Los Lecciones (The Lessons)
THE “STREET” WAS the Carretera Austral, the main highway through Patagonia. The continued creation of an all-Chilean north-south road had been one of the most hotly debated issues in Patagonia for twenty years. Unbeknownst to me, the situation was intensifying.
It was early November, springtime in the rain shadow of the Andes. While the rich valley bottomland was greening up, the mountains were still thickly snow covered. Except that snow line was headed upward instead of down, I had traveled to the other side of the world and found a place much like where I’d come from. This could have been the Matanuska Valley fifty years ago. For once in my life I was in exactly the right place at the right time.
As I traveled through the fertile grazing land of the Simpson Valley, a desperately needed sense of space slipped into my soul. Alamo trees, tall, fast-growing poplars planted by the homesteaders as windbreaks, marked the farmhouses scattered across the pastoral landscape.
By afternoon I was walking, claiming Nimbus was tired, while in reality it was my butt that was sore. Poorly packed gear kept bouncing out of Nimbus’s saddlebags. Unable to find a secure place for the hardback books, horse-grooming tools, and spare sunglasses I had far too many of, I stuffed them into my own pack.
An ancient red truck slowed nearly to a stop. A gray-haired couple stared at me through the cracked windshield of what was likely the first automobile they had ever owned. Mortified, I saw myself through their eyes, not as a woman on an expedition headed for the southern end of the continent, but as an overloaded, disorganized gringa walking down the road, leading a perfectly good horse.
By late afternoon, Nimbus tugged on the lead rope, letting me know that it was time to go home. How could I tell her that her sweet pasture was a thing of the past? Every night from now on we would need to look for a new place with decent grass. What I didn’t know yet myself was that behind me was also my own last night of uninterrupted sleep. For the next month, I would wake up several times every night to check on and move my horse.
That evening we camped in a small, trashy pull-off with barely enough grass for the night. Trucks rumbled by and dust settled onto my tent. My reality was a poor match for my dream of galloping off across Patagonia on horseback. The next day, unable to face another night beside the road, I marched Nimbus toward a nearby lake. I wasn’t headed south, but I didn’t care. A pattern for my journey was already being set.
A few graying giants, the skeletal remains of a once great forest, stood like sentinels around the lake, their comrades lay fallen, sinking into the soil. It was hard to believe that early explorers had described this now-open grazing land as an “exuberantly vegetated forest.”
In the 1930s and ’40s, Chilean laws designed to populate the province had given title to settlers who cleared and fenced their land. With no mechanized way to open the country to agriculture, the pioneers turned to fire. Spurred by the relentless Patagonia winds, blazes raged up mountainsides into country that would never be good grazing. Fires burned out of control through the winter, destroying homes, towns, and schools.
Beside the lake, tall fronds of bamboo grew in feathery clusters. A few kilometers to the west, the same plant flourished in impenetrable mats. During my NOLS courses, fighting my way on hands and knees through the dense foliage of western Patagonia had given me a measure of empathy for the pioneers who had wrestled homesteads from this verdant valley by whatever means they could.
Fifty percent of Aysén’s native forest has been lost or damaged by fire, yet nature’s ability to heal herself amazed me. When I arrived at camp, I hiked up a small hill overlooking the lake. A stand of Notro treesbent permanently downwind, red flowers flaring to leeward like trees on fire, contrasted with the soft pink of wild rose, the pastel purple of lupine. The delightful scent of a dozen different flowers and the soft sound of wavelets on the shore brought me sweet serenity. With my senses already bursting, a flock of chattering cachañas, twenty lime-green parrots, landed in a blazing-red tree.
Back at camp, cows were in the kitchen, trashing plastic bags, stomping my precious potato flakes into the dirt. I ran cursing at the beasts. My state of contentment, my fragile conception of my own competence—shattered.
The next day, a shortcut took me down a rough two-track dirt road with dozens of gates. At each, I got off Nimbus, opened the gate, walked her through, closed the latch behind me, and remounted my horse. If a single gate were to be locked, it would mean turning around and losing the entire day’s travel.
While stopped at yet another gate, a man on horseback galloped up to us, wool poncho flapping, black cap perched on his head, hand outstretched. He rode a gorgeous alazán, a red horse with a few white under hairs showing through.
He greeted me with a handshake. “Visitors usually stop at the house,” he informed me in Spanish.
I had not seen a house, but in the distance was a clump of alamo trees. Begging forgiveness for my rudeness, I said, “Permiso. Soy extranjero,” as if it weren’t obvious I was a foreigner.
When he asked where I was headed, I told him the name of a nearby lake. I was not ready to tell anyone I was riding this horse to Cochrane.
“I will show you the way,” he said.
Suddenly, I was riding with a gaucho, the name given in the early 1900s to the itinerant horsemen of Argentina. We blazed through campo land and forest at a pace I had not traveled before. All too soon he deposited me on a gravel road and rode off with a wave and a grin.
The day wore on. Ahead of me, barbed wire fence lined both sides of the road. Wishing we had camped in the open country we had just passed through at a trot, I examined each wide spot in the road for a place big enough to camp a night with a horse. A man was closing a campo gate.
“Is this your campo?” I asked.
“No, I only work here. Why?”
“Oh, I was just looking for a place to camp,” I said, trying not to sound desperate.
“I have two friends, Cantadilla and Juana, who live just down the road. You could stay there,” he told me, describing his friends’ house in detail. “Very friendly folks,” he assured me.
I thanked him and trudged onward. No stranger passing by had ever asked to stay at my house. I would not be asking Cantadilla.
I inspected every slightly more spacious spot between the fence lines. Nothing wide enough appeared. I marched onward. It was getting late, and the low sun behind me produced an amazing light show. The brilliant bands of a Patagonian rainbow ended right at Cantadilla and Juana’s place. I decided to stop. One cannot afford to pass up rainbows.
Maybe the illusion of colored light cast by the setting sun that led me here was just a coincidence, but Cantadilla and Juana’s house was indeed a pot of gold. A place to camp, fresh cow’s milk, homemade bread, and, best of all, new friends.
That evening a neighbor stopped by to buy some cheese from Juana and stayed to talk.
“Children these days are so much smarter than their parents,” he told me. “Take for example my daughter who lives in the city. She can talk on the phone, change the baby’s diaper, and open the mail all at the same time.” He patted his head and rolled his tongue counterclockwise.
Everyone burst out laughing, but I asked in all seriousness, “Is it really good to do three things at once?”
“Oh, in today’s Chile it is necessary,” he assured me.
On my trip, I had been purposely concentrating on one thing at a time. I didn’t read while I ate. I didn’t brush my teeth while I packed, and I felt saner than I had in years. If multi-tasking was essential even here in Chile, how had I survived my life in the United States?
If serendipity is the development of events by chance that leads to a brilliant discovery, this evening had been exactly that. As I slipped into sleep, a new confidence accompanied me. I would be taken care of. I would meet the people along the way who would teach me the things I needed to know.
The next morning, I headed off in the direction of a southbound trail that was clearly marked on my map. On my way I met a man carrying a chainsaw on the road.
“Can you get to La Horqueta from here?” I asked.
“Si, si,” he said. “It’s a great trail, wide like a road.”
I thanked him and hurried off.
We climbed into the lenga forest on a broad, well-maintained trail. Each tree, with its high, twisted branches, told an individual life story, making the lodgepole woods of my youth resemble a cluster of boring clones. Years of fallen lenga leaves had left the soil so acidic that only lenga and a few mosses could grow, making for open wooded country that was a delight to travel through. Ancestors of this southern beech tree had grown sixty-five million years ago on the supercontinent Gondwana. The Nothofagus family was ripped apart by continental drift. Patagonia’s lenga has cousins in New Zealand and Tasmania. This was my favorite forest on earth. But there was one problem: Grass. Camping with horses was about one thing—grass, quality and quantity.
Nimbus understood better than I did that the cool, damp understory of the forest lacked anything resembling good fodder. Tossing her head and swishing her tail, she let me know she was ready to go back to the lowlands. She, I was learning, was a strong-headed little girl, but I am also a willful female, and we had not yet come to an understanding.
We were off the road system and in the wild country I loved, when Nimbus planted her front feet and refused to move. Giving her a strong kick, I told her what I wanted. Complete with a youthful bucking fit, Nimbus and I had our first war. I won. I knew I had to. Still, punishing my horse left me shaken. If the last grass was indeed behind us, I had blown it, and I knew it.
Half an hour later, I stumbled upon what I took as deliverance—an open meadow and a tumbled-down corral. The grass was short and barely green at this altitude, but there was grass.
I was halfway through cooking dinner when Nimbus looked up. Her eyes ablaze with mal intent, she laid her ears back flat along her head and, hobbles and all, jumped the log wall of the broken-down corral. To my astonishment, she galloped down the trail in hobbles faster than I could run without. Boots unlaced, I stumbled behind her.
My poor girl was sweating and lunging. Pursuing her just made her run faster, but I couldn’t stand letting her out of my sight. At last her pace slowed. I lagged a bit farther behind. Exhausted, she hung her head in defeat. I slipped the rope over her neck, undid the hobbles, and led her back to camp.
I have a long history of talking people into expeditions they are unsure about. At least my human companions are able to say, “No, Nancy, I do not wish to go on your crazy adventure,” and they frequently do. Poor Nimbus did not have that option. I had bought her. However, she had just made her statement. She did not want to go on this trip. What was I to do now?
Tucked inside my little pyramid-shaped nylon shelter, I dozed fitfully. Outside, sleet was turning to snow. I felt sorry for Nimbus out in the storm. Part of me realized I was being ridiculous. Chilean horses spend the entire winter outside in the rain, wind, and snow, a barn an unheard of luxury. Her life with me was, in this way, no different than if she were still back in her pasture.
As I lay awake listening to snow pelt the nylon walls, I wondered how I could return to NOLS and explain that I had given up on my expedition because my horse did not want to go. When I finally slept, I dreamed of carrying a boyfriend around on my back and of being able to talk to horses.
The early morning sun melted the piles of snow that had drifted in around the trees, changing both the scene outside my tent and my mood. I did not want to give up on my expedition, but I had no idea where the trail went from here. Leaving Nimbus to graze what grass she could find, I took off on foot.
A tremendous amount of work had once gone into this old ox-cart road. Log bridges made of now-rotten timbers hung swaybacked over deep chasms, a certain death trap for a horse punching through. Soon, I was scrambling over a downed log every six feet. This trail hadn’t been maintained in years.
Curiosity and hardheaded stubbornness drove me on. Crawling through deadfall on my belly, I could see the Rio Blanco, the valley that would lead us at last toward La Horqueta, and from there, southward. But this was not a route that could be done with a horse.
Retreating down the long road I had come in on, I met the same man, again carrying a chainsaw.
“That trail should take about five hours,” he said.
I had been gone for two days.
“It is covered in downed trunks,” I informed him.
“Pero, los caballos saltan,” he said.
I tried to picture a horse jumping the hundreds of logs I had crawled over—maybe his horse but not mine. On a whim I asked, “How long since you traveled that trail?”
“Veinte años” He said.
Twenty years. Was it possible that the trail on my map had not existed for decades?
Then I remembered a conversation with Sergio. “There are three kinds of trails in Chile: Those that exist on the map but do not exist in reality, those that exist in reality but are not on the map, and those that are located more or less where they are shown on the map.” Praying for the third kind, I took off in the direction of another trail two days away.
A week into my trip, I could still see the backside of the mountain where the NOLS campo was located. We had been traveling in a circle. Was I subconsciously afraid to leave?
That night, with more than thirty kilometers behind us, our longest day so far, I believed we were finally on our way to La Horqueta. Camp was set up, and dinner in the making when an old man appeared on horseback. Smartly dressed in a gray wool vest, he sat upright on his horse, but as he drew near I noticed he was even more ancient than I had thought. The deep wrinkles of a hard outdoor life lined his face, but the expression worn into his face told of years well spent. He was hard of hearing and responded to my greeting with a heavy poblador accent through several missing teeth.
“Is it OK that I camp here?” I asked, assuming this was his land.
He looked at me, raised his bushy gray eyebrows, and said nothing.
Did he not hear me? Was my Spanish that poor? Did he not understand my question, or was it the concept he was unfamiliar with?
Finally, he spoke. “¿Estás sola?”
This again. Yes, I was alone.
“¿Con ese caballo?” he asked with astonishment and obvious disapproval.
“Yes, with a horse. Yes, I am alone with this horse.”
“Where is your companion?” he asked.
That remark struck a chord so painful my brain clamped shut. That question, I wasn’t ready to discuss with him or anyone else, in any language.
“There are sheep here,” he told me.
There were sheep nearly everywhere. Did he think the sheep were going to be a bother to me or that I was going to be a problem to the sheep? I was doing my best to understand him, but I could catch only a few words at a time.
“What about your husband? There could be thieves. There might be mountain lions.”
A smile frozen to my face, I fumbled with my stove for something to do. I suspected that the biggest danger I was faced with was the reaction of people like him convincing me that this entire trip was, indeed, a bad idea.
All I understood was that whatever I was doing was not OK, and no, I could not sleep anywhere there were sheep. His response baffled me. I had never been kicked out of anywhere in Chile before. The man lifted his eyebrows again and made a “follow me” motion with his head as he turned his horse away.
Was I supposed to pack up my things and travel however far it was to this man’s house for the night? Packing alone would take me an hour. I was exhausted. Besides, I couldn’t imagine convincing Nimbus that packing and moving now was a good idea. Plus, when I got to his house, there would surely be sheep. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to put my tent up in his yard and fall asleep. Hours of drinking maté and attempting to explain myself would be involved before I would be set up in a spare bed or on the couch. Here in camp I was half an hour from rest.
More than just language stood in the way of understanding. This man had been brought up in a time and place where women did not do things like this. For better or worse, I had been raised to think I could do anything I darn well pleased.
Social etiquette said I should accept his hospitality, but I couldn’t muster the energy. I shrugged as if again I didn’t understand, and he rode off. I was exhibiting a bold-faced lack of manners, and I knew it.
I lay awake, wondering for the third time in a week whether this whole trip was, indeed, an exceptionally bad idea. Too disturbed to sleep, I pulled out my hardcover copy of The South American Sketches of R.B. Cunningham Graham and began reading. Accidentally, I turned to the story, “The Captive” published in 1910. Graham was retelling a story about a woman taken prisoner while traveling alone on horseback.
“As I was saying, she might have gotten away—said my friend—only the mare of her tropilla had recently foaled, and either she was hard to drive or the maternal instinct in the woman was too strong . . .”
Was it possible that the Patagonia in Graham’s book was the country the gentleman I had just met had grown up in? These people, old men who had lived in this country all their lives, were exactly who I wanted to meet. Yet, here I was at last in Patagonia, without enough Spanish to be polite and too exhausted and cranky to care.
Before I could fall asleep, another man approached on a horse, this time, a stylishly dressed younger man on a leggy colorado. Not wanting a repeat of the evening’s events, my first reaction was to slink into my sleeping bag, to hide like a fugitive, my only crime being that I was a woman traveling alone. But it was obvious I was camped here. I decided on the friendly approach.
“Buenas noches,” I sang out, hopefully giving him the option of stopping to talk or saying, “Buenas noches,” and traveling on. He stopped to talk, but stayed astride his pretty cinnamon colored gelding.
“¿De donde viene?” I asked where he had come from.
“La Horqueta,” he answered.
At last, proof that this trail went where I wanted to go.
“It’s a good trail. I will be coming through tomorrow with my groceries; we can travel together,” he told me, as if what I was doing was the most natural thing in the world.
The next morning, I sat drinking coffee in the sun, waiting for the man from La Horqueta. By what felt like noon, he had not shown up. Could time actually move at a different rate in Patagonia, or was two cups of coffee and my gringa impatience getting the best of me?
When the sun was well overhead, I saddled Nimbus, and we headed off on our own. An obvious trail cut through straight lines of pine trees.
As a solution to the rampant erosion caused by fires in the mid-twentieth century, the Chilean government had given subsidies to farmers to plant forests of fast-growing, non-native lodgepole pines. The result was this extended expanse of trees all the same age, standing at attention in neat, orderly rows.
In this land of impressive hardwoods, no one has much use for these fast-growing, soft-wooded trees. The problems caused by the monoculture of pine plantations are now being realized, but things change slowly in Chile. As I rode through that sterile, artificial forest, some pine plantations in Patagonia were being removed, while new ones were still being subsidized.
Not far into the pine plantations, the man from La Horqueta rode up behind me. An attractive Patagon with long, thin legs, tall riding boots, and a colorful scarf around his neck, he was dressed for town. His horse, too, looked festive with its bright green hand-woven saddlebags filled with groceries. He had expected me to wait for him. I felt like the impatient gringa I was. One with his horse, I got an education watching him ride. At our first gate, he reached forward, opened the gate from astride his horse, and ushered me through. I watched as he nudged his mountalongside the gate, swung it closed, and slipped the wire-loop back over the fence post. This was a trick I needed to learn.
The trail, wide and unobstructed, dropped steeply to the river. The Rio Blanco had just enough glacial water in it to give it a soft, milky blue color. I leaned back in the saddle as Nimbus picked her way down. This was the steepest hill we had encountered so far. The man from La Horqueta waited for us at the bottom.
His horse traveled the flat, verdant pastureland in the valley bottom with the smooth, fast, Chilean horse walk that would take me years to master. Nimbus and I had to break into a bouncy trot every so often to keep up. When we did, my butt flew up off the saddle and came down hard. At our first stream crossing, Nimbus plunged in like she had done it all her life. Maybe she wasn’t such a city girl after all. I wished she could tell me her story.
By late afternoon, the volcanic pinnacles of Pico Blanco, which had been white with the previous night’s snow, shone black along the skyline. I had been in the saddle for hours. I suggested we stop for maté.
In an open, grassy place beside the river, a lone shade tree beckoned. I hopped off and dug into my bags for the things I would need: yerba, a gourd, and the bombilla. I had enjoyed maté in other people’s houses, but I was nervous about being the servador. Would the water be the right temperature, the maté not too bitter, the bombilla stay unclogged?
The man from La Horqueta was leading his horse to a good place to graze. For the first time, I realized that this man who moved through this country on horseback with a far greater ease than me walked with a lopsided gait. Like the mythological Greek centaur, a creature both man and horse, a good horse was this man’s grace, his speed, his efficiency, his ability to work and live in this country.
I showed him my map. He didn’t know what the lines meant, but he understood that I did. It helped explain how I was getting around in a country I did not know.
Instead of starting a fire to make hot water for the maté, I pulled out a lightweight backpacking stove and boiled water almost instantly. I had him perplexed.
“Don’t you miss your family?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure if he meant my mother and father or the husband and kids I don’t have.
“Si, a veces,” Yes, sometimes, I answered, thinking that would cover both options.
“¿No te aburro?” he asked.
The literal translation, “Do you not bore yourself?” struck deep within me.
The answer to that was much too complicated to explain in Spanish. I hoped I would get bored less and less as I adjusted to the quiet rhythm of life on the trail. I wanted to let the lack of external noise seep in, to let silence quiet the internal noise as well. Perhaps, boring myself was exactly what I was craving.
This man was the cuidador of La Horqueta campo and caretaker of three hundred cows.
“The owner lives in Balmaceda and doesn’t come by often,” he told me. “Once every two weeks I travel this route to buy food in El Blanco and visit my mother.”
This man, I thought, could teach me a thing or two about solitude.
A few hours later, I decided to camp in a delightful spot beside the river. Again, I had him perplexed. He always rode to La Horqueta in one day, but with a nod and a wave he headed home.
I woke up by the river to the kind of spectacular morning that reminded me that my entire life’s experiences, and all my decisions—good and bad—had combined to place me here in Patagonia on this particular springtime day, and that life was perfect just as it was. I traveled without a watch. With no desire to be anywhere else, I drank coffee and stretched. I hung around, reading and writing in the sun until the shadows grew small.
I counted on my fingers, starting with the last far-off date I could remember, the day I had landed in Chile. My birthday had been coming up and today was the day.
Was my lack of internal calendar a Freudian slip? If you don’t know it’s your birthday, do you still turn forty?
I jumped on Nimbus and galloped barefoot and bareback beside the river, unbrushed blonde hair blowing behind me. I don’t think Nimbus understood this pointless running in circles, but she caught the spirit. I gave her a gentle squeeze with my right leg and felt her turn left. That was it, the change of lead that my riding instructor in Alaska had been talking about. I tried it again, doing figure eights in the field, feeling her respond to my touch, matching the rhythm of her switch every time. My seat never left her bare back. It felt like magic and one thousand pounds of personal power.
I set her free, and she made no effort to leave. It is said in Patagonia, “If you have a caballo (a gelding) you have the same horse every day. But, if you have a yegua (a mare) you have a different horse every day.” She liked this place and its fat, green grass just fine. It dawned on me like a revelation: A few days ago on that high mountain pass, she had run away from a place she did not like, and I had taken it hard. “Don’t take things so personally.” I had heard this all my life from the people closest to me. Now I was learning it from a horse.
As a thirteen-year-old gymnast, I had learned to throw backflips. I hadn’t stuck with formal gymnastic training. The tension of competition had put knots in my stomach. Still, I loved the feeling of hurling my body through time and space, landing exactly how and where I expected. All through my twenties and thirties I continued to throw backflips in parks and on beaches. I intended to throw backflips in my forties, as well.
On a flat, grassy bench beside the Rio Blanco, I gathered my breath, snapped my mind into that place of perfect concentration, that place where solo rock climbers and big wave surfers go, that place where nothing is capable of going wrong. I took a powerful running start, did a round-off, and threw a backflip so high and powerful I had to recover with a backward roll. Afterward, my mother’s voice broke in: “You could have landed on your head in the middle of nowhere with no one to pick up the pieces.” I hushed her and all other cautionary voices. Today, I needed to feel foolish and young.
Late that afternoon I felt the urge to travel on. With the sun already far past its apex, I loaded Nimbus.
All too soon our lovely trail ended with a steep drop into La Horqueta valley, the first of a series of easterly flowing valleys that drained the expansive glacier-covered peaks to the west. While the lowlands were turning green, the high mountain passes between them were still deeply snow covered. These passes, the man from La Horqueta had assured me, were impassable on horseback, even in the summer.
With nowhere else to turn, Nimbus and I camped alongside the only north-south route available, the Carretera Austral. The highway, still called by some the Carretera Presidenté Pinochet, was pushed through by President Augusto Pinochet’s motivation to connect the country and secure Chilean Patagonia from the influence of Argentina. Construction of even this winding dirt road was a major feat, and the project was still incomplete. Some 370 kilometers to the south, the carretera ended 100 kilometers short of the village of O’Higgins. About 420 kilometers in the other direction, it ended, once again on the shores of a long, narrow fjord. From there, a combination of roads and ferries circumnavigated the most rugged, densely forested sections of coastline to link up with the rest of Chile’s road system.
As I turned southward on the Carretera Austral, the region of Aysén boasted 110 kilometers of paved road. The section of highway I was traveling was undergoing Chile’s attempt to up that number. While the peaceful lenga forest was just out of reach, dust, noise, and loose plastic were everywhere. Even worse, road construction in Patagonia included hundreds of men with shovels all staring at me.
The wind blew grit into my teeth and eyes. Nimbus got edgier as the day wore on, panicking at every piece of fluttering debris, unfamiliar noise, and sudden movement. I tried to keep her under control, but I was in the same state myself. “If one more person shouts or honks in my general direction I am going to scream!” We were a dismal sight, a worn-out gringa in filthy clothing alternately riding and leading an unmanageable mare down a dusty road.
My slow pace over the last several days meant that I was at the end of my rations. My hummingbird metabolism clashed violently with lack of food. With the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs crumbling, it was impossible for me to think of anything else. I pushed for the tiny village of Cerro Castillo, hoping to get there before stores closed for siesta.
I didn’t make it.
Villa Cerro Castillo was named after the peak that towers above the town. Castle Mountain is a heavily eroded volcano with rugged basalt columns rising an impressive two thousand meters into a clear blue sky. As I marched toward town, the base of Cerro Castillo’s spires were hidden by a layer of blowing grit.
When I arrived in the collection of square blocks that is Villa Cerro Castillo, the few stores on the main street had their lights off and doors closed. There was no movement anywhere. Near the edge of town, I saw a woman ahead of me. She walked up to the door of a small shop and rang the bell, something that would never have occurred to me. The owner, a short woman with shoulder-length hair, came to the door and happily opened up for her. I slipped in before the door could close. The store sold mostly cookies and candy, but food was food, and I was hungry.
Somehow the storekeeper, Eva, intuitively gathered the critical information about me. I was alone, on a horse, and famished. Soon, I was sitting behind her woodstove, and she was putting a steaming bowl of broth with a floating sheep vertebra in front of me. My hands, cracked and filthy with the dust of the last few days etched into the creases, looked like those of a sixty-year-old poblador. Unconcerned with what my vegetarian friends back home would think, I picked up the bone and began gnawing on it.
A chubby three-year-old boy bounded in and plopped onto Eva’s lap. I assumed him to be her son. He was her grandson. How old could this woman be? Her skin was smooth and her laughter light. Certainly not much older than me.
A calendar hung on the pale green wall behind the woodstove.
“¿Que día es hoy?” I asked.
“Diez de Noviembre,” she said.
Tenth of November. Ah, hell. I’d miscalculated. This horrible day on the carretera was my real birthday. Deciding not to say or do anything about it, I returned to my soup.
Eva offered to put me and Nimbus up on an extra piece of land she owned. My imagination took me to a green pasture beside a gently flowing brook, while Eva led us to an abandoned lot bordered by houses on three sides. However, after helping Eva fix the fence, it was home and it was heaven. I washed clothes, bought food, and took a bath in a bucket inside my tent.
In the evening, I closed the gate behind me and walked over to visit with Eva. So this was what life without a horse felt like. Funny, already I could barely remember a time when I did not need to look after my horse.
After a few days’ rest, I packed up and headed south again. Not ten minutes into my day, a big sign proclaiming Cueva de Las Manos caught my eye. The glitzy sign seemed a bit touristy, but archeological sites fascinate me, so I turned left in search of the Cave of Hands. The signs got smaller and older, taking me down one back road and then another until I found a hand-painted scrap of wood that had fallen off a fence and was lying in the road, leaving me with no idea which direction it had originally pointed. I decided to ask at the nearest house.
Andrés Vargas opened the door. Once he understood what I was looking for, he tossed on a coat and motioned for me to follow. We walked down a narrow trail leading to a two-hundred-foot overhanging cliff with a spectacular view of the entire Rio Ibáñez Valley. Painted in black and red were hundreds of outlines of hands. Most of the handprints, some higher up the wall than any normal person could reach, were of adults. But on one low section of overhanging wall, dozens of children’s handprints were neatly lined up.
Similar paintings have been found in indigenous sites from the American Southwest to Australia and Europe. This painting with hands struck me as a universal first self-expression. In kindergarten, I, too, had dipped my small hand in paint and put its impression on paper.
Andrés showed me a rectangular-shaped painting with softly rounded edges. “Moler,” he said, making a grinding action with his hands. Why would a grinding stone be depicted, but not horses? Then I remembered these paintings were between five thousand and eight thousand years old. The ancient inhabitants of this land had hunted on foot. Horses hadn’t come into their culture until the mid-1600s.
Historians believe that the original horses of Patagonia were all descendants of a few mares and stallions abandoned by the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Mendoza in 1536, when he was expelled from the shores of the La Plata River by the indigenous population of Argentina. By the mid-1600s the horse had transformed Tehuelcheculture.
The Tehuelche were so much a part of the country that the word pampas, used today to describe the land in arid eastern Argentina, is Tehuelche for flat. Although a few traditions and many of their words live on, there are virtually no Tehuelches left today to tell us the story. By 1896, the influx of Europeans and their diseases had reduced the population to about five hundred individuals. The conquest of 1897 killed off the last remaining Tehuelches.
The screeching of bandurrias brought me back to the present. Dozens of prehistoric-looking buff-necked ibis with their long curved beaks were nesting in the cliffs. I had no idea that these birds that pick for fish and bugs along rivers and hang out in flat farmlands were cliff nesters.
A big, square stucco structure dominated the valley below the cliffs. “What’s that building?” I asked Andrés.
“It’s an old residential school,” he told me. “Early settlers sent their children to live there for the school year. It’s abandoned now. This area is going to be a park. One day soon that building will be a visitors’ center.
MORE THAN TEN years later, I would return to the Cueva de Las Manos to find a small ranger station sitting where I had pitched my camp. In a four-wheel-drive van with friends from the States, the distance from town would seem so short, straightforward, and well marked. Domingo Vargas, Andrés’s son, would be working as a ranger. After paying a small entry fee, he would take us up to the paintings and show us around. Later over maté, I would ask about the old school. “One day soon it will be a visitors’ center,” Domingo would reply.
AFTER A NIGHT camped above the old residential school that would not become a visitors’ center any time soon, Nimbus and I headed south through the most open country we had traveled so far. Sedge grasses clumped together to hold onto scant soil and moisture mixed with circular mats of florescent-red herba negro brush in bloom. Forced by the terrain farther east than I had anticipated, I traveled off the edge of my map.
This wasn’t the first time I had journeyed without a map in Patagonia. In my NOLS-instructor days, we had often traveled into the areas marked S.V.E. (Sin Visibilidad Esterioscopico). Rumor has it that southern Chile was flown over to be mapped on one particular day. Everything under clouds that day was marked S.V.E., leaving huge blank spots on the map. No one cared. The cloud-covered regions were high in the mountains. Nobody went there anyway.
As Aldo Leopold once wrote, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” I moved by asking myself, if I lived in this country how would I get my animals around? The path of least resistance usually led to a trail. I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I knew vaguely where I was going, which is better than I often do in my life.
Nightfall found me camped on the edge of a tremendous cliff. In one day of moving generally westward, I had traveled from desert-like pampas to thick, verdant rain forest. From the sunless depths of the forest floor, I could hear the elusive huet-huet—a larger version of the chucao tapaculo, and another one of Darwin’s discoveries—calling out its eerie name.
The next day, after a long, hard, circuitous day in the saddle, I camped a vertical quarter-mile away at the bottom of the same cliff. I was beginning to suspect that progress, like time, was defined differently in Patagonia.
Somewhere ahead of me the Rio Sin Nombré drained a tremendous amount of country. I would need a bridge to cross that river. The next day, I asked the few people I saw about the existence of a puente. Their contrasting answers confused me. I have bad Spanish days the way other people have bad hair days, but I was exasperated. What was so hard about my question? Was there, yes, a bridge, or no, not a bridge?
It wasn’t until I arrived at the river and found a red and white swinging cable bridge wide enough for two horses to pass that I knew I would not have to double back several days’ worth of riding. Years would pass before I’d understand why I had not comprehended the peoples’ answers. A puente is a bridge built for automobiles, while a pasarela is the swinging cable variety used primarily by livestock. Two of the people I had asked had answered my question literally, no there was not a puente, while the third had understood my meaning and answered, yes, there was a way to cross the river with my horse.
As I traveled west, the vegetation should have been getting healthier and greener, instead it was getting thinner and poorer. Something wasn’t right. Gray dust blew from between spindly clumps of grass. Then I remembered . . . the volcano. When Volcan Hudson, only forty kilometers north of us, had exploded on August 8, 1991, the wind had been blowing south. A three hundred square kilometer area had been covered with volcanic ash and pumice up to a meter deep.
By afternoon we were traveling through buried farms. Fence lines that once stood four feet tall were now stubby rows of sticks a few inches above the ash. The few animals around simply stepped over them, a tiny inconvenience in their search for food. Campos had been abandoned or sold, no doubt cheap. The place looked like a previously inhabited moonscape.
Nimbus and I stopped for long periods whenever we found good grass. Nimbus was showing no signs of becoming skinny. In fact, people usually complimented me on the fact that my horse was “bien gorda,” but like me, she was a witch when she was hungry.
Again, we were traveling slower than I had expected. Figuring we were still several days from the next town, I also made use of whatever food the land had to offer. Dihueñe, small, round mushrooms that grow on lenga trees, fried with butter and onion made a delicious addition to the last of the spaghetti sauce. Nalca, a prehistoric-looking plant with a single huge, spiny leaf supported by a meaty stalk the size of a man’s arm, when stripped of its spines and dipped in sugar, made a tasty desert. I wasn’t the first to use nalca in hard times. Indigenous people, as well as early homesteaders, knew nalca as an appetite suppressant.
Nimbus and I stopped at an abandoned house for a long break. Wild roses grew out of the broken windows of a large, gray, wooden structure. The grass around the old house was already coming back thick and green. A wooden swing hung from an old apple tree. The tree was still producing, but the apples were small, few, and too bitter to eat. What had the people who lived here been like? Where had this family gone?
The garden was overgrown with weeds. The house would have to be gutted. Too many years of allowing whatever grew outdoors to grow inside had passed. Resting in a sweet smelling field of blue and purple lupines, deep into my fantasy about living in that old, wooden house, I let myself drift into an afternoon nap. The long-abandoned garden produced lettuce and cilantro in abundance, and laughing children climbed the apple tree.
That evening, I settled Nimbus into the best spot of grass I could find, a patch only about twenty square feet and a bit thin. It would have to do. The previous night, I had slept to the soft swoosh of the Rio Ibáñez flowing around the silvered trees left standing when the river changed its course during the eruption. The night before, I had enjoyed the almost imperceptible lapping of waves on the shore of Lago Alto. That night the babbling of a small brook lured me into dreams.
The faintest hint of light was in the sky when I awoke to move Nimbus to better grass. I had overslept. Stumbling outside, I forced my eyes to focus. An empty halter lay on the ground. I shook myself to awaken from my nightmare. The halter still lay there . . . empty.
I peered behind the nearby bushes, but in my heart I knew Nimbus had been gone for hours. We hadn’t closed a gate behind us for days. Hoof prints wandered around a bit as if searching for grass, and then headed decisively north. I took off after her. Fortunately, it is not hard to track an animal in pumice.
My mind started its all-too-familiar whirlwind which usually ends in, “my life is a disaster.” Why would anyone who had a good job with good pay, a comfortable home, and three meals a day choose to be hungry, stinky, and dragging a reluctant mare across Chile? Walking a lonely road at five-thirty in the morning, carrying an empty halter is this the highest form of accomplishment I can produce in my life? I should send myself home to write a thousand times on the blackboard: “I will not do crazy things.”
A few hours into my search I realized this could be an all-day affair. In my panic I had brought no food, no water, no extra clothing. I kept walking.