Early 2011. Leigh calls, as usual from the beach, and asks, “Are there any triathlons in Chile?”
“Why?”
“Well, Craig has this customer down there, Alain, who has a B & B in the high desert. We sold him his telescopes, and now he’s asking when we’re going to come visit.”
“You mean, like in the summer, in our winter, or something? ‘Cause there’s a ‘bucket list’ triathlon down there, by one of the volcanoes, Pucon. But, I’d have to worry about how to train for it, it would be right after Arizona, and I don’t know if I could get up again so soon. But it’s only a half, and most people do it as a destination tri, not a real race …”
“Well, whatever. Just think about it.”
Fast forward 3 years. Leigh and Craig are traveling all over the globe, seeing customers in places like Japan, and attending astronomy conferences in China, New york, Boston, and on and on. Craig is slowed down a bit, physically, by Parkinson’s, but his business is still going strong, and they seem to be trying to squeeze it all in while they can. Leigh and I meet up again in Snowmass. I’ve retired, and now have a different perspective on both racing and traveling.
I don’t feel anymore like everything has to be about a race, and I now have all the time I want to take off and go to, say, Portugal, Cuba, or the Galapagos. Why not give Chile a shot right out of the gate? So Cheryl and I leave all the planning to Leigh, and, only a year later, we fly 4 hours to Dallas, then 9 hours to Santiago, overnight. The longest I have ever been on a plane.
Part of the plan is to get Craig to see some of the telescopes he has sent down here. A hour north of Santiago, by plane, is the small town (9,000 souls) of Vicuña. There, Eric, a French ex-pat, has set up shop with a solar telescope in a cornfield at the edge of town, and a professional grade ‘scope up in the thinner mountain/desert air at 1500m/5000’. Eric has been here for 10 years, and built a bustling trade geared mostly to foreign travelers, either curious tourists, or dedicated sky watchers, who have come specifically to this part of the world to see the Southern sky in on of the driest, least light polluted places on earth.
Vicuña has a small tourist trade, but is mostly a compact wide spot hemmed in by cactus covered ridges, surrounding a central plaza. We wander around for a bit, and evetually find Eric’s solar scope. He and Craig have been doing business for 10 years, and never met; yet they seem genuinely linked in their greeting. Eric seems to have great respect for Craig, and gives us a royal tour of old Sol, showing off his brand new scope, several solar flares, and a few sun spots. In the email giving directions, Eric had noted that Craig “has provided over half the private scopes in Chile. He is certainly not nobody here.
Then, he escorts us to Lucia’s B&B, a converted hacienda in the old Spanish colonial style. Built over 100 years ago, the eight rooms surround a central court which has an open air skylight above a pebbled concrete center, where bubbles a small playful fountain.
“But doesn’t it get a little wet when it rains?” Cheryl asks.
Lucia, who must be pushing 80, twinkles and laughs, saying (in Spanish), “It hasn’t rained here in 3 years!”
A good chuckle, which sends us off with Eric and Christian (his assistant) to a deserted restaurant for dinner.
Eric smiles as we enter and, turning, he notes, “I think they opened special for us. No one eats here before 9 PM!” The restuarnat must have seating for 100. It’s built in the style of the Old West, like you might find in Pinedale, Wyoming or Tucson, Arizona – log walls, exposed beams, creaky wood floors. There is a large open hearth in one corner. I expect to see the waitress come out in a checked apron.
The food, though, is remarkable. We’ve been having large lunches, so I eat simply roasted potatoes savored with bits of bacon/ham, and mini-salsa. Enough to fuel us for the grueling drive after dark from the valley floor over a small pass to Eric’s night observatory.
The telescope is powered by a motor, guided by an internal computer program which accounts for the longitude, latitude, time of day, and has a database of thousands of celestial objects of interest. Paying guests sharing the viewing scope with us are from England, Germany, France and South America – a real polyglot of privileged western travelers. But all are awed by Jupiter, trailing four moons in a row, colliding galaxies, nebulas Crab, Tarantula, Sombrero, an exploding star (looks like a little dancing man to me), and other oddities whose names I can’t recall. While waiting my turn on the viewer, I ponder why the Southern Cross is not called a Rhomboid, and why Orion seems flipped around on his side.
And, while everyone else is marveling at the unfathomably long “time” it has taken for the light of all these twinklers to reach us, and the fact that some of them are “no longer” in existence, I take a different view. I realise that these immense chasms the light must travel provides an alternate perspective. Instead of thinking in a linear, chronological manner, I learn that in a time is simply a human construct, and space a creation of our sight. In reality, it is possible there is no “then” and “now”, no “here” and “there”, but simply, “all”.