Airport Scrabble? SFO to LAX to SCL to PHD(?)

Over the weekend, the New York Times Magazine published an amusing column on airport codes as literature, and it coincides with a southbound trip I’ll be making to from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Santiago de Chile and beyond next month. The rest of the trip from Chile’s capital will be mostly overland, with an exact itinerary to be determined.

Outside the international terminal at SCL

Flying used to be a pleasure but today, for the most part, it’s an experience to be endured. On my upcoming trip, though, I at least have the benefit of an overnight non-stop from LAX to SCL, though a potential LIM (Lima) stopover would at least have offered the option of a pisco sour (which, however, will be abundant if rather different in Chile). Still, I can’t help but put in a word for favorite airline and, by extension, my all-time favorite airport code.

On the tarmac at Stanley

The FIGAS pilot checks with the passengers.

That would be the Falkland Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS), which connects the Islands’ capital of Stanley with outlying airports and settlements. In fact, there’s only one other true airport, Mount Pleasant Airport (MPN), where intercontinental flights arrive from the United Kingdom (via Ascension Island) and South America (via Chile and, occasionally, Argentina). The other destinations have grass airstrips which serve relatively small settlements and some single-family farms.

The Royal Air Force manages Mount Pleasant Airport, which explains - at least in part - its utilitarian aspect.

In the mid-1980s, when I spent a year-plus in the Islands under a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, I had the opportunity to visit many of those outer destinations, occasionally by sea—hitching a lift on the vessel that gathered the wool clip—but also by air. In fact, the introductory chapter of my dissertation was a round-the-Islands itinerary in the form of a FIGAS flight, with observations on their natural and cultural landscape.

A FIGAS flight arrives at Carcass Island, in the archipelago's northwestern corner.

While my own itinerary was an amalgam of flights that I had actually done, I recently learned that visitors to the Falklands can do this in the form of a “round-robin flight” that depends on seat availability—if a given day’s flights are not full, it’s possible to arrange the trip for £55 (East and West islands only) to £88 (including outer islands). In fact I have done this de facto, without paying any premium, because the day’s itinerary just worked out that way (FIGAS itineraries depend on individual demand for any given day).

Island settlements have grass airstrips, such as this one at Port Howard. The flowering bushes surrounding it are gorse.

Most visitors to the Islands are cruise ship passengers, for whom this not really an alternative, but for land-based passengers it’s something I’d highly recommend. Given that there are only weekly flights to the Islands from Chile, there’s no guarantee it’ll be possible to arrange it on short notice, but it’s worth consideration.

Port Howard settlement from the air

Referring to the beginning of this post, I'll return to the theme of my all-time favorite airport code, which is Port Howard’s “PHD,” as depicted among others in the photograph here.

FIGAS airport codes, including Port Howard at the lower left.

Missing Malbec?

Leaving California at this time, even for a relatively short two-month trip, is bittersweet—an epiphany that came to me as I read an article in the Buenos Aires daily La Nación about a Mar del Plata family that located its missing Alaskan malamute after six years, thanks to a Facebook page that they had persistently maintained. Chornyk had been stolen but then found—now 16 years old—in the western Buenos Aires suburb of Caseros, nearly 400 km to the north.

Chornyk disappeared six years ago from the beach resort of Mar del Plata.

This strikes home because my own beloved malamute Malbec is approaching his 15th birthday and, for a dog his size, that’s elderly. He still has a healthy appetite and surprising strength and stamina, but he’s increasingly arthritic—walking around our block, which is about half a mile in distance, is pretty much his limit. At his advanced age, there’s always a chance he won’t be here when I get back, but Chornyk’s longevity at least gives me cause for optimism.

In his retirement, Malbec no longer participates in backyard squirrel patrol.

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Requiem for a Friend

Steve Anderson and his wife, Loreto Roselló, on the deck of their Panitao home

Last month, I was shocked to hear the news that a longtime friend, Steve Anderson, had died in an automobile accident near his home at Panitao, outside Puerto Montt. I first met Steve when he lived in Santiago, where he founded the online newspaper Santiago Times—still extant under a different publisher—to provide English-language news about Chile. Over the years, I often visited the Times’s offices along the Río Mapocho, and even stayed at his cul-de-sac home on the slopes of Cerro San Cristóbal—sometimes crashing in my sleeping bag on a deck that overlooked downtown.

Steve Anderson shopping for produce at the neighborhood farmers' market

Steve was a southern boy, a native of Arkansas, who had worked in the office the legendary Senator J. William Fulbright(who was indirectly responsible for funding my own graduate research through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant). He had come to Chile to help with the “No” campaign against the Pinochet dictatorship in 1988 and, in his new home, married a Chilean woman and fathered a now 21-year-old son who’s a student leader in Santiago.  In his home at Panitao, he had become a leading advocate—with significant local support—for preservation of strategic wetlands that were threatened by suburban sprawl.

Whenever I visited Steve at Panitao, there were unlimited blueberries on the table.

In fact, I had recently stayed at his home for four days, which let me avoid the Semana Santa (“Holy Week”) period when much of the region is overrun with Chilean tourists on a long weekend. It’s also a time when I tend to get more work done sitting at the computer than I would running around checking practical details in towns like nearby Puerto Varas. At that time, he told me, he was planning to return to the States to work on the midterm congressional elections. He loathed the current occupant of the White House.

Tributes to Steve Anderson appeared in the letters section of the local newspaper.

I don’t know the details of the accident, but Steve’s place lay about a kilometer south of the paved two-lane highway between Puerto Montt and the town of Calbuco via a dirt access road. Entering the highway from his access road involved a slight climb that was partially obscured by trees, so it’s possible he never saw the car that hit him. Whether or not that was the case, I will miss him, and so will his family and neighbors.

The Messenger and the Movie

A few weeks ago, the day my wife arrived in Buenos Aires, we had the good fortune to catch one of the last local showings of Jayson McNamara’s documentary Messenger on a White Horse, about Robert Cox’s heroic editorship of the Buenos Aires Herald during the so-called “Dirty War” of 1976-83. The movie debuted last April at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, but this was our first opportunity to see it.

Given the subject matter, it’s not the sort of film that one “enjoys,” but it was an absorbing account of Argentina’s most brutal dictatorship ever and the pervasive fear that prevailed at the time. As the paper's editor, Cox pursued and publicized the human rights violations that took place after the 1976 military coup and, facing threats to himself and his family, he went into exile in 1979—at a time when the Australian McNamara was not even born. I met McNamara four years ago, in Cox’s Recoleta apartment, at a time when he was working for the then struggling Herald—which was becoming the victim of the now-jailed tax evader and casino magnate Cristóbal López.

Bob Cox and Jayson McNamara at Cox's apartment in Recoleta, 2014

Given McNamara’s youth—I don’t believe he’s even 30 yet—I was impressed with his perspective on this complex country’s history. My wife, who lived through much of the worst in that period, agreed that his usage of historical footage and his interviews (with Cox and others) evinced a genuine skill for thorough and honest storytelling.

Some days later, when my wife and I shared empanadas and a bottle of Malbec with Cox and his wife Maud, both expressed admiration of the filmmaker’s ability to narrate a story he never experienced personally. In my opinion, it’s something that deserves a wider audience and, according to McNamara, “We’re hoping it will soon be available on Netflix or the like.” When it is, I’ll watch it again, and encourage others to tune in. It’s not a commercial film, but it deserves the widest possible audience.

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Risen From the Dead? The Buenos Aires Times Supplants the Herald

At the end of July, the venerable Buenos Aires Herald surprised me—and lots of other people—by shutting down after printing and posting one last Saturday edition without so much as a formal farewell. Shortly thereafter, I wrote my own mini-obituary of the paper, but I soon heard reports of a resurrection.

It didn’t take long. This past Saturday saw the first edition of the Buenos Aires Times, a 16-page English-language supplement within the weekends-only tabloid Perfil, and many of the Herald’s old familiar names were on board—most notably Robert Cox, candidly explaining the complexities of the paper’s not-so-sudden decline and demise after 141 years in print. Perfil’s Executive director Agustino Fontevecchia argues, meanwhile, that it’s time for a “strong, English-language publication" in Argentina, “relying on both the traditional techniques of print and the advanced tools of the digital era.”

Patagonia's long and meandering Río Santa Cruz, under threat from a pair of hydroelectric dams, is a featured topic in the first issue of the Buenos Aires Times.

The first also included critical and analytical pieces on topics such as controversial dams on Patagonia’s largest wild river, prospects for the Argentine economy, and significant news stories from around Latin America. Contributors included former Herald editors Andrew Graham-Yooll and Carolina Barros, and senior editor Michael Soltys.

All things considered, the Times’s rollout was stunningly quick, and there’s some evidence that it was rushed. For all that, there’s a reassuring familiarity starting with the paper’s masthead, which is virtually identical to the Herald—almost to the point of wondering whether there could be copyright issues. The story fonts, however, appear rather different.

Many if not most porteños get their print news fix from corner kiosks.

Maybe it’s partly print nostalgia but, when I return to Buenos Aires in November, I’ll be looking forward to waking up on Saturday morning, walking to the corner kiosk and purchasing Perfil—with its BA Times insert—to read with my breakfast. My only concern is that, with its aging staff—many are in their sixties and seventies, and Bob Cox is 83—the paper will have to recruit younger talent to survive.