The Obligatory Transition Post

            It’s difficult knowing where to take this blog, now that the horses are gone and I spend my days among Hamptonites.  There is a lot more to say about Chile, about Antilco, my adventures, the horses and the Bosses, so I’ve decided to keep writing, though I’ll probably worry less about sticking to any overriding theme.

A week ago I was excited to come home. The promise of family, friends, a visit to Dartmouth, and briny Montauk lifted me through the drawn out goodbyes and endless “lasts.”  Now, I find myself perpetually on the edge of my seat, with the bizarre sensation that something is about to happen, though I can’t remember what. I’m expecting something, but it’s a phantom longing and I’ve no idea what it is.

            Perhaps this is the inevitable letdown- the clichéd culture shock. But I’m not shaken.  Standing alone with my backpack while throngs of suits and stilettos powered through Penn Station’s rush hour, I was hardly rattled by the sudden rural idyll to urban chaos transition. And that’s what people usually talk about, isn’t it? They note how trees become skyscrapers; lean, rattling trucks morph into monstrous SUVs; and the meandering farmers are replaced with forward-leaning New Yorkers who hold their coffees-to-go high as they push through crowds.

            I nodded along as my friends sympathized with my transition, and agreed that, yes, the culture shock is difficult and it’s been a hard transition from Pucon to New York to parties at Dartmouth. But it wasn’t true. The jarring difference in setting is hardly troubling. No, what is harder to figure out is why, for the first time, there feels more like home than here does. It’s not simply that the two places are different and I’m struggling with the change. The real issue is that there feels right and here feels, somehow, wrong.

            Maybe that feeling will ease and fade away. I sure hope it doesn’t. Life in Chile, in rural Pucon, wherever “there” was, is something I inherently and fully understand. I get it. The daily rhythm, their perspectives, and their core values are all scripted in my native, natural language. Everything makes sense there. And maybe that’s the sense of peace I tapped into. When at Antilco, I feel like a mislead character who’s finally wandered back into the right play.

Here, however, is starting to feel like one of those bizarre dreams in which everything is familiar but just a bit off. Friends’ conversations, strangers’ interactions, discussion topics…  I find myself made anxious and physically uncomfortable by a lot of it. Because, it seems to me, still in my Antilco mindset, that none of their chatter matters.

And then something occurred to me.  I didn’t realize that the inspired, idealistic dreaming my peers and I did in college was only dreaming. I didn’t know their liberated fantasies were, for the most part, just fantasies and that they were giving themselves four fun years before getting right back on the mainstream track for the rest of their lives. That realization made me wonder if what I’d been thriving off in Chile, that electric, raw lifestyle, is really just a different sort of temporary sojourn from society. Maybe “college” means the same thing to America’s youth as a “backpacking” means to the rest of the world: they both provide a temporary hiatus from wage-earning life where participants can experiment, dream, seek thrills, and pursue happiness. Maybe those buoyant people with whom I sunrise hiked, and shared cramped hostel rooms, and bummed around winding city streets, and motored across turquoise glacial lakes, and went into the woods for weeks at a time with nothing more than a tent, a horse, and some food will all go back and spend their life doing things they don’t really care about.

I’ll guess I just have to see… and in the meantime I’m hoping this slight, persistent anxiety will stay and remind me that, for a short time at least, I found a place where it all made sense.

Sam, Remo, me, and Mara in front of Villarica volcano

Lying in Liminality

            “Confieso que he vivido.” Pablo Neruda

So here I am, curled up on a hard, green airport bench in sticky Panama. Women with stilettos and too-tight pants are waiting on line behind men with slicked hair and crisp shirts. A grey-haired, cartoon version of Bill Clinton is a head taller than everyone else on line and leans over, casually stooping to test his Spanish on the diminutive man behind him. Babies cry, business men pound their blackberries, and someone is stuttering in broken English. And although my shirt sticks to my body and my feet are too warm and soft inside my shoes, the sun has gone down and my overnight in this airport is dwindling.

And I’m here. Completely here- holding my nose and blowing to try and clear my ears and thinking about my parents and my brother and his lacrosse game which I’ll hopefully be home in time for tomorrow. And wherever I was forty-eight hours ago is of no consequence until an impossibly slender, effete man leans over my bench, squinting at the departure screen. He is so close I can see the tiny label on his pants pocket, which reads:

BOSS

HUGO BOSS

And there it is, the sign that hurls me back, sending this low ceilinged room full of anonymous masses flying away and replaces it with the family living room and the four loved ones I’ve left. How many times I sat on the couch, folding clothes, and turned over the sleeves of Mathias’ black t-shirt, the one with the “BOSS” label and thinking that if my surname were Boss, I would where nothing but this brand. I think dressing myself would always bring a tiny thrill with such labeled clothes. Like the canvas tote I’ve carried around South America which reads “Johann” beneath the bust of Bach.

Saturday night I fell asleep in Pucon and woke up in the smoggy urban din of Santiago. (In fact, that’s a harsh assessment. Actually, I had a pleasant day getting lost in the Parque Metropolitano, wandering the colorful Bohiemian neighborhood, and touring Pablo Neruda’s house. But no matter how pleasant it was, Santiago had the misfortune of being a sad postscript to my four months in Pucon.) Night busses are a magical thing- you can wave goodbye to your family and friends, seven of them gathered on the platform to see you off, the waves prolonged and faces growing more pained as the bus rolls backwards and creeps out of the station, then fall asleep, dream away the distance and awake worlds away to the attendant handing you a juice and cookie, as if to say “Good morning, welcome to Oz, have some sugar to soften the jolt.”

Two American girls came to the ranch on Saturday, forming part of my strange, last ride at Antilco. “Look, fellow countrymen to ease my transition,” I joked to Mathias. Their simple silliness saddened me though, and as one leaned down and ruffled her horse’s mane, saying “Good Gurrrl- that’s what I always say to my dog- kinda the same right?!,” I realized just how much I might be losing by coming home.

And I led my last ride with a detached melancholy, thinking I should be sadder, wishing I had a more electric group my last day, taking in the yellowing trees, rocky pastures, tumbling river with that forced moment-for-moment recollection that isn’t genuine but is summoned when you know “next time” isn’t anytime soon.  It was a simple whimper of a ride. Even the volcano exhaled.

Now I have this structurally appropriate liminal phase which I will spend in its entirety trying to get comfortable on a hard, green bench. Here I am nowhere. Despite having spent around twenty-three hours in its airport, my passport says I’ve never entered Panama. Four tiny letters on a man’s pants pull me to Pucon; everything else tugs me to Montauk. I am strung to both without access to either. Like the moments when you’ve realized your dream is just a dream but aren’t yet awake.

So I will lie here on this bench, dining on chocolate and finishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is an appropriately contemplative book for my philosophical liminality, until I fall asleep. Then, another night will disappear and I will be that much closer to home.

The Boss Family

I lied in my last post; I came back here for more than the intangible IT. I came back for this family. I may be filled with run of the mill two-days-left sentimentality, but I have to think that some sort stars aligned to bring me here.

There was no hole in my life for the Boss’s to move into. When I arrived two and a half years ago I wasn’t lacking a supportive family infrastructure or a close-knit upbringing. They are certainly not the family I never had. Because I did have that. I have that. I wasn’t looking to be taken in and I didn’t need to be adopted. Which I suppose it what makes it all the more surprising that I have been.

Mathias, Karin, Remo and Mara are an intimate unit, a far more coherent group than I’ve found in the stereotypical scattered, frantic American families. Karin’s relatives are nine hours away in Santiago and Mathias, the only son of older, now deceased parents, has none to speak of. Being transplants to Pucon the two have no long-time ties to the area. They’ve made tenuous friendships over the years with fellow German expats, parents of their children’s classmates, and co-workers, but the number of house-visiting acquaintances is small. The long distances between towns and villages, and the rough roads that penetrate the countryside where friends live, keeps them further isolated, and as a result, more interdependent.

The whole family eats dinner together every night. There is no ceremony, no pageantry, but the daily ritual of eating dinner together is, I think, somehow casually sacred to them. Mathias sits at the head of the table, cuts the steak, rabbit, duck he’s stuffed full of carrots, apples, tomatoes, oranges, and serves it out; Remo and Mara sit on the sides perpendicular to him, ladling their dishes full of potatoes and all the saucy, creamy components of the meal; Karin sits next to Remo hopping up and down and up and down to switch off lights, bring a new dish to the table, turn up or down music, or push the vegetables closer to my plate when Mathias isn’t looking because she knows I’m trying to avoid potatoes; and Sam and I round out the end of the table, looking forward to our dinner with the hunger that comes only from all day outdoor work.

There is nothing cloying or cute about it, but they are happy. Mathias and Karin love each other. They are loving and unembarrassed by it and when I get Mathias really talking about the decisions he’s made in his life, he is proud, deeply proud, for having made such a beautiful life. When Karin calls, he answers the phone with, “mi amor?,” or “mein schatz?” They fight about the other driving poorly, or the dishes being misplaced on the shelves, but they never look for excuses to argue and that’s the difference.

Remo and Mara, although they’ve grown up in an international environment with people from all corners of the world passing through their house daily, have a narrowed view of the world. I asked Mara if she would consider studying in Germany or the states, and she looked shocked and said “NO! That’s so far.” Of course, it’s not so far, but at this point, Remo and Mara don’t yearn to expand their world beyond Pucon and their family. Mara is thirteen and Remo sixteen and they are affectionate with their parents in ways which would shock a lot of Americans. Mara holds her dad’s hand during dinner and Remo, a full head taller than Karin by now, wraps himself around her shoulders, kisses her cheek, and lingers by her ear before heading up to bed. They are that rare breed of loved, doted upon, adored children who have escaped becoming spoiled or precious.

I’ll miss dinner conversations, which aren’t deep or electrifying, but are easy and functional and an entertaining display of language acrobatics. Karin shares news from town, Sam and I report on the day’s ride, and Remo and Mara give updates on grades, studies, friends and movies, and it’s all discussed without tears, angst, shouting, demands or threats. Thoughts are fractured units without a cohesive language and sentences jump split midway between German, English and Spanish. Karin, while perfectly fluent in German, always initiates in Spanish. Mathias follows suit, but yells and curses in German; it is his language of frustration which I think has as much to do with his associations with German and Germany than with the actual consonant-heavy harshness of the language. Once after reprimanding the dogs in sweeping, severe German, he smiled and said, “You just don’t get the same effect in Spanish.”

Remo and Mara are impressively fluent, nuanced English speakers which is partly due to

their parents speaking the language and there always being English speaking workers in the house, but has more to do with their obsession with movies. They watch a movie most nights of the weeks, if not more than one, usually in English, and there movies I’ve seen which they haven’t.  As a result, their English is relatively unaccented, their vocabulary is modern, casual and varied, and they have a strong grasp on youth slang. They insist on speaking to me in English, answering in their third language even when I begin in Spanish. I don’t share their stubbornness and am frankly self-conscious of my Spanish around them, which compared to their English, is infantile. Mara has a cute habit of slipping into frantic, runaway Spanish when she’s emotional; a heated story about the particular injustices of her life and mistreatment at the hands of an incompetent math teacher is told in squeaking, gushing castellano.

            Maybe I’ve fallen so fully into this family because I fill a unique niche.  Karin and Mathias are a bit too young to be my parents; Mara and Remo are a bit too young to be my siblings. I’m not an extra daughter or another sister. I am the aunt or neighbor who the girl next door who was the right amount of different to fit in. There are huge slices of my life they know little about, but I’m sure that goes both ways, and it doesn’t matter. Because when I’m here, even though I’m a different person than I am in the states, they know the Antilco me thoroughly.

On a recent and unusual drive alone with Mathias, I told him I was thrilled that, after so much time here, I was finally getting a chance to do some of the run-of-the-mill things, like go to Temuco, a local city, and visit Kathi and Conrad, friends of the family. Mara, I told him, is frequently shocked that there remain things like this I still haven’t done. (“..And my uncle- you’ve met him, right? WHAT?! You haven’t? How is that possible?”) As we drove, Mathias paused, then said with disarming sincerity, “You know, Mara doesn’t say that because all the other helpers do those things and she can’t believe you haven’t. She’s surprised because you are so much part of the family and she doesn’t understand how you don’t know something the family is so familiar with.”

That left me speechless.  Somehow it seems unfair to descend on a family with such intensity and then pull out of it just as suddenly. I appreciate Karin’s gentle mothering, winking eyes, and buoyant hospitality. I’ll miss the long hours of talk with Mathias, which range from politics and literature to the business side of Antilco, and stop frequently on topics of language. “I love your language,” he says and is the perfect conversation partner for my own geeky interest in words and English. Remo still seems far from seeking out his own path and life, preferring the cocoon of Antilco, but we are closer than we were two years ago and he comes to me enthusiastically with movie and music reviews.

            And Mara… who I’ve fallen in love with most of all. She’s grown up in all sorts of physical and emotional ways since I was last here and is now a sweet, caring, thoughtful thirteen year-old, and a fantastic rider.  And beyond the plainer, uglier truths that I fill the general place of “role model” that all tween girls are looking for, and that she flatters my ego by adoring me, there is something deeper there and I look forward to her getting home from school everyday. Yesterday, I didn’t wait that long and rode to her school myself to pick her up, leading her horse with me so we could ride home together.

            Last Sunday, in the burnt light of Autumn, Sam, Remo, Mara and I saddled horses for fun and set up jumps in the back pasture. We went round and round for hours, teaching the horses to jump and doing tricks. We put on the capes, one blue and one green, my mom made them two years ago and galloped with the material rippling behind us, imagining ourselves elves and warriors. An idea from Mara sent us back to the house to collect play weapons, bamboo swords, toy pistols, bows and arrows, and then we were out to the vast pasture down the street. We’d each chosen a character and had sketched out a vague story line and now all that remained was to act it out. There is nothing quite like playing cowboys and Indians when you can actually spur your horse into a gallop to chase down the bad guy.

 We’re all going out to a party tonight together, a fundraiser dance organized by all the 18 year olds in the area, and we spent tonight getting ready. I now have glitter on my nails and some borrowed jewelry and Mara and I have made escape plans and secret codes to help each other deal with unwelcome male attention. She and Remo have sworn to tell people I’m nineteen and I’ve resolved to slouch all night, in an effort to blend in somewhat, and though part of me feels ridiculous going, I was touched when they came storming in the house one afternoon to invite me. And honestly, on my last night in Pucon, there is no where I’d rather be than with the two of them.

Thoughts About Leaving

In less than two weeks I will be back stateside, on eastern Long Island, sitting in my high school auditorium, watching my brother’s spring music concert. From here, amidst the yellowing leaves and apple-infused breeze, a New York spring seems distant. We are eating thick soups and boiled chestnuts, and sipping homemade fermented cider as the days grow shorter and colder. The poplars are carpeting the ground yellow, the fruit trees are bare and my body desperately wants to store up for winter. But when my plane lands in Newark on May 17th, I know that I’ll shed the trappings of Antilco and slip effortlessly into the states. Montauk will replace Pucon with the same ease as a tank top will overtake my flannel.  

It’s usually like that: my spheres of reference give way to each other, without transition, in surreal seamlessness. Like bubbles touching, allowing me to hop between and continue my game of hopscotch. I’ve been jumping worlds for the past five years and the change is always easier than I expect because there is no baggage to transfer between experiences, only myself. Montauk, Dartmouth, Pucon, Franconia… my worlds are insular and beyond a handful of people, they share no common links. Scene, setting, characters, costumes and my own role change, I adapt, readjust and continue living. I wonder if represents some level of callousness that I slip in and out of these wildly different roles and worlds so easily.

So though New York, salt air, and my family seem like they should be farther away than a simple plane ride, I know that the instant I step off the plane Pucon will replace Montauk as the distant, intangible dreamscape. The high-excitement treks I led this summer, mainly the crossing of Sollipulli, are already drifting to foggy regions of my memory. I can recall moments in piercing clarity, but somehow the greater experiences themselves seem unconnected to who I am now in this moment. “Once I rode a horse across Sollipulli” is the same kind of detached, grey remembrance as “As 12 year-old I fractured my elbow.”  I know I did it. I can summon the feelings of fear, pain, and writhing worry and recount details of the event. But there’s a disconnect and I don’t have the same clear access to these memories as I did in the immediate aftermath.  It’s like they’re all balloons, intact and buoyant, floating high above me, tugged along by one slender string.

I’ve stopped fearing change and transitions- taking advantage of the opportunities that arise in my life has worked well for me so far and I trust that I’ll make it back here one day, and if I don’t, well, there will be a reason. So while I’m not overcome with a feeling of loss or a fear that this great adventure is ending, I am anxious about losing hold of the great emotional, physical and intellectual freedom that Chile has afforded me. I didn’t come back here for the mountains or the rides or the adrenaline rush of pushing horses over cliffs and crossing glaciers. I returned because there is something intoxicating about this raw, pure life where every day is electric and I am alert through all of it.

What I will miss is the fevered youth and promise of adventure that fuels a whole subculture of people on this planet. We’re all circling the globe, zooming along our individual orbits, and we pass each other with tiny explosions of excitement, exchanging stories from our disparate lives which are ultimately driven by the same desire to just do it, to live it, to see it all and never sleep for missing a single second of the ride. There are legions of travelers with packs on their backs and Dean Moriarty in their soul with no aim except to be present when the sparks fly.

The most poignant letter my father ever wrote me recounted his experience hitchhiking from New York to New Brunswick in 1971.  He told of hippies in vans, college-aged Mainers, farmers’ sons, and his patchwork trek northward. He wrote that the great excitements of the trip were those interactions. “We're all just scouts gathering experiences we can share with the people we adjudge to be most like us,” he wrote and I think it sums up my experience in Chile better than any words I can string together.

On a trek two year ago I spent an evening in Pitraco, a high mountain valley, with a 20-year-old Dutch couple. Our backs on the tall grass and our eyes towards the stars, we talked and laughed and spun stories from our short, magical, zany lives and none of it meant anything but we talked with such ferocity because the fact that we shared the same energy felt like the only important thing in the world. And we kept returning to the unbelievable wonder of it all- there we were, high in a valley in the mountains, with the universe casually unveiled above us and we were throwing inspiration, tossing electricity back and forth, cradling it momentarily before lobbing it back. We could look at each other and say, Hey! I get it, you get it, who cares if they don’t get it, because here we are.

            And the next day they left and I never saw or heard from them again. Since then there have been others, countless others whose paths I’ve intersected and again diverged from. And with all of them driven by the energy of youth and passion and a thirst for that feeling of being thoroughly, electrifyingly alive, I’ve shared something and learned something. I’ll miss the conversations that crescendo, climax, and then forever pause.  I’ll miss the ease with which you can share your soul when you know the receiver will both understand and then pass out of your life forever. I’ll miss that fierce, vibrant fever which sizzles within many of my riders and makes my days much more than simple horse/rider wrangling.

            I guess being a scout and witnessing sparks and tossing electricity is possible anywhere. Somehow it’s just seems easier here in these pulsing mountains than back in the American routine. So, while I have an eye toward home, and must remind myself that soon beach fires will fill my nights instead of house-warming stove fires, I’m thinking more about this indescribable energy that I lose track of when I’m in the states. When I’m here, it is the only thing I know, the only thing that makes sense and launches me into every day with confidence and ebullience. But it shakes loose when I make my jump back. At least it did last time, somewhat. This time, I’ve twisted my mind every which way trying to figure out how to hold to whatever this IT is I found here.

            I’ll also miss the way the sun hits my right shoulder everyday around 4:00 pm as we ride home. The sun’s rays hit me at an angle as we ride the wide dirt road in this section and cast a simple shadow: the silhouette of a faceless rider in a brimmed hat atop a compact, curved-necked horse. It is the exact design of our logo and in those moments I forget I’m just a blond American girl and I think, “I am Antilco.”