Fall Colors

Winter technically begins in 11 days. Chile just got doused with rain, thank God. For three days I've been able to breathe, temporarily free from the smog, particulate matter.

Raced and jogged up San Cristobal hill to catch the setting of the sun. Didn't settle for one of those halfway-up vistas. None of that counterfeit accomplishment for me.

Was rewarded.

I saw the rain hang huge and heavy, buckled by the Wind, the mountains black above it. Ahead The Andes covered in white. Would have hurt my eyes, but the white was gilded pink. The sunset softened the air around me into dulcet colors that I could breathe, violet and pink that became the concrete valley of Santiago and rained upon it.

I'll consider this an oasis amidst the vastness of Wintertime. Picture perfect and extraterrestrial.

Still, I can't forget how beautiful autumn was in Santiago. How earthly it was. The crunching leaves in Parque Forrestal and the dry, raging orange and red sunsets refracted by the smog.

So the bizarre southern hemispheric reversal of seasons made it unbizarre -- or more bizarre -- to travel up North to the desert. In the Atacama, May actually feels like Spring. Hot and flushed and gallons of water to stay hydrated. Until night, when Mr. Cold places the certainty of Death upon the shirtless.

While we were filming in Chacabuco I snapped a shot of these sheets of corrugated steel. I'm struck by how closely the colors resemble a seasonal clothing catalogue: "Fall Colors."

After I took this photo, Pedro--the guardian of Chacabuco--took us over to check out the graveyard, where the structures made of thin wood slats painted blue and green and white that are built up around each grave with an obvious mound in the earth within them look like playpens and oversized cribs.