South Like A Stone

Rio Gallegos. March 19, 2009

The Sierra Institute chapter of the journey is now behind me. I am no longer assisting any teaching other than my own. I have much to report about the entire second half of that incredible story, but for now, an update on my current whereabouts.

I left Bariloche the day before yesterday with my new friend Laura from the trip. After sinking like a stone southward for 28 hours we arrived in the small, off the map town of Rio Gallegos, and tomorrow morning early we will be back on a bus to travel another 12 hours to the southernmost city on Planet Earth, Ushuaia, in Tierra Del Fuego. South. The early morning´s phosphorescence was very predictably going to be out my left window, and when I awoke with my face smooshed against that very window it looked like a giant school of mackerel had broken the water´s fluidity and spangled the sky in tangerine tracers and apricot ripples. The southernmost city in the world. It´s a strange thought. We don´t have easternmost, and westernmost cities, but we do have northern and southernmost. Silly humans. It´s as if the rotation of the earth implies a continuum while the still poles are seemingly static, when in reality (reality?) we are just a sleepy waterball tangoing with a very lively fireball on a small node of the infinite corpus of the universe. Whoa. I seem to be especially fixed on thoughts of our miniscule little planet out there in the great drapes of space at this moment of my life, maybe because I can watch myself slide around on the surface of glossy maps, I don´t know.

So tomorrow we cross the Straight of Magellan, and in the evening we will arrive on the banks of the Beagle Channel, and when I have had a moment to grock Tierra Del Fuego, I´ll be sure to tell you all about it...Suerte.