Another week, another email, another story, another travel, another month, another empty polyglot table sprinkled with germans, namibians, catalanians, canary islanders, and an haitian american. and penguins.
My latest adventure took me to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. Proudly announced in the airport, on spoons, dishes, decorative plates, restaurants, port authority vessels, tshirts, and several monuments, it is the southernmost city in the world at 54 degree south of the equator. Several thoughts on the town in a very particular order:
1. It was formed as a penal colony and the horrid stories of the prison that spawned a city are now in display in the actual prison (each cell has a different display) that closed less than 50 years ago.
2. The sun didn`t set until 10 pm and it was only the end of october.
3. You can go from the ocean (or rather the Beagle Channel) to the snowline in 2 hours, 45 minutes, and 16 seconds if you walk with the gait of a 6 foot 4 inch man with a backpack.
4. If you walk for 2 hours 58 minutes and 23 seconds, you`ll feel the absolute terror of being stuck on a rocky outcropping in the middle of a glaciar surrounded by untrodden snow except for the four footprints you took to get to try to reach the several week-old footprints and the fifth footprint that went in 2 feet in the snow before you could shift your weight of a 6 foot 4 inch frame. lesson learned: don`t be the first to get to a poorly marked glacial boundary and don`t go past it.
5. If you go to Ushuaia and want the best wildlife experience, go on Tres Marìas. It was a small boat (8 people) captained by three 20somethings including one who i don`t think worked there but was just chilling, our bearded captain who once took a bus from Ushuaia to Rio de Janiero (6200 km!!!), and our guide who was a bearded Garcia Bernal who was a carpenter during the winter. We went to islands of penguin colonies and sea lions.
6. I spent some time in a horse pasture watching wild horses eating in a gully. The next day I was walking back through the pasture (it`s like a barrier between the port town and the suburb) and a man next to me whistled and all the horses galloped in from all over the pasture, then formed a single file line behind the man and walked together behind a bluff. i stood next to el señor de los caballos and didn`t even realize it. Seriously, it was probably the most impressive thing I`ve ever seen a human do, except for that one time when...
7. that one time when I saw movie posters all over town for the Legend of Zorro (sequel to Mask of Zorro) with Antonio Banderas, Catherine ZetaJones and Anthony Hopkins on all of them. I saw the movie today, and Anthony Hopkins wasn`t even in the movie!!! Lesson learned: If you are a cannibal, you can do whatever you want.
That`s all I thought.
I also walked once straight out of a meadow and into the wood. actually, i started walking east, first out of the downtown, then through the suburb of oddly shaped houses, then through a horse meadow, then down a dirt road, then on a horsepath next to a swollen stream, and arrived in the shire. I`m not even kidding. It`s there. just 5 kms east of Ushuaia and 4 kms up the river that empties into the center of that bay.
In the end, it was a good trip and probably my last for a long while. Apparently I have papers and presentations and classes to write, orate, and attend. And in spanish to boot!
I also timetravelled, moving one hour further ahead of the eastern seaboard of the US of A, bringing my total to two hours. Time travel isn`t as glorious as it sounds. It feels a lot like eating dinner and watching a movie, getting up to get another coke and then realizing you`ve broken the time-space continuum and moved into a state of future existence previously unknown to humanity except for Doc and Michael J. Fox.
To end this email, I wish health to the unhealthy, innocence to the guilty, concentration to the studious, an MVP award to Andruw Jones, marriage to the engaged, babies to the pregnant, a dog named deefer for whoever gets the next dog of this bunch (Deefer dog. get it?) (cheap) plane tickets to the relations, 3 dollar steaks to the hungry, and happiness to those who pursue it.
but only fleeting happiness because you shouldn`t be pursuing an emotion.
josh bull
"Listen, dear friend: After having spent my life in buffeting with this world of which you speak, I have lost all my illusions and retained but two faiths- faith in immortality, the love and fear of God; and faith in friendship and my duties as a father."
--Athos from The Man in the Iron Mask (I was going to let that one go without the source, and then I realized that I`d have to answer a lot of unwanted questions in regard to the `duties` part of the quote)
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