Travelogue 33 Chile: Hanging Hippie in Panamavida

I’ve been counting my days of late by the number of cold showers I’ve left to endure. Only two remaining! Since last I wrote, I’ve gone from a life of luxury at a Chilean country home to a meager existence in an abandoned agricultural trade school. The place is like a haunted house—broken windows, cracked plaster, sagging roof, creaking wood floors and it’s all grown up with weeds and shit, too. You’d never know it’s here unless you were looking for it. Two nights ago they did a “cleansing” of the whole place with sage smoke and reiki symbols trying to spook the lingering spirits away that were keeping people awake at night. No lie.

Buenmundo

Round back

Fire in the courtyard

I’m on day eight of hanging with hippies in a commune. They are trying to refurbish this place into a wellness, healing, New Age community. So far I haven’t seen any pot or free-love in the fields, but upon getting the gist of my preferences, one Jesus-looking guy identified himself as polyamorous (kind of like polygamous minus marriage).  While he didn’t come right out and invite me to the party, I got what he was hinting at. I passed on the offer, first of all, because I’m not interested in what he brings to the encounter and, thus would ignore him totally, which would hurt his feelings, and that won’t do, because we are all about love here. That fact, however, is of secondary importance. The main reason is I declined was the guy has got funkacious B.O..  I’m talking some serious, hefty, hippie stench. It’s so bad I had to come up with an excuse at lunch to move to the other side of the table. The only cure I see is tie him to the spit and give him a three hour rotisserie sage smoking and then soak him in a barrel of patchouli.
My mother would have a T-Total fit if she knew I was here. Besides the woo-wooness of it all, the conditions of the eating area alone would be enough to make her come for me. I’m all about water conservation, but after washing twenty-five dishes in a small washtub with soap made from lemon rinds and oats, it’s time to let that H2o go. But no, they will wash another twenty-five until the plates are dirtier when they come out than when they went in. It reminds me of white paper plate kindergarden art: flecks of lettuce for the grass, oregano sprinkles for rain, wavy lines of orange tomato sauce grease for the horizon and stubborn crusty dried cheese for a 3-D mountain range effect.

Pop would be happy that I have returned to the simple country life of growing your own food and letting heaps of  useful junk pile up until it blocks the view of the house. Unlike Mom, he could care less about the cleanliness issues. He would not be happy, however, about men with hair past their shoulders, pagan rituals, saying “Ah-ho” instead of “amen” , replacing prayer with mediation and the fact that there ain’t no meat on the table. As a matter of fact, meat is strictly prohibited on the premises. Pop would pull up the totem pole in the patio, too, and replace it with a Cross bearing the crucified Jesus.
Change of subjects:
There is only one member of the animal kingdom endemic of Chile that can kill you and I’ve been showering with it. The other night I was in the commons area working on my laptop when Lampu, who looks someone with the name Lampu would look, (use your imagination) all of a sudden jumps up and starts dancing a jig. I was both startled and baffled, and thought, “Like, Dude, yeah, we could use some rain, but keep your drawers on.”
“It’s a Rincon!!!,” he yells and that gets everybody else up out of their seats and dancing around. I remain sprawled out on the couch in a stupor  until one of the youngsters amongst us raises up a notebook and is about to crash it down on something with eight legs running across the floor. Well, that got Mr. Smelly Polylove Pants all riled up, because he is an animal rights activist. I think he shows his support by smelling like one. Instead of fasting like Ghandi,  he gives up bathing. Anyway, he tells everybody to back off; he will take care of it. “Is he going to expose his armpits and fumigate?” I wondered. No. Barefoot except for his sandals, he starts dribbling the deadly arachnid like a soccer ball toward the door. He paused before herding it out the exit to give us all a lesson on how to distinguish a Rincon (which means “corner” in Spanish)  from nice spiders.
Well, wouldn’t you know, the next day I’m enduring my nightly cold shower when a clearly marked Rincon drops out from between the shower curtain and liner and lands inches from my foot. Upon hitting the water IT  balled up into the same posture I sustain for most of my shower, a fetal position. I turned off the water and about tore down the curtain getting out of the 2 ft x 2ft square tray that constitutes the shower basin.  As soon as the water went down the drain, Corner uncurled itself and lifted each leg, one at a time, as if warming up for a sprint.
“Don’t panic!!!” I tell myself, “Remember what they said. If you apply ice (note: the commune doesn’t even have a fridge) and get to a hospital quickly, you won’t die; they will just cut huge hunks of flesh out of your body where you were bitten.”
Most would assume I grabbed the nearest shoe and squashed the bloody hell out of IT. Not so. I take Smelly’s side on this one. I can’t kill spiders. It’s not in me, no matter how notoriously dangerous they are. I wrote the following poem several years ago and never did anything with it. I’ll share it here, so you will know where I am coming from .
Moving Spiders
Shrink yourself down,
grow 8 legs,
spin a million miles of silk,
hang fearlessly by a thread,
wait 5 days hungry to eat
then mummy your food in 10,000 twirls.
Rebuild your home after broom or storm,
powder yourself with morning dew,
risk a trip across the room,
brood a nest and feel them go,
though no one thinks you a mother.
Weigh in under an ounce and
scare the screaming shit out of billions.
Do all this, and then,
ask me again your question
as to why I moved that spider.

So, I found a piece of newspaper rolled it up into a funnel and spooked Corner into the darkness. Then I threw out the whole thing out the window, as if it were a hornet’s nest on fire and slammed the window shut.

The end. Anticlimactic, I know. The story would be a lot more fun to write and read had I been bitten and the hippies tried to heal me with the weeds and seeds they keep in jars in the kitchen and I had some kind of loopy reaction and stared imagining things and then they had to pedal me on their 1980s recycled bike to the nearest hospital 20 miles a way on a gravel road with no lights and then I almost died except for Nurse Wratched and Dr. Hyde saving me by making a nice spider that carries the antivenom bite me. Sorry, that’s not what happened. The truth is I just went to bed and woke up every hour running my hands all over my body to get off whatever it was that I was sure was crawling on me.

The reason I have stayed so long despite the conditions is I got wrapped up in a radical bioconstruction/sustainibilty/recycling project. We (a super-cool carpenter, a groovy young Spanaird and I) are converting an abandoned pig pen into living quarters for the volunteers who come to work here.  No lie. Thank goodness I arrived after they had already removed most evidence of pig habitation and I’m leaving before they open for business.

 

Lunch time at the Piggly Wiggly Diner with Gabriel and Miguel

 



The experience brought back so many memories of my growing up on a farm and especially of building things with Pop. From the time I was big enough lift a board I helped him put up fences, build corncribs, barns and cow shuts and stuff like that.
In order for us to get out to the pig pens we had to hike twenty minutes through field and forest and that triggered lots of memories of dove hunting, picking blackberries and wading creeks with him.

park the car

 



 

I’m thinking that the reason I was called here to Chile was to take care of some undone mourning. The skills I offered the project and the closeness with nature I enjoyed I all owe to Pop. It was like being a kid at his side again.  Lots of tears fell on dried pig poop as I nailed and sawed my little heart out.
Next I’m off to Eco Yoga Park, which is somewhere south between here and the coast. I know little about it except it has HOT water, the serve vegetarian food, it has HOT water, one class of yoga a day is included in the price, it has HOT water and the pictures of it on the internet look pretty. It came up when I Googled, “spirituality retreats Chile.” Kind of like playing Spin the Bottle with your vacation, isn’t  it?
On the 13^th I’m off to Miami for my first solo tour to Cuba!! I’ve been emailing with my participants and it turns out 16 out of 18 belong to a Slovak dance group in Palo Alto, CA. They decided to take a vacation together. Almost all are retired doctors, political science professors, engineers and such. In other words, a little wobbly in the legs, but still sharp up top. I’m soooooo excited!
This addition has been composed under my least favorite travel conditions: in the back, beside the john, under the t.v. monitor of the low class, “solidarity”  bus. I call it the solidarity bus, because everybody is in it together from one end to the other. The main inconvenience is that the seats are so close together and recline so far back that you could give the person in front of you a dental cleaning…should they ask. If someone in the first row decides to kickback, it starts a domino effect. If you keep your seat in an upright position, your nose will be touching the head rest in front of you. If they put a movie on, which they always do on trips over two hours, since there are no headsets, everyone  “enjoys” the movie whether they want to or not. Anyway, it is what it is and my seatmate is a young, thin , bathed teenager who stays on his side of the crack, so there is that to be grateful for.
I loved hearing from those who got a kick out of the Cuban massage story.
As always many thanks for reading and much love just for being who you are in my life,
G