La Pedrera
She went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where — ” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“ — so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
When you travel long enough, life is stripped almost entirely of the things that make up what most of us consider normalcy. Places: the places you go five days a week, places you go back to every night to eat and sleep, places where you keep things large and small. These are gone. People: friends and family and co-workers and neighbors, the ones you daily remind you who you are. The people stay with you more than the places do, but they are long gone, too.
The consistent background of life becomes the elemental things: sun and wind, water and land, dark and stars. It’s the same moon here as in Perú as in New Orleans, though to be fair it’s at a different orientation down here. Smaller things. Dirt and sand and trees and birds. Dogs. Not one dog you know, but so many dogs you don’t. Unfamiliar cities and towns with their oft-repeating patterns of streets and plazas and thoroughfares. Strangers. A world full of strangers, a few of whom might become fast friends that you will never see again in your life. The foreground becomes the habits and ceremonies that you carry with you, the ones you are likely to carry out no matter where you go.
I find myself a couple hours further up the coast towards Brazil; this will be my third night in the little beach village of La Pedrera. There are five streets perpendicular to the water, six parallel, and that’s it. The only paved street is the Avenida Principal, and where it meets the ocean there are cliffs above dark rocky headlands. The rocks give this place its name, the word for quarry. And this is definitively the ocean — el Atlantico. It is a much wilder and more turbulent sea than at my last stop in Piriápolis, which in retrospect I realize was still on the Rio de la Plata.
On either side of the rocks at the bottom of town are big wide sandy beaches. Playa del Barco features a long-beached rusting shell of an old boat, and Playa Desplayado extends out into the misty distance east. Apparently you can walk that way to the semi-mystical Cabo Polonio, nine hours over the sand. Desplayado means naked, but I can’t say whether this name refers to nudity. It’s not really the season for it, though it wouldn’t surprise me. This is a hippie town, at least now in the off-season with its visitors, who are likely more well-heeled than the locals, far away. Almost all the vacation houses and cabañas are shuttered; more than half the shops and restaurants are boarded up. La Pedrera is left to the few people who live here year around, plus the flotsam of artists and drifters and hangers on, many of whom I would guess come from Argentina. Mostly the streets are quiet.
In three days I haven’t done much other than hang around the hostel, Piedra Alta, and walk around the village and the beaches. The hostel itself is an odd scene in the low season. There are five volunteers in addition to Guillermo the manager, versus three guests, including me. The volunteers are also artists-in-residence, and each are supposed to be working on projects for the hostel. I have witnessed almost no work being put into these projects. They cook meals for the other volunteers — and for those guests willing to pay for them, of whom there are none at the moment — and they keep the hostel clean. But it seems their primary activity is hanging around the patio deck and the living room, drinking mate, smoking a lot of rolled cigarettes and spliffs.
Guillermo, a tall Uruguayo from the capitol, runs the place. He has a thick reddish beard and shaved head, and speaks excellent English, as he spent a year in the states as an exchange student. His girlfriend and the longest-standing volunteer is Aitana from Barcelona, a bubbly sweet hippie painter. They seem like a new couple, and can’t keep their hands off each other. Nollwen is an illustrator from France whose Spanish is worse than mine but tries admirably to speak it constantly with the other volunteers. She’s the odd bird among them, and the most likely to hang out with me. Then there’s Rodrigo, a painter/musician dude from Buenos Aires who sleeps in my room, another Uruguayo guy who plays guitar all the time and a woman from Madrid who surfs every morning in a wetsuit, neither of whose names I can rememember.
Because of the paucity of guests at the moment, there’s not really much for the volunteers to do, and they dominate the space by sheer numbers. They’ve been welcoming to me, but the reality is that I can’t really keep up with the pace of a group speaking over each other in Spanish, with a variety of accents, and it’s all fairly cliquey. There is a volunteer spot coming open next week, when Rodrigo goes back to Argentina, and Guillermo has made it known that they would seriously consider me. I am flattered, but I don’t think there’s any reason I need to stay here for a month, though I am open to being convinced.
My motivation is at an all-time low, though I have somehow remained productive. It feels easier to do something than to grapple with not doing anything. One thing I can say for this place is that it seems to be good for getting some writing done. I have passed the chapter about crossing the border from Colombia into Ecuador, and am now close to finishing the next one, about Otavalo, my first stop in the north of that country. I made it to my hostel there at dawn, after a fifteen-hour all-night struggle across the frontera with ten thousand Venezuelans, crashed, then woke up in the late afternoon, sick. Ended up spending like nine days there recovering. Yesterday I wrote out almost the whole chapter; today I’ve all but edited it. Usually this kind of thing takes me a full week.
Meanwhile, I keep casting a wider net for schools in Argentina, as the job market here seems barren. I’ve started to write to schools in cities in Argentina where I don’t feel particularly drawn to, but could live — Córdoba, for instance. No interviews yet, though I have had a couple of nibbles. A woman from a language school in Salta replied to my email. I wrote back to her a few days ago suggesting we talk on the phone, but haven’t heard anything. Yesterday I saw a sign in town for a language school, called the number and had a brief conversation with a woman today. She said they might be able to find me six hours a week, but that it’s not worth staying here for. She said that: if you’re not planning to stay here anyway, it’s not worth it.
I recognize that I am aimless, in limbo. What am I doing? Hard to say, other than this vague plan of traveling up the coast for a week, while I wait for some school in this country or Argentina to offer me a job. A job with enough hours to get by on, that isn’t through closed-circuit TV. Or, barring a job, for something else to happen.
The week is up tomorrow, nothing has happened and no one is offering me jobs. I will completely run out of money in a week’s time, though my friend Chris in Virginia has agreed to give me a loan. But that will be debt, and I hate going further and further into debt, to finance doing nothing except existing here on the coast of Uruguay as the weather turns cold.
A beach in the autumn, in the offseason, is always a little melancholy, though of course it is also tranquilo. The main thing to do here is to go to the beach, but most days here have been decidedly un-beachy. Today was downright cold, a gray and overcast day, with low thick cloud cover that didn’t seem to be moving despite a steady wind. The climate has moved past sweater weather to the jacket variety.
Yesterday the sun broke through in mid-afternoon and the whole place turned golden and lovely. I went down to Playa del Barco and sat on the sand for a couple hours, made spiraline designs with the multi-colored shells scattered around me. I was working on a fibonacci sequence of shells, though I couldn’t quite remember the angle or proportions. Something like 1:2:5:9. It was a fine and intricately constructed spiral, but I think either you get the fibonacci sequence, or you don’t. Eventually with the sun I was almost hot enough to justify getting in the water, and thought this might be one of my last chances to do it. As I walked down to the water, I realized this would be my first time in three weeks in Uruguay so much as dipping my toes in the water.
I was expecting something very cold. The last many times I’d been at the ocean before Uruguay were all on the cold cold Pacifico, in Chile and Perú, with the Humboldt current coming up from Antarctica. Though I have spent my entire time in this country on the coast, I have seen very few people swimming, even on days much warmer than this one. And the few that did were exclusively either children or two types of men: the middle-aged, often with large rounded bellies and diminutive swim trunks, and the ultra-athletic, outdoorsy types. The kids played in shallow water, usually only up to their ankles or knees; the men dove in dramatically and then got right out.
The water was surprisingly much warmer than in southern Perú at the peak of summer, though it was indeed chilly. After a minute the body adjusted and it wasn’t bad. The surf wasn’t big but it had a little twisting bite to it, and I spent a while not quite swimming but just withstanding, traversing the waves, diving under when a big one came. This was my first time in the Atlantic Ocean since Buritaca in the north of Colombia, and that I think is technically considered the Caribbean. It was good to commune with the ocean that I grew up swimming in.
If it was warm-ish every day, it would make sense to be here. Then again, there would also be a thousand more people. But it is fall, and traveling out this way, I am going against the current of the seasons. Supposedly later this week, Easter week, called Semana Santa in most of Latin America and here Semana de Turismo, there will be a lot more people. From the looks of things on Monday, I’ll believe it when I see it.
This evening I ventured out into the grey for an evening yerba mate sitting on the cliffs above the sea, a sunset in which the sun never made an actual appearance. A couple families down below were posing for pictures, everyone wearing sweaters or jackets, some kids messing around with stones, one lone fisher-person. A little squat human, way out on the big slabs of rock above the surf, too far off to tell age or gender, fishing without a pole. I’ve seen a lot of people fishing on this coast, but not one have a serious bite, let alone pull in a fish. Even the kid at Punta Carreta in Montevideo, who yelled out to his family “¡tengo uno! ¡tengo uno!” only had a big mess of seaweed.
Sitting there I reached some kind of next level with the mate. Though I’ve been drinking mate for almost twenty years, it was almost always prepared like tea, steeped and filtered through a french press or teapot. And like the rest of my teas, I would add sugar. It seemed reasonable: it’s a bitter tea, smoky with strong notes of earth and grass and hay. It’s only been since Argentina that I regularly started taking it in the traditional manner, with bombilla and gourd, and though some people in that country do add sugar, it’s not considered the honorable or proper way to take your mate. I’ve been deeply enjoying the ritual and feeling of it, but almost in spite of the strong, biting flavor.
Tonight I actually savored the bitterness. I met it head on and embraced the bitter, the way you might with a strong delicious black espresso. It was like I found the true flavor of the yerba. Something about this and the cold salt of the sea and the heat of the drink was transportative. It made me think of my friend Zach from college, my first real yerba mate partner. He was just as into it as me, and we’d make strong batches of it in his french press, fill a couple nalgene bottles and go out on a road trip, camping or rock climbing or floating on a canoe. We had all sorts of great adventures and drank mate along the way, and here the combination of nature and this deep bitter flavor brought his presence so strongly to me.
Zach is someone who I have great affection for, but we have more or less stopped being friends. For a decade after college we kept in touch regularly if sporadically, and saw each other every few years. Then about nine years ago we had a falling out, over an incident that didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time. But it never got better, though I tried to make it up to him. The last time I saw him, at his wedding, I attempted in as quiet a moment as I could find to apologize again — he just said with flashing eyes “I had forgotten about it.” I decided sitting there that this state of affairs was absolutely stupid, that I was going to reach out to my lost friend.
So when I got back to the hostel I sat out on the wooden patio deck and wrote him an email saying that I was ten thousand miles away but thinking of him and that I still wanted to be his friend. I said that if he could forgive me for acting like a dick, I would forgive him for holding it against me for years. Perhaps this was the kind of message that would cut through the bullshit, or maybe it would just add another layer to it.
After I had sent it, Nolwenn the French illustrator came and sat down at my table, which was a happy enough occasion that I proposed we take some mate to celebrate. Likely she had already been drinking it for a while, too, but she said, shrugging, “es Uruguay,” and I boiled another thermos-full of water, cleaned out my gourd and filled it fresh. This was the equivalent of chain-smoking and the first time I’d done two gourds back to back. But sharing mate is at least five times better than drinking it by yourself.
After the mate was ready, and we’d each had a couple turns with the calabasa, she asked me in English if she could give me a short interview about my journey. I said sure. She explained that her art project is to interview people and then make an illustration from it. I had a feeling that there would never be any illustration, but was glad for an excuse to talk to her longer. The twenty minutes of our interview is the most I’ve seen anyone work on their project at the hostel. Though perhaps the Uruguayo guy’s project is music on his guitar, and he’s practicing it.
She asked me why I had left my country, and I started talking about Trump, but then decided that I didn’t want him to be such an integral part of my story, and certainly not present in any potential illustration of it. I had this flash of a drawing with his orange face like a sun in the sky with a little me walking in mountains, and I said, wait, no, I don’t want this to be about Trump. Instead I started over and talked about myself, how I had felt like I was spiritually and creatively dead, that I left my country to come alive again, to rediscover the beauty and magic of the world.
“And you find it?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, but in my head I thought that maybe I had found it and then lost it again. “Where?” she said, and the first thing that came to mind was “Perú.” I thought about the Andes and the Incas, about Arequipa, the cold Rio Chili running down from above Misti and Chachani, the buildings made from white volcanic stone. I thought about the north of Argentina, Salta ringed by green hills, the Quebrada de las Conchas leading to Cafayate. And then I thought of the sea just an hour before, and realized that I haven’t lost it, I’m just tired. “I found it here, just tonight, where the ocean meets the shore.” I paused. “I find the beauty and magic of the world at this table,” I said, and smiled, and she smiled too. Did I say too much? I don’t care. It was true. She asked me the next question.
I like talking to Nolwenn; she has this particular quality of being dreamy and down to earth at the same time. I think I would know she was an artist even if no one told me. This is the beginning of her journey; she’s been here for six weeks and will leave soon. Her path is west into Argentina, and eventually north to Perú and beyond. We are ships passing in the night, although neither of us is passing very quickly.
She is long gone from my table by now, back to her volunteer clique, and I’m still where we were sitting at dusk. My chosen spot, in the back corner of the deck, where I’ve spent most of my non-sleeping time at the hostel. There are canvas chairs and the table is the right height for writing. All the volunteers are at the big central table, drinking Portal beers, rolling and smoking cigarettes. I pick up bits and pieces of their conversations. Usually if I pay attention for a short while I can discern the topic. They are talking about Notre Dame in Paris burning today.
It’s a strange dynamic to be the only guest hanging out with all hostel volunteers, and often just tangentially hanging out with them. The other two guests are an Argentine couple and they’re either in their private room or out somewhere all the time. The first night here I was fully part of the volunteer group. I ate dinner with them, though I had made my own in lieu of their group meal of veggie crepes. Afterwards Guillermo and Rodrigo and I all got our guitars out and sat on the deck.
Sadly it never really turned into playing together, just each of us taking turns playing songs. I wanted to pick along with theirs but it didn’t feel quite right, as everyone else was just listening respectfully. Then eventually everyone started asking me for covers of old American classic rock songs, and I’d pull up chords from the internet on my laptop and do my best. In the end it felt like I was doing a show, that I was this American guy with a passing cameo in their movie. Sometimes doing a show is great, but I didn’t want a show; I wanted connection.
I like all of them, but I almost resent their social scene, conversations going on and on, their constant laughter, the Uruguayo guy strumming on his guitar, Aitana and Guillermo being cutesy and quietly making out on the bench. It’s like they’re taking up all the oxygen in the place. Every so often someone will call over to me or walk by and say “¿Gabi, todo bien?” and I’ll just say “si, si,” or “¿Gabi, como te va?” and I’ll say “bien, bien.” This is being on my own, but without any of the benefits of solitude.
At the end of my designated week on the coast, I find myself on the verge of heading still farther east, in the opposite direction from where I think I am going. The place calling me further is the mysterious, off-the-grid, off-the-road settlement of Cabo Polonio, which everyone here talks about tones of reverence. My recent trajectory has taken me to dramatically smaller and smaller places: from the megacity of Buenos Aires to the big city of Montevideo, then Piriápolis, a quaint little beach town, now to this village, and next to some lighthouse outpost with a hundred residents.
Cabo Polonio is off the road system, and you have to take a 4 x 4 over the dunes, or walk in. I’d heard about this place back at the Contraluz in Montevideo, but hadn’t planned on going through all the trouble to get there. A few days around these volunteers, though, have convinced me. It’s unanimously their favorite place on this coast. They use the words energia and magico and there’s a sparkle to their eyes when they talk about it. I’m an easy sell for that kind of thing, and Nollwen says I would love it there. Tomorrow I’ll be heading that way. Guillermo made me a reservation for a bed at their sister hostel, the Viejo Lobo, saying that during this week everything would be booked.
At this point I am just drifting along with the current. I’m going to Cabo Polonio mostly because there’s really no reason to stay here longer, and because people are telling me I should go there. Not only am I almost out of money, but I realize that I am almost out of energy for traveling. I’m ready to arrive, and I’m fairly certain that this end of the world beach village will not be my destination. But you never know, and I also feel like to get to where I’m going, I have to keep moving. So long as I get somewhere.
