play it by ear

Coda

2011-07-12T09:59:00.001-07:00

To new beginnings -

Puka Puka Cupcakes!

2011-06-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

Ka piri taua ki te po-mata
waka un kite varua toa
waka tere taku vaka kia Maroroji—
Wenua Mamao notetua Taua

Close to the sky-eyes of the night
Dancing with the souls of dead warriors,
You shall sail away in the canoe of the Sky God
In Taua's canoe, to the home of the tradewind.

— From "Mako Mate" Funeral Chant (Book of Puka Puka)

(Inside cover)

I had a chance to spend an afternoon in the Scotland National Library in Edinburgh last week where they have one of the only copies of The Book of Puka Puka by Robert Dean Frisbee. Frisbee was a trader on the south-seas atoll in the early 1900s, and wrote this whimsical narrative about his experience. The book is interspersed with black and white prints and each chapter begins with a few lines from a chant or a song, like the one above. At times Frisbee comes off a little preachy, but I like the way he becomes a character and allows the stories of the islanders emerge in his writing. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

“I am a South Sea trader on the atoll of Puka-Puka, or Danger island, as it is marked on the hydrographic charts. If you search diligently you should find a dot smaller than a fly-speck on a line whose ends touch Lima, Peru, and the northeast point of Australia. Perhaps the dot doesn’t appear to the naked eye. In that case, if you are still interested, intersect the first line with a second running from San Francisco to the northwest cape of New Zealand, and a third traversing the Pacific from Shanghai to the Horn. Where the three lines cross you will either find Danger Island or you won’t, depending on whether the hydrographer thought it worth while to mark such an insignificant crumb of land. In any case you will agree that the spot is a sufficiently lonely one.
Danger island comprises a reef six or seven miles in circumference, three small islets threaded on this reef, and a lagoon so clear that one can see the submerged coral mountain ranges ten fathoms below. The islets are little more than banks of sand and bleached coral where coconut-palms, pandanus, and a few grosteque gale-twisted trees and shrubs break momentarily the steady sweep of the trade-wind. The bizarre stunted trees on the windward beaches defy both the poverty of the soil and the depredations of the Puka-Pukans, who lop off branches to make drums and popguns, coffins for dead babies, and poles on which to hang spirit charms.
But when the hurricane comes, hundreds of trees are blown down and the little Puka-Pukan houses are carried away like so many card-castles. Away goes everything then – drums, popguns, coffins, spirit charms, and sometimes a man or two, whirled with his household gods to Maroroyi, the legendary land of the departed. At such times the Puka-Pukans scramble up the stoutest coconut-palms, hack off the fronds that have not already been blown away, and roost among the stumps until the gale blows over and the seas subside.
But for years on end Puka-Puka is untroubled by great storms. Then the weeks and months slip serenely by, their monotony broken only by the yearly, or semi-yearly, arrival of Captain Viggo’s trading schooner.
I have hunted for this sanctuary. Now that I have found it, I have no intention, and certainly no desire, to ever leave it again.” RDF. Pua Puka August 1929.

Right now I'm in Brighton/London, visiting some of my favorite people from the Maldives - Alexa Wilkinson, Muku Naeem and Ali Warnock! Missing the Vilingili crew :-). Here's a video we made about our weekend...

Wave Clouds

2011-05-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

Today's NASA MODIS image of the day comes from the Juan Fernández Islands! The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spetroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite captured this cloud formation induced by the Juan Fernández Islands.

Here's the accompanying descriptor, quoted from the website.
"A combination of cloud, wind and tall islands created a striking pattern over the South Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile on April 29, 2011. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying aboard the Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of two ship-wave-shape clouds induced by Juan Fernandez Islands on that same day.

The cloud pattern is given its name because the ripples in the clouds are reminiscent of the V-shape wakes left behind boats traveling in water. In this case, however, the air is moving around high mountain peaks that are stationary, and the patterns are caused as the air is swept over and around the mountains, causing a ship-wave like pattern on the lee side. The disturbed air rises and falls causing peaks and troughs. Rising air cools, and because the air is moist, clouds form on the peaks. As the air falls, it warms and the clouds dissipate. The formation and dissipation of clouds creates the striking cloudy-and-clear pattern.

The Juan Fernandez Islands are volcanic in origin, rising from lava flows from the Juan Fernandez hotspot a million years ago or more. The islands of Robinson Crusoe and Alejandro Selkirk have very tall peaks (3,005 feet and 4,360 feet, respectively) that are high enough to disrupt clouds, creating several interesting patterns that can be seen from space. In this image, the island of Alejandro Selkirk is on the left and Robinson Crusoe is on the right."

The islands are also famous for a cloud formation called the von Karmen vortex street - in fluid dynamics, the name used to describe a repeating pattern of swirling vortices caused by fluid moving with an unsteady separation of flow over fixed bodies. We see the same process with the "singing of telephone wires" and the vibration of a car antenna when we travel at high speeds. See an animation here.

Object Stories

2011-05-05T16:31:00.000-07:00

There's an exciting new interactive exhibition at the Portland, Oregon Museum of Art this month. It's called Object Stories.

Here's a description of the project:
The Portland Art Museum offers a unique opportunity to share your story about an object that is meaningful to you. Do you have something you would never give up? Like a favorite childhood toy, a military medal, or a memento? Something that lives on your wall, your mantle, or buried in a corner of your dresser? Something that evokes a time or person in your life, a place you miss, or something you hope for?

Check out the interactive story panel - I love the shifting photographs over audio. The descriptors — storytellers are asked to describe their story in six words — are so simple and evocative. You can even rearrange the stories within categories.

"There is no separation between objects and subjects." —Daniel Miller, Professor of Anthropology, University College, London (from the About Object Stories description on their website)

"Drawing from material culture, thing theory, anthropology, Museum education, and traditions of storytelling, Object Stories, the Portland Art Museum's new installation, is an open-ended exploration of the relationship between people and things, the Museum and the community, and the subjective and objective."

From a single, tangible object, stories from all corners of life emerge. And just as these stories are given life by the object, in turn they are reflected back onto the "objective" object - so that by the close of a story we the listeners view that object differently (and as we are listening, we likely form our own personal connections, tangible and intangible).

Maybe I'll bring in my glow-in-the-dark 7th grade full-leg cast, I'm going to see if I can convince my grandmother to bring in Colonel Catuna's hat. What would you bring?

2011-05-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Born to Live

2011-05-02T12:42:00.000-07:00

I've been helping my parents move house this last week - going through boxes, reading old letters, thinking about what comes next. I've been listening to a lot of radio, Studs Terkel especially.

I listened to "Born to Live" this morning, which captures what Terkel called the "essence of the human voice."

The late Terkel describes Born to Live and what he was going for in an interview from Transom.org:

"With Born To Live I had the help – more than the help, the collaboration – of Jim Unrath, who was an announcer at the station. He and I worked together on all the documentaries, and all on his own time. As I told you earlier, I’m inept mechanically. Jimmy gathered all the stuff. He knew the way I was thinking. Born to Live is a collage montage of voices.

How to explain this? There was a contest called the Prix Italia. It’s the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, you might say, for radio and TV documentaries and features. And Dennis Mitchell had won it for Morning In The Streets. So Rita Jacobs said, “Let’s submit it.” Well, very few American stations ever win. It’s won by BBC or Stockholm or wherever.

So I thought of all the interviews that I had, and there’s this one that was sponsored by UNESCO as a special interview. It was 1961, I think, that we started doing it. The Cold War was going on pretty hot. And UNESCO says, “Can’t there be one program of East/West values to lower the temperature of heated discussion?”

What came into my mind when we decided to enter the contest – with the odds about a thousand to one – was interviewing a hibakisha, one of the Hiroshima maidens, they were called, who survived the August 9th atomic bombing. She was talking through an interpreter. She’d been brought by the wife of a Quaker who ran that ship The Golden Rule, challenging the nuclear stuff. As she talked, I thought, “I’m going to open with that.”

And then I thought of other tapes I’d done. One of a street worker talking to a kid, a tough kid who’s got a tattoo that says “Born To Die”. There are tattoos on his fingers: die, death, D-E-A-T-H. The street worker says, “What about the time between you’re born and the time you die? What about that?”

“I don’t know. What is it?”

And then I say, “Time to live.” See? And then snip. [snaps]

Little thoughts. And music. Pete Seeger doodling on a banjo, but he’s doodling the chorale from Beethoven’s Ninth. Then it cuts to someone else – two couples in a suburb talking about their kids: “And so she says to me, ‘Well, might as well live today, tomorrow you’re gonna die. I don’t know how long I’ll live.’” “How old is she?” “Nine.” And in between and interspersed are children’s songs, American children’s songs and Japanese children’s songs. And then finally I say, “Born to live. What about the time between you’re born and the time you die?” Then all the voices start. Some dealing with humor and laughter and some dealing with myth and legend, and the voice of Jimmy Baldwin and the voice of Miriam Makeba, the voice of Einstein. And John Ciardi says, “Sometimes you can tell the difference between a large decision and a small decision. Sometimes it’s the sound of it. When I was a kid I used to hear Caruso records. I heard them in these Italian households in Providence, Rhode Island, I’d hear these Caruso records. And you think, ‘That’s as far as a human voice can go.’ And there he’d go one step further.” Then I slip in the voice of Caruso singing “Oh, paradisio,” as he goes one step higher. And then Charlie saying, “…tell the difference between a small decision and a giant decision.” Then it cuts to the voice of Sean O’Casey, and Einstein, and Bertrand Russell. And then it cuts to the voice of a child.

In any event, it had everything. But I was influenced by Dennis Mitchell as well as by Norman Corwin. Sounds need not have a narrator. I got that from Mitchell. Just let the ideas flow from one to the other."

Cloudstack

2011-04-15T01:44:00.000-07:00

2011-04-07T04:36:00.000-07:00

Recovery

2011-03-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

Robinson Crusoe, Juan Fernandez Archipelago

windows

2011-03-28T06:19:00.001-07:00

Chile 2010

2011-03-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

el rio de los pajaros pintados

2011-02-15T15:52:00.000-08:00

even if i knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree
.martin luther king jr.

gracias por un fin de semana inspirante Jenny y Edu!

2011-01-30T06:18:00.000-08:00

“Consider how the great architect of Cnidos acted. After constructing the tower on Pharos, the mightiest and most beautiful building ever, so that he could send a beacon-signal from it to sailors far and wide on the seas, to stop them being carried on to Paraetonia, a cruel spot they say, with no escape for anyone running on the reefs – well, after completing the building he inscribed it with his own name inside on the stones, plastered over it with gypsum till it was hidden, and inscribed over that the name of the king of the day, knowing that, as actually happened, the letters would very soon fall away with the plaster to reveal “Sostratus of Cnidus, son of Dexiphanes, in dedication to the Saviour Gods on behalf of seafarers’. So too he kept his eyes not on those times or his own brief life, but on today and eternity, as long as the tower stands and his craftsmanship survives.

Well, history too should be written in the same way, with truthfulness and hopes for the future rather than flattery to please today’s recipients of praise.

Lucian, How to Write History, 63.

Words of the Lagoon

2011-01-26T10:27:00.001-08:00

Early morning fishing
Kulhudhuffushi, Maldives

My sister Laurie and I have been talking a lot about folk knowledge recently - how easily it is dismissed within the academic world and yet how powerful it is in understanding nature. She's interested in how it can be applied within the field of marine biology. My friend Ann lent this book to me while I was in Palau last year. Words of the Lagoon by Robert E. Johannes is an incredible example of utilizing folklore to understand an ecosystem and a way of life.

letra

2011-01-20T17:31:00.000-08:00

Yo no canto por cantar

ni por tener buena voz,
canto porque la guitarra
tiene sentido y razón.

Tiene corazón de tierra
y alas de palomita,
es como el agua bendita
santigua glorias y penas.

Aquí se encajó mi canto
como dijera Violeta
guitarra trabajadora
con olor a primavera.

Que no es guitarra de ricos
ni cosa que se parezca
mi canto es de los andamios
para alcanzar las estrellas,
que el canto tiene sentido
cuando palpita en las venas
del que morirá cantando
las verdades verdaderas,
no las lisonjas fugaces
ni las famas extranjeras
sino el canto de una lonja
hasta el fondo de la tierra.

Ahí donde llega todo
y donde todo comienza
canto que ha sido valiente
siempre será canción nueva.

Victor Jara

Dolphin Bellies

2011-01-20T17:01:00.000-08:00

I started to write this a year ago when I was in Calen, Chiloé. I had a chance to go back and visit this past week, this time with my younger sister, Laurie. It was wonderful to catch up with old friends and also to somehow gain perspective on an experience past. My good friend Jeanette gave birth to her daughter Rossana while I was there, and last Sunday we attended a festival on Caguach, island of devotion, off the western coast of Chiloé with new and old friends.
This post is about my dear friend Ruthie.

Ruthie sits by the window and waits for rain. Her eyebrows are two horizons. Her arms are crossed as she sits. Listening.

The kitchen is quiet, but not an empty quiet. This is a silence that hums. Water hisses from the pot, a motor growls from the beach below, and somewhere in the bay giant seals argue on a styrofoam platform. Doña Nena arrives through a backdoor in the kitchen, bearing a giant repollo, silvery green. She’s bent forward at an angle and her thin hands are dirty in the creases between her veins.

“Va a llover,” Ruthie says, glancing over and back to the glass without changing her expression. A cold wind from the cordillera parts the two pines that stand outside, licking the half moon slice through the center pane. The sky is bright white. It presses on the house.

In the mornings when we walk to town she tells me her dreams. She’s dressed in her vestido de novia, and her mama has made her a tremenda torta. She stretches out her hands to show me the size of her cake and flicks her fingers to taste the cream icing. Other days she dreams of races, on the Diá de Calen. La Abuelita. Or of great long knives. She can’t remember how they finish.

Some nights when the sky is licked clean by the cold, the water is glass and the wind gathers and pulls at our throats, we think about the stars. Nena has sent us for a kilo of flour at la Marisol. Lights from the village blink ahead of us as our whispering feet carry us over the beach.

They come from above and below, the stars. We are walking a sandbar, suspended in the great orb. Not one wave disturbs our peace. Together we think about them. We let them wash over us in name and legend (me Orion, Ruthie las Tres Marias), sinking into the great highway of constellations that send hushing ripples to our shores. We hold them in our hands until the inky blackness in between draws sleep to our eyes and blood from our fingers. Up there’s Dioscito and los angeles. Come, she says, let’s go to the cemetery and remember the dead.

Ruthie cannot write her name. She cannot read or dress alone or leave Calen by herself. But she recites recipes as she walks and peels potatoes until they glow like moons. She has a laugh that seeps through cold mornings and rouses the trees. She taught me to build fires, to chop wood. She also taught me:

When the rock shaped like a seal emerges clean from the water, the tide is good to cross over.
There are 2 roscas for every 1 egg
When dolphins parade along the shoreline, bellies white like the snow of the cordillera, the weather will shift.
If the fire cracks, someone who gossips or tells tall tales is due to visit.
After the rain, tiny white flies swarm the camino like dust unsettled.
If you squish a horsefly slow and easylike between your fingers, his brothers won't come back.
Serpents carved the islands.
A bird enters, and someone who has never visited will arrive in the house.
Needles in a cross tacked to the door frame ward off witches.
Seals were humans once, we must treat them like we treat our fathers.
If it rains on the night of the festival of San Juan, the apple crop will be plentiful the coming year.
Romero, rosemary, is to drown the pain of first loves.
Many a man dies of the drink.
Balsamo stops bleeding and soothes dog bites

When Ruthie sits by the window, she waits for rain.

Pull down

2011-01-04T06:53:00.000-08:00

"Pull down the vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace

Pull down the vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be they place…”

Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

the sky is falling

2011-01-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

the sky is falling

burning and tumbling,

tangling the shrouds of schooners

and streaming ragged suns

whistling up from the deep

they sang phosphorescence on our retinas

hollowed green booms

glancing off bowed horizons

to kiss the spangled rooftops

the sky is falling and

the stars skitter beneath a thousand dancing feet

their hearts are made of

paper, tinsel, glass, metal

what are they singing?

before the fall

the fishermen moored their ships

and cast their gilded nets over hills

to pull the darkness down

first there was hungry blue stillness

and the harbor was a pail of milk

while Valparaiso held her breath

for the sky to open

loca

te volviste

twelve strokes and the steel-roofed houses

are strung up on telephone wires

marionettes dangling from wrists of smoke

shouts scurry up their walls

and the streets inflate as

the lonely accordeon gasps for air

the statues have stepped down from their pedestals

they lope about the plaza

through crawling men and walking dogs

and from his post in an alley near Anibal Pinto

Salvador Allende

waggles an approving toe on the stair

loca

te volviste

love, army, revolución, mob

there is a chorus

ten thousand strong

stacatto fists

balled or clasped or slung over shoulders

pounding the day into being

the morning moon curtsies before the dawn

he is a shard of bone

red women in lais hoist him up on flagpoles

the cords are cut

the streets fall flat

the statues congelan

and houses shiver into file

but on a stair by el cementerio

a few stars remain

apricot embers

winking under blood-stained toes.

2010-12-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

Jurel y Luz

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words,
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I came across the marks of the roe-deer's hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.

Tomas Transtromer

Overlooking Isla Santa Clara from Isla Robinson Crusoe

Atoll Way

2010-11-23T04:51:00.000-08:00

Blue Waters, Pulo Ana

Birds, Helen's Reef

This time last year I was getting ready for a trip to the Southwest Islands of Palau - Sonsorol, Fanna, Merir, Pulo Ana, Tobi, and Helen's Reef with the Atoll Way. I've been thinking of those people and that magical trip this week!

Itop Volleyball Team!

Parque Santa Lucia

2010-11-22T18:27:00.000-08:00

The capital city of Santiago has the worst smog levels in South America, not far behind Cairo and a string of cities in India and China.

One afternoon in Santiago I walk Bernardo O’Higgins looking for the Pre-Colombino Museum. The city ferments in the heat. But it is not the smell of soil or earth that swarms my nostrils and settles in my throat. I smell disuse, dejection, the forgotten.

Suddenly: color.

Green.

Flowers.

From the concrete rises a small mountain, fingers of stone twirling sleeves of vegetation. I am drawn in, up, seeking escape from the pinch of tall buildings.

Atop a low boulder, an Indian cast in bronze wields a wooden spear. He looks out over the cityscape as though he is defending the last stand of wilderness. And he is. His name is Caupolicán (Polished Flint), the fabled warrior who defended this valley for his Mapuche — “the people of the earth.” He seems uncomfortable in his headdress and uneasy on this hill, once called Huelén — meaning disgrace and misfortune — by his ancestors. History has forgotten this man strong as tree-trunk. They have forgotten his fight for this valley now peopled by tall beasts with silver scales.

From the lookout I turn and face the city, blinking to steer my eyes through the smog. In the distance smooth peaks of the cordillera are pressed flat against the horizon. Pale gray on still paler gray. I search the sky for depth. Up and up I look, scouring this canvas of sickly blue.

Suddenly out of the dome of sky a jagged peak emerges, floating in midair. Hanging. Suspended and cloud-bitten, easily missed, very nearly forgotten. I drop my gaze, sadly. “Lo que aprendes se lleva toda la vida,” reads a billboard on the streets below. “What you learn you take with you throughout life.”

As I descend back into the park, I pass a pool. There’s a salamander lying belly-up on the bottom, white arms flung outwards. I buy an icecream – fruits of the forest. The cone is soggy, glazed with congealed sugar. The chocolate flakes off to reveal an acid pink. After a few bites I toss it in a bin.

I want to weep. I want to yell out in protest.

But as I descend, the smell of thyme tickles my nostrils. The wind, breathless in the folds of the city, here whistles through the leaves. I can hear birds singing.

Spiraling down stairs from the summit, green reflects on the glass faces of tall buildings, until it seems as though the park is somehow emanating life. I feel my heartbeat fall even. The shadows here are not angular or harsh. They fling themselves over the ground, writhing, whispering. Beech trees fall into the blue sky. The people are smiling.

And water. Floating through space, glass droplets hold the light in their fluid palms. It’s the sound maybe — fluttering and chime-like across from a street of howling cars — that calms me. Here I can remember the wind.

Rising from a fountain is Neptune, armed with his fishermen’s trident, plying the water with a frozen grimace. He is harsh. He is kind. El Mar. La Mar. God of sea, storms, the polis. Of earthquakes and tsunamis.

Alone on a bench, in this island of green, in this valley of smog and right angles, I am somehow heartened. Within each of us revolves an island, and a choice. It’s whether we choose to listen to it that matters.

This Thursday, Thanksgiving, I ride with the Armada to Isla Robinson Crusoe within the Juan Fernandez Archipelago for a month. These next few days I'll be packing and gathering supplies (tent pegs, instant soup sachets, a map of the terrain). I'll be thinking of friends and family - to whom I'm eternally grateful! Bon Voyage!

2010-11-17T16:16:00.001-08:00

When I write paradise, I mean not apple trees and only golden women, but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattle snakes, bacteria, bear, cactus, yucca, bladder weed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes, disease and the rotting of flesh. Paradise is the here and now, the actual, tangible dogmatically real Earth on which we stand. Yes, God Bless America, the Earth on which we stand.

Edward Abbey

Shoeboxes and Opportunity

2010-11-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

I’m taking a break from transcribing to write a short update and share a little inspiration.

This last week I’ve been rushing about Valparaíso trying to organize a passage to the Juan Fernandez Islands. I’m here in Chile with a grant from Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, writing about the recovery process on the islands after the tsunami last February (triggered by the earthquake in central Chile).

Well, with the help of some new and old friends, I secured passage with the Chilean Armada and will head out on November 25th for a month’s stay in my new tent, to return for the holidays and a visit from my sister, Laurie, from Scotland!

I’ve been conducting several interviews, or conversations, continent-side before I depart – speaking with politicians, environmental ministry, philosophers, and architects about development and reconstruction on the island of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe’s famous novel was based on the experience of one Alexander Selkirk on this island in the 1700s). When the wave hit in the early morning hours of February 27, the entire coastal infrastructure was destroyed, tombs were ripped from the ground, 16 people lost their lives. As the islanders (680) grapple to rebuild, transform and construct a sustainable future, there’s a common thread that’s running throughout the conversations I’ve had: In destruction, disaster, also lies opportunity.

I’ve spent a lot of time with a group of Swedish documentary film/radio/print students through my wonderful housemate Lova, taking a few dance classes, lots of hill walking -- and have been trying to take advantage of the International Forum being hosted through the month of November – lectures, exhibitions, film, arts. This last weekend I had some interviews in Santiago and spent a few days with some friends of my wonderful friend Danielle Koplinka-Loehr, Juan, Daniela, Nati and Dani's family. It just so happened that my visit coincided with a baptism (these are all-night, ponche-drinking, guitar playing affairs, just watch out for when they sing your año) and a birthday party. I also had a chance to attend one of Juan's orchestra rehearsals (he's a violinist and conductor) - not to be missed. Can't get Mack the Knife out of my head!

Last week I spent several hours in the metro station walking through “Laberinto de Miradas” an incredible exhibition of Ibero-American photographers – flooding the otherwise dram subway station with great washes of color and movement.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Raul Cañibano Ercilla:

André Cypriano:

And Alex Carvalho, “Caixa de Zapata,” or shoe box.

2010-11-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning I rolled into Valparaíso on the early bus from Santiago. When I left all was black, only a few lights twinkling. Slowly the darkness separated, first land from sky, and as strands of light began to leak in through the bus windows, land from mountain from sky.

I spent the first two nights with my cousin, Sofia, her husband Felipe and their young daughter Florencia in their apartment in Bella Vista - so wonderful to be received so kindly by family! Yesterday afternoon I moved into a pensión in Cerro Concepción. Cerro Concepción was once populated by German immigrants, and its fort served as the main defense for the city. Historically it's also been called Cerro Chivato, because of a mythical creature who was said to live at the base of the hill. Apparently in the midst of excavations on the cerro, a deep cave was discovered beneath the bedrock.

One window in my room looks out over a church, and there's a music school around the corner. Add to the chorus Julio, the house dog, and the groan of car engines skittering up the narrow, winding lanes, the conversations of passerby. You can just make out a sliver of sea through a passage splintered by telephone wires.

I forgot how long it takes to fly to South America. I was seated at a window on the eastern side, and watched the landscape ripple beneath gauzy clouds as we flew southwest over Georgia, before slipping into the sea to pass over Cuba and Jamaica before dark. From above in the failing light, the landscape is somehow softened, it seems greener, and the spiraling network of highways and city grids loose their edge.

As we flew, I came across a passage in The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, that seemed to resonate with the moment.

It's an address from Chief Seattle, of the Duwamish and Suquamish Native American tribes, in a letter to President Frankling Pierce in 1854. At this time the United States was angling to buy two million acres of land occupied by tribes in the Pacific Northwest, including the region in current Washington state, where Seattle's people lived. There are many versions of Seattle's address, which was said to have been dictated, and never recorded. Some doubt its authenticity, but I wonder if that even matters. The authenticity lies in the sentiment, and if it is the consummate work of several hands, whittled and woven overtime, it still holds great value, perhaps more in its journey through history.

It reads:

"The president of the United States sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every shady shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and the experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices of the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each ghostly reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells us of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are my brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give to the rivers the kindness you would give any brother. If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last Red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the meaning of the land as it is when you rescue it. Preserve the land for all children and love it, as God loves us all."

This week I'm setting up my first interviews, and seeing if I can find a passage on a Naval or Merchant vessel to the Juan Fernández Islands!

Moments

2010-10-28T11:37:00.000-07:00

If you like Radio Lab, you'll love this video! Plays with image and sound in a delightful way.

Don't WORDS either, you can almost feel your brain working, may have to watch it more than once!

Here's a link to the accompanying podcast.

Photograffeur

2010-10-24T16:42:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks I've been gearing up to leave for Chile on Nov. 1.

I'll be spending my first month or so in Valparaíso (for those who don't speak Spanish, it translates to "Go to Paradise"), a smaller satellite city of Santiago, famous for its shipping port, probing thinkers, poets...and graffiti.

Valparaíso

Salvador Allende, the Americas' first democratically-elected Marxist president, first used mural art in his presidential campaign against Eduardo Frei in 1963. With its ability to reach out to the masses in a compelling and cost-effective manner, the street art that first emblazoned Valparaíso's Avenida España ushered in a popular movement that continues to probe issues of human rights and class inequality to this day. The last time I was in Valparaíso a friend told me the movement was jump-started by art students at the university looking for a place to paint. They asked the city council if they could take to the streets - now it's hard to find a stretch of calle untouched by street artists. It's become a tradition literally inked into the social fabric and structural skeleton of this storied city.

Even in times when freedom of speech was silenced through repression, the streets of Chile's port town hummed with emotion - clandestinely keeping the military government in check with images highlighting unemployment, starvation, and torture.

Graffiti is ephemeral - the walls of a city a canvas that is constantly changing to reflect fragments of the social mood.

It is individual in its undertaking and in its consumption (we all walk different avenidas, calles, magus and take in what we choose), but also collective in its participation - one could argue that graffiti forms some of the world's first social and participatory social media now being harnessed by twitter, facebook, wikipedia. It's free, often anonymous. It's open to the public - a collective museum stripped of its admission fee.

J R Wrinkles of the City, Shanghai 2010

Recent winner of TED's One Wish to Save the World grant, is graffit artist J R - self-proclaimed photograffeur (graffeur - graffiti in french) J R. Here's a quick lowdown from TED's website on his work and process:

"JR creates pervasive art that spreads uninvited on buildings of Parisian slums, on walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil. People in the exhibit communities, those who often live with the bare minimum, discover something absolutely unnecessary but utterly wonderful. And they don’t just see it, they make it. Elderly women become models for a day; kids turn into artists for a week. In this art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.

After these local exhibitions, two important things happen: The images are transported to London, New York, Berlin or Amsterdam where new people interpret them in the light of their own personal experience. And ongoing art and craft workshops in the originating community continue the work of celebrating everyone who lives there."

Check out this video from the Inside out Project, get involved!!

TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo.

Here's a slideshow recently featured in the New York times.

You can see more photos of his graffiti on Flickr.

And J R's site.

Another of my favorite social graffiti artists is Banksy, already very established in the global street art community - who hails from Bristol in England, famous for his fantastical, uncannily-realistic graffiti. Always pushing the envelope. Check out one of my favorites, two policemen kissing), and his famous rat motif.

This week I'm spending heaps of time with my grandparents and trying to enjoy the last of this fall foliage.

Lastly, here's a poem a friend from Chiloé sent me recently by Edmundo Herrera, about Valparaíso.

VALPARAISO NUPCIAL

A Valparaíso, azul manzana de la Vida.

Valparaíso nupcial, rincón de la ternura, recodo
del crepúsculo, cofradía de constelaciones; anillo de agua

ofreces al viajero, luz y sombra de la vida, panal
y Rosa de los Vientos, magnético y sonámbulo.

Ebrias callejuelas te cruzan de relámpagos la cintura,
patria de mi abuela, refugio de mi madre, bandera

de mi infancia; Valparaíso civil de madrugada, acorralado
por fraternales cántaros y rojos vinos peligrosos; por ahí

caminan mis hermanos Carlos Hermosilla, Pedro Luna, Ginés
Contreras, Praxíteles Vásquez, Manuel Astica, Cameron, Fuentealba,

mi compadre Polo con naipes y briscas bullangueras;
arriba vive la mamy Luisa, gaviotas errantes, peregrinas

abejas, hembras veloces, cercadas a pique en los acantilados
del humo. Valparaíso: quien dijo que la vida tiene una puerta,

centinela alegórico, Valparaíso, sin vuelta. Por cerro Florida,
Ramaditas, Mariposas, Plaza Echaurren, el Mercado,

subida Condell, Barón, buscamos estaciones donde apagar gargantas.
Valparaíso, tu sol emborracha y te ofrezco mi guitarra

vagabunda, mis pájaros marinos: recojo tu gitana sonrisa,
el Bar Roland a medianoche. Valparaíso de piel dorada

y luminosa, lámpara secreta de cómplices claroscuros,
tu primavera azul persigue mi navío perdido en la niebla.

Reflection

2010-10-13T14:22:00.000-07:00

Where does reflection begin?

Re – flect (verb)

1. send something back

2. show mirror image of somebody or something

3. show something

4. think seriously, carefully

5. consider an idea

6. symmetrically transform

7. say something to self thoughtfully

8. bring credit or discredit

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

2010-10-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

"We have stated that the s t a r s
are attached to the firmament -
not assigned to each of us
in the way in which the vulgar believe
and dealt out to mortals
with a degree of radiance proportionate to the lot of each -

the brightest stars to the rich,
the smaller ones to the poor,
the dim to those who are worn out;

they do not rise with their own human being,
nor indicate by their fall that someone's life is being extinguished.

There is no such close alliance
between us
and the sky
that the radiance of the stars there also shares our fate of mortality.
When the stars are believed to fall,
what happens is that
owing to their being overfed with a draught of liquid
they give back the surplus with a fiery flash,
just as with us also we see this occur
with a stream of oil when lamps are lit.

But the heavenly bodies have a nature that is eternal -
they interweave the world and are are blended with its weft,
yet their potency has a powerful influence on the earth,
indeed it is owing to the effects that they produce
and to their
brilliance
and magnitude
that it has been possible
for them to become known with such a degree of precision,

as we shall know in proper place."

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 2, 28-31

High Flight

2010-09-27T16:54:00.001-07:00

My Granny Gill is visiting from Scotland, and over the last few days she's been spinning tales of growing up during wartime outside of Sheffield, England. She was 10 during the famous Battle of Britain.

I was born on the birthday of her mother, my great-grandmother Marguerite, whom I'm named after. In the early stages of World War II, living on the outskirts of the small village of Bamford in Derbyshire, she found an old medal in a trunk in the attic. There was a note that came with it – something about how an ancestor had fought with Wellington against Napoleon in the peninsular war, but nothing else. “What a shame,” she wrote in her diary. “He lived in such stirring times and yet we know so little about him.” “Wait a minute: I live in stirring times. I’ll write it down.” And so she did – 14 diaries, about the village they lived in, windows blacked out to avoid the blitz, food rations, my naughty, yet endearing Granny. I thought about her a lot this year: how important writing and recording history can be, how it serves future generations.

My great-grandfather was fascinated by electricity. Electricity was still new when he was growing up, and he once rigged the doorbell so that whoever entered the house would receive a small electric shock as they passed over the doormat. Unfortunately, the first visitor happened to be the county clergyman, and so he was given a sound beating. When the war ended in Europe, he strung up their small country house on the hill with lights reading VE!. The message shone like a beacon over a valley of blacked-out houses.

We talked about the first spit-fire planes - their invention changed the British airforce, and this poem, written by a young pilot. Maybe you've read it:

Flying over the southern atolls, Maldives

High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

Chicken for Change

2010-09-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Freshlyground just released a video for their new single, "Chicken to Change." If you haven't yet, take a listen to Freshlyground (members from South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique) -- one of my favorite bands (listen to Nomvula, I'd Like also famous for partnering with Shakira in Waka Waka). The song satirizes Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's 30 years in power and in the video the band teamed with famous South African cartoonist Zapiro. Zapiro designed a latex puppet of Mugabe in addition to a whole cast of other African political leaders. Freshlyground were recently denied work permits to perform several scheduled concerts in Zimbabwe in part due to the political reaction to their new hit, but they're not swayed. It's already very popular. As one spokeswoman said, "The video is not an attack on Mugabe at all. It is a tongue-in-cheek challenge for him to reflect on things and become the hero he used to be, to consider his actions and surprise us. We are not afraid of his reaction. Why should we be in a democratic world?"

Talk about powerful media!

Listen to PRI's Marco Werman discuss this issue in the Global Hit, and read more about the band and their new video in an article in the Independent here.

ALSO! Just so happens that a friend and fellow fellow, Aisha Fukushima had the chance to interview lead singer Zolani Mahola while she was in South Africa. Check out Aisha's video recording of the impromptu performance of Zolani and Simon Van Gend's "Everything I Ever Wanted" at a friend's place in Capetown. While you're at it, make sure you take a look at Aisha's project: RAPtivism: Hip Hop around the Globe.

Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold

2010-09-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

Finally some resolution to a sad history on Malaga Island, Maine. Read the article about the Governor's apology this last weekend, and then listen/view Rob Rosenthal and Kate Philbrick's award winning radio documentary (click photo above).

Bill Nemitz: After 98 years, an apology long overdue | The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

A Year in Photos

2010-09-17T11:26:00.000-07:00

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Maldives, Palau, Yap, Chiloé, Lanzarote, Graciosa (and a little Patagonia thrown in!)

This is what life sounds like

2010-09-17T08:48:00.001-07:00

Photo by my sister, Laurie Baker

Till the end of time G and G.MP3

A few weeks ago I visited my grandparents at their assisted living home in Portland. My aunt Robin set up a folder with music from the 40's and 50's on their computer, and I spent the afternoon singing with my Grandpa and dancing with my Grandma. This is my favorite clip from that afternoon. It tells you a lot about their relationship. We had to leave half way through to head down for ice cream in the dining room at 315. Enjoy!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

2010-09-17T08:31:00.001-07:00

John McColgan in Montana in 2000

Why is it that we react viscerally to the destruction of our environment but not ourselves?

Listen to a great interview with Brent Stirton, photographer, by Terry Gross. Stirton talks about the famous Virunga Gorilla murders in the Congo, a tragedy which broke news worldwide. One of Terry's most poignant questions I think, probes the human reaction to this issue. A handful of mountain gorillas - millions of people killed by civil war.

Happy Anniversary!

2010-09-16T13:02:00.001-07:00

Restorative Justice in New Orleans

2010-09-16T11:18:00.001-07:00

Check out a project a good friend from Middlebury, Mallory Falk, has been working on down in New Orleans - Kids Rethink New Orleans' Schools: Here's a documentary describing the project, which combines innovative media and decision making with kids at the helm.

If you'd like to be in touch with Mallory, please email me.

From the Heights of Macchu Picchu, Pablo Neruda

2010-09-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

From air to air, like an empty net,
I went wandering between the streets and the atmosphere, arriving and saying goodbye
leaving behind in autumn's advent the coin extended
from the leaves, and between Spring and the wheat,
that which the greatest love, as within a falling glove,
hands over to us like a large moon.

(Days of live brilliance in the storminess
of bodies: steel transformed
into the silence of acid:
nights unraveled to the last flour:
assualted stamens of the nuptial native land.)

Someone waiting for me among the violins
found a world like a sunken tower
digging its spiral deeper than all
the leaves the color of hoarse sulfur:
and deeper still, into geologic gold,
like a sword sheathed in meteors,
I pulnged my turbulent and tender hand
into the most genital terrestrial territory.

I leaned my head into the deepest waves,
I sank through the sulfuric peace,
and, like a blind man, returned to the jasmine
of the exhausted human springtime.

From The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. Translated by Mark Eisner with John Felstiner and Stephen Kessler. (You can also get the book directly from City Lights.)

2004 is the centennial of Neruda's birth. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he said:

I did not learn from books any recipe for writing a poem, and I, in my turn, will avoid giving any advice on mode or style which might give the new poets even a drop of supposed insight. When I am recounting in this speech something about past events, when reliving on this occasion a never-forgotten occurrence, in this place which is so different from what that was, it is because in the course of my life I have always found somewhere the necessary support, the formula which had been waiting for me not in order to be petrified in my words but in order to explain me to myself.

Todos Juntos

2010-09-12T20:38:00.000-07:00

Tired of speaking?
Then why don't you be silent, shut up and:

Listen:
Todos Juntos

Read:

Hace mucho tiempo que yo vivo preguntándome
para qué la tierra es tan redonda y una sola no más
si vivimos todos separados
para qué son el cielo y el mar
para qué es el sol que nos alumbra
si no nos queremos ni mirar

tantas penas que nos van llevando a todos al final
cuantas noches, cada noche, de ternura tendremos que dar
para qué vivir tan separados
si la tierra nos quiere juntar
si este mundo es uno y para todos
todos juntos vamos a vivir

Translate:
After 30 years of trajectory, recovering the world carrying our roots. This night, like all Chile, their here with us. Everyone Together! What it means to be Chilean! (rough translation of opener)

It's a long time that I've lived asking myself
why it is that the world is round and one and no more
If we live separate
For what is the sky and the sea
For what is the sun that illuminates us
If we don't love ourselves or look about

Such pity we bring with us to the end
so many nights, each night, from our love we must give
so that we live so separate
if the earth wants us to join
if this earth is one and for everyone
all together we will live.

See:

Friends in Maldives, in front of Male'
(most crowded place in the world)
Eccles Family at my Grandfather's funeral 2009

Move:
Todos Juntos

Understand:
Todos Juntos

Swim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l5kcppMDAk

Pluck:

RAPTIVISE:

Poeticize:
Sometimes it all comes
By Laura Candler

Form:

nacreous clouds from Laura Candler on Vimeo.

Facebook Post:
Susan (maldives): I have a desire to investigate and explore all of the possibilities and potentials presented in life.Amdy (maldives): would rather have a world opened by wonder than closed by belief.

Live?
Todos Juntos. I'm listening! You tell me!

Field of Dreams…and Paninis

2010-09-12T20:02:00.000-07:00

(Yes this is a movie title and yes I’m stealing it. No this post is not about Kevin Costner or baseball, sadly.)

I’m back to the island of Addison County, VT for 2 weeks.

If this year confirmed anything for me it’s that I’ll never be able to leave the sea for long. But man, it’s nice to be back in Vermont (Green Mountains), back among the Vergennes (Green people, from the people?).

I was worried that Middlebury would be a huge culture shock for me, and of course in some ways it has been – took me 3 days and a best friend to get to a dining hall, where this micro-local-gossip life happens and the world screams at you so loud you can’t decide whether to scream back or right along with it.

At the moment I’m trying to silence the screams in my head. For the first time in my life I feel like I’m finding my voice and rather than keep it with myself, I’m going to share it with you. Thoughts, stories I have listened to, are fighting their way out. And God knows what words come first.

Today, 10ish a.m. it’s Panini.

Stepping into the dining hall (which has been remodeled but somehow looks the same, only shinier). And I’m frozen and walking at the same time.

I settle in when an old friend Abe Katz leaves our conversation to say Eid Mubarak to a Muslim woman he’s never met. That’s the power of speech and listening. Two words, just two words! Just wait till you hear him sing. Thanks Abe!

I know, Dad, got to get over myself. Come on down. How could I pass up a trip to the Panini machine?

But maybe that’s why I’m frozen!

(to clue you in:

#1: The Baker family is all about getting a good deal on your meal. Baker apparently comes from Beaker. Maybe we baked bread at some point (I’ve got the scars to prove it), but we also poured mead for Anglo aristocrats.

My grandparents have more coupons and two-for-one specials than my grandmother has baskets or molas or newspaper clippings of people who look like, but actually are not, her children, pets, and friends (to be continued). When you’re out to eat with my Grandparents, you get water and you get the special and maybe, just maybe, the dessert if it’s half-price or day-old.

Sure. Go ahead. You can look at the menus, count the blueberries in the trim or even exclaim over a meal that looks delicious…but you know it’s an exercise. It doesn’t matter if you’re at home or on the road: you finish everything on your plate, even if it’s T.V. dinner served on porcelain plates holding hands with butter dishes – veal cutlets and space potatoes and carrots that taste like chalk.

Got it? My cousin Andy once ended the famous all-you-can-eat promotion for fish-and-chips at a restaurant downeast (they made an executive decision to top it at 6). J He’s already a Baker family legend.

It’s not about being cheap. Maybe it’s coming of age in the depression. Or great-grandpa-what’s-his-name who talked like a blue streak and was imprisoned by those Yankees in the Civil War and survived a near fatal gunshot to the head. Or Grandma descending from Irish orphans, even if she can’t remember or maybe even chooses not to. Maybe it’s oatmeal cupookies. Either way, it’s a Baker rule, trait, and reality. And I’m not supposed to divulge this secret, it’s unspoken. But I want to let you enter my life, so I’m going to slip you a napkin with a few handy phrases.

So?

What would you like to drink?

Water, please.

I’m winking at you. We’ll get there, but I need to take a breath, take it slowly.

Thank you for listening.

#2: my Dad used to drive hours, hours!, to watch me play basketball at Middlebury.

#2a: It’s a 40 minute game and, if lucky, I might play 25 minutes.

#3: No matter how late we were running, he’d always try and catch a visit to the dining hall. If he was really late (more often than not J), he’d roll down the window and yell, “Better make it a sandwich!” And I’d jump in and we’d speed to Atwater. “I checked the menus!” he’d exclaim. “Me too!” By the time we’d arrived even Grandpa would admire our military efficiency. “How are you?” emerged somewhere between brussel sprouts and honey mustard at the sandwich island.

#4: Once, sprinting – juggling sandwiches, apples, a dream bar - to the gymnasium in January, me sliding over the ice in flip flops, he in dark sunglasses at last light (he’d lost them on the way), he shouted to some puzzled onlookers, “We’re bonding here!”

#5: I’ve never laughed so hard, or loved him so much. Now I can’t even remember when it was, or even the feeling of arriving late to the locker room (maybe I’ve purposefully forgotten). Nor do I mind that all of my best games at Home begin with this memory.

#6: This is what Panini machines made me realize yesterday: For me: deciding to leave basketball my last year of Middlebury was the most difficult decision of my college career not because of logics or commitment or turning in a uniform, or losing the people who may know me most - my mentors and my critics, or letting down a team, or winning or understanding my path in life (of course it was all of those things), but because of that moment, that rose-hued memory. Crackling ice, belly laughter, bruised apples, and wind caught in my throat.

#7: Basketball was something that brought my father and I together miles away from home; he loved to see me play and I loved to play for him. It didn’t matter if he showed up in the first five minutes, or more often, in the last five minutes, if we even spoke. I played to see him give me the….

See

You

You know: two-finger focus routine (pointing at first his eyes and then mine in the huddle or on the foul line, back forth, back-forth, until I cracked a smile). I’d hear him chuckle through the din and a line would be broken. In would rush my family and the world and life. I’d forget the committee upstairs in my head and remember my hook shot from high school, my hands.

And maybe that’s what courage, what bravery is. Being selfishly unselfish. Loving something so much you can’t remember whether you do it for you or for your father.

One day, Dad, I’ll buy one of the old Proctor Panini machines when I’m at a reunion. It will be at a yard sale run by a family with an Irish last name somewhere between Cornwall and Snake Mountain. Dave Birr will be driving in a car with 80s music, Catherine McCarthy will be singing and Elizabeth Bowman will be telling us about Greek Philosophy. Kelly Bennion and Alex Schloss will be on the phone on the quad giving us directions. And I’ll bring it home and we’ll call it Barney’s Burner or Cally’s Castle or Lo Lo’s Lair or Aylie’s Adoration. And Mom, you’ll say, “Oh Aylie, Stop it!” You can decide.)

My wonderful friend Kelly Bennion recently told me about a psychological study published about déjà vu triggered by familiar spaces. Not voices, sounds, tastes that bring us back, but the arrangement of a place. I disagreed with her at first – I have a keen memory for voices and faces, but being back has certainly given weight to her theory. You tell me: Can you think of someone (okay, admittedly more underclassmen) who can remember attending a party, visiting a friend in a specific Atwater suite? Stories about this region, this community, this “island,” almost always begin with – One time in Atwater suites….” Oh hi, architects who design prisons and dorm housing….

Well call it déjà vu, call it coming home, here in this wonderful confluence of a landscape and people I love (even in their absence) has been like looking at life with new eyes. After a year of playing an awkward game of solo paddleball or get-the-ball-in-the-cup, these last few days have been a riveting game of intellectual ping pong and I’ve got to reach to return each shot. Every person I’ve seen – old, new I’m inspired by.

It’s nice to remember knowledge and conversations as something beyond the classic game of slam dunk or knock out (sick of sport’s analogies??) I so often equated with class discussion groups – for once no one’s trying to hit the nail on the head or come away with all the answers or explain everything – all is gray (grey?) and confusing, and all the more wonderful for being so. Me most of all. No one strikes out. No one’s MVP or bench boy or under-committed or walkedallover or water girl. Play Ball!

(Quick side note: In case you haven’t noticed: I’m having an about face in my thinking about cliché.

What’s wrong with saying what’s already been said? It obviously worked perfectly when someone J wrote “Your love is like a red, red rose” way back when. And who knows if he was the first to write it? Our aversion to cliché might only be jealousy, hubris for not having discovered a more perfect way to describe emotion or situation.

I had a wonderful, completely unexpected breakfast with a new friend Fif (great hugger) and an old friend Mat Nakitare. I’m not surprised. Mat and I first met when he stayed over in Maine one night way back at the end of my first semester after driving home in a snowstorm for winter break. When my Mom and I returned from some errands that evening, we walked in to hear Mat and my Dad laughing and chatting in a living room without power or heat – but glowing by candle light and snow light and smile light on the couch in the living room).

We talked about how people express humor across language (totally confirming my complete loss and mourning of irony this year). I asked Mat about Kenya and we started talking about East African parables, sayings. Sometimes the easiest way to describe a funny, awkward, sad situation is simply worded, age-old. (Shit! My God! Holy Smokes! Sweet! Sketchy, man. What goes up, must come down, hipster, I can’t believe it!) Two of my all-time favorites from my time in Uganda: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers. All dogs have green eyes in the dark.

Cool one I found just now:

Baby not born yet, his eyeball big. Meaning: Do not be overzealous about what has not been entrusted to you yet.

You tell me: Why mess with that??

Thank you for listening.

Eid Mubarak!

2010-09-10T13:46:00.000-07:00

For all of my Muslim friends. Thank you for showing me a new perspective. Young boy, Kuda Eid, Utheem, Maldives.

Don't forget that you are Islanders

2010-09-10T05:07:00.000-07:00

This year was like a line dance I never quite mastered.

It's cadence was marked by smiles, unquestioning generosity, and that wonderful middling ground where land meets the sea and sky. There were passes that felt familiar, eyes that sparkled with deja vu. I began to learn how to chop firewood, build fires, make rope, navigate, cook. I learned about relationships, power, hate, love, religion, science, climate and about how they were all connected, each integral to understanding the other. Along the way, I learned how to live my life. As Pablo Neruda memoirs published posthumously: Confieso que he vivido. I confess that I have lived.

Isn't that the most we can do? The best we can do?

For me this year was about dismantling category, about losing, silencing myself to write for and record and understand others. As Bruce Chatwin once wrote, "My interest is people." I wanted to learn about life, and about how people lived it. Abandoning the get-in, get-out policy of journalism to listen without an agenda. To say, I'm here to listen to you listen to yourself, to hear what it is that makes you who you are.

I was blessed to interview and work with people from all walks of life this year: artists, taxi drivers, fishermen, navigators, historians, matriarchs, governors, revolutionaries, chiefs, presidents, 9-year-olds, a cave man, doctors, addicts, murderers, musicians, mothers, stars of telenovelas, gang members, unemployed, environmentalists, refugees, millionaires, missionaries, migrant workers, sons and daughters.

A big mentor of mine, Erica Heilman from Vermont, once told me that when she interviews someone she falls in love with them. And it's true - a good interview is exhilarating, heart-wrenching, you slide down their voice and into their soul.

I did not always agree with the people I met, but I listened, and I felt empathy for every one. Most importantly, I heard them listen to themselves.

It's hard to measure the impact of storytelling.

I imagine it as somehow airy, shimmery maybe - bobbing particles that spark and fizz and then dissipate as they are born on parted lips. There were days when I wondered whether storytelling was too fluffy - and I should turn in my equipment for a degree in medicine, alternative energy, architecture. But then I would interview someone, and it was magical. Studs Terkel once wrote that he loved to watch people listen to themselves back on tape, smiling as they'd say: "I never I knew I felt that way." And that's what I loved. After years of searching for the right medium I'm settling on the old fashioned kitchen-table, fireside, deckside, starside chat. The magic that occurs between two people.

It's woefully and wonderfully abstract. Every culture tells stories; every person has a story to tell. It transcends illiteracy, technology, education, access. Everyone can participate, everyone has something to say.

Here is an adapted version of the presentation I gave at the returner's conference.

My first presentation was a little overwhelming - close to 300 photos in 9 minutes! I regretted it after - what a blur, and how naive, trying to fit it all in!
But in some ways that's exactly what it's felt like - time warps and unravels at a dizzying speed when you're traveling. Days bleed together, memories hover and jostle for attention in the belly of a kaleidoscope. The more you see, the less you know.

To encapsulate that feeling in ten minutes is such a challenge, almost a slap in the face. Yet each of my peers unveiled something wonderfully unique and incredibly inspiring.

This is an audio-visual collage that spans:
1 Me
371 days
800ish audio recordings
1 Volleyball Team
5 rabies shots
73 beds
5 religions
15 words for coconut

1 world cup championship
4 marriage proposals
1 Independence Day
9 colonial powers (not counted twice)
12 languages
12 full moons
23 host families
Too many sunburns
Never enough sunsets
14 journals
40 boat trips (not including daily ferry in Villingili, Maldives)
10 school visits
28 books read
2 First Birth Ceremonies
3 Weddings
1 Funeral
25 Flights
41 Islands
1 Me

One of the questions I asked this year was - what advice would you have for the future generation? Just below the equator, on the island of Fuvumulah in the Maldives, an island councilor said something that will stay with me forever: "Don't forget that you are islanders."

Islands are everywhere - Manhattan, United Kingdom, Nelson Mandela's Robben Island, Bangkok was once an island - they populate literary tradition (Thomas More's Utopia, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare's the Tempest, Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa), even ourselves (I - land).

I'd like to dedicate this to the hundreds of people who helped me this year. When I first set out on my journey I naively envisioned myself looking back on my year able to say, "Look at what I've done. Me! All by myself." I know now, I've realized that all I have learned, all I have achieved - is the cumulative work of hundreds of people. This is for them. People who continue to teach in their absentia when their voices have evaporate on parted lips and alighted on air, settled in the sand, found lift on the foam.

Don't forget that you are Islanders from Aylie Baker on Vimeo.

Copyright © Aylie Baker (and hundreds of islanders). For educational use only.

Featuring Music by: Zero Degree Atoll, Shiuz, the musical stylings of the one and only Susan-Shifa-Thanzy Trio, Lisa, Sergio, Sergio Colivoro, Jorge Toledo, and Los Campesinos (Gran Canaria).

Calling all Vermonters!

2010-09-07T06:15:00.001-07:00

Friends in Vermont! This weekend, September 11 and 12 a new friend and another Watson Fellow, Gillian Grassie, is playing in Montpelier and Burlington. This last year she explored the relationships between new technologies and independent music scenes. Gillian plays the harp and has lyrics that will blow you away!

Here's a link to her website, and her music! I love Silken Strings and Ocean.

She'll be playing at the following venues:
9/11 Montpelier, VT – Langdon Street Café – 7 PM
9/12 Burlington, VT – Parima – 7:30 PM

Come hear this up and coming artist - she's famous! Can't get her out of my head :-)

2010-08-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement."
– James Agee Let us Now Praise Famous Men.

Time

2010-08-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sunrise last week off of French's Island, Freeport

My first day back in Maine, I joined my grandparents and my aunt Robin for a sunset ride on the mail boat that runs daily through Casco bay. Robin lives with my uncle Eric on their sailboat, Runaway, in Marina del Rey in Los Angeles. When I was in middle school, she and Eric sailed around the world, and I grew up listening to stories of her travels. They spent one Christmas in Graciosa, my last stop in the Canaries, and it was nice to compare experiences and talk about changes. When she left for the airport she handed me an excerpt from John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. Tucked into a string of dialogue is a paragraph that describes the passage of time - without ever mentioning it - wonderfully. I thought I’d include an excerpt here:

“O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast, days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and hearth smoke blown down from the chimney pots, misty days of sifted sunshine and gentle fitful rain that glistened and purred on the windowsill like a silvery cat, days of luxurious tall clouds that brought thunder east from Jutland,…days of high ribbed skies like an angel’s carcass, December days of howling sideways snow, March days of hail from the north like an angry knocking at the door, June days when greenness smothered every vista, days without qualities, days with a hole in the middle, days that never knew their own mind and ended in insomnia, days of travel…”

Speaking of time, check out Irene's blog, All the Time in the World: http://travelsalabillypilgrim.blogspot.com/. She was my roommate at the Conference and I hope a life long friend! She talked to people about time for a year - and brought a sketchbook with her filled with different drawings of "time" from her travels. What would you draw?

Hearing Humanity

2010-08-23T22:28:00.000-07:00

Start of Ramazan, Dhuvaafaru

"There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad to find the home one has lost."

Franz Kafka

I’ve always been a listener.

My earliest memory is coming home to our house in the trees after a surgery to improve my hearing. For the first time in my life I could hear the growl of cars on the highway.

I spent my whole year listening. So much so that I sometimes wondered if I’d forgotten how to speak. I tried to blend into my interviews - to be so open that I sloughed off my identity, my height, my beliefs, even my sex, to make others comfortable.

And the truth is I got used to staying silent. It was easier to hear the stories of others than to intone my own. After all, that’s the first thing we do as humans: listen in the womb. Before we see and touch, even think: we hear.

But in the end it’s all sound. We also have to speak, so others can listen to the stories we have heard, so we can hear ourselves.

This is the story that I wrote frantically in the days after I returned from the Watson Returner's Conference. It's long, and emotionally baring, but I think it somehow explains the range of emotions I was experiencing upon "re-entry." As one friend pointed out, in many ways I'm still traveling - navigating a new world between home and away. This story is about family, religion, recording, listening, Dhuvaafaru, the 2004 tsunami, and, I think, I hope, humanity.

I leave the airport in tears. It’s as if the scars on my body have finally begun to leach pain.

I find my Dad, shuffling through the glove compartment, looking for something. When he sees me he steps quickly out of the car and hugs me, alarmed. "Was someone mean to you?" he asks as he loads my bag into the trunk.

"No!" I sob. "They were so nice!" Shusshing (a sound I can’t describe, but one he uses when his daughters are upset), he drives.

“Smell the air, Aylie.”

I recognize it. We’ve arrived at Tony’s Donuts in Portland. I laugh. He's always had this reaction to my tears. When I was little and I would cry, he'd respond in one of two ways: “you must be hungry” or “you must be tired.” Today I’m both. But something else, too.

We enter the small bakery. A man with a red mohawk at the counter looks from me to my father and back, with no change of expression. This must be routine for him, I think, and let out a strangled giggle. Behind him, donuts are piled high on the shelves, slick with sugar. My Dad buys two molasses-glazed and we head outside to sit at an old picnic table.

I've never seen my Dad look at me so earnestly.

We are the same person on so many levels - we get lost in a familiar neighborhood, we are constantly searching for our keys or a phone, we ask questions, we dance like a family of orangutans. But when it comes to sensitivity - we couldn't be more different. He laughs as I whimper and begin to nibble at my donut, feebly picking at it as I speak.

This laughter has always echoed between us in these moments.

In the past it bothered me. I feel things very acutely, whereas my Dad holds it all in, letting it out in small phrases, sentences that only I can notice and usually surface when you least expect it. I see his eyes water for one of the first times in my life as I begin to tell him the stories of the people I have met. He wants to meet every one.

We leave Tony's after I've gathered myself and my Dad has eaten all of his and most of my molasses glazed. He’s rushing me a little. My grandparents, who moved into an assisted living home during my year away, always eat dinner at 530, and he wants me to see them before they eat.

To tell the truth I don’t want to go. My eyes are swollen, I have slept less than 15 hours in the last 4 days, and my body aches from dancing last night. Orangutans, remember?

I don’t want to face my grandparents, either.

My Grandpa John, like my Dad, doesn't really talk about emotions.

Grandpa was born with a story to tell. When the county nurse called in to the maternity ward to ask my great-grandmother what she’d like to name her first-born son, she hollered back: “Name him after uncle John!” And so she did. Uncle John Baker from Hazard, Kentucky. My Grandpa's got that musty southern drawl that winds itself around his listeners, beckoning them to hear his stories. His memory is crystal clear. His details are inventive, if at times fantastical. To me, he's one of the greatest writers who never picked up a pen.

A Colonel in the U.S. Army, Grandpa John retired to the Panama Canal Zone where he worked as a Judge for many years. And it’s there my Dad began sailing. On Christmas day, my Grandma would often announce that she wasn't ready for Christmas, and she'd shoo everyone out of the house, ignoring any whining from my aunts and uncles. “Jesus was still around on the 26th,” she'd say, and my Grandpa would take my Dad and his five siblings out for a sail. It was in Panama that my Dad, today a captain and an engineer, built his first sailboat. He was fourteen and armed only with plywood and plans he sent away for with an ad he tore from the back of a National Geographic magazine.

Dad, sailing at dawn, Casco Bay

My Grandpa's got strong beliefs about what success is and a patriotism that at times I find blinding. When Jimmy Carter "gave away the Panama Canal" he changed political parties overnight and has never looked back. When my father married a Scottish girl at 21 and left the cadet corps to study engineering in Edinburgh, my grandparents couldn't understand at first. They love him, but unlike my uncles, who’ve got badges on their shoulders, he'll always be the “architect” who took off to go sailing. The first thing my Grandpa asked me when I got home last week was, "So what was your favorite country?" When I began to fumble for an answer he interrupted me. "America, right?!" he boomed. I smiled silently.

My Grandma is another story. She knows I've traveled, but I'm not sure if she knows where.

In the last five years she's developed mild dimentia and now she’s taken to wearing the same austere outfit, hoarding packets of brown sugar from the dining room like those they had in Panama, eating unprecedented amounts of ice cream, and humming the Mexican Hat Dance down hallways. She forgets so much, but the stories she remembers are central to who she is. Aunt Ida's card table. Spooky Fooks. Mr. Catuna’s hat she wears.

Jean is one of the most beautiful women I have ever known, and it is from her I draw my sensitivity, I think. Apparently we have a Cherokee ancestor who went by "Princess Rain in the Face." Figures. My grandmother's known for bypassing the law with her good looks and a few tears. When I was three years old I won a raffle, and parents left me with my grandparents to fly south with my winning tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. When they returned I told my mother, weeping, "Now I know how Cinderella feels! Grandma's just like the evil stepmother!" "I heard that!" my grandma bellowed from the kitchen, and burst into tears.

When my uncle Matthew left home for Annapolis, my grandmother made a lot of noise about going to work in physical therapy -- finally fulfilling the degree she'd obtained years before. My grandfather thought it might be too stressful for her. But she kept at it – even enrolling to get her pilot's license. She completed the course, but never got off the ground. My cousin Michael was born, and she flew straight from motherhood into grandmotherhood.

In the Main Street house in Castine, there are paintings that sit abandoned in dark corners. Only the dust motes see them. When I join her for watercolor classes and other ladies look on in awe at her paintings, she giggles, embarrassed. "It's just a hobby," she insists, reapplying her red lipstick.

When she was young her mother forbade her from keeping a diary. My great grandmother was the youngest of many children, and her brothers were always getting into her things. Jean always regrets taking this advice.

She's the one who told me to keep a journal when I left. In case I forget.

We get lost on the way to The Woods, but when we finally arrive there are several old ladies sitting and chatting in rocking chairs, lapping up the last of afternoon sunlight. My Dad makes some joke about the “Costa del Maine,” and we enter in a cloud of laughter.

I’m wearing one of my favorite t-shirts. “Sail Fast” it says in big letters on the front. “Sail…” my Grandpa reads slowly, moving closer to read.

When I got back to the U.S., my parents told me he’s nearly blind.

Grandma wakes up and reads it too, and smiles. “Hey, that’s a great t-shirt,” she says and settles back on the couch. I turn around. “Live Slow,” it says on the back. She giggles, and when I join her she slaps my knee. She looks so tiny next to me, close to the bone. Her green eyes seem bigger, her smile wider.

“What’s that? Aylie’s not been crying has she?” My grandfather says, chuckling, but not necessarily surprised. “There’s no need to cry.”

“Come on, Aylie,” he says. “Tell us a story from this year.”

But I can’t speak. I beg a moment to myself and retreat to the bathroom.

I stand there, looking in the mirror. I’m exhausted. I hang onto the sink and examine myself for the first time in months.

My skin is scarred by sun and wind and acne. I trace a finger under my swollen eyes, lifting flecks of mascara from my cheeks. I got back only ten days ago, but my skin’s already starting to heal.

On my finger a scar swells pink at the knuckle. I cut it grating potatoes in Chiloé at Doña Nena’s house. I remember Lorena laughed when she saw the blood trickle down my wrist. “She doesn’t know anything!” she’d shouted in hysterics. A schizophrenic, that morning she was having one of her episodes. A few hours later she would refer to me as her brother’s future wife.

Cooking Mermelada de Ciruelas (Plum Jam), Calen, Chiloe

Another scar, faded now, just above the bone of my wrist. Where I burned myself on Thanksgiving in Palau. The day I spilled a pumpkin pie down my front and it rained until I thought the green might lift from the leaves. Obak, my host and chief of the village of Ngetkib, laughed too, and together we cooked our first turkey in that oven with a mind of its own. He became my father that day.

Obak and Ann: Parents, Mentors, best friends in Palau!

I’m thinner than when I first arrived home. The night when I broke the fast in not one, but ten houses, on the tiny Maldivian island of Thulhaadhoo, is far away now. I feel my stomach turn in memory. How many kilos did I gain and lose in an attempt to build trust this year? I laugh. Ramazan starts next week. Maybe I’ll fast.

Breaking the fast, morning after end of Ramazan, Kuda Eid, Utheem

I take a deep breath and step out. It’s not the home I recognize. The quiet stacks of old magazines and postcards, hanging baskets, molas and musty furniture are all gone. Their apartment is small now. It’s not sterile necessarily, but it’s too bright, no room for memories to lurk in the shadows. The only object from before is an old black trunk in the corner. My grandmother still recognizes it.

When I sit down my Grandpa tries a different tack.

“So how about the other folks. What did they do?”

I tell them about the bats, and the migrants, the musicians, and the poets and the puppets. About time and trash. The refugees, the clouds, the wolves, the whales and the gardens. Mountains, rivers, cultural artifacts, stars, diasporas, memory. Even abandoned houses (I think of the Main Street house and wonder if my Dad does too). Even a rubix cube!

“Now wasn’t there a fella swimming the channels?” Grandpa asks.

“But he did so much more than that, Grandpa,” I say. He smiles. He seems more awake then I’ve seen him in years, and he’s looking straight at me.

“And what did the other men do?”

“One explored religion and baked bread in the Middle East. One danced with refugees. And one tracked animals. Another biked. One built a multi-religion temple inspired by the spiral. One explored rivers. This other guy chased hurricanes. One walked a thousand miles! One guy even lived in slums for a year, Grandpa.”

“He did what with plums?” my Grandma surfaces from the corner of the couch, sifting the air for an answer.

“He lived in slums, Mom. Slums,” my Dad says, throwing me a wink.

“Ohh.” she says. I see the milky green of her eyes shift to a shiny blue. Her arm’s on my knee again. “Why would he do that?”

“To understand how and why people struggle, Grandma, and how they define success. He wants to be a doctor to help people in poverty,” I tell her.

“And how tall was he?”

“Grandpa.”

My Dad lets out a belly laugh. He’s stretched out on the floor, arms folded behind his head, watching the ceiling.

Grandpa squints at the clock. 20 minutes to dinner.

“And what about those fellas that lived with the Muslims, what did they say?” he asks.

I pause.

“Let me tell you a story about the Muslims I met,” I say.

“Alright. Let’s hear it,” He replies and eases back into his chair.

“The Maldives is an archipelago of islands in the Indian ocean. In Dhivehi, the local language, Maldives means necklace of islands. There are over 2000, Grandpa, but I’m going to tell you about just one. Well, two.”

“When I began to research the Maldives a year ago, I heard about Dhuvaafaru – an island in Raa atoll. But the residents of Dhuvaafaru actually come from Kandholhudhoo, an island directly across the atoll from Dhuvaafaru, on the western edge of Raa. Kandholhudhoo was once one of the happiest islands in this region. In the lagoon around the island, fish were so abundant fishermen did not need to travel far for food, they stayed at home and lived happily with their families.”

“That’s nice, honey.” Grandma purrs, folding her hands in her lap.

“I had been living in the capital of Maldives — Male’, for almost 5 weeks. Male’ is one of the most crowded places in the world! Some people even sleep in shifts there, Grandma.”

View of Male' from the Villingili Ferry
(Male' is 2 square miles, 150,000 people)

“They what?” She’s got a look of horror on her face. I wonder if it’s her blank look of unknowing, or if she really understands.

“There’s not enough room to sleep, Grandma. So some people have to take turns.”

She nods.

“So I decide I need to get out, get some perspective, some fresh air, and a break from bustling city life.

“I get a contact for the island councilor of Dhuvaafaru and decide to go visit for a few days. For about a week, I had been waiting for a ferry, calling various captains and checking with the Maldives transport authority, MTCC – all with no luck. Launches were too expensive, and besides, I was eager to see how the average Maldivian traveled.

“Finally, one Monday at 10 p.m., I’m just returning from playing basketball with a group of boys in Villingili when I receive a call from my friend Saffah at Bluepeace, an environmental NGO. There’s a boat leaving for Dhuvaafaru at midnight from the fish market!

“Quickly I do a mental check. Due to the rain I’ve put off doing laundry – but I can do that in the sink. I’ve arranged a few interviews for the next few days – but they can be rescheduled. I haven’t even had a chance to pick up any money from the post office – but I run and ask in the living room, and Sarah and Alexa offer to pitch in. I’ve done no preliminary research. All this, and I go for it.

“I take a shower and head down the stairs with my pack. Outside the wind howls, humidity falls off the palm trees and is whipped into thick, steamy currents. So much for smooth sailing, I think.”

“The boat is slightly delayed, so I don’t arrive in Male’ until 1:30 a.m. Saffah meets me off the ferry at the Villingili terminal with his motorbike and together we drive to the fish market. I wish you could see him, Grandpa. He’s this tiny man with glossy black hair, really curly. And I’m the biggest woman in the country!”

Grandpa chuckles. He gets up from his chair by the phone and slowly shuffles over to sit in the armchair beside me. His eyes are bright, and open wide. He tells me to speak slower and to take a few breaths.

“The fish market is an incredible place. It’s where cargo boats traveling to and from the atolls come to stock up on food stuffs imported into Male’ from outside, in exchange for products from the islands – coconuts, rope, toddy (A coconut tree’s version of maple syrup), dried fish. The ship is large, 1.5 stories. Together we tiptoe down a wooden plank and into the cargo hold.

“‘Make sure to keep your things close,’ Saffah warns. And I nod, I’m so excited and nervous I’m sweating.

“The cargo hold was packed tight with big, bulky duffles, boxes piled up to the ceiling, water tanks, even a motorbike. There’s dates from Jordan. Seedless Grapes from Egypt. Apples and oranges from New Zealand. It smells like bananas in there, and fish.

We climb a small ladder, upwards. It’s dark as we enter the sleeping hold, crawling on all fours in the shallow cabin. The room couldn’t have been more than 3.5 feet tall, filled with some 50-60 people splayed out on the floor. There’s one empty space at the stern, waiting for me near the hatch. I squeeze in and settle next to a sleeping woman, her dark curly hair cast out over her pillow. I say goodbye to Saffah then and settle myself with an arm slung through my pack. Alexa’s given me a sleeping pill. I pop it and try to sleep. It’s going to be a nine-hour journey. When I wake up I will be in Dhuvaafaru.

“But three and a half hours later I awake to someone tapping my foot!

“Light leaks through the open window behind me, and I can barely make out the figure standing on the ladder at my feet. We are moving now, and the waves rock us back and forth. I sit up and bump my head, clinging to the ceiling with one hand. The guy hands me my wallet. And I freeze.

Grandma freezes too.

Opening it, I shuffled through its contents. All that is left are receipts and discount tickets. Just like that! 1500 rufiyya gone. 100 dollars gone. More than 200 dollars! More than I’ve spent in four weeks on food!

“Oh no!” my Grandma exclaims. And I notice silver tears are beginning to form where the corner of her eye meets the rim of her cheek. This is the grandmother who asked my Jamaican roommate if her first language was English. Who said, “I guess they’re pretty intelligent, aren’t they?” when I played her recordings from child soldiers in Northern Uganda two years ago. I bite my lip. But I keep going.

“Remember when I lived in Buenos Aires, “world capital of crime,” for 6 months? 6 months, Grandma! And not a peso stolen. But here I was on a boat headed to an island with no internet, no ATM, and my phone credit was maybe 5 RF – enough for a few texts and maybe a phone call.

“So I begin to explain to Shaheedu – that was his name - what had happened. He was wearing a red shirt, over his shoulders, the words “Rule #137 of College: Don’t remember anything,” and green cargo pants. He was sympathetic, actually, running me through the course of events before disappearing to tell the reef captain my predicament.

“He returns with coffee but little resolution. We step outside where the horizon is flat but for a few islands and these huge dark purple clouds that mushroom from the southeast. The sea was rough.

“I can’t even cry. I’m standing there wondering, How am I going to pay for my passage? How am I going to stay on Dhuvaafaru? But all I can think about is the way the sunlight catches in Shaheedu’s eyelashes. No one else is awake. With nothing else to do but wait, I try and go back to sleep.

“When I get up, the lady who was asleep beside me is awake and gazing out through the sliding window, past the balcony and towards the horizon. Her legs are cocked up beneath her somewhat awkwardly. Since waking she has donned her buruga. It’s lime green, pinching under her chin. She’s wearing a long dress with a blue flower pattern, and teal track pants with purple stripes underneath. Her round cheeks are slightly pockmarked, her eyes tired beneath tinted glasses.

“Kihineh? I say to her.

“What?” asks my Grandfather. His eyes were closed, but he opens them to look at me.

“It means, ‘How are you?’ in Dhivehi,” I tell him.

“She smiles. She’s well, she said, and she returns the question. “Do I speak Dhivehi?

“Kuda Koh,” I say, pinching my fingers like my Grandpa would. “A little bit. A very little bit.”

“Her name was Rugiyya. She was 41 years old, and she was from Dhuvaafaru. She had only just returned to Male’ from India where she’d been for a checkup on her brain tumor. She pulled down her glasses to show me her eyes. The sockets were all swollen.

Grandma’s cheeks are glistening now.

“Talk about perspective. Here I am bemoaning the fact that I have lost all my money and Rugiyya here was battling a terminal illness -- and she’s still smiling!

“Eventually I tell her about what’s happened and I listen as she relays it to a group of old men dozing in the traditional sarong, or mundhus, just kitty corner to us. Soon a crowd has gathered round. There’s a group of women (including two also named Rugiyya), a four-year-old, several 20-something men. The cook even pokes his head up from downstairs.

“‘Don’t touch your wallet,’ Rugiyya eventually says to me after considerable chatter and gesticulating among the group. Others are peering on now, wiping sleep from their eyes. ‘We’ll get the fingerprints at the police station!’

“I don’t want to be rude, but I have to stop myself from giggling. Fingerprints? are you kidding?

“’Is there somewhere I can get some money?’ I asked. Someone I could send money back to? Here on the island?”

“Rugiyya shakes her head slowly, her swollen eyes are deeply troubled. “Noonu” she says, drawing the word out in a long sigh. “Don’t worry. I will take care of you. You can stay in my home,’ she says. “You can call me Mum.”

“It takes us 36 hours to reach Dhuvaafaru.

“The seas were really stormy and we had to stop periodically to wait for better weather. Outside and above the sleeping cabin was a wide deck open to the sky, spanning the whole ship. A group of ten or so young men are sleeping up at the bow, under the shade of the captain’s cabin. We stopped and anchored at Meeru Island resort for breakfast. A few tourists roamed the beach, no doubt miffed by the heavy rain clouds, which had not figured into their vacation plans.

Grandpa chuckles. His eyes are closed again.

“Later we stop for lunch, garu dhia — (it’s traditional fish soup, I say before someone asks – fresh fish which we catch mixed with rice, chili, lime and raw onions). As we eat, a pod of dolphins paraded past us, their dark bodies slipping in and out of the sea with ease. That night we moor in the northern reaches of Male’ atoll, waiting to brave the passage, Kaashidhoo Kuda Kandu in the morning.

“But who took care of you?” asks Grandma.

“That’s the thing. There was this outpouring of kindness from my fellow passengers as we made our way to Dhuvaafaru. Ali, a fisherman from Maakurathu, the island just south of Dhuvaafaru, made it his personal goal to see that I was well fed. He wore a green checked shirt, and his dark beard was cut short, swirling at his jawbone. He didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Dhivehi. But he would come up and tap my foot as I was sleeping, offering water, biscuits, supari – these dried betel nuts.

I think he also made it his personal goal to take me as a wife, but, don’t worry Grandpa,” I say, winking at my Dad. “I told him he wasn’t tall enough.”

“Shaheedu and his friends Ibu, Hassan and Amadey would check up on me periodically. “Do you need anything sister?” they would always ask.

“The ship captain even waived my fare. Finally, Ali – a different one this time, long curly hair dyed with henna – presented me with a handful of small bills assembled by the passengers. They had raised over 1000 rufiya for me!

“1000 Rufiya?” Grandma repeats.

“That’s almost 90 dollars, Grandma! I tried not to accept it but I couldn’t refuse, they were too nice. But by the time we arrive in Dhuvaafaru late Wednesday afternoon, I had so many new friends.

“I can't tell you what a wonderful time I had there. My host family, remember, the lady with the brain tumor, Grandma? My host mom was Rugiyya, her brother Ismail, his wife Anthu, Maama the grandmother, daughters Mayaa and Mahiyaa.

“Mahiyaa ran away from me when she first saw me. I don’t think she’d ever seen a white person. But they all treated me like one of the family. Anthu taught me to make roshi, curry and mashuni. Ismail introduced me to like the whole island. Turns out their family makes up over 1/3 of the population of 4,000! Even Mahiyaa — by the end of the week — she was feeding me food from her fingers.

10 minutes. I can see my Grandfather begin to shift. I speed up a little.

“In the Muslim world there’s a month called Ramadan. You don’t eat or drink during the day, only when it is dark outside. To bring you closer to God, and to give up worldly possessions. Or at least that’s how I understood it.

“Nothing?” asks Grandma. I wonder if she’s thinking of the icecream she gets everyday between 3 and 315.

“Nothing. Sometimes I would sneak water in the bathroom because it was so hot, but only sometimes, because I felt guilty if I did. You wake up early, before sun, around 430. And you have to wait all day until the sun sets and there’s the last call to prayer. When you’re hungry, that’s the most beautiful sound in the world.

Dawn, Dhuvaafaru

“All of my new friends invite me to eat at their houses. So many that I find I can’t keep all of my dates. And they won’t even let me spend the money they gave me on the boat.

I hear my Grandpa laugh and I look down at my Dad. He’s lost in the carpet, his foot grazing the stain my Grandma spends every morning trying to clean even though Anh, who works here, has explained it will never come out.

“And did they try and convert you?”

“They did, Grandpa. They were worried for me. When I told them I didn’t subscribe to one faith, some of them begged me to reconsider. One night I met with a group of sixteen-year-old boys and we had a debate about religion. I told them I didn’t believe in eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And they listened and then they countered. One boy, with a shadow of a moustache and liquid brown eyes, he asked me every question he could think of about other religions, and then he told me: ‘Islam is peace.’

“When the wave came to Kandholhudhoo that day in 2004, he ran to see it, and was almost swept away. Every building was destroyed, Grandma, every building but the mosque. That mosque saved them, Grandpa. Hamza, that was his name, he was known as the lost boy. That night he left us early, to go pray, and he told me he’d bring me a qur’an the following day.”

“A wave?” Grandma asked, face stricken.

“Yes, a wave. In 2004, remember the tsunami in Indonesia, the one we raised money for at basketball games? That hit Maldives too. And it hit Kandolhudhoo the hardest.”

I hear my Grandma gasp, but I continue.

“On my last day, we take a dhoni to Kandholhudhoo. Rugiyya and her brother Ismail want me to see it, and we go with a few friends on this little fishing boat back to the abandoned island.

“Kandholhudhoo was a happy, prosperous island, remember? But they were also very crowded. It got to the point where there were so many people, they had to reclaim the lagoon, fill it in, to make more space for houses. Even then, there were only 150 homes. And 4000 people! Over time the trees vanished to be replaced by tall, concrete buildings. When the children wanted to play soccer, they had to leave and go to a neighboring island.

“As we approach, the island seems to rise out of the sea. In the Maldives there are multiple names for water, to describe the depth, the fish that live there. Here there’s no faru, the electric aquamarine that sparkles in the shallow lagoon of most of these coral islands. Just murky olive-jade.

“When they filled the lagoon, they built a seawall, but it wasn’t enough. The wave pushed right through that barrier and reclaimed the island as it’s own.

“The streets are so narrow on Kandholhudhoo, not even a bicycle can pass through. We have to walk single file, cutting back vines that have replaced the people. The coral walls are crumbled and moldy with age. A palm tree has sprouted in the governor’s office, and the old school is filled with rubbish.

“On the third floor of the school, there are signs, nearly faded, painted on the walls.

Actions speak louder than words.

A hungry man is an angry man.

A closed book is an empty book, just a block of book.

For man, nothing is completed until he dies.

You have to respect others.

Do what u can, with what u have.

The worst man often give the best advice.

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

“Looking out over the abandoned island, I shiver in the heat. Ismail is already descending the stairs. I follow, and we head to the mosque.

View over Kandholhudhoo from the school

“There’s a minaret that floats upwards towards the clouds. Its intricate blue designs are barely discernible, but the half moon perched at its top still glitters as it opens to the sky. The guilded gates are thrown open and there are a few Bangladeshi men praying inside. They’re here to dry the fish. Now that they live across the atoll, men from Kandholhudhoo must leave their homes for up to a week to return to their fishing grounds. They’ve outsourced their labor, and have stopped making traditional fish sauce, rihakaru, in their new western style kitchens. Ismail enters and prays silently with the Bangladeshi men.

It feels inappropriate to take photos, so I stand in silence in front of the building that saved this island.

Bangladeshi men dry fish, Kandholhudhoo

“I’ve brought my microphone with me, too, but I can’t seem to press record. The sound is hollow here, echoing from the past. In the center of the island, wind can’t penetrate the maze of alleyways and the air tastes stale. Not even the vines breathe. Rugiyya leads the way with her pink silk parasol, and she smiles when she looks at me.

Rugiyya, Kandholhudhoo

“We have to break through the undergrowth to reach their house. It’s the first time Rugiyya’s been back in five years. There are gaping holes in the pale blue walls and the wooden stair that leads to the second floor is nearly white from the sun. There’s a mattress splayed out on the floor surrounded by broken glass and a few other items. I watch her pick them up slowly, and wonder what she is thinking. “Our home,” Ismail says, stone-faced, but no more.

Their home, Kandholhudhoo

“There are personal items strewn everywhere in this wasteland. Three-legged plastic chairs, stained curtains, refrigerators, plastic toy cars. It’s said that people kept their money in their houses. When the wave came, it was all washed away.

We begin to push our ways through the vines to leave, and tucked into a hole in the wall, there’s roll of paper, maybe a letter. Somehow it’s escaped the monsoon, and it’s in delicate Dhivehi script, pitch black on white paper. I wonder who wrote it, who it’s for, and what it says.

“And there scrawled on an old store near where we left the boat, TSUNAMI screams out in capital letters. Sometimes the words you can’t speak? They say the most.

Grandma whimpers.

“Some thought it was the end of the world. That God had sent a curse. But when it came time to evacuate, many didn’t want to leave.

“So what happened to them?” asks Grandma, her eyebrows pinned to her forehead in concern.

“They lived in tents for five years, scattered over five islands in the atoll, waiting for a new life, on a new island. They couldn’t go back to Kandolhudhoo.

“But why Dhuvaa… Duvaaa…?”

“Dhuvaafaru? Supposedly it means running reef. But I’m not entirely sure, Grandpa. It’s a bigger island, for one, and slightly higher elevation. But I like to think it’s fate. They say the residents of Kandolhudhoo actually emigrated from Dhuvaafaru many years ago. In Maldives legend, one of their heroes, Dandahelu, comes from Dhuvaafaru.

There are ruins close to where I lived. Fluted and dovetailed they rise through the greenery, held together without hammer or peg. No one knows anything about them. But this hero, he helped save Maldives, Grandpa. Saved them from the Portuguese who wanted to change their way of life. He was only a young boy. If history repeats itself, maybe it will be Hamza, or Mahiyaa who rises up to save Maldives from new threats.

My Grandpa smiles. On the floor I can see my Dad staring blankly and his glasses flash liquid.

“Rugiyya is tired when we return home. Here eyes are more swollen, clouded, and she walks as though she might be in pain. Even though we’ve been in the shade, the sun seems to find us, teasing energy from our bones.

“But I’m leaving that night, and she wants to take me to her uncle’s to break the fast. On the soccer pitch boys zig zag back and forth, and their skin turns pink in the failing light.

Football and Clouds, Dhuvaafaru

“The sky is enormous there, Grandpa. I can’t get over it. Huge fluffy clouds scud across an expanse of blue so large, I think I have never seen the world before. I am keenly aware of how small we are. In a country pinned flat to the horizon, the clouds form the topography. One’s shadow can engulf and entire island for hours, or mere seconds. But it’s not only their magnitude and great volume, their fluffiness, that throws me. It’s their reach. The way these clouds fall back towards an indecipherable horizon.

“If there is a God, I think he lives in one of these clouds.”

My Grandma giggles, her cheeks are shining.

“Time for dinner,” my Grandpa says, breaking the silence. He gets up and hobbles over to his walker. “You ready, Jean?”

I watch her comb her hair, dry her eyes and apply her red lipstick.

We begin to make our way down the hall, past the paintings that my Grandmother uses as guides. But I continue speaking.

“In those last few minutes before the sun set, Rugiyaa took me to the north beach and we walked through white sand so fine it clung to my toes like powder. We didn’t speak much, because we couldn’t. But we pointed, and gestured, and took in that sunset together.

When we rounded the point and turned back to face the stands of palm trees, I stopped. I sensed the moment was ending. My departure was reaching out in long, slippery shadows.

“’What do you think, Rugiyaa?” I asked. ‘I’m not a Muslim. But is that okay? Can we still be friends?’”

She smiled, breathing exhaustion from her lips. “You are my daughter, and I am your Mum.”

She reached up to touch her neck, tracing the folds of her veil, before reaching to my shoulder. “I am human. You are human.”

I hugged her then, and she staggered back for a moment, and I worried that I’d been disrespectful. But then I felt her fingers on my spine, and could hear the tears welling in our eyes.

The call to prayer sounded, and we left the sunset and entered the trees.”

Rugiyya, Anthu, Mahiyaa, Maama, Me, Dhuvaafaru

“Looks like Joan of Arc is going to let us in,” my Grandma says, glancing at the portrait of a woman dressed in white robes beckoning beside the elevator. The doors open, and I think the moment is over.

“I am human, you are human.” My Grandpa repeats, moving his walker over the metal grate. He’s smiling and I can see his mind whirring. I wonder how many people he’ll tell this story to at dinner.

My Grandma wafts in like a black moth behind him, humming the Mexican hat dance.

“I hope you will write this down, Aylie,” my Grandma says as we reach the first floor. “You know my mother never let me keep a diary. Her brothers got into hers, see. I’ve always regretted it.”

“Wow Grandma. I'm sorry that happened. I’ll be sure to do that.”

“So you won’t forget.”

“I promise, Grandma. I won’t forget.”

We left them sitting there, lifting their forks in a dining room that my grandmother likens to the belly of a cruise ship. My Dad wrapped his arm around my shoulder as we parted and my tears returned. He chuckled.

I cried for the scars that will heal and the lessons that will remain. I cried for my family, for the people I had met, whom I will meet. I cried for myself and this person I have become.

Nothing had changed and everything had changed. I cried and my Dad laughed, but this time I didn’t seem to mind.

Sailing with family and friends, Dad background

Uncomfortable

2010-08-23T06:54:00.000-07:00

The night of the World Cup Final, I biked down to Arrecife’s main beach, where they had erected a big screen to view the game. The atmosphere was electric. It was lowtide and spectators were scattered between the tide pools out to the low water mark. A pulsing hush descended over the crowd in the first overtime while red flags floated lethargically, almost mockingly in their ambivalence, in the wind. I whipped out my recorder – great moment to get on tape!
When Iniesta scored the goal in the final minutes, the beach erupted. Cold Play’s Vida thumped from the stage. I jumped and screamed along with everyone around me…and my recorder plunged into a tide pool. There was a split second of remorse – the little bugger recorded nearly 600 recordings this year. It had documented, witnessed even, a year of my life. I picked it up and the screen blinked a few times before going blank. And then I realized – Some things are meant to be lived. Not recorded. I smiled and continued dancing. My arms had goose bumps, and I spun glossy-eyed as spectators began to race into the sea.

It’s a struggle I’m familiar with. An inner battle I’ve waged this entire year. Many of my favorite memories and moments went unrecorded – some by chance, others with intention. I worried at times that the recorder was somehow screening the interactions I was having with people – that in recording I was stilting the relationship between me and the person with whom I was talking. Often I wanted to establish a trust with the person I was interviewing, particularly if they had something sensitive to say. And then sometimes if I was recording I felt like I was exploiting our friendship, our relationship.

There were days and interviews when all this seemed silly – a palm-sized recorder doesn’t bother anyone – in fact many people are honored to be listened to, to have their thoughts valued. Occasionally I regret not having recorded conversations. I keep them with me, rays of memories that float in and out of consciousness in flashes, moments seen through rose-colored glass. But the sound is muted, hollow. I wish I could have recorded Susan’s deep belly laugh, the fortune a friend told me one night on the floor of an apartment in Maldives, the way Jeannette described the funeral of her father – when the rain stopped and the sun emerged to let him go in peace, the tension that crossed the deck when we first heard the tsunami warning on the canoe, Ginés’ poem, Día.

There were other times that I worried I wasn’t recording enough. As I moved from one place to another I often thought about what I was missing. I felt as though I was only skimming the surface, the superficie. In the first few weeks in a new place, I would write frantically in my journal at night, plumbing my senses to describe what I had experienced.

I come home with no answers, no formulas, or prescriptions. I hope I never lose this ambivalence towards recording, this connection to humanity. Journalism and documentary often suppress emotion - employing a "get-in-get-out" philosophy that strips stories of their potentially emotional under layer. Last week I had a great conversation with a new friend about the importance of "remaining uncomfortable." I hope I never have an answer, that I remain perplexed, uncomfortable through this life journey.

Taking flight - overlooking Alegranza, Canaries

But if I have learned one thing, it's the importance of telling my own story.

Initially I tried to assimilate myself to the interview, shedding my personality and biases, to remain neutral and open to new ideas, even if they lay contrary to my own. Was it possible to be objective? Could I separate myself from the voices I was hearing?

“Good luck to those who can keep their distance from the howl, the yell of things.” William Carlos Williams

I ultimately realized that I can be culturally sensitive to any situation, but it is impossible to be objective in documentary work, in storytelling. My mind and my experience are shaped as much by my mother tongue as they are by the craggy coastline of Maine, the trials and triumphs of my ancestors. Each consecutive moment informs my future reactions. Who I am also affects the interviews I conduct. I am me, and that, I have come to realize, is important to recognize in my journey, in my writing. The singularity of experience is a wonderful thing, and to deny this fact is false and an injustice to those I am interacting with.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my favorite question to ask in an interview is "Who are you?" So I suppose it’s time to pose the question to myself: Who am I?

(silence, rambling, steadying gaze):

I am a young woman who believes in the power of listening, who believes in humanity, that every person has a story to tell, something to teach us. That history is best told from the horse’s mouth. That it is stories, our history, that drives us forward, that helps us to maintain our identity in a sea of change. I am optimistic. Someone who believes in confronting one’s fears, in stepping into someone else’s shoes, who draws energy from the sea, who believes in the power of the "uncomfortable," and who is ready for the journey ahead.

Champlain Sounding

2010-08-22T07:23:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine from Middlebury just began her own year of exploration with a Compton Mentor Fellowship. Angela Evancie is creating multimedia portraits out of the Champlain Valley in Vermont and she's created a site to host her work, called Champlain Sounding. Her most recent postings center around "Greening the Afterlife," probing the question: "So what’s the best way to return to the earth, to green the afterlife? And who is partaking?" Check out the way she combines stunning photography with poignant audio!

"Champlain Sounding is a conversation about this thing - this movement, this trend, this religion, this burden - called environmentalism. Everyone has something to say, but certain voices often get drowned out.

These multimedia portraits, created in the Champlain Valley, bring such voices to the fore."

La Copa

2010-08-21T06:33:00.000-07:00

Yo he llevado una copa
de una isla a otra isla sin despertar el agua
si la vertía, una sed traicionaba;
por una gota, el don era coduco,
perdida toda, el dueño lloraría

No saludé las ciudades,
no deje elugio a su vuelo de torres,
no abrí los braos en la gran Piramide
ni fundí casa con corro de hijos

Pero entregando la copa, yo dije
con el sol nuevo sobre mi garganta:
"Mis brazos ya son libres como nubes sin dueño
y se mece mi cuello en la colina
de la invitación de las valles."

Mentira fue mi aleluya; vedme
Y tengo la vista caída a mis palmas;
camino lenta, sin diamante de agua;
callada voy, y no llevo tesoro,
y me tumba en el pucho y los pulsos
la sangre batida de angustia y de miedo.

The Glass:
I have carried a glass
from island to island without waking the water.
If it spilled, it betrayed a thirst,
for one drop, the gift was decrepit:
everything lost, the owner would cry.

I did not salute the cities;
I did not say a eulogy to the towers' flight,
I did not open my arms in the great Pyramid
nor establish a home with a circle of kids

But handing over the cup, I said
with the new sun on my throat
"My arms are already free like ownerless clouds
and my neck is dangled on the hill
at the invitation of the valleys."

My hallelujah was a lie. Look at me.
I have the view fallen into my palm;
a slow road without a diamond of water;
and, blood pumping in breast,
I pulse with anguish and a fear, I collapse!

-Gabriela Mistral, Chile

I love this poem, so sad, yet so beautiful. Hay que aprovechar!

Mau Piailug

2010-08-19T07:45:00.000-07:00

Pius Mau Piailug, master navigator, died on July 12th, aged 78

A friend passed me this obituary and I wanted to post it here.

"IN THE spring of 1976 Mau Piailug offered to sail a boat from Hawaii to Tahiti. The expedition, covering 2,500 miles, was organised by the Polynesian Voyaging Society to see if ancient seafarers could have gone that way, through open ocean. The boat was beautiful, a double-hulled canoe named Hokule’a, or “Star of Gladness” (Arcturus to Western science). But there was no one to captain her. At that time, Mau was the only man who knew the ancient Polynesian art of sailing by the stars, the feel of the wind and the look of the sea. So he stepped forward."

I was very lucky to have the opportunity to join Sesario, Mau's son, on a journey from Palau to Ngulu back in February, on the Alingano Maisu. The canoe we sailed was given to Mau by the Hawaiians in gratitude for re-teaching them traditional navigation skills after these skills had disappeared from cultural memory.

In Mau's historic voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976, Sesario was on board, at only six years old. A few years ago, Mau elected Sesario to continue teaching these skills in Micronesia at the helm of Alingano Maisu, which means the "beautification of fallen breadfruit." In his passing, his spirit lives on through his children, his disciples and his students. To read more about Mau and the incredible life he led - read this article in the Economist.

http://www.economist.com/node/16635898?story_id=16635898

Sesario, 2010

To check out the Voyaging Society, visit the 2009-2010 Traditional Navigation and Sailing web site

The Maldives' Obama deserves our support

2010-08-09T20:47:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to meet and interview the president of the Maldives, Anni Nasheed, briefly on my last night in Maldives. His earnestness and his love for his country made me believe in politics after years of being jaded. Let us help him continue his steps forward to help his island nation!! Read this opinion essay by Farahanaz Fazal:

Mohamed Nasheed has gained fame through his efforts to raise awareness of climate change. Photograph: Chiara Goia

When Mohamed Nasheed was elected president of the Maldives in late 2008, ending Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's 30 years of rule, he brought into office the hopes and aspirations of the Maldives' 350,000 people.

The new, British-educated president started well, releasing journalists and prisoners of conscience incarcerated by the former regime, closing down a notorious jail where dissidents were held and tortured and forgoing the opulence of Gayoom's palaces and Mercedes, choosing instead to live in a modest bungalow and walk to work.

The freedoms ordinary Maldivians now enjoy – to criticise, to demonstrate, to join a political party – were unthinkable a few years ago. Since the Nasheed administration took over, Freedom House has promoted the Maldives from a "not free" to a "partially free" country. The country has shot up Reporters Without Borders' global press freedom index. In May, the Maldives received the highest number of votes in any UN election to win a seat on the human rights council.

The president is most famous for his efforts to combat climate change, winning a clutch of environmental awards during his short term in office. But "Asia's Obama", as the press often refer to him, has also been recognised for his human rights work. Last year he was awarded Sweden's prestigious Anna Lindh prize for improving rights and freedoms in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation.

Like Obama, though, not everything has gone Nasheed's way. He has run into trouble attempting to dismantle the corrupt political and business network that kept Gayoom and his family in power and opulence.

Gayoom maintained his iron grip through an extensive system of political patronage. If you fell ill, grew old or wanted your child educated abroad, impoverished Maldivians, who make up the bulk of the population, were forced to beg from the regime. This system kept the people in check, while affording the elite the opportunity to skim hundreds of millions of dollars from the system.

President Nasheed has started to break up the patronage system and free people to lead independent lives. He has introduced a state pension, universal health insurance and a public transport network to connect the country's disparate island communities. But the president has run into trouble as he tries to stamp out corruption, cronyism and criminality.

Powerful businessmen, which include members of Gayoom's family and former cabinet, have used their wealth and influence to win seats in parliament and are fighting hard to block Nasheed's anti-corruption drive and his attempts to privatise rotten state companies.

Three weeks ago, leaked telephone recording in the Maldivian press exposed a cash-for-votes racket in parliament that dwarfs British MPs' expenses scandals. The Maldives police are investigating Gayoom's half-brother, Abdulla Yameen, and the former president's finance minister, Gasim Ibrahim, for allegedly paying fellow MPs hundreds of thousands of dollars to veto the president's economic policies. Two other MPs, including an MP from the ruling party, are being investigated for allegedly bribing a civil court judge with bundles of cash and airline tickets.

The MPs are fighting hard to present themselves as victims of an unjust attack and have hired a London-based public relations firm to do their bidding. Last week, Ibrahim's lawyer, Hassan Saeed (who as Gayoom's attorney general often defended the dictatorship's democracy crackdowns, including a 2004 state of emergency when 200 activists were detained) attacked President Nasheed on Comment is free for becoming "autocratic" and harassing innocent lawmakers.

The international community has welcomed President Nasheed's efforts to raise awareness over the dangers of climate change, which threaten to submerge his low-lying nation. That same international community must not sit back and watch as the remnants of dictatorship try and sink the Maldives' fledgling democracy.I

If you want to help spread awareness about the Maldives, and some of the issues they are facing, think about bringing this exhibit to your hometown. Email me and I'll help generate funding and support!

Vulnerable

http://www.bluepeacemaldives.org/vulnerable/index.html

Stories that speak from the past

2010-08-09T20:26:00.000-07:00

Just back from an emotionally charged weekend in Swarthmore, the Watson Returner's conference. Met 40 of the most inspiring people I have ever met. I had flashes of feeling that with the future in their hands, all is right in the world. All that I thought I knew has been questioned. I am writing a lot, but nothing coherent. Hopefully will post soon.

I returned home to Maine drained, but so full of energy and purpose, if without direction. I was cleaning through some books and found this letter, from my Grandpa Snuff, who died last spring. He sent it to me the week I started college. The last time I saw him was at the Edinburgh book festival in August 2006. He's one of my heroes. This year brought me closer to new people but also to old. I found myself writing about my family to keep them close at hand in their material absence.

This really spoke to me, I hope it does to you.

September 1, 2005.

My dear Aylie,

What a wonderful time you must be having.

New friends, new lecturers, and new subjects. We are living in an old cottage in the village of Letham which is one mile to the east of West Mains. The old home is: Lownie of Dunnichen. In order to preserve the name we have called the cottage L. of D.

I have 5 volumes of a work called the History of Angus or Forfarshire published in 1882. In the depths of Volume III I found: -

The place Lownie (our old house) was occupied by man called Auchter Lownie between 1226 - 1239. or Ochterlong.

This is terribly old, about 250 years before the discovery of America.

What does Lownie mean?

There are at least seven adjectives derived from Lown - the lown side of a hill where lown means sheltered. As you read the following adjectives cast your mind back to what you remember of the old homestead.

Here goes: -
Lown adj.
1. Calm and serene (or it could be severe, I can't read it)
2. Tranquil, unagitated
3. Sheltered
4. Silent
5. Quiet
6. soft, gentle, low
7. secret

In the old house we were sheltered from the north, and the house faced south.

Granny and I have fitted into our 1851 cottage like a pair of hermit crabs. I have the largest room for my books and bones, not forgetting my Elephant skull.

Your Mum tells me that you are studying Economics and Middle East studies. Are you doing English literature as well?

I am enclosing the cover notes of the dictionary. Our new address is

Lownie of Dunnichen
8 West Hemming Street
Letham, Angus,
Scotland.

Lots of love from,
Granny and Grandpa.

Who are you? Jorge Toledo

2010-08-04T14:12:00.001-07:00

My favorite question to ask someone in an interview is “Who are you?”

Sometimes I have to repeat the question. Occasionally the person rambles (Who am I? they ask. Now that’s a question. But how can I answer that? How should I know?...Who am I?). Other times he or she might sit quiet for what seems like forever, eyes flicking about the room, searching, grasping. The silence hangs, but I steady my gaze. And I wait.

And then it happens. The silence breaks and rippling out through the space between us – sometimes as a whisper, other times as a declaration — something is born. People begin to reflect upon who they are, what they stand for, what they believe in, who they want to be.

In one of my final interviews this last week, I asked the question to Jorge Toledo. “Es el pregunton!” he told me, chuckling. “It’s the big question, the question.”

Jorge is from the tiny island of Graciosa just north of Lanzarote. He was born into a family of timple (say Tim – play) players. The timple is a tiny string instrument, cousin to the ukelele and cavaquinho.

I interviewed him on day 365 of my journey. When I met him around 5 p.m., the sun glowed silver through the low clouds, and the vendors just packing up their skirts and beads to wheel their carts to tents on the beach. People were starting to move through the streets, lured by the cooler breezes of early evening and the smell of tapas wafting from restaurant kitchens.

We were sitting in the small plaza in front of the house where he was born. Today it’s paved with concrete, and sunny tables from the portside cafes revolve around a spiny cactus. But when he was born, the plazita was used to dry salted fish brought back by Graciosa’s marineros from Marutania and the Spanish Sahara. When they were dry, women would cross the bay and climb the Cliffs of Famara, children in their arms, 25 kilo baskets on their heads, to sell the fish in the small towns of Haria and Ye of Lanzarote in exchange for basic foodstuffs. At that time Graciosa was extremely poor. Graciosa receives very little rain per annum and months can pass without a drop from the clouds. The soil does not support large-scale agriculture; fishing was a way of life. I was told the women used to scale the cliffs barefoot – a forty-minute climb – and only when they had arrived in the outskirts of Haria would they slip into their shoes. To save face, one man told me.

Jorge’s first memory is sitting barefoot outside his front door, inhaling the smell of earth bathed with rain. A rainbow fell into the bay that morning, and he rain after it in hopes to pin it down. I thought I could catch it! he told me. “Agua fue sagrado,” “water was sacred then,” he explained. He remembers his grandmother stooping down to peel water from the puddles, smoothly and carefully so as not to disturb the earth. “We bathed once a week, and washed our dishes in the sea.”

Graciosa was an island of marineros. The older generation used to wear loose blue slacks and tunics. On the fishing boats that traced the African Sahara gracioseros were known as “los italianos.” When there was no wind, the sailors stayed at home and there were dances. Music rang through the streets, notes jostling along the sandy passageways to disapate over the sea. Jorge learned to play the timple on a piece of carboard, strumming the corrugated fiber until his fingers felt the music. Like his father and his grandfather before him, Jorge joined the fishing industry, but he always carried his timple with him.

These days the fishing industry lies buried beneath slabs of concrete, but if you stop and chat with one of the older men who stroll the boardwalks at sunset, you’ll hear stories upon stories. I met Don Pepe and Jose one evening and after chatting for over an hour, the following day they invited me to La Peña de Amistad, a group of old friends who meet every day during the summer months to cook lunch and play cards in a club house.

Jorge misses the musical traditions of his youth, when people gathered in the plaza to play at dusk, when there was spontaneity to music, constancy, like a heartbeat. He’s started teaching classes to the younger generation, and slowly this tradition is returning. One night I joined some friends with a few plates of tapas and a bottle of sweet local wine and Jorge played and we sang into the very early morning.

So Who is Jorge? Listen in! I did very little editing on this piece – let it unroll in real time so you can hear him thinking. It’s a bit noisy, in the central plaza, but I think it gives a feel of what Graciosa is like, the community there. If you listen until the end you can hear Jorge play along with Gabriela, one of his students, 6 years old and a big fan of Hannah Montana.

Here’s the translation:

Jorge Toledo Quien Soy.mp3

And one more question, let's see, who are you?

Me? Who am I? I don't know. I'm Jorge. And what else? I'm Jorge.

A musician?

Musician, no. I don't like that word. I'm more than that. Who am I? I'm a friend. I'm a person. (Professor, see you tomorrow! passerby) I can't define myself simply, I don't know. Someone that likes...that likes....love, music, fiesta, synchronization, simplicity. Someone who doesn't make conflict, who avoids conflict at all costs. It's easy. Never cause friction. We have all of this! I'm not a philosopher... I'm a person. I'm a human. It's important question for the mind. Who are you? Who are you?

Last Call

2010-08-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

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A few final photos, final posts up shortly!

La Virgen de La Regla

2010-07-07T16:58:00.001-07:00

This past Friday in the tiny town of Tinajo residents gathered before sundown in a procession to honor La Señora de la Regla.

Maite, whose grandmother is from Cuchillo, a hamlet of Tinajo, plays saxophone in the band and Xavi and I went to join the festivities. Nuestra Señora de la Regla (which translates both as “rule,” and menstruation) belongs to the ermita, or tiny church, in La Vegueta. The church is situated high above a valley that spills out away from the volcanoes and down to the sea. Fields of volcanic soil are cultivated for grapes and other crops here, in an agricultural system unique to Lanzarote. Walls of stone are fashioned in half circles to protect crops from strong winds, and the volcanic soil traps moisture that falls at night to sustain plant growth in the desert environment.

The virgin Regla is uncharacteristically dark-skinned, and she is said to have been brought back to Tinajo by a Lanzaroteño who immigrated to Cuba in the 17th century. Supposedly he acquired La Regla from some Franciscan monks as a display of thanks for the fortune he amassed while in Cuba. Other sources indicate that the locals in La Vegueta were fishing when the image of the Virgin Regla appeared at the water’s edge.

Summer in Lanzarote means many a saint, patrona, and virgin has a turn around the plaza. On Saturday night I attended another festival in Femes, where Esther and her theater group, Somos, performed for the village.

This is an audio slideshow I made about the event, enjoy!

Recently I've been biking around the island on a bike a friend of the family lent me and learning salsa with Maite and Xavi (dancers and salsa instructors). Tomorrow I hope to go see Jorge and his singing group in Teguise! Also, soaking up world cup fever - Vamos España! Making history – first time to world cup finals!!!

Viva

2010-07-06T02:24:00.000-07:00

Time is flying by! 12 more days and I’ll have been gone an entire year.

In some ways I feel like my Watson experience has been out of time sequence. The 4th of July passed without my realizing it, tucked away writing in a tiny café in the old capital of Teguise where I ended up staying for several hours sipping a mojito and chatting with the Brazilian/Cuban band, a tarot-reading yoga instructor and a girl from Armenia. There was the waiter with long blond ringlets and a silk handkerchief around his neck, who reached out to grab my chin when I lifted my head from my writing to order a coffee. And the old man, his hairless head covered with red scabs, too stiff to join in the retinue of wispy, tambourine-playing hippies that swarmed the microphone, but strong enough to turn in circles and pump his fists, eyes smiling.

“Notaste todo?” (Did you get everything?) yelled the base player as I unlocked my bicycle to head home. “Casi” (Almost!) I replied, laughing. He blew me a kiss, and I let it chase me down the sun-bleached streets with their stern stone archways and tiny wooden doorways, to evaporate into the desert and the blue, blue sky. Hobbling down Calle Zonzamos (the last majo king), was the old man, fists still swinging.

I felt so full then, but also somehow sad.

So many times this year tiny worlds have cropped up in my journey, pitched like circus tents in a roadside bazaar, each unique and to be savored, however fleeting the moment. Yet inevitably they are disassembled and scattered, moments that are never to be recreated in the same manner, or under the same circumstances.

Last week I attended the opening of the documentary, Holidays, about the rise of tourism in Lanzarote. The screening was in la Cueva de los Verdes, deep in the labyrinth of an old volcano, in an auditorium in one of the larger caverns. The film, as well as the venue, were fabulous. The film was narrationless - incorporating tourist home videos, archived footage from historic Lanzarote, including environmental protests and Cesar Manrique’s public manifestos.

I arrived early to walk around a bit. In the south this landscape is called Malpais, which literally translates to the badlands. Writhing lava courses in streams to the sea, frozen over the landscape in twisting limbs. Bright red mosses and cactus with yellow flowers settle into the folds. Wind sweeps down the volcanoes and out towards the sea.

Outside the Cueva I meet Viva – a security guard from the Spanish Sahara, who moved here after Spain turned the coast over to Morocco. His name is Mohammed he told me, but here everyone calls him Viva, like “Viva el amor, viva la revolución.” In his hand he clutched a smooth stone – black with flecks of orange. When I asked him about it he handed it to me, folding it into my palm. “This comes from the Sahara. Squeeze it and it gives you energy. Three days I can stand in one place no problem with this piedra.” I watched him flex his fist, his veins rippling up past his elbow. “Wow,” I said, impressed.” “Not Wow! It’s true!” We talked for nearly an hour. True to his name, Viva was full of teachings about life. A devout Muslim and Aikido enthusiast, he told me about his travels as a mariner from his homeland in the Sahara and up to Europe. When I left to enter the auditorium, he handed me a book - El Arte de La Paz, by Morihei Ueshiba (Fundador del Aikido). “Remember: A Word can give life,” he told me, “a word can kill. Read this and learn.” “How will I return it to you?” I asked.

“If Allah desires, we will meet again.” And I left him there, descending into the volcano with the image of his red tie curling in the wind.

One of my favorite of Ueshiba's teachings, that makes me think of Viva: "La vida es crecimiento. Si detenemos crecimiento, técnica y espiritualmente, somos tan útiles como cádaveres. El Arte de la Paz es la celebración del enlace del cielo, la tierra, y la humanidad. Es todo lo verdadero, lo bueno y lo bello." Thank you Viva!

Yesterday I met Jorge Reyes Duchemin at the port of Arrecife. I found him leaning on a railing counting ripples in the bay. “Any fish?” I asked. “Pescados?” he boomed, opening his palm to answer, “por aqui, por allá” (here and there). His face was dark with years of sunlight, and hairline wrinkles spread like rays from his lips. “Are you from here?” I asked. “Si, nací aquí, por allá,” he swept his hand away from me now all the while nodding proudly. “August 3, 1912. I’m 98 years old.” He pulled out his wallet to show me then. The leather was black and thin with age. He handed me the license and I nodded, smiling. Two photos slipped out – matchbox sized and creased as though they had been examined many times. “Me when I was in the army, when the grandfather of the King fled to Italy,” he explained. There were a group of them, playing cards below the Sierre de Guadarrama, in central Spain.

I sat down with Don Reyes then, in front of his home, over looking the bay. “I remember everything,” he told me, “from the day I was born. I remember the bed I was born in.” (It was a collapsible bed).

He told me about his mother’s mother who had married a Frenchman named Duchemin who had arrived to Lanzarote escaping from the tumults of French revolution. His life as a marinero “en la mar” (not el mar, which is masculine, but la mar, feminine). There was no boardwalk when he was born, water ran right up to his doorstep. The houses were few, and there was a mill on the corner. People fished to eat, then.

Once he was out at sea off the coast of Morrocco when another ship was shipwrecked. “We were playing cards and it was nine o’clock in the evening when we began to hear sounds. The cook turned to me and he asked me if I heard them.” I opened the little door and listened to the wind, the moans sounded as though they were not from this world.” Sure enough a boat had been shipwrecked on the bottom. The next morning they found seven of them, clinging to driftwood, their skin as blue as the shorts I was wearing. One of them had a watch, the hour hand frozen at the time of the shipwreck.

I left as the church bells sighed 6:00 across the bay. “Thank you,” I said. May we meet again! “You come whenever you like, señorita. I remember everything.”

It’s the spontaneity, these small, scattered moments of intimacy that I will miss most when I return home. I am always sad to leave these worlds that I encounter, but I also know there are more to discover, more people to meet and paths to cross.

So: these next few weeks: Voy a aprovechar (take advantage of life; carpe diem).

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In Passing

2010-07-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

Photos from the end of Chiloe, a weekend in Valparaiso to visit Sophie, my Chilean cousin!, with Mai Ann, and a wonderful stop in Buenos Aires to visit old friends.

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Lanzarote: Island of Fire, Water, Air, and Rabbits

2010-06-24T12:52:00.000-07:00

Photo from Haría, el pueblo de diez mil palmeras (10,000 palms)
On Monday I arrived at my last port of call – Lanzarote, just in time to catch España take Honduras in a portside bar in the capital of Arrecife. That night the white-washed city was alive with horns and singing and flying banderas.

Earlier this year Salomé Gonzalez wrote me to ask about what I would do while in Lanzarote, and when I wrote her back in search of contacts she invited me to her home! Tuesday morning I called up Esther Gonzalez, her mother, and lugged my bags to Playa Honda, where I’ll stay until I get settled. In the last two days I’ve received an incredibly warm welcome!

Last night was El Noche de San Juan, and I joined Salomé's brother Xavier and his girlfriend Maite to attend a party on the coast of Teguise. We barbecued and danced salsa and bachata until the moon vanished and light began to leak through the clouds. In tradition, everyone wore white, and gathered round a hoguera, or bonfire, to celebrate. At midnight, people swam in the sea to rinse away any bitterness or sorrows!

Lanzarote may be the last leg of my solo sojourn, but in many ways I feel like I’m coming full circle. I’ve come to believe that stories don’t have beginnings or ends – but fall in chains, waves, and circles, propped up by history and legend.

In highschool, one of my favorite history teachers used to tease me that I was the only student whose mother had immigrated on her own vessel to the United States. After they were married in Scotland, my parents sailed through the Mediterranean before crossing the Atlantic and making their way up Central America and the Caribbean to settle in Maine. Before the transatlantic, they cast off from the Canaries, a chain of volcanic islands west of North Africa.

In Greek mythology the Canaries were thought to be the Hesperides, or Fortunate Isles, where the goddess Hera kept an orchard of golden apples that when eaten, promised immortality.

Lanzarote is the Eastern-most island of the Canaries. Before the Genoese sailor, Lanceloto Malocello, arrived in 1312, the people of Lanzarote were mainly of Berber descent. Known as mahos, they arrived from North Africa’s Maghrib around 500 AC.

The island was called: Tetergaget, meaning “la que está quemada” (that which is burned), or “Montaña Colorada” (Colored Mountain). Its an extreme landscape - dark, volcanic sands, ashy peaks, and crystal blue sky.

The indigenous population dwindled after the arrival of Europeans – many taken away as slaves. Today, the conejeros (coming from Rabbit, the name for people from Lanzarote) have Spanish and indigenous roots.

These days the Canaries are a popular European tourist destination, their coasts laced with strings of hotels and picnic umbrellas. Lanzarote, however, stands apart from its siblings. Among other influences, this is largely do to the work of one painter, sculptor, artist, architect, ecologist, urban planer - Cesar Manrique.

(Photo from Cesar Manrique's home)

Born in Arrecife in 1919, Manrique visited New York in the 1960s, where he stayed with a Cuban painter on the Lower East side. In a letter to a friend back home, Pepe Dámaso, he wrote:

"…more than ever I feel true nostalgia for the real meaning of things. For the pureness of the people. For the bareness of my landscape, and for my friends… My last conclusion is that MAN in N.Y. is like a rat. Man was not created for this artificiality. There is an imperative need to go back to the soil. Feel it, smell it. That's what I feel." (cesarmanrique.com)

He returned to Lanzarote with a desire to protect that which was beautiful.

Lanzarote has a history of being ahead of the curve. In 1965, the island opened the first desalination plant in all of Europe. Today, largely due to Manrique, nearly all of the buildings are painted white – as were the traditional dwellings (to reflect the sun and keep the buildings cool).

There are few skyscrapers, and much of the architecture draws on natural elements – the folds of lava from the 1730s volcano eruption, the natural acoustics of la Cueva Verde, where early inhabitants used to hide from rogue Berber and british pirates (Walter Raleigh attacked Arrecife in 1617 in his search for gold).

After Manrique’s death in a tragic car accident in 1992, his legacy continued. In 1993, Lanzarote established a Bisophere Reserve over 42 % of the island with UNESCO.

I’m here for a short time, but I hope to investigate and conduct interviews to see if that spirit preservation and change still exists – how it has changed, and how Lanzarote and los conejeros continue to evolve.

Donate! Juan Fernandez Islands Tsunami Relief

2010-05-13T11:58:00.000-07:00

The Juan Fernandez Islands was badly hit by the tsunami on February 27, 2010. I was planning to visit the Juan Fernandez Islands this year, but will hope to return at a later date due to the immediacy of the tragedy and the lack of infrastructure on the island. The recovery will be a long one, and any support is appreciated!

http://www.oikonos.org/donate.htm

"It has now been nearly two months since the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami struck Chile. On Robinson Crusoe Island, the coastal zone of the island’s single town was simply erased by the tsunami. Tragically, 16 people lost their life in the disaster. Given that much of the town’s infrastructure was located along the coastal fringe of the bay, the community has suffered significant losses, including to the artisanal fishery that is the driver of the local economy. Thankfully, the small seasonal fishing community out on Alejandro Selkirk Island, 180 km west of Robinson Crusoe, was not impacted. Clean-up efforts are ongoing on Robinson. To facilitate these efforts, Oikonos has hired five island residents to work full-time on cleaning up the coastal zone."

Don Chima

2010-05-13T11:27:00.000-07:00

On May 3, Don Chima turned 90 years old.

Sunday he and his wife Emilia invited me over for birthday cake – a torta de ciruelas brought by his daughters from the city. Emilia emerged from the pantry with thick slices laced with dulce de leche and whipped cream.

The sky has darkened these last few weeks, and the ortencia that line the pathway to their home – deep blue in the summer months – are beginning to take on a metallic green-red sheen. In the kitchen, we sat on benches around the estufa (stove), and chatted about family, the years passed. As we spoke, a white cat pressed up against the kitchen window, framed by the apple orchard behind. El gatito blanco is the newest addition to the troop of some dozen felines that stalk the pampas around their home. “So many people have left, we try and take care of them,” explained Dona Emilia.

Eliecer Bahamonde, known affectionately as Don Chima, was born in 1920, just up the hill from where he lives now. The school in Calen was smaller then, and all of the students walked to school barefoot except for the wealthy boy who lived on the beachside. At 14 Don Chima finished primary, and at 20, like many Chilotes of his generation, he headed south to Patagonia, with hopes to earn some money and start a family.

When his mother heard that her son was leaving, she wove and sold a chola, a traditional woman’s shawl, to help pay for his passage southwards. Chima knew he had some relatives who worked in yarn works in Argentina, but he didn’t have any papers to cross the border. Instead, he took to the hills, crossing at night by horseback through the cordillera to enter el pais vecino. “Back then, you could travel from village to village and people would offer you a plate of food, a place to stay without question.” It took a month to find work in one of the large estancias, but when he did, he stayed.

Younger than the other field hands, initially Don Chima performed a variety of odd jobs. On one farm he worked as a cook’s assistant, peeling potatoes, sweeping floors and serving plates of food. He liked it okay, at least until the crotchety cocinero got angry one day and chased him with a machete.

After that, on another estancia, he was charged with looking after 3000 sheep (on a farm of 90,000). He was given seven horses – one for every day of the week. For ten years he roamed the golden steppe in threadbare clothing, saving money for a life back home. Once he got lost in a snowstorm so thick it blocked out the stars. He wore every piece of clothing he owned that night, but made it through.

One afternoon I asked Don Chima if he sang, if he whistled. I couldn’t help wondering how he passed so many hours alone, accompanied by only mountains and bleating sheep in a seemingly interminable landscape. “No, no,” he replied, almost shouting, raising his eyebrows until they disappeared under his cap, shaking his head furiously. Perhaps the only impediment Don Chima has these days is hearing loss. When he speaks, he booms. “I like the quiet. The space. La tranquilidad. Eso y no más.” He eased back onto the bench with a giggle and began to warm his hands on the stove.

Don Chima is a small man, slightly hunched. He wears a cap at all times except when he eats and he lays it carefully on the table beside his plate. He is nearly bald. His eyebrows are dimples that sprout from three deep creases that begin between his milky blue eyes. His cheeks are taught, tanned by the sun and his chin is a road map of wrinkles. When he speaks he rocks forward, as though on horseback.

When he returned to Chiloe at 30, Don Chima settled down to start a family. With the money he earned, he purchased over 50 hectares of land and the house of the wealthy boy who walked with shoes on the beachside.

Together with his wife Emilia, they manned a store. The building was tremenda, he recalled - made of Alerce, Chilean redwood, with big windows. The store - it was not named - had two stories, with nine rooms. Outside it was painted celeste - the color of the glaciares en Patagonia. Don Chima would travel by boat to Puerto Montt for supplies – sugar, flour, potatoes, wine, liquors. The trip took eight days.

Their life was busy, but peaceful. Only once was there a notable disturbance – when a drunken customer stabbed Don Chima with a cuchillo under the armpit. On the rampla, pier, just below my home, thousands of sacks of potatoes were shipped out to mainland Chile and abroad. There were no roads then, and so people would come by horseback along the beachside to buy their wares.

Sundays were always busy in the store. “We worked from sunup to sundown,” recalled Emilia. “We never rested, the store was full of people and so when we did eat, it was late.” On one Sunday afternoon in 1960, a few people sat around drinking, watching the sea from the storefront windows. Everything began to shake. Sacks, jars began to fall from the shelves. “We all ran upstairs and watched the water come up and fall back. There was a family selling fish and marisca on the waterfront, and they were swept away.” Many remember the earthquake of 1960, likening it to the recent tragedy this past February.

This Sunday, like other Sundays here in Calen, everything is quiet.

There are roads now. The sound of hoofbeats has faded, occuring muy a vez en cuando. Potatoes continue to be planted, but they're rarely sold. All that remains of the store are the shingles of the bodega behind their new house on the hill. The bright red wood is now a silky brown. A prensa – an apple press – sits in the bodega unused. These days they sell their apples instead of make Chicha. Emilia grows beats and repollo (cabbage) in a lot beside the apple orchard. Don Chima still owns land around these parts, but much of it he sold to finance his daughters’ education, now teachers.

Sundays are quiet. The cat scratches to be let in.

I ask Don Chima which age was the best – which epoca de la vida. 25 he bellowed, no hesitation. “Life was exciting, free.”

Not far off from 25 - I've been having the time of my life in Chiloe. It's an experience in itself living and keeping up a house, but after a little practice I'm spending less time in front of the estufa lighting fires and more time out and getting to know the community. I've spent a lot of time at Don Pablo's learning how to cook traditional Chilote recipes from Nena (and many of the women in the village), I was invited to help with the recogida de manzanas and the making of Chicha by the family as well. Pablito took me fishing with nets recently and to a torneo de futbol in nearby Tenaun. I've learned to mariscar. My friend Jeannette recently invited me to Chonchi to interview her father, a famous accordeonista. Next week I head to Quenac for the radio theatre piece. More coming soon!

Chonchi y Chicha

2010-05-12T08:39:00.001-07:00

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Post coming soon!

Chiloe - A Glimpse

2010-05-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

The people in Chiloe are incredibly generous, open, and warm-hearted. I always laugh when I go to introduce myself and I receive the universal, Si, po! Pasa no más! Come on in, po (i.e man/che/buddy/honey)! which usually entails a long chat, once (tea time), and often an invitation to spend the night!

Here are photos from Castro, Calen, and Quenac. More coming soon!

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