Exit Stage Left

In Pucon, in the Southern region of Los Lagos, the main attraction is Volcan Villarica. This semi-active volcano looms over the town. Elisa being the jock that she is, the first thing that she wanted to do when we arrived was to climb it.

We signed up with one of the many available tour companies, and at 7am Wednesday morning we were bumping our way up the gravel road towards the volcano in the company of four hyperactive guides. They shared massive sandwiches, blasted the radio, and swigged soda from the bottle. I stared at the volcano dominating the windshield and resolved to reach the top.
With large packs filled with mountaineering outfits and one icepick each, we started off at the base. The first section was loose volcanic ash and stone--it was very similar to walking up a vertical beach. The sun was strong and punishing, but we wove our way upwards single file. Elisa, predictably, was at the front of the line, and I was just behind her. The pace was slow and steady, and as my calf muscles began to scream I repeated meditation mantras in my head. In this way we arrived at our first resting place.

From there, we entered the snow. We were given a brief tutorial on proper icepick usage, and off we went. My legs felt fine after the break, and the cardiovascular effort was minimal due to the slow pace. Strangely though, as we wound back and forth over the incredibly steep slope, my head began to feel odd. For about ten minutes, it worsened steadily until I became concerned about my ability to continue.

"Elisa, I'm dizzy."

"It's probably the altitude," she told me. "Take deep breaths."

Ah. I can deal with this. I tried to breath deeply, a difficult task while climbing a mountain. Nonetheless, the feeling only continued. Staring at my feet, as was necessary in order not to miss the footholds cut into the snow, I began to lose sense of which direction was which. At times, my stomach turned and I worried that I would be sick all over the bright white slope. My legs felt shaky, even though they weren't exceptionally tired.

"I don't feel very good."

"You should tell them."

"No!"

I kept pushing. The feeling kept growing. Every five or six minutes I'd ejaculate some increasingly dramatic comment on my condition. At one point, I moaned,
"I feel really, really bad right now!"

The guide heard me and swivelled his head around to face me. "Are you ok?"

"Oh yes!" I said brightly. "I'm fine, I'm fine."

About ten minutes later, some 30 or 40 minutes after I'd begun to feel ill, I was distinctly not fine. I caught my breath a bit too shortly and with that, I lost control over my breathing and began to hyperventilate. My knees gave out and I crashed down onto the snow. The guides ran over and, despite my embarassment, I let my pulse be taken and ate the proferred chocolate. Soon, I was able to make the very short distance to the next resting area, a bare rock in the snow.

Altitude sickness, the guides decided, and refused to let me go higher. And so I stayed on the rock, with a wonderful French woman who had tired, and a young guide who was thrilled to get off easy on his 9th straight day of work. The view was beautiful, and we talked and shared sandwiches before sledding down to the bottom and relaxing in the sun. It was a beautiful day; my two new companions each had wonderful stories to tell; the sun was warm; and the lower down on the mountain we got the more I felt my brain begin to stop spinning and my head stop floating above my body. It was not what I set out to do, but I was happy, and I felt no regrets even while browsing Elisa's pictures of the crater over dinner.

The next morning, I woke up, and I knew that I would leave Chile if I were offered the job I had interviewed for in the States.

It's not the country, though I thought that at first, nor is it being far from home. It's a combination of factors, and at the center is my dissatisfaction with work. Teaching was challenging me, but not in the right ways. I felt that my emotional life was wrought with stress, but that my intellectual life had somehow stagnated. I loved my city and my friends, but I had nothing of my own, no project to put my energy towards.

And so it was that when I left Valparaiso on the morning bus to Buenos Aires last week, I left for good, at least for now.

What next? I'm thrilled to have accepted a full-time volunteer position with couchsurfing.com. I'll be starting as their Member Communications Coordinator and Writer next month. In exchange for my work, I'll receive housing, food, and transportation in Berkeley, CA. If you're not familiar with the project, I encourage you to check it out--it's an incredible effort to transform the way people travel, and one that I've been active in during my time in Valpo.

I don't think that I'm through with Chile, in many ways, so stay tuned as I plan on blogging here for a bit longer. I don't expect to write with the same frequency, giving the changes I'm going through, but I still have plenty to say about my time in Valparaiso. Meanwhile, I'll hopefully have another blog up and running sometime after I arrive in California.

In the end, it sometimes works out that the goals that we set for ourselves need to be changed. Sometimes you need to accept your own limitations, and understand that moving forward will bring you more trouble than glory. Sometimes you need to stop and say, "The view is fine from here."