Traveling to the End of the World By Susan Deer Cloud

After leaving Petrified Forest on gravel road
the ranger and two amigos warned
penetrated Patagonia’s most isolated region,
Juan and I laughed at the scientists joking,
“We’ll pray for you,” when we decided to take
the back way out.  Jorge the geologist grinned,
“Let’s all have a beer in Ushuaia if you make it. 
I live and work there and will be back tomorrow.” 
“When we make it, many beers!”  I bragged bravely
before my love and I drove beyond the west side
of the kaleidoscope of marbled stumps and logs,
monkey puzzle trees metamorphosed to enchantments
of color by the alchemy of centuries.  Setting sun
already kissed the jagged buttes, last rays torching
lower horizon stretching over a hundred kilometers
before Ruta 3 would arrow further south to
Tierra del Fuego.  Just past National Park border
we settled on a hilly rise for our sacred place
to have a picnic then sleep in dusty Subaru ….
icy rain, clouds, gale winds increasing with dusk,
just enough light for eating cheese, nuts and apples
before burrowing inside sleeping bags.  Made sure
I grabbed a bottle of Malbec for extra warming,
and, feck me, I woke in the deep of the night
and needed to pee.  Squatting on puddling road
I peered up to where the clouds spread, also ….
hopeful clearing where Southern constellation
twinkled down at me wondering again why I was
doing this crazy trip, stars like mammogram image
of calcifications in my left breast the doctors
diagnosed as cancer last May.  My first thought then?
“How exquisite those calcifications look, delicate
and opalescent as snow crystals or distant stars.”
Not until late that spring night did I weep ….
remembering my mother dying of breast cancer
invading her bones, her whisper one day when chemo
dripped into her veins, “I wished I had lived a different life. 
I haven’t done what I dreamed.  I have never even flown
in a plane.”  I sobbed over her and women countless
as stars whose only “end of the world” was to die
not turning feral, not casting off aprons, bras,
taming lies, and the slow drips of poisonous fear.  Si,
I could write a book titled Epiphanies While Peeing
in the Middles of Nowheres in the Midsts of Wild Nights.
Drenched by Patagonian drizzle, muddied, wind-blasted
back into car, body shivering into a sad second sleep ….
but four nights later clinking vasos de cerveza
in an Ushuaia restaurant overlooking Beagle Channel
where Darwin once “made it,” Juan, Jorge and I
swapping freedom tales in Tierra del Fuego,
me toasting “Salud!” to my mother who had gone
even farther.