Clouds

Next time you look at a map of the world, take special note of the length of South America.  Chile and Argentina reach way way down.  (Historical perspective – I cannot believe this used to be the main shipping route to get goods from one coast of the U.S. to the other before the Panama Canal!).  Three planes and 24 hours after leaving Los Angeles, our wheels touched down at the Punta Arenas airport.  This seemingly long trek is still a small price to pay for travelling such a long distance.  Air travel often allows us to take for granted the many miles and small wonders that separate us from the final destination.  Countless families, political disputes, farms, roads, mountains, animals, and even national borders define the expansive landscapes and are passed by in an instant.  One way that I am reminded of these details is by watching the clouds outside of the window.  These ever-changing cloud formations are as dynamic and heterogeneous as the land below them and can even come to resemble scenes that are familiar to us.  First, we flew over what reminded me of frozen tundra covered with a thick layer of snow, smoothed by constant winds that send a transparent layer of snow flowing across the ground.  Soon this scene changed as the clouds broke apart to form rolling hills and finally dissipated as we flew over the Andes into the agricultural valleys of Santiago.  We followed dramatic, puffy clouds all the way down to Punta Arenas where they parted to reveal a beautiful but peculiar landscape of large, flat, shrubby islands separated by large waterways that I have since learned are characteristic of Patagonia.