Reflection

Dear Readers,

This is the last post of my Watson year. It comes as the first drop in a river that will grow and meander from here forward. Before we dive in, I want to thank you for reading – writing is solitary only in action, but in larger scope, it is shared and made possible by all who inspire and all who read and pass it forward.

Israeli writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens, questions how a species of big headed, relatively weak apes could take over as the dominant species on the planet in a fairly short period of time. Harari credits our immense success to our ability to organize ourselves in masses around particular intersubjective fictions – money, myth, and law to name a few. Homo sapiens means “wise humans” in latin, and I am humored to think that maybe we should call ourselves Homo fictas, “humans of fiction.”

As a writer, storyteller, and student of language, I am concerned with words – their purpose and manipulation to form interpretations of the world, to compel action and incite emotion, to unify, to uplift, and to protest, to tear down. Language and writing are the fertile ground on which the great narratives of humanity are built and stratified, fortified with time and power.

Part of the work for survival is to compete, to make it in a harsh world, and there is only so much room for one species before others begin to disappear; we are seeing extinction at a rate unprecedented by any other blossoming of a single species ever. The planetary impact of humanity is staggering, and we must honestly weigh the components of life.

Because of our ability to tell stories, we are not only prone to biological evolution, but to the evolution of consciousness. In just 20 years, the internet shifted the paradigm, becoming a global phenomena and bursting culture at the seams. Can we cocreate a story about sustainability as compelling as that of technology? As common vocabulary loses terms from nature and expands into digital reality, is it possible to entwine strands of our ancient reliance on land, water, flora, and fauna into the sphere of binary code and complex computation?

One metaphor of the river has to do with the movement of time: a child growing up along a certain stretch of river cannot perceive the full scale of the river or the time it takes to reach the sea, but a pilgrim who has walked the river’s length many times will have a longview and will see the interconnection of said river with the ocean. We must work for the longview.

With science & technology making great contributions to civilization, there is potential to overlook the catastrophic consequences of over-consuming and polluting the earth, and we cannot do this. We must use the tools of science and technology as well as our body of knowledge about nature and its dynamic systems to strive for a sustainable future. This includes building institutions around these tenets and working to transform certain norms.

I think in the shadow of Buckminster Fuller, a human of extraordinary courage who worked during World War II as a naval engineer. Post-war, depressed and losing capacity to live well, Fuller decided to take his own life. Standing on the shore of Lake Michigan pointing a gun at his own head, he had a revelation. He thought, why take my own life and cause suffering to those around me, when I could similarly sacrifice myself but for the good of others? From that moment on, Fuller dedicated himself to a 50 year experiment – how much good could he do for the rest of humanity and the earth in his life?

Fuller’s experiment lasted 56 years until he passed away and left the foundation of nanotech, the language of synergetics, a plea to prevent buildup of greenhouse gases in the 1970s – an inspiring legacy as ripe fruit for the world to pick and carry forward. Cultivating a positive future, like growing a garden, requires time, discipline, revitalization, and effort.

Presently I am working as a farm hand, with soil, water, and plants. The act of growing food is one I wish everyone could experience, for the dynamic process and the work required to farm will make every bite of life more flavorful. Perhaps next year I will be a student of law, exploring one of the great stories that shape our actions in the world. Angela Davis, wrote that “Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.’” Whether in a story or in the soil, roots connect to the substance that makes life possible, to grasp for that is a wonderful life’s work.

Jumbled as all of this may sound, it is a document of my life view from the age of 22 as I land on homeground with a rich year abroad steady on the mind. The urgency and difficulty of many situations we face on earth give powerful motivation to carry on downstream seeking solutions.

Thank you,
Galen

September 4, 2017 1

Rivers of What? A Watson Presentation

This poem is called Fishing

What are we looking for

Standing on sand or stone

Fishing into the waves

Getting our feet wet

What are we looking for

When we turn our eye

To the orange moon

The ironbound cliff

Fire in the place

Where fire burns

When we look at our hands

Lined with life

Telling stories that nobody writes

Our hands are truth

Look at your hands

When stars

And shadows on the deck

Don’t point North or South

And a dead reckon

Is all we have

When I was so afraid of the water

What the burning sun

Says to the corn

When it decides to grow

When grandma opens

The canned corn

And you take the kernels

To go fishing in the river

When the river fishes back

And pulls you in

What is it in the river

That speaks

To the soul

About moving on

About the ocean

About no end beginning

About loving the dirt

About what moves Earth

…

We begin when the Ganges River descended from Heaven.

When King Sagar wished more power, he decided to sacrifice a great horse. Jealous, Indra, the King of Gods, stole King Sagar’s chosen horse. To find the horse, Sagar sent his 60,000 sons who interrupted the great Sage Kapila in meditation, mistaking Kapila for the horse thief. Infuriated, Kapila incinerated the 60,000 sons. When Sagar found out, he broke down weeping, and Sage Kapila told him that to purify the incident, he must bring River Ganga to earth for salvation. Bhagiratha, the great-grandson of Sagar, convinced Brahma that Ganga must descend to Earth. Insulted to be expelled from heaven, Ganga wreaked havoc, flooding the world. Bhagiratha prayed urgently to Shiva, please entwine Ganga in your hair to hold her back, to save us. Hearing the call, Shiva agreed, and braided the great river as seven streams into his matted locks. Pleased at the union with Shiva, Ganga washed away the ashes of Sagar’s sons and filled the oceans and continues to bring salvation to India to this day.

Here is where she begins.

In June two years ago, I went looking for a book by environmentalist, Edward Abbey. Instead, I found Abbey’s friend Jack Loeffler – his big white beard and blue eyes. Jack Loeffler is a river man who spent his life recording geomythic mapping songs of people all over the world. He urged me as he urges everyone to think like a watershed.

A watershed is a community of life and land unified by water. A watershed is the whole body of a river system, and surely in that there is some soul.

This year, I wanted to find terra incognita and anima incognita, the margins of my map and the margins of humanity only charted with wild creatures and ideas, with water at the center. I wanted to map the unmappable, a sort of anthrocartoraphy to find out what anchors us in place. Of course, mostly I failed, hindered by so many human things. But, like Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, I had the opportunity to listen to the great river when I felt lost.

To think like a river. Like a mountain. Like the wind. First, one must listen.

The youth of India. Do they see Ganga as a goddess? Do they feel salvation in her waters?

In India, it was at times difficult to hear the river, for the fugue of humanity there is a lot to attend to. I do not have images of the garbage and sewage and bodies that Ganga carries, but one can imagine.

A river, a goddess.

There is Ganga and there is Torne.

Mikael rowing on Torne.

And Mikael skiing on Torne.

Mikael is on the river everyday. He rows, swims, iceskates, and skis. Mikael has surely listened a lot to the river; he picks berries and mushrooms to feed his family and knows the forest as a neighbor; he can name the things all about and he knows where the ice will be thin and how to survive in the winter woods. He is a philosopher, a naturalist.

We drank Torne’s water in confidence, without purification, a rare privilege. I think Torne is divine like Ganga, though she has less humanity to carry and no dams to clog her up. I also think that Hinduism is wise to anchor the gods in natural phenomena, for what miracle is more available to all of us than the gangetic river dolphin, mycelium, a blueberry, a pine tree, or a man on skis.

Another miracle, in Atacama one can find towns where no rain fell for 40 years. It’s as surprising to see green and water in Atacama as seeing a sadhu acetic on a cellphone.

Rio Loa, river in the great expanse of Pacific-bound desert serves the needs of a very large hole in the ground.

Chuquicamata, one of the largest open pit mines on earth is Loa’s neighbor, producing copper to electrify the world. Calmly, Loa quenches Chuqui’s thirst, and carries away Chuqui’s toxic detritus.

In Werner Herzog’s film Lo and Behold, about internet and connectivity, Ted Nelson explains the internet as dragging one’s hand through water. The most interesting thing about Chuquicamata is how it physically links water with the web.

These days, as we here testify, humans are globalizing. To think like a watershed leads to the realization that all water is cycling, interconnectivity is. And so seems the path of global civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson considers ethics as a system of human duties like religion but without the personality of God.I feel that the imaginings of Gods are but human personalities divined to voice human ethics in the face of Nature which does not observe morality with human eyes but rather offers us eyes and intelligence to observe the universe. Yuval Noah Harari suggests that Silicon Valley is a new sort of Vatican. And I agree, but what will be our book of Proverbs?

Our ethics about technology and our ethics about rivers are part of the same phenomenon; reformation. We are a species overwhelmed by our inventions and we need a philosophy of nature that includes the internet and smartphones and plastic garbage.

My grandmother Irene says this is Planet Life; we are in the terrarium of divinity, and in that, if in anything, we are unified. If the true cost of a thing is the amount of life expended to make it, what is the true cost of life? This is a question we must ask ourselves as rivers are declared dead and black, as the vocabulary of nature is disappearing from mouths and minds into libraries or worse.

My quest to create a linguistic cartography of humans and rivers was futile, alone. It is asking a painter to paint her soul. Such work is a worthy endeavor, but to be a force of nature it must be done together. We are all charting a cartography of place all the time, we are all painting our souls. We are poets of existence. Along with the rest of the universe, we create nature along this rapid of time we happen to be paddling. As messy as it will be, as dissonant as jazz, I want a poetry, a manifesto, to synergize nature and technology.

Let’s be the manifesto, let’s be the poetry to merge nature and technology, lets call on Shiva and Ganga to help braid this flood into a river of salvation.

August 7, 2017 1

Welcome Home

Walking on the green grass

A buzz overhead

A plane flying by

With a large banner.

I read it:

$3000 Dollar Breast Implants

But no phone number

What if I want breast implants?

I remember another sign

That I saw in the morning:

Welcome to the United States

Welcome Home.

July 31, 2017 0

River

Where the river knows no end

Is in kindling flames of family

It is the poetry of the river

To unite mountain to plain to sea

And in that synchronous flow

Where beginning is never nor end

Is the promise of passing

A promise of time

Which holds us all

Together

July 15, 2017 0

The Blue

A distant mountain

Pretending paradise
Blood in

The rivers of my hands
And looking up

We are everything

July 10, 2017 0

Meat

I walk to the corral

Outside Antonio

Clears gravel and sand

From an area the size

Of a sheep

And digs a small hole

On one side

I follow him through

The pallet gate

And stand by

While he finds

The one
Roughly he grabs it

Holding its forelegs

Walks it to the gate

Through and onto the ground
Tells me to tie the legs

And I fumble

He gets tense, tenser

I continue to fumble,

Bastante, says he,

Enough
I hold the legs together

Tight
Antonio draws the knife

Clean over the neck

Again and again
Fire ignites in the legs

I can’t hold on

And the movement is wild

Spastic
We step back

And the small hole

Becomes a red puddle

And the bloods seeps in sand

Like water to the aquifer
I feel so grateful

For the life of this sheep

For the meals it gives us

For the cycles that brought

Us to this moment of siege

The taking of life
Then it is still

And we put the fluffy

Thing in the wheel barrow

To bring it over to

The butcher table

And the sweet birds

Sing the funeral song

As the day begins

June 27, 2017 2

Preface and Potatos

Excavando Papas
In the sand

I am searching

In hand, a bone

I think it’s pelvic

Perfect for sand

Fits like a

Familiar spoon
I am looking for Papas

Pulling rosy cheeked

Eye bearing

Hearts of starch

And sunshine

Excavating

Sunshine from sand
The potato

Sweet dumpling

Of the soil

Plopping its weight

Into my waiting hand

…

I am here, and here comes a poem. Excavating potatoes, and excavating poems. These are not so different in fact. Both, for me, are currently the fruit of living. Finding poetry in sentience, finding papas in sand.
Last year, about this time, my dear friend Haleigh Paquette and I went on a walk in the woods. We wandered about in the lowlands, looking at beech and oak and spruce forests, ferns for minutes. Then we climbed up a gorge between familiar mountains, seeking views from the heights. At the notch, in the quiet spruce stand, the path no longer led on as one, but formed an intersection. Left up – right up – straight ahead the belly of the beast. We wandered straight, and encountering nobody but ourselves as we shared a world of a conversation.
Haleigh and I, when we get to talking, there is no evading the substance of mind, and so, this particular day, with no distraction but the sunshine and the forest, the wonderful spring of coastal mountain, we talked. As we wandered and wondered, and time passed as only time can when nobody is there to talk about it, Haleigh asked me questions, and I asked Haleigh questions. I started to feel something quite powerful during this talk. I was finishing school at the time, nearly graduated, and heading into the unknown. But I knew something. I knew something in the way that truth leaps up like a fire stoked.
It was poetry.
Not a poem. But rather a call. Like a spring wind beckoning to the fisherman, lapping the shore and stirring the fish to begin their festivities of summer. It was in the most wonderful way a natural sensation, a reciprocity.
…
Now, after a year of time, in the confusion of austral winter, and the staggering yet wonderful realization that we indeed live on a flying globe, I am harvesting potatoes, cutting alfalfa, walking with sheep and goats, feeding rabbits, and laughing at llamas. I am becoming friends with Doña Maria, an 82 year old woman who has lived here all her life, a cultivator of the soil and a pastora of animals, a hiladora who spins wool and weaves and knits. Also with Don Antonio, son of Doña Maria, a man of steady humor and grin who relinquished the life of the city to work the earth with his mother.
We three are living in a valley ringed by volcanoes to the north and east, a fractured canyonland of springs that arise from a series of geysers to the southeast, the canyon of the Rio Salado to the south, and the open desert to the west where in the night one can see the lights of the Chuquicamata Mine envying the scale of the stars above–Southern Cross, Orion, Scorpio, Taurus.
Turi, where we are, is a hermitage of sorts, home to a few that cultivate the land and run animals. There is a geothermal bath in the town, that leads to a canal which brings water to the house here, and to the east, just across the road is an enormous series of small hills covered by a lost city, a stone lattice of massive extent called la Pucará de Turi, the largest of the settlements left by the Atacameño culture.
…
While I am here, I am going to experiment in poetry. These poems will come spontaneously, and may not come with narrative such as this. But please, dear readers, let this be a turn of chapter as I enter the final months of this riparian journey.

Where there is water

The underbelly of earth

Is laughing so hard

It’s wet itself

May 27, 2017 2

Atacama — El Río Loa

La tierra del sol y cobre–
Once a storm of sandstone

Had a seabed churning

Waving at the heavens
Now it is

Lost of its sea
As though

San Pedro, San Pablo

Miño, Láscar

The volcanoes

Burst at once

Melted the ocean

And left

La tierra del sol y cobre
Left the marbled earth

To bake in the southern sun

A crucible of copper

And quebradas

Canyons

Carved of wind

And water

The little that remains
One morning, still sleepy eyed, gravity decides to abandon you. Thinking that you are just drifting back into a dream, you leave your chair at the breakfast table, rise above the toast and jam, boiled eggs and coffee, reach out to get one last sip of java as a bit sloshes out and stains your nice shirt. Now you know you’re awake. You feel anxious to be late for work, to be wearing slippers rather than shoes as you float out the window into public airspace, there is a bit of toothpaste on your face, as you rise, and rise, and rise straight up, above the neighborhood, watching all the other people down there doing people things, bringing their kids to school, walking the dog. What will I tell my boss? Did I leave the damn stove on?
But as you witness the slow unfolding of earth below, the patches of green, the blue of the sea, the curve of the horizon against the forbidding black of space, you forget those worries, and you see this planet in all its humble and thrilling form with the clouds rolling over you like a swimming pool of egyptian cotton, and speaking of Egypt, there it is, the brown and brown and brown of earth, the little pyramids and the stretch of green, that long thread of life we call the Nile. And then around you go, past India where you smell the sweet spice of Madras and the indian ocean and the climbers on Mt Everest up north look like little lego people, and the Earth is spinning and you feel dizzy, and over the Pacific Ocean, what if I fall in there?? And then South America, and over the red flowing sediment of the desert an earsplitting roar comes out of nowhere, and a jet airplane rushes by. In the intense adrenaline of that moment, time slows to a crawl, and as the turbulence around the Boeing 737 shakes your very bones, you see me and my curly hair and wide eyes, ogling out the window at the desert below, and you think, what on earth has this kid on such a sugar rush about this barren land that looks like the coffee stain on my shirt?
Well, here I am, alive in the desert. And I want to tell you why I am so excited about it.

Stretching west from the Andes, from southern Peru and southwestern Bolivia, through northern Chile and Argentina, along 600 miles of Southern Pacific coast is the Atacama. Marked by high peaks and volcanoes, enormous salt flats, canyons wandering through the sandstone, and hundreds of mines active and abandoned, the Atacama is often recognized as the driest place on earth. But for Antarctica, this is true, yet the Atacama has supported humans living here for 13,000 years or more. Atacameño peoples have made the oases of this desert home, cultivating the arid soil with water from the slightest of rivers, or vertientes and ojos de agua, desert springs falling from the cliffs or welling up out of nowhere. Civilizations like Tiahuanaco and the Incas traded and at times had sovereignty over communities in the desert, using the great wealth of mineral resources and access to the sea to their advantage.
I was drawn here on my geopoetic quest by the lore of Río Loa, Chile’s longest river, which tumbles and winds its way from the fractured rise of Miño Volcano through 440km of desert until it meets the Pacific. The Río Loa and its tributaries are truly remarkable. Fed at once by snowmelt from the peaks, and by springs and geothermal upwellings, even geysers, the river, apart from its staggering canyons, is not what many people would recognize as a river. In the abundance of water of New England for example, Río Loa would be no more than a brook, but here, it is everything.

When I flew into Calama, I was relieved to breathe the crisp desert air, air that reminded me so much of home in New Mexico. Outside, the sun was hot, and with this sensation, I felt the twisting of seasons having just entered austral autumn, coming from the northern winter. Not only that, it was my first time across the equator.
Doña Virginia Panire, a friend of my professor from College of the Atlantic, Patricia Ayala Rocabado generously offered to pick me up at the airport. Doña Virginia came and met me, explaining that she had arranged for me to stay at her sister’s home in town. On the way, we stopped at El Parque Loa, Loa Park, and I got my first real glimpse of the river. The city has put up some small dams to create a swimming hole in the river, and there are places to walk and sit on either side. The flow is not very dramatic, but Doña Virginia told me that in February there was a lot of rain in the mountains and the river rose enormously. I learned that this is a feature of the “Bolivian Winter” when during El Niño years, the Andes receive lots of precipitation from the pacific.
Doña Virginia started telling me about the region as we walked around, pointing out a replica of a church in Chiu Chiu, the oldest church in Chile, and some of the mountains and volcanoes around the area, San Pedro and San Pablo, and Paniri, a mountain with which Doña Virginia shares her family name. She explained to me that their family is rooted in Turi and Ayquina, villages to the east near Paniri, and that they only live in Calama so that their kids can attend school.

From Parque Loa we drove to the house where Doña Irma, Virginia’s sister was waiting. She showed me my room, which is actually a studio for spinning and weaving wool. I felt so welcome and their warmth was remarkable, treating my as a friend before we all remembered each other’s names.
Over the following days I learned that Doña Irma and her husband Don Rene have three boys, Matias, Juan, and Tomas, and Doña Virginia has one, David. All of the kids play music, Andean music with various groups here in Calama. I learned that Doña Irma is working with wool for a living, and Don Rene worked in the hospital for many years as a paramedic, and now he and Doña Irma run a hotel/restaurant in Ayquina on the weekends, and he does construction work and all kinds of things during the week.
On Thursday we went to the Calama shopping mall to see the opening of a product that Doña Irma worked on called Volvimos a Tejer, “Back to Knitting.” It is a bag that comes with three balls of yarn made from a sheep and alpaca wool blend, and knitting needles. It also has instructions about how to knit. Doña Irma and her friends spin the wool for the bags, and it is sold in big department stores called Paris all over Chile. The idea is that here working with wool is an extremely important part of life, and has been a livelihood for people in the region for centuries. Doña Irma wants to encourage young people to continue the practice and tradition and Paris wants to sell products made locally.

Though it was commercial, it was good to see that this big business was supporting Doña Irma and the other women of the group. Doña Irma told me excitedly that she dreams of making a wool cooperative in Turi, the village where she grew up and where her mom still lives and keeps sheep, goats, and llamas.
On Friday, Don Rene and Matias and I drove out of Calama to Ayquina. There was a major dust storm with wind blowing east, bringing dust from the copper mines at Chuquicamata all across the desert. On the way to Ayquina we stopped at Laguna Inka Coya, a salty lake in the middle of the desert that confounds visitors and scientists alike. The formation is very deep, so deep that people are not sure of the source. It is coming from groundwater, and some people believe a legend that is is actually an “ojo del mar” an eye of the sea, and that the water is actually seawater. It is an anomaly in the desert where all other lakes only fill if there is rain, and otherwise remain as enormous salt flats in the desert.

Arriving in Ayquina I was surprised by the number of houses. There were hundreds of houses, but I was told that only seven houses are actually occupied. Why so many others? I asked. Don Rene and Matias went on to explain that Ayquina hosts an enormous festival every September for the Virgin of Guadaloupe, and 70,000 people come to Ayquina to celebrate. The rest of the year the town is like a ghost town, and because of a conflict with the government about money stemming from the celebration, the town remains a private entity, without services of the state like electricity. There is a generator for the village that runs for just two hours at night, so for the rest of the time, it is either solar power, personal generators, or no electricity. Because Don Rene and Doña Irma run a restaurant and hotel, they have a generator.

Ayquina sits in an opening to a canyon of the Rio Salado (Salty River), and the resturant, El Valle, is the center of town, next to the church. The view out the front window is staggering–it looks right out over the canyon and the small parcels of corn and alfalfa growing with water from a vertiente that comes right out of the canyon cliffs. In the evening after we arrived and gathered firewood (pallets that Don Rene brings from Calama), we started up the woodfire oven as friends of Don Rene’s began to arrive. They were friends from his time at the hospital, and we all sat together sharing drinks and stories through the evening.

The next morning as Don Rene was preparing to roast mutton over an open fire, I went off on an adventure up the canyon, walking through the river and thinking about the weeks and months to come.

The canyon is about 200 feet deep, and after the arable land around the vertiente at Ayquina, the canyon starts to narrow, and the walls get steeper. There were animal tracks all over that I could follow, and along the sides of the river, a type of wide sedge was growing that reminded me of the type of plants in the intertidal wetlands in Maine, something that likes salt. Further up the canyon, the sheep tracks went up and there was a choke where some enormous boulders had fallen from the walls onto the river. I climbed around in these rocks the size of houses for a while, feeling the intense vulnerability of a human in such a place, so many stories of people heading into canyons and never coming back.

Leaving the rocks, I went to the north side of the canyon where I could see some small constructions under an overhang. Climbing up, I followed a path that was fairly easy to make out over volcanic pumice stone. On the way I was stopped dead in my tracks by some petroglyphs carved into the canyon. I just stood there staring for awhile, wondering who carved this face and the llamas and the little people on the wall. Struck by the wonderful reality that someone hundreds or thousands of years past was communicating with me, telling me something, a small fragment of the past.

Then I looked into the little constructions under the overhang. There wasn’t much there, but I couldn’t help but feel the thrill of this place, that humans could be here, live here, for so long. I continued out of the canyon where I had to jump a sheep fence where a sheep had been less successful than I. At the top I was struck by how different the world in the canyon was from up top. Up top it was windy, the plants were all diminutive, and the horizon felt so, so far away.

Back in Ayquina after climbing out of the canyon, I got a ride to watch Matias play soccer with the Ayquina team against the neighboring village Chiu Chiu. They played on a pure dirt field, no grass. It was quite something to watch them play with the 20000 foot volcanoes in the background. I forgot my camera, so you’ll just have to imagine. After the game we returned for lunch, and we munched the amazing roasted mutton.
In the evening, we went out to Turi, a village much smaller than Ayquina to celebrate mother’s day with Doña Virginia and Doña Irma’s mom Doña Maria. Turi isn’t directly on the river, rather it is watered by a vertiente, a spring that just bubbles up from the ground. It is quite near Volcan Paniri, where Doña Irma told me she has an apple orchard. Turi is also home to Pokara, an Incan ruin, one of the largest in Chile. I didn’t get the chance to explore it yet, but I will. Matias and I went outside at some point and the stars were booming across the sky. For the first time in my life I saw the Southern Cross and the deep blue of the Milky Way around it.
I will post night sky photos soon, but not yet.
On Sunday we prepared lunch and served it to people who had come to church in Ayquina. Doña Irma and Don Rene made chicken, pork ribs, and llama meat, soup, and salad. After cleaning up, we headed back to Calama.
In the evening I sat looking at maps for hours. I found the headwaters of the Río Loa, on Volcan Miño pass through a canyon called Quebrada de Mal Paso, the canyon of bad passage. For the first 150 kilometers of the river’s journey, there are no towns and at over 12,000 feet of elevation the place is cold and scattered with canyons on all sides, making it difficult to cross. Further on, as the river starts passing through towns, the water diminishes dramatically because the mine at Chuquicamata has bought up water rights from many of the villages for use processing ore, and sometimes this leaves the river dry.
Below Calama the river goes through a series of intense canyons in absolute desert as it makes a u-turn through the desert and then arrives and Quillagua, before heading straight west through the biggest of all the canyons, at least half a mile deep, before it wanders into the Pacific.
I started reading studies on the water quality of Loa and its tributaries, and especially noted the high levels of arsenic as well as other heavy metals like mercury and even detergents. One paper I read blamed most of the serious pollution on the mine, but an article from the Journal of Applied Geochemistry notes that the waters in the area are heavy in arsenic and other metals as a result of the groundwater coming from young volcanic rock, for example the Río Salado is born from geothermal geysers at El Tatio. The article blames the mine some, but moreso it blames evaporation and water impoundment for the concentration of harmful materials.
In 1997, the town of Quillagua was devastated when floods, not unlike those that Doña Virginia told me happened this February, caused sediment in three reservoirs above the town to get stirred up. This sediment was holding unnaturally high concentrations of heavy metals that had built up over time behind the dams. Suddenly the water went from having 300 µg/L (micrograms per liter) of arsenic to having 30000 µg/L, while the recommended maximum for drinking water is just 50 µg/L. This flood apparently devastated the crops, animals, and the people in Quillagua, a town that at the time had not received rain in 40 years. It has still to recover and most residents have left. Quillague is considered the driest town on the planet, and the Loa, the oasis, was what kept it alive. The floods also seriously damaged the fishery off the coast.
With all this in mind, I am redressing my plans to trek the length of the river – the Quebrada de Mal Paso, the heavy metals, the danger of canyoning alone, and the potential for drinking seriously polluted water along the Río, even with a good filtration system, it probably isn’t safe. Tomorrow and Thursday I am going on a reconnaissance to explore the river in a vehicle, to see what these places really look like. Reporting back soon.
Look out the window

The dark of space, the light earth

A desert laughing

May 17, 2017 0

Skiing the Torne — Headwaters

There—

A beginning

A jagged line

Of earth pining for sky

Granite range

Rolling off the forest

Heavenbound and Earthheld

A cloudcradle

Ever so slowly

Tumbling down

In blue ice and sand

Carried by skyfall

That floods all

White

Skiing from Nikkaluokta, looking up at the black granite cliffs and the wind waves of snow and ice that cross the nearly vertical faces lining the valley, I was fixated. Something inside of me felt at once exhilarated and unrestrained, the kilometers melted into the snow beneath my skis, numbers and language felt to mean nothing, effervescent reminders of how I learned to understand the world only one of an infinity of ways. The mountains breathed fresh air into my lungs and set my mind afire.

The first day I made it early to Kebnekaise Fjëllstation, a beautiful mountain lodge built into a fold of mountain birch just below Kebnekaise Mountain, the tallest peak in Sweden, just breaching 2,000 meters. Looking at the lodge from a distance, I was surprised that it hadn’t been carried off by an avalanche, but the birch grove suggested that this might be a safe(er) place. Kebnekaise was the first STF establishment where I stayed. STF is the Swedish Tourism Federation, and they maintain the huts and stations along Kungsleden as it is a popular ski and trekking route. People flock from all over the world in March to ski the good conditions and spend some time in the immensity, letting their minds and bodies expand through the open air and the newly long days.
I considered leaving Kebnekaise to continue to the next hut when in walked Örjan Pekka, the editor of the Haparanda Bladet newspaper who I met the day I started. Örjan and his friend Berth Widmark, a mechanic and retired firefighter, had driven snowmobiles from Kalix (just west of Haparanda) north, and we happened to arrive here at the same time. Örjan introduced me to Nisse Andersson who was at the Fjëllstation working as electrician. Not a bad day on the job. We got to talking and hit it off, sharing a love for skiing and travel.

In the evening when Nisse, Berth, and Örjan went for dinner, I was sitting with a young guy named Matti Rapila Andersson, a photographer and skier who was also up for work. Matti got to stay 11 days in the mountains, the lucky dog. Both feeling high on life, we got to talking. He showed me his photographs and told me stories about from where they came. One of an island of forest in the Moroccan desert burst from the page, an ode to the force of life in hostile environments. It can be seen here in his collection (t)here is (ho)me: http://www.rapila.se/there-is-home/. Our conversation rambled through nature, work, and whatever emerged. After dinner the men returned and we talked and had beers until late at night. There I was in the afternoon expecting a quiet early night in, and instead I was welcomed by a party!
The generosity and kindred spirits of these people left me feeling so good. I am no loner in the way of thought, there are so many people on the life-train I’m riding, and I am always grateful to meet them, to invigorate the senses and the intellect with stories and debate, and then to carry on, new lessons breaching my consciousness.

In the morning, after a delicious breakfast thanks to Nisse, I was off. Skiing on, I thought if the himalaya, over four times the size of these scandinavian titans. No matter about size, here the peaks rise right off the atlantic coast and the grace of mountains swimming in snow from floor to summit is overwhelming to me, an earthbound amoeba on plastic planks towing my life in a sled.
The morning brought me up and over a small pass with beautiful blue ice that glinted when the mountain mist parted for the sun. This blue on the crest of the pass is the headwaters of Kalix River, meandering arm-in-arm with Torne to the sea, but at the moment in a winter stasis.
In the afternoon I took a shortcut over a low ridge that promised some fresh powder on the downslope. At Kebnekaise I was made aware that avalanche danger was high because of warm days in February and high winds making solid crusts that can break and slide. Staying low and on southwestern slopes was best, but I could see a few places where slides had happened. Nonetheless I made it over the ridge and descended into a wonderland of a valley, rimmed by the kebnekaise massif on one side and a long wall of mountains with rolls of cliff dropping to valley bottom.
The turns going down felt the height of living, as though I was enveloped in the immensity of granite and snow upon which the friction that had caused my legs such expenditure of effort no longer had the power to keep me in place. Skiing downhill is as close as I’ve ever been to flying on my own two legs, and too fleeting it is. As I came to a stop in the rolling flats, I laughed at myself for skiing a 500km approach to make these sweet turns. It was all worth it.

The next three days are a blur of white, rolling billows of mountain snow, saunas and evening conversations with tourists, meeting the kind people who mind the mountain huts, and a sensory experience of walking on winter that submersed my mind in a peace of enormity.
The mid-section between Nikkaluokta and Abisko is a complete desert in winter. Between the pass from Kebnekaise through the awe inspiring expanse around Sälka hut and until Alesjaure, over 50km of skiing, I didn’t see any plants, nor animals, even birds. Yet life never felt so ripe with essence as in an environment such as this: the high peaks, ceaseless desert—just like the rolling ocean.

As I approached Abisko National Park from Alesjaure, I could sense closure on the horizon. The knowing that this ski trip was nearly over sat very well with me. A brief reflection helped me see that what Nan Shepherd referred to as a “geopoetic quest” had just unfolded before my ski tips, and the lessons were at once present and deepening, but inexplicable to my rational mind. There was not time for extraversion in those mountains, the peaks are not concerned with my journey, but realizing my privilege to be there, I understood that I could introvert myself into the belly of the peaks.
In a narrow valley between Gárddenvárri and Šiellanjunni, beautiful Sámi-named peaks, I dug into a snow ridge to build a home for myself for the night. The exercise was not as quick as I imagined, and after four hours of steady digging, and soaking myself to the bone to recreate the blueprint I had in mind, I had a wonky but functional snow cave where I could intern myself into the mountain for the night, but not before catching some turns.
To dry off, I skied up the nice powder blanket of the lee-slope and caught some telemark turns in the powder, looking down the valley towards Abisko and the gnarled birch forest. Up there it became apparent to me that I was was really truly standing on the headwaters, that the stream flowing below the heaps of snow in this little valley soon connects to Kamjåjakka, then becomes Ábeskojávri—Abisko Lake, then Abiskojåkka—the Abisko River, a principle headwater tributary of Torne that meets the river’s flow in the great depths of Torne Trask.

Returning to my cave, dry and happy after my ski, I cooked up some dinner. Moments after digging in, a helicopter nearly shaved my head, and flew out of sight over the windridge, but the deafening sound told me it was landing. Like a nervous rat I scurried up the wind ridge to ensure that my house didn’t cave in, and the heli was just a hundred feet away. Then I looked up and saw some dots flying down Šiellanjunni—heli skiers.

As the flew off waving to me eating my dinner, I was flabbergasted at this wild world. Feeling full I crawled into my cave and sealed the door and with it, sealed out the noise of the world. The quiet of that cave resounded and a fugue of mountain winter entered my consciousness, a symphony of a wilded mind—here I was, sleeping in the river, submerged.

This journey has no end. As rivers have no end, no beginning, but are a fluid fabric holding the world in a trance of movement and wild choreography.
“The river is everywhere at once, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the rapids, in the sea, in the mountains, everywhere at once, and there is only the present time for it, not the shadow of the past, not the shadow of the future…”
-Herman Hesse, Siddhartha