No Country

I am offering a smorgasbord of themes tonight so load your plate my friends.

No Country For Old Dogs

Except for Santiago, Chile appears to have an open policy on canine restraint.  This leads to a few obvious artifacts – namely an abundance of poo-mines.  In Valparaiso they were so dense that high-speed navigation of same would be excellent practice for football and bootcamp agility training.  Every time one passes a pet food store – and they are numerous – a feeling of helpless resignation fogs the cabeza.  Input/Output.  It’s inevitable - and probably one of the laws of physics except I can’t remember which one – not the one about conservation of soya product.

 Other obvious evidence resulting from copious unbound dog-kind is barkaramathons.  Everywhere we have travelled – except perhaps tonight in downtown Santiago (we hope) - we have been regaled with La Woofiata.  When the beasts get a head of steam of up it can be awesome and generally lasts for hours. There are, it would be fair to say, some promising dog-tenors in Chile. Dog arias have interrupted our repose on more than one occasion.  Travelers who are considering visiting this or any other country south of the US would be well advised to bring earplugs, or, for a more permanent solution, have their eardrums surgically removed. It is small wonder that those haystacks of pups are usually dozing in the golden sunlight; they must be completely wasted from a hard nights howling.

Sidebar: most male dogs here are intact with respect to their sexual apparatii.  I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to that kind of thing as a matter of course but it is pretty much in your face so to speak – if you are a midget at least. Thus Chilean dogs are remarkably sexually active before marriage despite their living in a predominantly Catholic country.

The last and most tragic result of dogs running free is traffic fatalities.  The number of canine corpses we have seen is staggering and upsetting.  We clearly have a different tolerance for the carnage than the locals because they don’t seem to focused on removing the bodies. There is no shortage of collateral for the damage though.  Each home seems to have at least three dogs.  Do the math. Most mutts are just that – few purebreds except in the larger cities - but despite their assigned role as gate-keepers we have found that they are usually very intelligent and friendly though usually quite dusty and dirty - and they greatly appreciate a bit of a scratch on the pineal gland (behind the ear - get your mind out of the gutter) as dogs are wont to do.  I get the sense that they are not usually pampered with human affection because they practically melt when you give them attention.  One part-shepherd in Los Vilos followed me down the road after a bit of a skritch – aggressively demanding more pampering by fixing his teeth firmly on my leg – no, it wasn't sexual.  He practically chewed my leg off.  Have you ever had a boy/girlfriend like that?  I had to use my cane to deflect him from his attention. Stick-handled him to submission so to speak. No act of kindness goes unchewed. Hm.  I’ll have to work on that.

No Country For Old Crabs

In this instance I am referring to the crustaceans, not myself. Having been born a prairie boy and then resettled in Muddy York where there is a paucity of any kind of marine shell under 400 million years of age it is always a thrill to wander along a beach and see the wonders that nature’s casino has shuffled up on the sand.  The Pacific – along the American coastline – doesn’t have any coral reefs and so there are not many shellfish or really much of anything other than exquisitely weird Giger-esque seaweed clumps.  

Giger image from internet

Chilean Seaweed

Anyone who has staggered along a Caribbean beach will encounter many different kinds of gastropod ex-domiciles but there are generally about three different types of carapaces on the West coast.  There are clams, oysters and then the crabs (obviously not a gastropod). I was pretty thrilled to find my first beautiful salmon-coloured crab shell on the beach north of Valparaiso.  Then I stood up and saw about 5 more within spitting distance.  Crabs are amazing creatures though they make poor lovers I am told.  I love the stalked eyes and the magnificent hinged claws with their beautifully detailed inner surface perfectly adapted for clinging to prey and subway handles and, interestingly, for frailing on the 5-string banjo.  It makes you want to cry to witness such amazing adaptation – remember we are all evolved from the same stuff – except for a few of us (right Paul?).  A group of crabs is called a cast. So is a group of actors - which is a strange coincidence when you think of it. Recent experiments reveal that they do feel pain when thrust into boiling water  so keep the thermostat low on your water heater. Crabs are fairly cooperative in groups (although the crabbiest tend to be solitary and tend to grow stubbly beards and smell vaguely of stale urine). They usually send their crablets to school (they call them castanets because schools are for fish of course) until grade 3 but have been known to go all the way to senior matriculation.  There are very few crab surgeons unsurprisingly. There is a famous Chilean crab poet named Pocuro. I don’t have any examples of her writing but I am told it is quite witty. Like most Chileans her work is magic realism.  Crabs don’t generally write in couplets because they have a tendency to walk sideways which messes up the ink.  Most crabs communicate by clacking their claws, called chelae. Not surprisingly, crabs tend to prefer classic Blackberry devices over Android and iDiot phones. I like to be informative in my writing you will have noticed. Some of this knowledge is known to very few people.

Anyway, it doesn’t really follow that this is no country for old crabs but I didn’t really have a useful entre to write about them.  I haven’t actually seen more than one live crab scuttling around on the beach but they are out there somewhere and in generous numbers. So Chile is a good country for crustaceans to be born - they are, unfortunately for them, a very popular food.  We have seen Jaiba advertised in every single restaurant in Chile.  A very common dish is Pastel de Jaiba which is a sort of uber-thick chowder that is baked in an oven.  It is usually quite bland but it's very rich in all the main fat groups.  There is bread and cheese in the sauce - the two foods that Chileans so adore. So, in fact, there are very few old crabs in Chile as they tend to get caught and consumed before they reach their senescence - which is perhaps a decent idea for most humans. I know it is not a new idea but perhaps we should revisit it.  The bread and cheese might just be the combination we have been missing.

No Country for Old Humans

An animita near Los Vilos, Chile

I’ve seen them in many Latin-American countries and Chile is not different - everywhere we have traveled there are little shrines called animitas.  I am told that they are not sites of mourning, rather a celebration of life.  I have always assumed that they mark the place where someone died.  If that is so then a lot of people have died along the roadways.  Were they walking, crossing?  I don’t know but I choose to remain ignorant.  In Mexico they call speed bumps (topes) ‘sleeping policemen’.  I keep imagining that the animitas mark the spot where someone decided to lie down on the warm pavement on a cold night to catch a few winks before heading home to kith and kin and when they woke up their thorax and their abdomen were...more distant than is generally recommended.

No Country for Square Rocks

I don’t feel like doing the work myself so if someone can explain to me why most of the rocks, pebbles, stones and likewise in Chile are rounded I would appreciate it.  From the highest hills (with the possible exception of volcanic cones) to the beachiest beach the rocks are round or, more precisely rounded.  Where I come from that usually suggests that the rocks have been subjected to millennia of erosion by running water.  I know the world is old-ish; nearly 4000 years last time I checked the Bible, but Chile is dry, dry, dry – at least where we have been traveling it is.  I can imagine that it might have had rivers at another time in history – maybe the early 1800s – but EVERYWHERE the rocks are rounded.  Look high, low, left, right.  Examine the cross-section revealed in a highway incision and from top to bottom; egg-shaped rocks.  I don’t think Chile was subjected to glaciations.  Is there another way that rocks get rounded?  Was God practicing with sandpaper for about a billion years?  So if you are reading this please do me a favour and find out why the rocks are enrondeleado (?) here.  Thanks.  I couldn't find any perfectly spherical rocks mind you and Sophie will gladly tell you that I spent a WAY TOO MUCH time combing the beaches, hills, deserts and wadis looking for same.  Still I have some decent eggy ones. I’ll trade 3 eggy ones for 1 spherical one if you found one.

A Toni Onley print

 

a Colin Gillies snapshot - The exquisite Elqui Valley While I am on the subject: angle of repose (maximum angle at which an object can rest on an inclined plane without sliding down. This angle is equal to the arctangent of the coefficient of static friction μs between the surfaces.) I have a feeling that all this rounded rock material goes some way to explaining the interesting sameness of the hills we have seen.  The ‘mountains’ tend not to be very steep.  They are soft, undulating creatures with an inclination usually not exceeding about 35 degrees.  Combined with the constant (before 2pm or so) haze that pervades the atmosphere due to the proximity of the cold Humboldt current (it's kind of technical, look it up if you are interested), they have a very Toni Onley-esque quality.  In fact Mr. Onley’s work would probably provoke huge yawns here given the ubiquity of the effect. Are the mountains here – about to slide under the Pacific Plate in about 500 million years – so old that they have lost their edge so to speak? It’s a mystery.  One eggy rock to the first person to satisfactorily explain the roundness of Chilean stones – no Wikipedia please. This contest is open until June 30th, 2015.  Potential winners will have to answer a silly math question that won’t have that goofy Greek letter in it.

Note: unfortunately the angle of repose is dramatically affected by the presence of water.  The lubricative quality of water altered the frictive status of the rocks during the unusual and profound precipitation in the north of Chile last month and tragically resulted in many deaths due to a dramatic rearrangement of the angle of repose.

Last Thoughts

Tonight as I was scanning the booze list of a menu my eye fell on a funny translation:  Clavo Oxidado.  It took me a moment.  Rusty Nail.  Cute.