Myrtle Beach, 2007

(To Kate on her 26th birthday!)


“‘Who’s that?’ will be the caption for that one!” the man sitting at the table with his wife calls to the woman taking a picture. She’s pointing the camera at her husband who’s lying on a chaise lounge with his white terry-cloth beach hat over his face, belly pushing toward the sky.
“We don’t look like we used to in bathing suits,” she replies to the other couple as her husband pulls the hat halfway off his face and peers out to see who she’s talking to. “That’s life, I suppose,” she says and hands the camera to her husband who has a holster for it on his belt. “Do you have the key?” she asks.
“No, I thought you did.”
The woman throws her hands into the air. “I told you to get it,” she says. “I told you to put it in your pocket.”
The husband reaches into his pocket and finds the key. He doesn’t look surprised. He turns the camera back on and lifts it to photograph his wife. She stops her fussing and poses, asking, “Did it take?”
They leave the lounge area and the other couple stays at the table for another hour, not saying a word to each other, just looking around.

~~~

It’s March in Myrtle Beach, and although my friend Kate and I are here on Spring Break, we’ve seen more people over sixty than of our own age. When we swim in the pool, a few loose-skinned women in flowered bathing suits watch us, looking up from their paperbacks when we laugh particularly loudly. When we lie on the blue and white striped lounges, we’re occasionally gazed upon by couples with wrap-around sunglasses, the men’s caps balanced precariously on the tops of their heads. Even in the coffee shop where we check our email, men in their fifties and sixties huddle over laptops.

What baffles me at first is their contentment with just sitting. When two couples sit together under one of the umbrellas, they chat, but when it’s just a husband and wife, they barely speak. Have they run out of things to say to each other?
Kate and I, of course, are just like them. Though I’d like to think we always have hip, intelligent things to talk about, sometimes we just sit in the sun, enjoying one another’s company and wondering how our tans are coming along. I decide that I’m relieved we’re sharing the beach with these folks and not other people our age on “Spring Break AWOOHOO!”

~~~

“What I would do differently next time is add a layer of swiss cheese,” the woman in a strapless, skirted bathing suit and bright pink lipstick says. “It was delicious, but I would add a layer of swiss cheese. I would put the cheese, then the sauerkraut, then another layer of swiss cheese.”
The women on the lounge chairs around her nod, not even trying to get a word in. They’ve laid their beach towels on the chairs and rest with their legs stretched out in front of them, likely reveling in a brief break from their husbands.
“You know,” the woman says a little later. “Every morning I wake up and feel so blessed. I’m sixty-eight years old and I’m just so lucky to be able to come here every year. We come for three months every year. This is the best deal we’ve found. You won’t find this kind of a bargain down the street. I don’t need frills, I just want clean sheets and friends. So we come here.”
A few chairs over, Kate and I lay with our beach towels under us. A plane pulling an advertisement flies over the water in front of us.
“Domino’s,” I say. Kate groans.
Ten minutes later, the plane flies over again.
“Domino’s,” I say again. “Large two-topping pizza, $9.99.”
Kate digs into her beach bag for her phone. “We’d get it just in time for the 3:00 Full House,” she says.
I giggle as she leans back in her lounge chair and dials the number from the banner in the sky. We pack up our towels and arrive upstairs just in time to meet the delivery guy.

~~~

Kate and I aren’t discussing recipes yet but for some reason I see my future in the women at the beach and it puts me at ease. I can’t sit with just anyone, doing nothing, and feel completely content, so I take the opportunity to have a cheesy moment about this Kate of mine and acknowledge that I, too, feel lucky. Our hotel room came with a kitchen and a balcony, the guys at the dueling piano bar played our favorite Steely Dan song (“Peg,” obviously) and our biggest problem is that, as it turns out, getting into a hot tub with a sunburn is really, really painful.

Heading back to Baltimore in my ’94 Camry, we realize we’ve driven for an hour on the wrong road and feel, for the first time all week, a little grumpy. It’s not so bad, though, because we’ve got Fleetwood Mac on my iPod and we can go our own way and we’ve got a box of Reese’s Puffs and Puffs are flying everywhere and we’re Spring Breaking the Rules! (Not so much, though, because the speed limit down here is seventy miles per hour but we’re doing our best and I think we’re having a pretty awesome time.) In that moment I’m feeling confident I’ll still know Kate when we’re both wrinkly and worried about how many layers of swiss cheese is the right number of layers of swiss cheese and that’s a pretty okay thing to look forward to.

Is this Yerba Loca?

Now that I've been in Chile for so long, it's tempting to spend my weekends drinking coffee and puttering lazily around Santiago, especially now that winter's on its way in. In this country, though, I have to remember that the rewards for getting out of the city are always incredible.

Last weekend I went with four friends to Yerba Loca, a nature reserve northeast of Santiago. It's accessed from the same road as the well-known ski areas outside Santiago but isn't famous enough (yet) itself to be in Chile guidebooks. In retrospect, a guidebook entry about Yerba Loca could have helped us, but being slightly underprepared allows for lots of after-the-fact giggles.

The theme of the trek, which from the parking lot to the campsite was about 18 kilometers, or 11 miles, became "Is this right?" There were moments of "Is this the path?" and "Is that where we have to go?" As the end of the hike became increasingly steep, bringing us to 3800 meters (12,500 feet) via a slippery, rocky, winding trail, I began to feel hopeless, stopping practically every 10 meters to give my heart a chance to slow down.

At the end of one particularly difficult hill, we reached an open area where a lone tent was pitched. "Is this the campsite?" we said. Thanks to the other hiker camping out, we learned that yes, it was, and we could finally take our packs off.

Here we are on a unique, forgivingly flat portion of the trail, gearing up to climb the mountain in the background:

Here's our incredible campsite, the most remote site I've ever experienced:

Our excitement at arriving at our resting place quickly faded as we noticed the cold. I can't say for sure what the temperature was that night, but I can say that I shivered the night away in multiple layers and a down sleeping bag supposedly good to 20 degrees Fahrenheit/-7 Celsius.

We had read that the water in the streams, although run-off from a glacier, was unsafe to drink due to a high content of minerals. The other camper at the site, though, told us that the snow was safe, so we collected it from along the stream and over the next couple of hours managed to heat enough water for tea and the most incredible lentils and white rice I've ever tasted.

The night was not the most enjoyable I've experienced. The tent we borrowed turned out to be a summer tent with lots of ventilation, which didn't work so well for a windy winter night. I was in better shape than my tentmates Faith and Lindsey, though, who survived the night snuggling between a comforter and a slumber party sleeping bag. One could say, though, that it's important to have these nights to appreciate a warm bed with an appropriately firm mattress.

In the morning, we were all too cold to sit around cooking breakfast, so we got up and immediately hiked the remaining 3 kilometers to the glacier (or what we're pretty sure was the glacier...). The sun was fully out by the time we got back to our campsite, so we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast before the 18 k return trip.

Here we are in front of the glacier, which the sun made difficult to photograph:

And a group shot: Faith, Meg, Lindsey, Nico and me!

The hike back down, although equally beautiful as the hike up, was a bit of a struggle as we were all pretty sore from the day before and didn't have any drinking water left. Much of the terrain was rocky, so the steady impact was rough on the joints, but we survived and made it to the parking lot, where the chlorinated Santiago water from a tap was the best thing I'd tasted in ages.

It took about three days for me to be able to walk normally again, but all the better to have a reminder of how great it feels to push myself and take advantage of what Chile has to offer besides a great café cortado.