Earth Day

April 22, 2005. Earth Day.

I spend the evening rushing out on a micro belching desiel smoke to the extremes of the city to buy a small cooking camp set (Doite, at MallSport), and return on an even noiser micro to buy guantes, un gorro, y bastones (gloves, a hat, and trekking poles) - all made from non-renewable resources - from the Dutch couple that runs La Cumbre. Then evening: cooking arroz, seboilla, y betaragas for a soup to take into the mountains for the weekend, checking gear, and putting off yet again doing dishes. This is not sustainable.

April 23

7:30AM rise shower eat pack. feeling rushed, and the rush.
8:30AM leave the apartment, micro to the turnoff for Farallones; hitch to the next turnoff at the beginning of the curves; hitch to the entrance to Yerba Loca, hitch to Villa Paulina.
11:00AM begin hiking from Villa Paulina. In a few hours, I pass the place that I camped last time; then the place where I turned back.
5:00PM Set camp at Piedra Carvajal, the stone refugio at the mouth of a high perched valley within striking distance of La Palomina Glacier. It has begun to snow, not too hard; temperatures hovering above freezing in the soft cloudy light of evening.
6:00PM cooking and eating dinner, as darkness falls slowly, a full moon hiding behind the clouds.
7:30PM To bed.

April 24

6:30 AM Rise, eat. Non-essentials left at camp
7:30 AM Begin hike toward glacier, in full gear including ski goggles, which prove to be invaluable...north up the long valley that is a wide braided field of cobbles cut by small streams and the memory of streams, stretching between steep scree banks at the base of sheer rock walls. One of my poles fails to remain extended, collapsing on my when I try to cross a stream. From now on, it is only usable as an uphill traverse pole.
8:30 AM Cutting up to the right of the cascade, I find the trail I lost, and follow it along the valley now tending east as it climbs higher, to a high alpine lake, and then on, along the sides of lateral moraines, across a landscape of glacial till and rockfall. It keeps going up, no end in sight; across the valley, dirty blue ice hangs from somewhere up in the clouds. Wind picking up, in gusts, along with snow falling down, and blowing across the ripples of gravel and scree.
11:00 AM In the shelter of a small mound, with my back to the uphill wind, I hunch down to eat a little before making my retreat. The wind is wipping over 40kph, and from what appears to be a terminal moraine where I sit, there is no glacier in sight, only a 30 meter drop to a gravel floor that continues up a valley ever tending eastward in a large arc that keeps the end out of sight. The blue ice hanging from the north side of the valley is taunting; there is no way to reach it without risking a brutal trail-less descent; and without a piolet and support no point even thinking about it.
12:30 PM Three and a half hours up, one and a half down to base camp. Back in the land where plant grow, however slowly; and a bird even, walking through the dusting of snow along the alpine ponds, the only sign of animal life all day. Lunch, while packing,
1:30 PM Begin the decent, with 4 1/2 hours until the park closes. Along the way, I catch up with a chilean out for a day hike; we make the decent together as my feet begin to swell, knees and ankles begin to ache from the constant hammering downhill stride.
5:15 PM Arrive at Villa Paulina; share a light supper,
6:00 PM Catch a ride with the new friend's family back to near Alto Las Condes, from where I take another noisy, jostling micro home, too warm the whole way in the now seemingly stale air of the valley floor.
8:00 PM (guess) Arrive home.

Lessons? Earth Day is fall here in the southern hemisphere; and it gets cold, even when you are embalmed in synthetic fabrics. The summer mountaineering season is over; from now on, it only gets tougher.

What's the Difference?

What's the Difference?

Many friends, both Chilean and Estadounidense, have asked me what is the difference between our countries. At times I respond by saying I sometimes forget I am in a foreign country, that it's not as exotic or extreme as I thought it might be. Of course, I live in Las Condes, a part of town that perhaps prides itself on being more like mainstream US culture than other parts of its own country.

Part of what is different, though, is the visibility of the informal economy, the multitude of vendors selling things in the streets, at the toll plazas, stop lights, and on the buses – anywhere that there is a flow of new possible customers. In the more 'scenic' towns and markets, vendors with tax-id numbers sell pottery, or woven hats; but most just sit for entire days with a blanket display of combs, plastic keychain decorations, obsolete technological artifacts and cheap new sunglasses. Farmers sit outside of the supermarkets with the same fruit that's inside, but in slightly better shape; although I can never quite figure out which is cheaper.

But that will change, soon, at least in the case of the buses.

There is a type of traveler that has been written of, the one who ruins your dreams of traveling by saying, with a sad and farr-off tone, when you mention a place you hope to visit soon, "Ah yes...if only you could have seen it before..." followed by some change that has forever spoiled that precious place, such that your experience, were you to venture there, would never compare to theirs, in its more pure state.

In a twist on this type, I find myself in the enviable position of being on the other side of that line, having seen Santiago before "The Change", the moment when the chaos and clutter of the ubiquitous yellow buses, the Micros, with their diesel smoke (or perhaps parrafin, alcohol, or anything cheap that burns) belching from barely muffled engines; without catalytic convertors (no matter how much they are labeled "eco-catalytic"), brakes screaching as they jerk across the lane to pick up a passenger, or drop one off, in either case barely coming to a stop before slamming into gear again and power-shifting their 8-ball, gold acrylic globe embalming dice, chrome and pearl gear-shift knobs through the chases, the fever pitch of fourth gear a prayer for a lube job and a day off- that day, when they were replaced with clean, efficient, environmentally sound buses, with trained drivers with set salaries and routes and schedules. Every thing set, well ordered, and modern.

There is a part of me that will miss the Micros as they are now; sometimes in the evening, for example, rolling up from la Pintana on Avenida Santa Rosa, back to the city center, with a black light turning white purple and pulling the exotic from every color; salsa music bouncing off of twenty round mirrors festooned with gold fringe; the driver's son (or girlfriend) sitting sideways on the transmission case, helping make change. I will miss the vendors, sweating through the Santiago summer jumping on and off the buses, calling out, in a strange flat drone "helados, helados – manzana, chirimoya, pina, helados, bebidas, helados..." Or selling band-aids; playing guitar and singing a romantic song; girls no more than 14 with their faces painted doing a comedy routine at midnight (although I must admit I have never once given any of them a peso. Does that make me a hard-hearted person?).

I wonder where they will go, the men thin – too thin – and darkly tanned; the women who begin telling their tale of woe with a tone as if they don't expect anyone to actually listen. The girls with face paint perhaps will change into make up, and instead of jumping on and off of buses smiling and laughing, stand on a corner, or sit on the stoop of a store closed for the evening, waiting for a job to come to them.

I will not miss the smoke and the noise, the unpredictability, buses that refuse to stop even as you wave your arms furiously; waiting thirty minutes for a bus and then seeing five in a row, still unsure of which will get you closest to where you are trying to go.

What I will miss is that this is part what is different. It may be inferior in a way to the system that will replace it, but the informal economy it allows expresses life in a way that the increasingly 'efficient' formal economy – with swipe cards, colorless receipts, and drivers whose hands you don't have to brush with yours – can never quite equal. Can we have progress without loosing what makes a place unique? Is progress always part of a trajectory of convergence on the banal? Will the need to sell something to stay alive emerge in new and creative ways? Will the increased efficiency create new ancillary jobs, ones that perhaps even pay better, are safer, or more enjoyable?

In the new economy, will they find jobs as paper-pushers? Or is the consolidated economy a bit thinner overall, on into which some people just don't fit?

Perhaps this is the question, of friction in transition, of how to make things better without some coming out worse. Nothing in history has happened without some waste. Are we wasting any better with time? I wonder if there will be job training, a sort of human 're-tooling', something to get the vendors into schools, or new jobs. Or will they just shift their location, from the buses to the curbsides that serve like cell walls, defining a permeable border to the movement of economic nutrients from the flow of traffic to the production/consumption centers of buildings. Are the vendors serving as symbotic (or perhaps parasitic) taggers-on, or more neutrally perhaps, like barnacles on the lips of whales.

Borderline employment exists everywhere, in the US as well; like trophic levels in nature. One of the cynical reasons I don't give them money is that I don't want to encourage them to continue; I want them to give up on the bottom-feeding and find a better way, one that makes them more a part of my world. If they did, how would I support that? The likely hood is that they already tried, and gave up.