It’s often a surprise, coming back home. When I came home from Saudi Arabia five years ago, I was shocked by the trees. I’ve lived with trees like this most of my life, but just seeing them lining the airport road, sucking gallons of water from the ground and throwing it into the atmosphere like it was nothing – what a miracle, after a month in the desert.
In May, I came home from two weeks in Japan. The differences were smaller – Japan is also quite humid – but they struck me. So I wrote down what I noticed on a post-it note, and now I’m sharing them.
1. Cars drive on the right here. So weird, a world where we can’t even agree on that. There are only two choices but not everyone agrees, and once you get started down one path, switching is nearly impossible. So here we are, with infrastructure built for one or the other, and pedestrians’ brains trained to look one way or the other, and we’ll be different until, presumably, the end of cars.
Each June, I revisit a post about June Gloom, a weather phenomenon that turns much anticipated summer sunshine into foggy despair. You thought you were safe this year, but no! Our gloom was so deep it started in May and lasted all day, every day. Now it’s July, and there is light at the end of the fog, which seems to lift around noon. So here it is, a post that first appeared in 2012.
I have a tendency to worry. When I’m stressed, I can worry pretty much any time of day, but my brain’s favorite time to worry is in the middle of the night. At 3 a.m., there is no problem that can’t be mulled over, chewed on, and puffed up until it seems like the biggest problem in the world.
Anxiety has been a problem for a lot of people I know lately. First there was the election, which hung over us all, with daily news stories (fake and real) and opinion pieces (anxious and more anxious) and stupid memes (mean and meaner). And now there’s the uncertainty about what this next administration will do.
But at the end of October, I was worrying about something pretty great: a three-week trip to Nepal. And, yeah, I was worrying about it. That’s just a thing my brain does, ok? In the middle of the night before I left, I did one of the things that helps me keep my mind off of things: Drawing. And I went for one of the more challenging subjects, my hand. And then I thought maybe I’d just decorate it with some of my travel-related worries.
To be a parent is to get jerked around. Toy manufacturers jerk you around into buying useless crap. Other parents jerk you around making you worry you live in the wrong zip code. The kids themselves jerk you around into buying that second scoop of blueberry brontosaurus crunch with rainbow sprinkles.
And, of course, Hollywood jerks you around, jerking your tears. My child loves the Pixar movie, Coco. If you haven’t seen it, first of all, what the hell? You have time for Cars sequels but you can’t watch Pixar’s best movie?*
Secondly, there is this scene at the end where the main
character is trying to remind his senile great-grandmother of her father, who
he just left in the Land of the Dead and who will die if she forgets him. So,
he uses the father’s old guitar and plays his song, which she hasn’t heard in
decades because music was banned in her house.
And he plays the song and she raises her aged brows and, in a
heartbreakingly tender moment, sings
along. The song, called “Remember Me,” was stolen and turned into a pop song
but was originally written as a lullaby, which is how the kid plays it. It
kills me every time. Then my kid turns from the screen and says, “Is this the
part that makes Daddy cry?” As if he doesn’t already know, the little jerk.
Yesterday I woke up, after sleeping in, to the sound of my husband and 7-year-old son yelling at the screen during the Women’s World Cup final. I came downstairs in time to watch the end, and soon enough I was crying like anything, even though I am not a Sports Person. There was just so much emotion on the field that it reached out and wrung my mirror neurons until tears came out of my eyes.
The older I get, the more emotionally sensitive I seem to be. I tear up at movies, at books, at commercials, at tweets. My switches are flipped so easily, just a few bars of “sad” music sends me over the edge.
There is so much horribleness out there in the world—so much real horribleness, from concentration camps at the border to a sexual predator in the White House to climate change—that it sometimes baffles me that I can listen to the news without curling up into a ball and sobbing. And yet some celebrating soccer players or an obituary in the paper will throw open the flood gates. Things that hit me the hardest include people behaving decently to one another and people who faced obstacles achieving their goals. Not sad stuff, but the opposite. My mother has the same tendency, despite being pretty tough and very much Norwegian-American about displays of emotion. When she is moved to tears despite her attempts to stay dry-eyed, she often says “its all just so goddam poignant!” And then we laugh. What is wrong with us?
The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes you understand why the painter Georgia O’Keeffe saw in pelvises and skulls the curves of desert hills. But the Atacama is more naked still than the Southwestern deserts she loved. “When you think of desert, probably you think of Sonora or Chihuahua,” a Chilean biologist recently told me—the vast, brutal deserts of northern Mexico. “They are forests compared to Atacama.”
Pause and listen for a moment: Where does the sound you hear arise? In most places, it comes from life and water. Voices and the growl of cars. The burble of rain and rivers. The rustle of leaves. In the Atacama, what sound there is comes from wind. What life there is goes underground: Spiders lizards birds, finding homes in the cool dark of holes. When Rudulfo Amando Philippi, a German naturalist, made a famous expedition across this desert in the mid-19th century, he improvised by sheltering in the shadow of his mule.
But at night, the Atacama does have a song, and it comes from the sea to the west, on the other side of the mountains. The first time I heard it, on a two-week expedition, I was up later than my five companions, laying alone on a fin of earth, trying to make sense of the Southern Hemisphere Milky Way. I thought the sound was a fox, because it was series of three weird barks, descending, somewhere on the western horizon. When it came again the next night, a single hoarse call and closer now, it was clearly a bird. One call, then nothing more, as if the world had been silenced by the fog rolling in. But soon, deeper in the desert, the call came each night in stuttering flocks of sound at two or three in the morning.
This essay originally ran November 11, 2015, and is reappearing here as part of Atacama Week.
Rain has been falling on the driest non-polar desert in the world, famous for parts of it not seeing a drop of rain for centuries. The Atacama Desert in South America is caught in the rain shadow of the Andes on one side, and cold dry air washing in from an Antarctica ocean current on the other. This year, el Niño is on. Warmer waters are pushing against the West Coast of South America allowing rain to come to a rainless place. Last March, seven years of rain in a place that averages less than 4 millimeters a year fell overnight. The result has been an explosion of wildflowers, their seeds waiting in the hard dry soils for this very moment.
In August even more rain fell and a second even wilder bloom followed. A barren country where you can walk for days without seeing an ant, a fly, or a blade of grass erupted in a gloriously obscene display of flora.
I know the place in its other state: death. I went there for the desolation. I was writing about projections billions of years in the future when the sun begins to expand in one of its final acts. Naked under this searing light, oceans would boil away. The surface of the Atacama is all that remained, a barren floor of salt pillars lifeless pans. It was my end of the world.
Note: This post originally ran Dec. 7, 2018, and is being resurrected for Atacama Week.Please consume extra water and enjoy.
Driving in a foreign country is a good way to turn your head inside out. It shakes the cobwebs and forces you to rearrange the heavy furniture of your mind. You need to make room for thoughts such as 10 mil is how many pesos is how many dollars? And what is the phrase for a full tank of gas? And if I put my backpack and jacket in the passenger seat, and adjust my hat on them just so, will the miners in that truck behind me be fooled into thinking I’m not alone?
I have always liked driving, especially when I have good music and a long enough trip for my thoughts to really open up. It is like a form of meditation, in that it’s both exhausting and refreshing. Driving in a foreign country, where you barely speak the language, is like competitive-level meditation.
I did the most intense driving of my life earlier this year, on a road trip up and down the coast of northern Chile. I wrote a lot about it in this essay, which published last fall, so please go read that. But I’ve been thinking a lot about all the other absurd driving I did on that trip, all by myself in the oldest and most barren desert on this planet.
After my stay in Salar Grande, in the northern reaches of the Atacama Desert, I drove an hour in the wrong direction to avoid revisiting a horrific switchback to get down the coastal range. The road was paved to accommodate the nearby salt mine and trucks traveling to and from the coastal town of Iquique. It appeared to be in need of shoveling: Salt blown from speeding trucks blanketed the edges in a fine white powder like snow. I saw a billboard that read, in Spanish, “Out here, the only thing that should speed is the wind.” Trucks hurtled past.
On the coastal road from Iquique to Antofagasta, the focus of my fear alternated between the very rare appearance of other, potentially dangerous drivers and the road itself. As I drove through road cuts blasted off the side of the Andes foothills, weird rocks towered above me. It felt like I was driving on the Moon. At times, I negotiated the sides of cliffs whose faces dropped a thousand feet to the sea. After every ascent and descent, I pulled over to wipe my soaking wet palms, and to shake out my aching wrists. “Is There Life on Mars?” David Bowie sang to me.
At one point, after a couple hours of driving south, I needed a break. I needed to smell the ocean, mere feet to my right. I pulled over to the shoulder, parked my silver SUV on the sand, and walked a few feet. I was completely on my own. I saw nothing alive—no gull, no driver, no seaweed, no plant. I stared at the Pacific and felt my chest tighten. I was thousands of miles from my family, and I have never felt more alone.
The ocean was loud, dashing against dark rocks, and within a minute I felt like its rhythm was a part of me. It was going to swallow me and the sun was going to drive me mad. I strained to see anything else alive, some sign that I was still on Earth, but I saw nothing but sand and blue.
I squinted for a minute. The entire planet looks like this, from a great distance. From the Moon, you can make out the continents, patches of brown and green beneath a light frosting of clouds. But the general impression of Earth is one of blue and white. Ocean and sky. Our blue marble.
I listened to the Pacific and took a step forward. I was on Earth. I was so lucky to be here. So goddamn lucky I suddenly wanted to scream. Do you know how rare it is to have a planet covered in water? How precious it is to get out of the car, walk a few feet, and touch the ocean? It was the deep blue of my daughter’s eyes. This water is flowing through me, through her, through all of us here, together. Is this enlightenment? I thought to myself. I don’t know enough about Buddhism.
It was hard to get back in the car after that. But I feared that if I didn’t, the Pacific would rise up and consume me, swallow me whole before I had a chance to tell anyone I saw it. I had to tell her what I saw.
After a few minutes I trudged back to my silver SUV, my most prized possession for those two weeks, with the possible exception of my sunglasses. La Cochita Plata carrying a sunburned bodhisattva.
The next day, I drove through a copper smelting plant and past plentiful sleeping street dogs. I stopped at the turnoff for a famous geoglyph, a gigantic carved-Earth artwork made by the Chilean poet Raúl Zurita. It is so vast that it is visible only from above. Only from the air, or maybe space — where the landscape resolves into a world, a whole planet whose only borders are water. On the ground, you would not make much sense of the curved letters. They spell Ni pena ni miedo. No shame; no fear.
I kept driving.
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Image by the author
Title: After Pablo Neruda (If you don’t read the poetry of a country before you visit, what are you even doing?)
