strange Chiloe and why I can't sleep at night

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I am haunted by reggaeton music. Even in the early hours of morning, under my bedsheets, within a room on the second story, in an old droopy house at the bottom of the world, and through a hard riving rain, I can still he hear the signature thrum of base. It’s the base that always finds me, the other parts - horns and synth and voices - drowned out by my surroundings. But the base survives, the redunant boop chee bop chee, boop chee bop chee conjuring images of a mop-headed child pounding on an overturned trashcan. That child is now smiling at me cruelly from some fleshy hollow of my mind. That child stands in a patch of yellow grass before a crusty wooden fence, thumping that can over and over and over, boop chee bop chee, boop chee bop chee - sickeningly defiant.

“This isn’t music,” I grumble to myself, struggling to get back to sleep. The coldness answers somewhere on my naked back, and I struggle to bring a thick of blankets to my chin, but they are too tightly tucked at the foot of the bed.

Ten minutes, and I’m daintily stepping downstairs, toothbrush in one hand, the other supporting a towel around my waist. I’m wearing a t-shirt, but the cold keeps me feeling naked. I don’t want the old couple that’s renting me the room for twelve dollars a night to see me. I descend and tiptoe through their living room. I imagine all the homes in southern Chile like my grandfather’s cabin in Colorado. Everything is aged, trapped in a cool sickly staleness, dry air, trapped in another time. The sagging brown leather couches, the bookshelf of old bibles and encyclopedias, an old radio with big shiny brass knobs. Old clocks and religious-themed brass figurines mysteriously serpented through by a sparkling golden tinsel. A wooden table with a glass top sandwiching several faded pictures, pictures taken on an old wind-up camera. Under the glass they’re like a shiny cloud to the past. There’s a man holding a baby; the owners of the house, many years younger, smiling up at me happily.

In fact, every item in the house seems to look at me in my shame as I move beyond, past the kitchen, and have to duck into the bathroom to avoid the top of the doorframe. I shower, carefully keeping my eyes on a little funnel of spider web near the ceiling. Yesterday I saw a spider watching me from this exact spot. I smile thinking of it being some kind of pervy insect.

It begins to rain harder during the short bus ride from Dalcahue to Castro, a daily pouring from perpetually gray skies flooding the streets. Cars pass and spit long spoking arcs of water that cause the locals to jump and hurry along. On the main street I find the address I visited a day earlier. I crowd with other tourists in a small stuffy room. Everyone has a shy smile that shows nervousness about the rest of the day. They don’t know if the tours they’ve signed up for will go on; they don’t know that this weather IS the town; this town takes it like a stone in a river; this town does not give up.

The clap of a door, and a young Chilote guide appears out of the wall, clutching a steaming cup of coffee. His smile looks painful and stretched. He ushers everyone outside to an awaiting line of vans: there’s a van assigned to each specific tour. I pile into the small baby blue van which I am told is going to the churches and national park.

There are about eight people now waiting in the van. Only the driver’s seat is empty. Everyone sits stiffly from the cold, they’re strength drawn silently inward, their blood trying to gather warmth. The windows fog. The patter of drops on the van’s roof makes a familiar, peaceful sound, and as everyone begins to drowse, an old Chilote in a green slicker slides open the side door, bringing a gust of cold. His smile is also painfully wide. “El otro esta enfermito,” he says. “Vamos en cinco.” The other guide is sick. We’ll leave in five minutes.

A young French traveler is next to me; his name is Brian. “Where are you from?” he asks.

Coming out of a daze, at first I do not hear the question, but begin to laugh. “The island of Chiloe,” I say, “a thousand miles beyond nowhere.” It’s a joke I’ve been saving for over a week, awaiting my next conversation in English.

The Frenchman’s stare is blank.

“From the United States,” I say.

Rain and cold, the van gargles along like a fleeing reptile, out of the town and into shining green fields of low shrubs and trees and grass under more gray skies. We begin touring a series of old wooden churches, each one within minutes of the next, in seemingly abandoned, dying towns, the locals washed cleanly away. I think the buildings go well with the island. The island creeps up their sodden porches and cradles them close in its earthy fingers, the constant downpour darkening their wood and growing clumps of mold on their rooftops, a winning battle against decades of paint and varnish, making them look vulnerable and soft.

We take out our cameras and snap outside pictures then filters inside. The guide smiles and gestures and arduously explains, but I am too tired to make translations in my head; I do not care much for facts. There are tiny dark passages, splintering ladders and steep, narrow stairways leading up into dark square holes. I want to climb up into them, and, finally, everyone does, one at a time, sucking in their guts and being quietly polite in the smallness of space. We duck our heads and allow each other to move softly on the sagging wood. We gaze blindly into straight and scattered wooden catacombs of dusty two by fours and spider webs. We are told to marvel at design and hurriedly disappear down separate unlit paths, to another stairway leading back down.

I linger behind and point my camera in particularly dark corners, far out of reach. I snap two photos: one with the flash and one without. I hope to catch the image of a ghost, a creature, or at least the glisten of ungodly eyes. To me, the camera is magic.

Outside, the rain is weakening, now coming in sporadic sheets. The sky yawns and begins to reveal doughy patches of fog. The sun is somewhere behind the mask, fighting its way through.

After the final church - and wandering around a small cemetery dotted with colorful flowers - we stop by a lake, a morbidly idyllic scene with a long glistening pier, have lunch and pile back into the van, a little happier - we each had a single beer with our roasted chicken breasts and steaming bowls of casuela (Chilean beef stew). We spoke to each other and do not feel so shy and alone anymore. We are becoming a team, unified against this strange soggy island.

The old guide turns in the driver’s seat and smiles painfully at our chatter. Now it’s off to the National Park, a massive lump of green taking up most of the West side of the island.

Here there are hills rising out of flat stretches of low trees and bush, layering into the distance in dull and earthy colors. The van crunches to a stop at the end of a gravel road, and we each pay a small entry fee and begin walking a forested path of many planks of wood safely atop perpetually softened ground. The forest throbs with life under the rain; it tunnels and glows and reaches out for stray clothing and strands of hair. Every tree is covered with moss, every tiny space crowded with tiny green leaves or twigs or soft pieces of wood. We are forced to walk in a single file and separate into smaller groups of two or three.

I find myself in the last group, with Brian and a beaming couple from Australia. We joke of little elf-like beings lurking out there in the confusion. To us all it is obvious this is truly a place of myth and legend, and the monsters are mostly cruel and watchful.

I recall buying a pamphlet when I arrived on the ferry in Ancud. The outdoor merchants were selling them, tiny red books simply titled: Mitologia Chiloe. I flipped through, ignoring the text written in Spanish, but pausing to stare at drawings of strange creatures: a snake with the head of a pig, a horse with the body of a sea serpent, a leaping bull with a single horn like an enraged unicorn. There were also more human-like characters, each one either horribly disfigured or immensely beautiful: a troll, a watery temptress, a skinny naked man walking on his hands, his ribs poking out of his belly, his legs painfully bent behind his head. They all looked up from the pages, as though alive in the ink, seducing, a kind of timeless obligatory violence hidden behind their eyes; or eyes glaring in obvious intent - to pester and torture and kill. The locals would insist that each creature is real, and that it pays to be mindful and wary, especially in such isolated rural areas. And as we move deeper into the forest, the guide falls back to drive the van to the other side of the path, where he says he’ll be waiting, and I feel a little more vulnerable, I feel that the laughter of my group is a little too loud and inviting, I maybe even hope it is. I like to scare myself and to be scared. I draw pleasure in my own brazen naivety, and I doubt the others are as wary as me.

Halfway along the path we come do a dank and bushy campground inhabited by locals and travelers half-naked and staggering around with lost gray expressions, as though possessed by the weather. They also seem drunk on the greenness around them, and are tiredly giving in to it, tiredly becoming a part of it, and will soon root their soiled feet into the mud and sprout branches from their dreadlocked heads and peeling shoulders. We pass these creatures silently, eyes respectfully to the ground, maybe somehow frightened, as though we had accidentally wandered into another sodden world.

While the forest crowds us again, I can’t help feeling suffocated, as though caught in some kind of endless green loop. I crave openness and the horizon, but also, I feel a kind of pleasure: this type of hopeless trek into the murky unknown is what I’ve always secretly longed for. I almost feel like a character in a horror film, and soon pale faces will blink in the distant spaces between leaves, soon every character in my tiny group will silently disappear, one by one.

Caught in this fantasy, I purposely trail behind, until I can barely hear the voices of the others out front. I pause to take photos, but every photo is the same dripping mesh of green and brown. It’s as though I’m caught in the earth's belly, in a kind of leafy digestion, and it’s hard to get a unique perspective. I take several minutes focusing on a spider web, and along with the silence, I eventually realize that I am now completely alone; I am the first to disappear.

The path finally opens to a compacted dirt road. The guide is standing here, alone outside the van, smiling and kicking at stones. He points to a wooden sign on the road. ARTESENAL is painted in sunken white letters, and a white arrow points the way.

I take off without a word, many times forced to walk on a soggy shoulder of grass to avoid large swallowing puddles. I pass the group on their way back. They tell me there’s not much to look at, but I continue on anyways. I’ve already come this far; I have to see, and after five minutes, I take my camera from my pocket as I near a sinking house with peeling white paint.

These people are poor. A young barefooted Chilote waits in stained clothing, a single long tooth poking out from his upper lip. He stands beside a straw-floored shack, smiling genuinely up at me. His eyes seem to lazily peer out from the bottom of his eye sockets, and I think he just might be dumb, because through the opening of the shack are only a few letter openers carved out of wood, a few indigenous statues ironically grinning (I already know that when their tops are lifted, I’ll be immediately met by a bulbous wooden erection shooting up from between their legs.) It’s the same junk I’ve seen all over Chile. I do not even bother to enter and have a closer look.

A long black dog suddenly squeezes out from under the house and runs off into the bushes. An old squatty woman appears at the window a second later, calling after it. She stops and sort of pauses, thinking, and smiles directly down at me, as though she already expected me to be there. Her teeth are yellow and long like the boy by the shed. I assume she is the mother, and I can feel her eyes following me as I leave. It’s like a soft burning on the back of his neck. I step deep into the shoulder of the road in order to escape her gaze quicker, trudging in bushes up to my waist.

After a minute of walking, I see a flash of black far off to my left. The dog from the house is lost in a thick wedge of bushes, galloping and leaping, trying to have a look at where it wants to go. I laugh: I like watching dogs play. I think it’s rare proof of pure goodness in the world. I take a few steps deeper into the bushes. I want to have a closer look at this funny animal.

The passing leaves soak my jeans. Cool water runs down into my socks. Every few seconds, the dog’s head springs back into view, turning, changing its path, seeming to have caught a new scent, now trying to have a look at me. I push further, quicker, the dogs tail wags excitedly. My thighs suddenly feel a sting. I’ve walked right into prickly wire fencing up to my bellybutton, covered in weeds. It stretches far in both directions, blocking my path. And it does not matter, anyways. The dog has changed direction again, now bounding deep from where it came.

As I turn to leave, my eyes catch a bare patch of ground, only a little way off. Not too far. There’s something interesting right over there: a freshly dug hole, and next to it, the edge of a medium-sized wire cage, long silvery hair growing out from its top, catching the wind, a kind of beckoning for me to come closer, only to have a peek.

My heart rattles a bit: that hair almost looks human. I look over my shoulder, then, with one hand holding down the wire, I take advantage of my long gringo legs and step over the fence, being careful not to tear my clothing.

On the other side, I get this strange immediate sense. The air is different here, silent… thicker. That burning I felt from the old woman is now all over, creeping into every pore of my skin, and I’m sure I’m being watched. Turning a slow circle, I only see a flash of black - the dog, maybe frightened by my approach, taking off, back in the direction of the house. The burning softens and holds steady, and the air seems to dim as I realize the road is no longer in sight. A ringing strikes my ears and I feel extremely tired. My limbs are like bags of sand, and I have the strong urge to lie down and fall into this dimness, like giving in to this sort of empirical hopelessness, a downward chorus of violins.

This muddying sense only grows stronger when I step into a circular, twenty-foot clearing rimmed with skinny trees, their faded limbs the color of dead skin. The ringing peaks in my ears, seeming to build upon the silence and thick air, almost deafening, like a moment before a smashing crescendo. My hand instinctively slides into my pocket, tightening around my camera as this new scene comes into focus.

A hole big enough to fit a large easy chair, a pile of dirt beside it, a metal shovel lying innocently upon its rim. A mesh-wire cage around two by two feet - like something someone would use to house a pet rabbit - a little person painfully stuffed inside, his dirt-sodden rags bubbling outwards against the mesh, his head bent forward and hidden in his knees pinned to his chest, his arms forcefully hugging his shins, his exposed skin on his wrists and ankles as ancient and bloodless as the tree bark. Not a single sliver of space is not crammed with this poor captive's misery; all that escapes are a few silvery long hairs, rising up from a massive dirt-caked clump covering the neck and face and most of the back. The hairs curl in on themselves and shoot outwards into a touching breeze; and the toes, long and feral, toenails cracked and overgrown several yellowing inches, poke out from between the wires, digging far into the soft dirt before him.

Whoever it is is surely dead, and I stood there, first trying to guess whether this poor creature is going to be buried or has recently been unearthed.

Then, all at once, the ringing stops as though my head is lifted from a bucket of water. The sensation of complete and sudden auditory clarity stuns me into a directionless terror, and instead of quieting, I do something strange, and laugh, blatantly, mockingly. Just as quick, a rotting earthy smell creeps into my nostrils, drawing mucus from the back of my throat. I can feel it creeping like a slug.

Cupping my mouth to stop, I immediately have a realization, for I’m sure that the cage just grunted at me. Like a reaching fire, it’s anger burns level with my knees.

I take a step back and fail to turn and run, my jaw locking open in a silent scream, my eyes craning to a group of dirty padlocks across the cage’s top. I somehow know that if they were removed, the person within would slowly float to just above the treetops, then, just as slowly, descend down upon me, holding me paralyzed in a pair of soulless eyes and a black-toothed grit of teeth. The scene plays so clearly in my mind that I cringe and fall to the ground with my arms protectively raised. It’s a woman in that cage.

Rolling back to my feet, I’m sure I hear a faint giggle arise from that clumpy mass of hair, a throaty feminine scratch followed by several grunted syllables. “Ill - elm. Ad - ak - er. Ill - elm. Ad - ak - er.”

I find myself at the van, bent over, hands on my knees, flushed and dripping sweat. I do not remember sprinting back. with each breath I'm saying my name out loud, "William Radaker," over and over. I'm thinking, that thing was saying my name.

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Photos

my 12 dollar room
I'll talk more about the creepy thing that happened in here in my next blog entry

attic of church
what's that in the back?

pier
can I say morbidly idyllic?