Fever

'Transamericana - from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego' the title read, and so I recruited ten students to check out the thusly advertised slide presentation. As usual in situations when I move in public with students, it took me a while to discard the uneasy self-awareness of the teacher's role that holds my emotions in check on such occasion - keeping an eye peeled on the students, while keeping the other peeled on my own (doubtlessly role-model) behaviour, I don't usually allow myself to feel situations as intensely as when on my own. The less-then-unromantic atmosphere of the location - a VW saleshouse in SFG - didn't help much, but the show was really good, and so I slowly slipped into the trippy mode. By the time we had gotten to the Atacama, I was completely gone, absorbed in the beauty of the images of landscapes, nature, and people, which reminded me so much of my own experiences on my trips - the loneliness in the desert where silence is so complete as to hurt in your ear, the bumpiness of a dirt track, which makes your arms clutching the steering rubbery with vibration, the dust and grit and sweat and adventure. By the end of the show my soul was screaming to go, go, just fucking go, to where the eyes can roam and see no ugly buildings and asphalt, and I felt that familiar old nagging, yearning, longing, spreading from the stomach - strangely reminiscent of being madly, and unhappily, in love...

A sight from God's Window in South 'Africa - from my last voyage.
How far can He see?

And then it was over and we stepped outside into the SFG night - and I was a teacher again.