Los Perros de Piriápolis
By: Gabriel Goldstein
Tags: Travel Writing, Journey, Uruguay, Travel, South America Travel

Sitting with my back against the sea wall just below the promenade, as much out of the wind as I can manage while still being on the beach. The end of another day is marked by the dramatic vertical exit of the sun. There is not another person as far as I can see in either direction, only the seagulls and me. Even the street dogs have thought better of coming out tonight. It is windy and cold and damp, and generally gray except for the colors of sunset, and those are muted. We are definitively in Fall here at thirty four degrees south latitude.

The plan today was to climb Cerro Pan de Azucar, but late last night the weather broke into a cold rain. The morning was drizzle with dense cloud cover, clearly not a good day for a hike. I took the morning slow, slept for as long as I could in the tent, then took shelter on the porch to drink some tea and write in my journal.

Around midday I was heading down to the main part of town, with my destination the Casa de Cultura, which among other things houses the library. Along the way, I was bitten by a dog. Not so bad, not enough to break the skin, but it was plenty disturbing. A couple blocks from where I’m staying, I passed by a corner house where the unfenced dogs have been very clear about their feelings towards me. This time they were bolder, and came charging out of the yard shrieking, with mean ugly dog faces, all flashing teeth.

While I was yelling “No!” at two of them confronting me from the front, the third, a little weaselly medium-sized dog, snuck around behind and bit down on my calf. Hard. Of all the crazy dogs I’ve met in Latin America, this was the first to close its teeth on my body. I jumped forward and it lost its grip but was still lunging at me, so I kicked at it hard and it leaped back. Now the other two were closing in from behind, one a bigger dog. This was terrifying. I spotted a good-sized rock, took a desperate swinging kick to give myself space and grabbed it. Praise God.

Dogs understand a rock in hand perfectly well, and they all backed up on their heels, still staccato machine-gun barking, while I backed away, faking like I was gonna throw. I didn’t turn my back on them for a block; even after I was out of sight I could still hear them. The adrenaline was flowing for a good half hour. Now every time I leave the hostel gate, the first thing I do is look for a rock.

By the time I made it down to the town center I had mostly calmed down, and proceeded to camp out in the library for most of the day. I wrote a mass email updating friends and family on my situation, confessing that after coming all this way to Montevideo, I don’t think I’m actually going to live there. Maybe no one will be surprised. I also included a request for any kind of work that I might be able to do remotely. Writing, editing, something like that. With no sign of a job on the horizon and diminishing funds, it’s time to humble myself and put out some messages in bottles.

Put some time in on my writing project at the moment, a blog chapter about the border crossing from Colombia to Ecuador along with ten thousand Venezolanos. I’ve been working on it for a few weeks. For their sake I feel obligated to attempt to do justice to how insane that situation was. To give some reflection of the dignity and humanity they maintain in the face of being exiles out on the face of the earth. Out of everything I’ve witnessed and written about on this journey, this is something that is real, and worth telling about.

That a country on the verge of the first world could absolutely break down, so that millions of people, by some estimates twenty percent of the country, would find themselves dispossessed and without enough food. People from all walks of life except the very rich, traveling for weeks with only the things they could carry, their currency worthless. Taking buses across the continent, sleeping at border stations and bus terminals, heading for countries whose people don’t want more Venezuelan immigrants. And all the while, the vast majority remain decent, kind, even generous humans. I don’t imagine that my countryfolk would fare half as well.

In late afternoon I ate my lunch, a tuna sandwich I’d made in the morning, sitting on the steps of the building. It had stopped raining but the ground was still wet; next to a trash can I found a dry cardboard box and sat on that. School had just gotten out, so there were streams of kids and teenagers walking by, many on their way to a rec center next door, others dallying and congregating in a vacant plaza/park across the street. Some of them would check me out with skeptical looks, and I saw myself as they saw me. Some old guy with a grey beard hanging around in the off-season, clearly not from around here, sitting on a cardboard box on the steps of the public library, eating a sandwich. I probably looked homeless, and really I’m not so far from it. I’m camping in someone’s yard on the edge of town, am very close to running out of pesos, and today I was bitten by a dog.

A humble beginning for the third leg of my migration. The first leg was ten months from the northern border of Mexico to Arequipa, Péru; the second, twenty-two days through Chile and Argentina to Uruguay. Not only am I lacking in resources, I don’t even know where I’m going. Although for the moment I have an eastern trajectory, up the coast towards Brazil, I know I’m not really going that way. It’s only two hundred fifty kilometers from here to the frontera, but there’s a visa entry fee of a hundred and sixty dollars, and obviously they speak an entirely different language. I’m still working on Spanish; the prospect of starting with Portuguese at this point is a bridge too far.

I am as directionless as I’ve been in years. All along, however things were at the moment, at least I knew I was going to Uruguay. And I always assumed that meant Montevideo. Now, on the other side of that, I have nowhere to get to and no schedule, with the only limiting factors being money and my energies. Here in Piriápolis I’m spending less than I was in Montevideo, mainly on housing, so at this rate I still have eleven days until my money runs out. I am just out in the world somewhere, making my way, trying to find where I’m meant to be, just like everyone else. Except different. Since I started writing, I have been passed on this cold beach by a couple walking their dog, then two street dogs chasing each other, though all of them have long since gone. It is nearly dark and time for me to go see about some dinner.