Chile doesn’t have any real tropical jungles, but the concrete and linguistic ones offer sufficient challenge to navigate. Life here in the Chilean jungle has always been complicated—my (very Chilean) daughter says it’s “against the law” for anything to be too simple! However, these days the jungle of the past looks like a stroll in…
Winters just aren’t what they used to be when I was a kid. But climate change or not, this one has sure dragged on—and in South America we’re dreading more than anticipating the long winter ahead. I remember so much snow during one childhood winter in Maine that we could jump out the second story…
From here on, I’m completely in search of a story. As we drive over a daunting mountain pass from Queulat National Park to the seaside village of Puerto Cisnes, I lay aside my role as a tourist in the magnificent Chilean Patagonia…and become the writer bent on research. I drag my notebook out of my…
“Developing a thinking culture”—that’s what the sign outside the school said, a couple of years ago when we were house-hunting in the port city where we now live. Wow, that’s kind of a novelty, I reflected. A definite novelty in a culture that frequently doesn’t read beyond the local newspapers—and even that’s rare now, replaced…
