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.”