Por Dedo
Our first day waking up in Chile, my friend Emily and I found ourselves sleeping in little tents on the sand of Playa Chinchorros, a public beach on the outskirts of Arica. It had been a trying night, with crowds of vagrant type people hanging all around us and partying. Really not so much partying as drinking and yelling with some music mixed in. For much of the night I lay in my tent just simmering at having to listen to them, finally became accustomed to it and lost consciousness in the wee hours. In the morning Emily seemed unsettled but didn’t say much about it, partly because some of the partiers were still sleeping it off around us, though some were starting to stir and wake up.
Our plan was to hitchhike down a couple hours south to a little seaside village I’d read about called Pisagua. It seemed like an achievable goal and a good first stop in Chile, and would get us out of the urban landscape. The problem was that it seemed somewhat implausible that we could even make it there. Beyond our perhaps unrealistic plan of hitchhiking, something neither Emily nor I had actually attempted in this country, our destination was a tiny village 25 miles off the Panamericana, the only highway, out into desert on a deserted coast, a way that perhaps no one would be driving. There weren’t even any public buses that went there. But that was our plan.
I had some details written down in my phone about how to get there, my phone that was almost dead after a day on the road and a night of wild camping. It didn’t seem that complicated, though. You take the highway south and get off at the road to Pisagua, to hitch another ride. And if you’re very lucky your first ride will be going there. If you’re not lucky at all, well, you probably go back into the city and spend the night again and decide whether to try hitchhiking another day or just take the bus to Iquique. We hadn’t thought that far.
Our rough night on the beach was following a rough day of traveling and crossing a border. We’d limped across la frontera a mere eleven kilometers to this city, Arica, which had always been part of Perú, like Tacna to the north and south all the way as far down as a hundred miles past Iquique. In the 1880s, Chile fought a war against Perú and Bolivia, the War of the Pacific as it is called, and after thoroughly defeating both countries, ended up with 500 miles of coastline which contained some of the richest nitrate resources in the world.
It must be explained at this point that this nitrate was being produced from guano — deposited sea bird excrement. Despite the fact that this war was literally fought over bird shit, it remains a very big deal in Perú and Chile, and the streets of these countries are littered with the names and statues of the starring generals and admirals from this conflict.
In Perú, it’s almost a “lost cause” sentiment akin to the U.S. Civil War in the (North) American South. Just down from where I lived in Arequipa, looking out over the Puente Grau is a grand statue. On the plaque at its foot, Admiral Miguel Grau is cited as the Peruvian of the Millennium. Out of every single Peruvian they could have chosen from the past thousand years, this naval officer in a losing, disastrous war was the one.
Chile declared war first on Bolivia, who it turned out had a secret alliance with Perú, which was committed to come to its aid. Though the two allied countries were more populous and had more combined wealth and resources than Chile, the latter was a stable, more modern country. It also happened to have the tacit and significant support of Great Britain, which it had promised a rich guano trading relationship. If there is a second country that has meddled the most in Latin American politics, after of course the Norteamericanos, it is the Brits. From Belize all the way to Patagonia, they have had their hands in the pie and made off quite well for themselves.
Chile ended up after five years taking all of Bolivia’s coastline, leaving that country land-locked, and a significant length of Perú’s, as well as utterly conquering that country, occupying Lima and Arequipa. The beach where we woke up was part of Perú until 1880, when the Chilean Army took Arica, the last bastion of Peruvian resistance in the south. Chile gave back Tacna through a 1932 treaty, but kept the rest.
Arica and Iquique were incredibly lucrative ports for the export of nitrate and Potosí silver from Bolivia, not to mention the possession of the nearby nitrate-guano deposits themselves. The annexation of this land is a formative reason why Chile remains more affluent than the other two, and there remains a palpable dislike and even disgust among Peruanos towards Chilenos. I’d been hearing the people of the northern country bad-mouth their neighbors to the south for nine months.
And here we were, in Chile-that-was-Perú, both ready to get right out of there first thing after our experiences the night before. Time to keep moving, make some progress heading south down the endless coastline. My camping stove had turned out to be broken the night before, so there wasn’t even going to be hot beverages this morning. It felt like there was nothing to wait around for. Within minutes of us both being awake, we were breaking down our tents and packing things up.
I made a trip to the paid bathroom house, 500 pesos or 75 cents with a meager amount of papel higenico thrown in. At least the place was clean. There was a guy scrubbing the bathroom with heavy cleaner while I was in there. I didn’t hang around. Soon the sun was getting furiously bright and we were going, loaded up like sherpas along a little road with the main city street situated on a bluff far above us to our left. After a while, we set about climbing up a long set of stairs to reach that level.
Our short-of-breath conversation while we huffed our way along was about being homeless, what we really thought of homeless people and how we responded to them. The unspoken thing being that right now, sleeping on beaches at parks with other people who don’t have houses, that’s essentially what we were. I told her about a movie I’d helped written and make long ago in San Francisco. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting that fair city, you know it contains both fabulous wealth and a large down-and-out homeless population.
Researching for and making that movie, I spent a lot of time in the Tenderloin, the center and most junkie-addled of that community, and a lot of my assumptions I’d had about people without homes were turned on their heads. They were as a general rule, more generous and good-natured than homed people, once you got on their side. After expressing various theoretical feelings about our judgements and wariness, we began to talk about the actual ramifications of our situation. She told me that she’d slept badly and had been terrified that some drunk would end up in her tent. We were both clear that we didn’t want to camp in cities anymore.
The first thing we came to was the same shopping mall where we’d been yesterday. Right outside it, facing a parking lot was this combination bank/cafe/workspace, which could have been in the states. Some sterilized, trendy corporate space the likes of which could perhaps be found in Lima but certainly not in Arequipa or the rest of Perú. Ordinarily this would be the last kind of place I’d want to hang out in South America, but my standards had dropped immensely after one night of wild camping.
It was mind-boggling how much utility could be found in this one location. We could drink tea, charge phones, use the wifi, use the bathroom and its modern fixtures, soak up the air conditioning. It made me think of homeless people in the US hanging out at the library. Despite all this usefulness, it was still off-putting. On the other side of the big room was literally a bank, with well-dressed tellers and managers and all of that, and they were looking at us like we were bringing down the quality of the clientele. To be fair, neither of us had showered that day, and had extensive baggage. The tea was pricey, basically US coffeeshop level. They charged extra for the splash of milk, but I tried not to dwell on this given all the other benefits they were providing us.
Getting out of the sun might have been the most important. After nine months in the Andes, I am not used to the relentless heat of the coast. Thirty hours into traveling, a lot of me wishes I could press a button and return to Arequipa. That city is but a day’s travel away, but feels much farther than that. There’s no going back there, even if I decided to. After overstaying my visa I won’t be allowed back in Perú for at least six months, if not more. However things turn out in Uruguay, going back won’t be an option until September at the earliest. My last night in Arequipa, sitting with friends at a picanteria, two nights ago, didn’t feel like goodbye. It does now.
We were a couple hours recovering from a night of camping by camping out at this bank/cafe, taking turns running little errands while the other person watched the bags, a job that someone must be doing at all times. In early afternoon we got our things and selves together and walked out to the street to wait at the nearest municipal bus stop. Our idea was to take a bus to the edge of town, as far out as we could, and then try to hitch a ride.
Passersby were very helpful, and informed us that this bus wouldn’t take us where we wanted to go. We needed to walk a few blocks away from the ocean and catch a local colectivo taxi that drove a particular route. We took their advice, and some fifteen minutes later we had hailed a car heading out towards the edge of Arica, on the street that led to the highway. At some point when it seemed we were going out of the way, Emily told the driver what we were trying to do, which at first he didn’t understand.
Eventually we found the Chilean term for it: por dedo — by finger. In Perú they say hacer dedo; in Mexico, pedir ride. I’ve also heard another Spanglish one: hacer autoestop. The driver was very friendly, comparing notes with the other passenger up front on what we should do. He ended up dropping us at a gas station which I’m sure was outside of his normal terrain; told us this would be a good place to start and wished us good luck. In a couple kilometers, this road would be Ruta-5, La Panamericana.
At the gas station I filled up my camp stove canister with gas, despite being highly dubious that it would work. We bought a bunch of water for the day, for hitchhiking through the desert, and after a couple minutes gathering ourselves, we took our position by the road, by a wide shoulder pull-off area, a place where drivers could easily stop for us. One of us would stand out there with our thumbs up to the universe, until we’d get disheartened and switch.
The first part of hitchhiking is often the hardest. When you haven’t got a ride yet, you will inevitably be trying too hard. It’s too important, and the drivers can smell that on you. True to form, no cars stopped for our first hour, though a minority would point to say they were not going far, or give us the three-fingered wave from a hand atop the steering wheel. We’d see a pickup or something that was a good candidate, make eye contact, feel like they were almost thinking about it, then fwoosh they were past. I hadn’t tried hitchhiking in a long time, not since the north of Colombia with Oceane, and it hadn’t gone well there.
There have been times in the past I have had success hitchhiking, and just being in the right part of the world is the most important thing. In places where hitchhiking is common, they’ll pick you up. If it’s not, they probably won’t. We’d heard from all sorts of sources that hitchhiking was something you could do in Chile, but not necessarily that this area around Arica was a good place to do it. We were going to find out, and started to settle into the looking off into the same distance for the fiftieth time boredom that comes with the territory.
A couple men were walking by and one of them, a rough around the edges guy in his fifties, asked where we were going. He said he was a truck driver and was headed all the way to Santiago. First he was going to get some lunch, but then he could give us a ride. We told him we’d be right here. They went on to their lunch, and we happily retired from hitchhiking to a bit of shade to eat ours: cheese tomato avocado mustard sandwiches that we made sitting in the gas station parking lot. Mine on some kind of roll, hers on a tortilla wrap. All stuff we bought from Lider the day before, mostly soulless ingredients, a far cry from the bursting flavors of Perú, but still appreciated in the moment.
After our sandwiches were done, we huffed our bags back out to the street, not knowing how long the guy would be, not wanting to miss our ride. Pretty soon a young-ish guy with a friendly face and a bit of a belly, came up and said he was a truck driver and was leaving town in half an hour. He’d heard of our destination, which he described as a fishing village. He said we should walk up to where his rig was, and he could give us a ride to the turn off for Pisagua. Even showed us a picture of it on his phone, a red semi truck with ROCAL written in big gray letters on the side. Then he walked away in the other direction. Maybe he was going to get lunch, too.
This all seemed real and tangible enough, so we sprung into action as quickly as people carrying multiple bags can spring, and walked out of town. Half a mile up we came upon a big parking lot for semi trucks and we didn’t ask permission at the gate, just walked straight through like we knew what we were doing. Spotted the red truck from the photo that said ROCAL and took refuge in its shade from the insistent sun, perhaps on the verge of success, perhaps just standing in a random parking lot on the outskirts of town.
Just when I was starting to wonder, the driver showed up and it really was happening, he was ready to go. We threw our bags in the empty gigantic-looking trailer in back and climbed up in the cab, Emily sitting on the bunk in back and me in shotgun. It was a hell of a view through the big windshield on which was also written ROCAL, now accompanied by that image you see on trucks of all kinds in so many countries, the silhouette of the ultra-curvy long haired female figure leaning back.
From our vantage point high above the road, Emily and I were feeling pretty good about ourselves as we pulled out of town, exchanging glances and half-smiles, trying not to seem too excited. This is one of the best feelings of hitchhiking, when you can sit back having successfully secured a ride. Now you must deal with the fact that you are in a stranger’s vehicle and are almost completely under their power.
The drivers name was Nicolas, maybe in his mid-thirties, and after a couple minutes he put on music and played it loud. Between that and his accent, it was hard for us to understand him, but I did my best to make conversation, partly because I was genuinely curious about what it is like to do what he does. He loves his job, driving from somewhere south of Santiago up here to Arica and back. He was heading fourteen hours that day, and most of the night.
I asked him if this would be difficult — todo noche — but he dismissed this out of hand saying he had rested muchisimo. I asked how he does it — a lot of coffee? and he smiled and said: no, cocaina. I laughed, thinking he was joking, but he pulled out a little tiny baggie, talking about how good his stuff was. Mucho mejor que café. This will get me three trips there and back, he said, then encouraged us to try some and see. We were on a crazy trip already without the drugs, so we respectfully declined.
The highway south of Arica is incredibly barren, white salt flats, gray sand hills, dead land without a single living thing in sight. Periodically we would drop down into sudden deep ravine-like valleys, where there might be a house or two, some pale green scrub brush by a dry riverbed, then back up into the mountains of the moon, the cordillera de la costa. It felt like a different planet.
He played a smattering of American country and hard rock, some Chilean metal, some Argentinian pop from the 80s, an occasional Peruvian cumbia. I asked him if he had been to Perú, and he said, emphatically, si, like he was well-acquainted, but it turned out he’d only ever been to Tacna, right across the border.
The difficulties in understanding his accent over the music eventually became too much effort, and I mostly just looked out the window at sand and rocks and hills and no plants. A couple hours down the road — he’d said forty minutes — we came to the crossroads for Pisagua. He pulled the rig over and we got our bags from the back, shook his hand, and Nicolas was gone down the road.
This was the middle of nowhere. There was a tired-looking restaurant and on the corner opposite, a little shelter from the sun surrounded by solar powered light poles. We took refuge in the shelter, where there was a lot of trash on the ground. It looked like the ends of the earth, like no one might come by for days. Our plan was to wait in the shade until we heard a car coming.
Not long after we got there, before a single car had passed on the Panamericana — a sprinter van marked Transporte Pulman came along on the way from Pisagua, and pulled up right behind the shelter. The driver, a middle aged respectable guy in a uniform shirt, with an Inca face, broad forehead, sat down to wait with us in the shelter. I asked where he was going and he said, Pisagua. (!) Podemos ir contigo — can we go with you? He shook his head- no, es privada. We can pay, I said, but he said no es posible.
That was that and he lit a smoke and drank a soda, and we made a little conversation but mostly just waited. He was meeting a bus to pick up some workers and take them down to the town. Apparently they obtain seawater and transport it in trucks to an iodine mine nearby. I had never heard of iodine mining but I suppose it must come from somewhere. He said there was good camping in Pisagua and good cheap restaurants. I asked if they had good pescado, mariscos but he said no. They fish there, but don’t prepare fish in town at restaurants. This seemed strange.
Emily walked out to the other side of the street to be in position to hail passing cars, but none came, and before long she came back in out of the heat. After maybe fifteen more minutes, the bus the driver was waiting for pulled up, and two grim-looking workers got out with duffel bags. The driver went to load up the van and bade us, ciao.
I said to Emily that I knew he’d said it wasn’t possible, but I was still kinda hoping he’d take us. Thirty seconds later, he appeared, saying vaminos! We happily grabbed our bags and climbed into a comfortable air-conditioned van, and we were on the road to Pisagua. Somehow we had hitched two rides despite not hailing a single vehicle from the road.
Emily and I had a program on our shared travels that we were sticking to about half the time, of only speaking Spanish. We’d had a class together some months back, and could both express ourselves, if a bit haltingly at times and with lots of mistakes. We were roughly on the same level, which at our school they’d called Advanced, but I suspect it was really more like Intermediate. And so in fits and starts along the way we’d been talking about Alex, the guy she’d been seeing in Arequipa for months and had just said goodbye to, maybe for good. To be more specific, they hadn’t actually said goodbye. She had decidedly mixed feelings about it all. It was a good conversation to have in our español, now in our tall-backed seats in the rear of the van. Liberated from the harsh desert highway, now that we had a ride and a comfortable one at that, being able to talk felt like a luxury, not a requisite of survival.
As we rode down a little unmarked road following a ravine, I confessed to her that I was also leaving behind a crush, and asked Emily to adivinar — guess — and it took her about five seconds to say Karem, who she knew from Soul Guest House where we’d lived and where Karem hung out all the time with her Venezuelan “cousins” Katherine and Karolayn. How did you know, I asked. Was it so obvious? Obvio, si. You were always talking to her and smiling, flirting, she said.
She asked if I’d done anything — hiciste algo? and I said I’d told Karem, but that I also told her that I didn’t think it was right. I hadn’t said all this exactly, but she is young, if not by age then by behavior. She is young by age, too — she turned twenty three in late December, when Ms. Sharon and I went over to her family’s apartment to help them celebrate. I am almost double her age. I didn’t dwell on this aspect to Emily, because in fact she is the same age, if some months older, and she is my friend and I didn’t want to imply that by being young she somehow had less worth. Mainly I expressed the emotional part: Karem was lovely but young and fickle and flighty and all over the place. One day she’d be happy, the next terribly depressed. Right after we’d have a lovely day together, she’d act like I barely existed. Guys always like girls like that, Emily said slowly, measuring her words: los muchachos siempre les gustan chicas asi.
I even wrote a song about Karem, the first song I’d written in four years. It was a sad song but I was delighted just to have had it come to me, to have written a song again, and it made me happy to play it, this song that perhaps marked the return of the muse. It was about having strong feelings for someone that you know isn’t going to be there for you — how confusing that is.
At my last show in Arequipa, Karem had been out there in the audience, and while I was playing this song about her acting like I don’t exist, she had her back turned to me onstage, chatting and flirting with a cute young American guy. As I sang the words to the back of her head, I was actually enjoying the perfect irony of all of it. For the last verse, though, she turned around and stared at me wide-eyed, like she’d seen a ghost. We talked about it later, one night huddled under blankets beneath the stars in the back courtyard of Soul, keeping Ms. Sharon awake at all hours. She said she’d had a feeling I was singing about her, but couldn’t understand the words.
For all sorts of reasons my brain told me it made no sense to be interested in her, that she had nothing to give in a relationship at this point in her life, but my heart didn’t care one iota for these reasons. And there was no denying the fact that we were two humans who had made a strong connection. The last week, once Karem realized in her heart that I was really going to leave, we’d spent all kinds of time together, staying up late, drinking rum, night after night, a whirlwind — la Tormenta de Karem. I missed her already but was also glad to be out of the storm. Relieved and wistful.
The way to Pisagua was stark, desolate, down into sheer canyons, then over the last crest of hills before the bright blue sea, cliffs dropping down a thousand feet, a little ramshackle fishing village around the curves of a cove dotted with colorful lanchas moored in the harbor. The driver dropped us off at the top of town in late afternoon in the still-hot sun and we heartily thanked him. Incredibly, here we were, Pisagua, time to put our bags back on and walk into this ghost of a town. Just above us was this monumental nineteenth century wooden building, straight out of the old West, maybe once a glorious hotel, long since abandoned and now permanently vacant, illustrating the surreal place we had come to.
