The Bus Stop
San Pedro de Atacama is one of those places you visit and it stays with you forever. At least for me, this town in the middle of the Atacama desert changed the outcome of my life. It was ten years ago, on a day like today, when I met Ignacia on a dusty road in the center of this touristy oasis. Mid-afternoon, the desert winds were picking up, shaking the algarrobo trees growing along the San Pedro river. She had been waiting around this bus stop for a ride to work. Her red floral dress reflected the bright sun, contrasting with the volcanic dust that coats everything in town. I had just climbed a volcano with Josh Iverson. If any of you are wondering who that is, he was Student Body President of Bonneville High School in 1995. That’s how far back all this goes.
I moved to Chile in 2006, at a time when the Chilean economic model was making the neighbors jealous, tourism was a vibrant sector with no end in sight, and the call of the Andes was still a guidebook-less mystery. I stayed four years, a few of the best years of my life, perhaps. For my 30th birthday, we held a call-of-the-wild costume party. I wore a one-piece baby blue ski suit. I worked as a tour guide in the Andes, climbed plenty, and had a weekly internet radio show called Nice it Up with Nico Jah. Yes, those were the Nico Jah days, and I was living the dream.
Ignacia was enjoying some of the best years of her life, too. In her mid-twenties, she had moved out on her own to an apartment in Providencia, successfully juggling enough editorial design work and a career in NGO communications to afford life in high class Santiago, which back then was known as a great city for a reasonable price. She was doing strategic comms for meaningful organizations, practicing bikram yoga, traveling, all things she would call living the dream.
In San Pedro, Ignacia was working for Piensa Chile, a non-profit carrying out a massive, in-depth survey about life in Chile in order to create a master document that would hopefully inform the next administration’s public policy. In love with the desert, she chose to the Atacama work group. She carried out 15 workshops, each a 2-hour conversation with Chilean citizens to document the challenges their communities faced and suggestions for improving their country.
I went for the altitude. One day, I had Hans Schmitt, the man behind mountain climbing tour operator Spondylus, on my radio show. We talked about Chile, travel, and trekking in the Andes. We talked about the Atacama Desert and Patagonia’s glaciers. Little did I know, that conversation would lead me to my wife and eventually a family. As luck would have it, Josh-the student body president of my high school-was listening to the show from Boston. The high desert peaks inspired him to sign up for a Spondylus tour. Hans invited me to join, we were off to San Pedro where fate was waiting at a bus stop.
Love is Geography
Love flourishes where you flourish. We connected in the desert where spaces are exposed, where the horizons are endless. In the desert, there are few secrets. Its contours speak in truths, those of stone realities and prickly candor. In the desert, the past is told through fossils and the hardy ones endure extreme temperatures. Somewhere in that naked bedrock lies a metaphor for a successful relationship, as genuine as the red rock, and as honest as the wind shaping the landscape.
Back then, Ignacia and I each had other emotional attachments, but thanks to that chance encounter, we connected. Later on, we emailed, we chatted. Eventually we made a few phone calls. Three more years would go by before we actually fell in love, also in the Chilean desert. In 2012, I went back, following a pang of intuition I booked a flight to South America with Ethiopian Airlines. Six months later, she left everything she had in Chile and moved to Ethiopia, a sacrifice not many people would make. Ignacia and I didn’t let the oceans between us sink our dreams. Love is not only luck; it doesn’t happen to everybody. You have to be a risk-taker and a sacrifice-maker.
There is little rationale behind love stories. Most of the time it’s sheer randomness. Plenty of courage and perseverance are needed to turn these chance encounters into devoted partnerships, but without that first step, without the opening act, ten more years may go by before your story finds its main character. Or, it’s just as likely that the next person you meet is the perfect spouse. Every relationship has its near-hits and near-misses. Who knows in how many ways your life would be different if you hadn’t gone out that night, if you had chosen a different major, if you hadn’t swiped right on Tinder.
As much as the Rainbow’s odyssey across South America is about the discovery and adventure in new places, we are thankful for the difficult-to-predict circumstance that rerouted our journey back to San Pedro in the Atacama. On arrival, we walked through the village, telling our story to our children before showing them the bus stop, where we then reenacted our initial flirt, a decade later.
Despite the restlessness and non-stop movement of the campervan, returning to the places we love brings happiness. And it’s the love story that reinforces our past, our identities, and creates an emotional monument to behold and to treasure.
