Dog. Drum. Duet.

Up at Metro Tobalaba, where the Tip y Tap beer garden fills the plaza in front of the entrance to the metro, a couple of musicians had set up shop. One had a guitar, another a drum kit, and they were good - I mean, really good, or at least they almost certainly would have been, but when I came into the plaza, the guitarist was putting away his guitar with a face like a sucked lemon, and the drummer was going at it on his own.
            The dog thought he was fabulous.  He was a big black dog - mostly labrador, with a bit of mastiff about the shoulders, and he had parked himself nose to brass with a cymbal, and every time the drummer hit a drum the dog barked a great big whoouff.
            The drummer hit a drum.  The dog barked. The drummer hit another drum. The dog barked bigger. The drummer drummed faster.  He reckoned he could out-bark the dog. Pretty soon he was going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, but the dog's tail was going about double that -
            As far as that dog was concerned it was an ecstatic, practically hallucinogenic, full-on meeting of souls and minds. It barked and it barked and it barked.
            The drummer was beginning to look a wee bit lemonish himself. He and his guitarist had counted on a beer-generous Tip y Tap audience, and what they had was about fifty people laughing their heads off and holding up their cell-phone cameras - not even pointing at him. They were all aiming at the dog.
            I would have love to have stayed, but I was late for an appointment, and slipped past them into the metro station.  A machine-gun whoouf-and-drum-kit duet followed me all the way down the stairs.


It was a GOOD day.

Dogs in the Dark

Last night, being a crisp, cold, clear sort of night, I walked down to the park.  Wrapped in an aura of twilight and church bells ringing the local faithful to evening service, I wandered all the way down to the slides and swings, and was standing happily under a lamp post when two small dogs came boiling out of the dark. Their teeth were pinned back over their lower lips and in a torrent of snarling and snapping and loud whuffs, they were aiming directly for my shins.
            I shouted "NO!" in my biggest baddest "bad dog" voice, and to my extreme surprise, they actually stopped. The schnauzer subsided a lunge-length from my knee and with a filthy look, commenced to growling:
            "Boy oh BOY," it said.  "Boy oh BOY.  If you ever let me to get my hands on you, I'll, well I'll -" and it flung me a look of such furious passion that it brought him to its feet in another howling hail of barks. "Get you get you get you get you" - and the dachshund joined in  - "Yowowowowow!"
            From the darkness outside the cone of light came a voice.  "It's your hat."  The voice said.  "They don't like hats."
            Me and my winter hat stepped forward into the dark.  A man stood in front of me. He was wearing a hat himself: a woolly beanie pulled right down over his ears.  A cigarette flared.  A woman sat with her feet up on a park bench, nodding her head.  
            "They don't like hats."  She had one of her own as well - a wrap of elderly fur.  Behind them, another young woman - hatless - wrestled with something enormous - possibly a wolfhound - on a leash.  It leaped in silence, but the silence was pregnant with menace.  The little dogs boiled around my feet, yapping shrilly, telling me they wanted blood, - or at least a bit of skin from my knees -  and an enormous German shepherd looked up at me with liquid brown eyes and pressed her nose against my hip pocket.
             "Shut up, dogs." The man said casually. He aimed a kick at the dachshund and they subsided abruptly into silence.
            "That's Sofia" he said, pointing at the shepherd.  "She's a good dog." 
             Sofia sighed and looked up at me, and her tail thumped, once. I reached down and scratched her ears.  "GOOD Dog, Sofia."  I said. "GOOD dog."  
            She sighed again, and lowering her chin into my hand, sat down at my feet.  She was clearly ready to sit there forever, to settle in there with me for the night.
            Behind her, the little Schnauzer cocked its head.  He looked at Sofia, and he looked at me; you could practically see the little cogwheels working inside his little skull. Perhaps a different approach was in order?  With a short, conciliatory "gruff!" he trotted over and sniffed my trouser leg. 
            "Nothing doing, kiddo."  I said.  "After the way you carried on?"
            I bent and scrubbed at Sofia's soft neck, by way of illustrating what he'd missed.  Sofia got in on the game with gusto - twisted half on her side, she was leaning heavily against my legs and  banging out a tatoo on my thigh with her long brown tail.
           The schnauzer gave her a disgusted look and turned her back.  I stuck out my tongue.  Behind her, the dachshund made a spluttering sound.  The young lady with the wolfhound had clipped a leash onto its collar.  With one furious bark it leaped for the wolfhound, aiming for its belly.  The wolfhound yelled in shock and bit its own leash, and the schnauzer, yapping joyfully, leaped into the fray.  The wolfhound tried to eat its leash, the dachshund tried to eat the wolfhound, and the schnauzer was getting in a few good bites anywhere it could.  The man in the beanie was in the middle of the fray, bellowing and flailing.  The young lady tried very hard to go in several directions at once, and on the bench, the lady in the fur turban contemplatively extinguished her cigarette.  Fur was flying, sand was flying, and in the middle of the scrum, Sofia got up and lay down on the man's feet and rolled herself around on her back, tugging his trouser legs and begging for a cuddle.
            Very quietly, I tiptoed away.

Christmas Carols

For the past five hours  a bird has been sitting in a tree outside our window, singing. Since he began he has not stopped, or barely even paused for breath. He is singing his little heart out - he chirps, he chirrups, he warbles, he hopsup and down his branch, working up the most fantastic runs, tweeting and whistling and chortling, harder and louder and louder and faster until he chokes on his own whistle, and with only the slightest of pauses to clear his windpipe, he starts again -
            It is three o'clock in the morning, We can't sleep. The sound of this one small bird echoes off of the building to our left, and echoes off of the building to our right, and bounces up and down the parking alley between the two buildings across the street, and on its way back to us, meets the bird's next terpsichorean assault, and it grows and it grows and it grows-

We are afflicted with a lover. You know the guy, the one crouched below the window of his beloved and strumming furiously on his guitar - the guitar strings are smoking, his fingers have turned to rubber and his shoulders are on fire and the stem of the rose between his teeth has been crushed to a bloody pulp, but he will show her -
            He'll show everyone - 
            Beneath his love the world will give way -
            Ooooh, you just watch and see how deep is his love.
            Right above him, his senorita's daddy is out on the balcony, ready to dump a bucket of ice water over the edge.
            Or if we're back to talking birdies, he's got a cat.
            It might have been amusing, but an hour ago the lover from hell was joined by a second bird. They are not friends. Feather to feather, they are trilling their little beaks off. There's no quarter being given - this is war. If one pauses for breath the other finds it in his tiny diaphragm to double his volume and show of just what sort of deathless devotion he is made -
            The father is still upstairs on the balcony, but this time, the he's got the full complement of family retainers lined up on either side. Sleepless and grim, they've all got buckets, ready to go.  He's traded in his bucket for a shotgun. And the señorita is inside on a sofa, with an ice-pack on her head.
 
Merry chirping Christmas.

Christmas Cats

The Autumn Rains Bring Unexpected Gifts

Thunder!  Lightning!  Power Outages (small ones). RAIN!
            We have had our first rain of the Autumn season and it was a good one - howling torments and running around like mad closing summer-open windows as the rain poured in.

The morning after, I sent this email to Mum: 
            This morning we discovered that our open windows had let in a piteous trail of refugees - all the summer spiders and pill bugs, coming in out of the rain. As for ants  - the ones that live in the bougainvillea outside the bathroom window got flooded out and headed straight in a body towards dryer pastures.
            Mr Tabubil met them before I did. There was much howling. "They're coming in EVERYWHERE!"  
            "What are? From where?!"
            "Ants!  Lots and lots of ants!  I don't KNOW!  EVERYWHERE!  Do something!"
            I squeezed a lemon so I could break their trail with citric acid and went in. I've found.... six ants so far. 
            A very large part of me would love to see Mr Tabubil go work for a year in Papua New Guinea for a while, just for a sense of perspective.
            -Me

Mum wrote back:
            Mr Tabubil needs a good tropical experience all right - with ants and cockroaches and spiders and geckos - and snakes of course. Did I tell you what happened to your father when he opened his suitcase on our return from PNG last week? In front of him and myself, a gigantic cockroach climbed out of his valise. It was awfully big and I had to go thumping after it with a shoe. 
            This cockroach had hitchhiked its way across  border crossings to lend to strut its stuff in front of all the not quite as gigantic, Australian cockroaches. The bold effrontery of this specimen.  I am sure it had plans to improve on the gene pool of Australia's cockroaches. I did eventually lay waste to its plans with a final and more enraged assault. I suppose in a way, it's speed and cunning, pitted against - ???  --  I guess I could only offer 'size', gave it the huge advantage.  My size meant nothing against its deviousness.
            Have you noticed how hard it is to exterminate a determined insect!?   

Yes, I surely have.  Mr Tabubil has as well.  Mum and I can't really talk, of course.  My deep-freeze Canadian Mr Tabubil might be climbing the furniture but he holds cards of his own.  When the giggling starts, all he has to do is mention Mum's Canadian Bear bells.  And bear stick.  And bear flare.  And the car she picked out because it looked square and solid enough that a hungry bear wouldn't be able to roll it on the first go...

The Park When the Weather is Unseasonal

This weekend, the winter went on vacation. The temperature rose, and the skies turned blue, and Mr Tabubil and I took a nap on the floor in front of an open window, while a breeze blew air at twenty-four degrees celcius across our faces.

            And after that, we went to our park. With the winter somewhere else, it was a rather busy park. The children's playground was one big buzzing sea of primary-colored sweaters (chilean mothers dress their offspring to the season, not the weather*) and away from the pre-teen scrum playing cards and smooching on the benches, the lawns under the trees were practically standing-room only.  It was exactly like one of those cardboard picture books that you give to small children with fascinating and singular activities hapening in every square meter of green grass - 

Look!
            Here's a man walking a little Scottie dog on a leash with its white whiskers hanging down, and its long white tail standing up, and its white legs twinkling as it runs.

            Here's a group of little boys playing football with a big red ball almost as tall as they are.

            Here are a young man and a young woman having a picnic. They are sitting on a blanket and drinking wine from long stemmed glasses and smiling at each other, rather foolishly.

           And here's a baby, pushing along a plastic walker that plays Farmer in the Dell over and over and over, while his parents cheer him on and he makes enormous grunting noises with the effort of every step.
            Here's a group of girls with a life-size cardboard cutout of a singer, grinning wildly and taking selfies on their cell phones.

            And here's another baby -  a baby bulldog with great rolls of puppy fat around his shoulders and enormous puppy feet. He's as big as tank, and he's yanking his leash out of his owner's hand and  bounding about the lawn, tangling up the football game, desiring to bepetted by every single person in the whole park, all at the same time. Doesn't matter if they want to. He'll make them want to - he's bigger than they are.

            The baby with the walker is looking hard at the couple on the blanket.  Now, all on his own, he is slanting, unblinking, towards them across the grass, and they are sitting very still, side by side. The woman has put her glass down on the grass and is holding out her arms-

            One f the girls with a cell phone is knocked flat. The puppy bowls over her like a panzer tank, a cardboard cutout with a marvelous white smile goes flying andthe air fills up with screams. The baby with the walker loses interest in the man and woman on the blanket and angles away.  The couple sigh deeply and sit back on the blanket, like puppets whose strings have been cut and the woman reaches out for her wine and drinks, deeply, looking at the grass.
            Above them in a tree, red aerial silks are slung over the highest branch, and another man and another woman practice their twists and falls high above the ground -

           And a Canadian sits with an Australian on another blanket.  They are pretending to read books and watching every single thing -

           We watched until the sun went down, and then sometime in the night, I became cold and dragged an extra blanket up the bed.  And in the morning we woke to a chill, damp fog. The winter was back from vacation and we could scarcely see the building next door.

*Winter is winter and what the weather is actually doing in the streets is an irrelevance. The calendar says that winter starts June 21st, and on June 22, women push strollers filled completely by small humans wrapped in woolly hats and fleece vests and puffy coats and layered over of their padded trousers, hand-knitted woolen leg warmers. And after all that, the occupant of the stroller is buried under so many blankets that half the time you have to take the existence of the baby on faith.
            When Sarah and Miles were visiting us last year, little Laurie was going through a growth spurt. If I hadn't know them I could still have tracked their progress through the streets of Santiago following a chain of Chilean matrons giving them the stink-eye because it was cool enough for a cotton cardigan and when Laurie sat in his stroller his pants rucked up there was an inch of leg visible between the top of his sock and the bottom of his trousers.   
            Dearie me.

The Park

Tonight I am wandering. Mr Tabubil is stuck at work in a late meeting and I am out wandering in the early winter twilight - down our street, through the tunnel of platano orientale, still shedding its awfulleftover summer fluff, past a collection of tall and modern apartment buildings with the apartments all laid out in rows like shoeboxes - and into a park.  
            On the paths in the park there are kids on bicycles, on the lawns there are grown-ups on blankets, and in the sunken rose garden there are dogs greeting other dogs and running in happy circles when they meet. At the other there is an enormous  playground, and it is always full of children.
            There are lots of parks and squares in Santiago, but as play-places go, they can be pretty sterile.  Children play separately, on their own recognizance, while their grown-ups sit on the sidelines, nodding guardedly to other grown-ups and encouraging their charges not to play with les autres. In our park, matters are different. Around the edges of the playground, parents sit in companionable knots and chat while their children run and shout and inflict social justice upon each other, and always, the children are playing with the other children. When Mr Tabubil and I first began to come here, the grown-ups and the children would look us up and down and smile and nod - decisive nods. Welcome to the neighborhood. Our neighborhood.

Tonight a man and a woman have a slackline stretched between two trees. They are winching. Climbing up, taking a step – or two – balancing, checking tension, dropping down to the grass, and winching again. A small girl stands with her skirts pressed against her fathers legs. Her eyes are as big as the moon. The man with the slackline lifts her up, and he and the woman - one on each side of her - walk her slowly all the way up and down the line.
            There is a public recycling station in our park.  That is why i wandered this way. Aimless winter happiness feels too foolish and ephemeral for virtue. I need utility, please, thank you, but either Thursday is the official neighborhood recycling night, or everyone else has felt the same urge- the row of recycling bins overflows into sacks - and stacks - of plastic jugs and aluminium cans. Piles of  milk bottles. Pyramids of glass bottles. There's no city-wide recycling program in Santiago, so those who choose to recycle must make these little pilgrimages to the neighborhood stations. It's heartening that so many in Providencia want to, but there clearly isn't capacity to meet the demand.
            Lamps are coming on between the trees. There is a dandy sitting on a park bench. He has mutton-chop whiskers on his cheeks, and an electric-yellow unicycle leans nonchalantly against the bench beside him. The dandy is reading in the dark; a kindle on his lap, and his brow furrowed in concentration as he poses with a book of which he cannot possibly be reading a word. I salute him, gravely, in the night.  He cannot see me either.
            In a pool of light on the lawn, a little golden spaniel and a beagle dog are running in circles, faster and faster and wider and wider - and stopping, every few passes to stand nose to nose, breathing deeply and smiling. A man is trying to photograph speeding dogs and unicycles (the man with the book has stopped pretending to read and is wobbling sideways and hither along the path) and snorting with frustration when the dogs come out as blurs the unicycle lurches out of frame.
            It is too dark to see my hands now. The man and woman on the slackline are a pale smear of white between the trees, winching it down. At the top of the park i turn left, past the local catholic church. It is the hour of evening service. The church is full, and there is a crowd in the courtyard. Yellow light spills out the church doors, and the service, loud on loudspeakers and megaphones, comes out into the night.
            And I go home in the winter dark. 

Little Dog Meets Big Dog

Today I watched while a little white poodle stopped at a cross light next to a great big German shepherd. The little poodle attempted to make the acquaintance of the big dog, with all of the most polite wag-and-sniff etiquette that well intentioned little dog can show.  But the Shepherd was wearing a great big opaque plastic cone of shame around his neck, and the little dog was so little that the big dog couldn’t see him.  
            He could hear him, wherever he was, and as the big dog turned his head from side to side, and turned himself around to see behind, and wagged his tail hopefully, and turned around again to try in front to see if the mysterious other dog had gone around the other way while his back was turned, the little dog trotted along right behind him, padding desperately on his little poodle legs and remaining perpetually in his blind spot.  
            Around and around and around, two willing dogs running in circles and never ever going to meet. Chuffing with bewilderment, the big dog shook his head in his great big plastic cone and gave up. He straightened himself out and shook his head and trotted away up the block, and the little dog sat down and cried.

Recipe: Garlic Prawns (and New Year's Wildlife)

Mr Tabubil and I rang in the new year in style.  When the countdowns and party hooters began in the street below us, we climbed out of bed and went to the window to watch the fireworks above the city skyline, then went back to sleep!
            On New Years Day, we went to the park and lay under a tree on a picnic blanket.  We watched small children playing soccer, and small dogs who wanted desperately to be part of the game, but ran like hell whenever the ball came near them.  Above us, parrots shrieked in the ceibo, showering the grass with little feathery fragments of seed pods, and beaning pigeons with whole ones when the pigeons strutted past.
            Under a tree was a woman with an accordion and a man with a guitar.  They played German polkas and Violetta Parra and Gloria Gaynor. In the sun, we closed our eyes and fell asleep.

In the evening we made a splendid year-end supper - light and summery and rich.

We did it like this:
 
We heated up some olive oil in a frying pan and tossed in 3 - 4 cloves worth of pressed garlic.
We sautee'd the garlic over low heat until it was fragrant and soft, but not caramelized.
Then we tossed in whole packet of prawns  - (previously peeled by moi) and added lots of fresh-ground salt and pepper.
We tossed the prawns in the pan, so they'd cook evenly without scorching, and added the juice of a lemon.  I decided that the flavor wasn't lemon-y enough and added the juice of a second lemon.
The lemon reacted with the oil  to form a nice thick emulsion. We threw in a handful  of finely diced fresh flat-leaf parsley and basil leaves. (previously diced by Mr Tabubil)
And we stirred and tossed until the prawns were tender but not yet rubbery, and served it up with jasmine rice!

I sent the recipe to my mother, who was so excited that she made it herself, and declared it fantastic.  And it is.  Give it a try!

Happy New Year!

Bah Humbug.

It’s the evening of December the 23rd and right now, at this moment , my holiday spirit is pretty much a solid Bah-Humbug.  I have a new niece (Mr Tabubil’s sister's baby) and she is charming and precocious and clearly miles ahead of every other baby anywhere and I am making her a stuffed elephant for Christmas.  Every time I make a stuffed animal I buy the pattern off of Etsy - Why support some multinational corporation like Butterick or Simplicity when you can support a creative individual?  That's how the thinking goes, anyway - and every single time I do this, after I cut out the pattern pieces and have used up all my fabric, I remember that the reason one supports multinational corporations is because they have a history of actually testing the patterns.  One doesn't have to redesign the whole flaming animal on the fly. The picture on the pattern I picked out was pretty cute, so I gave the elephant a very long name, and even wrote a little story about why elephants have such long names, and how my Valentina Euphrasia Trumpet-toes McGonagall got hers -
            This blamed elephant only has four legs, but as of this evening I've sewn on seven feet and redesigned a trunk and a purple elephant posterior.  Mr Tabubil, my dear husband and helpmeet, thinks the situation’s hysterical.  I’ve no comment.  But my story has a brand new chapter.  It's called "Valentina the Elephant visits the La Brea Tar Pits."  It's very short and extremely educational.

Cueva del Milodon

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

 

The Mylodon is an giant ground sloth that inhabited Patagonia up until about ten thousand years ago. They were very large animals – weighing in at around two hundred kilograms and standing three meters tall in their socks, and little bony plates (osteoderms) lodged inside their skin. Not many other animals would have tangled with a mylodon. They were tough customers, and it says something about how very tough the humans of these cold, windy parts were that they managed to take all of them out. One by one.

The Cueva del Milodon is a very large cave, where almost a hundred and twenty years ago, in 1895, the German explorer Hermann Eberhard dug up a cache of Mylodon bones and petrified Mylodon scat.  Five minutes later, the place was overrun by looters and treasure hunters, but one hundred and twenty years later, archeologists still haunt the place, digging fitfully in corners, trying to convince visitors that the potholes and debris piles are just how the prehistoric human inhabitants left it.  
              When I first visited the cave nine years ago, Dad and had I considered the extinction a significant blow for interior design.  I mean, really...  Streaky mud floors, creeping damp, salt damage….
            The cave doesn’t need the Mylodon – its two hundred meters of depth are staggeringly impressive all on their own. But a week of wind makes you punchy.  It drives you to desperation, and when you snap, you break out in chintz.  Dad and I considered something in an oversize floral print.  Maybe a tiki bar in the back, to justify a few prehistoric flaming torches.  And oh, the potential for hi-fi!  At the back of the cave, where the wall curves up against the scree slope, the echoes get really big. 
            Dr Tabubil and and I halloo’d the reverberate fjord.  “Tabubilgirl  -erl –erl is a hottie  -hottie -ottie!)”
            Dad looked at us and looked at us and said dryly how pleased he was to see how far the level of human culture had risen since humans moved into the place.

Back then there wasn’t much there: a car park, marked roughly with logs, and a gravel path up the hill to the mouth of the cave –
            Today the Cueva del Milodon has a café, a visitors centre, a ranger station, and an elevated walkway to take you all the way to the cave while walking six careful inches above the pampas grass. On a natural promontory in the mouth of the cave there is a life-size milodon done up in fiberglass and a plexiglass box holding a mummified scrap of genuine milodon skin, with genuine milodon fur on it –
            We duly marveled and went down into the cave.  It’s still hugely impressive – two hundred yawning meters of dark brown echoes and poetry of the gaping cavernous sort. Today, though, you can’t get near the echo wall.  A gravel path circles through the cave, with chain-link ropes on each side and everywhere, signs explaining that only a fraction of the cave floor has been dug up and priceless artifacts lie centimeters beneath the virgin surface in every single direction, so kindly, gently, courteously please stay on the path.  The signs urged, begged, pleaded and even tried for stern nursery tones, but it was patently obvious to even the most credulous viewer that nothing further from virgin earth had existed this cave at any time in geological history –
            The floor of the cave looked like a major European city center during the blitzes of world war two, after the rescue crews had been through the place and added a layer of shafts and ladder holes to the chaos.
            Chileans don’t much like being told where they can – or cannot - walk, and to my discretely outsize pleasure, every square meter of the cave floor that wasn’t actually vertical had recently accumulated a brand new layer of archeological interest – the overlapping footprints of hundreds and hundreds of sneakers and hiking boots.  All together, they made a rather fetching pattern of interlocking divots and caterpillar prints, vaguely reminiscent of a carpet in a low-rent casino in Las Vegas.  It would have gone great with the tiki bar and torches.
            I took a step toward the echo wall, but Sarah blocked my leap across the chain-link rope. 
            “You have to think about examples, Tabubilgirl.” She said, and looked meaningfully at little Laurie hanging about behind me, round about the level of my knees.
            “Yep.”  Miles nodded sadly. “You’re a role model now.  You want him learning bad habits? Do what the sign says except when you don’t because that doesn’t count, forget you ever saw it?  Really, Tabubilgirl?”
            I looked eloquently at the carpet of footprints, and mouthed a rude word over Laurie’s head.
            “He’s two feet tall.” Sarah said. “He notices people, not the background stuff.  You just spent two days playing patty-cake and spot-the-birds-on-poles with him in the backseat of a car. He thinks you’re the best thing to hit the earth since that first time he heard us singing baa baa black sheep.  He’s tracking everything you do like those great big eagles on poles track sick sheep! Do you really want this for your legacy? What comes next?  Running in the street?”
            Well fine, then.  Nine years since I was here last, and now, no echoes. I loitered moodily, sulking and kicking gravel about with my feet and taking bad photographs of the inside of the cave with no flash lighting until Laurie and his dismal parents had cleared a debris pile halfway to the entrance, and then I grabbed Mr Tabubil’s hand, nipped over the chain-link rope, and made a run for the wall.
            “I don’t get this” Mr Tabubil panted as we climbed and slipped our way up the scree slope.“The cave echoes. That’s what caves do. But the echo isn’t any different over here-“
            “HERE!!!” the cave rang.  “HEREHereherehere Here!”
            “Oh.” Mr Tabubil said, very softly, and the cave whispered back to him. I laughed, and the cave laughed.  I tittered and the sound ran back and forth across the roof, chiming like stone bells.
            Mr Tabubil growled a low “Ho Ha Ho.” Rumbles of sound around the walls of the cave, shivering through the rock.  We laughed at each other and the cave laughed back – high, low, happy, gleeful, heated, cruel – until the air rocked and trembled and little Laurie in the mouth of the cave was crying in fear.
            “Are you happy now?”  An exasperated shout came from the cave entrance.
quake
            “Appy!”  The cave called back.  “Ow?  Now?”
            “For Pete’s sake.”  The voice said, disgusted.  “You’ll be running on roads next.  Right in front of him.”
            Holding tightly to each other, Mr Tabubil and I slithered down the scree back to the path, grinning like loons.  I could walk on the paths for another eight or nine years now. I was filled up.

Animals in the Deep South (Patagonian Edition)

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

The first time I visited the Torres del Paine, we came in summer, when the guanacos were spreading out across the park, and half the animals seemed to be babies.  We drove through herds of ‘em - mothers, babies, fathers, uncles, brothers and sisters, stepping daintily from behind tussocks of spike-eared grass to pace regally along side of our car.

They posed, profile rampant, with noble carriage and enormous long lashed eyes – such carriage as only a camelid can sustain.

Babies pranced, facing into the wind, kicking up their heels in the spring sunshine.

We promised ourselves that we’d only stop to photograph a herd, then only for a baby, then for a baby suckling, a baby nuzzling, a baby galloping across a hill.




In an hour we traveled two kilometers, and forced ourselves to become more selective.  We’d stop only for a noble profile, held high in disdain and hauteur against a setting sun – and we stopped again, almost immediately.

Our criteria narrowed further.  New species only, and on cue, a silver tipped Patagonian fox strolled up to the road, sat down and yawned.  Five minutes later he stood up again and trotted away, a long plumed tail sweeping raindrops from the bushes.

Do the animals have a contract with the park service?  To pose for so many hours a day, and in return – no radio collars, no annual predation by scientists that dope and weigh and measure and draw blood and leave them lying woozy and cotton mouthed in the grass?
            A park guide told us that we had a fifty percent chance of seeing a puma.  There were four of us; we reckoned we should see two of them.
            I admit that our statistics were more optimistic than scientific. We never did see a mountain lion – that coup was saved for this second time around, when  Mr Tabubil shouted out from his perch in the driver’s seat–
            “Hey!” he yelled, swinging us around a hummock and down toward one of the innumerable long lakes.  “What’s about the size of a lion, with a long tail – running really low to the ground?  Running really fast?”
I stared at him from the back next to the baby seat, thick with envy.
            “That WAS a lion.” I said at last.  “A puma.”
            “Really?” He threw us around a hairpin bend. “It was fast.”
            And that was that.
            Lions there were, apparently, but in April we were too late for babies. The herds had grown up, and split up, or split for warmer pastures. We saw guanacos, distantly, in small grazing herds, but  they were too far away to be seen clear, and their proud profiles were shrunk to tufts and tussocks of brown grass, diminished by the terrible immensity of bad poetry rising up behind them.

Torres del Paine: Into the Park

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

The National Park of Torres del Paine begins a hundred kilometers north of Puerto Natales, but the park is a large one, and the towers themselves are another hundred kilometers further north.  If you want to go see them in one day, you have to start very early indeed.
            We left our hotel before the sun was up and drove out into a thick  white fog.  Little Laurie in his car seat passed the time counting ‘birds on poles.” Nothing was moving in that fog.  Even the birds were grounded.
          These weren’t dainty meadowlarks or plover. Talons like garden forks were sunk into fence posts on both sides of the road and above them, hawks and eagles the size of combine harvesters loomed damp and indistinct, waiting for the fog to lift.
We drove slow, peering into the swirling fog, watching out for headlights of other cars and gauging bends.  Watching so close, you see things in the mist – swirling shapes that come out of the fog and go back into it before you know if you’re seeing truly or seeing ghosts –
          Ahead of us, the white began to boil. We hesitated, braked, in case the boil was real - and sudden as a camera shutter coming down, the fog turned and we were driving through sheep.  Masses of sheep. hundreds of sheep. As sea of shaggy white backs, huasos (cowboys) on horseback, little islands in their sheepskin trousers and flat, wide-brimmed hats bobbing among them like little floating islands.  A dozen working dogs slunk low against the grey grass, tag-teaming strays that tried to bolt out of the herd into the fog, growling and nipping, chivvying them back into the pressed mass. The huasos slapped their reins and whistled to the dogs and jinked their horses left, right, and left again – and the whole boiling, seething mass flowed around us like a river in a flood, carried swiftly down upon a current of snapping dog and jinking horse -

Twenty kilometers further up the road, we met cattle. They came at us in snatches of shifting brown bodies, bellowing and steaming all around us in the murk. Mindful of another bull we’d met, on different road down near Lago Ranco, we pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
          A huaso on his horse loomed up out of the white. He wore a patch across his right eye, and in his frilled sheepskin trousers and flat hat he looked a proper pirate.  He grinned down at us from his horse and raised his hand, and like the parting of the waters, a narrow slot opened up between the churning animals. We edged forward. A dog barked –one sharp crack – and a great big brown body lurched. We shot forward and were through.
          Behind us the one-eyed cowboy gave a whoop and waved his hat – and we were gone – they were gone, swallowed up again by the white.

So late in the year, many people don’t see much more of the park than this.  Even in high summer you might come for a week and see no more than ghosts of foothills, thinly, through the shifting mist.
             But for whatever reason – perhaps our one-eye’d huaso had called it up - it was our day.  As we cleared the grazing country and started up into the foothills of the park the fog lifted, and there they were: the Torres del Paine –
          As if the road were a geological divide, a massif rose up- crowned with hanging glaciers and shattered rock fingers -  a slab of mountain like the bottom of the world turned on its end and reaching up into the sky-



We were back to improbable poetry again.  How else could anybody sensible describe this place?  When a white fog rises one expects- the narrative demands - something windswept and barren, a sere and alien beauty – if beauty at all.
          Not this–
          We had come out of the fog into the middle of a moonscape - domed hummocks and puddle lakes that meandered out to eternity with no horizon and no base level.  There was no perspective– just up and down and round, vivid in primary yellow and primrose and green.

We drove for hours over the rolling ground, the towers on our right drifting in and out of clouds.  Here at the top of the world, roads snaked and switch-backed, throwing themselves from one side to the other of pocket-handkerchief-sized valleys with their bellies full of water, little lakes, overgrown, in tones of emerald, chartreuse, gold and burgundy and olive, sweeping out from the centre, and then emerald again, where the water met the autumn grass at the edge of the next rise –

And over that next rise, we’d teeter on the lip of a hanging valley: three hundred meters straight down to a long lake the color of blue glacier ice, and on the other side of that, that wall again–no trees, no bushes, no grass, no green, just a fist punching up through the roof of the world –

The Joys of Prescription Antihistamines

"Hey !  Mr Tabubil!  Heeeey!  Guess What! I'm going on the internet to look at pictures of kittens!"
            "Did you just type the word 'kittens' into the run command?"
            "How else do you do it?  It worked, too, see?  Look - kittens!  But I don't want these kittens.  They're too small."
            "That's because they're thumbnail pictures in an image search window.  Seriously, how did you get into the internet from there?"
            "I don't want these kittens. They're not big enough to cuddle. Does the internet have any other kittens? Ooooh - PUPPIES!!!"
            "Oh GOODIE.  You just found CuteOverload.  Although I don't know HOW, in your condition-"
            "You're being that pa word. Puh... pota-"
            "Patronizing?"
            "That's it.  Aren't you."
            "You bet I am.  Remember that nice little lie-down we talked about earlier?"
            "Don't be pota...pato... that mean P word any more.  It's not very - ooo!  OOOOHHH!  Look!  LOOK!! LOOK!!!!  It's a doggie and a bitty baby human and the babby has the big old doggie on a leash and the woggie is running and pulling the sweet widdle babby down the stweeeeet!!!!!!!"

Roll up, roll up, Ladies and Gents!  500 pesos to see the wonderful world of prescription antihistamines! Next time I may just choose Door B and take the allergies. Possibly there will be kittens down there as well.

Dogs in Santiago

Santiago has very little dogs and very BIG dogs. The little ones are yappy and live in apartments and are walked by maids in pinafores. The enormous ones live in houses with very small gardens and boil off their frustration and boredom by barking furiously through the front gate at pedestrians in the street. The effect can be devastating - they time their attack for a moment when the pedestrian has momentarily looked the other way and compare notes afterward, grading for speed and distance, and mostly, how HIGH the pedestrians jump.

Last week I saw a man walking two dogs -  the biggest German Sheppard I’ve ever seen in my life, and the smallest, yippiest, fluffiest white poodle I’ve ever seen. All I could think was “how is it that one of the two hasn't become lunch?”

Daschunds are the loudest dogs in creation. They yell even bigger than beagles. Yesterday I took a new route to work.  The dogs along my usual route were used to me - I hadn't been barked at properly in weeks, and my edge was getting rusty.  I was humming along, with my music going in one ear and walking far too close to the fences, and suddenly all HELL broke loose at a hundred and fifty decibels right under my left elbow. I levitated - straight upward, with all my limbs flailing independently, and - I admit it - I yelled.  I came back down to earth just in time for a massive German Sheppard to come bounding out to join the wretched sausage dog and start snapping a set of slavering jaws about a foot from the level of  my nose. A little grey poodle came out to add HIS noise to the din, but by that time I was long gone.

Horrible things.

I vented my feelings by barking rudely at the next dog I saw, an elderly spotted spaniel, who lifted her head, stared at me with bemusement and went back to sleep.

I do enjoy barking at dogs. Last week I walked past a house and a cocker spaniel sitting on the front stoop perked his ears up and bounded joyously toward the fence, ready to give me the full treatment. Right as it reached the gate I gave a full-throated “RUFF!” and the silly thing stopped in mid bounce, like he’d galloped into a wall. He fell flat on his belly, with his mouth hanging open most unbecomingly, and an expression of total flabberghast on his face.

I WISH I knew what I'd said.

Little Dog Meets Little Dog.

I went for a little walk this evening to buy fresh fruit (apples, peaches, white nectarines and blueberries - even the tail-end of summer is extravagant!) and stumbled into the most LUDICROUS dog fight I've ever seen.

            A teacup poodle being walked up Calle Suecia decided to take on a miniature dachshund being walked down Calle Suecia, and the dachshund perked up her ears and said "Oh, bring it ON-"

            They lunged at each other - yip! yip! yeek! yip! - teeth bared and ears back - and then, simultaneously, they reached the ends of their leashes, discovered that they were only about 12 inches apart (nose to nose, practically! Gosh!) and with one last terrified "Yeek!" threw themselves backward and cowered behind their owners feet with their tails between their legs.

            And from that vantage point, each little dog saw that the OTHER dog was cowering, so each, again, lunged forward, yipping and yeeking and snarling - and came to the limit of their leashes to find themselves nose to nose with something just as big as they were and terrifyingly loud and snarly-

            In total terror, they threw themselves backward and hid behind their owners legs and quivered there, with their tails so far between their legs they were practically tickling their chins.

            And then they snuck a look across the sidewalk, saw their foe cringing, perked up their ears and did it all over AGAIN.

            No kidding - from my perspective, this was serious 'stand stock still in the middle of the road, gawping with disbelief" stuff.

Canine intelligence is frequently overrated.

Rain! (and kittens and spaniels)

Yesterday I stayed home and did a LOT of work on my computer.

            To clarify, there was a great number of things I would have cared to do outside our apartment, but the rain-!

            It started as a a misty moisty morning, and then someone upstairs turned on an immense tap, and it rained and it rained.

            It rained kittens and spaniels and you couldn't see the other side of the street for all the yapping, squalling bodies.

            Every time I decided to get up and go out, the lightning flashed and the thunder rolled in along the street.

            Every time the thunder rolled around the building, the lights flickered.

            Every time the lights flickered, the weather felt spiritually validated and ratcheted up the power of the storm.

Watch this:

            "I am going to get up and have a shower and go buy some chocolate so I can bake something exciting!"

            (Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it....)

             Ke-RASH booooom!

             Ten seconds. That's all.

            How did the weather Know?!?!

Did you know that snails come out in the rain?
            (I didn't.  I only knew from kamikaze earthworms.)

            On Saturday I walked through the park from the subway through a thunderstorm.  The path is lined with big elephant ear plants, and the glistening leaves were covered in fat garden snails going for walks, their slug bodies stretched as far out of their shells as they could go.

            Around seven this morning, the weather finally stopped playing extreme sports and settled down to making metaphorical sandcastles and listening to the sound of waves on a shore.

            And I went for a walk.

            And snails courted death by big feet on the paths and they, and the rest of the world glistened cheerfully.