and tend to a garden, where he will live in a manner fashionably now called sustainable. Of course no such place is left him, nor is much of him left for it. It was a dream. He also dreamed of living on a boat, a more reasonable quest, but also unfulfilled. Instead he worked his way up through the ranks at International Harvester until he retired as early as he could. His modest life, shared with my mother, included cutting the grass once a week and cleaning the gutters in the spring, caulking and painting the window frames, and attending to the weekly trash. He said to me this very morning that it’s best to have left that world behind, that he would not be able to walk behind a lawnmower now. Though he is still of sound mind, he talks of someday getting another motorcycle, like the Harley he had as a young man. I humor him, but suggest he also get a sidecar in which to store his walker.

It is fortunate that, unlike my father, I have made progress pursuing a dream or two, though my dreams have never been so concrete nor vividly imagined as his. The nature of my life has been more that of the rising stream during spring run-off. It will likely follow the course it took the year previously, but one cannot be sure and there is a thrill in that unknown. Eventually, as occurred three years ago, something might nudge it out of its ancient bed and turn it toward parts unknown. Therein is a natural cause for celebration.

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It does not escape me that this is the second post this week using a river-stream metaphor. I think a little Hemingway might be in order. Here is the last paragraph of his two-part short story, Big Two-Hearted River:

Nick stood up on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy, then stepped into the water and splashed ashore. He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground. He was going back to camp. He looked back. The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.

Amen, Ernest.

Charles

Charles, age: 40

“I’ve been on the street, on and off, since I was fourteen. It was my fault. I wanted to do what a grown up did. I was just a kid and made bad decisions.” He told me of his various illnesses, including diabetes. “I also suffer from depression, but take medicine.” He described his circle of seven or eight friends. They all sleep together at Charles and Saratoga, at the steps of St. Paul’s Church. “There is safety in numbers. We all look out for one another. If somebody has food and somebody’s hungry we give it to them.”

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” ~ Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1958)

Perhaps the best vacation I’ve had was when I came down with Lyme disease. (Before continuing, I should mention that vacation, trip, adventure, and travel(s) are all a different genre in the art of temporarily moving from one place to the other–I leave you to think out the distinctions by which one crosses boundary with the other.) We were in southern Spain in a rented car and were coming out of the mountains. I got sick but continued to drive, not wanting to burden Carole with the mountain driving. When we got into Benalmedna I was getting a headache. By night fall I was suffering the only migraine of my life. Terrible thing, a migraine.

We ditched our itinerary and spent the next two weeks moving from beach cabana to pension room to cabana. It was the only way I could have possibly read the complete Leatherstocking tails of James Fennimore Cooper, Library of America edition.

Dozing on the beach, reading Cooper, dozing again. It made for a perfect vacation, but for the weakness in the legs and dizzy spells. I got through Cooper and by the time I got home I was a petrie dish of infection.

_____________

Once flying back from Chile, night flight, I sat next to a Chilean farmer. He had a nice smile, bad teeth, and expressive eyes. We exchanged pleasentries then he nodded off, with a little toot-fart. Eight hours later the farting had not stopped and I hadn’t the heart to wake the poor guy. He seemed tired and worthy of a good flight’s sleep. It didn’t matter, I don’t sleep on planes anyway.

_____________

My first trip abroad, Carole and I in our youth, arrived in Jerusalem as night fell. It was the first night of the High Holy Days and the streets where flooded with pilgrims en route to the Western Wall, the only remaining portion of David’s temple.

It was a transportive experience. By midnight the crowd in the Old City was dispersing and we, six hours in a new country, where thinking of bed. Only, in our excitement, we’d not taken notice of our lodging–except that David was in the name. (It was not the famous Kind David Hotel. We did not have the budget for that.) David is to Israel as Smith is to the states. The hotels sporting the name are as infinite as loaves and fishes.

We found, finally, an English speaking taxi driver who had the requisite compassion and good nature to take two kids from the US to every hotel in Jerusalem incorporating the name David. Thus was born the spirit of adventure, a thing most potently realized in the ignorance of youth.

Perhaps we got two or three hours sleep that night. I don’t remember. I do, however, remember waking up in a major foreign city for the first time in my life. It was then that the travel virus infected me. I’ve been hosting the bug since. Like malaria, it lies dormant, then suddenly springs on one, unawares.
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So sorry if you’ve received this post twice. It was supposed to go up Monday morning, the 28th. I think I hit “publish” not “schedule” and perhaps sent it out into the world without proper introduction. Oh, the plaguing details of this mission I’m on…

I should blame jet lag, but it’s been a week since I returned and how long can I claim that excuse? It’s been 56 years of jet lag, if one were to calculate with honesty. But the details are plaguing–perhaps a plague is just what I need.

Büyük Menderes River in Turkey (Meander River)

I read recently that a successful blog should have a core theme or topic, and that the postings should not stray far from the topic. Scanning the blogosphere I see the common wisdom in this. You can find and read a blog on any and all manner of themes. Yes, it appears that the successful blog stays on message: cooking, travel, sex, love, health, family, and so forth. It must be refreshing to be so singular. So limited.

Fortunately–or unfortunately–I have taken a different approach. Long before reading Nietzsche, I recognized the stink of the herd and trained myself to move in opposition. I confess to nurturing the contrary, seeking out the different. There is truth in resisting the pull of the common. If my blog is a metaphor for my life, I am a trained generalist, specializing in the nature of the other.

I have identified thirty themes to “…house….” (Located at the bottom of the home page.) They are:

• Adventure
• Books
• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Death
• Depression
• Dogs
• Faith
• Family
• Happiness
• Life
• Literature
• Memoir
• Music
• Mythology
• Nature
• Philosophy
• Photography
• Reading
• Religion
• Technology
• The Examined Life
• The Infinity of Ideas
• Thinkers
• Travel
• Truth
• Wisdom
• Writers
• Writing

I like that alphabetically dogs follows depression and precedes faith. At any point a reader can click on a theme and will be directed to relative posts. Of course it is a mishmash. I’m not a scholar or academic, given to a trained mind. Rather, I’m a person who embraces the meandering, nurtures a tangent, and exercises walking the crooked line. I realized years ago that I would never be really good at any particular thing. No matter my pursuit, falling short of mastery was to be my fate.

I am grateful that my major interests can be captured in thirty simple categories. A herd cannot navigate thirty options, ensuring that I’m free to make my own way. To this end, Harrison observed that the writer’s gift was one of “excessive consciousness.” Perhaps that is the difference between blogging and writing. But that is a stale semantic.

The generalist does not know what he thinks about a subject until he writes about it. This is the lesson of Montaigne and is the raison d’être for “…house….” I was asked recently about the title of this place, “…the house I live in….” A house is where we keep our junk, as well as our prized possessions. It’s where we sleep and shit and fidget and relax and ponder and love. A house is a place of refuge. It can be private or shared, boisterous or quiet, filled with light, or a place of lurking darkness. Pick a room in the house and you have a speciality, a kitchen, or a bedroom–but the architecture of house is encompassing. That’s why I titled this place as I did. I want to be encompassing.

It seems to have resonated with some. Readership has climbed significantly since the resurrection of the site. I find great comfort in this. One might avoid the herd, yet still appreciate the assurances of company. I salute my fellow generalists and applaud the meandering life.

Thanks for reading.

Meanwhile, he’s still in adventure mode and I’m sharing a few paragraphs of his recent correspondence. I should mention that these missives are sent not to his long-suffering parents, but to a certain young lady awaiting his return in the mountains of Colorado. Thank you, Candace, for passing along.

* * *

I wrote this a month ago, saved it as a draft, thinking it best not to post it, for reasons which will be soon apparent. But I’m nursing a brainwave flatline and like its shallow mellowness. So, rather than get the synaptic camshaft cranking, I’m going to swallow my pride and roll with the post. What the hell.

__________________________

Carole is out of town and so tonight I eat out. BBQ chicken pizza at Portland Pie Co. Carole does not care for their pizza so this is my place when she’s gone. And beer. I drink beer here too. Copious amounts.

I divide the pizza: eat this half tonight, this half tomorrow lunch. I eat. And drink beer and eat more. The first half is gone and I peel off a piece from the second. I hate myself for doing this. I order another beer. The hate increases.

I eat and drink and read. I read when I eat alone. Often, I read with company for that matter. Once I left a party we were hosting and went upstairs to read, the party being so very something other than what I thought it’d be. I was rude, of course. Just writing that makes me feel like a jerk. But that is a different story. I eat the whole thing. Drink more beer even. I leave loathing myself. My discipline has abondanded me. I am lost.

Tonight I read Joyce Maynard‘s At Home in the World. It is one of the finest, if the finest, memoir I’ve ever read. Maynard was a child literary prodigy–she writes like an angel– and came to the attention of old man J.D. Salinger living as a recluse in Cornish, New Hampshire. She moved in with him. She was nineteen. He was thirty-five years her senior. I was reading the part where he teaches her how to induce vomiting after eating food he deems toxic. There is a reason Salinger was as he was.

Things begin to turn ugly.

I leave, paying the tab, in a state of gastro distress. As I walk home I think about Salinger, two years younger than me, puking. I think about life imitating art. I rush home, miserable more so now that it all has settled and capped off my GI tract. Into the bathroom I go, kneeling in front of the toilet. I look at my middle finger. Is the nail clipped? I think of Brando in Last Tango.

I plunge the finger down my throat, curious at what’s down there. Interesting. I wretch. But no pizza, no beer. Just a little phlegm. Lucy is sitting to my left, looking at me. I reach out and scratch her ear, tell her it’s alright, then plunge the finger down my throat again. Again, nothing. My eyes watering I give in. This is obviously not a solution. I’m not made this way. I must pay my dues, suffer for my sins. I must digest. I ask Lucy if she wants to go for a walk and she tells me that yes, indeed, let’s go for a walk. I get the impression she thinks that to be a better solution to my current trouble than whatever it is I’m doing.

After our walk I come home and recline, the only position that offers up any comfort, and continue reading how a nineteen year old woman came to live with J.D. Salinger.

Tea house at a mountain pass.

I mention in the post, From Manang, that we took a day hike to visit a mountain mystic, a Lama. Here are three images from that visit.

Outside the lama’s mountain gumpa.

The Lama.

View across the valley.

In Note from Pisang, Tim and I climb to a mountain monastery.

Tim inside.

I write about the snow, the high camp and the Lorong La, in the last two posts, Thorong High Camp, and Thorong La.

Ponies in the snow at high camp.

Ram, our guide, and the morning approach to Lorong La.

Uphill slog.

Water break, Scott and Tim.

The team on the world’s highest mountain pass, 17, 700 feet. Tim, our porters LaLi and Santos, our guide Ram, me, Scott.

As always, thanks for stopping and reading–or in this case, looking.

It’s nice to be home and back at my desk.

Best regards.

Flynn

Flynn sat on a bench in the shade. There was a book next to him, The city Boy. “It was the first book Herman Wouk wrote,” he said. “I have an eidetic mind. The second definition of it is total recall, a photographic mind. That’s what most people are familiar with.” I asked him what is the first definition. “Science of the world,” he quoted, “intuitively apprehended.” He said he wanted to open a bank and cited regulations required to start a financial institution. He said his bank would also provide inexpensive used cars. “I will address the needs of moderate and low-income people.” I remarked on his creativity. “I have a lot of ideas. And they are all elegant.”