Chapter Next

Summer in Maine.

I've been in Portland for almost a month now, and I suppose the time has come to start writing things down. I happen to have a free evening, so here are retroactive blog posts.

June 1

I leave reasonably early (7:00am) in the company of Will and Charlie driving from Ohio to Massachusetts. Will decides to stay up all night in order not to be tired while driving. He takes first shift, and I stay awake and make conversation. Will regards the GPS estimated time of arrival as a personal challenge. Our stops are infrequent and brief. Charlie takes second shift, and I drive cleanup. We stay the night at Charlie's family's house in Andover, MA. His mom cooks steak and refuses to let us help clean up, so we play with the dog.

June 2

I eat my first freshly baked bagel and then get to the train station to take the commuter rail to Boston (you must go South to get North around here). I have come over encumbered with instruments, so I leave the guitar in Andover for the time being. From North station, I take the T to South Station and just make it in time to board my bus to Portland. I finish my book en route. It's a long ride. Kris and Jim, my new landlords, pick me up from the bus port in their Prius. We drop off my things, and then Jim gives me a driving tour of Portland with a stop off at Hannaford to lay in supplies. I forgot my list and manage to not buy most of the basic essentials I will need. The Millards seem like nice folks. Jim teaches English at an independent school, and Kris does freelance writing. One of their daughters is in Italy, but will come back soon, and the other is in high school at the school Jim teaches at. The house is on the campus of the school. I will stay in the old servants' quarters. There are two closets and a separate bathroom. Jessie drives down from Brunswick, where she is working for the week, and we see each other for the first time in three months. It's raining, but that doesn't matter.

June 3

I go on a downtown walk with Jessie. It's pouring, and we get soaked through. We stop at a yuppie soup place and get clam chowder. I go home and get a hot shower. The shower is nice with a reliable, steady temperature. Sometimes it shrieks like a boatswain's whistle for no apparent reason though. Jessie takes me to Goodwill, and I buy a reading lamp, a pair of shorts, and a bucket.

June 4

I wake up early and walk downtown. The Forest Foundation has hired a van and driver to transport the Portland interns to MA. I meet up with the other three Portland interns and with two staff from the McKeen Center for the Common Good. We meet with all of the Forest Foundation interns (there are 27 in total) in a community center in Lawrence, MA. There are many introductions, getting to know you activities, speeches about philanthropy, and we are introduced to a grant writing project that we will work on over the summer (this came as a surprise to me). I meet David, the Forest Foundation director, in person at last. He seems competent, and very committed to his work at the Foundation. After the meeting, I go to the bus station with Nural, another intern, and make the now familiar way back to Boston to get on another bus headed toward Hanover, NH for the GIS and agent based modeling working group. I arrive late at night, with an address for the hotel and the name of the person I will be rooming with: Peter. I meet him in the elevator on the way up to the room. He's a cheerful, chatty fellow, with a big beard and a ready laugh. He fills me in on what has happened so far in the working group and who are the people I should know. We talk economics late into the night.

June 5

I get up early. Peter introduces me to Jim and Tim from the University of Maine and Ted Aimes, all fishery people. We eat breakfast with them, and I remeet Sigrid, a French post-doc at GMRI who I briefly met in March. The working group sessions are long and chock full of information. They talk about a lot of models in a lot of fisheries. If I had not just finished a GIS class and talked at length with Peter about agent based models, I would be lost. I learn about Tuna migration patterns and Floating Aggregator Devices and many other things. After the sessions, I meet up with my UWC roommate, Carlo on the green. There is a crowd gathered around a bunch of sun telescopes to watch the transit of Venus. There is a carnival atmosphere. We join them and watch the little dark circle move across the big light circle. I see Peter Johnson, an old teammate from SERF. Dartmouth sets a good table for dinner, and I chat with Sigrid and Tim about the difficulties of working in a second language.

June 6

Both days of the working group start with presentations with lots of information and then digress to fairly tangential presentations. The person who organized the thing seems not to have read the paper she is talking about. I feel uncomfortable when she misinterprets some graphs. I don't know if I should point it out (since I have so little knowledge of the subject area); luckily, someone else does. After lunch we visit the greenhouse on the roof, which houses a fantastic collection of exotic plants. I go back later and take pictures. I drive back to Portland with Jenny (my boss), Peter, and Sigrid. It's a pleasant drive, and I enjoy their company. Too bad Sigrid will be going back to France soon, and Peter neither lives nor works in Portland.

June 7

I make it to the lab for the first time, on my fourth official day of work. The other interns have had an orientation and are already at work in their respective labs. I get all my paperwork taken care of and get my workspace set up. I'm in the closet of the benthic lab, mostly because there's a spare desk there, though I will be working topic related to benthic critters. My first task is reading through a bunch of background information. I know nothing about lobsters or groundfish at this point, but that is about to change. I'm going to be working on two projects with Jenny this summer. The first is a groundfish sector viability project. The groundfish sectors are non-profit organizations that serve to self-regulate fishermen who target groundfish. Groundfish are bottom dwelling species like Cod, Redfish, and Flounder. This fishery is managed under the catch-share system, where a Total Allowable Catch (TAC) is set for each fish stock, and each vessel is assigned an Annual Catch Entitlement (ACE), which is how much they can fish. The fishermen can choose to join one of the 17 sectors to manage their ACE or they can operate out of the common pool, though few really active fishermen choose the latter option. The problem that we will be dealing with is that until now, funding for the sectors has been provided by the federal government, but that funding will end in 2013. Then the sectors will have to find a way to cover their costs of operation as well as finance the mandatory observation program that ensures compliance with catch-share regulations. Our task is to find alternative sources of funding and suggest business strategies that will keep the sectors viable.

My second project is an assessment of the lobster industry to see if there are opportunities for increased profits and sustainability by accessing more of the international market. GMRI is also submitting a bid for a third party assessment of the limited entry system in the lobster industry, so I will probably work on that too, if our bid is selected.

June 8

I manage to take care of that last of my paperwork concerns, and start working on the import/export database for lobsters. Jenny is trying to get an idea of the market structure, so I am tasked with generating a series of figures identifying who is sending lobster where, for what purpose, and at what price. I try doing it with SAS, a statistical software package that I am trying to learn, and it does not come out exactly how I want it. The rest of the afternoon is spent fighting with Excel instead. There are a number of problems and intricacies to the dataset. It's tricky, but it's exactly the sort of thing that I signed up for.

That's all I feel I can write for now. I'll keep going at a later date (perhaps with pictures and/or something more exciting to tell). Hopefully I can catch up to the present in good order.

Future topics will include:

Give and Go rummage sale.

The Old Port Festival.

A Grant Writing Workshop and project.

A trip to the Library.

The District 118 election campaign.

Lots of data processing.

Other interns at GMRI.

A backpacking trip to Mahoosic Notch and Old Speck.

Teleconferences.

A trip to New York City.

and many more.

¡Que fome!

Passport situation resolved.

After about a month of sending emails without replies and listening to answering machines, I finally found a telephone number for the US embassy in Santiago that doesn't lead you through a bunch of recordings (it was a number to get a temporary passport). Instead, I talked to a real person who told me that they actually do have my passport ready, I just have to pick it up. I suppose this proves that the embassy isn't weaselly or incompetent; they just don't handle email very well. In any case I'm very glad that I'm going to be able to return to the US after all.

It's sort of ironic that the thief who made off with my backpack won't get any value whatsoever out of the passport, but so far it's cost me about $350 to replace the thing.

La Isla

One final trip in Chile.

I just got back from a week traveling in Chiloé, an island about five hours south of Valdivia. Great trip: beautiful rainforest, ocean, cliffs, beaches, interesting architecture, and warm hospitality. We spent five nights in the tent and three nights in hostels. The hostels in Chiloé, like much of Southern Chile, are essentially private homes with a few extra bedrooms. For $20-$30 you get a room for the night, use of the family kitchen, breakfast the next morning, and good company. Chiloé is famous for its palofitos, houses that extend over the estuary on stilts, and its wooden churches. We saw both in Castro, and they were fairly interesting, but they didn't hold my attention for long (about 35 minutes). Both myself and Jessie aren't the sort of people who do tourism very well, and we quickly realized that Castro didn't hold much appeal for us, so we decided to cut our stay short and head for the wilderness as soon as possible. To be honest, I had the most fun in the cities watching futbol in resto-bars and hanging out in the kitchen of the hostels talking with the families and cooking US comfort food (we're getting started on the transition process).

The national park was difficult to get to (1.5 hours in big bus, 1.5 hours in rural bus, 4 km walking/hitching gravel road, 9 km hiking along the beach, 5 km hiking on horse trail) but worth the effort. The beaches were lovely. At the first one, near the indigenous community of Cole Cole, we found a CONAF shelter and met a couple from the US and another couple from Europe (not sure which country). Aside from a couple of Huilliche fisherman we had met just before entering the park, they were the only people we saw. It was interesting that we didn't meet any foreigners in the hostels and we didn't meet any Chileans in the park. The next day we bushwacked through 6 km of very rough trail through the rainforest to arrive at another beach where the Río Anay empties into the sea. This one we had completely to ourselves; the two days we stayed there we didn't see another human. Uncharacteristically for Chiloé, we had perfect weather for all three days on the beach.

After hiking out we stayed in a campsite near the park headquarters. A group of CONAF rangers had ordered a curanto from the restaurant/common area of the campsite. Curanto is kind of like a clam bake but with chicken, pork, lots of different types of shellfish, and lots of potatoes. We had stopped by the restaurant because the owner had offered us real coffee (extremely uncommon in Chile). However, since the rangers had a lot left over, they ended up giving us a heaping platter of the stuff along with fresh bread and good wine. It was good, but I had lost my appetite for shellfish by the end. (Another food highlight of the trip was milcao, a meat filled potato pancake with the same grease content as a stick of butter deep fried in lard. I liked it. It proves that Chile is one of the exceedingly rare countries with a culinary tradition less healthy than that of the USA.*)

We also visited the Northern sector of the park, near the tiny town of Chepu, with a stopoff to shower and restock food in Ancud. We found a boat to take us across the river and then hiked about two hours to reach a penguin colony. They were cute, and the coast along the north of the park was gorgeous. We stayed at a campground with a bunch of gringos (my first time speaking English with someone who isn't part of my immediate family in five months!) and went kayaking at dawn (on the water at 5:15 am) the next morning in a dead forest. The earthquake of 1960 had sunk the entire area and what once was forest is now a collection of dead trees in a tidal estuary. We hitchhiked back to Ancud in the afternoon and stayed with a couple of old ladies we had met our last stay in Ancud (they baked excellent bread for breakfast). The next morning (this morning) we hopped on a bus (and a ferry because Chiloé is an island) for Valdivia.

I bought my ticket for Santiago today, so tomorrow is my last day in Valdivia. I still don't have a passport, and the embassy won't answer their phones or return my emails, so at this point I have no idea if I'll be able to get back into the US or not. In any case, I'll have two days in Santiago to figure things out.

I'll try to throw up some pictures when I get them, but there are a lot of other things to do right now (like packing).

*For further proof of this assertion, see the completo.

Leso

Why is it that only after five months of living in Chile I finally think to take two minutes to switch my keyboard to the international setting?

Seriously. I've been typing tildes the hard way for five months. I probably could have saved myself an aggregate of half a day's worth of time by just thinking about what I was doing at the beginning of the semester instead of two days from the end.

Two days. It's scary.

I took my last exam today, and met with my economics professor to review a draft of my last essay.

The weather has been beautiful all week, but I've been glued to the keyboard churning out academic drivel (high quality academic drivel let it be known). Two papers turned in, one finished, and the last one halfway there. There was a span of two days were I don't think that I set foot outside of the house. But soon all this will end, and I'll have ten days on the myth-filled island of Chiloé (that tilde was so easy to type!): more rain forests, more beaches, more curious and unknown foodstuffs, and, in all likelihood, more rain.

¡Vivan los novios!

Time to celebrate.

Last night was the wedding of Lesli, the daughter of my host family, and Enrique, her (former) fiancee (obviously), and I was invited to the ceremony, and the party afterwards. The civil wedding had taken place last week. I was the "official" photographer for the pre-wedding wedding, and we had a party afterwards at Enrique's parents' house. We stayed up late eating and taking turns singing. I sang some bluegrass to represent Kentucky.

The church wedding was short and sweet. The catholic bits were exactly the same as what I know from the US, only in Spanish. Then everyone lined up to congratulate the novios, who subsequently departed in an antique Fiat to do a photo tour of Valdivia in wedding attire. Everyone else loaded up and headed for the ballroom in the centro that had been rented for the fiesta. There was champagne, lots of toasts, embarrassing baby pictures, steak, lots of alcohol, and lots and lots of dancing. Jessie didn't attend the wedding, but she showed up for the celebration afterwards, and we spend the whole night eating, drinking, dancing, and making merry. At about 3 am we had a surprise visit from a group of bateristas, a band of drummers who danced and played and were a lot of fun. The novios were both excellent dancers and danced all night long. Myself and Jessie left shortly after the cake was finally cut at 4:30am, and I got to bed just as dawn started to break.

Today I have to finish up a 16 page paper and a 10 page history project. Such is life.

(There are lots of pictures, but I don't have any of them yet.)

Investigación

Reading and writing.

My classes are starting to wrap up, so the next few days will be filled with the writing of research papers. Most of the topics are interesting, so that much is good. On the other hand I have to deal with UACh's library, which is not so good.

I'm spoiled by Kenyon's library system, where you can check out as many books as you want, enter and exit freely, renew books online, take your backpack into the library, and where the operating hours reflect the studying schedules of undergrad students. At Austral on the other hand, things are a bit more complicated.

To enter the library you have to have a student ID, which takes several weeks to process, and a barcode, which takes another day or two. You have to swipe the card to get into the library and again to get out. You can't take your bookbag into the sections of the library where the shelves are located. You have to exchange your national ID card for a key to a locker and stow your backpack before entering the collection. Then you have to present your student ID again to check out books, and you are only allowed four at a time. If you want to check out a high-demand book, you have to schedule a borrowing window beforehand on the library's website. (Unfortunately my login information to access the webpage mysteriously stopped working several months ago, and I haven't been able to figure out why or how to fix it.) If you want use a computer, there are about twenty, for a school with over 10,000 students. If you want to make a photocopy, you have to leave the library, stand in line for upwards of 15 minutes, and shell out 15 pesos per page. It's a hassle.

We're having warm weather at last. Yesterday Jessie and I decided to try swimming in one of the rivers that surround Isla Teja. In spite of the sunshine, the water was breathsuckingly frigid. We swam just long enough to justify the hike.

Cochamó

My first trip to Patagonia.

I just got back from four days in Valle de Cochamo, a glacier carved valley some three hours Southeast of Puerto Montt, in the Northern extreme of Patagonia. We woke up at 3:00 am to walk to the bus terminal because our bus to Puerto Montt left at 3:50. The sky was mottled with clouds, and as dawn broke we had a good view from the bus of two impressive volcanoes: Osorno and Calbuco. Puerto Montt is similar in appearance to Valdivia except that it is larger and has an ocean instead of a river beside it. We spent an hour waiting in the bus port there for the rural bus to the town of Cochamo. Jessie fell asleep on the bus, but I had a good time admiring the views of Lago Llanquihue, which is enormous, and Llanquihue national park. After a couple of hours the bus started traveling alongside the Reloncavi estuary, a very scenic fjord with snow capped mountains on both sides. We passed through Cochamo, a tiny town most noted for its

wood-shingled chapel, and got off the bus at the bridge over the Rio Cochamo, a few kilometers to the South. From there we hiked six kilometers East along a small, gravel road into the valley itself. There were a few houses along the road and a couple of people harvesting firewood. We saw two vehicles, and one of them stopped to offer us a ride, but we declined.

We stopped for lunch along the road. Across the valley, we had a good view of a double waterfall. Jessie commented that in Maine, people would build trails and found state parks for a waterfall like that, but here it's more or less ordinary.

At the end of the road, we found the trailhead starting with a horse bridge over a small river.

The first couple of kilometers had fences on both sides to keep cows in and hikers out. There was some mud, a few more waterfalls, and no other hikers. Then the fences stopped, and we had to ford a larger river full of glass-clear water running over a white granite bed. After that we started entering into more mature forest.

Cochamo is home to one of the few remaining examples of temperate rainforest. There is water everywhere, and everything is green. The trees were enormous and every available surface was covered in plantlife: vines, moss, lichen, ferns, and the like. Each large tree was like its own mini-forest with all sorts of plants, including other trees, growing out of the cracks and crevices in its bark.

Every now and then a break in the canopy would reveal multi-level waterfalls coursing down the sides of the valley. We walked slowly, partly to admire the constantly astonishing scenery and partly because of the rough nature of the trail. The path was often steep and was composed of never-ending puddles of mud and trenches worn up to two meters deep by the passing of countless horses.

About four kilometers into the trail we started seeing areas where the path was paved with alerce and coihue logs, a reminder of the times in which the trail was used to drive cattle from Argentina to the fjord with access to the Pacific.

Sometimes the trail would run though deep forest. Sometimes it ran alongside the river. The river was rough, at one point we passed about two kilometers of continuous, big rapids. The water is very clear up close and from father away has a sort of electric blue-green color. We climbed down from the path to explore part of the river.

Eight kilometers into the hike, we arrived at a clearing with our first good view of the interior of the valley. Bald granite peaks on both sides were covered with rainforest below, snow on top, and countless waterfalls in between.

We had to stop for about half an hour to take it all it (and eat GORP). After another hour of slogging through mud and enjoying the views we arrived at the campground, La Junta. We set up our cheap, Wal-Mart tent and decided to take a nap. The campground manager came by while we were getting settled in we chatted a while. His name was Daniel, and he turned out to be a North American transplant who lightly poked fun at us for speaking with him in Spanish. He recommended a trail for us for the next day, collected our camping fee, and invited us to stop by the Refugio (lodge) later to look at maps and get descriptions of other trails. We decided to visit the Refugio after a nap (it was about 7:30pm, and we started this trip at 3:00 that morning). Unfortunately we didn't set an alarm and instead of taking a nap we ended up sleeping through the night.

The next morning we climbed Cerro Arco Iris, following the directions Daniel had given us the day before. The trail was steep and muddy, and it had started to rain before we left the tent (I was very happy to have an opportunity to use my brand new--and very expensive-- raingear). We took a slight detour to look for water and filled up right below an incredible waterfall that Daniel had neglected to mention.

The trail up the mountain was steep and muddy and passed through more incredible, old-growth rainforest. After gaining a considerable amount of elevation, we passed into alerce forest. Even though neither of us had seen an alerce before, we instantly recognized it when we saw it. They're often called the Sequoias of South America and with good reason. The trees are enormous in girth (though they don't nearly rival sequoias in height), and some of the trees we saw were well over a thousand years old. The canopy opened up too, affording intermittent views of the craggy domes of Cochamo, looming out of the fog and clouds.

We couldn't see as much of the mountains as on a clear day, but the mist lent an atmosphere of mystery to the landscape that was equally impressive. The combination of giant trees, swirling fog, and soaring granite cliffs was like an image struck directly from my conception of an exotic, wild South America.

About three hours into the climb, we came to a section of the trail where the path went from steep, to almost vertical, and we had to progress by scaling exposed roots and scrambling up cracks in the boulders. Jessie said it reminded her of the movie Avatar; I concurred. At one point the trail dead-ended with a cliff on one side, and a very, very long drop on the other. Someone had installed fixed ropes up the cliff, and the only way to keep going was to hand over hand climb more or less directly up.

(What you don't see in this picture is the 1,000+ ft drop on the other side of the camera.)

After the climbing section, we passed through more alerce forest. Over a certain altitude, we started hiking through a cloud, and the view was all the more restricted until the world beyond the mountainside was a pure sheet of white. Before we reached the summit, we met with the snowline and had to turn around.

By the time we made it back to camp, we were both thoroughly soaked. We met some climbers from Osorno in the fogon, a communal shelter with a firepit, and they shared some soup with us while we tried to dry out our gear a bit. We also met a couple from Belgium who had also climbed Cerro Arco Iris. They were even wetter than we were. Later than evening we went to the Refugio to get directions for our next hike.

The next morning, we were planning on climbing the other side of the valley, but when we woke it was raining as steadily as ever, so things looked sketchy. Our tent, by some miracle, never failed us, and we were dry and warm both nights. With two full days of rain, hiking uphill was a slippery proposition, and descending was more like skating than walking. With this in mind, and considering all our gear was soaked from the day before, we opted to explore around the base of the valley in the morning, and spend the afternoon relaxing in the Refugio. The plus of all that rain was the spectacular condition of the waterfalls. The waterfall we had filled our bottles from the day before (pictured above) had at least twice the volume, a thundering torrent that had to be seen to be believed. In addition, hundreds of new falls appeared down the sides of the granite domes.

The Refugio was located on the other side of the river, and to get there you have to cross in a cable car.

The lodge itself is a charming wood building with a wrap-around porch affording a wonderful view of the valley. We had reserved a private room there for our last night in Cochamo. We arrived shortly after noon, and I spent the afternoon playing guitar, reading Garcia Marquez with Jessie, and chatting with the hosts. The staff consisted of Moni, an older Argentinian lady, Jupi, a girl a few years older than me (also from Argentina), and Daniel, the US expat. It was very pleasant to pass the day in the kitchen, next to the woodfired stove, drinking tea and talking with Jupi and Moni as they prepared dinner (really excellent pizza).

The next morning we woke up early to follow a "you can't leave without trying this" recommendation from Daniel: the Toboggan. To get there, we ran to the Rio Cochamo and cabled across. Then we had to ford another, smaller river on foot, which turned out to be quite a challenge. It was above my knees and moving very fast. Another ten minutes of following the smaller river (Rio la Junta) through the rainforest found us at the Toboggan, a waterfall over a smooth, granite slope. We didn't bring the camera because we didn't want to risk losing it while fording the river, so we didn't take any pictures, but here's one of the Toboggan in the summer that I stole from the Refugio's website:

Due to the heavy rainfall, it was much less like a waterslide and much more like a waterfall when we got there (imagine a lot more water than you see in the picture). It's a snowmelt fed river, so it was pretty darned cold too. We had borrowed a 5mm wetsuit for Jessie, but they didn't have any in my size, so I opted for just swearing loudly to deal with the temperature. The first time I tried to cross to get to the falls, I slipped, fell in, and got swept about 30m downstream before I could escape from the current. We eventually found a safer way across, and jumped down the waterfall two or three times before I felt like I was dying from the cold.

We hiked back to the Refugio, dried off, warmed up, packed up, and started down. We thought the bus for Puerto Varas would pass at 4:00pm, and we left at 11:30 am, so we were trucking it to make it out in time. It turned out that the bus didn't come until 5:00, so we had time to eat most of our leftover food at the side of the highway.

Fell asleep on the bus. Found a little Peruvian restaurant in Puerto Varas, ran into the Belgians from Cochamo in the busport, and slept again on the bus to Valdivia. It was raining in Valdivia when we arrived at midnight, so we splurged on a taxi ($3) instead of hoofing it back to Isla Teja.