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23 Jun ' 23:24
On Monday I rose at five in the morning in order to be all packed up and ready for the transfer at six. The shuttle was completely full after all the passengers had been picked up. As we left San Pedro it was still dark, except for some smoky-pink clouds above Licancabur and Cerro Toco signalling that the sun, "in russet mantle clad", was close to the horizon.
The trip to Santiago was routine. There I was greeted by a Gonzalo, a Chilean friend from Princeton who is spending the summer at home. We drove downtown where we met up with Rolando at a Peruvian restaurant for luncheon. The food was really quite excellent and we took our time over it. Much of the conversation revolved around the Chilean election due to be held later this year.
When we were done eating Rolando departed as he had to get to some work. Gonzalo and I spent the next couple of hours walking about the city. It was a very nice, informal tour he gave me: I saw many landmarks to which a more conventional tour or guidebook would not have led me. When, at about five o'clock, we arrived back at Gonzalo's car, I was becoming footweary, especially after having such an early morning. But the day in Santiago was a very nice end to my time in Chile.
My flight to Miami left in the early evening. The in-flight film, She's Not That Into You, educated me on certain aspects of the western Zeitgeist which, in my life of scholarship, I am sometime apt to forget. When it had finished I managed to get two or three hours of sleep before we arrived at five in the morning in Miami. Since we were an early flight there were no lines at immigration and I passed through very quickly. There was little benefit as my connecting flight was not until a quarter after ten, but it is preferable to be sitting in a café eating breakfast than to be waiting to speak with an immigration officer.
Torrential rain swept through Miami a couple of hours later. This diverted a great number of incoming planes, including the one which was supposed to be used for my connexion. The boarding area where we all waited for updates on our flight status was next to a little enclosed courtyard, the one place in the airport where smokers are permitted to sate their cravings. The poor creatures were faced with a difficult choice: either to get wet puffing in the downpour, or to remain dry but without satisfying their tobacco lust. Many of them hung, haggard-faced, next to the door, like divers on the edge of a icy lake unsure whether they wanted to take the plunge.
At about one o'clock, the flight finally took off, about three hours behind schedule. I returned to Toronto rather than New Jersey in order to have a brief visit with my family. The weather when I emerged from the terminal was pleasantly warm and humid and I embraced it after the perpetual cold of the Atacama. But, dear reader, my stepping out of the airport at my journey's end signifies my return to private life and the completion of this chronicle. Though your narrator is absent, life in San Pedro and on Cerro Toco continues: the telescope still observes its chosen patches of sky, seeing deeper and deeper with each passing night, all the while quietly spooling data to disc with cosmological information we can now only eagerly anticipate uncovering.
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