4.

The glacier is like a slow moving organism. Perito Moreno is famous for a cycle that happens every few years, in which it advances to the landmass in the winter and then pulls back, causing an ice bridge to form that eventually crashes down in one loud, catastrophic moment. Hundreds of people come from around the world to see this, and my cousin has been in Calafate for the last few cycles. The reason it happens is that the advancing glacier divides the lake that it saddles when it connects to he land. The warming water of the lake melts through the underside of glacier in the summer, and the lake is reconnected beneath the ice bridge before it weakens and falls. I drew a map^lv of the lake and glacier, which looks a bit like sexual anatomy.

 

5.

The cliché about Patagonia, like Alaska, is that people move there to escape something. It even seems branded into these small towns by the name of the supermarket chain that has a virtual monopoly in small towns all over the interior: La Anonima^lvi (The Anonymous). It seems like this kind of anonymity is one that supermarkets in the U.S. try to downplay (“your friendly neighborhood so-and-so”), for fear of aggravating the alienation already omnipresent in the culture. In Patagonia anonymity is less menacing, an attraction even.