I’m still in the cubicle with nothing to do… it’s Thursday, so I still have one more day to go after this one ends, and even more depressing than that, I still have more than a month to go. The sandwich guy is walking by as I type. He’s this random dude who sells sandwiches in the break room and he walks through the office every morning at this time calling out: Good Morning! Happy Thursday! ‘How does he know?’ I grump to myself. At least I know when he walks through that means only a half an hour until lunch. I sit back in my chair and stare at the royal blue screen of the Semtek program. Its color reminds me of perhaps the most vivid blue I’ve ever seen: the color of the water on the salt flats of Bolivia during rainy season…
I woke up that morning around 5:30am, which was no insignificant feat, considering I had gone to bed only a few hours earlier. I opened the clapboard door to structure Claire and I had stayed in and saw gray tendrils on the horizon.
“Shit,” I said to Claire. “We need to get going. Up and at ‘em.” I only heard a grumbled response, but I knew she’d be right behind me.
As hard as it was to get myself up, it paled in comparison to the task of rousing the group as well as the 4x4 drivers. The night before we had been up way too late obliterating bottle after bottle of cheap rum and cheaper beer. I particularly remember Neil and Tom’s impassioned renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody, Fat-Bottom Girls and other Queen favorites. Either one of those guys is hilarious when they’re on their own and sober, but get them together with a bottle of rum and you’ll literally be crying-laughing for hours.
Unfortunately, by 5:45am on a frigid morning all the hilarity had seeped away with the last drop of rum. I stumbled across the rocky driveway towards the main building. We had spent the night in the foothills on the shore of salt flats. The site was accurately called a refuge; cob buildings with aluminum roofs, no heating and electricity that only worked for a few hours every evening. I paused for a moment to admire the slowly fading, but still stunning nightscape. At over 10,000 feet there is much less atmosphere obscuring the sky than where sane people normally live and at that moment we were probably sixty kilometers from the nearest electricity so there was no light pollution to obscure the crystal clear canvas. The black blanket of night, gaudy with twinkling stars, draped all the way down to the straight-line horizon. The smear of the Milky Way was directly overhead. The sky was so perfect, it looked like a replica, as if God had woke up in middle of the night and thought to herself, ‘You know what? I’m going to bedazzle that shit.’
As I tromped into the main building, I decided to start with the drivers. Though they didn’t always agree with me, they at least had some obligation to do what I told them so I figured they’d be easier to get moving than my hungover group. I knocked on the door to their room and eventually I heard a shuffling behind the door. Finally it opened and one of the drivers, squinting in the light of my flashlight, said, “Si? Que es la problema?”
“There’s no problem,” I replied in Spanish, “but we need to get going. I want us to be on the flats for dawn.”
I’m sure after the late night, he went to sleep secure in the knowledge he’d have an extra couple hours in the morning as we slept off our hangovers and so over the next thirty seconds, it was interesting to watch the seven steps of depression start to play out on his face. Of course the first step was shock and dismay, which came when he realized this crazy gringo actually meant to make him get up at this ungodly hour. The next step pain and guilt (why did I ever agree to take this group?) came and then went quickly into anger and bargaining, which led to this exchange. “Amigo!” he half shouted. “We have lots of time before dawn.”
“Yes,” I replied, “but I want to be there for dawn, which means we need to get moving now.”
“I think if we wait one more hour it will be good, no?”
“Nope, now.” I said.
He hung his head as the next stage, depression, settled over him and I left him to work out the upturn, reconstruction and finally acceptance on his own.
The people in my group were not so easy to convince. Nobody had a real clear idea of why I wanted them up in the first place. They all had seen dawn before and had no real desire to see it that morning. I started cajoling, threatening and physically pulling people out of their beds. I told them it would be the best thing they saw during their whole four months in South America and if they missed it, they would regret it the rest of their lives. Of course, I had no idea if that was true. I had never been out on the flats for dawn and in fact never had heard of any other tours doing it either. However the rainy season in Uyuni only lasts a few weeks and in that time the normally bone dry, utterly flat landscape fills with about 2-10 inches of perfectly still water creating a mirror effect of ground and sky. Ever since I had missed it the year before because I was too lazy to go on the excursion (and I had already been on it several times before and had no reason to suspect it would be any different this time) I had promised myself I would not only go and see the water-filled salt flats, I would wake-up and see it a dawn! And since I wanted to see it, the group had to go too.
Finally after exhausting every trick in the book, I had everybody more or less up. The only person who I didn’t eventually get out of bed was Martin, who threatened physical violence against me and was one of the few people big and ornery enough to actually back it up. After a quick bite and use of the facilities (I seem to remember more than one person needing to regurgitate the fun from the night before) we piled into the 4x4s and drove out to the flats.
The fact was, the drivers were probably right. We could have waited another half hour or so to head out, but I was given some leeway because at least now everyone could see what I had been talking about. To our right it was dark, the brilliant stars still hung over the horizon, while to our left tendrils of pink were starting to invade the gray sky. Behind us rooster tails thrown high by our jeeps shattered the dark mountain outlines in the water’s reflection. We stopped about a half-mile into the flats and as the water settled around us to once again paint a perfect likeness of the sky above, we climbed on top of the 4x4s to watch the show.
It was bitterly cold and the smart people were bundled up in coats, thick sweatshirts and long pants. I on the other hand, had thought that maybe I would want to walk around in the water a little, so had dressed in my Evergreen State hoodie, shorts and havianas. That way I wouldn’t ruin my one pair of shoes. Shivering, we sat on the luggage racks, watching the glow slowly creep over the edge of the world. As it grew lighter, mountains appeared on the horizon along with low-lying clouds, but because of the reflection it was hard to tell which was which.
I wanted to get down and take a picture of the group huddled on the tops of the jeeps, but I was freezing and I wasn’t looking forward to walking around basically barefoot in the icy water. It was still pre-dawn and the color in the water was glorious. When I looked straight down, the water was a deep luxurious blue, but as my gaze lifted blue slowly faded to gray, before orange took over and gradually became deeper until the burnt sienna of the horizon. Then as my gaze continued up above the horizon the process reversed itself.
Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer. It’s rare that you can capture the true beauty of a dawn or a sunset and often the better picture is what’s behind you, bathed in that beautiful soft light. So with that in mind and my camera in my pocket, I eased down into the cold water. Though the water only came up to my ankles it was still a shock just how cold it was. Immediately my toes were chilled to the bone. Close up, the water appeared milky with saline and I could feel the salty grit sloshing under my feet and between my toes. Walking in flops proved to be problematic as they kept suctioning to the ground underneath the surface, but taking them off was even worse because walking on the crystallized saline felt like walking on serrated knives. Eventually, keeping the havis on, I learned to walk on my tiptoes and made my way out into the water, leaving a little bubble trail behind me.
I walked out about twenty feet and stopped. My feet were so cold that I just wanted to get it over with. As I turned, perfect concentric ripples grew around me, slowly running towards the dawn, the dark, the mountains, the jeeps and everything else. Now that I was out there, I immediately knew that the shot wasn’t going to be as cool as I hoped. It was all right, everyone huddled together on reflecting jeeps in the pink light, but the real show was behind me. I snapped a couple of pictures and then went around to the other side and snapped a few so that the jeeps were shadows in front of the dawn, but nothing came out that great (and anyway all those pictures were lost along with every picture I took in S.A. when my computer and external hard drive was stolen two days before I came home… it was tragic and I don’t want to talk about it).
I climbed back up on the jeep and tried to swipe the layer of salt off my calves and ankles, while trying in vain to warm my feet. As is the case with almost any sunrise, the sun breaking over the horizon was anti-climatic after the spectacular pre-dawn. Still, we waited another hour or so before finally climbing back into the jeeps and moving on. I didn’t realize that people had been taking pictures of me when I was out trying to take ones of them, until later when I was looking through Michael Rimmer’s camera. Even on the small viewfinder of his camera, I could tell it was the most amazing picture that had ever been taken of me. It’s the one that hangs in my room today and the one that’s on the opening page of my blog. There were others taken while I was out in the water, but some how he framed it just perfectly. Every time I see that picture I’m immediately transported to that perfect moment in time.
Driving out into the middle of the flats in the daylight the water so perfectly replicated the blue sky and puffy white clouds that it felt like we were floating. We stopped and took a group picture, careful not to disrupt the water and the reflection was so distinct that you can pick each person out…
My phone rings and I am startled out of my reverie. “This is Mike,” I say, fumbling to get my headset on.
“Mike,” a voice says in my ear, “it’s Vickie from Harrisburg?”
“Thanks. Go ahead and put her through.” I wait for the line to change over. “Vickie, hi!” I say with enthusiasm that I don’t feel. “We’ve added a date in your area this fall, so I wanted to know if the Berkshire I is available…”
It’s Thursday… only one more day to go until the weekend.
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