it's been two weeks now since I came home from south america, but it feels much longer than that. the agua mineral bottle on my windowsill looks like it's been sitting there all summer, and I'm packing my suitcase with a week's worth of clothes, so it must have been months since I emptied it out. that's how things usually work, anyway. but this has been a strange whirlwind of a summer, lacking any real sense of permanence. so it was a bit disconcerting to have a stack of photographs in my hand, all shiny and floppy and solid, durable little pieces of the past two months, from physics in madison to last week's drunken dance party.
these are some of the pictures I took in chile. if you click on them you will get the big versions, which are not so phone-modem friendly, but are rather pretty, sometimes.
after we landed in chile, we took a bus from the airport to downtown santiago. it was a mild, overcast winter friday, and the colors everywhere seemed faded. really I think they were just hidden under layers of smoggy grime. but the city itself felt vibrant; there were people everywhere, and palm trees, and stray dogs, all channeled into swift and swirling streams between the tall buildings along the sides of the narrow streets.
I took this standing near the edge of the plaza that's the epicenter of santiago. behind me there were rows and rows of benches, every one of which had at least a few people sitting and chattering. there was a brass band playing under a gazebo whose roof was covered by a flock of pigeons. later, while we were sitting on a bench ourselves, consulting the map in a small guidebook to help us decide where to go for lunch, I turned to the center section with the color photographs. on the very first page, there was a plate with these same two side-by-side buildings. "that's right there," I said, holding the book up so that I could look at the picture and the real thing at the same time. things like that, I think, are very good indications that something has gone right with your life.
after lunch, we walked all the way down calle huerfuano to a big hill in the municipal park at the edge of the city. this was taken a few meters from the top, and is a perfect little summary of santiago, I think: flowers, mid-century buildings, smog, mountains.
on the way down, I looked over the railing along the side of the path and saw a hummingbird. it sat still (under the second flower from the left) only just long enough for me to take a picture. the foliage around the hill was all like this: vaguely tropical, not quite blooming all the way, and strangely lush and verdant for the seasonal equivalent of our early march. the hummingbird darted away so fast after the shutter snapped that it almost seemed to have simply vanished.
the observatory itself is up at the top of a mountain, of course. when you're outside at the summit, you can look east to see the pacific ocean, west to see another telescope, and the andes are everywhere.
I'm a bit like a hummingbird. it can be tough to take my picture, because I'm always flitting around and getting distracted. we're both looking north, here, maybe at a blue patch in the cloudy sky. going on an observing run will make you absolutely hate clouds, but fortunately that only lasts for a few days. the sky would be sad without clouds.
see? we were usually eating dinner during the best part of the sunset, but I liked to run outside to watch while my dinner companions were drinking coffee. the sun always seemed to be doing some sort of melodramatic swan dive into the ocean. this, of course, does not begin to capture how beautiful and radiant the mountains look inside that pink-golden swath of light. they look like they're having a revelation.
the four-meter telescope is in a building several stories tall. the astronomers spend most of the night in the control room downstairs, but an elevator will take you up to the dome and the telescope itself. this is a good thing to do while you're waiting for the sun to set the rest of the way. it was very cold when we went up. the wind was whipping through the vents around the edge of the dome, and the slit was open above the telescope -- that yellow bit is the edge of the dome around the opening. it was the second time I've seen it, but I still couldn't help but laugh to think that this gigantic and powerful thing was there, at least that night, for the sole purpose of pointing and spectrographing whatever we told it to. humans build so many big things -- factories, tractor trailers, nuclear submarines -- and as much as love the bigness of our cities, it can be easy to think that the scale of our construction is proportional only to our greed and shortsightedness. it is so, so nice to see this big telescope and be able to say, yes, humanity did a good thing right here. and we will use it to learn about the universe. (for scale, here it is next to some people.)
there are several smaller telescopes on the mountain, and if you turn around you can look out the side of the dome and down onto all the others -- here they are from the opposite direction; I was inside the big one -- they look to me like a small colony of bald, hibernating aliens. it was getting quite dark when I took this picture, but you can still see the walkway and the snow on the ground below. I never quite got over the strangeness of feeling snow between my fingers in august.
you can't really take pictures at night, at least not with a little automatic camera, but that's okay; we have the telescope to do things like that. but the nighttime was the most amazing part. at midnight on the first night it became my birthday, and by two am I had gotten the best present ever. it didn't look like much, really, just a single aborption line, but it meant that we had found what we were looking for. and there were more, all night long. I felt like such a scientist. it was a good, good feeling.
this is what the world looked like in the morning, for those of us who were higher than the clouds. I might as well have been flying.
there was still someone higher than me, though. she was just hovering silently overhead, watching the sun come up.
at 8:17 am on august fourth, I had been alive for twenty-one years and two hours exactly, and awake for twenty-five hours straight. I was too tired, after returning my thermos to the cafeteria and changing into my pajamas, to even keep my eyes all the way open. still, I thought I should take a picture, to help me remember what it felt like. and I do remember: I was standing in the bathroom with one hand braced against the sink, reeling a bit from the excitement and glory of discovery, and after I snapped the button I just started giggling. "I'm twenty-one!" I said to my reflection, and it laughed at me.
∙ ∙ ∙
(20 august 2002)
these are some of the pictures I took in chile. if you click on them you will get the big versions, which are not so phone-modem friendly, but are rather pretty, sometimes.
after we landed in chile, we took a bus from the airport to downtown santiago. it was a mild, overcast winter friday, and the colors everywhere seemed faded. really I think they were just hidden under layers of smoggy grime. but the city itself felt vibrant; there were people everywhere, and palm trees, and stray dogs, all channeled into swift and swirling streams between the tall buildings along the sides of the narrow streets.
I took this standing near the edge of the plaza that's the epicenter of santiago. behind me there were rows and rows of benches, every one of which had at least a few people sitting and chattering. there was a brass band playing under a gazebo whose roof was covered by a flock of pigeons. later, while we were sitting on a bench ourselves, consulting the map in a small guidebook to help us decide where to go for lunch, I turned to the center section with the color photographs. on the very first page, there was a plate with these same two side-by-side buildings. "that's right there," I said, holding the book up so that I could look at the picture and the real thing at the same time. things like that, I think, are very good indications that something has gone right with your life.
after lunch, we walked all the way down calle huerfuano to a big hill in the municipal park at the edge of the city. this was taken a few meters from the top, and is a perfect little summary of santiago, I think: flowers, mid-century buildings, smog, mountains.
on the way down, I looked over the railing along the side of the path and saw a hummingbird. it sat still (under the second flower from the left) only just long enough for me to take a picture. the foliage around the hill was all like this: vaguely tropical, not quite blooming all the way, and strangely lush and verdant for the seasonal equivalent of our early march. the hummingbird darted away so fast after the shutter snapped that it almost seemed to have simply vanished.
the observatory itself is up at the top of a mountain, of course. when you're outside at the summit, you can look east to see the pacific ocean, west to see another telescope, and the andes are everywhere.
I'm a bit like a hummingbird. it can be tough to take my picture, because I'm always flitting around and getting distracted. we're both looking north, here, maybe at a blue patch in the cloudy sky. going on an observing run will make you absolutely hate clouds, but fortunately that only lasts for a few days. the sky would be sad without clouds.
see? we were usually eating dinner during the best part of the sunset, but I liked to run outside to watch while my dinner companions were drinking coffee. the sun always seemed to be doing some sort of melodramatic swan dive into the ocean. this, of course, does not begin to capture how beautiful and radiant the mountains look inside that pink-golden swath of light. they look like they're having a revelation.
the four-meter telescope is in a building several stories tall. the astronomers spend most of the night in the control room downstairs, but an elevator will take you up to the dome and the telescope itself. this is a good thing to do while you're waiting for the sun to set the rest of the way. it was very cold when we went up. the wind was whipping through the vents around the edge of the dome, and the slit was open above the telescope -- that yellow bit is the edge of the dome around the opening. it was the second time I've seen it, but I still couldn't help but laugh to think that this gigantic and powerful thing was there, at least that night, for the sole purpose of pointing and spectrographing whatever we told it to. humans build so many big things -- factories, tractor trailers, nuclear submarines -- and as much as love the bigness of our cities, it can be easy to think that the scale of our construction is proportional only to our greed and shortsightedness. it is so, so nice to see this big telescope and be able to say, yes, humanity did a good thing right here. and we will use it to learn about the universe. (for scale, here it is next to some people.)
there are several smaller telescopes on the mountain, and if you turn around you can look out the side of the dome and down onto all the others -- here they are from the opposite direction; I was inside the big one -- they look to me like a small colony of bald, hibernating aliens. it was getting quite dark when I took this picture, but you can still see the walkway and the snow on the ground below. I never quite got over the strangeness of feeling snow between my fingers in august.
you can't really take pictures at night, at least not with a little automatic camera, but that's okay; we have the telescope to do things like that. but the nighttime was the most amazing part. at midnight on the first night it became my birthday, and by two am I had gotten the best present ever. it didn't look like much, really, just a single aborption line, but it meant that we had found what we were looking for. and there were more, all night long. I felt like such a scientist. it was a good, good feeling.
this is what the world looked like in the morning, for those of us who were higher than the clouds. I might as well have been flying.
there was still someone higher than me, though. she was just hovering silently overhead, watching the sun come up.
at 8:17 am on august fourth, I had been alive for twenty-one years and two hours exactly, and awake for twenty-five hours straight. I was too tired, after returning my thermos to the cafeteria and changing into my pajamas, to even keep my eyes all the way open. still, I thought I should take a picture, to help me remember what it felt like. and I do remember: I was standing in the bathroom with one hand braced against the sink, reeling a bit from the excitement and glory of discovery, and after I snapped the button I just started giggling. "I'm twenty-one!" I said to my reflection, and it laughed at me.
(20 august 2002)