Passing the Time in Patagonia

by Elisabeth Ampthor (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown Chile

All night the wind had threatened to blow my tent inside out; the morning’s stiff breeze was calm in comparison. When I emerged around eight o’clock, it seemed I’d overslept. The sun had already risen over the Paine Grande campground, and groups of two and four were hurrying to break camp. To the northeast, the Cuernos del Paine wore a veil of gray that obscured the harsh striations of the rocks. As I stood gazing at those peaks, a tingly sense of awe swept up my body, from the wet ground through my bare feet and out my chest, carrying away some of the soreness that had settled in my muscles, my bones, and my heart. The serrated formation reminded me how absolutely far from home I’d wandered. I turned my attention back towards camp and attempted to pack up. The two-person tent I’d borrowed was unwieldy for one, and the corners kept catching the wind and escaping as I tried to shove the whole thing back into its sack. After nearly an hour, I was finally lacing up my boots once again. I walked as far up the trail as I wanted to push my tired feet. The day before I had hiked over 16 miles, and a painful blister was my souvenir. I stopped at the mirador overlooking Grey Glacier, which choked off the top of the lake, measuring over three miles east to west and stretching as far north as I could see. As I rested behind a large rock that blocked the wind, but not the sun, I contemplated the glacier’s magnitude, its seeming agelessness. Less than two weeks later, an enormous ice sheet would rupture to form the lake’s largest iceberg in over thirty years, but on that day everything - the ice, the wind, the wonder - seemed permanent. Even the hikers marching like ants along the trail that skirted the lake and approached the glacier seemed an essential part of the landscape. This magic was what I had been seeking when I left California. Back at camp I waited in the guincho, the kitchen shelter, with four hours to kill until the catamaran arrived; it would ferry me across a different lake to a bus that would eventually deliver me back to Puerto Natales. At home I’d become so accustomed to filling that kind of time with idle internet exploration that my thumb would scroll, double-tap, scroll, seemingly of its own accord. The guincho had outlets, the campground had wifi, and nearly everyone was using their phone. Even in that remote national park, we could still be connected. But I had left my charger in town. With no internet, I became bored in a way that felt foreign, almost confrontational. In my eight weeks traveling alone, this was my first encounter with true boredom. When I realized what was happening, I was both intimidated and intrigued, like watching a sword swallower practice their craft. First, I decided to stare out the window for ten minutes, and then another ten, and then another. I made myself wait until 4:00 to slowly eat one hard-boiled egg. I tried to nap with my head on the table, but that only lasted seven minutes. I described the boredom in my journal but quickly ran out of things to say. This was uncharted territory. My mind felt buzzy and blank, yet it was an inviting blankness. Instinct told me structure might help, so I decided to start with one haiku, which turned into two, then a series. The poems were silly, crude, and haiku only in the loosest sense, but the act of creating these little imperfections delighted me. When I left home, I’d believed a new self would meet me on a mountain peak, not hunched over a cafeteria table. I’d expected to be transformed by Patagonia’s epic vistas and bucket-list destinations, not the stretches of time in between. No longer bored, I filled pages with my observations of the quickly shifting clouds and how bad my feet smelled after so many miles and days. I finally looked up to see the ferry approaching as a double rainbow arched over the Cuernos.