Catholicism indelibly shaped much of the history of the San Luis Valley — it even informed the actions of the Valley’s first mythic villain. Few know that America’s first serial killer came from the San Luis Valley. Even fewer know that he was inspired by probably the only apparition of the Virgin Mary who besought her witness to carve the still-beating hearts out of as many white people as possible (or so the witness claimed). No doubt, these two dozen grisly murders were products of a supremely unhinged mind, but they were also a twisted articulation of mounting racial tension in the Valley, a tension that persists today — and it’s worth taking a quick survey of the atmosphere in which Espinosa committed his crimes.

The lack of precipitation in the Valley (it gets seven inches annually, tops) would render agriculture impossible were it not for a combination of artesian wells and canals diverting Rio Grande water to farmland. And in fact, despite being classified as a desert, the Valley is an important agricultural hub: enough alfalfa grows there to give bunnies the world over heart palpitations of joy. But if land isn’t adjacent to a water source, it’s dust. Back when the area was still part of Spain, the imperial government doled out huge land grants to Hispanic settlers. By the time the Americans came, the best land had long been part of multi-generation family plots.


So when Americans “annexed” the Valley and surrounding environs, they discovered that Hispanic settlers had the vast majority of arable land. What miffed the Americans most was that the Hispanic settlers still primarily practiced subsistence farming, and exchanged commodities mostly through barter. Americans saw the situation as another “white man’s burden” kind of scene, with their burden being to bring these anachronistic folk into the nineteenth century.

One of the first things the new territorial government needed to do was to survey existing plots of land and legally register them in accord with American property laws. This process of surveying and deeding turned out to be a prime opportunity for Americans to dispossess the Hispanic settlers of their best land.

Here’s how it happened: An American surveyor would visit a Hispanic landowner and inform him of good news: the landowner’s property was now part of the United States. And in order to be a legal American landowner the exact boundaries of his property would need to be surveyed. Unfortunately, the surveyor would inform the landowner, surveying isn’t cheap. The landowner would be informed that he had to pay the surveyor for his services.

Typically the landowner would inform the surveyor that he had no legal tender currency. The surveyor often responded with an idea: the landowner could pay the surveyor using his own land. To pay for the surveyor’s exorbitant fees, the landowner would have to cede the most valuable parts of his land, those parts with access to irrigation. It seems almost incredible today, but through this process, Hispanics in the Valley lost more than two-thirds of their land in a few short years. This led to astonishing poverty, cultural isolation, and no small amount of churning rage.

Even before he himself faced this surveying tomfoolery, Felipe Espinosa seethed about the treatment of Hispanics in the area by the Americans. He was intensely proud of his Spanish Catholic heritage and was infuriated by the influx of Protestants who saw his faith as barbaric. In his youth, during the American invasion of Mexico (euphemistically known here as “The First American Intervention” and “The Mexican-American War”), Espinosa saw six civilians killed by American shelling off his town in what became New Mexico.

In 1863, Espinosa (with the help of others) began murdering Americans. His killings are unclassifiable: they demonstrate aspects of spree killings (committed in a relatively short period of time), serial killings (ritualistic treatment of the bodies of victims), and political insurgency (motivated by fury at occupation of his homeland). Perhaps these taxonomical difficulties are what render Espinosa a historical unknown — H.H. Holmes of Chicago World Fair infamy gets credit for being the first serial killer in America.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the case is that Espinosa claimed to have been inspired by an apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Given the racial tension that catalyzed these killings, her appearance seems important to note. The Virgin of Guadalupe had historically been used as a mediator between native and colonial religions in post-conquest Latin America. La Virgen de Guadalupe has been seen paradoxically as both a symbol of native empowerment as well as a tool for colonial powers to force Catholicism on native populations. Because the hero of her legend is the peasant Juan Diego, and the story employs traditional native symbolism and imagery, she represents the power of native tradition. On the other hand, some interpret this same use of native semiotics as a cynical veneer of sympathy by a Church bent on snuffing out those very traditions.

When she appeared to Espinosa, the Virgin certainly did not bear a message of love. He claimed she demanded that he cut the hearts of six hundred white people (one hundred for each of the six civilians killed by Americans that he saw). He began his murders in the San Luis Valley, and the first victim was found in May, the body hideously mutilated and the heart cut out.

Espinosa killed at least 23 more people (no mean feat in this sparsely populated area) before trackers shot and killed him. Residents and travelers through the area had no information about the author of these crimes or the intent of their macabre symbolism until late in the spree. An educated man, he wrote the territorial governor to demand a land grant from the government and complete immunity for himself and his accomplices; if denied, he insisted that he would kill another five hundred and seventy gringos. Terror gripped the region, and the already taxing passage through these harsh mountains and valleys became sinister journeys of abject terror. No one knew anything beyond the fact that bodies were being found sans hearts throughout the region.

Espinosa and his coterie finally slipped up when a particularly gruesome robbery went awry; the victim survived and described his attackers. A short time later, a team of trackers found Espinosa et alia and killed them. Despite Espinosa’s letter describing the wrongs perpetrated by the Americans and the clearly targeted nature of the killings, the incident led to no particular soul-searching among elites of the area. To many, it was another senseless apparition of the violence that seemed to haunt the American West at the time. To others, the incident was the product of a man unhinged by a loss in a just war. The absorption of the San Luis Valley into the vast folds of America continued unabated, though it was never fully completed — a fact one can see easily upon visiting this strange place.

Photo by Tony Poole

Photo by Li Hao

On our first full day in Tokyo, we’d done nothing but the touristy stuff: the Imperial Palace, the shopping district of Shinjuku, the busy intersection of Shibuya — all of which were noteworthy but, disappointingly, not all that weird. Our last stop was Akihabara, where we were supposed to meet a friend, but he was late (or maybe we were). So we found ourselves looking for something weird to do in the “Electric Town,” which was famous for its electronic stores, video game arcades, anime culture, and something called “maid cafes.”

I looked up maid cafes in our guidebook. The concept sounded simple enough: they were bars where the waitresses were dressed as French maids. Sure, the idea of girls in maid costumes seemed a bit perverse, but no more harmless than, say, a Hooters. Maids even wore less-revealing clothing. And though I’d never been to a Hooters in the States, I was compelled by the idea of visiting what I believed to be the “Hooters of Japan.”

My roommate Jordan was unconvinced that the “Hooters of Japan” was a good idea, being the kind of gay man who shudders at the mere mention of the word “vagina,” but he too had been disappointed by the overall banality of our day. Also I think he wanted some coffee.

There were maids on every block of Akihabara’s crowded, noisy streets, attempting to shout “maid cafe” in English over a cacophony of arcades and street traffic and people. We said hello to a girl, dressed almost like a sailor maid, and she handed us a flier adorned with cheery anime girls. I asked her where the cafe was, and she motioned for us to follow her.

She led us down a busy alleyway, through another busy alleyway, and into an old, nondescript building well off the main street. The three of us crowded into a two-person elevator with walls covered in fake grass (think mini golf green). We rode the elevator to the fourth floor, which opened up to a small, smoky bar. It wasn’t particularly nice, but it wasn’t unpleasant either. The cafe was plain, with two bars, two maids stationed behind each.

There was a ¥300 cover (about $4). On top of that, we had two options: ¥800 for a half hour of unlimited soda and coffee or ¥3000 for an hour of unlimited beer and cocktails (actually not a bad deal in Japan). I didn’t understand why there was a time limit, but we pointed to the cheaper option on the menu and asked for coffee.

Our maid finally introduced herself. Her name was Kalumi — she spelled it out — but it was clear that she wanted it to be “Cream” (“like in coffee,” she said). That was about the extent of her English. After Kalumi brought us our coffee, she stood in front of us and watched us drink. I realized that unlike Hooters, we weren’t merely at a bar with attractive waitresses. They were supposed to talk to us — we were paying them to talk to us, paying for their time. In a way, it felt like a non-sexual form of prostitution.

But Kalumi was in high spirits. Since she couldn’t really hold a conversation with us, she doodled pictures of animals on a napkin, and we had to guess what they were.

“It’s a dog,” I’d say, and she would smile and clap. We got through all the basic farm animals and a few cartoon characters. Even Jordan seemed to be enjoying himself, and he doodled a sheep on Kalumi’s napkin.

“Hitsuji!” she said, jumping and clapping her hands.

We were seated next to a group of four other patrons — young Japanese guys in their early 20s who were chatting up another maid. They were also drinking coffee, but from the number of cigarette butts in their ashtrays, they had been there for at least a few hours. Their maid laughed and giggled and seemed overwhelmingly miserable, batting away advances and generally keeping her distance from the patrons.

After Kalumi brought us a couple ginger ales, she drew a map of Japan. She was from a small town several hours away from Tokyo. I sketched an outline of the U.S. and pointed to the northwest, to indicate that we were from Seattle. I looked over at the other maid, who was being hit on by four guys at once, and thought that we must be giving Kalumi a much-needed break from that. But as soon as we hit the half hour mark, Kalumi handed us our bill and walked off. I was wrong. We were just like any other customer.

That evening, we returned to the apartment, where our host Tadashi and his roommates were having a dinner party. They had invited a group of girls over, all of whom were cute and spoke impeccable English. They asked us what we had seen in Tokyo, and when I brought up Akihabara, one girl asked if we had been to a maid cafe. I was hesitant to admit it, but I said that we had accidentally stumbled into one for coffee. She explained that “Japan is a very weird place.” I couldn’t tell if she was embarrassed about maid cafes or for us.

It wasn’t until dinner a couple days later that Tadashi admitted that he had been to a maid cafe before. His roommates had too, all reluctant to admit this when the other girls were over. Later in the conversation, Tadashi, who worked part time at an electronics store in Shinjuku, said he met a “nice girl” at work. Jokingly, I prodded to see if he had asked her out.

“I go up to her and I said ‘hello’ and walked away.”

We all laughed. He asked me how I would talk to a nice girl. I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I told him to be friendly and just ask her a lot of questions about herself.

Hiroshi, another roommate, piped in. “Japanese girls don’t talk much.”

The rest of the housemates nodded to show they agreed. The room got kind of quiet, and we mostly finished our meals in silence.

The Days Inn in Clarksburg, West Virginia has earned five “sunbursts,” an indicator that it has fulfilled Corporate’s highest quality assurance standards. At its front desk, a sign states that if you live within a 50-mile radius of the hotel, your business is no good there. I asked the receptionist about the reason behind the rule. She said she wasn’t really sure, but “a lot of locals end up destroying the room and stuff.”

The squat, tan building – distinguished only by its shining sun logo – shares a parking lot with the USA Steak Buffet located just off I-79. Less than a mile away is a dormant downtown that is probably livelier on weekdays. The new core of the city has moved a few miles south along the interstate to the Eastpointe Shopping Center – the state’s largest strip mall, a disorienting blob of 80 stores arranged in classic sprawl.

I moved on from Clarksburg after a night at the Days Inn and haven’t been back since. I was their ideal guest: just passing through and with a home more than 50 miles away.

To drive along any interstate in the United States is to become familiar with the limited palette of budget hotel logos: the Comfort Inn and its tri-colored circle with wavy lines; Motel 6 and its blurry, red six; and the generic white text on blue background of the Rodeway Inns and Travelodges. The corporate logos of today are a far cry from the eclectic and original motel signs of previous decades, which lured in travelers with neon cowboys and teepees.

However they might try to brand themselves, roadside lodging falls into the category of what French anthropologist Marc Augé calls “non-place,” or in other words, a place of transit or a temporary abode which “cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.” Fast cars, trains, and planes have ushered us into an era where our expanding mobility allows us to physically pop in or out of non-places, such as hotels or airports, which do not always leave meaningful impressions.

A scene from Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 film Mystery Train comes to mind. Two Japanese tourists travel to Memphis and after checking into a shabby hotel, the male tourist begins taking photos of the room.

Girl: Why do you only take pictures of the rooms we stay in and never what we see outside while we travel?

Guy: These other things are in my memory. The hotel rooms and the airports are the things I’ll forget.

Thus Augé: “The traveler’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place.”

Before the internet and the surge of online review sites, the vast landscape of budget hotels were a bit of a no-man’s land. Despite a healthy amount of pre-internet guidebooks profiling cheap roadside motels, the proliferation of the corporate logo – and its promise of consistent “quality” – seemed to displace the need for personalized reviews of minor, “non-destination” hotels along the freeway. Was there really any difference worth documenting between two Super 8 motels 20 miles apart? And if so, who had the time or desire to catalogue thousands of roadside motels when in all likelihood the traveler would just take what she could get. After all, these cheap motels were just resting points on the way to grander locations.

But now, any corporate chain is just as worthy of an online review (if not more) than a luxury hotel. And not always a positive one, either: according to a 2011 report from the market research firm PhoCusWright, the number of reviews of two and three star hotels on online review sites has increased, while reviews of four and five star hotels have declined.

Now, the most minor details of a $50-per-night hotel stay are documented and shaped into stories, giving the most forgettable chain hotel a semi-permanent presence online. We see hotel identities emerge at a local level beyond a brand, and with such detailed reviews, I wonder if our stays at cheap hotels are as impressionless as the concept of non-place would have us believe. With each review we give identity and texture to places that were deemed unworthy of such attention decades before.

I first experienced this when I read about the Leland Hotel in Detroit on TripAdvisor. Though I had been to Detroit once and had never visited the Leland, I became engrossed in reading travelers’ descriptions online. In short, it’s one of the misfit hotels of the world that, shunned by tourists, caters instead to black markets, partiers, and renters.

Up until 2006, the Leland, an impressive Beaux Arts structure built in 1927, operated under the name Ramada Inn Downtown Detroit. Then, apparently forcibly, but also in time for the Super Bowl, they dropped the Ramada flag. Oddly enough, when you searched Google for “Ramada Inn Downtown Detroit” two months ago, a reservation page for the Leland was the first hit.

In between the portraits of dejected humanity and stern warnings to other travelers on review sites, the Leland is portrayed as the scariest hotel in the Midwest. Tourists who thought they were booking a night at the Ramada, as opposed to a hotel with a goth-industrial club in the basement, begin reviews on TripAdvisor with:

My night stay at the Ramada Inn downtown Detroit was the worst and most terrifying experience of my life.

Or:

The lobby was full of bedraggled people with redoubtable demeanour.

For some, this is the allure of a place like the Leland. Boundaries of privacy and “decency” are in constant flux there, making it appealing to photographers like Chip Willis, who told me that, during a trip to the Leland in 2008, he photographed a nude model in a fully functioning elevator for about ten minutes without objections from anyone.

Every individual room at the Leland embodies a miniature catastrophe. Some reviewers described their stay as traumatic, while others had only “disturbing” encounters, like the man who found this bloody handprint in his room. Other reviewers are confounded by the physical space of the Leland:

There was a locked closet and a sealed door in our room. The sealed door was painted shut and had no handle, it wasn’t going anywhere. The hotel room next to us had the number taken off and was also sealed. I swear at one point I heard 3 distinct taps from that direction, but I never heard it again when I listened.

Still, the Leland is a “survivor,” according to Buildings of Detroit. While movie theaters and shops shut down in its vicinity, the Leland and its 22 stories – though decaying – have remained open for almost a century. In this way, the Leland doesn’t work as a non-place, even if it tried to pass as a Ramada for a few years. Firmly positioned in its local environment and with a history unmatched by any corporate chain, it complicates how we have become accustomed to interacting with hotels in a distant and detached manner. Unlike the hotel in Clarksburg, West Virginia, which banned locals, the Leland wouldn’t have survived without them, even if it has sacrificed a few tourists in the mix.

Just last month, I was traveling through the Midwest en route to Wisconsin and considered a night in Detroit. I was eager to stay at this place, which had such fabled reputation. I called the Leland to check their availability. “Anything open Saturday night?” I asked the receptionist. “No,” she said. “Sunday?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Anything available ever?” She hung up. I stayed at a Motel 6 outside of Toledo instead.

Stairwell photo by Chip Willis

Mid-hike of the Philosopher's Walk on Father's Day. Dad said it was a lot easier when he was 20.

This June I emptied about 3/4 of my bank account to fund a trip to a place I didn’t care about. I did no planning, I had no interest in any particular sites or experiences, and I didn’t set out to learn much about the culture. My sister, dad, and I were going to Germany. And it was my idea.

Germany means very little to me, but it’s a place of great significance for my sister and father. Dad spent his time in the military stationed in Heidelberg and hadn’t been back since leaving in the ’70s. My sister believes her exchange experience to Germany in high school shaped her adult life. For the past five years I’ve been trying to find an opportunity when all three of us would be able to take off work and school long enough to go together. Finally, the planets were aligning for all of us to be free last June. Tickets were purchased, hotels were booked, German was practiced, and in mid-June, we were there.

We did manage to do a few distinctly German things, but our first priority was memory lane for my dad. Second priority was memory lane for my sister. Third priority was getting me one of those huge soft pretzels (the only thing I said I wanted to do during planning). Leftover time could be for new German cultural experiences.

The things we did for my father included touring his old Army barracks and part-time job, eating at an upscale restaurant in downtown Heidelberg he used to frequent, stopping at a garden café he went to with his mother when she visited him overseas, and walking the Philosopher’s Path of Heidelberg.

Every one of these activities came with plenty of stories that gave context for everything I had gleaned about my father’s youth. I was overcome with a sense of timelessness and love as my sister, Dad, and I reached the top of the Philosopher’s Path overlooking the entire city. It was the most memorable Father’s Day we had ever experienced. But it was semi-incidental that we were in Germany.

At the restaurants we specifically sought out, my dad looked around, explaining how things were different, how they were the same, and what significant things had happened over there or in that corner or right here. But did we discuss the difference between German and American service? Décor? Ambiance? Not really. I noted things here and there, but I was distracted by family history. It’s like we could have sat in Dad’s kitchen and heard all the same information.

The weirdest part of the trip was visiting Dad’s old part-time job. He used to work at the base cinema that has since been turned into the formal theater for the military community’s productions So, for one of the few nights we spent across the Atlantic, we saw an English community theater production of the Gershwin musical Crazy for You. Coincidentally, my dad and I had seen Crazy for You together before — my sister was in it in high school. Her production was better. (Although I will say it’s pretty interesting to watch a bunch of muscular women dance around as Ziegfeld follies.)

My dad on the "floating bridge" that looks out over Neuschwanstein castle in Schwangau.

Since my sister’s experiences with Germany were more of a tourist nature to begin with, revisiting her memories at least gave us some built-in culture. We visited Neuschwanstein — arguably one of the three most famous castles in the world. I highly recommend seeing it if you ever visit Germany. The king who built it was imprisoned for insanity, and his persecutors used his house as proof of his mental instability. Think a mural of Jesus floating on a rainbow and a giant mural of woodland creatures (that Walt Disney based the artistic design of Bambi on). But, while we waited for our tour time, I didn’t bop around reading signage because I was wrapped up listening to my sister tell me about how when she was here as a freshman in high school, she got stuck in the rain and almost missed her bus.

When we went to Fussen, a nearby small town, she wanted to eat at a place that advertised selling “American Pizza” because the owner had been really welcoming to her while she was staying there on a business trip a few years ago over (what she didn’t know was) a Germany holiday. We complied — it was part of her history with Germany.

I was very pleased with my vacation to Deutschland. It was beautiful, I ate a ton of good food, and I learned a lot about my family. The question remains: did I have to go to Germany for that? The answer is yes, although I can’t quite tell you why. I didn’t try to understand any aspect of German culture, nor would I feel comfortable attempting to relate textbook culture to what I experienced there. Did I just use another country as a backdrop for my own American adventure? In some ways, it’s unavoidable to view other cultures from outside your own bubble wrap of personal culture, but shouldn’t we at least try?

Perhaps. And normally, I would really care. But, I’m just not worried in this instance. Maybe I missed my chance to really dive into observing German culture for the moment, but I can always read about it. You could make the same argument for learning about my family. I could have always just heard about it. But, if I had to decide which kind of education I’d rather be on location for, hands down it’s my family history.

And I might even get another chance with Germany one day. Or, maybe in twenty years I could be back with a niece, sitting in the garden café telling her about her grandfather and great-grandmother coming here. I could be waiting for the carriage to Neuschwanstein with her — not reciting facts about the architecture from a guidebook, but telling the story of how this was the place I almost had a meltdown about finding an ice cream cart because I hadn’t eaten in 20 hours. And how after I got a cone of chocolate and settled down, my sister detailed what running down the mountain in soggy flip-flops was like.

It was an unconventional European vacation to say the least, but it was ours, and all our expectations were met. I ate not one, but two big soft pretzels. Who could ask for anything more?

A couple years after the UFO convention, I returned to the San Luis Valley to do research on the Penitentes, Catholic groups scattered across the various villages and towns. These groups are fully Roman Catholic but also hold their own separate meetings in buildings called moradas.

I pulled into one town late in the afternoon, just ahead of a thunderstorm. The town was tucked away at the end of a dirt road, and was mostly abandoned. The town was only a few stucco buildings with tin roofs, surrounded on all sides by alfalfa fields and dust. I quickly spotted a beautiful Penitente morada, and asked the adjacent property owner if it would be alright if I took some pictures, as I tried to have photos of the moradas in each town I visited. He didn’t say anything but made a gesture indicating yes.

As I crawled under the barbed wire to take a pictures, a couple more people came out and stood at the edge of their properties and stared at me. Then a couple more. There were never more than a handful, and nobody said anything, but the whole thing got disconcerting real fast. Between the impending thunderstorm and the discomfort between me and the neighbors, the air was getting tense. I left.

It’s not like the people in the town were being creepy — I was. It takes a bit of impropriety just to show up in a town not used to visitors and ask to take pictures of a religious dwelling there. I noticed this vague tension in other towns in the Valley, so I set out to the New Mexico state archives in Santa Fe to get a handle on why these situations were so uncomfortable. It all starts on the East Coast.

Let’s pretend you’re an aristocratic man living on the East Coast around 1835. You’re doing various aristocratic things and generally yukking it up when you come down with a frightful case of the pleurisy. You go to the doctor for the treatment du jour for your lungs, which are beginning to worry you.

Unfortunately, contemporary wisdom is that the cure for a devastating lung infection and its attendant physical weakness is to plop you into a covered wagon and send you at a brisk pace of ten miles per day across one of the vastest, emptiest, harshest expanses of land in the world, through several nations and the shattered remains of the Spanish Empire. The dry air is good for your lungs.

You’re pretty tense going through the Indian nations, given that your mere presence is an affront to their sovereignty. So it comes as a relief when the leader of your phalanx tells you that you’ll shortly be passing into Christian territory (that is, the newly formed state of Mexico, soon to be the even newer-formed state of New Mexico). You pull into the next town but are a bit alarmed at the noise level.

There’s a procession happening. It features people with large wooden carvings of Catholic saints. They’re doing strange things, putting the carvings in fields and yelling at them for not bringing rain. Some people are flagellating themselves. Given that you’re a 19th century Protestant aristocrat, you’re generally of the opinion that Catholics are barely a step removed from dirt-worshippers to begin with. And seeing this seals the deal. All you wanted was some good God-fearing hospitality.

So what do you do? Write an exaggerated account of what you saw, pepper it with some jingoism and racism, and sell it to adventure-hungry people on the East Coast. And in the process, sow the seeds of years of tense discord between whites and Hispanics in an isolated valley in Colorado.

The name of this 19th century aristocrat is Josiah Gregg. He really did write an account of his pleurisy-induced travels through the Southwest, and it was a huge success. As one of the first Americans to write about the culture of the area, he set the tone for future writing on the topic.

To be fair, the procession he saw would have scared the pants off anyone who didn’t know what was going on. He had stumbled upon a group of lay Catholics known as Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (an unwieldy name that gets shortened to “The Penitentes” in regional parlance). The ceremony he witnessed was the pinnacle of the liturgical year, commemorating Good Friday.

In addition to the flagellants, one person has the great honor of portraying Christ in the procession, which involves dragging around a huge, heavy wooden cross. Others sing prayers and play flutes. The procession ends with Christ being bound to the cross by rope while those around him pray.

What Gregg didn’t mention is that rituals like these were just a small part of the activities of the Penitentes. Here’s some context: In 1821, Mexico won its war for independence against Spain. They promptly purged themselves of all things Spanish, which included many of their priests. This, in turn, led to a shortage of priests that was felt most acutely at the hinterlands of the empire, or in today’s geography, New Mexico and Colorado.

In the absence of reliable visits from priests, the devoutly Catholic people in the villages of this area organized themselves into groups like the Penitentes to address the holes in civic life. They cared for the poor and sick, provided loans (there were no banks in the area), held funerals and prayer services, and organized huge ornate public ceremonies with roles for many townspeople. Far from the sinister jamborees the media made them out to be, notes from Penitente meetings are disappointingly banal: lists of collections for a poor family, discussion of community topics, and so on.

The Penitentes are a bit of a legend in Colorado and New Mexico. They still exist today, though their numbers have dwindled. To this day, most discussion focuses primarily on their Good Friday rites. That’s what makes Gregg’s account of the Penitentes so unfortunate — it strips their rituals of context, which makes it pretty hard to see them as anything other than crazy. Even with context, it can be tough to empathize with flagellation as part of a healthy spiritual regimen these days, but it’s old news and the Penitentes didn’t invent it. Corporeal mortification has been a part of Christianity since the desert-dwelling monks of third-century Egypt (and compared to these monks’ asceticism, Penitente rituals look like a day at the beach), and roving bands of flagellants haunted the European countryside as early as the eleventh century.

By focusing on the flagellation, many writers gloss over what to me is a much more interesting part of the Penitente story: the ways in which community members came together in the absence of institutional authority to create an organization tailored to the many idiosyncrasies and anachronisms of living in a remote area — one that was quickly becoming a crossroads for very different cultures. As I looked at how the media covered the Penitentes in the past, I felt that I had found a big part of why people were so nonplussed when I would roll into town to try to take pictures.

Starting around 1870, a trickle of articles building on Josiah Gregg’s account of the Penitentes became a deluge. Eventually, magazines and newspapers all over the country began to carry more and more over-the-top stories about Penitentes. Harper’s, Time, and The New York Times all joined the zeitgeist.

“Penitente-hunting” became a buzzword. Hordes of white people would drive around the Valley during Holy Week, shining their headlights on Penitente moradas in hopes of getting prurient glimpses of a foreign faith. In the end, all the bigoted articles and Penitente-hunting shed more light on the culture that birthed them than on the Penitentes themselves. And even though this fad died out long ago, aspects of it were malicious enough that perhaps the scars that remain take the form of extreme suspicion of outsiders.

Dozens of articles about the Penitentes written between 1875 and 1925 are remarkably similar in structure and content. They often borrow facts from each other, but each article tries to be a bit more extravagant than the last. Examined chronologically, they read like a game of telephone: the accusation in 1875 that the Penitentes crucify a man each year becomes by 1884 the accusation that they crucify babies. These articles make cable news look like amateur hour in terms of fear-mongering and xenophobia.

I began to wonder what was behind this slew of widespread national coverage that appeared suddenly and disappeared just as suddenly. And I can only offer two hypotheses: The first is that this coverage started just as Colorado was becoming a state, reached its apex during the debate over New Mexico’s potential statehood, and petered out thereafter. Perhaps, then, the idea behind the coverage was to discredit the inhabitants of the area as potential American voters (more on that in just a bit). The only other guess I can hazard is simply that we have an abiding prurient interest in the grotesque and bizarre, and the Penitentes’ Good Friday rituals captivated the media for that reason alone.

Almost every piece starts with a description of the landscape itself as wholly other and even a bit sinister. Inter Ocean magazine in 1895 writes, “I am glad I have seen [this] country but don’t care to see it again. Such drought, desolation, and sandy barrenness I had never dreamed of before.” A reporter for Harper’s takes a more poetic spin on the land in 1876: “Rugged, weird, depressing… in [the Valley], Nature becomes a polyglot… a region of fantasies that set at naught the common laws of heaven and earth. I was a lost mortal in a goblin land where the grotesque and preternatural are blended.”

Imbuing the land with this much potency is important in these articles, because nearly all go on to describe the Penitentes as wrought from and possessed by this alien landscape. The authors imply that the land itself drives the people into religious frenzies by virtue of its sheer weirdness. “This is a land where distance is lost and the eye is a liar; a land of ineffable lights and sudden shadows,” writes Charles Lummis in 1923, connecting the strange land to its people, “of polytheism and superstition, where the rattlesnake is a demigod and the cigarette a means of grace, where Christians mangle and crucify themselves — the heart of Africa beating against the ribs of the Rockies.”

Less exaggerated articles portray the Penitentes as the result of a lack of civilizing influence. These pieces simply set up the old civilization/barbarism trope and let loose. The Penitentes are “simple, ignorant folk… shut off from the railroads by thirty-five miles of mesas and the awful canyon of the Rio Grande… [the area] is not of the 19th century,” says the Sunday Oregonian in 1893. A book called Land of Poco Tiempo uses technology as a point of comparison as the author stands with a camera taking pictures of a crucified Penitente: “The crucified and I… stood facing each other… one playing with the most wonderful toy of modern progress, the other racked by the most barbarous device of twenty centuries ago.”

The final and most telling aspect of this media coverage is the claim that the citizens of New Mexico and Southern Colorado (that is, the Penitentes) threaten long-fostered American democratic ideals. One piece published just before Colorado was admitted to the Union describes the Penitente rituals as “the most disgusting crimes the mind can conceive of,” adding “this in Colorado, that bright Centennial star that aspires to rank by the side of New York and Massachusetts.” One popular claim is that Penitentes exercised complete political control of New Mexico and Southern Colorado. Harper’s writes: “There are 20,000 Penitentes, mutually sworn to protect each other to the point of perjury… [Authorities] face a formidable hydra.” The Sunday Oregonian article asks, “How many people know that American voters, who help to choose the President of the United States, are crucified, bound by biting thongs, yes, nailed to crosses, and suffer to death?” Yet another Harper’s article declares “This society, until it is crushed, will remain a barrier to the progress of morality… in New Mexico.”

So that’s the gist of the Penitente media coverage of circa 1875-1925. I should note that almost nothing I quoted from these articles is factual with respect to the Penitentes. That’s what made the similarities in the articles jump out — it’s remarkable not so much that they’re full of bullshit but that they’re full of the same bullshit organized in the same way. It could just be lazy reporting in the interest of a juicy story, but it seems to me that these articles often have a distinct political purpose.

And yet a couple dozen articles written long ago by people far removed from life in the Valley contributed to a tension that lingers today. It wasn’t just the articles; more obnoxious still were probably the Penitente-hunters who clamored for a lurid glimpse of a kind of faith long unavailable to them. Add to that the large American interests who used their knowledge of property law to secure the best water rights in the Valley after annexation, and the various other little bureaucratic shifts that occur when a region passes from the hands of one nation to another.

The Penitentes still boast quite a few members in chapters scattered around the area, but their ranks aren’t exactly teeming with youngsters. As a former Penitente I talked to said, “Any young person with a head on their shoulders is going to want to get out of here fast, where there are jobs and schools.” And he’s probably right: several of the counties that comprise the San Luis Valley are among the poorest in the nation. I considered these two things as I thought again about that strange day when I tried to take the picture of the morada in that dusty town. The families that remain today have been there often for generations. They’re certainly aware of what a vital role in a lively community the Penitentes played and how nasty the period around the American annexation was. I have no doubt that showing up to take photos of these aging, self-made religious dwellings carried with it more than a tiny echo of the days of Penitente hunters and yellow journalism.

Ben (left) and Sam (right)

Sam and I fume at opposite ends of the terminal. I sneak glances at his smug, punchable face, fantasize about tearing it apart. He turns toward me; I look away.

We’re in Santiago’s International Airport waiting for Sam’s father, Steve. He’s flying down to ride with us through the Atacama Desert. We came early because he doesn’t speak Spanish, and we were afraid he would get lost on public transportation.

We arrived at the airport, got snacks, and sat to wait on a wide staircase overlooking the gate, the only exit for international flights. It was crowded. A tall blond couple stood in front of us, chatting to each other in Dutch. Their heads were a foot above the crowd, and from our vantage point we could see people furtively starting at them at them. It felt good not to be the most obvious outsider.

We exhausted our small talk a month ago, and we don’t have anything to share that the other didn’t directly experience. It was twenty minutes before we struck up a conversation.

Later, we would describe it as our biggest fight. We joked through the question until we found our positions; then the niggling began. Over the next twenty minutes we whisper-yelled and gesticulated wildly, tensing and raising our voices until we were ready to throttle each other.

Only the threat of Steve’s arrival stopped us, sent us slinking to opposite ends of the terminal. Neither of us wanted to explain a black eye.

It was a simple conversation. It didn’t segue into deeper issues, didn’t touch on longstanding feuds, didn’t even veer from the central question: “Would you rather be invisible or have the ability to fly?”

I like telling this story because it makes people laugh. The action are exaggerated, the cause slight. It’s an anecdote that illustrates — but doesn’t delve into — the uncomfortable truth of our trip. I’ve hated Sam more than anyone else I know, and Sam’s hated me just as much.

We’ve been friends for nearly a decade. We’ve gone to high school together, worked together, and even lived together. We don’t always get along, but we’ve always been jovial, always been able to put our squabbles in the context of our friendship. By my simple definition, friends are people who choose to be around each other. So what happens when you take away that choice?

I could hide Sam’s body.

It’s a small body, easy to bury in sand or roll off a cliff. I could fold it into my bike trailer, ride into the desert, and leave it for the vultures. I could be back in time for breakfast alone. These are my thoughts as I fall asleep in my tent.

“You’ve thought about killing me, right?” I ask Sam over coffee a few days later.

“Oh yes,” Sam nods vigorously. “All the time.”

We laugh. We’re past trying to hide our frustration. If it weren’t clear from the occasional days of silence — difficult when your days are spent together — it’s unmistakable when it bursts out in streams of curses.

We understand why we’re upset: we’re adventuring together. We ride together, work on our bikes together, and set up camp together. We eat in the same restaurants and stay at the same hostels. We make every decision together, which means that every decision is a compromise.

Where are we camping? Compromise. Where are we getting lunch? Compromise. What movie are we seeing at the theater? Harry Potter 7. What time are we going? Compromise. I describe this to my mom over Skype, and she chuckles knowingly: “It sounds like you’re married.”

I have to believe this undersells marriage. When I share my mom’s analysis with Sam, I scramble to find a silver lining: “In a real marriage the fighting would probably be mitigated by sex.”

“Really?” Sam asks. “When was the last time you talked to a married person?”

Thanks for killing my optimism, Sam. That really helps our bitter, sexless marriage.

We’re within sight of Torres del Paines, one of Chile’s southernmost national parks. The road winds past beautiful plains and lakes, green from the frequent rain.

It’s growing late; we begin looking for a campsite. We get excited about a lake that follows the road for a stretch, blocked off by an old barbed-wire fence. On the far side is a serene patch of untouched grass. We bike along the fence, looking for a spot where we can hop over, until we find a large sign that reads “Danger: Landmines.”

Ah.

We ride further. We’re tired, hungry, and we don’t want to be outside after sunset; the temperature dips below freezing. Soon we round a knoll and find a shed to the side of the road.

We’ve read about these on the blogs of other cyclists — small roadside sheds built for desperate travelers. This one is made from tin. It’s dirty, but convenient. We roll our bikes off the road, lift them over a ditch, and lean them against the shed.

It’s not roomy, but it has a fireplace (an old oil barrel with a hole cut into it shoddily joined to a stovepipe). The floor is dirt, and squeezed into the tiny space is a wobbly bunk bed made of 2x4s. There are no mattresses, not even a flat place for our sleeping bags —only wooden slats holding up a few pieces of cardboard.

We hesitate — our camp setup is more comfortable — but opt for protection from the wind and the warmth of the fireplace. It’s been a week since we’ve been warm at night.

We move all our things inside and begin to gather firewood. It’s easy; a nearby cow pasture is full of dry branches. We light our kindling ecstatically, huddling close to the meager flames. We continue to add wood, desperate for heat, until we begin to choke.

Despite the grate of ashes — a promise of recent use — the stove is a sieve. We throw the door open, hoping to empty out the smoke, but it’s too late. The stove is filled with kindling; we’re trapped outside until it burns through.

We look at each other, exasperated. We’re too hungry to wait out the smoke. We decided set up our camp stove outside, braving short trips into the smoke to rescue vegetables. The wind picks up, and the sun drops below the mountains to the west.

We finish setting up and squat to watch the food cook. We start to make a plan. I think we ought to give up on the fire and get inside, but Sam disagrees. He says that if we can get through the kindling to the denser logs the smoke will dissipate. We’ll eat in a warm tin shed and watch a clean burning log as we fall asleep.

We explain our positions with relative calm as we grill our vegetables, come to a conclusion, and dine happily together.

Not quite.

Sam strains to make sense of the muffled curses I’m forcing through the towel wrapped around my mouth (I ran out of layers). He tries to reason with me, but I hold my cooking pan as aggressively as I can and gesticulate wildly. I imply that if I’m not inside soon, I will strangle Sam in his sleep.

We move inside at the first opportunity. Our food isn’t ready, so we bring the camp stove in as well. It runs on gasoline, the only fuel we can find this far south, and we’re unsure if the fumes will fill the shed to kill us.

We debate the issue through the door. I close it, Sam opens it. Ten minutes, no speaking.
It’s a study in passive aggression. Finally our rice burns. We split the pot without a word and retire to our slats.

As we fall asleep, Sam complains about strange headaches. I hope they’re debilitating.

I visit Sam in Grants Pass, Oregon, two months before we leave on our bike ride. He manages a river rafting operation in the summer, and I’ve come to raft, hang out, and finalize our trip plans. It’s a week of busy days, but by the end of it we’ve scrambled a loose plan; we’ll train, get matching gear, and take things as they go.

The night before I leave for Portland, Sam drives us down the Rogue River Highway. We park near a bridge to share beers over the river.

We make dumb jokes and toasts, promise not to abandon the other if we’re kidnapped, and speculate wildly about future exploits with South American girls. Sam tells me about his last year of school. I fill him in on my odd year living in Portland. We’ve been on opposite sides of the country for four years, and won’t see each other again until we meet in Colombia’s Bogota airport.

Finally we quiet. I stare at the dark river as it moves to the sea, the murmur of it barely audible. I’m awed by the scope of the trip, so unlike anything I’ve done before. I’m a novice, an idiot when it comes to this, and I’m happy to be in the company of another idiot.

“This is going to be a good thing,” I say to Sam, “It’ll to be nice to finally have some real time together.”

When I went to Germany this June, I ate a lot of food. And it was all excellent. Literally, every single bite was delicious, presented beautifully, and felt, for lack of a better word, good in my body. It’s not unusual to have better dining experiences when traveling. Part of going on vacation is eating well. Especially in foreign countries, most people seek out special, fine dining, but we actually didn’t. My travelmates ate one decadent meal at the Hotel Ritter in Heidelberg. And, yes, the ravioli was phenomenal, and the salad was crisp, and the butternut bisque was the perfect balance of textured and creamy, but honestly, the meal didn’t far exceed anything I had eaten within the week. We ate at a local pub, off street vendors, a greasy pizza joint, our hotel’s buffet, and even at a McDonald’s. And, I repeat, all of it was excellent.

I can’t pinpoint what exactly in every morsel I ate made it so divine, but I can point out a few basic things I noticed about all the food I had in Germany. I noticed that nothing was in excess. Salads were spritzed, never drenched, in dressing. If cheese, salt, or sugar was an ingredient, it was a garnish. All servings were stomach-sized. I also noticed that food was lighter. The “greasy” pizza I mentioned had a flaky buttery crust, but it was a paper thin crust, so I didn’t roll away from the table with a heavy belly. Finally, I noticed the sincerity of the produce. The best example: I saw zero bright red, fat, luscious-looking strawberries in Germany. I did, however, have an abundance of tiny, wither-y pale pink strawberries at breakfast each morning that now hold the record for best berries I have ever eaten.

It occurs to me that what I found incredible about German food was that it seemed content being average. Or, perhaps in a more “German” mindset — food was “right,” prepared the way it is “supposed to be.” When comparing American food to German cuisine, I see clear cases of “too much of a good thing.” If an American restaurant serves a tasty salad dressing, they want to give their patrons the opportunity to drink a lake of it. Buttery crust tastes good, so we want slabs of it on our pizzas and pies, don’t we? Fruit people eat should look just as perfect as if it were wax.

I mock, but I’m not above any of this. I love horrible-for-you deep dish pizza and ridiculous amounts of sugar in my coffee. I’m attracted to pretty, bright fruit. But, after just a week of inadvertently treating my body and tongue to food the way it’s supposed to be, I started second-guessing my cravings. I thought back to the morning I had left for Germany. I had gotten a Dunkin’ Donuts bagel with way too much cream cheese smeared on it. I remember being consciously excited (“Way more than I would ever need!”). I was actually happy to eat a disproportionate amount of non-nutritional food. How long have I been conditioned this way?

Two things I absolutely must bring up about eating in Germany: the hotel buffet and McDonald’s. I love breakfast buffets with all my clogged heart. This buffet at our hotel, NM Hotels in Heidelberg, was the best of all time. Marinated mushrooms for lightly fried eggs, homemade jam in tiny jars, fresh-baked croissants, an assortment of sad-looking but rather juicy fruits — the list goes on. Every individual element of the buffet was delicious. Of course it was. Why should an establishment make “eh” food? No one would eat it! Logically, that is.

I considered all the breakfast buffets I had been to in my life. Like I said, I always look forward to breakfast buffets, but how do I feel after? Usually full, but satisfied? Sadly, I can think of very few things I have eaten at buffets over my whole life that were legitimately delicious. In my head, I still like the idea of not having to pick between cereal, waffles, muffins, yogurt, or eggs and just eating some of it all, but is it worth it if none of the components match up to even one bite of truly great food?

McDonald’s was meant to be a pit-stop on a road trip, but upon entering, my companions and I were overwhelmed with the desire to try items from the McCafe. We couldn’t believe the crumbly apple muffins, tiramisu, and thick chocolate cake that perched in a display case. Move over, cardboard Hamburglar-shaped cookies of my youth! Honest to God, the cake was in my top five chocolate cakes of all time. I moaned back in the car, “I will never have that cake agaiiiin!” I cursed McDonald’s American menu. “Why won’t they serve me good chocolate caaaake?”

“Because no one would buy it,” my sister said. “It’s too expensive.”

It had been just over five dollars — a bit steep compared to buck apple pies. I’ve eaten my share of McPies in my life — not because they’re good — but because they’re there and they’re cheap. And I wondered how often I make food choices based on there and cheap. I decided that things were gonna change for me once I was stateside again.

Rules I Tried to Follow:

1. A lot of mediocre food isn’t interchangeable with one great meal.
2. If I am dissatisfied with the options on a menu, I don’t have to order “the best I can do.” I can just leave.
3. If I’m about to eat something I would never have found in Germany, ask if I want to eat it or if I want to want to eat it. (A good example: I don’t actually like sugary cereals, but they remind me of childhood. I never want to eat Golden Grahams. I just want to want to eat it.)
4. Just spring for the better quality.

Now, two months after my trip, I am doing a decent job of consuming better quality food — but just decent. Although the pull was more psychological than physical, I was still drawn to the siren song of a crappy hotel continental breakfast while traveling a few weeks ago. But, instead of trying all the crappy food, I stuck to a crappy muffin and a crappy bagel. I’ve found that leaving or simply not ordering when the menu sucks is harder than I thought, but I no longer hesitate to make fussy special orders.

Rule number 4 is mostly throwing me through a loop. I’m a poor graduate student. While I was in Germany, I thought, “Don’t ever eat a piece of chain pizza again. You’re worth the few dollars difference to eat at Whole Foods.” But now when I look at my bank account, I wonder, “Am I? Am I really worth the few dollars difference between Country Crock and organic honey butter?”

It’s very American to do things that are bad for us — i.e. being hung-over, neglecting workouts, watching Jersey Shore, eating at Chili’s. It’s funny to hear someone talk about how they hate themselves for loving that damn Bruno Mars song. It’s weird if we purge ourselves of that American quirk. But, ultimately, it is all bad for us, especially the subpar food intake.

I realized that I persuade myself to eat poorly in two ways. First, I have tricked myself into thinking I will like it. After Germany, I’ve decided to stop being so self-manipulative and give up the fact that I don’t actually want to eat Oatmeal Crème Pies ever again. And if that’s all that’s “there” I just have to refrain or seek a better option. In our society it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to make or find alternative food. I don’t have an excuse. Second, eating poorly is less expensive. This venue of reasoning is also generally illogical. If I decide I must buy pizza, then, yeah, it’s going to be hard on my wallet to buy the fancier, better kind. But couldn’t I just do like a third grader and make whole wheat English muffin pizzas for less than the cost of Papa John’s? I’m obviously not swinging at a 100% good food average yet, but I’m getting better, and my memories of Germany keep me going strong.

Photo by Zanthia

At -33 degrees Fahrenheit, you’re as likely to vomit as you are shiver upon taking your first breath outside. This kind of cold makes interacting with rural eccentrics in a warm small town bar attractive, even if it’s not your kind of scene. Even if it’s at a reception for a conference of “UFOlogists.”

I’m in Colorado’s remote San Luis Valley with a couple of friends, and we’ve come here to meet these UFO aficionados. Like many here, we’ve been drawn after reading Christopher O’Brien’s poorly researched and written, but nonetheless compelling, accounts of paranormal activity in the San Luis Valley. We all grew up in Colorado, but none of us has been to this area since childhood.

While the alcohol doesn’t make these UFOlogists any stranger than they usually are, it certainly makes them more gregarious. One of the recurring topics of discussions this evening has been the Valley’s recurring problem with unexplainable livestock mutilations. We’re talking to a local cattle rancher about the grisly fate that has befallen several of his herd.

“What people don’t know about mutes [local parlance for inexplicably mutilated animals] is that they’re not gory, and that’s what’s so damn scary about them. I mean sure, you’ve got your amateur copy-cat-type mutes, which are grislier’n a combine accident, but the true mutes are bloodless. They’re cut with laser precision. They’re always found with identical wounds: the area around the eyes and mouth removed with surgical skill; same for the genitals; and often sometimes the flesh and gristle’ll be peeled way back near the organs, and of course those are gone as well.”

He doesn’t exaggerate. These are textbook traits of classic San Luis Valley livestock mutilations, which are a matter of concern not only to paranormal people, but also to ranchers in the Valley. Though few ranchers have lost more than one animal to these mutilations, cattle are shockingly expensive. Not to mention, they just creep out all parties involved. Despite the UFOlogists’ certainty, there are other purported explanations, usually involving black magic or high school students.

He continues, clearly relishing his arrival at the most disturbing aspect of these mutilations: “The damndest thing, though, is you can’t find fuck-all in the way of tracks, animal, human, or otherwise, leading to or from the carcass.”

“Now another thing even fewer folks know is that often when you touch or hold the mute, lotsa people get this strange electric sensation in their body.” He reaches into his bag, a one-shoulder briefcase-type thing. I have one of those awful protracted internal moments where you’re trying to convince yourself that what’s about to happen isn’t about to happen, but deep down I know that he’s reaching for a chunk of mutilated cow.

He pulls out a mason jar that contains a desiccated cube of cow, and shakes the jar like a kid would if there were bugs in it.

“Hold out your hand,” he says.

This falls firmly into my no-fucking-way category, but my good friend David “Cowcatcher” Gilbert is all about this kind of thing, so he holds out his open palm, and the cow-chunk slides smoothly into his hand like some communion wafer from an extraterrestrial Black Mass.

Meanwhile, word has gotten around the bar that we’re from the City, and we become attractions in our own right. Most of the paranormal people seem to regard us with an almost parental pride, saying with a sigh that they wish more folks from our generation would realize the significance of things like the Taos hum, a bowel-shakingly deep hum only audible to an unlucky few that pervades the Valley at night. We get cornered by a woman who says she’s on the Chamber of Commerce for the area, a man who claims that the contrails of jet airliners are actually “chemtrails” spewing mind-control chemicals, and a whole host of other such things that make Ancient Aliens seem like a Ken Burns documentary.

The last thing we see as we finally edge our way to the door is someone emphatically saying, “…unheard of in the annals of probing abductions,” without even cracking a smirk.

We end up staying at a thirteen-dollar-a-night motel that’s not without its charm, but is on the whole one of the more disgusting places I’ve ever been or seen. Not even the Gideon’s Bible people have crossed the threshold of this forsaken place. The heater has fallen out of the wall, and it’s still 33 below outside. The beds are like some horrifying expressionist Pollock painting, spattered with marks recognizable and unrecognizable as well as enough hair to make a third-rate toupee. Of course, a turd lays mockingly in the toilet, and the soap and toilet paper are stolen from a Super 8 motel. We all end up sleeping on the floor mummy-wrapped in sleeping bags to keep out the cold and squalor.

To keep our minds from all the microbial friends we’re making, we discuss an unidentifiable weird feeling we get from the Valley itself, a strangeness wholly other from that of these UFO people, a strangeness more fundamental and yet more alluring. It’s as if all your senses become more alert, more aware of the influence of the landscape on your mind. A strangely spiritual-type feeling, we all agree, that some folk would call “numinous.”

This was a few years ago now, but it marked the beginning of a recurring relationship between me and the San Luis Valley. I found as I talked to other people about the place, they all described a similarly uncategorizable but vaguely unsettling feeling induced by the place. Since that first visit, I’ve returned many times, both as a lover of Weird America and as a student of religion in the American Southwest. I’ve never been to an area with such a unified feeling of place. I came for the alien abductions and cattle mutilations, but stayed for the people and history (and alien abductions).

Illustration courtesy of the Boston Public Library

In 1996, Keith Lockhart inaugurated his tenure as the new conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra with a tribute to Broadway that featured the singing and dancing talents of Jason Alexander (no joke: he was pretty good). The opening number, or at least one of the first ones, was a rendition of the song “Ring Them Bells” by Liza Minelli, which is about someone named Shirley Duvore, who, on the verge of spinsterhood, decides to leave her Manhattan apartment and travel the world in search of a husband. After dallying her way across Europe, she ends up in the Balkans, where she meets and hits it off with — here’s the kicker! — her next door neighbor, Norm. She gets a husband, Liza gets a show tune, and I’m stuck for the rest of my life with the image of George Costanza doing his best Fran Drescher impression as he sings about the woman “who traveled ‘round the world to meet the guy next door.”

The song, as one of my old teachers would say, is “pure froth.” But I think it sticks with me because it expresses something that most world travelers will recognize: the fear that, no matter how hard you try and how far you travel to find something new, you can never really get away.

It’s definitely not a feeling that most of history’s great travelers would have recognized. It’s almost a reverse cliché, but until the arrival of the jet engine and the television, the world really was much bigger, which is to say that you had to travel to experience most of it. Julia Child couldn’t have had her sole meunière-induced revelation anywhere but Rouen, for instance, and Alexis de Tocqueville wouldn’t have learned, or prophesied, about democracy except in the United States. As anyone who’s read ibn Battuta, or Mark Twain, or Chiang Yee knows, travel writing exemplified what the Russian critic Viktor Shlovsky called ostranenie, which translates as “defamiliarization” — in other words, the ability of certain kinds of writing to make the world seem incongruous or unfamiliar, forcing the reader to dwell and perhaps struggle with deeper truths.

There is much less mystery to the world these days. If I weren’t writing this right now, I could be watching any one of a dozen travel shows that cover topics as diverse as Vietnamese food, Budapest’s nightlife, and African safaris. Or I could go down to the bookstore and buy a variety of pretty comprehensive guides to hundreds of places. Or I could spend an hour or two clicking through the photo galleries on National Geographic’s website.

And it isn’t just that we can see more of the world more easily than any other humans in history. We can also have it interpreted for us in a dizzying variety of ways, from the legions of earnest amateur travel bloggers that populate the web — here included — to the weekly onslaught of glib, travel-induced maxims by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman.

This is why it’s no surprise that the great old guard of travel writers, like Ian Frazier, Michael Palin, and Paul Theroux, have had to go to ever more remote places (Siberia, Gibraltar) or twist themselves in logistical knots (travel around the world in 80 days, or pole to pole) in order to grab people’s attention. London is officially boring; Mumbai is passé; even McMurdo station in the Antarctic has been the setting for more than a few good travelogues. So where do we go — where can we go — from here?

Allegedly, G.K. Chesterton once said that the difference between travelers and tourists is that “the traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” (Full disclosure: I’ve quoted it once, too.) It’s a great quotation, until you think about it a bit. For one thing, I’ve never been able to track down the source for this quotation, so I am not sure it’s something G.K. Chesterton ever wrote, said, or otherwise thought. But more to the point, I’m not even sure if there is something inherently better or even ontologically different about being a “traveler” as opposed to a “tourist” anymore. Just because you don’t have a sightseeing itinerary doesn’t mean that you’re any closer to finding something “authentic” or “real”; similarly, does standing near or looking at or taking a photo of places where great (or wicked) people did great (or wicked) things somehow create an invisible connection to the past that didn’t exist before, and can’t be found in books, TV, music, film, or the web? In the end, the de-defamiliarization of the world leaves us with even less of an ability to invoke the semi-mystical, self-actualizing powers of travel as they have traditionally been understood.

That’s not to say that we should all give up on going out. But we should acknowledge that, for most of human history, the mere act of seeing foreign sights could be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and now it’s a commonplace. So we ought not to expect that standing in front of Angkor Wat, eating sole meuniere, or retracing the steps of Alexander the Great will automatically lead to a flash of enlightenment the way it has for generations of travelers.

Happily, it is still true that travel compresses a wide range of experience in an extremely short amount of time, and forces us to make, do, and suffer things that we wouldn’t in our everyday life. To the extent that it causes us to look beyond our personal, professional, and digital obligations, it’s still creating that ostranenie. And that means that travel is still a good thing; it still works on us the way it has.

Which brings us, in a rather roundabout way, to that Liza Minelli number. Yes, the song makes Shirley Duvore the butt of a little joke, that she wasted her effort on traveling halfway across the world when all she had to do was go ten feet to find a husband (there’s a feminist critique of this song waiting to be made, too — but in the words of Gertrude Stein, not everything can be about everything). But it’s hard to fault her too much, because she made an interior journey to complement her exterior one. To me, that’s the point of this whole traveling business in the first place.

Our plan is to catch a ferry, ride it overnight, and arrive in Puerto Montt on Thanksgiving morning. We’ll find a buffet, eat as much as our touring cyclist’s metabolisms can handle, and most importantly, get away from each other.

Sam and I have been biking together for a month now, and in that month we’ve managed to spend only eight hours apart. Unless we have a hostel where we can safely stow our gear, we’re tied to it, and without cell phones we’re fixed to each other as well. We make every decision together, react to compromises with the same glower, and resist the same impulses to punch the other repeatedly in the face. Though Thanksgiving ideally pulls people together, we want nothing more than a day of solitude in the big city and the chance to talk to those we miss back in the States.

We don’t know the ferry schedule. There is no official website, and every town we pass through provides us with a different date and time. We do know is that the only ferry for the next two days leaves tonight.

Which is why I’m screaming “fuck!” at the top of my lungs on a Chaiten dock, glaring at the outbound ferry not thirty feet from the shore. I saw it docked from the other side of town, couldn’t bike fast enough, and now Thanksgiving is ruined.

Sam pulls up seconds later, and the sight of the ferry sends him into a flurry of curses. We both need to take this out on somebody, and we’re both conveniently close. We say some shitty things to each other, walk our separate ways, and finally reunite in silence thirty minutes later. We’re pissed, cold, and unwilling to pay for a hostel. It’s getting dark, and although the townsfolk said we could find free camping on the beach, the Chilean policemen firmly disagree.

“There is camping down the road,” one suggests, ”near the roundabout.”

The roundabout boasts an abandoned hostel, but no campground. Sam and I duck into a patch of trees, crush a bed of happy-looking plants, and call it good. It’s exactly the kind of spot an environmentally conscious camper avoids, but it’s hidden, and we’re willing to play dumb if we get caught. At this point, we’re willing to be dumb. We probably already are.

We set up our tents in silence, and soon a wild dog wanders into our makeshift camp. This is standard. Our Chilean friends often describe Chile as “el país del perros libres,” or “country of the wild dogs.” Packs of them roam the streets, although they’re more pitiful than threatening.

Moved by the Thanksgiving spirit, Sam offers the dog a piece of bread, rendering it gratingly obsequious for the next 48 hours. We call it Amigo, then Go, then Go-go, and finally, after a quick gender check, Lady Gaga.

Once camp set, we part. Sam explores Chaiten’s abandoned districts while I practice ukulele on the beach. I read dire portents in the heavy clouds on the horizon, and mope up and down the shore until I’m tired enough to sleep. Fittingly, Lady Gaga keeps us awake all night with inexplicable barking.

We break camp early the next morning and head into Chaiten. We both feel better, buoyed by a cocktail of intermittent sleep and holiday spirit. We decide that we can spring for a holiday hostel, and begin to search the town. As we pass the façade of a large of a surfer lodge, a voice booms out in song. It’s “Puerto Montt,” a Chilean classic, and one we’ll hear again and again over the next day and a half. It’s Javier Alahandra, the lodge’s owner, who waves us over and insists that we stay with him.

Though the lodge is furnished with expensive looking tables, a beautiful fire pit, and a well-stocked bar, it’s empty as a ghost town. He gives us a quick tour of the restaurant before taking us upstairs to see the lodging. Though the second floor has at least a dozen beds, it looks as if nobody’s slept there in months.

“Sleep an hour in each one!” he jokes.

We’re charmed, and have our bags up and unpacked in minutes.

We spend the next few hours chatting with Javier and cleaning our bikes, washing 2,000 kilometers’ worth of dirt and accumulated grease into the ashy streets. We go through boxes of napkins and a full container of Q-tips, and, at the end of two hours, we have a pair of beautiful, gleaming bikes ready to be sullied.

Javier is delighted to have us there — we remind him of his son, a whitewater kayaker now living in Canada. We’re increasingly thankful for Javier as well; everybody else we see in Chaiten wears a dour expression, as if the ash grayed them to the core, while Javier is buoyant, often breaking into song. Though we first see this as a perk of living in an abandoned city, we soon realize it’s a benefit of being Javier Alahandra.

After we’ve finished or work, Javier offers to take us to a nearby hot springs if we’ll pay his way in. We gleefully accept, and minutes later we’re stuffed in the cab of Javier’s pickup, his dog Rocky riding along in back.

Perhaps it’s because we have just spent a month going 15 mph, or maybe Javier is a really terrifying driver, but Sam and I have white-knuckle grips as the pickup careers out of Chaiten. When Javier finds out we’re from California, his entire face lights up.

“Hasta la vista, baby,” he growls in a hybrid Austrian-Chilean accent. “The Governator?”

We nod, and he smiles.

Twenty minutes and one bumpy dirt road later we arrive at the hot springs. After a month of freezing our way across Patagonia, it’s one of the first times we’ve felt warm, clean, and happy all at the same time. Javier takes us to see all the different pools — one for bathing, one for smoking, and two small, caged in pools where the boiling water first comes to the surface.

After this tour, Javier heads to the owner’s cabin to share a mug of yerba mate while Sam and I disrobe and sink into the hot springs.

After a few minutes of soaking, Sam and I start to tool around the pool, and at the far end find a pair of pipes bringing boiling and ice cold water in to one side. We take turns drifting between them as they mix, experiencing in quick succession every temperature tolerable and intolerable. We’ve brought our waterproof camera, and after a series of delicate underwater balancing acts, we’re able to photograph of the experience.

A welcome rain feeds the pool, and we enjoy it alongside the only other soakers, a pair of sisters from Argentina and their husbands. We share stories of our trips, though our Spanish and their English are both lacking. When we mention our final destination, Colombia, one of the husbands lights up.

“I’m from Colombia,” he says.

Although the sisters are ready to go, he lingers to describe his country in beautiful detail. His wife tugs on his arm, and he begins to walk away with an apologetic smile. The sisters stop to grab their towels, and he takes this opportunity to sneak back to us and offer a piece of parting advice.

“You know what they say about Colombia,” he smiles, leaning in. “The best behaved women are your wife!”

He winks and walks off.

On the truck ride back home we talk with Javier about Thanksgiving. Once he understands the basic concept — Americans shamelessly eat huge amounts of food in the name of tradition — he gets excited. We stop by a small general store to get some chicken, drive out to the edge of town where a carpenter and his wife serve as the town’s stopgap bakery, and swing by Javier’s sister’s store for a box of wine.

We return to the lodge to prepare dinner. Javier is chef as well as owner, and while we prepare guacamole and set the table, he disappears into the back to do mysterious and amazing things to the chicken. An hour later we open our box of wine, sit down, and eat a sumptuous Thanksgiving feast on the patio. Javier gives us a rundown on American culture over dinner: he likes Westerns and Dolly Parton, although it’s Terminator 2 that he can’t stop quoting. He disliked Bush, saying he has a “¡cabeza de pistola!” (gun for a brain), but seems excited about Obama.

Against all odds, this Thanksgiving has become what so many of our previous Thanksgivings have tried to be: uniting. Defying our admittedly slight expectations, Sam and I are having a fantastic time — and with each other! The food is good, we’re a little drunk, and Javier’s quips and unpredictable speeches on American culture have kept us laughing all night. We’ve built an impromptu family out of the ash, and while it’s not a substitute for our family’s back home, it’s not trying to be: we’re all uncles here.

After another hour of wine and winding conversation — Javier has a lot to say on Hugh Hefner — we retreat to bed. Sam plays Christmas music quietly on our ukulele as I repeatedly mishandle candles into impromptu haircuts, and we’re soon asleep in a very, very quiet Chaiten.

We’re up early the next morning, determined to catch our ferry this time. We say our goodbyes to Javier, laughing too much to allow for any cheerful catharsis, and bike down to the dock. We wait an hour in the rain, watching car after car load on the boat, until they allow us to wheel our bikes onto the deck. Lady Gaga whines from the shore, and I catch Sam looking back with wistful eyes.

The trip so far has been part adventure and part race, though we have no reason to speed. It took being trapped at Chaiten, unable to move forward, for us to realize the value of being here. It’s another part of the world, a lifestyle we may not get to live again, and we get so much more out of living it at a slow pace.

Sam and I don’t talk about our Thanksgiving miracle on the ten-hour ferry ride to Puerto Montt, but we do talk, and enjoy it, which is another miracle all together.

Post-Scipt: I can’t talk about Thanksgiving without mentioning my wonderful family. While I was away in South America, my brother and sister took it upon themselves to make a surrogate Ben out of paper-mache to take my place at the table. OtherBen is pictured below.