Snippets of Durham, So Far

         I spent my first weekend on campus holed up from Irene and watched bad TV with my mother, who was recovering from the trauma and elation of setting her youngest son free into the world. This past weekend I left town and returned to Dartmouth to tread the hallowed halls of ivy I know well. My exploration of the area has been severely limited. I’ve ridden my bike or walked the one mile stretch from my apartment to the library approximately 50 times. When I ride home after dark I am terrified of hitting a bump in the road and sprawling into the pitch dark night.

 I have entered no more than six of the dozens and dozens of buildings on campus. I restrict my traffic to the library and the English building, and the student center where I periodically check on my broken computer and receive the most bizarrely accusatory attempt at an apology I’ve ever heard: “Well, I have no good news. Your computer has certainly been a huge pain this past week. I got the screen in but that didn’t work. Had to send it back and file a complaint. The other order didn’t include a power button which is specifically what I asked for. Sent that back as well. Your laptop really is turning into a disaster for us. I don’t know what you want to do- you must be upset it’s taking us so long to fix. I guess if you want to just take it somewhere else we’d be saddened and relieved.”

I see walls plastered with posters: a capella groups need singers; the theater needs actors; rugby wants women who are looking for an outlet for their aggression; the psych department wants “MEN ONLY” for a brain study; Christian Impact is holding a free ice cream social inviting freshman to “come see what God is doing at UNH”; a recent graduate seeks someone to watch her cat, “a great lap sitter,” for two months; and professor Leah woods needs more students for her “Tables, Tools, and Toboggans” class.

               There must be a whole surging underworld of undergraduates here, but I’ve never been into a dining hall so I haven’t seen them in action. I flipped through the Freshmen issue of “The New Hampshire,” UNH’s campus newspaper. It seems every campus thinks they’re the only one in the country with the idea to hyphenate, abbreviate, or give nicknames to locales. “Freshman, you’ll learn that we love our nicknames here in Durham. Keeping them straight can be a challenge, but with this easy guide you’ll never be out of the loop,” a blurb reads. The truth must be that every college campus in the northeast loves its tevas and nalgenes, considers itself “outdoorsy” even if the majority of students don’t know which way is West, and embraces its unique jargon. That Dartmouth and UNH have abbreviated their dining halls to FoCo and HoCo, respectively, (from Food Court and Holloway Commons) and both consider the re-chriestening original and clever, justifies my theory.

I am the youngest student in my graduate classes. The girl next to me looks my age, but wears a blinding diamond on her left hand which puts us in very different places in our lives. An older woman in one class tells us that as adults, our main goal will be to iron out all of our quirks until we seem like normal people. She then tells a story about an out of body experience she had in Italy, when she looked down to see herself screaming at an airline attendant. The conclusion being, she is just as quirky as we are. 

My landlady is a very fit, naturally pretty, middle-aged woman with an equally fit husband and four sons, the youngest 18. He is a senior in high school and may have been warned not to interact with the three girls living in the apartment over the garage. When I returned from a run the other day, he gave me a small wave as he pulled into the driveway. It was a huge breakthrough in our communication. Before, he seemed devoted to ignoring me.

I run a four-mile loop into the residential neighborhood of southern Durham, avoiding the more peopled roads closer to town. A small sign on the side of Bagdad Road directs me to “Merrick Trails” but these are brief paths that lead to a private house, then back out to Canney Road. Perhaps the trails are meant to be private too and I have been excercising in someone else's backyard. But then why the sign? My whole body tenses when I see a wiry, shirtless jogging man, all abs and sinew, due to intersect my route. The activities we are each performing have zero in common, and I avert my eyes in a private apology for inwardly claiming that I too am “running.” It is a deficiency of the English language, I explain silently to him. I move aside to let him bound on by while I continue what could be named “The Durham Shuffle.”

I drive nine miles away to the quaint village of Newmarket twice a week. There I spend hours crawling on the floor and reading Eric Carl books with Liam, the 18-month-old I nanny. For 18 months old, I am told, he’s quite advanced, running around flailing, Captain Jack Sparrow style, and parroting every word out of his parents mouths. Damien and Susie are also very fit. So fit, in fact I find it hard to not feel guilty about even being in their house. “Help yourself to anything in the fridge!” Susie offers kindly. The thought! Not while your triathlon jerseys remain the size of my thigh, I think. Her triceps ripple when she lifts Liam and I resolve to start training for a half marathon.

She takes Liam and me to the farmers market in Exeter, NH. It is my first glimpse at Phillips Exeter Academy and I realize why so many of my classmates were unfazed by freshmen year at Dartmouth. We wander the stalls; Liam has learned the social custom of greeting and shouts “HI!” with a smile at everyone who passes. Old ladies smile back as if he is simply breaking their hearts and men (every man) bug out their eyes and open their mouths in a silent roar in response. In the small park we let Liam run and kick his two soccer balls. He is verbal, agile, and non-fragile. Another boy waddles up, stares at Liam and rocks on his feet, struggling to stay balanced. He descends to his knees and reaches clumsily for one of the balls. His mother catches up and introduces herself. “Karin,” she says.

“Susie,” says Susie.

“How old is yours?”

“Liam is almost 18 months. Yours?”

              Karin pauses before saying “Johnny just turned two,” and they both shuffle awkwardly, embarrassed by the obvious: Johnny is six months older but pales in comparison to Liam’s advanced coordination. It is my first introduction to the tomes of unspoken communication exchanged between mothers and nannies in peaceful parks.

On the way home, Liam begins to howl. Susie had asked me to sit up front, and now says its best to leave him alone, although his sobs make her uneasy. “My friend did the whole Ferber method with her second born, let him cry it out, self soothe. It’s one thing to let Liam cry on the way home for two minutes. But leaving your child wailing in the crib for a half hour? That goes against every maternal instinct I have.” I think it’s probably not a good time to mention my mother’s Wooden Spoon method.

I’m headed out this weekend to Star Island, part of the Isles of Shoals of the coast of NH, to research an article and attend the Isles of Shoals Historical and Research Association’s fall conference. I’m on the lookout for quirky characters that will enliven the piece. There promise to be many. When I return to Durham, if I escape the many ghosts of the island, I am determined to make real human, adult acquaintances. Updates to follow.

Gilbertville Part I: Pennies

Gilbertville

Part I: Pennies

Canton has followed my family for decades.  

My mother was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, a Midwest town she left soon after high school graduation. It’s dry and flat and I’m grateful she fled, turned her life in a different direction and raised three salt-washed, ocean-bred kids at the edge of the Atlantic.

In the ‘70s, my father followed an old friend to a tiny town an hour west of Augusta, Maine and spent a few seasons working construction and scraping by. He liked it there and was drawn to the Androscoggin River, which bowled through town, alive and splendid, with fish to catch, birds to watch, and countless tiny islands to discover. Without a family, he was free to relocate so he bought a piece of property with a small house, and over time added the surrounding parcels until he had a handsome, 50-acre property extending from the rail road tracks on the forest’s edge to the river bank. Canton, Maine was his to explore.

            Thirty years later, when my sister neared high school graduation, it didn’t take her long to find the right college.  She fell in love with a small liberal arts University on the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York, applied, was admitted to, and committed to attending without thinking twice. She’s recently returned for her final year as Saint, at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.

            We note the coincidence and wonder which Canton we’ll next be drawn too. But I’m not thinking forward quite yet. This summer, after touring Durham for the first time, my father and I returned to the house in Maine. For a short time, it was our home, and even after that it was the site of all of our get-aways and adventures. I hadn’t been there since early high school and driving back up to the house, I was struck by how small it all seemed. What had been the grand, oversized playground of my childhood had shrunk in the intervening eight years and I was left reconsidering our home in Maine.  

My early childhood took place just as much in the forests and waves of eastern Long Island, as on the river and potato fields in Canton, ME. A once prosperous, burgeoning mill town on the Androscoggin, Canton, (or Gilbertville on older maps) is now a sad place. One gas station stocks milk and beer, and a small general store keeps other essentials, but patrons are few and dwindling. With no job opportunities, families continue to relocate and the government has lured out stragglers, enticing them away from the river’s flood plain by buying out their homes.

My father prepared me for the differences; he’s visited over the years to check on the house and board it up against local hoodlums who’ve ransacked the place without actually taking much. Not that there is anything to take. On an early trip my dad salvaged a 2’ x 4’ glossy wooden plaque with Elton John’s likeness on the front (a memento of my mother’s teenage infatuation) and few family mementos. But vandals come for fun rather than goods. They left the TV, choosing instead to crack windows, tear furniture, hurl ancient jars of mustard against the wall, and shove stacks of plates off shelves, sending them shattering, to the floor. I suppose the house was an easy target; when the out-of-town owners stopped visiting altogether, there was nothing keeping the locals from doing as they pleased. And so, my father warns me as we drive into town, “Don’t get too excited about seeing the house. They’ve pretty well torn it apart.”

It’s an anticlimactic approach to the battered house awaiting us. The road out of town to our property, once lined with houses, old families my father remembers from decades ago as farmers, dairy men, and old-time locals, is now mostly vacant. The people are gone, and their homes too, along with swing sets, lawn ornaments, pets, and cars. They’ve razed the ground and eerily rewound the area to a pre-inhabited state.

We spent long weekends and most holidays in Canton as children, tumbling through the woods down to the river, canoeing around to small islands, sledding and cross country skiing along the snow mobile trails, and setting traps under the train trestles for polliwogs and trout. It’s a three minute walk from the house, across the fields, to the train tracks which curve around the land and house in a sweet, crescent hug. My father’s local friend, a dairy farmer named Craig, is allowed use of the fields, and he sows and harvests them every year with alternating potato and corn crops. In corn years, we ran through the towering stalks, playing hide and seek and imaging whole cities within the rows. In potato years we dug our hands deep into the dark soil, searching for the firm, starchy spuds until our hands and nails were deeply black.

 

The real excitement, though, was the train. As it approaches, the train whistles in anticipation of the eastern road crossing, circles the property, and chugs toward the western road crossing. We were alive and on fire at the sound of that long Toooooot-tooooooot from the conductor. We screamed “TRAIN!,” and raced, slamming our way outside and on top of the chicken coop to watch it amble by. It’s a freight line that passes our house, without passengers, and it was our earliest and most entertaining counting game to see how many cars one engine could pull. The number at times reached the forties.

When it had snaked its way around the fields, finished its small half-moon curve and was headed north once more, we’d spring into the fields towards the tracks. As I remember, it was an exhausting sprint, over soft, pliant earth, lunging to reach the rails first.  But at the other end was treasure:  sparkling, flattened coins which we’d set down earlier and could now retrieve in their newly one-dimensional state. They are our tokens, our secret artifacts, our “Roxaboxen” pebbles. No one at home knew you could lay coins on the tracks and be rewarded with twisted treasures, and anyway, there weren’any opportunities. You need accessible tracks and a slow moving train to obtain the elongated eagles and fun-house presidential profiles.

Simple map of house in Maine, road, RR tracks and fields.

Only today, as my dad and I are walking down the road, (it’s oddly much, much shorter than I remember) admiring our newest treasures, does it occur to me that this is probably illegal. Not only the whole jumping in front of trains business, but the more serious destruction of currency. How many felonies have we committed over the years, I wonder, turning money into treasure?

Five minutes ago we were lost in reminiscence when the whistle sounded and we turned to each other in electric muscle memory, our eyes wide. TRAIN! We took off running, me shuffling in flip flops, he with his hand deep in his pocket trying to fish out coins. We weren’t getting anywhere fast and it was coming, whistling and chugging, rolling across the eastern crossing and circling our house. Adrenaline spiked and I felt the only important thing in the world was to reach those tracks before the train. We couldn’t come home from Maine without new squished pennies.

“We’re not going to make it!” he said.

“Stop! Give me the coins, I’ll sprint, I’m faster.”

He handed them to me, I kicked off my flip flops and ran like I have never run before, my bare feet slapping the pavement, my arms pumping, gasping for breath (five months on horseback does nothing for lung capacity) until I reached the tracks, and, like a crazed hero trying to do something actually important and life-saving, laid the pennies, dimes, nickels, and one quarter, on the rail.

I stood up, stepped back, and as I heaved, recovering my breath, the train slid on by, slowly and peacefully, in a relaxed calm that seemed to mock my sprint to the tracks. The conductor in the engine looked down with an amused grin, entertained by the afternoon sight of two adults frantically running to obtain a souvenir, trying to catch a train moving at glacial speed. It didn’t matter. I’d made it. And as the train rolled by, our coins grew flatter and flatter and eventually flipped off onto the timber sleepers between the rails.

And my father and I stood at the side of the road and counted cars.  

Back to Blogging! A summer in the theater

I lied in my last post. Nearly three months ago I promised to keep writing and I haven’t. Here is where I start again. Newly relocated to Durham, NH and starting an MFA writing program, I plan to recommit myself to this blog and post, at minimum, a weekly essay. Although I am no longer in Chile, I want to keep exploring my months there and use this as an exercise space to keep writing and exploring new topics.

 If my summer was absent of written words on my part, it was, at least, filled with spoken words.

By day I worked in Guild Hall, the Hamptons’ answer to a community cultural space. Two galleries, a beautiful, intimate 360 seat theater, and an educational center comprise the modest, white building on Main Street in East Hampton and while it is a respected, historical institution, the great shame is that too few locals are familiar with it. Patronized mainly by Manhattanites, Guild Hall can’t help but cater to that crowd. What about the locals? The amateurs? The youth? True, its museum has several admirable programs to showcase the work of local artists. But what about a weekly coffee house or open mic night. Let’s give the aspiring 17 year old poet an opportunity to stand up and voice his/ her words.

As a 16 year-old I went over one night after basketball practice, donned a white dress and performed Helena at a high school arts night. Few people attended. Even fewer paid attention to the Shakespearean monologue. And no one, I am sure, except my father and I, remember it. But in it, I had an opportunity to perform. There should be more evenings like this. Open the theater to the local community, let the stage lights illuminate the beautifully renovated circus tent ceiling, and welcome amateur audiences to test their work on a crowd.

By night, I production managed a non-profit theater company, called Mulford Repertory Theatre. Imagine this:

Two actors, both a full generation younger than the characters whose words they inhabit, stand in a 300 year-old barn with a leaky roof. These trappings contrast the play’s setting and do little to bring forth a $900,000 upper west side apartment. And yet, that’s where we are… simultaneously within a plush Manahattan living room and an overheated barn at the historic Mulford Farm in East Hampton. The scene over, the actors brush past the brocade curtains and step off the white shag rug onto the decades-old straw in the horse stall designated as “backstage.” The female lead teeters in her heels, which were never intended to balance on dirt and hay, strips off her dress and allows the silent, nearly invisible wardrobe assistant to slide the next costume over her head.

The fifty folding chairs in the audience hold summering theater fans from the many neighboring hamlets. After parking on Main Street, they’ve crossed the farm’s lawn, passing the original windmill, farmhouse and slanting outhouse, and followed a path of glowing lanterns toward the great double doors of the barn.

It’s wonderful childlike game of make-believe we all play in the theater. Where else can you get dozens of adults to willingly forget normal conventions and slip away into a slightly fractured reality? Everyone in the barn, including many buttoned-up, stoic types, participates in an unspoken agreement to suspend reality and play.

That, in and of itself, seems a small magic act. Even without the fireflies flitting across the paling sky, it would be a fantastical evening: fifty adults are playing pretend, conjuring a world in which the weathered wooden beams in this colonial barn logically belong in the apartment of a wealthy urban couple.

For me, this summer at Mulford was a welcome sort of second chapter to the ten summers I spent with the Hamptons Shakespeare Festival in Montauk. There too we set theater in non-traditional spaces, let actors speak their words to the open air and welcomed the geese, wind, trees, grass, and weather to be active participants in the show. Both offered theater which interacted with its surroundings rather than muting it.

A reviewer asked me why I thought people were drawn to Mulford Rep. I knew without hesitation that it’s the intimacy and originality of the experience. The performances are raw, and therefore electric. The setting and physical proximity to the actors creates a perpetual toggling back and forth between awareness of the “play” and full descent into the fantasy of the performance.

What is exhilarating as a manager is the basic level of self-dependency which is required. Each of us involved has the sense of being a parent to the company- at the end of the night when the actors have taken their bows and received their applause, the chairs in the audience still need folded, the props put away, the costumes washed, and the stage reset for the next performance, of a different play (repertory theater) the following evening.

So, if I neglected my writing over the past few months, I am proud to have contributed on a fundamental level to another artistic entity this summer. Mulford is created and run by locals who decided there should be more accessible art in the community and simply created more. It was the basic idea behind HSF fifteen years ago. Actors act. Writers write. If you want more artistic opportunities, create them for yourself. It is a principal which deep down guides Mulford, could guide Guild Hall a bit more, and which I hope will guide me.

As I settle into life here in Durham, and look forward to more committed writing and experimentation with subject and form, I’d appreciate any feedback. I’m hoping I can use this blog to motivate me and keep me producing, outside of classes, from week to week.  For now, this entry will be my own pledge to stay active in writing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/nyregion/mulford-farm-repertory-theater-stages-plays-in-a-1721-barn.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=mulford%20theater&st=cse

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.”