Month: January 2025

2024 was a juggernaut that broadsided me when I least expected it. One minute I was sipping a Pisco Calafate in Patagonia and the next minute I was down on my knees, taking a full ten minutes to crawl the ten feet from my bed to the nearest facility. But this is getting way ahead of my story. 

2024 began with my firm resolve to continue with my blog—Mywanderingsintheworld.com.

I had begun it in late 2023, a few months into my retirement. I needed to find a calculus for my days, separate from watching the world go by. Putting my feelings down with specificity made sense to me—of writing a blog twice a month to capture my inside stirrings as I moved through my world. I traveled through Chile and Antarctica, Milan and Turin, Maui and Kauai, Trinidad, New York and Cincinnati, Highland Beach in Florida and the surrounding environs like Miami and Sarasota, Washington DC and Boston. In late fall, we went to a wedding in the Athens Riviera and then to India—Kolkata, New Delhi (again, for a mega wedding), and the soulful backwaters of Kerala. I ended the year in Patagonia, a place that made me fall in love again—not only with landscape but how we humans turn to nature to rediscover ourselves and our wayward complexities. 

In the meantime, the US, like India, tended to a monolithic nationalism. I barely wrote ten blogs this year. But I vowed to write more in 2025, beyond my daily scratchings in a bright red, 5-subject College Rule 200-sheeted book. 

I also moved, again and again, from temporary housing one after the other, to our condo in East Walnut Hills. The remodeling was complete—we were home again, the kitchen fully stocked, art on the walls. 

Our dearly beloved son also got married this year—in August, in a traditional blessing ceremony and in December, with an officiant competently doing her job. The newly minted couple looked relieved that the elaborate festivities were behind them; right away, they took off for Zanzibar, to the remotest place on the map that they could imagine.

And then the acute stenosis, the cramping of the nerve endings inside my spinal column, my body refusing to act on command and demanding its own rest and relaxation.

This year, I also continued my diligent work at several museums—as a trustee and docent at the Cincinnati Art Museum; as a docent at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; as a member of the Program Support Committee of the Weston Gallery; as a Board member and Secretary of Bader & Simon gallery in Cincinnati; as a co-chair of the Ohio Arts Group of NMWA; as a member on the National Advisory Board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. 

Thinking about art all around me, my writing, and my family are the pursuits that take up my days. And then there are books to read and films to watch. 

This year, I am incredibly grateful for all the good-hearted, sensible, imaginative, creative souls that I have met everywhere. There are such people all over the world and one need just pay attention to one’s surroundings to find them. I am grateful for leaders calling for a ceasefire or those being ousted because they have carried it too far. I am grateful for the minuscule strides that we make toward a better world, a healthier body, a sustainable climate. I am grateful for artists who come in all shapes and sizes. I am grateful that I am not so jaded that I cannot lose myself in a good book or film. Mostly, I am grateful that I can lose myself in a museum, imagining through art how people made choices, or had these made for them, just like we do in our present time.

I am mostly, mostly grateful for the love that I feel for all humanity, and especially, my friends and family. I find myself still capable of a good cry. Gisele Pelicot draws tears to my eyes just as other innocents do all over the world. May we all find our singular peace in the time to come…

As we pass the controls at Paso Don Guillermo, we find ourselves at the border of Chile and Argentina.  Lancha Carrera then Santa Cruz, and here we are in Argentina.  We spot a marked difference right away; perhaps the deathly inflation rate of over 200% influences the geography of place and people. Starting with the littered landscape and the dozens of dead guanacos in rigor mortis roadside, I sense the chaos and unruliness of Argentina to Chilean order and control. 

We head up the motorway to the small border town of El Calafate, on the shoreline of Lago Argentina, the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the country. The lake flanks an entire swath of glaciers, some of which we will get dangerously close to: the Upsala, Viedma, Pope Pius XI, and the Perito Moreno Glacier all in the Los Glaciares National Park in Argentina. In preparation, we make a stop at the Glaciarium, the Patagonian Ice Museum, dedicated to the interpretation of glaciers. It provides an education on the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the early explorers and scientists, how snow turns into ice, and how glaciers move. Alongside Chile, Argentina stretches over the third largest ice field after Antarctica and Greenland. 

We settle into El Calafate, a town of about 25,000 bustling with wanderers, tourists, and ne’er do gooders. Next morning, we depart from Punta Banderas and board the Estancia Cristina ship toward Upsala Glacier and later to Estancia Cristina itself—the ranch that put this land on the map of the world. We watch icebergs stand in sculptural magnificence in the North Channel, and when we return at the end of the day, we see that the iceberg has changed orientation—it is now flipped bottom-up. We ride a 4×4 to an overlook for the Upsala Glacier.  This is an open schoolhouse of nature, where one can view the entire range of an interconnected universe. 

Deep in the heart of the Argentinian Patagonia, Estancia Cristina is only accessible via a 3-hour boat ride from El Calafate, sitting in the middle of 3000 square miles of rugged Patagonian wilderness. Cristina Estancia is named for Joseph and Jessie Masters’ daughter, Cristina, who died in her young 20s. The Masters were English immigrants who founded the Estancia in 1914 and lived there till 1997, when the last remaining family members passed away. 

A gem of a museum on the Estancia showcases the rich history of Estancia Cristina and the story of the Masters’ family’s obsession with Patagonia. It is filled with details from daily life—who the Masters were, the impact that they had on the land and its people even as new immigrants. From shearing equipment to carriage fittings, mountaineering equipment to milking technology–the museum has it all.

The journey to the Upsala Glacier is precarious and not for the faint at heart. From the overlook, we view a benign and pristine scene, but a reminder emerges from deep in its belly ever so often. Crackling rifle shots pierces the air, sudden bursts of water resemble gun-shot wounds. Snow hydrologists tell us that these are the sounds of the glaciers giving, of breathing and moving and moaning—making its presence known. 

The Perito Moreno Glacier likewise is a massive structure of ice filled with crevasses pockmarking its surface. The till and moraine of the silt lines the sides of the pristine glacier in caramel goop. The immovable block of ice exists as a source of great beauty and catastrophe at the same time.

In Chile, we have encountered Magellan, Ladrilleros, Bernardo O’Higgins, among others. In Argentina, we hear of explorers Moreno, Fitzroy, Prichard, and Masters. In each Patagonia, the landscape is different, Argentina is made up of active glaciers versus the Chilean mountains, lakes and deep valleys carved out by glacial activity. Argentinian Patagonia is dry and rugged, scrabbled together with vegetation that can be described as “xelic”–  it can hold water without getting dehydrated. Chilean Patagonia is made up of dense forests and rugged mountains which are lushly green. Even to a new traveler, each Patagonia looks distinct in its geography and temperament.

Patagonia reaffirms for me yet again that death and life live in proximate reality to the other. Both are intrinsic parts of this same, one life and both are meant to make us whole.

In its vastness and scale, Patagonia equates with wandering. Just being there made me feel mysterious dependencies and yearnings. I eased into my rootlessness and felt free to wander at will all over my geographic and psychological map. In this uprootedness, I felt calmly dependent on my inner being– this my flawed hunk of humanity that flowed out of the armature of my spinal cord and made me feel whole. Where others yearn for the safety of comfort, I realized that I live for the open road, the expressiveness of an unknown face yielding many truths. And I think to myself, there is no greater glory in the world than witnessing the spectrum of human complexity in one’s wanderings. 

I have read of monks in Japan (perhaps in Pico Iyer), who wander inhospitable terrain, enduring harsh elements and the rigors of a self-imposed discipline. Instead of shying away from it, they do this to meet suffering face-to-face. This is the only way across, from what I recall. I am no monk and neither do I endure suffering in my travels. I practice openness and a curious searching for how others make sense of their lives. I want to know the storyline that defines other travelers. Their truth confirms my own narrative: a story of early grief that put me forever on the road for how and why people choose the story that they want to live.

For this journey, here is the trajectory—from Cincinnati via New York we travel to Santiago, Chile. Thenceforth, we take a smaller plane to Punta Arenas at the bottom of Chile. In Punta Arenas (aka Sandy Pointy), we load onto buses—us humans and our 23 kgs of luggage each, and munching on our eggplant and cheese baguette, we journey to Puerto Natales and Puerto Borias. Puerto Natales is the capital of the Ultima Esperanza (Ultimate Hope) province and was ‘discovered’ on Christ’s birthday, 1894. This is deep in the heart of Chilean Patagonia and still considered to be civilization.

Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon this area in the 1520s, putting it on the map of the world with the waterways linking the Atlantic with the Pacific in South America. The Straits of Magellan—this line of water—is the mark of Magellan’s insolence. That this man would refuse to give up on his wanderings and the ‘known wisdom’ of other discoverers, and that he would press forward on a hunch despite the specter of death, is why the Straits exist. 

As if an omen, pedigreed dogs wander motorways in Puerto Natales, skulking in between fast-moving cars and buses. They hide in plain sight for fear of being trapped. To what end will they go to avoid domesticity? How did these pedigreed dogs get to the streets in the first place?

Just like Antarctica, Patagonia is brutally honest and unfathomable. It seeps under your skin and overcomes you. You come here not merely for a hiking trip, or to attend to Chatwin’s “God of Walkers,” but to confront yourself head-on, just like our suffering monks in Japan. There is no escaping unless you are on the other side of the experience. 

In preparation, I had read Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, published 1977. This book is a model of where an obsession will take you. Chatwin came here presumably to write an innocuous article for an English newspaper; he ended up becoming mesmerized by Patagonia’s geography of feeling. Chatwin writes of the harsh truths of everyday life in Patagonia through the stories of the Welsh, German and Croatian immigrants who wandered into this landscape and made it their own. It’s always the human stories intersecting with the mercurial landscape. But the humans are the only ones who can attempt at self-knowledge in the context of this vast natural canvas. They are critically dependent on the natural world that surrounds them. The landscape, on the other hand, doesn’t care. It is quintessentially agnostic: a theater for the unfolding of countless human stories.

Patagonia gets its name from its original inhabitants, a race of giants called Patagonians who were over 7 feet tall, our well-informed lecturer, Rodrigo Perez Diop, tells us. When the British colonists came, the made-up name persisted. The original Patagonians came from four distinct tribes—the Tehuelches, the Selknam, the Kaueshka, and the Yamanas—whose genealogic variety were added on to the Croatians, British, Welsh, French, and other immigrants who followed. As a result, Patagonia exists as a diverse United Nations of sorts. (The Historical Museum in Puerto Natales is a treasure house on everything Patagonian. https://torresdelpaine.com/en/tourist-attraction/puerto-natales-municipal-historical-museum/)

Darwin called the region “scarcely passable” and perhaps unknowable. Melville used the term ’Patagonian’ as an adjective for the “outlandish, the monstrous.” Shakespeare’s Tempest is thought to have been influenced by Magellan’s trip report. And Jonathan Swift’s Brobdignagian giants are said to be modeled on the Tehuelche Indians who once inhabited Patagonia.

Through my eyes, Patagonia looks sparse– in truth, it is fat with the bounty of nature: copper, tin, silver, gold, and natural gases. Hugging the Magellan Straits, a spit called Fire Island, which is potentially flammable, bulges over thick with veins of underground gases. 

We see a variety of birch trees lining the pampas middle ground: nirre and koi. They are bent almost at 180 degrees by the intensity of the Patagonian winds, almost parallel with the land on which it stands. In these parts, you can tell the weather by reading the Andean tarot cards: the Andes mountains in the distance.  Where there is smoke and a whiteout on the horizon, you know that the weather is worsening. 

The barren, monotonous landscape is home to animals that camouflage readily: the guanaco—ostriches revered in Chile but gunned down in Argentina as a pastime. The South Andean deer, the Patagonian mara, the sea lion, the Chilean flamingo, the upland goose, the austral pygmy owl, and the crested caracara. This is the natural bounty of the Chilean Patagonia and chief of them all is the Andean condor. It circles overhead relentlessly. The world’s biggest bird of prey, the Andean condor’s wingspan measures a whopping 10 feet. Associated with the sun, the condor is thought to be the ruler of the upper world.  Through our time in the Chilean Patagonia, we see bus drivers and tour guides pay homage to this being. Always, there is an upward glance and a smile, a silent prayer of humility. 

On a cold October day, we take the 21 de Mayo ferry through the fjords to Bernardo O’Higgins National Park on Ultima Esperanza. Everything here is a reference that serves as a reminder of Chilean history. On May 21, 1879, Chile won a decisive naval victory in the Battle of Iquique in the War of the Pacific. A series of naval and amphibious strategies defeated the armies of Peru and Bolivia.  Bernardo O’Higgins, after whom this large natural reserve is named, freed Chile from Spanish rule in the Chilean War of Independence. A founding father, O’Higgins became the first Supreme Director of Chile, heading a fully independent Chilean state. 

Bolstered by the importance of O’Higgins, we proceed on our hike through the park named for him. It is cold and a steady rain makes the granite path slippery. On a sunny day, this walk would be termed an easy one; today it is rife with impending disasters. But these are ancient paths that have been crisscrossed by travelers from Juan de Ladrilleros (1505-1574) who was the first to cross the Magellan Straits in both direction to Lady Florence Dixon, (1857-1905), the English explorer who went through these parts and wrote two books about it.  

Like the landscape, the Chilean fjord system is also vast. Wikipedia informs that Chile has at least 43, 471 islands including almost 4000 of them that are significant in size. They are a series of punctuation marks that lead us in and out of the southern waters. Gabby, our guide, tells us that the Patagonian archipelago is land, sky, sea and wind. The wind is the main protagonist here—the driving force, it lurches and blusters and knocks us off our feet. It throws people off the ledges of mountains, cracks open windows of cars, and upturns big buses like toys. In a moment, things turn on account of the wind. But a complete whiteout will lead instantly to blue and streaky skies. Lenticular clouds are common in the aftermath—pillowy clouds resembling a giant shoe, an UFO, a stack of pancakes. A reminder of familiarity in an otherwise hostile environment.

An exploration of the Torres del Payne (pronounced pie-nay) or the Blue Tower follows. This was declared a World Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1978. It has three horns and the metaphoric peaks—together constituting the 120-million-year-old Payne massif. Brilliant blue lakes and lagoons, cascading rivers, and roaring waterfalls overcome our senses. The double and triple rainbows cascading over the valleys. And then the wind, reminding us of the swift changes in nature. 

The bigness of this world demands a singular approach from me: That I let the answers to my questions come to me. I am at the Singular Patagonia in Puerto Boreas. Here, we have met pastry chefs from Bretagne who have settled in Patagonia via Marseille and Morocco. We have met the whole gamut of humanity here:  mountain climbers, archeologists, sea farers, climatologists, anemologists (those who study wind), artists, and ritual seekers. All seem bent on creating an ideal society in Patagonia