at nahuel pan, patagona (thought I was waving, not being photo'd)

Photo: Laura Bernhein

[leftover notes from 12/26/09]

Right where the dirt road ends and the asphalt begins an RV–newish, clean, long, out of place on this road–turns the corner at San Martin and I see the logo of the PanAmerican Hwy from Alaska to down here in Patagonia.

I think about what it would feel like to stitch your perception of the world together that way for a while. Deconstructing it all by driving. Something about the fact that it isn’t all connected yet–that there’s a last wilderness impasse at the Darien Gap in Colombia–is reassuring somehow.

I pass a nogal (walnut tree) and remember at least it’s all one ground, driveways or not. When I get nostalgic I look at pictures of the drops on the Chattooga River on American Whitewater. I think about little fires getting built in all different places.

Last night Segundo emailed me about being back in the D.R. His father’s family was selling off the last of their land and splitting up all the ganancia among the tios and primos. His last remaining uncles were in their 80s and 90s. They said he looked just like his father. They took him to church and made him get on stange and lift his hands and alleluiar.

Segundo was using the land money to pay off his own land loan on campo irie, his church of douglas firs and front range snow. These emails sent after bowls of Sancocho and visiting his father’s grave.

I told him that writing this was important somehow. This was Christmas Day and the people down here greeted each other with the word Felicidades. It feels like a good day, I told him, although even thinking that phrase I threaded back to the one question I asked Dale after T.M. drowned on the Chattoga.

“Was he having a good day?”

Dale nodded. He said he was playing on the way down, jumping in all the waves, which counts for something if not everything.