On two occasions I got the opportunity to visit Antofagasta, Chile while my father was working with their major electricity provider down there. Chile is a long skinny country spanning the western coast of South America, and Antofagasta finds itself in almost the northernmost tip. Elaine and I weren't yet married but my parents were kind enough to invite her to come along as well which made Chile our first and second overseas trips together.Each time we stayed there we lived the life of the Anglo expat. We ate homemade empanadas and drank pisco sours. My dad rented a house that was the former home of a previous Miss Chile and it came complete with some fine antique furniture, including a pair of velvety cushioned throne-like chairs. Rumor had it that one of the chairs had been loaned to the Vatican during the Pope's visit to the country in 1987. We didn't know which one, so we made sure to sit in both of them so that maybe we could pick up some of His Holiness's papal super powers. Additionally one of the neighborhood stray cats pegged us as the animal-loving softies that we are and adopted us as her new owners at least for the duration of our stay. We named her Chica.
One of the most memorable brushes with wildlife I had though while in Chile was during a tour my dad had arranged with a local fisherman who had one of his underlings take us out on his boat. We went maybe a mile or so off the coast of a smaller less affluent town called Mejillones. There were six of us in the group: my mother and father, my older niece, a bilingual coworker of my dad's and Elaine and I. Plus the fisherman's underling himself so that made seven.
We all strapped on life vests and climbed into the boat. Somehow my dad managed to bump into the fisherman when he was trying to steady the boat for us to make it easier to get in, and the fisherman fell into the drink. He quickly climbed back up onto the dock and tried to profess that it was not my father's fault. While I don't think any of us said otherwise, we all thought that it was. We managed to all board the boat just the same and were off to what would later come to be known in our family folklore as Penguin Island.
Penguin Island was just that, an island that was home mainly to penguins. Sure, they also had a few seals and gulls because the mor liberal penguins refused to build the fence, but the island was basically a chunk of volcanic rock covered from one end to the other with penguins and penguin excrement. Big penguins, small penguins and penguins of every size in between. I can tell you from personal experience that penguins are loud and penguins smell.
The part of the journey that most stays with me to this day though occurred after my dad's coworker had the boat captain turn off the motor. Once the engine was silenced there was a peaceful and yet awe-inspiring calm that I cannot readily describe. We were floating along the western side of Penguin Island so the mainland was out of our view. There was nothing but ocean, island and us. For a brief moment it seemed like nothing else mattered anyway. Nothing existed outside of our narrow perception.
I don't just mean there were no bills to pay and no bosses to answer to (after all mine was still on the boat.) What I mean is that somehow for those few minutes of my life I had no obligation, certainly no luxury, but most importantly no overbearing external stimuli to preoccupy my thoughts. This sounds silly I know but it was also as though I had no national identity. No Americans; no Chileans. No Bush, no Pinochet, no Castro, no Chavez. We were just seven people out on a boat. Money didn't have much meaning either. If we started to sink, no dollar amount could have bought us salvation and besides, the view and the sounds and the smells were all priceless.
In a sense that boat ride is as close as I've ever come to time travel also. Upon gazing around at the ocean, the island, the penguins, and the gulls and smelling the salt of the sea and the shit of the seals it dawned on me that of all the things around me, we, the seven human beings on that boat, were the only things in the picture that didn't belong. We were that thing that's not like the other. We were the interlopers. This small portion of the planet probably looked the same as it did thousands of years ago with one small exception. Us. We were looking at the majestic past.
My wife and I still talk about Chile sometimes. La Portada, the Shell Boy of Mejillones and Wally's Pub will always have special meaning to us, but at the same time we doubt we will ever return. That's a pity because Chile is probably one of the few remaining places on the planet where the dollar still has a good degree of purchasing power and we found Chileans ranked topnotch when it came to hospitality. It's just that our time on this planet is short and there's a lot of this planet still left to see. Somehow I don't know that I could convince a one-year-old that a nine-hour plane ride to Santiago and then another 3-hour flight to Antofagasta would make penguins worth the trouble.
Whenever I visit the ocean I like to dip my hand down into the water and taste it. A year ago I went to a wedding in Mendocino, California just north of San Francisco and I sampled their shore in the same fashion. As the salty water washed over my lips and down my throat I looked up at my wife smiling and said, "Tastes like Chile."
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