The end of a chapter

I'll be departing briefly from the usual themes presented here, in order to describe the end of an extended endeavor of mine.  While riding on Santiago's subway this week, I read the final page of the third and last volume of Eduardo Galeano's Memoria del fuego.  On the surface, this might not seem like such a big deal, but in many ways, this series of books has been very much a companion for me during my years traveling in Latin America. 

One of the three volumes - along with my even more dog-eared Spanish-English dictionary -  has been a virtually constant item in my backpack any time I've left the house, whether to go to work, for a weekend vacation, or simply for a walk outside.  In considering what to pack for our trip from Ecuador to Chile, there was no doubt that all three volumes would be making the journey with us, as indispensable as they had become for me.  I've learned countless words, phrases, and colloquial expressions from them.  Grammatical features that once puzzled me as I first began deciphering the first pages have slowly become familiar to me.  But more than that, the books for me have stood as an emotionally-moving teacher that has deepened my understanding of Latin America.

Memoria del fuego is laid out across a total of nearly 1000 pages in its three volumes, presented in the form of short and captivating vignettes.  Each short story reveals one moment in history, applying the very Latin American art of the cuento to the task of defining its history.  Volume I, Los nacimientos, begins with pre-columbian legends of creation and prophecy, before fixing on the three Spanish ships led by Columbus and his superstitious crew on their way towards the inevitable meeting of two worlds.  From that point in1492, the stories march through the long history and expansive geography of Latin America, until Volume 3, El siglo del viento, concludes the series in the 1980's.  As I read the stories, I have also moved my way around Latin America, with the books providing insight along the way.  Today I will trace this journey through Latin America, as defined by Memoria del Fuego.  All the translations in italics are my amateur's own.

As most journeys do, mine began with an idea.  As I described in a previous story from a year ago, the idea to experience Latin America started with the immersion Spanish course I took in Oaxaca, Mexico, at the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca.

Thanks to our teacher Luis and his impassioned reading of Galeano's rendition of the first landing of the Spanish expedition led by Hernán Cortés on the American mainland, I became fascinated by the story and decided I would find my own copy of the book.

Once back in Santa Fe, I soon discovered the Spanish language bookstore Allá, which had a single copy of the book on the shelf.  The owner, Jim, was a kindred spirit in his fascination for Latin America, and his store was a few blocks from where I worked in downtown Santa Fe.  As such, in the coming months I learned from Jim a great deal about Galeano, his occasional visits to Santa Fe, and other interesting and tantalizing pieces of wisdom, as I planned a return trip to Latin America.

In the coming months, any time I found myself alone in a cafe or park I was alternating between story and dictionary, struggling to grasp so many new words and phrases.  At the time I swore I would commit the 60 or so pre-columbian stories to memory, and so I read each one over and over until I had a rough English approximation that I could relate to whomever was willing to indulge me.  5 years later, I'm not convinced that I've maintained such a sharp recollection of those stories, but if you put me to the test, we could find out...

By the time I returned to Latin America, a year after my first time in Mexico, I had made it through the first section of Los nacimientos and was getting into the initial meeting of the Spanish and the Aztec empire.  In a personal milestone towards my goal of reading in Spanish, I revisited the story of Cortés and the founding of the city of Vera Cruz.  At the time I was also finding some new places to read, like these:

I had decided to return to Oaxaca, Mexico in order to complete a course to become a teacher of ESL, through an on-site program through the School for International Training based in Vermont.

I got there about a week before the program started, which gave me a lot of time on my own to explore the city and find my preferred places, like the cafes pictured above, or the upstairs patio of the house where I was staying, here on the left.

I also enrolled in another Spanish Immersion course, this time through the institute that worked in conjunction with the SIT program, called Ollin Tlahtoalli.  This program started a week after the ESL course finished, giving me more time to explore Oaxaca on my own before the course began.

For me it was perfect timing to return to Mexico while also returning to the same section in the book that I had discovered during my first visit there.  Walking around stone buildings and churches constructed during the same time period I was reading about added a dimension to the stories.  At the same time, the stories gave a poignance to my surroundings.  In the streets of Oaxaca, I read as Cortés marched from the coast towards the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán and shrewdly maneuvered his way into victory over the city.  The coming together of two empires, both rising in power, resulted in the abrupt conclusion and supplanting of one for the other.  What resulted was there around me, hundreds of years later.

From Mexico I flew to Cuenca, Ecuador, where I began my experience as an ESL teacher.  I had found work there months earlier and knew I would be going there before deciding to return to Mexico.  In fact, it was a bit of an afterthought and a lucky coincidence to be able to go back to Mexico at all.  The director at the school I would be teaching at in Ecuador suggested that I get a certificate to teach ESL before coming.  Fortunately I was able to find the program in Oaxaca, which would conclude a few short weeks before I was slated to start work in Cuenca. 

As I settled into my more extended stay in Ecuador, and continued poring through my book on the patio of my new apartment, I read about the ongoing exploration and conquest of the territory beyond the Aztec Empire.  I read about the Incan Emperor, Huayna Capac, upon whom depend the fields, the water and the people... While he contemplates the sun, Huaina Cápac decides, "Soon I will die."

I learned that Huayna Capac was born here, in the Inca city of Tomebamba.  Cuenca was built upon its ruins, which have been partially restored.  I also learned that Huayna Capac had expanded the Incan Empire beyond Peru and into parts of modern day Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay and Chile.  Most likely, he died of smallpox, brought to the Americas by the Spanish.  European diseases often moved through trade routes faster than the Spanish themselves, resulting in the Spanish finding a new group of people already decimated by disease.

After his death, Huayna Capac's empire was divided between two of his sons, and the Incan Empire descended into civil war.  Atahualpa, one of the sons, defeated his brother Huascar and was marching south through Cajamarca when Francisco Pizarro, the Spaniard, came upon him.

In Cajamarca, Vicente de Valverde, a priest in Pizarro's band of explorers, upon meeting Atahualpa, raises the Bible with one hand and a crucifix with the other, as though conjuring a storm on the high sea, and shouts that here is God... the interpreter translates and Atahualpa, high above the crowd, asks:
-Who told you this?
-The Bible says this, the holy book.
-Give it to me, so that it may tell me.
Atahualpa looks at the Bible, turns it around in his hand, shakes it, and presses it against his ear.
-It says nothing.  It is empty.
And he lets it fall.

At this point, Pizarro uses this blasphemous act of dropping the Bible on the ground to launch his surprise attack, capture Atahualpa and hold him hostage in return for the famous Inca's Ransom.  Once the Ransom was delivered, Pizarro reneged on the deal and had Atahualpa put to death after all.  Only after Atahualpa accepted baptism and the Christian name of Francisco, his conquerer.

The same day I read this story while sitting on my patio in Cuenca, I attended a lecture on the musical instruments of the Inca and the other indigenous people of the Andes.  The sounds of rattles, whistles, conch shells and drums, in a culture with no written language, were the means of communing with the divine, much as the Bible is in the Christian world.  So, was Atahualpa merely exercising his own cultural means of spiritual communication by shaking it like a rattle and then holding it to his ear like today we hear the ocean in a seashell?  Or was he truly challenging this lowly but arrogant priest from his position as triumphant Emperor?

More recently, we have come to Chile, and in the meantime I had progressed into modern times in Galeano's series.  This year, as the US remembered September 11th, Chile remembered the military coup of September 11th, 1973.  In another coincidence, I had reached the 1970's in El siglo del viento.  The themes of this time revolve around the storm of military dictatorships and political assassinations that swept over Latin America, a truly dark time in history that Galeano captures with his unapologetic accusations and intimately told revelations of atrocity.

The series abruptly concludes, seemingly, with the year 1982.  Up to this point, you find yourself reading hundreds of stories, one after another, in the inexorable march through time.  When the final story comes and goes and no other follows, you are left with the sense that so goes history, one event after another, in such a way that any attempt to chronicle it will inevitably end, and time will still continue, unpausing, unstoppable.  But why 1982, rather than some other year either earlier or later?  Galeano, in his letter to the editor of the series on the final page of narrative, reveals why not before, or after, I don't know.  Perhaps because that was the last year of my exile, the end of a cycle, the end of a century.

Galeano, from Uruguay, left his country in 1973 as it too was gripped by military dictatorship and the killings, disappearances and imprisonments that followed.  He returned in 1985, having composed all of his epic historical narrative during his time of exile.  These final words, as all his words do, frankly deliver the reality of history, to your heart.  This defines Memoria del fuego against your traditional "history book," which itemizes history, catalogs it, filing it and placing it neatly in your analytical mind.  In addition, it has introduced me to countless figures, moments, concepts, other books, which the coming years will no doubt find me exploring further.  In so doing, these three books will continue close by, having slowly gone from an endless source of discovery to an endless source of reference and light.  The book and I know that the last page is also the first.

Pomaire

Since we arrived in Chile, we've been living in Santiago, its big, modern capital city.  In many ways, it's even more modern than many comparably-sized cities in the US, when you take into account the kinds of apartment and office buildings that are going up in Las Condes, or the constantly expanding subway system, for example.

Living in a city like Santiago has been a great experience so far, revealing yet another angle in the multifaceted gem that is Latin America.  I've remarked before, surely, on the simultaneous unity and diversity of Latin America.  With a common language, history, and certain aspects of both traditional and popular culture, you can visit many places around the region and find common threads.  And yet the culture is so varied that you can go from one country to the next and discover the countless details that make each place unique.

Santiago, for its part, represents Latin America perhaps at its most modern, its most globalized.  Here, you haven't lost the charm inherent in any given latin culture, but you also find yourself surrounded by all sorts of conveniences, and big business.  Fascinating, and overwhelming at the same time.  A topic I will certainly explore further in later musings.  It will have to come later, for today's story starts here in the capital, but ends up elsewhere.

After a month or so of staying in Santiago, once work was lined up and a regular schedule began looming ahead, we thought we ought to get out of town for awhile.  As pleasant as it's been to be in a modern city, both of us come from smaller towns and after awhile, a city this size can start to feel oppressive.  Fortunately, once you leave town you go from urban to rural landscapes very quickly, and there are a number of interesting destinations within an hour or two from the city limits by bus.

One such place is Pomaire.  It has a very small town feel, with no buildings seemingly more than two stories, and most homes with a small but fertile garden.  Many of the houses look to be made with adobe, and either have flat roofs, or sloped and topped off with corrugated metal.  Or better yet, with the red ceramic shingles you can find all around Europe and Latin America.

Further contributing to the small town atmosphere is the fact that the people are much more likely to say hello to you as you pass by in the street, and on the day we went, there was hardly a car to be seen on the roads.

There aren't many destinations in central Chile lacking the ubiquitous grapevine, whether it is laid out in countless rows in a commercial vineyard, or spreading along a trellis in someone's backyard.  Nearly all the homes in Pomaire seemed to be graced with vines of this latter ilk, and since we found ourselves there in the late summer of mid-February, the grapes were getting plump and ripe, and looking mighty tasty.

Grapevines of this sort add an elegance to even the simplest home.  Really, if you're going to grow a garden, why not make it an edible one?

Before going any further, I should mention the main draw of Pomaire, which is its pottery.  Here, you can buy simple, functional and beautiful clay pots for use in the garden or kitchen, plus all kinds of utensils.  Oven-proof and purportedly even stove top-proof, we've been baking pizzas and casseroles in the ones we bought for the past several months.  We haven't risked filling one with soup and throwing it on the stove yet, but every vendor we asked boasted that it could be done.

While some of the shops had attractively designed showrooms, the majority were like this one, little more than an open warehouse.  Walking around a store like this, you had to assume that in the next room over the next round of pottery was being molded and fired by members of the same family who was sitting casually in the storeroom with you.

Pomaire is so close to Santiago that it's a popular weekend destination, a place to shop in some rustic stores and get out of the city, much as we had chosen to do.  So much so that its unmistakable style of pottery can be found in Santiago homes, up and down the socioeconomic ladder.

When you consider the sheer size of our new big city home and the popularity of Pomaire's products, you have to imagine that this town has potentially churned out millions of earthenware goods over the years.  There are dozens of vendors around town, and ostensibly just as many potters turning out the clay merchandise before throwing it in the kiln.  Each of them most likely has their own personal touch or specific technique that makes certain products better than others or unique to the eye of the trained beholder.  But from my layman's perspective, what we saw from store to store conformed to a signature style that is less individual overall, and more demonstrative of a sort of "Pomaire brand."

If my casual assumption is to be believed, we could go on to observe that the collective selling power of Pomaire's goods must be a well-recognized economic engine within the community, and the local potters may well have collaborated in designing such a recognizable style and functional quality.  This would help to guarantee that Santiaguinos keep coming back for more, and rather than one family cornering the market, the entire community benefits from the constant influx of visitors.  In other words, grassroots branding.  Who needs a corporate logo when you define your product with your own bare hands?  

Best of all, it's cheap.  We bought an armload of various clay pots and what have you, plus one of the lamps from the shop here, and a liter of local honey.  Each item ranged from only $3-$10 more or less.  But this also meant that as we made our rounds through the town we ended up spending a decent chunk of money before we were done.  We didn't mind; we were in the market for something to bake a pizza in, and a reading lamp.  Everything else was more of an impulse, truth be told.  But we haven't had any buyer's remorse so far.







The other attraction of Pomaire is the rustic food, baked in rustic clay ovens, and served up in equally rustic-looking restaurants.

We got there too early for lunch, which meant that the bread was just going into the hearth, and the stores were just starting to open.  The lady shown here was in the middle of turning her pan amasado around for an even bake just as we walked by, and was nice enough to pose with her modest yet enviable oven for us.  

Unfortunately, the bread still had some more cooking to do before it would be ready, and we never got back around her way to try it.  Pomaire is also famous for its over-sized empanadas, which can be described roughly as a meat pie.  Imagine a potpie, but wrapped up like a calzone, and you've got the basic idea.  

I've developed an unbridled appetite for the empanadas they sell in our neighborhood, which are big enough to fit nicely in your hand.  The empanadas here were about twice that size.  Or at least, that's what we saw as we walked by the restaurants.

We didn't know there were going to be empanadas in Pomaire until we got there, so we had packed our own lunch before we left home, and contented ourselves with a picnic lunch in the park.  We didn't feel like we were missing out; it's an easy and pleasant trip out of the city, and we'll be making it again.  The next time, we'll try the food.  For the time being, we had some nice sandwiches and corn on the cob, and shared our mealtime with a pack of hungry puppies who wouldn't leave us alone.  Hence lunch on a bench instead of in the grass, safely out of their limited reach.

Otherwise, we were in Pomaire for the day, so we had time to wander the streets for awhile. 

We've been told that Pomaire fills up on weekends, especially on holiday weekends when everyone is looking to get out of Santiago.  But the day we went was a sleepy weekday in the summer, so we got to enjoy the town during one of its quieter moments.  There were a few tourists wandering around besides us, especially after lunch when the weather warmed up, but as close as we were to the big city, I can imagine how different it could be on other days.  

Shopping and eating is what tourists do in a place like this, but for us, having been confined in the big city for more than a month straight, it was nice to simply waste some time in a small town.  That kept us entertained for at least an hour or so.


But eventually we made up our minds to call it a day.  We had scoped out the things we wanted to buy in the morning, and then systematically bought them up on the way out of town.  Once thoroughly loaded down with our weighty earthenware purchases, we found one of Chile's peculiar colectivos, a taxi with a fixed route and a fixed price per destination.  It took us to a dusty bus stop, where a bus quickly came along and whisked us along the highway back to Santiago, through some extensive stretches of agricultural land.

If you grew up in Ohio like I did, and if it weren't for the picturesque mountains in the background, you might be fooled into thinking that you weren't in South America at all when you look at a picture like this.  But that cornfield and barn are as Chilean as wine grapes, and a visit to the vegetable market in summer here will present you with plenty of sweet corn that's *almost* as good as what you can get where I come from.


While I'm on the topic, I'll also mention that on the four different roads that I've taken out of Santiago so far, each has a revealed a vastly different landscape.  The one to Baños Morales took us up a mountain pass that got drier and more deserted the further we went.  This one led through the cornfields you see here, and other crops you could find throughout the Midwest.  The road to Valparaíso runs past vineyards spread out amongst gently rolling hills.  Another, which I'll write about eventually, went along rows upon rows of the fruit trees that comprise central Chile's many orchards.  Maybe I saw the trees that will bear the apples you'll be eating next summer?


We've been talking about going back to Pomaire again soon, now that it's Spring.  We're all out of the delicious honey we bought, and there's a few more things we could use for the kitchen.  We won't see the grapes this time of year, but I imagine there will still be some giant empanadas. We'll be sure to stay for lunch.

Baños Morales

During our first months here in Chile, we had the opportunity to do some exploring outside the city of Santiago.  Rather than take long trips into the far-flung northern or southern regions of the country, we opted to stay close to home, venturing no further than two hour bus rides beyond the city limits.  One of the first destinations we chose was a set of hot springs to the southeast of Santiago through a mountain pass known as Cajón de Maipo.  

If my map is a good indicator, we were closer to Argentina than we were to Santiago by the time we reached our destination, heading up and up into terrain that to me began resembling the dry landscape of Nevada's deserts, the further we went.  After more than an hour on a dirt road through a desert valley, I began to wonder if we were headed for a couple of pools in the sand with nothing else around.  We were on a morning bus whose only destination was the hot spring in question, full of other people, and with no return until 5pm that evening.  Would we be trapped under the sun all day in a hot pool filled with the several dozen other people on the bus?  As we bounced along the dusty road, our little day trip was starting to sound a little less pleasant than I had original imagined.  But with no way back until the evening, there was little more to do than enjoy the rugged scenery and wait to see how our destination would turn out.

Eventually, the bus turned off of the main road and up into a smaller valley.  We came around a turn, and the otherwise barren landscape was interrupted by a veritable oasis in the desert.  This was Baños Morales, a tiny resort town sprouted up from the trickle of tourism coaxed from the city by a couple of little hot pools in the desert.

We got off the bus and began to explore this haven of wooden cabins and trees resembling the aspens of Northern New Mexico.  Upon closer investigation, the slender trees had thick, rubbery leaves adapted to retain moisture despite the high desert heat, wind, and lack of humidity.  Most of the cabins, predictably, were given over to tourism, each one advertising food, beer, lodging, tourist transport, or all of the above.  As we explored, however, we noticed a few houses which were nothing more than homes, probably the weekend or vacation homes of Santiaguinos seeking respite from their urban surroundings.  

In addition, there were probably also at least a few full time residents, making a living in some capacity off of tourism or else living independently in homes that began reminding me yet again of New Mexico.  I couldn't help but make a comparison with the little mining village-turned-art community of Madrid tucked away in the hills between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Beyond the unorthodox style and decorations of the various cabins, and the arid backdrop that both places have in common, they also share a connection with the mining industry.  Madrid originally sprang up from the desert due coal mining, and from the right vantage point, you can see an active gypsum mine in current operation in Baños Morales, if you care to look.

As we walked around, we soon discovered the source of the local verdure.  In addition to the town's eponymous hot springs, a source of fresh water graces the hillside Baños Morales is perched upon.  It drives the whimsical waterwheel you can see over Nancy's shoulder in the previous photo, and intrigues my daughter, who didn't want to leave once she discovered it.  It also makes the town possible, gracing it with trees, green space, drinking water and gardens.  I found it incredible that from the desert could come such a gush of water, albeit a relatively small one.   Seeing the stark and nearly barren mountains standing over the valley, it seemed impossible for a stream to exist at all. 

Until we walked further down the hill, and looked back up the valley:

In the middle of the summer heat lies this beautiful glacier, atop an active volcano.  In a sort of environmental symbiosis, we find the glacier giving life to valley below it, and the volcano its mineral wealth.  Without either of them the hot springs of Baños Morales wouldn't be possible.  Residents told us that fumaroles have been visible above its peak in recent years, and also that some pristine hot springs lie on the slopes of the volcano, existing in a much more natural state than the man-made pools and surrounding facilities to be found in the village.  

We were destined for a mere day trip this time around, but that kind of information is all it takes to tempt me into the notion of a longer return.  An overnight stop in Baños Morales, followed by an early morning expedition to the volcano, some hot springs, and an up-close encounter with a glacier.  Or better yet, a night spent on the volcano itself, which, according to my limited studies of an area map, would appear to be designated a national park.  How does that sound to you?

After so much talk about hot springs, I should probably show you the real Baños Morales.  Here they are, three multicolored pools in the morning sun.  We glimpsed them from above, shortly after our arrival in the village.  We decided, based on the lack of shade, that we would try back later in the day.  Later in the day, we didn't get around to going back.  You might wonder why we would go all the way to a town famous for its hot springs and never get in the water.  Maybe it was the hot weather, or the less than crystal clear water.  My first hot spring experiences were in New Mexico, which has very nice, translucent pools to be found amongst the most beautiful of wilderness settings.  This type of wild setting, I've come to realize, is not always easy to come by.

Nonetheless, in Ecuador I learned to love the murky, steamy pools of Baños de Ambato, and other springs with pleasantly warm water, if not completely clear.  The pools of Baños Morales may be just as lovely, and someday, I might find out.  Or maybe I'll go instead to those tantalizing waters closer to the Volcán San José.  In the meantime, we had a fine time just wandering around town, meeting the locals, and communing with the goats.

A Chilean goat, with her cabra chica.  These were two of the many goats to be found wandering around the upper reaches of Baños Morales.

Didn't I tell you?  That's a lot of goats.   Goats belong in the mountains.  These aren't really mountain goats, but they must feel a little closer to the essence of their nature with a glacial peak within sight of their foraging.  The dirt road that led us to them continued up the hill, and the name of the road, Calle Volcán San José, would suggest that it leads at least part of the way up to the mountain itself.  But we chose the goat sighting to be the limit of our wanderings for that day, as the hour of departure was starting to get closer.  We didn't want to miss the bus, so we thought we'd hang around a little closer to where it would pick us up, for the rest of our stay.

This also provided the perfect opportunity to relax in the shade on the patio of a nearby restaurant, and sample the cheap beer options of our new country of residence.  Escudo comes by the liter, and is, therefore, for sharing.  Chile has other cheap beer options, and even quite a few microbreweries, which was an exciting discovery for me.  On other occasions, I will doubtlessly explore such topics, for your consideration.  For now, I will go so far as to say that while Crystal is the ubiquitous draught beer to be found at any bar, Escudo is my personal favorite for an unassuming drink at home.  And when you're on a patio of a restaurant far from the city and regular delivery of kegs, Escudo is what you drink to cool off after a long day of exploring a high desert town.

It wasn't long before the bus came down the hill and all the people we rode up with began showing up, filing back on to the same vehicle that had taken us here in the morning.  In fact, as we walked around we noticed our bus parked behind a building not far from the foraging goats.  The driver was inside taking a nap, perhaps, or else enjoying the town like the rest of us.  And after a long day of ostensibly not doing much, he was now back to work, ready to take us on the two hour ride back to Santiago.  Not a bad day's labor, hopefully he gets enough for it to pay the bills.  

As for us, we were happy to have had a chance to get out of the city and into the Cordillera de los Andes for the first time, setting our sights on some of its iconic snowcapped mountains, and breathe some fresh alpine air.  Maybe we'll get back there some day, or maybe we'll be drawn deeper into the country's more extreme reaches.  It's hard to say.  Our time in Chile is just getting started.