A Simple Phone Call

Everyone was making money. Or trying to, or talking about it, so that every conversation inevitably came around to the topic. I understood the need; it was the height of the dot-com boom, an unprecedented period of opportunity, and the world seemed so infused with promise: the promise that with plentiful stock options or enough cash on hand you might never have to work again.

The problem, though, was that I didn’t feel part of it. Sure, I’d had a minor opportunity at a large computer company in Silicon Valley. There had also been offers back in Seattle with smaller companies for generous stock options.

But I wasn’t consumed with the idea of making lots of money. On the verge of turning 30, I was consumed with the idea of living life to its fullest before settling down, and to me this meant doing more with my life than wasting it away in a cubicle with only the whir of a computer and the bleat of a fax machine to keep me company. 

What did you do when you were rich, anyway? Most of the rich people I knew were obsessed by their work or their toys, and hardly took the time to think about, let alone get to know, other parts of the world. Orange County, where I grew up, was full of stodgy old white people whose main purpose in life seemed to be how to hold onto their money. I even had a name for them. I called them HOMPS, which stands for “Hands Off My Pile”, as that was the predominant sentiment by which they lived their entire lives. HOMPS hate government, yet many of them no doubt make their living off some form of government expenditure, for example in defense contracting or mineral extraction from public lands; many others are involved in banking or law where protecting people's money from the government earns them their bread and butter. The HOMPS aren’t bad people; they just grew up in a world where the main goal in life was to accumulate wealth and property. It's capitalism, sure, but there's a closed-mindedness to it, a stifling selfishness that seems very unhealthy, and I have always wondered why they don’t see how lonely it is to huddle around your possessions and interact solely with your own kind. In many ways, despite their wealth (or, because of it) the world hadn’t treated them all that fairly either. Many had family problems, high divorce rates, drug and alcohol problems, sons and daughters whose lives of excessive comfort had made them soft and purposeless.

I’ve been a shoestring traveler most of my life, starting when I was an adventuresome teen making non-parentally-sanctioned trips into Mexico. I’ve never questioned that the best way to get to know a place and the people there is to travel cheaply, to ply the dusty streets in search of a place to stay, to eat what the locals eat (stomach problems be damned), and to expend every effort to avoid spending much time with fellow countrymen. And for some reason I’ve always thought that getting really rich would do away with all that.

There were other issues. I was still recovering from a messy break up with a girl. I’d been in one of those awful relationships where you both know it’s wrong, but you cling to it out of habit because you can’t really picture not hanging out anymore. Then she turned out to be the one that finally said good-bye and I couldn't stand that, being the one who was dumped, so, driven by raw, injured ego, I went insane for a bit, behaved tortured and reckless, as if engaged in some kind of jihad, as I desperately sought to revive the relationship. This, of course, was silly, and wrecked any hope of salvaging a friendship. Not that I wanted one. But I did feel pathetic, feeble and worm-like, and even though my friends told me that I was acting like a wuss and that they’d like nothing better than to beat the shit out of me, I went ahead and did many really foolish things that are probably best left unmentioned. Even now when thinking about it, I feel kind of ill.

Anyway, it's really amazing how quickly things can turn around as a result of a single small decision. In my case, I decided to travel. To bail on the confused disaster of a life I'd created. To just leave. It all happened pretty quickly, and started with a phone call.

* * *

The call came, as calls of this type often do (that is to say, life-changing calls), when it was least expected. Saturday morning and I lay in bed in my basement room in a house in Seattle wearing a pair of tight fitting white underpants, and listening to Nirvana playing Pennyroyal Tea on the stereo, not the most uplifting music, I grant you, but the doleful chords and suicide-inducing lyrics had a strange appeal. Outside it rained. Streaks of water glistened on a filthy pane. A typical Seattle day.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

            “Erik Olsen? Is Erik Olsen there please?” The voice on the end of the line was female and business-like; the tone of someone calling about an outstanding debt.

“Who’s calling, please?”  I said, partially distorting my voice by putting fingers across my lips.

“This is Susan at the Rotary Club of Seattle. May I speak with Erik, please?” Shit! Susan was the chairperson for the Rotary Scholarship committee, a group of hard-faced Seattle business people I’d met a few weeks earlier in competition for a year-long scholarship abroad, something I’d applied to more or less on a whim a few months earlier.

“This is Erik,” I said, remembering mid-sentence to  remove the fingers from my mouth.

“Erik I wanted to call and thank you for meeting with us, and to say that on behalf of the committee, we enjoyed interviewing you.” This sounded like the quintessential rejection setup. It didn’t matter. I was kind of expecting it. Susan was one of the people I’d interviewed with the week before. She was the head of the scholarship committee whose job it was to select an individual for one of the coveted Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarships. A friend of mine had won one of these scholarships a few years before, and said that it had changed his life. Aware of my passion for travel and understanding other cultures, he told me to apply. I expressed my doubts. Such things always went to classic overachievers: straight-A students, Harvard graduates, future astronauts. But my friend was persistent. “What have you got to lose?” he said. And so I’d applied and made it through the first set of interviews. Then, when I was called back for a second interview, I was grilled by a dozen or so local members in a spacious conference room on the upper floor of the Safeco Insurance building in Seattle’s University District. I thought the interview went OK, but when I left, I wasn’t feeling as if I’d nailed the thing. I left the building more or less consoling myself with my friend’s words: What had I lost? Nothing. It was a good experience, but surely I wasn’t going to win anything. Then the call came, and I stood there in tighty-whities as a woman on the other end of the line explained how my life was going to change.

“I have some very good news,” she said. My mouth dropped open.

“Ung hm.”

“Congratulations, Erik. The committee was very impressed with you, and we believe you will make a fine ambassador of goodwill. You’ve won this year’s scholarship. You’ll be going to Chile.” I sat there for what must have been over a minute in stunned silence. I was happy, no question about it. The call had just changed my outlook on the next year of my life, and who knew where things would go after that.

“Erik?” came the voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes, wow, thank you. This is really incredible. I...thank you...thank you...thank you.” And then I hung up.

This was amazing. Like a gift from God. I had my chance. I could leave behind everything: the job, the long days of staring at screens (I was working for a large video game company), the rain, the memories of a failed relationship. If this wasn’t the cure for my psychic ache, what else would be?

* * *

The seed for traveling across the expanse of South America was actually planted at a young age. There was a map of the world on my wall when I was a kid, and when I first got my drivers license at age 16, I looked at that world map and thought, ‘Wow, if I wanted to, I could drive south into Mexico, and just keep on going. I could go until I drove off the end of the earth.’ (Of course, this is untrue. There is no road across the Darien Gap below Panama.) This was a magical thought to an adventuresome young mind; a frightening one to a parent whose kid just got his license.  

I’d chosen Chile as the destination for my year abroad for two reasons. The first was that I already had a familiarity with things Latin, having lived in Spain for a short time and in Los Angeles, very near the border of Mexico, for most of my life. Second, I had some facility with the language, which was a requirement for the fellowship.  This made sense. They didn’t want to send people to live alone in foreign countries where they’d be completely lost. (I can speak to this from personal experience. I also lived and worked in Thailand for a bit, and despite my best efforts, I never got a handle on Thai. Needless to say this affected my ability to participate constructively in a many important professional discussions). This said, I really didn’t know the culture down there at all. When I looked at the South American continent, I thought of all the countries as states, and lumped everything together under the nebulous term “Latin”.

I would come to know Chile intimately over the course of the year, but the rest of the continent remained a mystery. When my year was up, I decided that rather than go straight home, I’d find some way to travel back to LA so that I could see more of the continent. In fact, I decided to make it to Antarctica. And from there, I’d take the long way home.

Exactly what that meant at the time was unknown to me. I’d never been very good at planning. It always seemed more interesting when you just went. I hardly had any money, but it wouldn’t cost me much because I’d travel cheaply. I’d stay in the most inexpensive places I could find, and would camp out where I could. I’d eat inexpensive food from the street or grocery stores. Typical budget travel. I knew it would be an amazing adventure, and three and a half months later, when I arrived in Los Angeles gritty, bearded and about 20 pounds lighter, I was right. This is the story of that journey.

* * *

Final Days

I spent my last days in Chile sitting alone on the floor of my spartan apartment sipping Chilean wine (I’d become quite a connoisseur of the reds), and staring at a large map of South America. The map was “borrowed” from an issue of National Geographic at the local American library…I mean to return it one of these days. I also had a copy of The Lonely Planet, which I was using to determine the best route up the coast. 

My first goal was to get to Antarctica. I asked around in Santiago if there was a way to get down south cheaply, and was told by a Chilean friend that the Chilean military did a lot of travel to Antarctica where there were a number of Chilean bases. Maybe I could get a cheap ride? A few phone calls later I was put in touch with a guy I knew from the Rotary Club of Santiago. The club was composed mostly of well-to-do business people, very upper class, and so their connections into the Chilean military were high up.

Eric was an older German gentleman I knew who told me I could likely get on a trip at the beginning of the year. He said he'd check for me and then get back to me. A few weeks passed and then I got a call from him one evening.

“Do you still have an interest in travelling to Chilean Antarctica?” He placed an emphasis on the word ‘Chilean”.

“Yes, of course.”
            “Then you are in luck. There is a space available on a boat out of Punta Arenas. It leaves in a week.” A week? That didn’t seem like nearly enough time to prepare. There was way too much left to do. Suitable clothes to buy, things to ship home, I had to get out of my lease. But it didn’t matter. This was likely my only chance to make it that far south, and since that was very much the goal of the whole exercise, I told him to count me in, and then I set about packing up and leaving the city in a week.

With Antarctica in the bag, I still had to figure out what my route home was going to be. Since I’d traveled through most of Chile already and well into Bolivia and Peru, I decided I would take the eastern route: up the coast of Argentina, through Buenos Aires to Iguazu and into Brazil. My timing had to be right because I wanted to be in Salvador, Brazil by the start of Carnaval. Salvador, or Bahia as it is also called, was the place to be for the Great Global Party. In Salvador, I was told by a friend who'd been there the year before, Carnival was the real deal. Rio, he explained, was overrun by tourists. Salvador was far more interesting. And dangerous.

From there, I’d continue my way around the bulge of Brazil to the mouth of the Amazon, where I’d find passage upriver. I’d press up, through Venezuela, Columbia, Panama and the rest of Central America, and through Mexico, before crossing the border into the US and finally arriving at my parents’ home in Los Angeles. It was one hell of a long way to go, over 15,000 miles. But I’d never been more ready to tackle such an adventure. I wanted to be on the road.

            My last evening in Santiago was spent in my friend Fred’s apartment. Earlier in the day, my landlady and I got into a serious row over my definition of “cleaned up and ready for the next occupant,” the result of which led to the sacrifice of a large portion of my deposit and a hasty departure.  Fred and I shared a six pack of warm Chilean beer (Fred had recently moved in and his fridge was not yet working), and listened to a few of his CDs. He had 100’s of them. He got up and put on a Kris Kristofferson disk. Not what I would have chosen, but I confess that as we sat and listened to Kristofferson’s soulful baritone, I couldn’t help but feel cheery. He sang of independence, being on the road, taunting the Devil.

            The phone rang all evening. Every call was from a different Chilean woman that Fred was dating. It was my first glimpse of a system he’d employed since arriving in Chile. Chilean women were notorious for calling and not identifying themselves when you picked up. This caused Fred serious headaches because with so many different women interested in him, he could never be sure whom he was talking to. He often kept six girlfriends at a time, keeping them in a steady rotation so that whenever he met a new girl that he liked, he dumped another. The system Fred came up with was this: he gave each new girl he met a different name so that he could tell them apart. Currently, he was Glenn, Roger, Doug, Mike, Pete, and Erik, the last of which, I admit, was flattering. I suggested he add John, Paul, and George and Ringo. The system seemed to work well. A woman would call and ask for, say, Pete, and Fred would check the list by the phone to cross-reference the name Pete with that of the girl who was calling. It was a remarkably clever system, I thought.

I sipped a beer as Kristofferson's voice rang through the apartment.

‘I’m not saying I beat the Devil, but I drank his beer for nothin.’

            Around midnight, one of Fred's girls dropped by, a lovely Chilean with 7-Up bottle green eyes and a tight sweater. They disappeared into his room, and I dozed off reading the liner notes to an Bob Dylan CD. I managed to get about four hours sleep. It was fitful sleep. I couldn’t get the coming trip out of my mind. Had I packed everything I needed?  What was I supposed to do once I arrived in Punta Arenas? What if the plane was late? What if I missed the boat? What if all my money ran out? This endless barrage of questions and uncertainties gave me the hard-core jitters and made it impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. Listening to Fred bang the young Chilean girl in the other room didn’t help much either.

Off He Goes

Said he'll see me on the flipside

of this trip he's taking for a ride

He's been takin' too much on,

off he goes with his perfect holy unkempt clothes

there he goes.

-- Pearl Jam

             The morning sky in Santiago was a silvery blue, with pink clouds marching across it’s expanse like a herd of stuffed animals. Even at five-thirty in the morning there was traffic in the streets. It consisted largely of Santiago’s awful yellow buses, boxy mechanical monsters that roared and belched smoke into the air, smoke that would soon settle over the city in a dismal shroud of smog. I carried a large pack filled with far too many books and my handmade Spanish guitar, which was in a soft black case. I was weary, but buzzing with an electric thrill that I was on my way.

            On the plane I sat next to a large, beefy Chilean man who seemed to be completely unaware of the protocols of personal space on commercial aircraft. He wore dark prescription glasses and a business suit. He read the newspaper and kept to himself, despite my initial efforts to be friendly.

            “Are you going to Punta Arenas?” I asked.

            “Yes,” was his curt reply, which he spoke without looking up. It was obvious that he didn’t want to be bothered.

            Behind me, I heard English…actually, not just English, but the loud, trumpeting version that means Americans are speaking. An American couple from New York. They appeared to be in their early-sixties.  The man was heavy set, with Brillo pad hair and black bags that sagged under lids like Hefty bags. He was vigorously discussing their itinerary with his wife. She was a graying blond with big fruity blue eyes that suggested an avid interest in astrology and/or the monthly revelations of People magazine. He seemed eager to announce to the entire plane each port of call and every flight number of their trip.

            I peered over the seat and asked them where they were from, more or less knowing the answer.

            “New York,” the man announced, as if he were just asked the question as a contestant on a game show. “And you, where you from?”

            “Seattle,” I said.

            “Oh, Seattle. That’s a lovely place,” said the wife. “I hear it rains a lot there. You know, they’ve had a very hard time recently. Some of the worst storms of the year.” I knew. My friends had been complaining in e-mails all winter about how horrible the winter in Seattle had been. One of the worst in decades.

            “My daughter, you know, was just in Seattle,” the woman informed me. “She was there on a job assignment. She works for a law firm in Manhattan. One of the biggest. My son is doing his MBA at Cornell. He spent last summer in Russia, and did some very interesting work there.” How we’d moved from the weather in Seattle to the résumé of each family member was a mystery to me, but I smiled as if interested.

             “You know,” she said, placing her hand on the head-rest in front of her, and leaning forward slightly, as if passing on state secrets, “the Mafia has infiltrated everything there. Business-wise, it is very hard to accomplish anything, there’s still so much red tape and people to pay off.” I nodded and uttered a long, tapering, “Ahhh”. Then, she leaned back, raised her eyebrows knowledgeably, and, as if she’d just competed an award-winning book on the subject, said:  “Oh, I figure it will take 15 years before they get things straightened out. If they ever do. You know how the Russians are.”

            I soon learned the man was known back in New York as “The Rice King”. An impressive title, I had to admit. He bought and sold rice in international markets. A global businessman. I asked him if he found the rice business exciting: “Oh sure,” he said. “Great business. Very exciting. Lots of action.” He was a nice guy, but for some reason, I imagined him in a dark, smoky room, waving a fat cigar around with big arcing swoops of his hand as he ordered business competitors to be rubbed out. I asked him where they were headed.

“Antarctica. With good friends. Rice friends. A big trip down south. Far south.” I realized at that moment that so far the man had avoided using a single verb. I wondered if that meant anything.

            Mrs. Rice King showed me a pair of day-glow yellow parkas that she said had been made expressly for this trip. They were bulky, awful-looking things that were of such a bright yellow color that I almost needed sunglasses to look at them. Each had an embroidered patch on the shoulder with a picture of a penguin standing on an iceberg. They were obviously very expensive I smiled and became nervous about the tattered Gortex shell I’d brought, wondering if it was going to be enough.

            The two of them seemed very proud: proud of their children, their success, and the fact that they were headed to South America and Antarctica. I think they wanted me to be proud of them too, but I was too busy being proud of myself for not being like them. They were obviously nice folks, but I think their concept of travel differed significantly from mine. I didn’t know the details, but I imagined they were going to be on an expensive cruise ship, perhaps something organized by a company like Abercrombie and Kent. A ship called The Explorer or Antarctic Adventurer, with morning brunch buffets and evening banquets. And each passenger would be given a pretty pin-on name tag and a complimentary “I’ve been to Antarctica” certificate at the end of the cruise. And every day at noon there would be an “educational session” with the on-board biologist, some professor taking advantage of a free cruise junket, who would discuss the bizarre mating ritual of the Antarctic sea elephant and explain why penguins look the way they do and how many tons of krill can fit into a cubic mile of sea water…

            Ok, I’m being harsh. The fact is, maybe I was even a little jealous (especially about the on-board biologist – wouldn’t it be cool to have a specialist available to answer all your stupid questions?) I had to give them credit. At least they weren’t growing old in front of the TV somewhere, overeating, popping Geritol and wasting their money on all the things they wouldn’t be able to take with them to the afterworld.

            I needed some rest. I leaned the seat back, closed the curtain, and laid my head against bulkhead, conjuring dreamy images in my head about Antarctica and what lay ahead. About an hour later, I was sitting there with my head lolling to one side, a silvery spider’s thread of drool hanging off my lower lip, when I was awakened by a surge of severe turbulence. I pulled up the window shade and stared out the window into a blank gray wall of clouds. Then, we dropped out of the clouds and I saw the flat, scoured earth below. It was a colorless landscape of ranches and open fields, low rolling hills and monotonous desolation. All the earth below was made of the same faded greens and browns, as if someone had pulled a plug below the surface and drained out all the color. Glug glug glug. In the distance, the sea was dark gray and frappéd by the powerful winds that lashed at the surface. We’d arrived at Punta Arenas.

            It was a perilous landing into the airport, which lies about twenty miles outside of town. The wind, loud and furious enough to elicit frightened gasps from Mrs. Rice King, seemed intent on blowing the plane around like a leaf. I closed my eyes, scared to death, afraid that any second we’d be slammed onto the tarmac or catch a wing and go spinning head over tail with the plane disintegrating into a brilliant fireball. Of course, no such tragedy occurred, and soon we were safely on the ground, taxiing along the runway.

“How ‘bout that?” said the Rice King, slapping my headrest from behind.

“Oh my, that was something,” exclaimed his wife.

“Thank God,” I thought.

Debarking the plane, I bade farewell to the Rice King and his wife, and expressed my best wishes for their safe journey. “Good to meet you. Nice trip,” he said. Still no verbs.

Near the terminal exit, I noticed a gaggle of old people boarding a bus, and knew it had to be my group. I saw Eric, the German-born Rotarian whom I knew from Santiago. I walked over and said hello, introducing myself to the others.

“So you are the young American we’ve been waiting for,” said one of them, expressing his impatience in decent English. “What do you think of the bottom of the world?”

Geriatric Spring Break

I was ushered aboard a surprisingly comfortable bus and packed in with about 30 others, and soon we were rumbling down the narrow, single lane road towards Punta Arenas.

I was the youngest person on board the bus by about 40 years, and the only foreigner (that is, non Chilean). But this difference in age didn’t prevent people from acting like children. In fact, the half-hour bus ride to the docks in Punta Arenas had a dreamlike quality, as if I were watching a cable channel program on some kind of septuagenarian Spring Break road trip. Men teased their wives and pinched other men’s spouses, and the women teased back. One guy flung a balled up ticket envelope at another guy, who responded in kind by shooting him with a rubber band. A silver flask was passed around and emptied just before it got to me. There was laughter and back slapping and the randy flashing of dentures. In a way, I felt like the oldest one there, like a chaperone. “Now you kids stop it this instant!”

            We rode along the coast, and on the ocean side, I saw an old fishing trawler that had washed ashore, its decaying black hulk listed in the mud. On the other side were gently sloping hills and wide grasslands harshly combed by the winds. It was strange how everything seemed to lean away from the sea. There were no tall trees or buildings; nothing stood very high. The trees that did grow on the hills were bizarrely shaped, with branches and leaves twisted and disfigured and bent diagonally away from the coast. I’d never seen the weather expressed in the landscape so vividly, nor so vigorously.

            A man in the adjacent aisle asked me a question in English. He was a distinguished-looking Chilean gentleman with blue eyes, a thin David Niven mustache and a healthy mane of gray hair. Like many of the Chileans I’d met over the course of the year, he was obviously of German descent. He wanted to know if I’d ever been this far south.

            “Only once,” I said, and explained that I’d been down for a week in Puerto Natales the previous October to hike through Torres del Paine National Park. He nodded.

            “You know that all parts of Chile are very different,” he said. “The country changes tremendously from North to South.”

            “Yes, I know,” I said. I told him that I’d seen Chile from top to bottom over the course of the year.

            He seemed surprised. “Oh? And what do you think of my country?” he inquired. I’d been asked this question so often in Chile, just by habit I’d developed a standardized answer:.

            “It’s a beautiful country,” I said. “There are so many interesting things to see, and I have found the people here to be very kind.” The answer sounded practiced, but he seemed satisfied. He sat back contentedly and smiled. I think he was also hamming it up a bit to show off his English.

            “Que bueno,” he said, “Yes, it is a beautiful country. We are very lucky. And you are very lucky. I think it is important for young people to travel.”

We passed a number of large ranches, known as an estancias, where hundreds, perhaps thousands of sheep nibbled the grass. The blue-eyed man leaned over and tapped me on the arm, pointing out the window: “This part of the country is famous for wool,” he said. I nodded politely, even though the presence of all the sheep had pretty much tipped me off. “First the English settled here, from Wales, and then many others. Dutch, Yugoslavians, Germans. This whole area was settled by European farmers. Like in America.” He was right. I knew part of the story from the books I’d read before the trip. In fact, among the many books I’d brought along was Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, one of my favorite travel books of all time, and a book that, along with Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express, largely fueled my passion for travel to this part of the world.

            About half an hour later, we rumbled into Punta Arenas. I saw many houses clustered upon the gently sloping hills near the sea. I was surprised to see how colorful the houses were, painted in different pastels, many of them gingerbread-like, with roof tiles or shingles in an assortment of delicate colors. It was as if the residents were seeking to enliven the otherwise color-depleted surroundings. We entered the city and I immediately had the urge to get out and explore, to wander down the gloomy avenues, among the rows of small, weather-beaten, but colorful homes. I was eager to find out what life was like here at the end of the earth. But I would have to wait. A man aboard the bus stood and said we were already a bit late for the boat, and we’d have to proceed directly to the pier. I would save Punta Arenas for another day.

Lo, the Aquiles!

            We arrived at the port and continued to the end of the main pier. We passed a series of large cargo and fishing vessels tied by thick ropes to massive iron cleats the size of minivans. The first three ships were flagged from Japan, Argentina, and Russia. The last ship on the right was a long, military-gray freighter called the Aquiles, a Chilean Navy vessel obviously ready to set sail; there was a long line of civilian and military passengers waiting to board via a narrow gangplank. The bus pulled up alongside and stopped.

            “That’s our boat,” said the blue-eyed man, tugging on my jacket. I suppressed the urge to thank him for his brilliant and glaring statements of the obvious, but I knew we had a long cruise ahead and I didn’t need to make any unnecessary enemies.

            We spilled out of the bus and waited patiently in line to board. It was slow-going because a sailor standing at the head of the line was asking for passengers’ names and then checking them off a list he held in his hand. When my turn finally came up, I was distressed to find that my name wasn’t found on the passenger list. I heard suspicious whispering behind me when the sailor holding the list went to talk to a nearby officer to discuss the problem. They finally cleared it up, but then the sailor had trouble with my name. Olsen, it seems, is a difficult name for the Latin tongue, in the same way, I suppose, that Guillermoprieto  might be difficult for English-speakers. I had had trouble with it before in Chile. For some reason, everyone wants to spell it with an “H” and two S’s. H-O-L-S-S-E-N. I’d never met anyone named Holssen in Chile, or anyplace else for that matter, but I assumed it was popular down here since that was what everyone wanted to call me. Anyway, soon I was aboard and happily putting down my bags on one of the beds in my assigned cabin - or camarote, as it is called in Spanish.

            The cabins were far from luxurious. No champagne on ice, no mini-bar, not even a mint on the pillow, but that suited me fine. Navy boats across the world aren’t known for pampering guests. Besides, with all the traveling that lay ahead, I figured it was best to get used to bare conditions. The fact is, in a few weeks, I’d look back on these camarotes and they would seem as luxurious as the Four Seasons.

            There were four beds to each cabin with a narrow aisle between them hardly wide enough for me to pass with my pack. A single porthole glared at me from the wall facing the door. There were four of us assigned to each room, and each had a small closet and a reading lamp over the bed, which came about two inches away from your face and delivered a toasty Richard-Dreyfuss-in-Close-Encounters burn to the side of your face. A step beyond the beds there was a small writing desk and a padded chair. Everything was spotlessly clean and well ordered, really just about as anal-retentive as hell.

            There was another man inside the room, a cheerful, plump Chilean named Jorge. Jorge was a baker from Concepción in the south of Chile. He was a round man who looked like he enjoyed sampling his wares. He reminded me of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; in fact, he looked just like him, or just like a book jacket picture of Neruda I’d seen. The other two roomies would show up a little later. There was José Domingo, who at 78 was the patriarch of the cabin. He wore expensive European designer sweats, and had a thin Yugoslav mouth which turned down into a frown even when he smiled. José Domingo was friendly in a Mafioso sort of way, in that he spoke in a deep, quiet voice, and talked about his family a lot, but didn’t divulge much about his line of work. The third, also named José, and who I’ll call José II, was a silver haired businessman from Puerto Varas, also in the South, who had left behind his wife and kids to, as he said with a tone of voice addled with implication, “Get away for a little while.” Like most of the other passengers, my roomies were all about twice times my age, but it never seemed to matter.

            The horn blew above, the engines kicked in, and I went upstairs to explore the upper deck. I met my friend from Chile who had invited me along in the first place. His name was Eric, and as a former president of the Rotary Club in Santiago, he had all the connections to make the trip happen. As I understood it, he knew the Admiral of the Chilean Navy, a Señor Martinez Bush, and had finagled the whole deal, getting all of us on this maiden tourist voyage of the Aquiles.

We stood there among about a hundred others, waving good-bye to well-wishers who stood on the pier. I was startled by the number of Sony Handicams I saw, and wondered if there’d been a discount special on them in Santiago. I stood on the top deck as the boat groaned away from the pier and started forward, violently churning the gray water behind us. The Chilean anthem played scratchily over a loudspeaker. Sailors in uniform scampered about swabbing the deck, batting down hatches, and doing what sailors do. From Eric, I also learned a little bit more about the ship’s kill-three-birds-with-one-stone mission. It seems we were not only taking a large group of passengers to Antarctica, but that the voyage was also part of a cold-water training mission for the navy men aboard, for whom, I understood it, this was their very first trip to Antarctica. And thirdly, we were making the trip to transport some goods to two of the Chilean bases down here.

            Soon, we were on our way, pounding through the wintry waters of the Straits of Magellan. Where the Straits leave Punta Arenas the water is surprisingly wide (in fact, it is known as Paso Ancho, or Broad Reach), and closely resembles Puget Sound in Washington State. In a short time, Punta Arenas became a dark, lumpy streak behind us, and what lay ahead was about ten hours of navigating around the hundreds of small islands in the Straits before we reached the Pacific Ocean and Drake’s Passage.

Sometime about three hours into the trip, we suddenly turned around. I was below deck, bent over in the narrow gangway in the rear of the ship, examining a few of the pictures hanging on the wall. They were mostly lithographs of scenes from famous Chilean battles (of which there are few) and faded photographs of Chilean submarines (the Chilean fleet had four of them). Suddenly, the ship listed to one side and I smacked my forehead against the wall. Wondering what the hell had happened, I hurried up to the second deck and stood at the rail. We were heading back towards Punta Arenas. But why?

            “What’s going on?” I asked one of the sailors standing by leaning against the rail.

            “We’ve forgotten something,” he said gravely. “Something muy importante.”

            “Really? What?”

            “I don’t know,” he shrugged, and then walked off.

            A group of six passengers stood clutching the rail and gazing over the edge. Two of them, both women, looked ill, the color of their faces was a greenish pink, like old bubble gum. Their husbands stood by looking worried.

            “Anybody know why we’re turning around?” I asked.

            “I think we are going back to pick someone up,” said a tall gray-haired man in a green parka that was too big for him.

            “Any idea who?”

            “Carlos says maybe the admiral himself,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the guy next to him.

            “Really?”

            “Yes, there were rumors he might be coming aboard,” Carlos noted confidently, as if just now deciding to pass on important information he’d already been privy to. “That would be interesting, no?”  I waited at the rail, enjoying the frigid wind and the exhilarating feeling of being in the Straits of Magellan. I wondered who this important person was supposed to be, and if it was the admiral, why had we left him behind?

             About half an hour later, a small speed boat came hurtling  towards us, and a dozen sailors busied themselves throwing ropes overboard and lowering a collapsible ladder to the water. Meanwhile, a group of us clustered around the rails craning our necks over the side to see who was so important that the entire ship had to turn around to get him.

            There was no important passenger left behind. No admiral coming aboard. Not even a captain or a cook. The ship that pulled aside was loaded with cases of whisky and wine, which someone had forgotten. The cases were diligently hoisted aboard and stowed below deck. I found it a bit hard to believe that we’d gone back for this, but a great sigh of relief went up from the men who stood nearby. One of them leaned against the wall and turned his grateful eyes to the gray sky.

            “Thank God,” he said.

            “Far more important than the Admiral,” voiced another. This sentiment was echoed enthusiastically by the rest of the men standing around, who solemnly nodded to one another that leaving behind this precious cargo would have been grounds for keelhauling.

            “Booze,” spat one of the wives. “We turned the ship around for booze. That’s absurd.” A few of the men shot her a glance as if she’d just let loose a horrible, awful-smelling fart.

Crooked Straits

            The places in this part of the world have dreary names:  Desolation Island, Point Starvation, Tortuous Pass, the Gulf of Sorrows. This is not surprising. It is a land of coldness and death. No condos. No hotels. No cheesy tourist knick-knack shops, 7-11s, all-night Laundromat or DKNY billboards displaying the perfect breasts or rock-hard abs of fashion models. There were no roads in sight, not even a path along the coast. There were just dark rolling hills of grass and rock that crept silently into the freezing water. It was a lonely and forsaken place, known to sailors for centuries for the nearly endless storms that batter the coastline, the scarcity of animal and plant life, and the dangerous intermingling of land and sea. All of these things create a feeling of being pushed to the very edge of civilization, as if you are passing through the gates of a different world.

I doubt things have changed much here since Ferdinand Magellan first sailed through believing (correctly) he had found a safer way around the continental tip to the Pacific. Well, perhaps things are a little different. We were on a massive navy ship after all, with ample heating, a full mess and a well-stocked bar.  Magellan sailed in fragile, slow-moving wooden hulks, with no GPS, and little food. In fact, by the time that Magellan reached the straits that bear his name (named, incidentally, after he was killed in the Philippines), he’d already sailed all the way from Spain, and along the coast of modern-day Brazil and Argentina. During that time, one of his ships had been destroyed (the Santiago), and he was about to lose another to mutiny[1].  To say that it must have been a miserable trip is an understatement.

The first thing I noticed is that the straits are anything but straight. Historian Daniel Boorstin called them “the narrowest, most devious, most circuitous of all the straits connecting two great bodies of water.”[2] I don’t know about that, as I can’t say I’ve been in many straits in my life, but I will say that over the course of twelve or so hours it took us to reach the Pacific, we darted down this inlet and into another and went around islands large and small. We cruised up narrow channels and wide ones, and I know that if I’d been driving, we would have gotten horribly lost.

            Of course, the straits are expertly mapped now. Oceanographic maps show the depth of the straits to the foot, and with GPS, there’s little chance a ship will find itself getting lost down the dead end of Useless Bay, as Magellan did. Still, with all the technology and all the people on board, it was a strange feeling to be sailing in the very same waters where such an amazing voyage took place almost 500 years ago. As I stood on the deck of the Aquiles, watching the approach of Cape Pilar at the mouth of the Strait, where we, too, would soon enter the Pacific Ocean, I imagined myself on one of Magellan’s boats, and wondered if I would have experienced the same sense of futility and despair that his men felt. What would I have done? Join the mutiny or hang with it? Would the thrill of seeing places that few Europeans had ever seen before outweigh the pangs of hunger and the agonies of dysentery and scurvy? I don’t know why such thoughts came to me at that moment, but my guess is that there is something about the vicious barrenness of the place, the gulag-like bleakness that stirred my emotions and made my mind ramble off in strange directions.

Americans on Board

            I wasn’t expecting to find any of my countrymen on the Aquiles, so I quite surprised when I overheard some folks in the galley talking about “The Americans”. I wasn’t exactly eager to search them out, but I was curious who they were. It was not until about five or six hours after we’d set sail that I finally met them. They were gathered in the lounge in a small cluster of four, two men and two women, and I overheard them speaking English nearby:

            “I’m telling you,” said the tallest man of the group, “that’s why the ozone’s disappearin’. It ain’t what we’re doing at all. It’s all the whales out there farting.” This comment was followed by a round of raucous laughter.

            “Oh, stop,” said one of the women. “That’s not true at all.”

            “No, I’m serious. I read somewhere that methane comes from, you know, living creatures, actually puts more of them greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than we do with our factories.” The rest of the group seemed to be digesting this information when I stepped forward.

            “Where you folks from?”

            They turned, surprised, I think, to hear American English. “Oklahoma,” boomed the man who’d been speaking. “How ‘bout yourself?”

“Seattle.”

“Oh, the rainy city.”

“I hate the rain,” pouted one of the women.

Smiles and handshakes went around, and the obligatory exchange of personal data. Their names were Don, Stan, Jane, and Barb. Stan and Barb were husband and wife, while Don and Jane described themselves as “just friends”. My quick estimate was that Don had about 20 years on Jane and Jane had about 15 pounds on Don. All four of them came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and had been invited on the trip by a Chilean business friend. Don was tall and gangly, with a steel-gray Sinatra haircut and big, square-framed glasses. There was something about him that said accountant. He did some kind of work in the oil business, although he was never very explicit about what it was. He said his work often took him around the world to many exotic places like Libya and Iran, which I thought was interesting, if not a bit sinister.

            Stan was fit, balding, and had a red-ripe face that lit up like a Christmas light when he smiled. (“We just got back from Cozumel!”). He looked like a country singer, or an aging game show host. He explained that he was a pediatrician with a successful practice back in Tulsa; so successful, in fact, that he and Barb were able to travel a good part of the year. “We’re shooting for the Century Club,” he announced. “You have to visit 100 countries to make it. You get a card and everything. Chile is our 69th. No pun intended. Ha ha.”

            “This is an actual organized club?” I asked, ignoring the joke, whatever it was.

            “Yup, all you have to do is visit a hundred countries. Just set foot in one, see? It doesn’t matter if you’re there for a week or a minute. Even airports count. Step foot in an airport in a new country, you check it off the list.” I nodded doubtfully, thinking to myself that this was one of the stupidest things I’d ever heard of. Only Americans would have a competition like this.

            “We did the airport in Australia, for example,” said Barb. “Didn’t see the Opera House or anything, but got to check that one off.”

            “And remember in Thailand on the northern border?” Stan reminded his wife. “We wanted our driver to stop and let us get out to touch Burma, or Myanmar they call it now, but he wouldn’t do it.”

            Barb nodded and then finished the story: “So we had to hire a boat later, just to cross the river at the border, and we jumped out and touched the other side. One foot. That was number 49.” They giggled together as I imagined the two of them someday being shot dead at the border of Haiti or Libya or wherever, in an attempt to reach The Century Club - that magic 100.

            “What brings you on this trip?” I asked.

            “Well, Don knows some guy down here involved in Rotary, and apparently this guy called one day and said, ‘You wanna go to Antarctica?’, and then Don asked us and I said, hell yes. And here we are.” We chatted a little more, but then I got bored and figured it was time to do something else. I decided to explore the ship, to venture into the guts of the Aquiles to see what she was made of.

            Built in 1987 and launched in August of the following year, the Aquiles was 337 feet long and 56 feet wide. The ship functioned primarily as a troop transport vessel, and secondarily as a cargo vessel, moving goods up and down the long Chilean coastline.  She was built in the shipyards of Talcahuano near Concepcion, south of Santiago, and was one of the few navy vessels actually built in Chile. Most of Chile’s navy boats were built in Britain or the States. Without cargo she displaced some 2,200 tons of sea water; when fully loaded, she displaced 4,700 tons, the rough equivalent of the contents of Shamu’s tank at Sea World. The Aquiles could travel at a maximum speed of 18 knots and her maximum transport capacity was 250 people, although it seemed to me, counting crew and passengers, there were many more people on board than that. The ship was a single screw (one propeller) with a 7080 horsepower Krupp Diesel engine[3]. Altogether a pretty respectable beast.

            Four lifeboats dangled from the sides, two boats on each side, each with a capacity of about 40 people. I did the quick math and realized that things didn’t seem to add up properly, and I wondered and hoped there were inflatables located somewhere else. Up front, near the bridge and also astern on the poop deck, there were two 20 mm guns, little things, pea-shooters really, four in all, suggesting that the Aquiles was not much of a fighter. There was a sheet posted near the bridge that listed the weight of our current cargo. We were carrying just a little over 11 tons. I wondered if that included passengers.

            While exploring the lower deck, I peeked into a room cramped with a large set of desks where a couple of officers were sitting behind computers. I asked if they could direct me to the engine room.

            “Why do you want the engine room?” one of them asked suspiciously.

            “Because I’d like to see it.”

            “You can’t see it. It’s closed to passengers.”

            “Closed? Why? Are you sure?” the one speaking looked at me with a hard expression that suggested he was not used to being second-guessed.

            “Because it’s closed!” he snapped, and then he turned abruptly to the work he was doing on the computer.

            Unwilling to provoke a major international incident by taking things further, I made my way down to the mess instead of visiting the engine room. Of course, I’d sneak down again later.

All the people on board were broken into groups according to what deck you were on and the particular section of that deck. There were two decks and two groups per deck, so that made four groups in all. Ours was third, which meant we had a designated chow time for evening meals of seven-thirty.  The food was about what I imagined typical Navy slop would be: chunks of oily meat and instant potatoes, and some ground up greenish vegetable matter that smelled of spinach and gun metal, all of which was spooned onto the plate by morose young sailors on mess detail. I took an open seat next to three guys who all said they were teachers from Concepción. They looked like teachers. All of them were kind of doughy, had bushy mustaches and that look in their eyes as if they’d long since passed the point where they saw their profession as “virtuous”, and were now waiting things out until they could retire and collect their pension. Or that’s what they ended up explaining to me. 

            It was 10:30 in the evening when we rounded Cape Horn. Given the fact that it is the Southern most continental point in the world, I kind of expected more (what I hoped for, exactly, I can’t say, perhaps a large blinking sign saying, “You are now leaving the continental land mass” or something like that). The famous cape was little more than a black hunk of land beneath darkening gray skies. Everyone hurried out to watch and to film it with their Handicams, and I just stood there scratching my head wondering what all the hullabaloo was about. A short while later, the announcement was made that we were passing Diego Ramirez Island, which looked like a mole on the face of the sea. It was the last bit of land we’d see until Antarctica.

We were being followed out to sea by magnificent birds with enormous wing spans. They soared behind us effortlessly on the cold air currents in the wake of the boat. They dipped and dived, nearly catching their wing-tips in the ship’s frothy trail. I thought maybe they were albatrosses, and I hoped they were, as I’d never seen one in the wild. I thought of Coleridge’s poem and the good omen that albatrosses were supposed to bring:

And a good south wind sprung up behind;

    The Albatross did follow,

    And every day, for food or play,

    Came to the mariner's hollo!

 And then I thought of the less-than-environmentally-green sailor who senselessly killed one of them and was forced by the ship’s captain to wear the bird’s heavy carcass around his neck:

And I had done an hellish thing, And it would work 'em woe: For all averred, I had killed the bird   That made the breeze to blow.   Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay, That made the breeze to blow!

What a bummer. The guy must have been glad, though, that he hadn’t shot a whale. Or a manatee.

My guide book had a center spread of lovely bird photos, and these helped me discern that the birds were in fact Giant Petrels. Among some of the others that came and went were Cape Petrels, Prions, Terns, and the heavily built - and mean as hell - Subantarctic Skuas. There was not an Albatross to be found.

            Once in the Pacific, the weather began to turn nasty. Black clouds swarmed like an invading army on the horizon, and the wind began to wail like a troubled spirit. The sea had become a different beast altogether, and the ship rose and fell clumsily on gigantic swells. Since the afternoon, the temperature had fallen by ten or twenty degrees. We’d entered Drake’s Passage, a 600-mile, wind-lashed gouge of angry water between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula, where the world’s two great oceans crash and roil in brutal tumult, where waves fifty feet high are not uncommon, a body of water that is widely considered to be the worst in the world for ship travel. I went back inside.

            The lounge was packed with Rotarians drinking beer and glasses of whisky on the rocks. They were eagerly discussing business, sports (in this case how well the Chilean soccer team would fare against the Peruvians in an upcoming game), and drinking, the three main topics of Rotarians around the world. I think there is something in the Rotary membership guide that restricts members to these topics.

            I went to my room and read for a few hours. I must have dozed off at some point because a bit later all three roomies had come in and climbed into bed. I’d been startled awake by a terrible noise, as if someone had dumped a handful of nuts and bolts into a blender and pressed the button for liquefy. It was  Jorge, who slept right below me, snoring more loudly than I thought humanly possible.  I’d never heard anyone snore quite like that. No matter how tired I was, with that going on all night, it would be impossible to sleep. José and José II were both awake and they gave me a “what should we do?” shrug. José climbed down off his bed to give Jorge a friendly shove, but before he did so, I told him to wait, and went to my pack to get my micro-tape recorder. I held the recorder an inch from Jorge’s large nose and taped a good twenty seconds or so of his snoring. I figured he might want to hear it; as would numerous others on the ship. José gave Jorge a sweet shove that made him grumble, but had the desired effect of quieting him down. From then on we slept relatively well.

            I awoke promptly at 6:30 to the sound of the shrill Navy whistle bleating over the loud speaker in our room. I felt a little strange. It wasn’t sea sickness exactly, more like the feeling you get after riding a roller coaster. All of my roomies were already up and had breakfasted. They were talking among themselves about me, joking about how lazy I was to be in bed at that hour. Why is it, I wondered, that old people always get up so damn early. My father wakes and goes to work at five; my grandparents all get up at five-thirty. Is it a growing awareness that your last days are approaching, so you feel you’ve got to make the most of each new day? Or something biological, like a dormant gland that suddenly starts squirting Vivarin into the blood stream?

            The mess hall was virtually empty. It wasn’t my group’s time, but I didn’t think anyone would notice. I sat alone and drank my coffee and ate runny eggs at a table. Then I went upstairs to the lounge where there also seemed to be a puzzling scarcity of people. Where was everybody? I found many of them outside, not enjoying the fresh bliss of a new day, but mostly puking over the side. The rail, about as far as I could see, was occupied by barfing Rotarians, hucking up their coffee and breakfast into the blue sea.  It was interesting to see how the sea-sickness would sometimes just leap upon someone without warning. A guy I’d meet the night before named Miguel came up and greeted me with a smile. He’d gone to Colombia for an MBA and now worked as the head of a small business NGO promoting US and Japanese management practices throughout Latin America. We’d just begun to converse when the smile dropped from his face like an anchor, and his eyes went kind of yellowish, his face an off-green. He stood abruptly and bolted for the community barf rail. From my vantage point inside the main hall,  I could see him perfectly framed in the window so that it was almost like he was on TV, leaving a little part of himself behind for the fish.

Did I mention the sea? What an incredible blue it was? Man, this was by far the deepest, bluest ocean water I’d ever seen; an impossible blue the color of those ice packs you put in Styrofoam coolers to keep the beers cold. I thought is was a shame that so many of the folks aboard could not appreciate that wonderful blueness.

            I was lucky. Perhaps it is the Norwegian blood in my veins, a lineage of sturdy Norsemen who’d braved these kinds of waters for centuries, but I never felt sick. My legs often felt a bit elastic, my head sometimes lighter than normal, but I never felt the need to empty my guts into the ocean. That’s more than I can say for about two-thirds of the boat. Even some of the sailors were ill with la marea. 

            I sat down to read on one of the couches in the lounge.  It was a book I’d long looked forward to reading: The World According to Garp, by John Irving.  Two things made me want to read it:  First, it was about a wrestler. I wrestled in high school and believe the experience was transforming. Second, I’d hoped it would be strong inspiration about the thrills of the writing life. It wasn’t, but it was one of the funniest tragedies I’d read in a long time. I’d seen the movie with Robin Williams and hated it, and I hated it even more while reading the book because the whole time I had to endure thinking of Robin Williams as the main character. I hate that about adaptations. I’ll never read another Tom Clancy because Jack Ryan is always going to be Harrison Ford in my head. That’s why you’ve always got to read the book first.

A rather large woman with a well nourished face came to sit next to me, curious about the book, and obviously eager to talk with me in English. I welcomed the company and asked if she’d read the book too, perhaps a Spanish version. She said she hadn’t, and then sat down next to me. This was unfortunate. When her ample buttocks met the couch, there was this sickening crack, like a bone breaking, and the couch collapsed beneath us. She rolled onto the carpet, her legs kicking helplessly in the air like an insect, and let out a throaty wheeze. I stood up quickly to help her, and a couple other guys came to her aid as well.  When she was righted, standing there in front of a gawking crowd, she stood there looking totally humiliated. I felt sorry for her, and wanted to say something consoling like, “Oh that old couch. Salt air’s been eating right through it. I’ve been waited for that to happen for days.” But instead I stood there stupidly and watched her burst into tears and disappear from the lounge. I never saw her again.

            The motion of the sea created some other extremely entertaining scenes. From my vantage point sitting comfortably on another couch, I was an observer to an assortment of skits that might have made a good segment of “America’s Best Home Videos”:  There was the stout, ruddy-faced Rotarian from Santiago - “in the gas station business” he’d told me earlier - who, with four drinks cradled against his chest, was attempting to navigate his way across the floor to make a delivery to his thirsty wife and friends.  The boat rose and heaved and then fell hard, and his course, rather than a straight line between two points, described a perfect parabola which ended with him dumping those four drinks in the lap of a sleeping Rotarian. The victim, who perhaps might have been already dreaming of the cold Antarctic seas, awoke immediately, more than surprised to find himself drenched. And then there was the short, bothered-looking man with the Sony Handicam, diligently recording for posterity the lazy flight of sea birds behind the ship. As he searched his camera bag for a blank tape, another passenger upwind discharged his breakfast into a sudden gust, causing a frothy beige spray to envelop the poor fellow and his camera. Then, there was the coffee table that seemed to move of its own volition as we passed over a particularly violent swell, smashing into a lady’s shins and pinning her helplessly against the wall. Finally, there was the well-dressed man who had already had his share of whiskeys, and who, after losing his balance, groped feverishly for something solid to hold onto, but found only the flabby arms of his friend’s wife whom he pulled on top of himself as the two rolled rather obscenely on the floor in front of a small, but obviously interested crowd. These scenes and others were far more enjoyable than my book, and I found that over the course of two or three hours, I’d only read a chapter or two of Garp.

The Bridge

            We were given a set of printed “Rules of Behavior” when we boarded the ship. I read the title, but didn’t get through the rules themselves. I’m not exactly sure what was there, but I think a few of them had something to do with where you could go on the ship.

No matter. I ventured forward to the bridge with an intense curiosity to see how the captain and crew were keeping us on a direct course in the middle of such rough seas. I figured that if I was nabbed, I could play the stupid foreigner. But to my disappointment (as I‘d hoped to be the first one to be so bold), there was already a gaggle of Handicam-equipped passengers on the bridge, standing around and chatting with the half dozen or so crew members who were involved in navigating the ship. I wanted to show off my extensive knowledge of seafaring, and took some time to carefully design and phrase a question, which I directed at an intent-looking young man who was adjusting dials on the radar console. The radar screen was very cool-looking, just like you see in the movies with the big circle and the spinning line that swoops around going beep when it hits something big, like an iceberg.

            “So, how do you steer this thing?” I asked. He looked up at me as if I’d just asked him if he’d made high score, and said nothing. He pointed to a fellow in a navy blue baseball cap who was seated behind a large wooden box with an assortment of knobs, dials and needle displays on top. I stepped over to him, and noticed he had his hands on a tiny wheel that came out of the box about chest high in front of him. The wheel was made of solid brass, had half a dozen brassy protrusions extending from it equally spaced around the circumference, but was no larger than a dinner plate. What a disappointment! A fan of old sea novels like Treasure Island (as well as Gilligan’s Island), I expected the wheel to be one of those massive wooden things, bolted to the deck, and the captain, invariably some wooden-legged Ahab with an eye patch, stood there holding on for dear life as waves crashed over him. Still, there was a rousing motto inscribed on the little wheel: Vencer o Morir, it said. Win or Die.

            The atmosphere on the bridge was reserved and professional, and the crew went about their business without taking much heed of the curious on-lookers. “Heading 137 Southeast,” came the call from the young sailor standing behind me; he stood in front of a menacing-looking M-16 secured to the wall. “Bearing 16 knots.”

            A little while later, a crowd developed around a man who’d entered the bridge a few moments before. He was slender, tan, and movie-star handsome, like Cary Grant, but shorter. He wore a navy blue turtleneck sweater beneath his buttoned up pea coat. You could tell from a mile away that he played an important role on the ship. He seemed aware of this as well.

            “Who is that?” I asked a sailor whose name tag identified him as Second Lieutenant Secas.

            “That’s Captain Medel,” he said with a reverent look in his eye. Captain Medel was telling the group about a prior voyage on these same seas. He spoke quietly, but waved his arms to illustrate. I stood on the fringe of the group, managing to catch bits and pieces of the story:

            “The waves were 15-20 meters high, crashing over the bow, smashing against the windows...ship rolled and pitched, all you could see was sky, then the water coming at you...down at any moment...radioed for assistance, but there were no ships within 90 miles...waves swept away cargo...lost two lifeboats...thirteen people with broken bones...” An interesting story to be sure, but I thought it a bit of a breach of wise captainship, a bit like an airplane pilot telling air disaster stories over the flight intercom. 

            A little later, as I stood in the rear of the bridge scribbling down coordinates, trajectories, and other useless numbers, a squat, intense-looking man approached me and asked quietly if I was a spy. He wore a blue windbreaker and a green baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes. He seemed quite old and very suspicious. The question took me off guard. I wondered if he was joking. I laughed and said, “Excuse me?”

            “You are a spy, an Argentine spy?” A stiff silence hung between us for a moment. I didn’t know what to say. Then a man who’d I’d been speaking to earlier came over, put a hand on the man’s elbow, and said, “Arturo, he’s American. He’s not a spy. Leave him alone.”

            “An American?” Arturo said, his eyes suddenly flashing, expressing a genuine (if somewhat manic) fondness. “Ah, an American. That is good. Good. I thought you were an Argentine spy.”

            “No, I’m not a spy.”

            “Not a spy,” he repeated, nodding. I turned away from himand watched the sea for a while, hoping he’d go away,  and when I turned back, he was gone. 

            “What was that about?” I asked the man who had defended me.

            “Arturo is a little strange,” he said. “Some people are very suspicious, particularly of the Argentines. There are many unsettled differences between us right now, and it makes some people nervous.”

            “What kind of issues?” I asked.

            “Issues over territory. Over who owns what. Like the ice fields.”

            I knew what he was talking about. In Santiago, there’d been numerous stories about the dispute which was said to be the last remaining unresolved territorial issue between the two countries. The southern ice field runs down the center of the Andes far south in Patagonia. A 1991 treaty signed by the then-Chilean President Patricio Aylwin and former Argentine President Carlos Menem, divided the field into two roughly equal portions but nationalism and political interests had stalled ratification of the accord in both countries. There were obviously many lingering suspicions between the two countries.[4]

            I went back to the rear deck and stood for a while watching the wind rip across the surface of the sea, lifting great scallops of water into the air, which would then explode in sprays of white. The petrels were really digging the cold, fast winds, and their numbers had increased. I wondered if they’d been there all night. Why were they following us? Were they watching, laughing their asses off at the grown men and women who stumbled around like drunkards? It sure seemed like it; I swear some of the birds were smiling.

            Inside the lounge there were even fewer people than before. The stalwarts who were there, however, seemed to enjoy the rough seas. The boat would rise and fall, and list to one side or the other, and each time, as stomachs leapt - mine included - a great hoot would go up from the people in the room: “Woop!” they’d declare, as if we were enjoying some amusement park ride. “Woop! Woop!”

            Down in my cabin, all three roommates were lying in their beds affected with la marea.  José Domingo turned over languidly when I came in, and I asked him if he was going to be OK. He groaned. Jorge snored loudly. I went back upstairs. 

            The sea had calmed considerably when evening came, and people came crawling out of their cabins to hit the bar. I found the Americans sitting together drinking whisky and Don bought me a round. They were discussing their weight.

            “I used to be 200,” Don said, patting his belly. “I went through a whole series of personal trainers until I found the right one. Ray,” he said, as if we all knew who Ray was. “Yup, Ray did what all the others couldn’t. He brought me right back down to my ideal weight, 175 pounds.” Don took a sip of whisky. “Yup, Ray did me right.” The others nodded in approval as if Ray were standing right there working his lats.

“I lost 14 pounds on the cabbage soup diet,” said Jane.

“The what?” Stan asked.

“The cabbage soup diet. It’s becoming famous. You get to eat nothing but a soup made of cabbage, onions, peppers, tomatoes and celery, every day for a week.”

“Didn’t you get hungry?” asked Barb.

“It wasn’t too bad. You’d be surprised how quickly you can get used to it.”

“Cabbage gives me gas,” announced Don.

“I doubt if you’re getting all the nutrients you need on a diet like that,” said Stan, who was, after all, a doctor. “Most of the weight you lost is probably water loss, not actual fat tissue.”

“Oh,” said Jane, perhaps finally understanding now why her ass was still huge.

This was more or less as interesting as things got, which explains why I started drinking heavily. I ended up buying the next round, and then everyone else had to buy a round, and before I knew it I’d downed six whiskies and was quite drunk.

The next few hours passed in a blur. I started to feel ill from all the alcohol that saturated my sytem, and decided to go down to pass out. I entered the cabin, where a faint light from the midnight sky shone through the porthole and cast a soft plum glow on the planes and edges of the room. I took off my clothes, got into bed, and just as I was about to close my eyes, I looked across at the other bunk and realized with a sudden dread that something was wrong. The guy sleeping across from me didn’t look familiar. It wasn’t Jose Domingo, but some guy with a huge bald head and one of those great bushy gray Monopoly Man mustaches. Thank God he was bald because if it weren’t for the light on his head, I wouldn’t have realized I’d slinked into the wrong cabin.  Clad once again in tighty-whiteys, I gathered my clothes in my arms and scurried down the hallway to the right cabin, hoping no one would see me, half-naked and stealing through the pink, creamy light of the passageway[5].

Antarctica: The Arrival

            Around ten-thirty the next day, a wave of excitement rippled through the ship. Long on the horizon, an iceberg was spotted, the first real sign that we were nearing Antarctica. We’d sailed far enough south into the latitudinal zone known as the Antarctic Convergence, and when the announcement went out about the iceberg, Handicams were broken out like rifles during an invasion. As we approached and passed the iceberg on the starboard side, it seemed everyone on board was standing at the rail watching and filming the floating chunk of ice.

            The iceberg - the first sea-borne berg I’d ever seen - was monstrous, about the size of two city blocks. It had a flat mesa top and sheer sides that caught the sunlight and blazed a dazzling white, like a floating shopping mall. I wondered how long ago it had broken off and where it would go? How long would it ride the swift, cold currents of the Passage until melting away?

            The wind was terrifically cold, and bit my nostrils and froze the tears that welled up in my eyes. Over the next few hours, we passed more icebergs, some of them traveling in flotillas like an armada of alien ships, all of them of the same flat shape. I learned that there is a reason for this. As opposed to Arctic icebergs, which usually have pointy tops sticking out from the sea, Antarctic icebergs are tabular, or table-like, because they calve off the tabular ice shelves. As a result, they look more like buildings.  They can be huge, too. Far larger than the ones we saw.  In fact, in 1965, an iceberg broke free of the continent and floated 120 miles off shore of Scott Island. It was roughly the size of Connecticut[6].

            I snapped a couple of pictures, while those around me did the same or shot with their Handicams. I watched one would-be Jacques Cousteau stand on the upper deck and do a full 360 degree pan of the sea and the ship, resolutely holding his Handicam against his eye and turning around in excruciatingly tiny steps. It took him about five minutes to do the full circle, about 60 percent of it just flat blue sea, 10 percent iceberg, and 40 percent a close up of the side of the ship. Ugh, I shuddered at the thought of having to watch that video.

            We spotted the islands in the early afternoon, a long, flat expanse of snowy white punctuated by tall rock towers jutting into the sky. The wind blew from the direction of the islands, bearing the smell of earth and ice. The islands were smothered with glaciers like thick dollops of ice cream or frosting that met the sea as towering white cliffs over 100 feet high. 

            I made for the bridge, which was now crowded with curious passengers (obviously the rumor had spread that the rule against civilians on the bridge was laxly enforced). The area around the map table was particularly crowded, and I had to squeeze my way between two plump ladies to get to the map so I could tell what the names of the islands were. The smaller island on the right was Nelson Island, and the one to the left was King George Island, which was to be our first destination.

            As I watched the island approach on our port side, Stan suddenly appeared next to me in a bright red Patagonia jacket, just a shade redder than his face, which beamed like a newly shined apple. “Isn’t this great!” he said giddily. There was another man sitting confidently in the captain’s chair, a large man with intense blue eyes, a navy blue sweater, and four stripes on his shoulders. He was peering out the window through a pair of big binoculars. I remembered that Captain Medel had only worn three stripes, so I wondered who this man was who seemed to outrank him.

            “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” I said to Second Lieutenant Secas, “Where is the Captain?”

            “Right there,” he said.

            “But that’s not the man who was here yesterday.”

            “No, that was Captain Medel. That man there is Captain Roman.”

            “There are two captains on the ship?”

            “Yes, but not really. Captain Roman is the Commanding Officer, but Captain Medel is the official captain of the vessel for this voyage.”

            “So Captain Roman outranks Captain Medel?”

            “Yes, but he’s not in charge of the ship.” Second Lieutenant Secas’ explanation didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I decided to ask Captain Roman myself. He gave me the same confusing answer. My impulse was to ask who, if the need should arrive, would have to go down with the ship, but I kept the question to myself.

            Captain Roman turned out to be an easy-going, affable man. He spoke perfect English and reminded me of somebody’s uncle. Whose uncle? I have no idea, but he was decidedly “uncle-like”. We talked briefly about the life of a Chilean navy man, which he said was full of adventure. He was proud of the Chilean navy, which was said to be the finest in Latin America. I believed him. Captain Roman told me he’d been in the service for 36 years, and that his father had served in Japan during the Second World War.

            “He fought with the Americans,” he told me. “He is very proud of that.”

             We came upon a narrow strait between the two islands, and I noticed numerous small black animals darting through the water. They swam just below the surface and then broke through, squirting through the air like pinched watermelon seeds, before splashing down. I thought maybe they were some kind of fish, but on closer inspection could see that they were penguins. How totally cool! I had no idea penguins could swim so fast.

            Soon, we entered the strait, swung around King George Island and steamed north into calm, glassy Maxwell Bay on the back side. The surface of the water glimmered gold and silver, like a billion coins. The bright sun suggested warmth, but a severe chill had settled over the cramped harbor. The small thermometer that hung on the window of the bridge read six degrees below zero centigrade.

Sailors in heavy navy parkas and gloves swarmed like ants over the bow of the ship, preparing to drop anchor. We hummed to a stop about a mile off shore. There was already a ship moored nearby, a rusted cargo vessel flying what appeared to be a flag of the Russian Confederation. The boat appeared hardly sea-worthy. It had long streaks of rust running down the side, and a number of holes in the side. On closer inspection, however, these turned out to be portholes. 

One of the crew on board the Aquiles yanked a metal arm attached to the anchor assembly. The anchor fell with a hard splash, and the spool holding the chain unwound with a furious racket. We were more than a mile from shore and an announcement went out over the intercom that for those interested in visiting the island this evening, life boats would be departing in the next half hour. I hurried back to my room to get some things.

            As luck would have it, when I returned there was already a long line of people waiting on the deck near the lifeboats to go ashore. I stood behind a frail-looking old man and his wife, wondering to myself how safe it was for them to be standing around in such cold temperatures. Six or so sailors were busy lowering the lifeboats into the water while another two were fiddling with the ropes that controlled the narrow staircase we were supposed to descend. Watching the scene, I became a bit unsure of the whole enterprise. There seemed to be a lot of question-asking going on, and the whole affair reeked of inexperience. I don’t wish to criticize the Chilean Navy, but when the ladder twisted and its ropes tangled, and when top half of the life boat splashed into the water ahead of the bottom half, and then swung against the ship with a loud thud, I wondered how much training the boys had had to date on this equipment. Many of the crew looked to be in their late teens. There was something altogether nerve-jangling about placing my life in the hands of Menudo.

            The passengers in the front of the line began the slow and treacherous descent to the bobbing lifeboats while a sailor stood at the top of the ladder and checked off names. Good thinking. They wanted to be sure they left no one on shore. But the process was excruciatingly slow and it was so damn cold standing there that I had the urge to call it off altogether and rush back to the bar. Furthermore, many of the eager travelers were old, and watching them hobble and wheeze down the ladder was almost more than I could bear. It took one lady a full ten minutes to get down the staircase; she took a step, and then brought her other foot down to the same rung. Then she’d huff and puff a few times before going again. I had to balance my sincere concern for the health of these old folks with a mad desire to scream, “Hurry up you old dame! It’s freezing up here!” 

It was freezing down in the boat, too, and it took them over half an hour to get their shit together and get the boat moving towards shore. I was shivering so badly that it felt as if I was losing complete control of my muscles. I sat down on the hard bench of the lifeboat and tried to keep warm by knocking my knees together.  I berated myself for bringing such a thin pair of gloves, and hoped to God that it wouldn’t get much colder. My fingers were already numb and the water in my eyes felt like it was going to freeze my lids shut at any moment. I couldn’t believe how cheerful some of the folks were, particularly some of the elderly, and I felt ashamed because all I wanted was to find someone to bitch at.

Our boat moved away from the ship and headed towards shore. As we passed alongside the Russian vessel, it dawned on me that something was missing. A vital piece of equipment on any boat, let alone one skimming through frozen seas.

            “Excuse me, sir?” I said to the sailor who stood in the bow. He was flapping his arms in a gesture that I couldn’t tell was an effort to keep warm or some Chilean navigational technique. “Aren’t we supposed to be wearing life jackets?” He looked down at me as if I were something that just fell out of someone’s nose. My lips were frozen, and I wasn’t sure if the Spanish came out correctly.

            “Que?” he said.

            “I said, aren’t there supposed to be life jackets? For passengers?” He shrugged and I searched my memory to be sure that I had used the right words: chaleco salvavidas. Another sailor nearby scoffed, “Why do you need a life jacket? If you fall in this water, you only have about twenty-five seconds to live. We’d never get to you in time.” I saw a faint smile cross his lips as he exchanged glances with his buddy sitting across from him. Bastards, I thought.

            We made it ashore in about 40 minutes. I was miserable. Futilely, I hoped there would be a Starbucks somewhere nearby. And maybe a hot tub. We landed on the pebbled beach, and the sailors aboard leapt out and tried to haul the boats further up the beach, but they were very heavy wooden things, and the sailors barely managed to budge them. A troop of Chinstrap Penguins eyed us with curious interest from just a few yards away as we lumbered out of the boats.

             It was a very odd sensation to have my feet on solid ground again. I could still sense the movement of the ship in my legs, which translated into a kind of rubbery feeling that left me slightly off balance. Even though I felt like I’d entered the