Having grown weary of the environs of my now-beloved Tocopilla, despite its offering up some sumptuously bleak industrial landscapes for my photographic brain to parse, I drove east back into the desert this afternoon. 30km of winding road cut through the precipitous cliffs and mountains that dumps you out onto the desert floor a couple of thousand feet above the sea.

Actually, it wasn´t so much weariness that drove me on as the early stages of what I´m sure is ¨desert syndrome,¨ a fictional malady coined by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman in his fine memoir about Atacama called Desert Memories. His theory is that the desert induces a kind of mania, a restlessness, a feeling of isolation that enters through the pores and melts into the nervous system. I´ve logged plenty of desert hours myself, in Mojave, across the southwest, Death Valley, etc. But this is different. Something hums under the surface: coexistent anxieties both of staying put and of going anywhere. You can see it in people´s faces.

So what was I seeking on this excursion? Nothing really. Something, I guess. A spot. A landmark. A logical point to get out, stretch and turn around. You see, I passed this entire landscape last night at 10:00 and saw nothing of it. Only the road materializing in my high beams and at one point the ghostly depot of trains that carry processed minerals and ores from the many mines in the area down to the port where they sail to God knows where. So I drove, and I drove, and after 50km of nothing, only power poles and dirt and rocks, I turned around.

30km back toward Tocopilla and, how could I have missed it the first time around, an actual hill. A hill in the desert. Just sitting there, wating to be climbed. I grabbed my book (Robert Fagles´ translation of The Odyssey), a blanket Allison pilfered from our flight from the states, and a bottle of water and headed out.

It was a short climb, about 20 minutes to the top where I plunked myself down in the dirt, cracked my bottle of water and read the entirety of Book 11: The Kingdom of the Dead. It was as Ulysses is conversing with Achilles´ ghost in the underworld that I felt something in my bones. I thought maybe it was my heart skipping a beat, or my imagination, but there it was, persisting, a rumbling coming up through the ground that would shake the acorns from an oak tree. Holy shit, I thought that the earth was going to open up right beneath me and the ghosts of all my old heroes pour forth and start hounding me for a drink of whiskey. And then it all passed. And then it dawned on me that what I had felt was the dynamite blast from a mine many, many miles away. What I had felt in my bones was the seismic concussion of men blowing ungodly tons of rock out of the earth. And there you have it.

And with my last post from this morning still bouncing around in my head, I descended the hill and decided to symbolically reenact those two acts of marking: mining and the creation of geoglyphs. So I began by hunting specimens of a certain volcanic rock that is quite beautiful…the perfect, unbroken ones look like watermelon seeds, almonds and robin`s eggs. Almost perfect geometrical elipses. So I prospected and mined about 20 fine samples and tucked them away in a sack to bring home. And then I made a geoglyph, right there in the desert. The next time someone flies a chopper over that spot, they´ll see a big, fat ¨A+B¨ made of rocks marking the land at the base of my hill. Who knows, maybe it´ll still be there in 1,000 years.

Now it´s 10:00 and I have to get a pizza. More soon…

B

P.S. A small celebration is in order. My last post, ¨Marks Upon the Land,¨ was our 50th blog post since we first posted at the end of June with our very rough trip itinerary (which basically got thrown out the window halfway through). 50 is a good, round number, just ask Hawai´i. Four out of five of them agree that it equals one half of one hundred.

My Private Reading Hill with Red Blanket/A+B Geoglyph

Fabulous Tocopilla

The Charming Rooms I Stayed In