In the year of our Mooseknuckler 2003, I spent a good chunk of said year in a country that resides quite a ways south and east of the place where my ass is currently seated. And by a good chunk, I mean long enough to completely deplete my savings.
In aforementioned year, I learned lots of stuff. First, it isn’t as easy to do absolutely nothing as it would seem and second, that sometimes you just have to stop worrying.
I may or may not have made note on this website that I have a tendency to be uptight about time. This goes back as far as I can remember and I feel completely powerless in front of a clock. That’s why I ensure there is one on my wrist, on my phone, on my computer, in the hallway, two in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. Time is mathematical and cannot be fudged. Being late is my irrational fear.
This fear of being late flows over into traveling. I love to fly but I hate airports. The idea that I have to be at a certain gate that I may not be able to find at a certain time or I miss the chance to leave, can just about kill me. The same goes for bus stations. Also, the idea of knowing when I will arrive but not what will be happening when I get there took me a while to get used to. Time and having a plan go hand in hand in my mind.
In Chile during 2003, I spent some time traveling via bus and train to the southern parts of this country. At one point, we left Santiago for a small beach town known as Pichilemu. After our planned three or four days (I don’t recall that was exactly 4,378 beers ago. Do you blame me?), we ended up at the bus station to buy tickets back home. Instead, we jumped on the next one headed to Villarrica, about 6 hours south.
Speaking of irrational fears, I never thought twice about going to Chile. It never scared me.
But, once in Chile and trying to make my way around the country, the idea of missing a bus or being late still struck me with a fear that could leave me physically sick. The first time I traveled this way, I was forced, due to my circumstances, to have no plan but simply board a bus and head to my destination with no idea where I would be staying that night. The first time this happened, I was scared shitless. I don’t think I ever traveled anywhere without knowing where I was going and where I was going to stay when I got there. Beyond that, I usually knew what the plan was for most of the stay.
Of course, this was more done for me than done by me, but nonetheless, I was scared to think that I would arrive and have nowhere to go.
I can remember fighting ferociously with my girlfriend of that time before leaving on that first trip. I had no concept of how this was going to go down. The concept of not having a reservation was as foreign to me as having a reservation was to her. Seeing that we were in her country, we did things her way. The moment we stepped off the bus, we were greeted with about 10 offers of places to stay. We simply shopped for a room and chose one. It worked out splendidly.
It took a few trips but soon the unknown variable of where we were going to stay no longer left me waking up in a pool of sweat worrying about what was going to happen.
Of course, not everything always went that smoothly. I had to renew my visa so we jumped the border to Argentina (renewing your visa in Chile is as simple as leaving the country and then coming back). We were headed to Mendoza for Easter weekend.
To put this in perspective, it would be like going to Moab on Jeep Jamboree weekend without a hotel reservation. All of our clothes/things were neatly packed into my giant backpack. We wandered and wandered. Until we finally found one room in a four star hotel. At this point, the price was irrelevant and when I finally rested enough to figure out the bill it was like $15/night. That was the worst thing that ever happened due to not having a plan.
Yet I had worried myself sick over it, for what? To pay $15/night after walking for a couple of hours in a beautiful city with a heavy backpack on my back. Most of the time I carry a heavy backpack, I don’t pay anything and just sleep on the ground.
Fear is just an overly obsessive worry.
I fear time and being late. It’s always on my mind. I’ve probably looked at the clock 35 times while I’ve been typing this up. Obsession. It’s not that I worry about the consequences of time passing, just time. I have to know what time it is, at all times.
In that same country, in that same year, I started to feel like I was in a cage. This was mostly because I was. Every house has bars on the windows, spiky gates and walls, they are like compounds. Once inside, everyone feels safe. As a city, Santiago is obsessed with being robbed. Not obsessed with thieves roaming the streets, but with being robbed. There is a collective feeling that everyone is two seconds away from losing everything to a robber.
In 2004, we rented a small house on the outskirts of Renca. There was an 8 foot fence that completely surround the house. The porch connected to the top of the fence. It was literally a cage. It was meant to keep everyone out, but I just felt like it was keeping me in. Our house opened to a small plaza with grass, swing set and benches. In the middle of the plaza was a tall pole with a huge siren on top of it. On the bottom of the pole was a button that would turn the Robber Siren on. Then everyone was to run out of their houses with their bats and beat the shit out of whoever it was that was stealing.
I never heard the siren go off.
When we moved in, there were no bars on the second story windows. Everyone told me that I was crazy to move in before bars were installed and that I should have made sure that the owner of the house was going to get them put on for us, immediately.
I never had them installed.
I used to wake up in the middle of the night to sounds. I would grab a knife and run downstairs to see who the fuck was breaking into my house to steal my gringo things.
Damn, if those dogs didn’t rife through my garbage every night, but I never saw a single person. Everyone was nicely caged inside their houses too scared to go outside.
I was robbed once while in Chile. It was in downtown Santiago. We had gone to get some money changed. We were walking down the road where these kinds of transactions took place and a man approached me and offered to give me a better rate for my money. I said sure and he told me to follow him. We wandered around for a bit and then entered a shopping center that had offices on the floors above. He made a phone call and asked me for the money. I handed it over and he said he would be right back. I’m a dumb ass and it cost me a couple hundred bucks, but that was it. No knife to the throat, no physical threats, just a loss of money.
The Mooseknuckler Cycling Alliance World Headquarters was broken into a couple years back. The house KB and I purchased has been occupied by a million people, at least that’s what the neighbors have told us. We didn’t change the locks and somebody used their key to come into our house. They didn’t take anything, just looked around, turned some lights on and left the door unlocked on their way out. After the second time, we changed the locks. No harm, no foul, who cares.
It took me a few trips to stop worrying about what was going to happen when I arrived in an unknown city. The giant question was always in my head I just learned to stop obsessing about it.
When I left Chile in January of 2005, the things I had experienced shaped my life in many ways that I had nothing to do with, but a made a cognitive decision to not ever live in a cage again. It wasn’t always an easy task for me to not worry about my door being locked every time I left, or when I went to bed. But slowly it became a habit and I just don’t think about it anymore. It came down to being more important for me to be free than to worry about losing a few possessions.
In the immortal words of U. Utah Phillips, “I want to be the kind of person that it is impossible to steal from.”
P. L. and R.