This year’s great new discoveries: strange Argentine lit! Selah Saterstrom! Amanda showing me what I am missing from not regularly reading fantasy books! Humanimal, which helped me find a form for the novel I’ve had in my head for three years. Books coming alive in an almost literal way: Ice, when I walked a glacier in Patagonia and thought how I will write a short story based somewhat on this book and that glacier, possibly involving Anna Kavan herself; Shadow Country, when I read great a swath then the next day visited the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia with my family and saw things mentioned by scenes in the book in glass cases. I’ve also had a bizarre series of dreams about Ghosts. Not included here are my repeated close readings of several chapters of the Texas Transportation Code and its corresponding confused dreams, a result of what my seasoned coworkers called the worst / busiest / most convoluted legislative session since the 73rd (also the reason why I didn’t read more this year).

1. Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. (reread)
2. The Meat and Spirit Plan, Selah Saterstrom.
3. Don’t Cry: Stories, Mary Gaitskill.
4. 2666, Roberto Bolaño. Trans. Natasha Wimmer.
5. Ice, Anna Kavan.
6. The Last Summer of Reason, Tahar Djaout. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager.
7. Family Ties, Clarice Lispector. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero.
8. Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline, Lisa Margonelli.
9. The Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing.
10. Humanimal, a Project for Future Children, Bhanu Kapil.
11. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira. Trans. Chris Andrews.
12. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch.
13. The Pink Institution, Selah Saterstrom.
14. A Friend of the Earth, T. C. Boyle.
15. The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Trans. Ruth L. C. Simms.
16. I Go to Some Hollow, Amina Cain.
17. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje.
18. Ghosts, César Aira. Trans. Chris Andrews.
19. Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald. Trans. Anthea Bell.
20. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore.
21. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood.
22. The Drowning City, Amanda Downum.
23. The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, Edmund White.
24. The Lizard’s Tail, Luisa Valenzuela. Trans. Gregory Rabassa.
25. Shadow Country, Peter Mattheissen.

We spent part of Christmas this year in Charleston and the barrier islands. I’m reading Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen so as we drove across South Carolina to get there, those parts of the book flared up alive. Also, we went to the State Museum in Colombia, where I found historical bits mentioned in the book in glass cases. The caning of Charles Sumner, including a thank-you cane sent to Rep. Brooks!

My family had secretly agreed to have some diamonds from my grandma’s wedding ring set into a necklace for me, so now I gleam with that hard fire and walk around sentimental all the time.

Pattern: Cheadle by Marie Wallin, from Rowan 46.

Yarn: 8 skeins of Rowan Cocoon in Tundra.

Needles: U.S. 10 and 10-1/2.

I love this sweater even though I'm making a weird face. It's from the hard sun of Texas autumn.

My love affair with this sweater began simply enough, when I saw it in an advertisement for the Fall 2009 Rowan magazine. Over the days that followed, its image began to consume me, and I started looking at the ad a couple times a day. My yarn store didn’t have the magazine in stock but offered to order it; a week went by and then I ended up ordering it online with my yarn for the project because I figured that way I’d get everything a little sooner. That was rather shameful but I think the yarn store women could at least understand the grade of obsession I was working from (and I assume they’d ordered several to sell). So there was a great ecstasy to finally casting on for this project, but that was back in September when I had three self-imposed writing deadlines and could only work on it for an hour a day. Again: like love. In October I decided I wanted to finish it in time to wear my sweater to Argentina, so spent several days knitting up the big 22-cm. cowl neck, and then I ran out of yarn since I’d made the bottom ribbing longer than in the pattern. Bought more yarn from someone on Ravelry. Went to Argentina and most often was thankful I hadn’t finished my gigantic bulky sweater since the weather was so warm and my backpack was full. I thought of it waiting at home in my closet. Soon after returning home, I finished it.

I spend a lot of time looking at fashion magazines and am coming from that when I say I love this sweater’s shape and find it absolutely modern. I pretty much stuck to the pattern besides lengthening the sweater to 20.5 cm. This is my first Rowan magazine though I remember them from working with Renee in San Francisco, who used to knit from them all the time. Renee learned how to knit in school when she was seven; she’s a tall Irish woman with white hair who wears layers of diaphanous clothes and bright lipstick and once left to go trekking in Nepal for a couple weeks (she was in her late fifties or early sixties).  She was my first (and only) knitting mentor and would come to work with thisgs like a whole side of a sweater coat she’d knitted up the past night. But the thing about Rowan magazines is that they take beautiful photos that are not particularly helpful in seeing how the garments are finished. Crucial details are concealed in artsy shadows. The photo below is what sparked my obsession with this sweater, but gives no indication of how the big plait in the center is finished–if you braid it the way it’s braided here, the weight of the sweater causes the three strips to gap and hang open in some places. I decided to solve this by sewing a couple stitches where necessary to close the gaps instead of seaming them all the way so that I could retain as much texture in that area as I could. I also lightly blocked the strips before plaiting them. I left the sleeves a little more open because I like how that looks in the photo. Were I to make this over again, I’d lengthen the bottom even more (I had half or a third of my eighth skein left) and would braid the plait one or two more times to make it hold together more tightly and thus have less need to sew the gaps.   

I write some fiction involving textiles and something I keep coming back to is an idea of fusing fibers with skin and people with animals. In industrial textile production you’re a part of the machine you’re operating. Knitting and weaving by hand is a deeply physical process where your materials are right against your skin and your tools are an extension of your body. Sometimes your hands hurt, or your eyes dry out. Your skin might chap where yarn passes over and over. One could say this about any art or craft process but textiles especially resonate with me because I mainly use animal fibers. Working with Cocoon, which is 80% merino wool and 20% kid mohair, I felt this more than ever. Cocoon has this subtle animal smell that I hope never goes away. It’s expensive (I got a bulk discount from Webs online, but still!) but I felt like a little animal with it between my fingers and I can attest that it wears really well since I’ve been wearing this sweater about three times a week–no pilling or spontaneous felting.

I started researching salt for a story I wrote some time after seeing the salt flats in Utah. I’m going to rewrite the story because it wants to be more about failing someone we love than it is about salt, but I’m still into salt. My favorite thing I know about salt is this, from Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky:

Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, and natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were often a flat area of several acres of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth. Deep holes, almost caves, were formed by the constant licking. The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement. Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.

Before I left for Argentina I had asked Todd how I could get to the salt flats–the salinas grandes–without a vehicle of my own. He told me to take the bus to Purmamarca and there would be guys right there outside the station we could hire to drive us. This sounded like something that could reasonably happen in South America and I was fortunate to be traveling with an extrovert, so we took the bus to Purmamarca and just like Todd said we met Marco when we got off the bus and he offered to drive us there for 40 pesos each, a four-hour trip. We began our drive further into the mountains, which are pink and deep red and green, cacti and yellow bunchy grass. There were vicuñas, the rarest of camelids, in a line with their necks bent to eat, small bodies furred with yellow-orange fluffy wool. There were deep valleys with our road winding through and little rectangles of green for growing papas. We climbed altitude consistently and the salinas were just above 3300 meters.

The salinas were firm and cracked into big octogons and other cornered shapes. A hard salt crust: grays, browns, and whites, colors I’d like to knit in Rowan yarns. Rectangular pools cut into the salt filled with cold water reflecting blue off the sky, the pool floor clustered and crystaled with salt. We sat on the edge of one and put our feet in. A line of these pools stretched all the way to the horizon. I think Marcelo said the pools were part of the salt extraction work that happens there, all by hand with pickaxes. This was my dream place. When we got out of the pool there was salt on feet, legs, and jean cuffs. Salt streaked the screen on my camera and Marcelo heroically licked it off before taking a photo. Walking out, distances were hard to judge. There were salt carvers who carve owls and alpacas all day and wear stocking caps over their whole faces and sunglasses to protect their eyes from the salt and white glare. There were a few people on tours. I wanted to stay out alone for a long time and think about salt and hear it when it was quiet. Marcelo took a series of artistico trick photos of us, manipulating distances and space, and we imagined him coming up with all the scenarios on his own, dragging his friends out to the salinas to enact them as practice.

Back in Purmamarca, pop. 510, we ate at a restaurant run by Gabriel then took a 3km walk around the big pink and terracotta cerro. To get to the path we passed the cemetery, with graves marked by piles of stones along the length of each body, some of the headstone crosses ringed by carnations in bright primary colors fastened together by their stems. In the distance were masoleums with open grids and flowers inside or little houses. The land around the hill was red folded and frilled hills and big cacti. In the back I showed S how to do a kintu ritual for the apus. I couldn’t remember it correctly, so we raised our leaves to each of the four cardinal directions, folded the leaves into our mouths, then buried them in a little hole we’d dug and poured in a little water and drank a little water. I wondered how deep belief runs here since Marcelo was so earnest invoking Pachamama.

We were very tired in Tilcara but everything had this gleam for me. It was warm out and I was in love with the Andes, altitude, and salt. We passed a woman who was trying to exit a building without waking the street dog that was curled asleep in the doorframe below her step. She had difficulties walking and had tried several times to bypass the dog with her hand on her friend’s shoulder, then S. offered her arm too and the woman made it safely over the sleeping dog.

The four-hour bus ride to Tilcara started through flat, broad lands of short yellow grass and trees. I knitted the whole way there. We went through a lot of small towns and the further we climbed into the mountains, the more Tupac Amaru graffiti we saw, stencils and bold-lettered quotes. After Jujuy, the provincial capital, we started to seriously climb altitude and the mountains humped up next to us. The ground was inhabited either by abandoned mines or dry washes, swatches of gray and rocks. Behind them the mountains were pink, sometimes weathered to frills like Capadocia, and later with tall, twisted-arm cacti. The mountains seem to change color and contour constantly. Gradations of pink and mossy green. The towns became more ramshackle, adobe houses and some tin roofs, but still more developed than villages I’d seen in the Peruvian Andes. Through Maimará with its mountain cemetery. Past the turnoff to Purmamarca, where we’re going tomorrow.

Tilcara is a pretty village and 2471 meters altitude. For lunch we had humitas and empanadas de queso at a little restaurant by the bus station and watched a news program about the heat wave, which said it’s 45C in Catamarca. We’re staying at a bed and breakfast called La Posadita, up a gentle grade, which means we have a view of the mountains from the window of our beautiful room. We spent a long time on lounge chairs in the front yard watching the light change across the mountains in the hours before the sun went down. Angles sometimes grew bolder, sometimes disappeared, and the colors kept changing. Around seven, a band of light cut across the tops.

We had dinner at a restaurant by the church called El Nuevo Progreso. I ate a tomato tart with a green salad and crunchy toasted broad beans in olive oil. S ate llama and papas andinas. Drank Quilmes and for dessert we had chocolate mousse with toasted corn praline. I want the whole world to know about Andean food and how you can get complete protein by eating crunchy broad beans with toasted corn praline. There was live folklorico at the restaurant, not the touristy kind but simply a man and a woman playing love songs together, long drum clamped between the woman’s knees and legs and the man playing guitar.

At night dogs bark from all over the mountains. The stars were out with their unreadable constellations. The Incas and other pre-Columbian civilizations didn’t read the stars but rather the darkness between them.

Today we went to the museum of high altitude archaeology, which is focused on the mountaintops of the Argentine Andes, primarily the Llullaillaco peak where three mummified sacrificed children were found in 1999. There’s also an exhibit from Chuscha Mountain, where a mummy girl’s grave was looted in the early 1920s.  The grave goods were unlike the ones I’d seen in Peru since this was a different branch of the Incan empire. There were little metal llamas and also red ones made from seashells. Little metal human–maybe godlike or hybrid–figures wrapped in tiny, still-bright woven cloths. Some had tropical bird feathers in brilliant red, gold, emerald, or silvery white, and there was a silvery white feather headdress for a woman, since that’s the feminine color in Incan cosmology. There was also some pottery, mostly shallow bowls and some plates with duck heads.

So in the first part of the museum, there’s a video about the 1999 Llullaillaco expedition, then the grave goods in glass cases with lots of wall text in castellano I could only sort of read, then a room with all wall text talking about the child mummies and their sacrifice ritual and meaning. Behind a pane of opaque glass was the first mummy girl, Juanita the Ice Maiden, in a case with pink and purple lights, kept very cold. Her face was still intact and expressive, and her little visible hand, and her bony legs, and the warp and weft of the cloth she’d drawn around herelf either in sleep or to keep away the cold of waking up alone on a 6700-meter peak, the highest point in the western hemisphere. I looked at her for a long time. She is not a momia in the ancient Egyptian bandage sense but rather in the preserved by mountain elements sense. She had just been exposed that whole time. My LP guide says it was controversial to remove them from the sacrifice site and even though they would have been looted once the site was revealed to the public, I thought as I looked at her that they should have been left there. There were three kids at the site–two of them are still being preserved and prepared for exhibition in the MAAM labs that replicate the climate of the peak.

Downstairs there was another room with a dark pane of glass and a note above a light switch instructing me to flip it on if I desired to see the momia. I turned on the light and instantly this girl appeared, eye pits and an empty triangle for nose and an open toothless mouth all lunging forward, hair in braids and trepanned skill extending back, a white shroud pinned across her body. I started and thought there’s probably a video camera right there so the staff can snicker at the shocked expressions of museum patrons. (That is definitely what we’d have done in the YBCA box office.) She had been looted in the 1920s and shuffled around, kept in Buenos Aires, at one time sold for $45. The grave goods were similar to those from Llullaillaco and lovely, with more pottery. I don’t understand the sequence of how these pretty statues and textiles were spread around the sacrificed children. In the room, a pan flute version of a Simon and Garfunkel song played on repeat. We hear it everywhere; I think it’s the anthem of Salta province.

Unrelated, but we also took this teleferico to the top of Cerro San Bernardo!

When I first started traveling abroad I loved that I could get on a bus or train and be somewhere else every few days if I felt like it. Especially when I’d travel alone; there was nothing better than having all that time and whole cities and towns to myself and just leaving a place if I didn’t like it. But now constantly traveling isn’t as satisfying and I want to stay in cities for a week and a half or the mountains for five days and just sit with them. That was what I wanted to do in Salta and the northwest, so we decided to stay in this region for 8 days and on our first full day here, we did very little. Reading and walking, laundry. At 21, I would have been horrified by this inertia, but I think back then I didn’t imagine I’d still be traveling 10 years later, much less to the places I’ve managed to visit on what was up until three years ago a very limited budget. At five we decided it was time for lunch, but everything was closed besides the tourist restaurants on the plaza, where we ate empanadas and dulce de leche milkshakes.

Matching old men by Plaza 9 Julio

We visited the Museo de Arte Contemporanio, which was not too impressive but is always a good thing to see in cities, to get that sort of impression of a new place. Brown-toned photos of the puna and an older woman leaning over. Bright wood sculptures of men and women with the most beautiful faces. An arc of 3-D plastic outlines of houses in an arc over two long drawn beds, all encased in a big rectangle.

They were saying mass in the pink cathedral on the plaza. It had alcoves along either side laminated in silver and gold with a few saints and many statues of Mary and Jesus. High arched ceilings painted with designs on the sides and Bible scenes in the center, where the congregation sits. I tried to explain to S why I like to go to churches and couldn’t really say why. Something about recognition of the ritual and remembering being a kid and thinking the world was a huge mystery filled with spirits. Knowing more firmly and empirically as an adult what I can and can’t know about the natural world is more exciting and transformative for me, but my love of going into churches and mosques has never felt particularly in conflict with my atheism. I just like them, and I think a lot of that has to do with being raised in the Catholic church and having learned to respect the respectable parts of it, having learned that empathy. In second or third grade at Catholic school they read us cleaned-up Bible stories and I was completely fascinated by them. I told my mother, who said I was at the perfect age to enjoy them and that they might never in my life seem as vivid and harrowing as they did right then. So I looked forward to them every day and listened.     

Iglesia San Francisco

Later we tried to go to Balcarce, Salta’s supposed nightlife district, but it was uninspiring so we returned to Plaza de Almas. I ordered a torre de vegetales, which was literally a tower of matchstick-cut red peppers, carrots, onions, and eggplant, separated by crepe circles and towering atop a sauce of saffron, wild mushrooms, and leeks.

In the morning I lay in a hammock in Puerto Canoas’ courtyard for a long time and read Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen, full of subtropical weather in frightening 19th century Florida. For some reason I had decided that this book would be just the thing for my trip to Argentina, and oddly I was right. Hummingbirds flitted close, searching out the feeders. Above my hammock was metal lattice supporting a shawl of pink flowers, and a huge network of bees crawled all over it, making everything above me appear moving and alive.

Papaya tree and hummingbird mobile at Puerto Canoas

That afternoon we flew Andes Air to Salta. Domestic flights in Argentina offer an abundance of dulce de leche cookies, crackers, and cups of tea. They also serve wine, at least on Aerolineas. Below was farmland and great flooded rivers and some lakes. The tree-covered mountains crept up then gave way to Salta’s relative lowlands. We took a city bus into town. The outskirts are industrialized and densely commercial, much more so than the outskirts of mid-sized cities I’d seen in Peru. We walked from the plaza to our beautiful B&B/hostel, Las Rejas,  where our room is dark wood with yellow walls and high ceilings and breakfast is served from a generous six til noon.

Salta's pretty windows

Vowing to become accustomed to the national dinner habits, we walked down Salta’s big pedestrian street eating ice cream and looking at shoes until 9:20, when we went to Plaza de Almas, the best restaurant in Salta (okay, the only restaurant we ate at in Salta because it’s so amazing we kept going back). We were seated under flowering trees in the courtyard and drank a bottle of wine and ate little crunchy breads with astonishing Andean-influenced salsas. We ate delicious things called junitos and saltedas and sat at the restaurant for so long we didn’t get back until after one. By then the traffic had cleared and the air was still warm. We looked at an odd window display of artfully arranged shells of remote controls, the little statues and tiles of the Virgin Mary on buildings and in windows, and at the pretty grillwork and colonial buildings in orange light.  

Iglesia San Francisco

After breakfast pastries and bread with dulce de leche, we returned to Iguazú Falls. We walked the upper circuit along the falls first, then the lower. The lower circuit featured a platform you can run out onto to be drenched by mist from the pounding water. I did this and it felt good. Back at Puerto Canoas that night we talked to a cool old guy who spent ten minutes out there just feeling the force and presence of the water, which reminded him of his years at sea. He’d been shuttling back and forth to the park for six days, almost returning to Buenos Aires and then staying on so he can do the platform again.     

Patrona de la Selva

Since the path we’d intended to walk after lunch was closed from flooding, we walked the upper circuit again. The sun came out and the mist caught up rainbows. I could see much further into the long curved drop of the falls. Butterflies, such as the enigmatic ochenta y ocho,  flapped everywhere, and soon it was like living inside a Lisa Frank folder, like my most wonderful dreams of the future as a seventh-grader. Complementing this was a couple with long auburn hair and nice cameras who took photos of each other standing by the falls, with rainbows, majestic hair blowing. The color caught fire in the slant of the late afternoon light.

Animals I saw:

Coatis, like an anteater and a raccoon combined. Their noses bend in when they smell things.

A very playful monkey.

A rodent with no tail resembling a guinea pig and rat combined.

Giant ants, leafcutter ants, fire ants that bit me.

Little lizards sprawled on the rocks by the falls with their arms around each other. Very large lizards walking in the grass. (For some reason I thought it would be clever to sort of chase a big lizard to see what it would do, then the fire ants bit my feet after I’d made it scamper into the brush.) A lavender lizard on our wall last night.

Vultures, a light brown bird with a yellow belly, swallows, the birds that glide the air of the falls, black birds with a blaze of red that build nests like weaver birds.

Most notably, a toucan flew over our heads, and then another followed it, their beak undersides orange. Later one settled nearby in a tree and calmly preened, then flapped to an even closer tree! Our friend at Puerto Canoas says their beaks are so thin you can see through them a little when they open their mouths, and that their tongues are as long as their beaks, thin and beige like a reed.

It rained all morning, streaky and gray on the bus window as the trees thickened on the roadside. Water streamed down the red soil through village streets and pooled at the lowest points. We stopped in a few towns in Misiones province, hippie-looking shops and bright vegetables, before coming here to Puerto Iguazú. The dogs were curled in the bus station to keep out of the rain.

 

Our room at Puerto Canoas is pale blue and coppery orange and the courtyard is huge and painted colors bright enough to overwhelm the rain. We found a lovely dark little grocery store and bought food to cook, then the rain stopped and we rushed back to the bus station and caught the 15.10 to the national park. There we took the Tren Ecológico de la Selva to Garganta del Diablo (The Devil’s Throat!), riding in an open car with a bunch of kids who helped us spot animals along the ride. In the distance, a toucan turned its head, silhouette beak nearly as long as its body. I’d somehow determined that I’d never see such a remarkable animal in my life. We also saw coatis parading out near the tren, and dark parrots, and other birds.

To reach Garganta del Diablo, you walk along a network of narrow metal platforms over the flooded red-brown river. The whole route is wheelchair accessible. The current moves fast and soon mist clouds the distance. Walk a little further and there’s the subtle tumble of the very top of the falls, then soon the falls open up, the water now brown and in great cascades, swifts and swallows swooping across the mist. I watched the side of one of the cascades and how the water sort of unfolds as it falls, changing shape at its frilled edges. Small brown-gray birds clung to the rock a little below the platform, big almond eyes set deep in their round faces. They looked like little owls and they clung so calmly, one pair and one group of four. There is also the sound of the falls.

For dinner we made pasta with red peppers, green beans, strawberries (hooray South American spring!), cheese and crackers, tea, and Hacienda Hernando Malbec. The dog sounds outside gave way to crickets and the occasional bird.