In a past post, I explained the reason for using Snow Globes in the title of my blog. For those who are curious, here’s the reason for Tree Ferns:

Official Trees

Every region seems to have an official tree. The state of Washington opted for the western hemlock, a large evergreen coniferous tree; and the city of Spokane, the ponderosa pine. The oak recently became the national tree of the United States, sharing that status with a number of other countries, including England, Germany, and Jordan. The official tree of Puerto Rico, where I lived for many years, is the ceiba, a large tropical specimen with sprawling buttress roots. Chile’s official favorite is Araucaria araucana, the monkey-puzzle tree, an evergreen that, when advanced in age, looks like a squat Christmas tree set atop a long pole (more about it in a future post).

My Personal Favorite

Then there are the personal preferences. Though the ceiba is a worthy choice as Puerto Rico’s official tree, the specimen that most reminds me of the island and strikes a great longing in my heart whenever I see one … well, it actually isn’t a tree at all. Called a tree fern, it’s a member of the fern family, but, because of ideal growing conditions in the tropics (I’d like to think), it can reach up to ten meters (33 feet), a parasol-like silhouette of slender trunk stems and delicate arcing fronds. Common in El Yunque rain forest, it became the title of my first (unpublished) novel, The Irony of Tree Ferns, and shares the name of this blog.

Tree fern, El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico

Valdivia, the City of Rivers

High in the Andes Mountains east of Valdivia, snows melt into streams and streams flow into pristine alpine lakes. From these lakes, rivers make their way down the mountains toward the coast, merging and tumbling and eventually becoming the great Calle-Calle River (the name comes from a Mapuche Indian word, kallekalle, for a common white-flowered plant along its banks). Approaching downtown Valdivia, the Calle-Calle merges with the Cau-Cau, forming the Valdivia River, a wide expanse of relatively calm water that ambles along for about nine miles until it reaches the sea. Other rivers — the Tomagaleones, Cruces, Naguilán — join the meandering journey.

The Tour of the Seven Rivers

Dozens of mostly white boats of all sizes line the docks of downtown Valdivia, offering a variety of waterway adventures. Only one boat, the Reina Sofía, tours seven of the neighboring rivers, providing snacks, lunch, more snacks, and short visits to two coastal forts in its six-hour tour.  I climbed aboard.

An awkward moment for solitary travelers comes when you have to seat yourself at a table. Those in charge solved the problem by assigning me what turned out to be the table for guests from far away — two Venezuelans living in self-exile in Santiago and a traveling doctor from New Zealand. I couldn’t have asked for better companions.

At 13:30, the boat motored away from the dock, and we were soon on the Cau-Cau River, passing a mix of grassy swampland, deep-blue water surrounded by forested hills, and the Cau-Cau Bridge, started but for some reason never completed, a monument to … well, something not so positive. Tall stands of imported eucalyptus trees line some of the hills, and we saw a couple of timber mills along the way. Toasting with pisco sours (more of them in a future post), we had lunch (I chose pullmay sureño, a pile of mussels, clams, longaniza (sausage), chicken, pork, and broth) as the boat approached the coast.

Our guide at the fort on Mancera

Once at the coast, we visited two Spanish forts. One was on the small island of Mancera — rugged, forested, home to about 35 people, a lovingly appointed chapel, and the fort ruins. The other was the village of Corral, with homes, restaurants and small shops hugging the hills, and views from the fort across the bay where promontories descend into the water and the Valdivia River meets the Pacific.

A blog is scary: you publish it without the time to let it absorb the inevitable additions, changes, and deletions. In my last post, sent out for all the world to see (well, maybe not ALL the world), I noted that Valdivia’s promenade does not extend beyond the city center.

Mea Culpa!

Today I returned to the Feria Fluvial (also called the Mercado Fluvial …) in the city center and headed upriver to see just how far the promenade went. Behold, it went on and on and on. How I missed finding it my first day here is a mystery that will never be solved, but I’ll chalk it up to jet lag and disorientation.

It’s Sunday, sunny with temperatures in the seventies, and the promenade drew hundreds of people. Families, couples, and university students about to start the new school year strolled along, watching the river and the interesting assortment of boats making their way across the water. An occasional jogger slipped by at a faster pace. Food trucks parked in the street, artisans spread out their crafts, a guitarist jazzed up local melodies, and homeless dogs (there are a lot of them) scooted by with great purpose.

Ironically, when I was doing my virtual traveling on Google maps months ago, I had located the promenade. In fact, in one chapter of the novel-in-progress, two characters rent a dinghy and head upriver along the promenade, almost capsizing when a speedboat zeroes in on them.

The moral — don’t trust your senses the day after 24 hours of flying.

Valdivia’s riverside market, with its colorful awnings and stands of fish, seafood, regional foods and crafts, seemed the perfect place to start my explorations.

This is what it took to get there:

By Plane

The 24 hours of flights had moments both good and bad.

Good — It didn’t snow in Spokane and the plane left on time.

Bad — There was a thunderstorm in Dallas and it took an eternity to park the plane, leaving me to scramble desperately in an unknown airport to make the measly one-hour connection. I probably would have missed it except …

Good — The plane to Santiago was delayed.

Bad — It was delayed for over three and a half hours.

Good — I met some really nice people while milling around, people who have interesting stories of their own — the Chilean who lives in Alaska, the Brit who lives in La Serena, the husband who had a lifelong dream to visit the mountains of southern Patagonia and the wife who wished they had gone ten years earlier.

Bad turned good — I’d had a six-and-a-half hour layover in Santiago to take the plane to Valdivia, but with my delay in Dallas, I only had to wait an hour or so.

By Public Transportation

Puerto Rico’s públicos — public transportation vans — are alive and well in Chile. About ten other passengers and I, and a daunting pile of luggage, crowded into a van at the tiny Pichoy Airport about twenty miles north of Valdivia. On the outskirts of the city, the van stopped at a gas station: half of us, and our luggage, were shuffled off to a second van, apparently to get us to our destinations faster.

I soon found myself in front of a brown wooden gate on a tree-lined residential street near the center of town — the Airbnb site of my room with private bath. I must admit to a few ‘what-were-you-thinking’ doubts at that point, but they lifted for the most part when my hostess gave me a welcoming hug.

By Foot

The next morning, armed with a map securely tucked inside my purse, I headed for the Feria Fluvial. Downtown Valdivia looks like a fish head jutting into the Calle Calle River which loops into the Valdivia River. My house is at the lower right corner of the head, around where the gills would be. Heading to the river, I assumed there was a sort of promenade that would take me along the water’s edge to slightly beyond where the fish’s mouth would be — the center of town. Alas, there wasn’t, so I stayed on streets close to the river. At one point I passed a black submarine and assumed I was getting close. My map remained in my purse. I walked, and walked, and walked, passing a couple of university buildings, a yacht club, all sorts of homes and offices,  but no downtown.

The struggle to preserve old buildings seems to be universal.

Finally, I stopped in front of what seemed a mirage — a beautiful German-styled hotel surrounded by manicured gardens, a terrace, dock, lounge chairs and tables, looking out on a nearby island. Named Hotel Naguilan, it faced Haverbeck Islet. At this point I extricated my map. It turned out I’d walked past the lower left corner of the fish-head gills, a good mile beyond the center of town, which was actually back at the site of the black submarine. The kind hotel staff called for a water taxi, and I returned upriver in style.

And there, where the taxi dropped me off, was the Feria Fluvial.

A type of seaweed sold at the market. I passed.

In my novel-in-progress, Clara Albright arrived in Valdivia over forty years ago. This after a whirlwind, forbidden courtship with Jorge Valle, a Chilean graduate student in West Virginia at the time.  Some ten years ago, tour guide Pete Snyder reached the Lake Region on the heels of an unsuccessful career as a ski instructor in Colorado.  A couple of years ago, Bill Albright flew from Charlestown to Valdivia to find out what was wrong with his sister Clara, and Pamela Palmer traveled south from her home in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, eventually reaching Valdivia to visit her long-estranged daughter Luisa.

Now it’s time for me to join my characters, to make sure the world they inhabit resembles the real one.

Check and triple-check:

For months, I’ve been preparing. I’ve bought miniature toiletries, compression socks, and a TSA-approved luggage lock; agonized over which clothes to pack; contacted credit card companies and learned as much as I can about my technological acquisitions (including this blog site); worried over a variety of imaginary scenarios;  and strove to figure out if 24° C is a pleasant temperature (it is) and 2,000 pesos is too much to pay for a cappuccino (probably not). As the departure day approaches (February 28), the excitement gives way to a more robotic state, similar (though on a much smaller scale) to how I felt when I left my life in Puerto Rico and moved to Spokane.

My stomach teeters like the ship at the edge of the precipice. However, the plunge will be cushioned by the good wishes of so many.

Go!

Pinterest

Even cheap plastic snow globes have an element of magic about them. Flick your wrist, and the flakes swirl down upon a tropical beach, the Empire State Building, a steepled church at Christmastime, even a favorite photo you insert into the heart of the sphere. But the vintage globes—glass domes encapsulating miniature winter landscapes caught in a blizzard—create true fairy-tale enchantment.

A bit of history:

In 1900, an Austrian surgical instruments mechanic named Erwin Perzy tried to improve on the brightness of early electric light bulbs by placing a glass globe filled with water in front of the light. Not satisfied with the result, he added reflective particles to the water–semolina at the time–and was struck by beauty of the falling particles, which reminded him of snow. The snow globe was born. Original Vienna Snow Globes, the Perzy family company, made the early globes, including the one featured in the movie Citizen Kane. The company remains in operation. To learn  more, read the BBC article, The Family Company that Invented the Snow Globe.

A bit of fiction:

Once upon a time, a German immigrant to Chile, Johannes Schmitt, hired a local glassblower (from Austria of course) to make him a snow globe. For the landscape, he provided a photograph of one of his favorite places—the soaring Torres del Paine mountains of southern Patagonia. The globe became a treasured family heirloom, passed down through several generations. But it also seemed to have a peculiar effect on certain people, stirring up more than artificial snow …

Which is why I have tentatively titled my novel-in-progress, The Snow Globe.

During the many years I lived in Puerto Rico, a garbage can was a zafacón. Much to my surprise, when I used the word in a group of Spanish speakers here in Spokane, I got blank stares. Zafacón, it seems, derives from the English ‘safety can’ and is only used in Puerto Rico and perhaps a neighboring island or two. (The word for ‘garbage can’ in Chile is tacho or tarro de basura, I believe.) Because of the island’s close association with the U.S., when English-language speakers in Puerto Rico are unsure of a word in Spanish, they can give the English word a Spanish pronunciation, and hope for the best. Quite often they’ll be understood. I don’t think that’s going to work so well in Chile …

Not a pepper:

You can say ‘Peru’ or ‘Argentina’ or ‘Venezuela’ with an American accent, and there will be no confusion as to meaning. Not true for Chile. Use an American pronunciation, and you could be referring to a pepper popular in Mexico or the sensation in an overly air-conditioned room. To zero in on the country, you must pronounce it ‘chee’ as in Cheetos, and ‘lay’ as in Frito Lay, spoken quickly and with an airy tone.

Longitudes:

Living on the west coast of North America, I assumed Chile, on the west coast of South America, was directly south. Only when I learned the country fell into the same time zone as North America’s east coast did I open a map and realize the error of my assumption.

Flags:

The flag of Chile

The Chilean flag and the Texan state flag look suspiciously similar, the primary difference being that the blue in the Texan version extends to the bottom of the left side. The Chilean flag was adopted first, in 1817; that of Texas in 1839. Both seem to have taken inspiration from the U.S. design. In the Chilean flag, the blue represents the sky and sea; the white, the Andes Mountains; and the red, the blood and sacrifice in achieving independence. Curiously, the Chilean flag is nicknamed La Estrella Solitaria (the lone star), similar to Texas’s nickname as the Lone Star State. Something to ponder (or not).

Valdivia after the 1960 earthquake (Wikipedia Commons)

On May 22, 1960, the world’s strongest instrumentally documented earthquake occurred off the coast of southern Chile. Registering a magnitude of 9.5, the Great Chilean Earthquake felled buildings, tore out bridges, capsized ships, blocked rivers, split streets, sank land, and created a tsunami that rose up to eighty feet along the coast, with damage reaching as far away as the Philippines, Hawaii, Japan, and Alaska. The brunt of the destruction and tragic loss of life occurred in a small historic city near the earthquake’s epicenter — my host city, Valdivia — giving rise to another name for the cataclysm, the 1960 Valdivia Earthquake.

Those darn tectonic plates:

Tectonic plates, sub-layers of the Earth’s crust, are in constant motion, jostling for position against neighboring plates. Subduction zones, where one plate pushes under another, are especially prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity. Lying near the volatile border where the Nazca Plate pushes into the South American Plate, Chile has one of the highest earthquake rates in the world.

A haunting image:

Tsunamis, immense waves generated by the earthquake, caused the worst damage to Valdivia in 1960. They swept over the city, drowning many people and pushing homes from their foundations, reaching a mile inland. An interesting bilingual blog site, a memorial to the 1960 earthquake, recounted the following image: “Then the wave returned to the sea, carrying back small boats with fishermen and whole houses with people alive, asking for help while in their fatal travel to the ocean. They were not to be seen again.” One can’t help but imagine the horror.

After-shocks:

Almost half the houses in Valdivia were destroyed, leaving thousands of people homeless. Ironically, the traditional wooden homes survived the earthquake better than the concrete ones, which back then weren’t fitted to endure such jolts. However, virtually all suffered damage.

The earthquake destroyed the promenade, mentioned in earlier posts, and much of it sank underwater. Thankfully, it was rebuilt, using rubble from the quake to raise it some it was completely rebuilt several years later. A plaque marks the reconstruction.

In my novel:

Clara Valle arrived in Valdivia fifteen years after the Great Chilean Earthquake. Signs of damage remained — parking lots where buildings once stood and capsized ships in the harbor. Decades later, she actually saw the earthquake first-hand — in a journey people attributed to mental illness …

Decades ago when writing travel pieces in Puerto Rico, I joked that the greatest test of one’s mastery of the genre would be to write a successful piece about a never-visited place. It seemed a rather fanciful, far-fetched idea.

Not so today. On a small screen and with the click of a few well-placed keys, you can travel virtually anywhere in the world. Start with an overview on Wikipedia; scroll down specific sites of interest; peruse the high-resolution visuals of screen-size landscapes; zero in on Google Maps; watch a host of characters teach you on YouTube. Way leads onto way—an infinity of ways. And voilá: you’re an expert without ever leaving the confines of your house.

For example:

A Chilean friend, Ana,  recommended a series of travel pieces on YouTube, titled Lugares que hablan (‘places that speak’), featuring the irrepressibly enthusiastic guide, Pancho Saavedra. “Check out the episodes for Valdivia,” she recommended. I did, clicking on Lugares que hablan rios de valdivia, Before I could blink, Pancho and I were in an apple orchard, learning how to make cider [chicha], and, moments later, at a local cultural fair, watching a woman cook deep-fried pastry [sopapilla]. All from my desk in Spokane.

Bill’s walk:

In an early chapter of my novel, Bill Albright arrives at the Pichoy Airport after a grueling 24-hour flight from Charleston, West Virginia. Sick to death of airports and airplanes, he decides to walk to Valdivia, a mere twenty miles south of the airport. How could I write this scene? Clicking onto Google Maps, I zoomed ever closer to the airport to get a feel for the surrounding landscape. Then–wham!–I was no longer looking down but was actually on the road, observing the surrounding fields, brush, and isolated homes. By hitting an arrow in a circle, Bill and I walked along Ruta 202, making our way toward Valdivia.

Ruta 202 (Infomariquina)