By Sam Gerrish from University of Puget Sound
It’s 6am, and I’m up early to write this and to pack, because today we are leaving basecamp for the last time. Yesterday afternoon marked a week until we disband completely. I was supposed to write about something else for this blog, but the realization that we’ve only got a week left in this place has made me conscious of everything I’m going to miss, and I wanted to write about it.
Of course, I’ll miss the obvious stuff: the huge snowy mountains and shining rivers and pretty flowers and the collective majesty of it all. I’ll miss being able to dip my Nalgene—or my face—into the nearest stream when I want a drink, something that’s practically unfathomable in America. I’ll miss watching the light move over the hills across the river in the morning as the sun climbs the far side of the ridge behind basecamp: it starts with Mount Tamango before creeping east, and earlier this semester when I woke to my rainfly frosted over on travel days I’d wait and wait for it to hit my tent so I could pack everything up just a bit dryer.
But I’ll miss other things, too. I’ll miss washing my clothes by hand in the big bathtub, even though it takes an hour, and watching the water get just a little clearer with every rinse, even if it takes 30 rinses for things to feel clean. The water never really runs clean if you include your socks, so those have to be washed in a separate bin. I won’t miss running out of clean underwear or having to spend a cloudless day in full raingear because I’m waiting for my clothes to dry. But I will miss the sight of them strung up on the P-cord, and how the trees by the quincho become a forest of hanging clothes when we’ve all returned from the field and done our laundry, like lines of motley oversized prayer flags.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m going to miss the birds. Other than the few that can also be found in the States, every species here was new to me, but I’ve come to know them well. Knowing the birds around me makes wherever I am feel like home, and after three months I feel as though I know these birds like neighbors—I know who I can expect to see depending on the habitat, and I can recognize most of them by sound. I’ll miss this avian neighborhood: condors wheeling on thermals, bandurria cackling as they fly overhead, and brave little rayaditos scolding us from the branches of a nearby lenga. Of course, I’ll also miss hearing “Sam what bird is that?”, and feeling just as useful when I answer as I do when I manage to make a good fire in the quincho wood stove.
At basecamp, I’ll miss waking up before the others to finish an assignment or to run my favorite loop in Tamango, swimming across the frigid Rio Cochrane on my way back to camp to make it to the quincho in time for our 9am classes. I’ll miss wearing the same clothes every day and forgetting to shower for at least a week, but then feeling like a reptile in fresh skin when I finally get around to doing it. I’ll miss the strength of the Austral sun even though it blistered my ears and the sound of rain hitting my tent at night, even though crawling outside to pee in the rain was unreasonably miserable.
But most of all, I’ll miss the people. I’ll miss Phoebe’s girlish wonder and Bryce’s enthusiasm over a hot shower. I’ll miss Calvin and his camera, Cat and her little grey elephant (whose name is Toby), and Ben N. and his yellow fleece—the one I stole for a week longer than I meant to. I’ll miss Betsy’s collection of earrings and the way she always had the right music for our road trips in Dave Mathews Van. I’ll miss Johnny’s evening guitar and relentless humor, and Cal’s amazing dinners and baggy pant energy. I’ll miss our instructors: Jose and his three silly games, giggling with Dani as we tried to find a way to understand each other in Spanglish, and Clau’s voice, which I could recognize anywhere. I’ll miss Maripa’s puffy jackets, which are probably more patch than they are jacket, and the way that Felipe was probably never once on time for dinner. I’ll miss Ben S. for his endless supply of stories and enthusiasm.
Things might be melancholy at times over the next week, as it really hits us that we’re nearing the end, even though I think we’re also all looking forward to going home. Our lives will get easier in a lot of ways when we’re back in the states. We’ll have washing machines and electric kettles and other wonders of modern technology. We’ll have our families and our friends far closer than we did living at the bottom of the world. But we’ll lose things, too. We’ll never get back what we had in this place together, and we’re probably not meant to, as much as we might miss it. It’s a big world out there, and there’s a lot of work to be done. What comes next will look different for each of us, and we’ll probably all look back on this semester a bit differently. But there is something intangible and precious about the three months we’ve spent here, something you don’t have to understand to know, and even though we’ll all return to the real world and move on with our lives, I think every so often we’ll remember, and we’ll miss it.