MORE EVIDENCE THAT I AM NOT A CURMUDGEON

                         Hugo Wilde Weiss, and his great grandfather

Memoir 16: Antarctica

Cold?  Nah, not me!

Several time in the last few weeks I have found myself playing the old geezer on the cracker barrel, spinning yarns of times long past.  I guess this is an occupational hazard of senior citizenhood.  It may not be dignified, but it beats constantly snoozing in the recliner.  And, you can only waste so much time thumbing through Facebook.  So, there being nobody around right now to inflict my memories upon, I decided it would be amusing to write the history of my brief career as an Antarctic Explorer.

Well, I wasn’t really an explorer, of course – I was a lecturer on a cruise ship and, as an unwelcome adjunct duty, an on-land cop and an all-purpose drinking buddy.  I will explain.

I retired from teaching at the end of 1997.  I continued to do research – entirely for fun; nobody paid me, of course – until about 2005.  That also was the period during which I worked on the campus tree tour – identifying the campus trees, taking their pictures, and writing short blurbs about them.  In case you like trees, you could  click on

  http://treetour.wwu.edu/ .

But tree identification, thinking about tectonic plates – even (especially)  golf – grew boring after a few years, so I was susceptible to temptation. One day I got one such from a notice on the Geology Department bulletin board.

Seems one of our recent graduates had landed a job with a tour company based in Seattle, called Society Expeditions.  Why it was called that was never clear to me: had it been an offshoot of some Exploration Society, or did it specialize (at one time) in tours of the Society Islands?    I never found out, but it doesn’t matter, anyway.  They had one ship, called the World Discoverer, a thoroughly gussified Korean car ferry that served very well as an upscale tour boat.  At any rate, suddenly they found themselves without someone to lecture their passengers about geology.  Our ex-student notified the Geology Department office, Vicki (our secretary) put up the notice – I saw it, and I got the job.

The World Discoverer was at sea almost continuously.  Spring and Fall it would tour the central Pacific islands (Fiji, etc.), summers it would operate out of Nome, Alaska, and in winter (summer in the southern hemisphere) it butted head with icebergs and very large waves in the Southern Ocean.  I signed on for two tours, which used up the month of November, 2002.  Note that November in Antarctica is the equivalent of June up here; in other words, very early summer. 

I was stoked.  I knew another geologist who regularly did this sort of work for a different cruise line.  He ate well, was housed magnificently, was given elegant T-shirts to keep – and generally treated like a VIP.  As it happened, however, on the World Discoverer lecturers were just hired help.  Maybe we were one step above the Phillipine ladies that made the beds, but in no way to be compared with, or treated like, paying passengers.

What did I get for my efforts?  Well, they paid $50/day.  They flew me to Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan to start the trip – and then back home from Ushuaia, Argentina when my tour of duty was over.  They also gave me a liquor allowance of $3.00/day.  They did this because one of a lecturer’s explicit duties was to schmooze with the passengers after dinner – and buy them drinks!  My allowance would buy maybe one $3 beer.  However, I quickly fell in with some very interesting people with whom I sat (and drank) nearly every evening.  (This ate up my $3.00 plus a significant fraction of my daily pay.) 

They were cheap in other ways, too.  For one thing – we had to wear their shirts, but we couldn’t keep them.  We didn’t even get a discount in the gift shop.  And, their most heinous sin in my eyes – they housed us in dingy little closets below water line; two guys in maybe 40 square feet, two bunks, a toilet, and a desk.  The passengers were wallowing in luxury on the higher decks, living like royalty.  There were empty cabins – but they didn’t let us (lecturers) use them.    The company later went bankrupt, lost their only boat, and went out of existence.  My eyes were dry; no tears for skinflints.

(But, come on!  They gave me a trip to the White Continent, something I never have been able to afford otherwise.)

So, we flew to Santiago, Chile, and assembled at a fancy hotel in the ritziest part of the city.  There the passengers were plied with Pisco sours (I snuck my share), and introduced to all the “staff”.  I had to make a little speech, warning them of what I planned to talk about.  They were surprisingly enthusiastic.

While I was there I caught the Santiago Metro (a very good subway system) and went across town to visit with some of my friends from my old Chilean field-work days.  Then, the next days we flew to Punta Arenas, got a tour of the city (not much there I am sorry to report), and were welcomed aboard.  That very evening we unmoored and headed east through the famous Straits of Magellan.

Well, heck, we did the whole trip at night, so nobody saw much of anything.  The next morning we were pretty much in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for the Falkland Islands.

The Falklands are very interesting.  First we stopped at a little island on the west side, mainly to see Rockhopper penguins.  Of greater interest to me was the single family that lived there, apparently owning the entire island and running sheep on it.  They lived in a snug, fairly big house, surrounded by outbuildings and agricultural equipment.  I think the various tour companies paid them to allow passengers to visit their farmstead, where they served various baked goodies (excellent) and coffee.  They were friendly enough, but you could sense that they were uncomfortable around all these chattering strangers.  It is hard to imagine a more solitary life than the one they led.  My guess is that their nearest neighbors were a day’s boat ride away.  When the Argentines invaded a few decades ago, I wonder if these people even learned about it until it was all over.  (No, of course they did - they have a good radio,).  Their island seemed to consist entirely of rolling hills covered with coarse grass.  There were a few trees near the homestead, but apparently not anywhere else on the island.

Next we put into the capital, Sidney, on the east side, and stayed one day.  Sidney is – how shall I put it – a little peculiar.  It has an excellent harbor, with lots of shipping – but there also were a bunch of rusting hulks littering the seascape.  The church and government house are worth seeing, as well as some of the (well, yes, peculiar) houses scattered about.  One had a garden consisting entirely of little concrete gnomes!

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 They also had a fine pub.  Several of the ladies wanted to go in, but felt they needed an escort – so they asked me to go in with them. What me?  In a pub?  Well, just this once. – and in we went.  The barkeep looked at us a little sourly.  The ladies sat down while I strode up to the bar and asked for three pints of his best bitter.  The barkeep looked at me with a small smile and said “Sir.  London is 10,000 miles from here.  Our beer is in bottles.”  Well, of course – with 3,000 people max, the Falklands aren’t about to support a brewery.  I felt a little stupid – but later he came to our table and told us about life on his island, and why he wouldn’t live anywhere else. 

My impression of the Falklands is that it is very interesting and fun to visit, if the weather is right.  (It was for us, but we were lucky.)  Basically it is treeless, wind-swept grassland, covered with sheep.  Why do the Argentines want it so desperately (they call is Las Malvinas)?  Well, partially out of hurt pride – but also because both to the east and west of the islands lie excellent offshore oil prospects.

One last Falkland observation:  The Argentines initially over-ran most of the Falklands, but when they realized they were going to get their butts kicked by Margaret Thatcher and the Royal Navy, they laid fields of land mines, out of spite, or so it appears.  The Falklanders haven’t bothered to dig them up.  Instead, they built fences around each mine field and put up warning signs.  This has, strangely, benefitted the penguins; the stupidly adaptive little buggers have turned some of these mine fields into rookeries.  Seems the little devils are too light to set off a land mine, so building nests in a mine field makes excellent sense – nothing much heavier than a penguin is going to bother them.

After the Falklands we headed further east into the south Atlantic to visit what I regard as one of the major wonders of the natural world – South Georgia Island.    

S. Georgia is a big island, approximately 170 km by 20 km, with a permanent population at the time of our visit of two.  There also was an outpost of the British Antarctic Survey, with 15-20 temporary residents.  S. Georgia is much cut up by deep fjords, and down its spine stretches a mountain range with peaks that reach nearly 3000 meters  in elevation; 11 peaks are more than 2000 m.  Most of the range is covered by glaciers or huge snowfields.  The only fauna consists of birds (most notably nesting albatross and King Penguins), seals (fur seals and elephant seals), and large herds of caribou that were introduced by whalers in the late 1800s, to provide fresh meat. 

About the turn of the last century S. Georgia was a big-time source of whale oil.  There were at least four large “factories”, with permanent workers/residents numbering in the hundreds.  Whales were killed in the Southern Ocean, and then brought to S. Georgia for final processing into the whale oil that lighted the homes of the affluent in Europe and the United States, before John D. Rockefeller and kerosene.    The famous Antarctic explorer Sir Earnest Shackleton stopped in S. Georgia several times; in fact, he is buried there. 

Well, of course, the whaling stations are in ruins now; mainly rusting metal buildings slowly collapsing into picturesque heaps.  Human beings are forbidden to enter (by the U.K. government, which administers S. Georgia); the only inhabitants at the time I visited were fur seals.  Fur seals are nasty little (well, not so little) devils, especially during mating season, which this was.  The Expedition Leader lived in constant torment lest one of these horny buggers – frustrated by not having been able to collect his own harem of females – took it out by biting one of our high-paying passengers.  Thus, we lecturers sometimes were posted near particularly menacing seals, with orders to scare them off if they charged our precious supercargo.  They hated loud noises, so you were supposed to run at them, yelling your head off, while banging several rocks together.  In my experience this always worked.  If it didn’t, I guess we were supposed to kick them in the chops, then run like hell.  They are surprisingly fast on land, considering the fact that they have no feet – but not as fast as a terrified lecturer. 

One afternoon I spent three hours protecting a trail used by passengers, from a sleeping male fur seal.  I called him George.  About every ten minutes George would wake up, open his eyes, and look around.  I would then say – “Go back to sleep, George” –in an authoritative voice: - and he would do it.  George was better behaved than my cats are, that’s certain.

However, the paramount attraction of South Georgia Islands has to be elephant seals and King penguins.   We spent one whole day anchored off a beach upon which there were 50,000 breeding pairs of King penguins*.  There also were thousands of yearlings wandering about; covered in brown feathers that gradually gave way to the regal splendor of an adult.  These latter are called “Oakum Boys” – I’ll leave it to you to figure out why. 

*The only thing that smells worse than a big penguin rookery is a mink farm.

According to various treaties, humans are not permitted to approach any animal or bird closer than five meters.  However, nobody said anything about standing still and letting them approach YOU.  King penguins are curious.  There were a bunch of un-mated females wandering around.  Three in particular, sticking together, were determined to figure out what manner of creature I was.  On land penguins have no natural enemies, so they had no hesitation about waddling right up to me.  One particularly persistent bird was bound and determined to peck one of my buttons – but she couldn’t quite get up the courage.  She would extend her beak to within about two inches of me, then suddenly jerk back.  I felt like breaking off a button and giving it to her, but I’m sure that the Expedition Leader, would not have been pleased..

In amongst the penguins were harems of elephant seals.  These must be among the strangest creatures ever to inhabit the earth.  The austral elephant seal (male) can weigh 8,800 lbs. and be as long as 19 ft.  (Females are tiny by comparison).  The males have a strange, hanging, floppy kind of nose resembling, with imagination, an elephant’s trunk – hence the name.  They spend most of their life in the water.  However, in the spring they haul out on the beaches of S. Georgia and other sub-Antarctic islands, to await the females.  As the ladies arrive, the bulls fight each other for dominance,; the winner then gathers a harem together and gets on with the job of creating more elephant seals.  By the time we had arrived the fighting had mostly stopped, but the mating was in full, conspicuous swing.  (Some of our ladies were not amused.)

 Every so often a bull would decide that he needed a bath, and would thereupon flop his 4-ton self-down to the water, sometimes right through penguin rookeries.  Somehow the birds mostly escaped; I can’t vouch for the eggs. 

Okay, so I spent more than a page on S. Georgia Island.  Does it deserve it?  Yes.  In spades.  Like I said, it is one of the natural wonders of the world.  In some ways it’s better than the Galapagos Islands.

All this and we hadn’t even gotten to Antarctica proper.  However, we did in about two more days.  The stretch of water we had to cross is widely considered the roughest stretch of navigation anywhere.  It is called the Drake Passage.  I crossed it four times.  Three times it was very smooth; the fourth it was quite bad.  From what I have been told, I was very lucky.

And from here on the trip becomes a blur.  We cruised through straits defined by ice-covered peaks on either side, we explored island chains, we visited Antarctic research stations, and we just soaked up the scenery.  I’m into mountains, ice-covered and jagged, and this was the ultimate.  If you much prefer grassy hills with flowers and bubbling brooks, this might not be for you, although I’ll bet you would get off on it, anyway.

Oh, I should have said – we visited penguins.  There must be six thousands kinds of penguin in Antarctica, and by God we were determined to visit every last one of them!  I like penguins as much as any sane person should, but after a while all short, waddling black-and-white birds look exactly the same.  Fortunately, I usually was assigned fur-seal duty.  I’m not saying that penguins are uninteresting; they certainly are not.  All the same, I would have preferred to look at more rocks, glaciers and icebergs, at the expense of one more colony of chin-straps!

So, I only spent one month at this “adventure”, and already I have burned up five pages and 2,700 words, so I will get on with it.  The best I can do is to recount some interesting experiences.

We had looked forwarded to putting into the U.S. base Palmer Station.  We were to get a lecture or two, tour the facility, and admire our tax dollars in action.  We had received permission in advance.  However, as we approached, Palmer Station radioed us to be on our way – they were too busy to “entertain” us.  I think lots of congresspersons received letters about that when our highly educated, successful passengers got home. 

The Antarctic Treaty states that the continent is not to be claimed by nation states, but rather held in trust for all.  However, Chile refuses to sign the treaty.  Thus, whenever a tour ship approaches the Chilean station they are radioed with a demand to identify themselves and state their business.  One and all, the cruise ships simply ignore the poor devils at the station, who certainly were required to do this by the home government.  If we ignored them, what were they supposed to do?  Throw snowballs at us?

We did get to stop at the Polish station.  Everything about it reeked of poverty.  They seemed to have spent a lot of time making little trinkets to sell to tourists.  Their station buildings were run-down and looked positively unsafe, let alone uncomfortable.  To enter we had to take off our boots.  When we came back, several pairs were missing!  Poor buggers – they even had to swipe their footwear! 

We tried to put the passengers on land at least once every day, and often more.  They were transported from ship to shore by zodiacs; rubberized rafts that can hold up to about a dozen people.  They travel fast, can go into very shallow water, and are easy to put on and off the big ship.  They were run by sailors from the Philippines; short, very strong, always smiling guys.  The captain of the ship was German, as was his wife, who was sort of head concierge.  The waiters in the dining hall were German, and the guy behind the bar was, too.  It was a funny situation: an American ship, crewed by Germans, with all the hard work done by Philippinos.  Also, there were lots of maids – all from the Philippines.  Half the passengers were from Germany; the rest from the U.S.  Given this mix of passengers, the home office had laid on two separate sets of lecturers; half American, half German.  Unfortunately, the Germans lecturers all were kids in the middle of their graduate studies;, none  had much experience giving talks.  By contrast, we three Americans were all veteran blabber-mouths.  Most of the German passengers easily understood English, and so gradually they took to attending our lectures.  Toward the end the German geologist kid took to sitting in on my lectures and also asking me to vet his talks.  (He would write them out!)

Okay, an adventure.  There is a place called Desolation Island which is an “extinct*” volcano.  At some time not long ago it evidently blew off its top and then subsided, with the result that the crater is full of sea water.  However, there is a hole in the rim through which you can sail a cruise ship.  At one time not long ago there was a whaling station there (buildings still standing), but a lava flow persuaded them to move.  We sailed into the middle of the crater, and then took those passengers who wanted to go to a place where hot water was boiling up from the magma beneath.  You could jump in and find places where the water was like a nice hot tub.  Five feet away it would be cold, and in some places it was too warm for comfort.  The active young things among us would get warm, then swim out into the icy water, then back again.  Me – no swimmer, that’s for sure – I dog-paddled around in the comfortable zone.  But after this all our passengers could say – Oh, yes, we went swimming in the Antarctic!

*You can see why I put the word “extinct” in quotes.

The various cruise lines running ships in Antarctica collaborate to make sure that they don’t encounter one another; that gives the passengers the illusion of being in a complete wilderness – only us, against the ice.  The captains and expedition leaders constantly consult one another by radio to maintain this apparent solitude.  We heard of one ship, a Russian “trawler” modified to take 50 or so passengers that had a most unfortunate experience.  They had just put their passengers on the beach when up came a ferocious katabatic wind; these are winds that arise when the air above a glacier becomes cold and dense, then “flows” down the glacier slope.  Katabatic winds can push the largest ships around; we had to skip one of our stops because the captain said he couldn’t safely anchor the ship near land.  Anyway, these passengers – all Americans, I seem to remember – had to watch as their ship sailed away into the distance, stranding them in Antarctica!  I guess they started a fire with the bits of drift wood around (strictly verboten) and sheltered in the lea of a big rock, singing old campfire songs, and ten or twelve  hours later the ship returned.  They at least had a darned good story to tell. 

What else?  Oh, yeah.  Some of the more mature ladies on our trip became totally smitten with penguins.  Through lectures and reading they became aware that the chief enemy of penguins in the area was the leopard seal.   One day somebody discovered one of these miscreants, sunning itself on the beach.  They are ugly brutes; spotted and blotched in dingy colors and shaped rather like a fat eel.  Like all other Antarctic critters, they have no fear of anything on land.  We had to restrain several ladies from throwing rocks at him.  Instead, they took lots of pictures and then sat around after dinner discussing how ugly he was.  If concentrated hatred can kill, that was one sick seal.

How about an “on ship” adventure?   This cruise fancied itself the nee plus ultra of upscale, luxury touring.  At dinner the passengers were served in courses; often freaky gourmet tidbits I could scarcely recognize.  Lecturers were required to eat with the passengers, and to dress up a little.  We ate off white tablecloths and were elegantly served by the German kids.  Two girls spent the entire dinner hour walking around with bottles of wine in their hands, filling glasses.  Well, this was great – when the seas were calm.  However, several times the seas came up during the dinner hour and the ship began pitching and rolling through preposterous angles.  I remember one time sitting with two ladies, talking geology, while I watched the stern of the ship go up – until I could see only sky – and then down, with nothing but sea water visible.  That’s called “pitching”; we also “rolled” – side to side.  As you can imagine the plates slid off the tables and into our laps, the little frauleins- with wine bottles found themselves on the floor – and very soon all the passengers were heading for their staterooms.  Sensibly, they also had a buffet – you could make yourself a sandwich, grab a beer, and find yourself someplace to anchor to.  It was stupid of them to keep up this pretense of luxury, but they tried. 

Another nautical adventure.  We were heading across Drake Passage for the last time; I would be heading home in a few days.  All of a sudden the captain comes on the intercom, sounding like a man in the grip of frenzy.  He has spotted a pod of fin whales heading our way.  Fin whales are the second largest of the whales, and I can vouch for the fact that they are impressive.  They also must be closely related to dolphins, because they seemed to want to play with our ship!  They swam along with us for several hours, mainly keeping just ahead.   They were these monstrous big brown things that would roll their backs out of the water.  They easily kept pace with us without, apparently, ever moving their tail flaps.  They played and then, as if a trumpet had sounded, they swam off

Okay, this certainly is more than one month in my life deserves.  I want to finish by giving some advice. 

1)      There are two kinds of Antarctic cruises that normally are offered.  The longer is about three weeks.  It goes from Ushuaia to the Falklands, South Georgia, and then to the Antarctic Peninsula for a week or so, before returning to Ushuaia.  The second goes straight across Drake Passage to the Peninsula, putts around for about a week, then goes back.  It takes about 10 days.  If you possibly can afford it, take the longer trip.  I did both.  On our 10-day cruise a bunch of people got so sick on our first day out that we didn’t see them again until about day 5!  Drake Passage can be very, very rough, so be prepared.

2)      Try not to go to early (November) or too late (April).  In November pack ice and horny fur seals will get in your way.  In April, I am told, the pack ice begins to return and many of the animals and birds are gone.

3)      Pick the smallest boat you can find.  They may not serve five course dinners on fine china, but they can get you to shore quickly – and go anywhere the big ships can go, and  some places they can’t.

4)      Buy good-fitting, quality rubber boots before you leave.  Otherwise you will be burdened with some real crap.  And, believe me; you will need rubber boots, especially when crossing those shallow lakes of penguin waste-products.

Anyway:  An Antarctic cruise should be high on your bucket-list – if you can afford it!

Memoir 15: Adventures in South America

Volcan Copiapo & Lago Negro Francisco

ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AMERICA

Some people may be interested in my adventures in Chile.  I went there for a few weeks or months nearly every year from about 1985 to about 2000.  This amounted to a prodigious heap of frequent flyer miles.   Unfortunately, they went to Western Washington University, or the National Science Foundation, never to me.   The scientific results that came out of these South American excursions turned out to be less important than our work in North America, but one very important conclusion emerged – the geologic history of North and South America are not alike, at least on their western edges, and geologists who continue to refer to California as an “Andean plate margin” are full of refried beans.

The guy who first lured me south was Robert Drake, whom I had known in graduate school.  Drake was what is referred to as a “geochronologist”; that is, someone who determines the age of certain kinds of rocks, chiefly volcanic ones.  As most of Chile is made up of volcanic rocks, Bob was something of a Chilean national hero, at least to their geologists.  Bob also was a crackerjack volcanic geologist, and I relied on him to an extraordinary extent.  Other Norte Americanos who worked with me from time to time include Russ Burmester, Bob Butler, and graduate students Paul Riley and Brian Steele.  Russ ran the paleomagnetism lab at WWU, had his own projects, and was (and is) an excellent geologist: with Russ and Bob Drake I could hardly go wrong.  Bob Butler was a professor of geology at the University of Arizona, who had done paleomagnetism in Argentina; he was happy to cross the Andes and collaborate on my projects.  The two graduate students had one thing (at least) in common; they were persuasive.  I had a rule that stated “only Chilean students on South American projects”.  These guys talked me out of the money to do work in the Andes.  Publications came out of both trips, so I shouldn’t complain too much.

More important than the gringos were my Chilean colleagues and students.  I can’t name them all: the list would be too long.  I will mention six: Francisco (Pancho) Herve’, Francisco (also Pancho) Munizaga, Constantino Mpodosis, Alfredo Garcia, Jose Cembrano, and Connie Rojas.  The first two were on the faculty of the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago.  Mpodosis (“Cocho”) worked for the Chilean Geological Survey,and the remaining three were their students whom I kidnapped and carted back to Bellingham to work on  M.S. degrees.  Pancho Muni was a special friend of Bob Drake, and we often stayed at his house when we were in the big city.  Pancho Herve’ was (and is) the “Grey Eminence” of Chilean geology; he knew everybody, everybody knew him, and he was the go-to guy for many kinds of Andean geological problems.  We were lucky to have these guys help out.

The Chilean grad students were superlative.  They knew they had no more than two years to finish their research and write their thesis, so they worked hard, and succeeded.  Cembrano may have been the most talented graduate student we (WWU geology) have ever had.  Connie and Jose were married, and Connie was pregnant, so she didn’t finish her degree.  Alfredo was a good student and a very popular and social one.  He played a lot of tennis with some of the other graduate students; it was fun to watch a match, with Alfredo cursing freely in Spanish and his opponent in English.

More about these folks later.

So, anyway, on my first trip south I was met at the airport by Pancho Muni, who was to take me to an apartment that the U. Chile geology people somehow had title to.  I was hungry, so I invited him out to dinner.  He seemed perplexed, but we found a restaurant and a table.  It was about 6:00 pm.  The place was deserted and the waiter looked a little surprised.  Later I found that Chileans rarely eat “la comida” before 8:00 pm.  Often when the season for field work arrived Pancho H would throw a “gringo party” to welcome us back.  This would start about 10:00 pm.  I was at one when one of the Chilean geologists arrived after midnight!  Strangely, they all seem to make it to work by 9:00 am the next day.

Trips to and from Santiago would take about 24 hrs., what with changing planes and all.  I hated the entire airline experience.  Often we would have to go via Miami and come back via Buenos Aires and again Miami.  Most of the flights were by Pan Am, at least in the early days.  It was a terrible airline: rotten food, rude cabin attendants, and inconvenient schedules. .  I once shipped a drilling outfit via Pan Am , rather than take it as luggage.  It hasn’t been seen to this day.

We worked at various places the entire length and breadth of Chile.  (“Length” is considerable;” breadth” is not.  Chile is shaped like a piece of spaghetti.  There are places where you could stand on the Pacific shore and throw a rock into Argentina if you had a good arm.)  For wheels we usually used Toyota Land cruisers belonging to the University of Chile; they, and their “chauffeurs” were part of the Chilean contribution to the projects.  Yes, each vehicle came with its own driver – and boy, were they good!  Also, part of the time we worked from boats in the southern Chilean fjords.  This was real luxury field work, for the most part: a cook, a shower, a bunk, and no worries about where the next food was to be found.  But usually we drove, we camped out, and we didn’t change our clothes very often.  We would get clean only every few days, when we either found a little hotel someplace, or a hot springs.  I remember Pancho Herve and I jumping into this one warm pool and turning the water a rich, golden brown!

A work party would consist generally of me, a Chilean graduate student or two, one or both of the Panchos, and often one or more other gringos.  Smaller parties were more efficient.  None of us Americans could speak Spanish worth a damn, so we absolutely had to have at least one Chilean along.  Several times Russ and I were forced to work by ourselves for a few days.  Russ’s Spanish stops at “no hablo español”, and mine – painful to relate – was not a hell of a lot better.  We managed to survive, but it was my most uncomfortable time in Chile.  That’s why I almost entitled this thing “A MONOLINGUAL GRINGO LOST IN THE ANDES”.

Okay, so you really don’t care about the science aspects of this story.  You are rightfully asking: “Well, what in heck did you do that was interesting?”  So I will see if I can find some humorous bits to relate.  Keep in mind that it really was work: most of the time we finished the day tired, dirty, and bored.

So, by far the best trip I took to Chile was the one where Linda went along.  We were out for about a month, “we” consisting of Linda and me, Bob Butler and his wife Pat, Pancho Muni, Alfredo Garcia, and a drive named Rosando.  We had a Land Cruiser and Alfredo’s little 4X4 something.  We drove from Santiago south to the Lake District, as far as the city of Puerto Montt.  (You might locate a good map of southern South America, if you feel so inclined.)  The country there is very beautiful: big lakes, volcanos, and attractive agricultural land.  In deference to the ladies, we stayed in small hotels or resorts, and usually ate in restaurants.  Linda has written a wonderful account of this trip which she seems to have distributed to family members.  I have the original and will be glad to show it to anyone who visits.  The highlights of that trip included a few days in Puerto Montt, which is the official end of the Pan-American Highway.  The road continues further south, but it is dirt or gravel, filled with chuck-holes, and constantly under repair.  Puerto Montt has a wonderful seafood market, where you can buy anything you know from the ocean, and gaze in wonder at things you had no idea people could eat!

 Our best experience in Puerto Montt concerned a special dinner, called a “curanto”.  I have had curantos several places since, but this was the only truly authentic one.  It was held on a small island just offshore, where there is an old and famous restaurant.  Here is how it works.  They dig a big hole in the ground, into which they put very hot rocks.  Then they put in layers of seafood, sausage, vegetables, more seafood, and so forth, each layer covered by some kind of big leaf.  All the customers are expected to stand by the pit and watch.  When they are finished they cover the whole thing over in leaves and dirt, and then everybody goes inside to drink white wine!  After an hour or so and many bottles of wine they bring the stuff in on huge platters, and everybody digs in.  I ate some things that day that I had not known existed.  And they were good.  If you ever find yourself in southern Chile, try to find a curanto – you will never forget it.

We had lots of little adventures on that trip, too many to tell.  One of the volcanoes was erupting (little puffs of smoke) near where we were working.  Pancho was breaking rock with a sledge hammer, and I was getting ready to drill.  Suddenly an old indigenous woman came out of a nearby house and stomped over to us, screaming and shaking her fist.  Pancho said she was saying “You are pigs!  You are hurting the earth!  Look at the mountain, blowing fire and smoke!”  Pancho said we had better cut and run, so we did.

One thing that does merit mention is the annual curse of the colihuacho in the Lake District.  About mid-December they suddenly appear.  They are very like a colorful version of our horse fly, only bigger, dumber, slower, hungrier – and way more ubiquitous.  They are everywhere.  They land on any tiny scrap of exposed skin, walk around for a second or two, then bite.  I read somewhere that the female can only breed if she has had a drop or two of mammalian blood.  When doing field work during colihuacho season every task requires two persons, one to do the work and the other to swish away the flies.  Pancho Muni once stood in the shade and watched us work one day, while swatting colihuachos.  He killed 67 in two minutes.  Once we hired a boat to take us across a big lake; the colihuachos followed us for about a mile, out over the water.  This description doesn’t do justice to the full horror of the colihuacho infestation.  I am surprised humans ever managed to maintain a foothold in their territory.  They disappear abruptly after the first good rain.    You may think I’m exaggerating the visceral horror of these bugs, but I’m not.  Do not visit southern Chile during December.

I should have mentioned that Linda and I, plus the Butlers, visited Machu Picchu before we started work.  That was a wonderful trip, and the several days we spent in Cusco before and after were fascinating.  Cuzco has beautiful buildings, good food, and abjectly poor people everywhere.  The Inca ruins are spectacular.  To get there, however, you have to go through Lima which is (or was) a hole.

Linda went to South America one other time, by herself.  I was working in Chile, so we arranged to meet in Guayaquil, which is the largest city in Ecuador, located at sea level only two degrees south of the equator.  Man, what a place!  I got there two days early and walked all over.  All the downtown streets had permanent awnings, because of the tropical rains.  One time I got soaked to the skin merely by running across the street from one bit of protection to another.  Our hotel looked out over the central plaza, which had huge trees populated by strange birds and many very large iguanas.  They would sleep sprawled out on the upper branches, and only came down to eat – people would pile all kinds of food around the base of the tree.   Although we went all over after Linda arrived, I believe those iguanas were the highlight of her trip.

But I said that she went to South America by herself, and she did.  I went to the airport to greet her, and I must have blended in with the locals – short, dark hair, tan.  I saw her come out from customs, trailing her suitcase.  I have never seen such a forlorn expression on the face of my beautiful wife, before or since.  She couldn’t spot me, and it took me several minutes to fight my way through   the crowd and “rescue” her.  She could speak not a word of Spanish.  You can imagine the greeting I got when I finally reached her.  We went to the Galapagos, Quito and the Ecuadorian highlands that trip.  Wonderful!

Okay, so a few more adventures.  When I first started working in Chile it was under the thumb of everybody’s favorite Latin dictator, Augusto Pinochet.  I think he sensed that he wasn’t universally liked, which was certainly the case.  Consequently, there were police everywhere.  One foggy day near Santiago Bob Butler, Bob Drake and I drove up to the top of a volcanic hill, to drill some rocks.  Several of Pinochet’s fervent admirers had taken to blowing up telephone towers and things like that – and there was such an installation at the top of the hill.  As it happened, it was “guarded” by two boys – soldiers or police, I forget which.  Imagine how they felt when we pulled up beside them, and out of the vehicle climbed three – to them – huge gringos.  Drake, who spoke fluent Spanish, started to tell them what we wanted to do.  Out came their rifles, and one managed to say – in quavering voice – “pasaportes”   They must have been all of 16 years old.  We showed our documents, and then started to get out all our equipment.  They freaked.  One pointed his rifle at us and asked – not ordered – us to stop.  The other took off running to the bottom of the hill , to fetch his sergeant – they didn’t have radios.  The sergeant arrived, again examined our “pasaportes” –and gave us permission to work.  At the time it seemed a rather comical bother, but later I realized we could have got our butts shot off!  Those kids were green, terrified, and well-armed.

The most useful work we did in Chile was near Santiago, but the fun stuff occurred in the far south`, down the dirt highway leading south from Puerto Montt.  At the time we were there that road was known as the “Caretera Austral General Pinochet”, but I’ll bet it’s called something else now.  It goes through nearly empty, incredibly beautiful country.  It was a rotten road then, always under repair, and I would be astonished if it were any different now.  It includes a good number of ferry trips to cross deep fjords.  Gas stations and other amenities are few and very far between – and don’t always have what you need.  The Chilean government has been trying to develop that district as a tourist attraction for decades now, but I doubt if they have succeeded.

Far in the south is a genuine city, Coihaique – probably 40,000 or so.  It is the capital of whatever “Distrito” it is in.  General Pinochet made it a practice to visit the capital city of every Chilean district, every year.  Most of them had garrisons of troops.  Well, one evening in Coyhaique a bunch of us had a nice dinner, complete with a bit too much good Chilean red wine.  We were staying at a house the Servicio (Chilean geological survey) owned on the outskirts of town.  The General was due in town the next day.  People who didn’t want him there – and there were plenty of them – were drawing graffiti all over town.  Pancho Herve and I somehow found ourselves riding on the top of the Land Cruiser, holding on for dear life – and singing “Y va caer” at the top of our lungs.  It was a subversive little ditty – the words translate “and he is going to fall”.  Somehow we made it home safely.  If we had been stopped I probably would have been okay, after some jail, maybe – but Pancho might never have been heard from again.  We were old enough to know better.

Another incident on that trip to the far south: If you have your map, find Lago General Carrera .  That’s what they call it in Chile; in Argentina I believe it is called Lago Buenos Aires.  It is a huge lake in a beautiful setting, said to be full of big fish.  Hardly anybody has seen it.  On the south side of the lake, right near the Chile/Argentina border, is the town of Chile Chico, a typical stony windswept Patagonian village.  We worked around there for a few days, and then set out to cross into Argentina. 

As it happens, the “border crossing” entailed fording a fairly substantial river.  I remember it as at least a quarter-mile across.  However, it was shallow, and there were markers, in the form of sticks thrust into the sand, to show where to go.  The Americans (me) were skeptical, but the Chileans thought nothing of it.  When we got to the far side there it was – a full-fledged Argentine border station, complete with guys with rifles.

Well, we all presented out passports, one by one.  The Chileans went first and breezed right through.  But when I got there the “border agent” (with rifle) took one look – and announced that he was going home for lunch!

It seems that this was only a few weeks after Margaret Thatcher and the British navy had kicked Argentine butt over the Falkland Islands.  At the last minute the United States had shared intelligence information with Great Britain – and the Argentines knew it!  Thus, Americans (we from the E.E.U.U.), while legally entitled to enter Argentina, were not at all liked.  I cooled my heels for three hours before they let me in.

That was a unique trip.  We had to drive out into the middle of the real (Argentine) Patagonia, then some distance to the north, and then back west to the eastern foot of the Andes.  We stayed at a “rancho” that was so far cut off from the rest of the world that we outsiders were a source of great mystery and entertainment.  They threw us a genuine “asado”, wherein you dine on a roasting sheep, some kind of pan bread, and – because we had brought it – good Chilean red wine.  In a true asado you go up to the sheep, roasting on a spit, and use your clasp knife to cut off as much as you want.  It was delicious.  After dinner we all drank “mate”, which is a bitter-tasting tea you suck through a straw. 

The work went well there and we eventually got some important samples.  The only problem was that we had to do it all again the next year:  my car was broken into in Santiago and all the rocks and field notes stolen!    The next year I was sick and couldn’t go, but Bob Butler and Russ Burmester repeated the work.

One last interesting aspect of that trip was the way home.  We decided to cross back into Chile at a place called Alto Coihaique, high in the Andes.  We did the approach at night.  The road was dirt and rocks, naturally, but not too challenging – until the lights of the vehicle went out.  Fortunately there was a bright moon.  The Chilean guard at the border station evidently were a bit annoyed that we had snuck up on them in the middle of the night, with our lights out.  But we made it.

I will end this overlong history with doings in the Atacama Desert.  We started in the city of Copiapo (at the foot of the valley where much of the fruit Americans eat in the winter is grown.)  Out of the river valley the terrain is – by official international certification – the driest place on earth.  The Atacama lies in the so-called Horse-Latitudes, and also in the rain shadow of a particularly high stretch of Andes.  There are a few places where people have lived (all near the mountains) for hundreds of years.  In those places, it has never rained.  Not once.  All the food comes from irrigation, using streams that flow out of the mountains, into dry salt lakes called “salars”.  The best known of these villages is named San Pedro de Atacama.  It is something of a tourist destination now, I understand.  We called it San Pedro de Cerveza, because the mining camp we stayed at, about 50 miles distant, was dry.

Nothing much of scientific value came out of that venture, but we tried.  We drove all around, on mining tracks.  I saw my first and only wild alpaca one day, and on another a large, saline lake (Lago Negro Francisco) covered with pink flamingos, and with the perfect volcanic cone of Volcan Copiapo (6052 m., or 19,856 ft.) high smoking away in the background!  That area is now a Chilean National Park – and if I were 20 years younger I’d go back!

As I have implied, most of the “roads” in that area were built by mining companies.  When they abandon a prospect they abandon their roads.  However, since it never rains the roads take decades – heck, maybe centuries, to disappear.  But nobody ever drives on them, except crazy geologists.  Well, one day one of our Chilean partners (Cocho)  found he was needed back in Santiago, so he took a vehicle and set out for civilization.  (At this time we were staying at a mining camp on the edge of a huge salar, about 50 miles from San Pedro de Cerveza)  Along about evening, after dinner, we look up to see a figure walking toward us across the desert.  It was Cocho.  Seems his jeep had broken down after several hours of driving, not to be resuscitated.  Cocho knew nobody would come by any time soon – probably not for months – so he calmly took a compass bearing from his map and WALKED CROSS COUNTRY for about 15 miles back to camp!  We were, yes, impressed.  

So how do I sum up?  Those trips were fun, and even a bit useful – to the half dozen or so people in the world passionately devoted to geotectonics. And best of all, they were funded by the National Science Foundation.  Thank you, loyal taxpayers!

OH, LORD!

Dinner

It seems now that all of my sins of table and tavern are destined to come back to haunt me!  I have only recently discovered that I am afflicted with an industrial-grade case of type 2 diabetes.  The probable cause is a lifetime of pushing the alcohol limit, probably assisted by my craving for red meat and fried foods.  Whatever; from now on I must eschew booze in any form; yes, sob, I am permanently on the wagon.  Furthermore, what I eat must change drastically.  This morning I had an interview with a very nice young nutritionist.  She didn’t give me meal plans; rather, she explained a pie diagram guiding my nutrient intake.  For instance the upper right quadrant contained suggested proteins – fish, lean red meat, beans, etc.  This I can handle.  However, sprawling across the left half of the pie was a list of vegetables that I must ingest – and nearly every entry was from my lifetime compilation of “foods to be avoided at all cost!” 
  

No more sugar, no more vodka, no more French fries, no more German chocolate cake!  Hello, carrot sticks.

And thus does Providence reward a life lived carelessly!

Memoir 14: Road racing

Not me, but I have felt this way from time to time

I spent a good part of my fifth decade training for and running road races.  Elsewhere I have written that the only athletic activities that I could have hoped to excel in were those that took lots of effort and training; no actual talent required.  Where distance racing is concerned, it is possible to become fairly proficient by prolonged, herculean effort – even if you have short legs and thick bones.  You will note that all the men winning important marathon races these days are about six feet tall weigh about 85 pounds – and hail from the oxygen-deprived highlands of East Africa.  I was 5 ft. 8, weighed about 150 pounds, had short legs, heavy bones, and did my training at sea level in the misty  climate of NW Washington.   This is not offered as an excuse, merely a fact.  I am rather proud of my running career, considering my lack of hereditary advantages.

I stumbled into road racing through Bob Keller (he of my mountain adventures).  Up to the mid-1970s I got my exercise playing tennis.  I really loved that game – but I had to stop playing, owing to a chronically painful back.  To keep from getting fat, I took up jogging on the track at Western Washington University.  Bob sometimes ran there as well.  After a month or so I got so I could run a few miles without stopping to rest.  Somehow, Bob had learned of a short road race to be held on nearby Lummi Island – a fund-raiser for their library, I believe.  He suggested we both enter (I think he wanted me to drive.)  We did, paid our ten dollars (and got a T-shirt!), and did our best.  I was happy just to finish (I think it was about four miles), and it seemed like half the island’s population beat me.  But, wonder of wonders!, it turned out that there were age divisions, and that I had somehow finished second in the 40 to 49 group.  And I won a little trophy!  I was hooked.  From then on, for about 12 years, road racing was by far my main outdoor pleasure, and collecting ribbons and trophies became a compulsion.  To this day there is a box somewhere in my basement, absolutely stuffed with ribbons.  Alas, not many are blue – but some are.

So, from then on I trained perhaps 20-25 miles per week.  I would run six days/week, mostly on country roads.  Between important races I would drop down to ten or fifteen miles, and then build gradually toward as many as 50.  I estimate that, between 1974 and 1985 I ran about 12,000 miles*.  I was never bored, and I felt great.  I could eat as much as I liked, of anything, and drink all the beer I could lay my hands on.  So what if I fell asleep a few times while giving Geology 101 lectures; the students were mostly asleep themselves, anyway! 

*This may help account for the fact that I now (2019) have two artificial hips and one artificial knee – and that my “good” knee is hurting more every day.

Seriously, I believe it is true that only college professors and other unemployed people can properly train for long road races.  Some people get up before dawn and hit the streets, rain, fog, wind – or all three at once.  I could fit in my training around a few lectures and a weekly faculty meeting. And if it were raining I could run on the track, rather than sloshing through mud puddles.  Big advantage!

For more than a decade, then, I ran every road race I could find within commuting distance of Bellingham.  Mostly they were 10K’s (ten kilometers), with a few 5Ks or ten-milers thrown in.  Some of them were well known – the Chuckanut Footrace, for instance.  Such well-known events pulled in good runners from Seattle and Vancouver and points nearby.  These guys would take home all the more desirable  ribbons (blue, red, etc.) and leave people like me with ribbons with green stripes and pink polka dots for, say, seventh  place.  But when they didn’t come, I usually could pull down at least third in my division (it was called the Masters Division, but sometimes felt like the Geriatric Division).   It quickly became apparent that, the longer the race, the better I scored. 

So, I ran perhaps ten half-marathons, including a huge one on Mercer Island where I finished second (in my age division, of course).  I started twelve full marathons, and finished ten.  The first I had to abandon was the Birch Bay Marathon, where I went out too fast and found, at about mile 20, that whenever I stopped for a drink I would start to pass out.  Virginia made me quit.  My worst actual full-marathon time also occurred at Birch Bay: realizing that I was going embarrassingly slow, I stopped in a road-side grocery store, bought a can of beer, and walked across the finish line, drinking it – in exactly four hours.  I caught hell for that smart-aleck performance.  The organizer, who was a friend, threatened to bar me for life.  The second bail-out was forgivable; I had eaten nothing but refried beans the night before, and you can guess the consequences.

My best time was a little under three hours; 2:57.17, I think it was.  That is pretty slow for a real marathon runner, but a noteworthy accomplishment for the likes of me.  I am tempted to bring up the short legs and heavy bones again but for the fact that my friend Tom Read, a WWU math professor, who was shorter than me, had shorter legs, and bones at least as heavy – once ran about 2:35!  People have taken videos of him running, and nobody has ever seen his feet touch the ground. 

I guess my proudest accomplishment in road racing would have to be the Skagit Flats 50 miler, run in the summer of 1981, when I was 48.  I had no idea how to run such a race.  Bellingham happened to have in its citizenry an authentic elite ultra-marathoner, in the person of my friend Jim Pearson.    Jim did not register for the race, but his brother Don did, and Jim ran along to pace him.  Also accompanying Don was his beautiful wife, on a bicycle, wearing very tight shorts.  Well, hell – what to do.  I decided to follow the Pearsons: Jim would set the proper pace, and Don’s wife would give me a way to get my mind off my misery.  This worked great for about 35 miles, at which point Don abruptly quit – and I was on my own.  Heck, now what?  I figured that I would poop out and die pretty soon myself (although I felt good), so I started walking every so often and otherwise dogging it.  Finally, I found myself at 47 miles with plenty of energy still in the tank.  I happened on a young fellow out for a jog, and challenged him to a race for the last few miles.  He beat me, but I took perhaps a full minute off my time.  The upshot was that I finished third overall, first in my division – and was even ranked in Runner’s World for a few months!  However, from that point forward my running career went steadily downhill.

When I finished that 50 miler I felt fine.  I sat around, shooting the breeze, and drinking Gator Aide – and then got in my car, eased onto Interstate 5, heading for Linda’s place on Lake Samish.  About half way there, at 65 miles/hr., I started to pass out!  I managed to get to the side of the road and sit there, head buzzing, until it was safe to drive again.  Maybe this was nature, telling me that 50 miles is a bit far.

So, in retrospect, running was good for me.  It kept me thin and healthy and gave me something to aim for nearly every week-end.  I know that many people say that they run because it makes them feel better, cleanses the soul, relaxes them, etc., etc.  I ran to win ribbons!  (And to collect T-shirts.)  When I reached 50 it seems that my joints began to rebel, my lungs shrunk, and I became more attuned to pain.  As a result, I wasn’t winning ribbons any more.  So I quit – and turned to mountain hiking instead.  Ignoble, yes, but honest. We are what we are, and I’m competitive.