Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

52 degrees 48 minutes S 73 minutes 50 minutes W

Since 5:00 pm on the 8^th we have sailed through the Chilean Fjords and, at 8 pm on the 10^th have come into the Straits of Magellan. Sunset at this latitude comes at 9:30 pm, so there’s still plenty of sightseeing time. We have come 852 nautical miles from Puerto Montt and have 178 nautical miles to go before we dock at Punta Arenas, a city of 100,000 and the big city in southern Patagonia.

Add those two mileages together and we will have sailed 1,150 nautical miles through the Chilean Fjords.

In addition to their stark beauty these glacier cut islands and peninsulas are so big. 1,150 nautical miles and their extension out from the mainland must be 30 or 40 miles. Within that swath of water lie hundreds of islands, small and big, glacial inlets, snow topped mountains, innumerable straits and channels, bays and inlets plus the glacial carved fjords.

While the cultures and practices of Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, rural and urban Chile, do fascinate me, they represent only a graduated departure from the familiar patterns of home. I have never experienced anything like this. Their very strangeness quickens my imagination and stretches my perceptions because now I have to include them in my perceived reality.

This, for me, is the wonder and essential purpose of travel, to learn what the wide world really holds by getting close, touching it, feeling it, smelling the clean air off the glacier and looking at its bright blue color.

Here on this cold slate gray water, moving past rock and ice, seeing snow caps on mountains my heart sings and the song comes from that deep mind, perhaps even the reptilian brain, the part that knows wildness and remoteness, isolation. The song, like the sacred sounds of Hinduism and Buddhism, unites the singer and the strangeness, the stranger and the earth, a ritual of union within alienation.

There is not, for me, any way to learn these new songs without moving the body from place to place.

And the slower the mode of travel the better. Train, yes. Good. Ship, yes. Better. On foot, yes. Best. Right now we sail, slow enough to take in the otherness of this watery and islanded realm, and it’s good enough for me.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

Amalia Glacier. At 10:00 am we came to the end of the Amalia fjord and found its creator, the Amalia Glacier lying blue and massive, its leading edge right at the water line, small growlers and the larger icebergs floating, blue, the color of captured sky.

The air temperature came down to around 40 degrees with small spits of snow as we entered the glacier’s realm, far now from the heat of Tambo Colorado or the Elqui Valley.

Still Latin America, this area has its own distinct identity, neither Amazonian rain forest or west coast arid desert. This portion of Latin America has more fellow feeling with Scandinavia, the northern US and Canada, than with the Latin America we’ve visited up to this point.

Patagonia, a region not found on any political map, begins south of the Rio Colorado in Argentina and around Punta Arenas in Chile. It means land of the big feet, a characteristic taken from early contact with natives who had large footwear.

Even today Patagonia and wilderness go together, a land largely, though not completely, uninhabitable, though not inaccessible. Many eco-tourist come to the national parks, the long stretches of mountains and plains and lakes, the glaciers and ocean. They come, many of them, seeking isolation and it can be found here.

These fjords have no towns that I can see on my maps, I’ve seen no boats, no planes, no smoke and they occupy the Chilean coast from the 42 degrees S to 54 degrees. In that large territory I can only find three dots for inhabited places and they are all on inlets that push deep into the mainland, far from the ocean and the archipelago.

As the world presses itself into denser and denser population patterns, urbanization continues to accelerate all round the world, it only makes these wild distant places more wild and more distant.

That is not to say that these wild places experience no impact from the remainder of the world. They do. Acid rain. Global climate change shrinks glaciers. Ocean currents carry mercury and other toxic materials all round the world ocean. Over fishing to feed urban markets depletes the breeding populations of ocean wild life.

Even so places like the Chilean fjords and much of Patagonia will, I imagine, remain wild. Their geographical features like mountains and fjords and lakes will survive even dramatic environmental changes. The flora and fauna may not, but some flora and some fauna will come to fill in the emptied gaps in eco-systems. Patagonia and its lands will always be distant, always be forbidding, just like the high mountains of South Asia, the massive forests of Siberia and the rugged Alaskan wilderness.

We need these wild places for we are animals born of the wild places. In our deep minds we remember the vast, the tractless, the forbidding, the uninhabitable because we once tried to live there.

Sometimes we modified the wilderness, look at the United States, Europe, China, South and South East Asia. Sometimes we passed through it on our way elsewhere. Always though our deep minds were made to cope with its challenges and to see to our survival there. With no wild places an essential part of our specie’s memory would go dark as it gradually had no place to replenish.

Like the fresh water from the Amalia Glacier flows out to the Pacific through these fjords, so the story of human evolution courses through the geographical regions, the terra firma which makes up only 1/3^rd of our blue planet, and washes up against the shore of current life, carrying with it the hard won lessons of our kind.

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

In the Amalia Fjord, headed for the Amalia Glacier. We’re now sailing roughly east on the 50^th latitude, 50 minutes. We’ve come back into the fjords from our necessary journey out to sea to sail round a large peninsula. On either side of the ship bread loaf shaped mounds of hard rock rise from the fjord, some with small trees and shrubs, others bare. Behind them taller peaks rise, snow dotting them from time to time.

This huge ship feels a bit closed in here, as if it would not do well if frightened with too little room to move.

Clouds brush the tops of both bread loaves and mountains, a scene that could contain a troll or two, perhaps Odin and Thor and not look unusual.

The ship, at 18 knots on the open sea, has slowed down here and we slide past the rocky inlets and their guardians at a stately pace, almost funereal, as if a burning Viking ship might precede us.

The sun and sand crowd will find nothing to like in this part of the world, but two constitutionally introverted northern Europeans (I’m half-German, the Celtic roots only a quarter.) find this vista calming, familiar and conducive to creativity.

I’ve seen glaciers from afar, stuck in the high valleys of the Rockies, but I’ve never seen one as close as I imagine we will get in twenty minutes.

Passengers have a variety of cold weather gear ranging from down coats to shorts and a wind breaker. I bought, as I had planned, an alpaca sweater in Ecuador. It zips and has a register of llamas topped by stylized golden stars with red and yellow wool at the top register and the bottom. As you might expect, it does not stop the wind, but it does make warm with a zip up hoody over it.

This portion of the trip has switched the nature of our journey, putting the emphasis on the natural world and on a particular part of it unfamiliar to both Kate and me.