And Back Again
An hour short of Dallas, I’ve already been on, or rather over the road for 21 hours. Another eight before I’m done for the day, but the strange, albeit understandable, […]
Category Archives: ship
Showtime, Part II
Just a short note here, so as not to keep everyone wondering: we made it to the ship about as uneventfully as could be imagined. A small mountain of paperwork […]
If You Want to Hear the Gods Laugh…
The plan was that within a few hours of now, I’d be settling in behind my old desk below deck on the icebreaker, down at the end of Muelle Prat […]
That Other Thing I’m Doing
There are many reasons why my life is the kind of thing that would have been inconceivable to someone a hundred years ago. Case in point is the realization that […]
Tales Not Told
Last night we stood on the bow, squinting out in waning dusk for the Cuernos – the Horns – of Torres del Paine. They were out there to the east, […]
Inside Passage
We’re halfway down Chile’s equivalent of the Alaskan inside passage, threading our way through the archipelago that cuts Chilean Patagonia off from the rest of the country. Chile itself is […]
An (Almost) Uneventful Arrival
Hang on. This visually-evocative musing has been preempted by another, much-less probable one in which I’m riding in the back of a car driven by two total strangers – both beautiful women, by the way – with a mounted police escort of two motorcycles, going the wrong way down the parade route of Valparaiso’s Festival of a Thousand Drums. And I’ve only been in town for what, like 15 minutes?…
Here, Now and Away
Today, on Erev Yom Kippur, the most solemn day for observant Jews, we are urged to search inside ourselves, to seek out and contemplate the questions that define us and our path forward in this life: “How have I fallen short this past year?” “How can I best use my life for the good of the world?” And, “You’re getting on an airplane for South America in less than 24 hours – why haven’t you even started packing?!?”
North
It’s eight hours in an LC-130 Hercules from Pegasus Airfield, at the edge of the ice shelf off Ross Island, north to Christchurch. A C-17 can do it in five, […]
Waking…
You’re always reluctant to talk about the dream, because somehow it stops being real when you do. That’s why you try so hard to hang onto these liminal moments: because […]
