Winter again

This is not an adventure post...you'll just have to wait for riveting trail tales. 

If this damn Ph.D. is about creating the job I want for myself, this Fulbright is about making that job useful for someone else. 

The rain stops and forgotten sun awakens latent joy that quickly crumbles into nostalgia for a summer season that I won't see. Pictures of growing garlics germinated from cloves buried in a sunny south-facing Boulder bed in boreal winter compose a composted sense of participation, presence in a world that exists only in dreamland. I shouldn't be so dramatic, but dreams dictate an urgency, urges that I couldn't consciously communicate. Seeking sunshine at the stream stems such silliness, I cast catalina, catch a swirling, shearing eddy edge that leads the line lazy below boulders, toward trucha. Quedo, de sol a luna, ya tú sabes que no voy a encontrar nada en este arroyo más que la paz. 

Pacific patagonia is a strange land where I learned to stop worrying and love the rain, the mighty massive mar never lets us forget the close coast: temperate, tempered, tempting...  In these soggy forests and windswept plains, frigid flows and rocky ridges, I indulge internal, conceive craft and create, crazy in austral awakening. 

Abstraction aside, I'm stoked! We've stumbled on a simple system for forecasting flows throughout Patagonia, throughout Chile, based on plenty of public data. We have a friend in the director of the local Chilean water authority who shares the stoke and suggests ways we can develop and direct the work in a way that will be integrated with the way the water authority grants and renews water rights. I gag every time I read a hydrology paper in which the author introduces the work, 'this arcane, statistical method that no one understands but me is essential for water managers and stakeholders...' (paraphrasing). Here we have a unique opportunity to work directly for the water managers in a way that will impact policy and climate adaptation! I'm feeling pretty estranged from my adviser in the states for a number of reasons, and it's relieving to be productive and useful here and now. 

I'm moving out to Lago Atravesado this week - my Chile adviser and family are in the states until early July so I'm watching the house, hanging out with dog and cat, and building a fire whenever the ambient air temperature drops below -5° Celcius to keep the pipes from bursting. There is a sauna, greenhouse, and garden full of kale and potatoes that need to be harvested. Am I up to the task?