ENTRIES / Mark Robertson
August 22, 2010
I grew up in the surf-soaked north San Diego. I went to college in the idyllic Mediterranean villa, Santa Barbara, where Oprah goes when she tires of her penthouse in Chicago. There seemed little reason to leave SoCal.
When I was married in 2005, my bride and I felt a stirring.A call of the wild--a call it what you will. Perhaps the "ideal" is not really idyllic. Perhaps an easy, coastal-suburban lifestyle was, for me, narrowing. Soon we found ourselves at a job fair in Waterloo, Iowa and got a job teaching in Brazil.
We work at The American School of Brasilia, the country's 50-year old Orwellian capital.
During Brasilia’s construction, a Rio paper called the project "the limit of insanity." When I arrived here, I agreed. The cerrado's red dusty landscape, and arid, windscapes and dry climate resemble Hubble's snapshots of Mars. Why us? Why here? How far's the ocean?
And then I learned that the cerrado is the world's most ecologically diverse region in the world, largely due to the startling diversity of the flora in the many microclimates…
And then I visited IBAMA, a rehab center for large cats, and met a jaguar that was found and nursed by a human mother along with her newborn child…
And then I visited Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua; I traveled in Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay; I surfed the Azuero peninsula in Panama; I hiked in Peru's sacred valley; and I drank coffee in the ancient cloud forests of Norwest Colombia and Yerba Mate with bus drivers from Uruguay…
When I started blogging I didn’t stop. My time is limited, but I’ve allotted a place in my mind that it is constantly logging, logging, logging, and loving shaping the experiences into language. WiFi signals come and go in Latin America, but there is enough material, no matter where I am, to scribble and send it back to the waves.
In short, I love the ache and draw and pull of my homesickness. It pushes me toward an inward home and a proselytizer’s zeal to share travel stories with others.
If selected I’ll have a grand platform to instill “the call it what you will” stirring, the kindling, of our beautiful, murky, complicated mangrove island we call culture.
