A confident tire changer. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Riding and ferrying to the island of Chiloe was an intentional detour. Highly unnecessary. It didn’t lay in our path. But if we didn’t pay our respects to the official end of the Pan American highway in the small city of Quellon, on the island of Chiloe, what kind of a story would it be when we one day rode up to its official beginning in Prudoe Bay, Alaska?
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We were airborne for a second. The culprit? A grapefruit-sized stone, conjured by shade in the middle of a turn. When we landed, the rear tube was popped, the rear tire was knocked off the rim, and the front wheel was dented. It was five pm, and Chaiten, the port town where we would board a ferry to Quellon, lay about 85 miles away. But the days were still summer-long and we were finally confident in our processes. Within 40 minutes, after removing all our luggage and panniers and disconnecting the brake to access the rear wheel; after inspecting the frame for cracks or other damage; after changing the inner tube and hooking, strapping, and locking down everything we had just unloaded and dismantled, we were off to Chaiten again.
The rock in the shade. Photo by Diana Juárez.
For about ten minutes, that is. The brake wasn’t responding—Nathan hadn’t reconnected it. We both scrambled off the bike and he kneeled at the rear wheel. And then he gasped—my least favorite of his vocalizations. Not only had he forgotten to reconnect it, but a loose component, a perforated brass tube through which the brake rod passed, had twiddled its way free. Rolling meadows of tall grass sprawled at either side of the road—who knows where it had silently plinked down—regardless, we spent the next hour doubled over, slowly surveying the gravel and grass for the missing tube. Any longer and our fantastic shadows would have severed, limp as taffy-threads stretched to breaking. It was time to give up. Nathan fashioned two nails into a repuesto temporal, a temporary fix, that would have to serve until we reached Quellon.
Or for the next 45 minutes, rather. We twisted and turned down a beautifully paved and graded road through a deeply green valley. And then the ghastly screech of the rear rim scraping the pavement reached our ears and the wind vacated our sails. We had no second spare; just the patch kit we'd carried from San Francisco and a can of lime green, tube-sealing goo—a parting gift from our friend Mark in Bogotá. Daylight was fading fast and we were now stuck on a narrow shoulder simmering with mosquitos and declining steeply towards a stream. This was no place to stay the night. We had no choice but to try to patch the tube.
The adhesive of the kit was gummy and dry. A Chilean highway patrol vehicle passed us without slowing. And then another car passed us without slowing. And then a car sped up to pass both ourselves and a passing truck. The truck honked. Nathan cussed.
Our repuesto temporal. Muy temporal. Photo by Diana Juárez.
I looked around. There was no good place to lay out the tent and we had never camped this vulnerably to passing traffic. Then, out of the darkness appeared the car that had cut off the truck. It pulled up alongside us. General Jose, a military general sporting a suit jacket under his down vest and a headlamp, was on his way to Chaiten and then on to a different destination; he wondered if he could help us in any way. He had once planned to ride his own motorcycle to Mexico, he told us, but had returned home prematurely due to a painful flare-up of fibromyalgia. Our guts told us that he was trustworthy, but again, our choice felt like no choice at all.
The truck whom Gen. Jose had cut off also reappeared. Its driver, a man about our age named Pedro, was also headed to Chaiten and then onto Quellon—for a lark, since he had completed the delivery of his family's potato harvest earlier than expected.
Need a tow? he offered. If we couldn’t get the tube repaired by the ferry’s departure, he reasoned, he could declare the bike as his own cargo and load it onto the vessel for us. He didn’t have a ramp, but after kicking aside a load of crushed beer cans destined for a recycling center, the four of us were just able to hoist Horace onto the flatbed. It just happened to be our luck that we had filled up the 11 gallon gas tank earlier that afternoon. Nathan rode with Horace, the luggage, and Pedro, and I rode with General Jose. An hour later, we were all checked into the same Hospedaje Astorias and seated together at the restaurant next door; each of us was tired and hungry, and conversation was polite but reserved. General Jose’s phone buzzed—it was the concierge of the hotel where he’d stayed the previous night. The forgotten toiletries and pair of Jockeys he’d inquired about had been recovered! So. This night was even luckier than we’d thought.
Not a single motorcycle inner tube was available for sale in Chaiten, as much of the year’s climate was simply too harsh to inspire any culture of motorcycle riding. We’d determined that when we’d crashed down to earth after Horace’s brief flight the day before, the rim had sliced into the tire and the resulting gash had pinched and bitten into the spare tube, causing the second flat. We rode the two streets of town with Pedro, who leaned his head out the window and inquired with passersby for a breakfast joint and una vulca, Chilean vernacular for vulcanizadora, or tire repair shop.
The dueño’s in the hospital, we were told of one shop.
Waiting for our patches to cure in Chaiten. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
Another was closed for good. And so it was that we begged the only vulca open that day, where they were loathe to work on motorcycles, to patch both our inner tube and tire. They eventually agreed, and within an hour we were holding air. Shortly after, we were gifted a small length of copper tubing from a hardware store’s scrap pile, the clerk insisting that the three-quarters of an inch that we needed was too minuscule to bother ringing up.
It wasn’t yet noon, but almost all our problems had been resolved for the time being. In the street in front of the vulca, I stood watch over our pile of luggage as Nathan and Pedro made one last attempt to locate a new tube. My mind wandered to a bad fall I had taken a few months earlier on the lake shore of Bariloche. I had rolled my ankle and fallen off a wide log I was standing on, landing hard on my neck and side of my face. I had scraped and bruised my left knee, left thigh, both shins, and hairline, but I was ok. And the dip into the pristine, ice cold waters of Bariloche afterward, determined as I was to celebrate our arrival in Patagonia, did me a world of good. But a spiral of dark thoughts was approaching, their footfall so quiet I hadn’t heard them coming. Suddenly they were just there, cloaked in my own voice, counting off all the ways my life would have been made a million times worse had I been severely injured. The trip could have ended there, two months prior, and my whole life would have looked completely different, and my imagination quickly began filling in the blanks. Fear of what hadn’t happened, but potentially could have happened, was overwhelming. A pall of nausea clung heavily to my body. I felt viscerally ill and I began to sweat as I stood there. And then I had another thought.
It was the clearest experience of thought I could remember having. It was like words spoken into my mind.
It hurts you to think this way. Stop.
So I stopped. The nausea receded as suddenly as its onset. Things that lay within the realm of possibility could stay there. What could be more real than the wholeness of my living, healthy, uninjured body? Than the shiny, regenerated skin on my knee? Than how far we had come? I could stand watch for the signs of bad news that I’ve somehow always known might be coming for me. It was within my power to make preparations in the event that my return home was to be in a body bag, as my mother had cautioned against before our departure. And it was certainly within my power to feel guilt for causing her the anxiety.
I sat down on our duffle and took my head into my hands. Whatever was in my power, I wasn’t responsible for anyone else’s anxiety but my own. Could I perhaps find some purpose in the gifts that have fallen into my lap? Some semblance of will, intention, or something like it? Could I respect their reality as I had come to respect the shapes and colors of this land—its Milky Way and scorpions; its Volcan de Fuego, which spewed fireballs to our delight and then destroyed the village in its shadow only months later; its watermelons, cucumbers, and chiles cultivated on the banks of the Amazon’s tributaries? It didn’t matter that I would never know the name of the giver. It didn’t even matter whether the gifts came from mere oversight or through special favor, when I could only imagine anyway. The tube and tire patches held. We bid farewell to Pedro and rode Horace onto the loading ramp of the ferry to Quellon.
Maintaining wooden fishing boats in Quellon, Chiloe. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
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Nathan with our machinist’s fee. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Each morning, men hammered cotton caulking between the planks of solid wood fishing boats in the harbor. And so it was that we snapped our last selfie along the PanAmerican highway at its official terminus, alongside boats that would be repainted and cajoled into service until their planks would seal out sea water no more. Someday we would find the film we shot that on last day of our old life, when we hopped the watery gap between the deck of the Famiglia Santa and the dock once and for all, and heaved shut its “sliding” red door behind us.
We stood in the street among a crowd of uniformed students eating completos con fritas, or fully-loaded hotdogs, and shared a paper cone of french fries. In a machinist shop brimming with spiraled metallic shavings, we waited for the shower of sparks emanating from somewhere behind a pile of parts to die down before we called out a greeting. A wild-haired machinist emerged—would he bore a few holes into our little copper tube?
Pues, sí. He waved us off when we asked for his fee, requesting only that we bring him a liter of Coca Cola in the afternoon instead.
Pavement ends. Photo by Diana Juárez.
We searched the city in vain for a new camara neumatico, or inner tube, and a mobile phone mount; virtually no one rode regularly motorcycles down here. We bought spare ribs in the meat markets, capitalizing on the certainty of being able to cook up a square meal and eat off of separate plates in the well-outfitted communal kitchen of the hostel, in whose garden we were invited to camp. The housekeeper of the hostel fried up buñuelos in the afternoon and demanded that I join her and the handyman in the empty dining room. The wood stove blazed in the corner as she set a plate of still-steaming donuts and jam before me.
Get your esposo in here! She clucked as I took a crisp, fluffy bite. I didn’t dare correct her—Nathan and I were not husband and wife—and did as I was told.
Our last few nights were plagued by motorcycle problems which we endeavored to remedy as quickly as we could, while still sleeping in the wild. Nathan adjusted the steering column on the beach at Ancúd, where we watched dolphins play in the shallows. In the morning, we shared coffee with Andres, a man with Down syndrome wearing patched fishermen's clothes and wading boots, who hiked up and down the beach and combed the sand for washed-up treasure while his family members fished.
On the beach at Ancúd, Chile. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
Fewer than two weeks remained before our flight from Santiago, and we could no longer risk getting stuck in some out of the way place. We did manage however, to camp on a heavily forested riverbank where a tree went up in white, crackling flames. Indeed, 9 p.m. on Saturday night seemed an odd hour to begin a controlled burn on public land. No one else was around, except for a pick up truck parked on the bridge above the stream. While we were safely on the bank opposite to the tree, which by this point had been completely consumed, the stones of the riverbank were large and comically spherical and had been difficult to cross on our way in. A quick getaway would be impossible. Wildfire hazard signs were posted around the region, so I called the local fire department to report the fire, provided our coordinates, and asked if any controlled burns had been scheduled for our area. However, the department was unable to locate us.
Oh, is it still burning? No one came? they asked, when I followed up with a call 20 minutes later.
The fire eventually died down, without catching any other trees.
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A kilo of frutillas. Photo by Diana Juárez.
Dirty hands and paper maps. Photo by Diana Juárez.
We ate a kilo of frutillas, strawberries, purchased at a roadside stand in our last 24 hours before arriving in Valparaíso. I understood immediately that they were the only real strawberries I’d ever eaten. Our main priority, however, was managing Horace’s carburetor, which was now spewing gasoline from the moment Nathan turned on the petcock until he turned it off. The constant torrent of gas had even dissolved the stitching on the sole of Nathan’s boot and was beginning to burn the dorsal of his foot.
The city of Valparaíso, muraled over. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
Gas-cades aside, it was the oddest feeling. The end of the trip was happening to us. We filled our days with as much sightseeing as we could, but our adventure now had very concrete limits. We took in the colorful houses and the hideously tacky home of Chile’s poet laureate Pablo Neruda perched on the hills of sunny Valparaíso by the sea. There, we found a surfeit of falafel houses, vintage clothing, and artisan coffee and colorful murals colorfully expressing Anti-Yankee sentiment, as we had in all cosmopolitan tourist destinations. We learned that on voyages to the California from Europe during the Gold Rush, the port of Valparaíso was the first stop on the way to San Francisco—the first stop in six months, in fact. Six months, with favorable winds, would remain. Many who had left home with their sights set on my nascent City By the Bay and found themselves out of money and longing for the medical discovery of dramamine, got off at Santiago and never looked back. Thus, the same immigrant heritage which shaped my own hometown made strikingly similar marks upon the port city of Valparaíso. Here, too, I felt a sense of home, through a Latin looking glass.
We found the pace of the city of Santiago pleasantly live-able. We visited the Museum of Memory and Human Rights dedicated to victims of the atrocities perpetrated during the coup and years of dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. We attended to necessary details—we power-washed the mud of countless loamy, rainy days off the bike on the brick patio outside Julio’s home, who would orchestrate Horace’s shipment back to the US by air. We hid Woolworth, our sheepskin, within our bundle of belongs and riding gear to be crated up with Horace, as US Customs would not have permitted an animal skin to enter the country otherwise. We sated ourselves on Chilean fruits.
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Quelat, the hanging glacier at Quelat National Park. Photo by Nathan Sharp.
I climbed onto the crowded bus with my backpack and our duffle bag, and Nathan followed behind me. Airport bound. As the bus lurched and jolted along the congested city streets, it was hard to look back on everything we had accomplished with love. It was hard to look toward the future with optimism because the next challenge was unnamed. In 16 months, we had covered just under 30,000 miles. Now, we were going home.
The funny thing is, it’s difficult to understand what lifting your spirit feels like until it happens to you. Where it happened to me, the sights along the Austral were glorious—dolphins sickled up through the Puyuhuapi sound; the hanging glacier of Quelat gleamed above thick forest like clouds clinging to an alien planet, and the lakes of Chile Chico dazzled us with their clarity and aquamarine. It was inarguably beautiful—I was grateful to behold it and I wanted to push off our homecoming for as long as we could. I breathed easily and smiled even more readily.
Yet, I didn’t feel that insistent tug saying, Just stay here. Just step into the trees and don’t look back. The rhythms of Chilean life thrummed too similarly to those of home. Nor did I feel bowled over by majesty and strangeness, as I had in remote, sparsely inhabited places like the Salar de Uyuni or the Lagunas route of southwestern Bolivia; or, conversely, as I had in the far reaches of the Ecuadorian Amazon that howled and cackled with life eating life eating life.
He’s adjusted the steering on the beach once before. This time, he’s smiling. Photo by Diana Juárez.
I had felt closer to an eternal heartbeat in those wild, earlier, and slightly more northerly places—to feel it was why I now understood that I had left. By the same reflexive wisdom that a moth sheds the outermost boundary of its body through which it inspires oxygen, I knew I had to change my life. Shed what’s cracked and old and breathe into another lifetime. Don’t change; go ahead and wheeze your last. Still, in those wild places, my mind had refused to relax its grip over my body. Privately, my chest was buckling under the weight of this knowing—I was desperate for it to fill my lungs like a deep breath.
I had to leave home and I had to forsake some comfort, I was certain. But the certainty fizzled out there. I remember weeping to Nathan one night in our apartment in Bogotá. I’m running out of time. I’m running out of time.
What I had to do, I suppose, is what I did. By inhabiting other places, I had become a place that I wanted to inhabit. I had to invite life back into corners of my being the way humanity has always enticed the gods to rest in ornate cabinets and to walk among our fields and families. But I had to observe, first, the elements that pleased them—which little flames; which incense scattering precious oil into the sky like birds; which of the colors and shapes and sounds plucked from the world we live and die in. It was muddy work—convincing my organs, nerves, bones, and blood that they were all a bit like the eternal. But I believe it was critical. I had to make myself a place where my heart had will to pump and where my lungs wanted to compress and expand. I had to make myself a place into which the very air was pleased to flow. I had to remember that I have always been such a place.
It was a slow year-and-a-half that I had spent doubting, failing, and yet, staying; knowing I hadn’t yet accomplished the vague objectives I had set out to accomplish, and so, not turning around. It was time spent at the side of a road collecting rubbish and sticks with which to prop up a deflated back tire. It was time spent sending Horace's entire wheel off with a stranger to have the inner tube replaced because the spare tube we'd been carting around for months turned out to be a waste of space. It was time on an empty beach after an argument, alone and allowed to wonder whether atonement and penance had to go on forever and whether I could simply decide to forgive whomever, forgive myself, for whatever needed forgiving. It was time with an intestinal parasite at high altitude, far from any brick and mortar shelter, simply willing myself not to hurl my dry bread and Coca-Cola.
Time and challenge made a place out of me, although I have no doubt that the length of time and the kinds of challenges that this process entails are as unique as the person experiencing them. I can scarcely remember now—who was it that I thought I needed to be in the eye of the eternal?
Horace prepares for takeoff. Photo by Nathan Sharp.