Spring Moon of the Southern Cross
52 degrees 48 minutes S 73 minutes 50 minutes W
Since 5:00 pm on the 8th we have sailed through the Chilean Fjords and, at 8 pm on the 10th 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.
