Elsie Garrett reflects on the significance of nature experienced in her year abroad.

December 7th

And he strummed the green guitar.

Que rico es tener cuerdas nuevas en la guitarra.

The words reverberated around my head, I felt them behind my eyelids, on my tongue, wishing I was able to produce them, to hold them, to own them. Just as the strings let out the softest melodies, intertwining and mixing in that small Patagonian hostel room, his voice seemed to me the purest form of melody.

Nike, se escribe. Con k.                                                                 

I understood the meaning, but the sounds were different. They created shapes in my mind, bending and twisting and birthing a new musical, rhythmic expression that I had always chased and never quite grasped. It was the poetics of that phonetic expression that mixed in my mind with the poetics of the Chilean culture. This ability to charm, to persuade, to capture. Their poetical culture, their romantic, metaphorical way of life succeeded in capturing my attention just as much as that hostel room, the notes of the green guitar and the sound of his voice.

July 29th

It was my first day living in Santiago de Chile. I had landed from a two-day round-the-world flight, stopping for twelve hours in Canada, and another six in Colombia. My eyes felt as heavy as the luggage weighing my arms down – my life for the year packed haphazardly into four misshapen rucksacks. Cami and Domingo - friends of friends in Madrid that I’d never met - picked me up from the airport and we drove through the winter sun of the city I’d been dreaming about for three years. They took me for French tacos and taught me the word cordillera. I repeated it, memorising its shape, its sound. Mountain range.

I lived at first in Lo Barnechea - the commune furthest away from everything. Every morning, I would wake to my alarm at six o’clock, and hurry to catch the two-hour bus to university. Waiting at the bus stop, my view would immediately be consumed by the mountains. They seemed to rise out of the dusty, slate-roofed houses, their snowy tops mingling with the low hanging clouds. They would follow me throughout my commute, murky shadows expanding across my vision, towering at the edge of the city, all the way to the end of the bus line and on towards the above-ground metro of San Joaquín.

I would go to my weekly yoga class and the cordillera would watch faithfully over me through the window, bathed in the burnt tangerine light of its rosy sunset. I would climb the San Cristóbal hill in the city centre and the mountains surrounded me without warning: claiming my attention from all angles and demanding recognition, awareness, regard. The cordillera observed all. At every street corner, from every viewpoint, in every commune near or far, its mountains appeared. Their presence seemed significant to me - I wondered at their slanting lines, their daunting size, at their meanings and metaphors. The power they held, to give and to take. I asked the locals what the cordillera of the Andes meant to the people. Some said it inspired hope through offering the city its first rays of sunlight. Some spoke of the cordillera in its winter months. Y cuando nieva la cordillera se viste de novia, they said. It dresses like a bride when it snows.

The immense symbolism of the cordillera was clear to me. Rising around the city, it offered both protection and separation, a representation of both refuge and challenge. The mountains meant that wind didn’t blow so strongly along the city streets, yet crossing the Andes by land would cost a night of constant winding lanes up and around mountain tops. The mountains were revered, contemplated, feared, longed for. They provided a balance between the modernity of the city with their reminder of tradition and of what has always been. I felt drawn to them. I was compelled to keep them close somehow: sketching their silhouettes across the margins of my books, carving their lines into my skin with ink, preserving them until they were singed into my mind’s eye.

The cordillera offered me a moment of reflection. It was a quietness amidst the rush of Santiago’s skyscrapers, the metro and the work-focused lifestyle of the communes. It was a consistency in an otherwise hurried world, reminding me of its strength, its eternity. It opened an opportunity for stillness, which I found ever more important in the seemingly panicked urgency of the modern world. I looked towards those mountains each day with a searching wonder, questioning where to find that peace and stillness, where to obtain it, how to possess it. The mountains stared back in silence. Their allure never faded.

It was the last day of classes for the semester. I’d just given a presentation on the poetry of Ruben Darío, thanked my professor for all her kindnesses, and continued to the airport where I took a three-hour flight to southern Patagonia. The landscape of the south differed immensely from the northern dryness and desert. The houses reminded me of Sweden, the weather of Scotland. Yet that same mountain range remained, miles long, offering its peace and constancy. And so, four months on, the cordillera of the Andes has just as much significance to me as it did that first day, mid bite of taco and sip of bitter Piscola. 

Published 10 December 2024