The End of the World (or, “People See What They Want to See”)
It’s the middle of June and there’s two feet of snow lining the runway. Our plane buzzes low over cold blue seawater, rubber wheels hit the icy tarmac. I’m pinned to the part of the planet that God pulled down south and then tucked into place with frozen rocks and sea ice. The southern hemisphere plunges further south from this tiny airport where I deplane and grab my bag, but not much of humanity follows it down there. Maybe I’m looking for the end of the world, perhaps to prove to myself that it’s not really the end. You see what you want to see.
A couple hours later me and Spencer are huddled in a rental car with studded snow tires, working our way through the hard rocky hills, snow-splattered flats, and cold, empty air shot through with golden arrows from that low, distant, cool-burning sun. This corner of Chile juts out into the Straits of Magellan, water named for a restless man who traveled far from home looking for God and died there on a beach in the springtime. I don’t think I’m much like Magellan. Except I’m a bit restless, and I do find myself far from home a lot. Also, I unapologetically look everywhere for God. I should probably be careful on beaches in the springtime.
Two months later my son was driving us through the desert. Hot American air, fused with tufts of time, kept charging at us, sliding past us, wafting up to some mansion in the sky behind us. The road ended at an airport. We parked beside the curb and pulled our suitcases from the car. We were all flying home, but not my son. Halen stayed. He left on his LDS mission to Peru a couple weeks later. We wouldn’t see him, touch him, walk beside him, for two years. Two years isn’t very long. It’s also an eternity. So I pulled him close in the departures lane with the car running and the desert burning up all around us, and I tried to memorize the shape of his shoulder blades, the way the sunlight made a halo on his hair. I pulled him close to me and breathed him in. I held my breath. Then he had to drive away and I had to exhale. I watched that breath waft up to heaven, all sacred and invisible, like a holy little ghost.
There’s a lake way up high in Patagonia that hangs like a hallowed jewel against the stony nape of the mountains. A series of massive rock towers rise majestically upwards behind the lake and brush up against the blue sky, like a blessing that everybody wants to see, some so they can Instagram it, hashtag it, commoditize it, others just to be close to it because they don’t know why. Me and Spencer want to see it. But you’re not allowed to make the 14-mile hike in the wintertime without a guide. I’m not sure whether this rule is to keep hikers safe or to keep the guides employed through the gaunt winter months. So me and Spencer hire Vincent and we climb the holy mountain.
Vincent says more than 3,000 people per day make the hike in the summertime. Today we’re the only three people here, trudging through knee-deep blankets of winter. The careless clouds are low and they spit out snowflakes because they’ve got nothing else to do. The pines thin out the higher we go and the daylight gets flat and the world loses definition. Gravity tells us what’s up and what’s down, but gravity is the only thing making any noise up here. Then Vincent says we’ve arrived. Everything is white and it’s ten degrees and the lake has been frozen for weeks. The snow is high and the clouds are still low. I don’t know for sure whether the towers of stone are soaring heavenward and blessing the blue sky or not. Vincent hunkers down in a snow drift and heats up some coffee, says he’s sorry we can’t see anything today. I say that’s okay. I watch the snow swirl, I feel it flit past my face, brush up against my eyelashes, like a blessing I want to see. I guess people see what they want to see.
It was September in the middle of the night at home in El Salvador. Thunder boomed at 3 am. Rain ravaged the roof, the trees and flowers, the dark night air. I woke with a start, then drifted back into some wispy world between thoughts and dreams. Halen was thousands of miles away, but I sensed something in the room. When I opened my eyes he was standing in my bedroom doorway. I know his outline like I know the outlines of all the holy little ghosts that have ever lit upon me. Halen took just a step or two into the room and I got up, circled the bed, told him I miss him, and hugged him as tight as you can hug a hope. When you dream like this, you know it's not real. But the scent of my son, the shape of his shoulder blades, the street lamps making halos on his hair. Maybe I don't know real as well as I think I do. Maybe real doesn't know itself that well. He was as much in my arms as he was anywhere else. Halen said he’s okay, that he's happy. I already knew that. Knowing something isn't everything though. There are things that knowing doesn't understand.
Rain beat on the world, lightning flickered, thunder grumbled. Halen said he had to go. He melted back into his own dreams. I know this isn't real. But what do I really know? Less than I think. People see what they want to see.
