In a tent on a remote Patagonian ice field, where the wind turned rain to bullets, I first heard Juan sing. His deep warble belied a skinny frame and boyish features.
Hubo un tiempo en que fui hermoso, y fui libre de verdad.
Guardaba todos mis sueños en castillos de cristal.
There was a time when I was beautiful and truly free.
I kept all of my dreams in castles of glass.
“Canción para Mi Muerte,” or “Song for My Dead,” by Argentine singer-songwriter Charly García, was Juan’s favorite and the first song we played after forty days in the Chilean backcountry. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why Juan, who always seemed so happy, was drawn to such wistful music. In early January 2024, several months into a pre-college gap year in South America, I met Juan Andrés Vargas Reyes in the main square of Coyhaique, Chile. We were joined there by twelve other people—nine other amateur outdoorsmen and three mountaineering instructors—about to embark on a month-long expedition to Patagonia’s Northern Ice Field.
That afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor of a lean-to, Juan told me about himself. He was a proud Colombian, and a not-so-proud resident of Bogotá, the capital city. He had spent his childhood summers escaping the city, chasing his grandparents’ two cocker spaniels around their ranch in the Andean countryside. The year before, he had graduated from the prestigious Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá with, at his dad’s behest, an economics degree. For his first job post-grad, he managed the books at his family’s property development company. A few months in, Juan was assigned to budget a new infrastructure project that would blast tunnels through the Colombian Sierra Nevada mountain range. He told his dad he’d be stepping down. “There is nothing in the world I love more than the mountains,” he told me.
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Juan and I spent the first dawn of our trip in a remote Chilean village, hauling supplies for the trip onto our motorboat. Groaning under the weight of 14 100-liter packs, our boat sputtered across Lago Plomo and dropped us in “tierra baldía,” no man’s land. We set a course for the ice field. Many of our expeditions—up glaciers, into crevasses, derailed by hurricane-level winds and rain.
But in pockets of peace, when the storm clouds paused their brutality, we explored. One day, after trudging over dunes on the valley floor, Juan found a swimming hole. We jumped in and cleaned the grime from our skin, despite the stern warnings of our mountaineering instructors, who worried the water was too still. The next day, in the folds of wooded foothills, Juan ditched his tent set-up to sunbathe. We spent the afternoon filling our water bottles with wild berries to make jam. Juan was an avid botanist and promised the berries were “edible enough.”
I envied the zeal with which Juan chased the heart of Patagonia. Once, he spotted an Andean condor carving an arc through the sky. He followed its path, pushing into a clearing to find himself face to face with a guemal, an Andean deer. They stared at each other, heads tilted.
When I asked Juan what he planned to do after the expedition, he brushed off the question with a smile and a simple “no tengo ni idea.” I didn’t have any idea, either, though I found uncertainty far more worrying.
Juan and I parted ways in mid-February. We exchanged the most generic byes: “Give me a call if you’re ever in Colombia,” he said, and I told him the same, if he ever came to the States. I spent the next month wandering up the coast of Chile, with no plans for where to stay or what to do. I struggled to recreate the raw excitement of exploring Patagonia with Juan.
In late March, I came across an opportunity to do political science research at Universidad de los Andes, Juan’s alma mater. I called Juan to tell him I’d be flying to Bogotá soon. He flipped his camera on and panned to an empty guest bed, which he said was “esperándote”—waiting for me.
I arrived at his dad’s apartment a week later, where Juan had been staying since spending the last of his post-grad earnings on the Patagonia expedition. Juan woke me at 5:00 a.m. the next morning. We drove to the outskirts of Bogotá in his beat-up Jeep Wrangler and took off down the dirt roads of the Colombian countryside on foot. Thanks to several—I suspect intentional—wrong turns, Juan led me on an impromptu half-marathon. Though my lungs struggled in the thin mountain air and my knees flared with pain over was eclipsed by the sight of Juan’s proud grin when we finally found our way back to the car.
Over the next month, Juan introduced me to his routine: spontaneity. I learned to never ask him about his plans for the next day. Initially, I thought he was hiding them. It took me a while to understand that he never knew them either.
Juan found a job that compensated him for adventure. Adidas hired him to lead the running community of Bogotá on weekend trail runs through the nearby mountains. Most mornings, I tagged along as Juan toured the city, stopping every jogger around to plug the Adidas Runners community. Within a few weeks, he persuaded nearly a hundred Bogotanos to wake up at 4:00 a.m. on Saturday mornings, drive two hours, and run trails with him. I was convinced more people were there to see Juan than to run.
Juan doubled as a park ranger on the trail. While the rest of us gasped for air in the high-altitude Colombian wetlands, he backpedaled, explaining how the leaves of the frailejones pulled moisture from the fog to provide water for the millions living thousands of meters below them. “Qué lástima,” Juan said. What a shame. What a shame that ranching companies were destroying these wetlands.
When I grew tired of research and Juan found a gap in his Adidas schedule, we filled our backpacks with gear and set out for the Colombian wilderness. Once, picking our way through a rock field in the mountains of southwestern Colombia, Juan vaulted himself onto a boulder to point out another Andean condor. The bird was exceedingly rare, he explained. Less than seven thousand remain in South America. They roost on the highest mountain ledges and, without a single flap of their wings, glide for several hours and hundreds of miles. Andean condors are believed to be a bridge between mortals and the heavens. In parts of Perú, Juan said, indigenous communities memorialize their struggle against the Spanish Empire by tying the leg of an Andean condor to the horn of a bull for a fight to the death. The condor always won.
After months of spontaneous adventures in Colombia, I began to understand why “Canción para Mi Muerte” was Juan’s favorite song. At 23, Juan had already learned to break his dreams out of the glass castle. He sought them out each day—the mountains and running, the frailejones and condors. He was convinced that our mortality made living a “beautiful and truly free” youth all the more important.
During those two months in Colombia with Juan, I began to live the same way. I stopped needing every adventure to justify itself. Juan’s impulses and mine began to blur. On my last day there, Juan and I took a detour from our run to stop by a tattoo parlor. We got matching Andean condors on our right ankles. By then, we had seen the condor on three separate expeditions. The last time, we were more than three miles above sea level, on top of a volcano in Colombia’s Parque Nacional Natural Los Nevados. We watched the condor’s ten-foot wingspan of white-accented plumes catch the air currents in big looping swells. The sun forced me to squint, but Juan sat bug-eyed. He traced the condor with an intense desire to take its place.
Savan Parikh is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.
Photos by Savan Parikh.
