A weekend "al campo"

I spent the past four days out in the countryside ("el campo") cutting wires to built plant protectors and planting various indigenous plants to restore the wild chinchilla habitat in northern central Chile along the edge of the Chilean National Chinchilla Reservation (which, as I learned, has its fair share of corruption, hence our working outside its borders). No trees are left on the mountains: they were all removed over the past four hundred years as people mined for various minerals. Most of the world’s supply of copper, used in many electronics, comes from my region of Chile, as well as a fair supply of gold and silver. All the other plants, except for cacti, have been eaten off the hillsides by the free-ranging livestock, mostly goats. There are many lifetimes worth of work if the environment is ever really to be restored.

At nights I spent hours reading by candlelight. When I stepped outside on Saturday night before the rains came, I saw the Milky Way. I noted, for the first time in my life, incredibly crisp, clear shadows cast from moonlight. I lay outside the house on the dirt despite the cold just to watch the starry night sky of the Southern Hemisphere, wondering about the constellations and the stories and histories they might tell of the peoples who once populated these lands. Someone once said to me, "I wish I could take a picture with my eyes." As I lay out under the stars with the chill breeze blowing over me, my winter hat tied securely under my chin, I wished just that. If only you could have seen it all. What I wouldn’t have given to have my eyes transmit as a webcam for a bit, sending signals back to you all rather than just along the closed circuit of my brain for me alone to enjoy as I looked up and felt so small. The skies here in Chile are just so vast and fantastic.

Without any heating, electricity, or even running water to support me this past weekend, I had plenty of bizarre experiences I living in a one-room house with Amy, the woman for whom I’m working this summer, founder of Save the Wild Chinchillas, and her three pre-school-aged daughters (who now call me Aunt Mimi) for four days. Despite the funny experiences, of which there were many including earthquakes, rainstorms, look-outs for hunters and wild pumas, freezing nights "huggling" (in other words, getting beat up by an unconscious four-year-old), and a goop/papaya cake disaster that Amy and I were stuck eating for several days in every way we might imagine (warm, cooled, toasted, fried), the weekend was not only memorable but quite enjoyable.