San Pedro de Atacama — Writing — Jeff Kelly Lowenstein

We're in the air from Toronto to Chicago.

We've left Santiago, site of fulfilled dreams, 80 degree Christmas Days, our impossibly dusty postage stamp of an apartment, and the consumption of more pisco sours and glasses, well, bottles, of red wine than we could have ever imagined, and are heading back to the Windy City that has been our home since 2002.

With grins that stretched beyond our ears, Dunreith and I deposited the check from the house sale we completed the day before we left on our Chilean adventure.

It far exceeded our greatest expectations.

We had the great privilege of being in Chile as the nation confronted, more directly than ever before, the still raw wounds from the Pinochet coup that happened on September 11, 1973.

We attended vigils and memorials events and plays and conferences and documentary films and panels and book launches, all of which were dedicated to grappling with the enduring impact of the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende and the brutal aftermath.

I've lived in the United States close to 50 years, but never before had I witnessed the concentrated and unified focusing on a single event in our nation's history the way Chileans from Arica in the north to Punta Arenas at the end of the world turned their attention to the coup.

In October we witnessed the jubilant eruption of emotion issuing forth from Chileans who hugged, kissed, screamed and honked their horns when their beloved soccer team punched its ticket to the world's largest sport event, to be held next June in Brazil.

In November we went to election events and talked to voters of all persuasions and ages and sides of the political spectrum during what turned out to be the first of two rounds in the presidential elections.

And in December we traveled to Torres del Paine, a national park of unsurpassed and staggering beauty that recently was named the eighth wonder of the world, when Michelle Bachelet made history in becoming the first candidate ever to be elected president twice in the post-democracy era.

Beyond these momentous months in Chilean history, we received an enormously generous reception from Chileans with whom we had some connection-we met everyone from dear friend Marjorie Agosin's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins and former students to a female anesthetist Dad had helped train nearly 30 years ago to our colleague, friend of a friend, guide/secret weapon Alejandra Matus-and those whom we had the good fortune to meet through our travels.

My Data Journalism students at the University of Diego Portales gradually understood my Spanish, my teaching methods and the concepts and application of this type of journalism in a process that left both sides feeling enriched for the encounter.

My research into the landmark 2009 Transparency Act, after an initial shift in focus, led me to talk with journalists, lawyers, non-profit executives, government representatives and plain folks in a project that gave me a sharper sense of the law's as yet incompletely realized potential.

Dunreith and I traveled to the vineyards of the Central Valley, to the coast cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar. With Aidan we flew to the searing desert of San Pedro de Atacama, the world's driest such space, and to Patagonia, a place Dunreith had longed to visit for years.

We also ventured to Rio, where I had the honor of attending, teaching and presenting to colleagues at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference doing investigative work, often at great physical peril, throughout the world.

We flew to Buenos Aires, where we met Dad and Lee before they set off on a two-week tour to Southern Argetina and up through Chile, and strolled together down elegant, inordinately wide, European-style boulevards, ate ice cream at Cafe Tortoni, the continent's oldest cafe that oozes with swagger, listened and learned for three hours at ESMA, the largest of the Argentine dictator's network of detention centers, and feasted on the sights and food of El Ateneo, the former theater that has been converted into one of the world's most spectacular bookstores.

Jon and I had the tremendous fortune to receive a grant from the Pulitzer Center to do a project about the impact of the past on the present in Chile 40 years after the coup. Together we worked long hours over the course of two weeks for a three-part series that ran on The New Yorker's Photo Booth and on Hoy's website.

The family visits over our final six weeks in the country helped confirm to me the possibility of weaving together the people and passions and dreams and values that I hold most dear. Perhaps, greatest of all, it's fortified my increasing conviction that this way of living was not only possible, but could in a very real sense become ordinary.

Now, we are returning to Chicago, the city from which we have left, where we raised Aidan from a boy to a man, and where we have spent the vast majority of our married life.

I am, and will always be, a Bostonian at my core.

I had too many seminal events, from the Blizzard of 78 to the 1975 World Series to growing up amidst that inimitable accent for it to ever be otherwise.

But if Boston in my heart, Chicago's in my guts.

The people's straightforward manner and generous spirit, the city's sense of itself as a place of story and legend, the passion that Chicagoans bring to their sports and their politics and their brats and their neighborhoods, its industrial past and tortured history with race and segregation and immigration and labor that make it what the late, great Studs Terkel called "the true American city", have all gotten in deep, and are not going anywhere, either.

I'll miss our life in Santiago and our travels throughout the country and continent, to be sure.

And I'm excited to fly over the leafless trees toward the dirtied snow and land at O'Hare, to walk in the 20 degree weather and see our breath and our circle of friends and family again, and to bring a fresh, broader perspective to my ongoing love for the city.

We don't know our exact next steps, or, frankly, where we're going to live after we stay at my brother Jon's place on the South Side.

But we do know without any shred of a doubt that, as always, the adventure will continue.

There are many types of freedom.

Freedom of speech.

Freedom of assembly.

Freedom of movement.

And, for me, one of the most basic types is the freedom to live life as you see fit, based on passion, responding to each moment, secure in yourself, and able at different moments to laugh and love and sing and learn and share.

Alejandro Arellano is one such free man.

Dunreith Aidan and I met him in San Pedro de Atacama, the desert in Northern Chile that stretches hundreds of miles and is the world’s driest.

Alejandro was our guide during two of our three days we participated in tours with Cosmo Andino, one of the many companies that operate in the town whose population has exploded about fivefold in the past decade.

With him we covered varied terrain-we went to the rocky Valley of the Moon and saw the sun set over Death Valley, traveled the next day to salt flats and lagoons, and saw a traditional village to boot-and even more varied conversation topics.

Alejandro’s sturdy, with strong arms and a bit of a stomach. He’s got indigenous, Chilean and Irish blood-the latter is reflected, he said, in his reddish that is just beginning to be flecked with grey. (It adds to the package for the women, he told me, leaning in as if he was sharing a secret.) He speaks Spanish fluently, English more than comfortably and apparently can handle himself in Swedish due to having lived there for several months.

Sitting to the right of the driver in the front seat of the 18-person bus, he leaned forward to point out and give explanations for what we are seeing, like how there are three different types of flamingos in the area and why the old ones are the only ones that are visible.

During the course of the two days, in cheerful, upbeat tones he told us at different points about the surname he shares with Sergei Arellano, a high-ranking, “half-sociopathic” Pinochet general, and the gods and demigods and sacred beings of the Atacamian people.

He told us about the optic colors and how the astronomy sites in Chile are helping us understand about the other galaxies that exist and the 29 dimensions that exist, rather than just the 4 that we know about.

He mentioned several 10- and 20-day hikes he had taken recently, describing with relish squeezing cacti to extract every last ounce of fluid.

He also shared about how he came to San Pedro a dozen years ago from the Elqui Valley. The musicologist soon realized that the Kunza masters were aging and their music was in danger of being extinguished if no one recorded it.

During the past decade, he’s sought them out and employed the traditional knowledge he had learned from his grandmother, a shaman, to earn their trust. He’s recorded and documented their art, played the instruments, and taught young people how to play them, too.

Alejandro recently finished a major publication that documents and summarizes what he’s learned.

He’s done it all for free, using the money he’s earned from guiding to support this passion.

Alejandro does a lot more than talk and record his own and others’ music.

He insisted on helping the women descend from the bus-“My mother taught me to be a caballero,” he explained-and, when Dunreith struggled with the altitude, he waved me aside and told me to take his seat in the front of the bus.

“Don’t be jealous,” he said with a smile before applying pressure to her temples.

It helped relieve her pain.

The guiding schedule is determined daily, so Alejandro often doesn’t know what he’ll be doing the next day until the evening before.

But that doesn’t bother him. At all.

He offered us a ride back to our hotel, which was near his home and about six kilometers outside of town.

We walked behind him on the dusty main street.

Alejandro didn’t just walk, though. He strode drown the middle, greeting and shaking hands with those people he knew along the way, sauntering with a swagger that was not aggressive, but based in a firm conviction that he belonged.

We arrived at his car, a dark 1992 Chevrolet jeep that was caked in dust.

Before the three of us got in, Alejandro moved the extra tomatoes, bread, water and other supplies from the back seats to what my brothers and I used to call the way back.

The seats weren’t real comfortable, but the car got us to where we needed to be.

We stopped at a grocery store around the corner from the truck.

Alejandro ran in and surfaced a minute later, toting a many-gallon jug over his right shoulder like a trophy.

I don’t have water at home, he told us. There were a lot of people, but they let me pay tomorrow.

I’m a regular customer, he said.

He told us later that he didn’t want to wait in because he knew Dunreith still wasn’t feeling well.

We drove to the cabana where we were staying.

Along the way, Alejandro tarted talking about the interrelationship between indigenous cultures and music, how the Incans read music in spirals, and how you can hear the contributions each group made when you listen closely.

He believes that textiles reveals the same web of relationships, but they’re a mystery that no one understands yet.

We arrived at our cabin and dismounted from the jeep.

I enjoyed the conversation, Alejandro told me.

So did I, I answered.

I tried to give him some money for the ride, but he wouldn’t take it.

I do this for amistad, he said.

For friendship.

We exchanged a man hug, and then Alejandro Arellano rumbled off down the road and into the distance, 12 years into his time in San Pedro, new adventures ahead, free as anyone I’ve ever known.