The Dip

In southern Alabama, not far from a town called Opp, there exists a stretch of road known as ¨The Dip.¨ About ten years ago, while on a trip to the coast with cousin Andrea and Pam, a friend of the family who used to frighten me by wearing a stocking on her head and who for lack of a better word--crashed both mine and my brother's high school graduation parties, I experienced it for the first time.

The drive from Atlanta to Destin, Florida, was typically a very simple route. Take I-85 to Montgomery and then Highway 331 straight to the Gulf of Mexico. It's a journey so uneventful and tedious that on family vacations past J.Michael himself could be known to pull out a book, prop it on the steering wheel, and in an act of vehicular negligence read whilst driving.

Pamela Beall had a different route. Her's was a complex traverse of lower Alabama that skipped from one small town to another, frequently changing roads, and constantly defying geographic logic. With a lead foot behind the wheel, however, it was shorter, faster, and all together more harrowing, one of those routes that a person perfects only after years of travel. And best of all, Pam´s route included ¨The Dip.¨

As we neared the Florida border, the tension began to mount. ¨Get ready for the Dip,¨ Pam warned Andrea and I. The infamous¨Jack Ass-embly of God¨ was behind us, and all that stood between us and the Sunshine State was a stretch of road whose mythos resided deeply within the Pamelan pantheon. I could hardly contain my excitement. What was this dip? A deep valley, a roadside chewing-tobacco stand, a pool-size bowl of delicious white Mexican cheese dip?....oo..oo...or that yellow kind with the rotel??

I was a little disappointed. If you've ever made a late night run to west-side Kroger, then you know what The Dip felt like. In the early morning hours, on that stretch of Baxter Street just past Fook's Foods, a car slows. A gap opens between it and the cars ahead. The light at Milledge turns green, and it's time to floor it. As I approach the intersection, I brace myself for a joyride, and then: The Milledge Bump. LaTisha launches into the air and instantly I'm back on that lonely Alabama road. A Dip flashback.

So what is The Dip? Well, it's more of a bump than a dip, and it's more about the anticipation than the actual airtime. On the night before I left for Chile, amongst the gathered familyfolk, the discoverer of the Alabaman Dip charged me with two tasks. One: find a product that cannot be found in the U.S. and begin illegally exporting it to the U.S.; and Two: find a Chilean Dip.

It's a charge that I had nearly forgotten, so when ¨alemap¨ posted on my blog: ¨have you found a Chilean dip?¨ I found myself puzzled. Who had written that? And what was a Chilean Dip?

Last weekend, while in a minibus, or micro as they're called in these parts, the answer suddenly came to me. My co-worker, a Brit by the name of Kristi, and I were on a weekend jaunt into the Volcanic Vunderlands southeast of Valdivia. Our plan for the day was carefully constructed. We would rise before dawn, take the early bus from Puerto Varas to some delicious waterfalls called Saltos de Petrehue (see right), and then we'd quickly make our way to Ensenada, a lakeside outpost from which we'd take a ferry to Peulla.

It was the perfect plan for a perfect day, but there was one tiny little insignificant detail. The time gap between waterfall fun-time and the boat's departure was a narrow one, and we found ourselves waiting nervously for the only bus that would pass in that time window. The time stretched on, so long in fact that I had the opportunity to show Kristi every single dinosaur picture on my camera, including the one of Honey on the Golden Gate that drew shrieks of godzillian delight from a pair of Asian pop stars. Then it came. We hopped on and hoped for a speedy five kilometers. But then.... The Dip.

I'm probably overdramatizing it, just as Pam did her discovery, but Dips by their very nature are exaggerative, and again it's the anticipation that trumps reality. Rolling along a paved road skirting a volcano on one side and a rushing river on the other, a microbus suddenly slows. I look ahead and see a gap in the pavement. The dirt section dips down through what is no doubt the path of a past flood, or better yet a lava-flow, and then as the last reaches of pavement disappear beneath the micro's wheels, the driver speeds up, and the bus's contents begin to shake violently. Amidst the earthquake-like rattling, my mind clears. 'Alemap' was Pamela, and the Chilean Dip was, well, this.

And then it was over. The pavement resumed, and within minutes we were boarding a ferry to complete one-third of the epic Cruce de Lagos. I took a moment to reflect. The 3-lakes crossing was something I had dreamt about since first watching "The Motorcycle Diairies," and it was once an integral component of Robin's and my Buenos Aires-to-Ecuador Che Guevarian road trip. Two years ago, we missed it when our trek began in Santiago instead of B.A., and on this particular day we would experience only one of the three lakes. But that's alright; we got the best one anyway. It's called Lago Todos los Santos...aka: All Saint's Lake...aka: All Saint's Lutheran Church Lake. And with its fjord-like qualities, it was so freakin´ Norweigan. Alas, amid the towering Andean peaks on all sides, I could almost here the distinctly Lutheran sounds of Creasters hatching, matching, and dispatching.

With The Dip behind us and Lutherland ahead, the day was complete, and on the whole the weekend jaunt a success. And better yet, I was able to check one of Pam's two missions off my list. Now, if I can just find something worthy of illegal export. Any ideas?