San Pedro de Atacama

All of the power in town was out - hotels and restaurant kitchens had gone to backup generators usually kept hidden and dusty, reserved for only this situation. I had arrived finally after a full day's travel and had only took my backpack from my shoulders, leaning against the hollow metal of my hostal's bunk-bed, and placing the already dirty bag on a dusty, adobe floor. What does a tourist, traveling alone, and instantly without power, do in such a situation? Beer, I thought. Beer.


I walked down the street only a half-block before finding a small, candle-lit eatery with uneven wooden tables, a dusty floor, and a full refrigerator. 


"Do you want to eat something with that? Or anything?" 
"No, thanks, I'll just be drinking." 


And with that, pulled out a pad of paper and a pen from my  backpack, and in the dimly-lit bar, tried to look around and observe as much as I could.  I felt old-fashioned and lonesome, like a tragic character from a 19th-century set novel; There I sat, at a table, the wood smooth yet unfinished, enough so to run a finger along but still coarse like teeth on a popsicle stick, creaking and rocking beneath the shifting weight of my writing hand, with a small, flickering water-candle dancing in my beer's reflection. 


And yes, I was in the middle of the Atacama Desert, one of the largest, most vast, and driest places on Earth. I found myself, sitting at that table, writing about silence. A kind of silence so powerful it is listened for, almost giving it the fundamental properties of sound. The silence of desert, the emptiness, has a specific effect on a writer - the tone of my words was stoic, static, small lonely pictures I tried to draw - the scene of an empty, dark street. The scene of the bar. The scene of the sky, tattooed by constellations and freckled by countless stars. 

My trip to the Atacama Desert was an examination of size, I found. I continually saw geographic structures - volcanoes, high-altitude lakes, salt flats, geyser fields, geothermic pools - yet, I kept coming back to the sky. I had looked, but until then, I had never really seen the Southern Sky. How big it felt. How small I felt. Observing the size of the natural world, something that has become vacant from Northeastern suburban life, was in a word, humbling. What are we to make of the natural power, the natural beauty of the Earth? 

For me, I think the Atacamians have figured it out - and its something intuitively that I had done. We just sit, or stand, and watch, in silence. 


All in all, shh - just listen.