Al Interior (The Land Within)
THE MILKY GRAY glacier runoff made it impossible to tell which parts of the river were deepest. I probed the river with a long stick, looking for holes. Leaning on a sturdy stock to help steady myself, I entered the edge of the river to feel the power of the flow. Using a technique I had often employed at NOLS, I faced upstream, moving first my right foot, then my left sideways into the current.
Harry probably thought me completely daft. My behavior did not surprise me. I had done ludicrous things before in defense of my animals. The consequences of losing my footing and taking a wicked, cold, nasty swim would not be fatal. However, a pilchero that slipped with his load might possibly drown. Slow and cautious was how I had learned to cross Patagonian rivers. I intended to approach this one the same way.
Meanwhile, faint mares’ tails, the first sign of a possible weather change, whipped across the western sky, reminding me of the need to keep moving. We still had the snow-covered pass ahead of us.
Finally, I was satisfied we had a safe route across the river. We led the horses up the steep rocky slope on the other side, where I noticed another small shrine nailed to a tree. I left a few pesos in thanks for our safe crossing. No trust had been lost between us and the horses, but Harry and I were furious with each other. Our differing opinions as to how to treat the horses remained painfully irreconcilable.
We were well above the timberline. Snow patches started to link together until unbroken snowfields stretched before us. We traveled on foot, carefully leading our animals. Again, we were not being gaucho, but if a horse were to put a foot in a hole or behind a log and stumble, it could break a leg. Having a horse in pain and suffering because of my own inattention or stupidity was my greatest nightmare.
However, the late spring snow was still firm and surprisingly supportable. Best of all, we had the tracks of four horses, only a few days old ahead of us. No other sign of a trail was visible. Somewhere high on the pass we slipped across the unmarked border into Argentina as people had done since before there were borders.
In 1881, a treaty between Chile and Argentina fixed the boundary as being “between the highest summits” and “along the water divide.” The discrepancy this language induced has proven problematic. In Patagonia the exact border is still uncertain in places.
In this wild country, far from any official border crossing, locals frequently made short trips across the imaginary line between their two countries. A few hours later, with no one to know or care, we stepped back into Chile.
Dry Argentinian peaks to the east turned pink with the setting sun.
“Condor,” Paul hollered.
A mature male with a white collar around his neck rose in lazy circles over the summit. Wingtips arched characteristically upward, it was definitely an Andean Condor, the largest raptor in the world. Paul had been waiting all trip to get a glimpse of this rare monstrous bird. Still, from this distance, it was hard to believe it had a wingspan of over ten feet. The Andean condor had been working its way to the wrong end of the endangered species list since 1973. We stared, transfixed, lost in the moment, the hardships of the day fading with the sunset.
We could see forest below. Our long day was nearly over.
We found a green spot big enough for the night. After unsaddling, I ran my hands over Tamango’s coat to check for sores and give him a little rub down. He had been a fantastic pilchero on a tough day. Suddenly, my good sweet boy turned and bit me hard on the leg. Tough blue jeans prevented the skin from being broken, but I was badly bruised. For weeks I would carry a blueish purple reminder to tie his head up when messing with him and to change that packsaddle so it doesn’t sore him up!
A place called puesto de tablas was the only man-made objectmarked along our entire route. Where there was a puesto there would be grass. The following day would be another tough one, but I was determined to make it there by nightfall.
The next day, I was admiring the forest around me on a rare section of easy trail when Arraquien snorted, bounced aside, and stared. He had nearly stepped on a strange elongated creature with short stubby legs. An armadillo, or pichi, as it is known in Argentina,stooddefiantly in the trail. Long, dark reddish hairs grew from its armor, like unwanted whiskers. Could this tiny creature really be related to the two-thousand pound armadillo of prehistoric Patagonia? His short bowlegged limbs, with long claws for digging, did not seem capable of taking him far from his desert home. But here he was deep in the forest. Maybe, I thought, this one was like me, wandering simply to see what was out there.
We arrived at the puesto de tablas just at dusk. Smoke curled from the rooftop. Don Rial, a wiry older man in a faded denim jacket and black boina—the only inhabitant of this country and the man whose horse’s footprints we had been following for days—greeted us at the gate.
“Saque la montura,” he said with the invitation to unsaddle. In typical poblador fashion it was understood we would be staying awhile.
Saddles deposited in a shed, we were ushered in for maté. The puesto was, exactly as noted on the map, a simple cabin madeof tablas, graying four-inch hand-hewn boards. In order to keep livestock out of the immediate living area, the place was surrounded by a small wooden fence. A few chickens and a dog roamed the yard. Outside the gate, we tied one horse and left the others free to eat.
At this altitude, grass was still poor this time of year. Don Rial didn’t give a second thought to grazing three extra animals for the night, but I was aware we were asking a lot.
This man, with his simple dwelling, sparse cooking utensils, and dirt floor was in charge of the entire valley we had just travel though, the campo we had slept on the previous night, as well as the country we would travel through the entire next day. Fortunately for us, he had just returned from his semi-annual trip to town with three pilcheros loaded with maté, flour, and sugar for the summer. At the end of the summer he would push his fattened cows back up over the pass to market in Cochrane.
We made a pot of soup from ingredients in our saddle bags and meat Don Rial hacked from a lamb hung to cure in the back room. The sky darkened and the light faded away inside the puesto as we sipped maté and talked.
I longed to understand everything about how this country had shaped his life, but my Spanish failed me miserably. Nevertheless, long after Paul and Harry had gone to bed, I stayed up listening to his stories by the light of the open fire.
Don Rial had three children. One was in living in Cochrane. The other two were studying in Santiago. I tried to imagine where their lives and studies would take them. I doubted it would be back to this beautiful, desolate country. What would become of this tremendous expanse of land with the passing of Don Rial?
Right before bed I hobbled two horses and tied Chucao. I liked to change who got tied at night so each had a chance to eat. In the middle of the night, I untangled Chucao who had wrapped himself up tightly in his rope. Sleeping with one ear open, as camping with horses had taught me to do, I heard hobbled horses nearby most of the night. Come morning, I could hear nothing except Paul and Harry making breakfast.
“Are there horses?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” they replied in unison.
None of us were too concerned about the horses until I discovered Don Rial’s four horses grazing nearby, unaccompanied by Tamango and Arraquien. Then I knew. Our boys had taken off. The thought of my horses jumping logs and negotiating the muddy trail behind us in hobbles disturbed me deeply.
Paul and Harry were confident the horses were still nearby. I was equally sure they had returned to the last gate.
Four miles back, two horses stood looking forlornly at a closed gate, their hobbles thankfully missing. I slipped the halterover Arraquien’s ears, and he resolutely followed me down the trail. Tamango stubbornly stood his ground at the gate.
“Oh, Tamango,” I said, taking off Arraquien’s halter. I slipped it over Tamango’s nose and whispered sweetly in his ear, “Tamango, you pig-headed jerk, let’s go.”
By the time I arrived at Don Rial’s it was lunchtime. One could not leave before the midday meal.
Some time well into the afternoon we took off for Lago Christy. We were headed al interior, into the heart of wild country,the land farthest from all roads. Two inches of soil covered a recently glaciated landscape. A series of bald granite steps made up the trail. Each time we lost the route, we dismounted and crawled on hands and knees, examining the bare rock at eye level, looking for the scratch marks of shod horses that had gone before us.
That evening, we camped beside a crystal clear lake. Snow-covered peaks rose steeply from the shoreline. Dense, verdant rain forest vegetation lay to the west, the dry mountains and huge stacked lenticular clouds of Argentina to the east.
This country felt wild, untouched, raw—exactly what my soul had been craving. Like others need food, shelter, and money, I need silence, open space, and the raw, clean, sometimes volatile elements of nature mixing randomly, the way they do in Patagonia. If landscape creates culture, if a tough, wet climate creates patience, if natural disasters create perseverance, and surviving in a harsh, windblown landscape creates good neighbors, it didn’t surprise me that rural Patagonians seemed so solidly sane compared to the rest of the world.
The next day we passed the Salto de Rio Perez, a tremendous waterfall coming out of Lago Christy, and continued on through miles of blooming red norto trees. In the clear water of the Rio Perez, a showy black-and-white-stripped duck played in the waves. He caught an eddy, surfed the foam at its apex, efficiently ferried across the river and, with the finesse of an expert kayaker, caught another eddy and continued upstream. Impressive to watch, the pato cortacorrientes, or current-cutting duck, falls from its bankside nesting holes and begins running rapids.
The milky blue glacier water of the Rio Ventisquero was converging with the rapid clear water of the Rio Perez, leaving us traveling down a narrow peninsula. It was time to camp. At exactly the same moment, three people and three horses noticed an inviting patch of deep green grass the other side of the Perez, and without saying a word, crossed the river. We were headed for camp, food, and rest, but upon arriving at our haven, things went suddenly wrong.
Our pasture was not grassland but a mallín, a wet muddy swamp. Harry, Chucao, and Tamango had time to turn around, but Arraquien and I had plowed too far in before we realized the danger. My poor boy was thrashing, bucking for all he was worth, getting mired deeper and deeper into the muck. Normally I respond to emergencies in a cool, levelheaded manner. This time I freaked.
My high-pitched scream startled all of us. Panic pulsed through Arraquien and I, as if we were one animal. My voice rose to a screech. With Arraquien up to his belly in muck, I jumped in nearly to my own waist. I managed to undo his cinch and dump his saddle and saddlebags in the mud.
“Arraquien! Mueva su poto.” I yelled at him to move his ass. Shaking with fear, I slapped him violently on the rear. His only chance was to fight and fight hard.
Paul tugged on his lead rope from a drier patch of ground. I pounded on Arraquien’s butt as hard as I could. We couldn’t let him give up. I had heard of horses that had quit and died in this kind of situation.
This trip was proving to be every bit as treacherous as the locals had warned me about two years earlier. I was more than thankful for the help of my two friends. The people of Cochrane had been right. Alone on Nimbus, this would have been a crazy, foolish endeavor, maybe one we would not have come home from.
This was no time to descend into that ever deepening spiral that always ended in, “Why do I get myself in situations like this?” This was the moment to fight—hard.
Finally, Arraquien broke free of the muck and plowed headlong into the forest, where we all stood, wet, shaking, mud covered, and sweating. I wanted to cry. I wanted to quit for the day. I almost wanted to go home. But, there was nothing to do but put saddles back on and keep looking for a better camp.
Hours later we found it—horse heaven. Huge, widely spaced, nine-hundred-year-old coihue trees lifted their twisted trunks a hundred-and-fifty feet into the sky. The richest pasture we had seen in weeks grew in the diffused light beneath their curling branches. With profound pleasure I watched my boys bury their noses up to their halters in thick young clover. Dinner for us was three rainbow trout Harry had pulled from the river. That night, for the first time in days, our entire tropé washappy and well fed.
The night was remarkably clear and warm, a combination that rarely goes together in high latitudes. As I drifted into much-needed sleep, the Southern Cross peeked in my tent door. I tried to see an ostrich in its four bright stars, as the Tehuelche had when they named the constellation ñandu after the sixty pound flightless bird of the pampas. I saw a kite. Why hadn’t I noticed the Southern Cross before? Had it been lost in the clouds, hidden by trees, or overlooked by the muddled, unobservant brain I had brought with me from town.
A lot of 599-foot hills can be missing from a map with 300-foot contour lines. Expecting a straightforward, wide open river valley, we found ourselves trapped in a confusing maze of small hills. The trail was marked as crossing the river at a canyon. This didn’t make sense either. The water would be slower and shallower at a wide spot. I suspected that, once again, the map was wrong, but we rounded the corner to see a neatly constructed red-and-white pasarela spanning the canyon.
On the other side of the bridge, near a small paddock filled with angora goats, we lost the trail for what seemed like the hundredth time. There was a small puesto nearby,but no one was thereto ask for directions. A swinging wooden gate, built so a person can open and close it on horseback, led out of the corral. The other possible exits were gates made of horizontal poles or barbed wire, both of which required dismounting to open and close. Extrapolating that the trail with the superior gate would be the main route, I pushed my conclusion on my companions.
We took off on a wide, well-brushed trail. Soon something seemed odd. The Rio Mayer had been flowing downstream on our left, we had just crossed it, and now it was flowing downstream on our right. That made sense and no one else felt anything disconcerting, so we kept going.
Our trail divided and divided again. Each time we chose the path most traveled. Years earlier, traveling with NOLS students, I had learned the first rule of travel in Patagonia. “If two paths divide in the woods, don’t even think of being poetic, take the one most traveled by.”
Nevertheless, we were soon ducking under branches, a sure sign that we were on a cow trail. A poblador on horseback would simply take out the huge knife, always tucked in the waistband of his pants, and slash the offending branch. Eventually, we came to a fence without a gate. We sat down, defeated, lost again.
Confused, I scrambled over the fence and climbed a small hill to get a view. On the other side of the rise I saw something too strange to believe, a red-and-white freshly painted swinging bridge. Where the hell were we? Could there really be two bridges? My confusion reminded me of reading the intensely vivid stories of Chilean author Isabel Allende. Had the Patagonia landscape created this distinct style of writing where places and things are never as they appear? Or, could magical realism actually have created Patagonia?
Lost in abstract thoughts, I sat silently on the hill, staring at the bridge. When my mind finally cleared itself of preconceived convictions, I understood. We had somehow come full circle. I was looking at the bridge we had just crossed. It took another several minutes to convince Paul and Harry. Two hours later, only a hundred meters past the bridge, we found a faint trail taking off unannounced, not to a paddock of angora goats, but to the town of O’Higgins.
All too soon, we were starting to lose the wilderness feel of the trip. There was something different about the first occupied dwellingwe had seen since Don Rial’s. Instead of hand-hewn wooden shingles, this house had a metal roof, a sure sign that this homestead was accessed from the O’Higgins side, and, at least during certain seasons of the year, an ox cart road. At the house, we stopped outside a swinging gate to ask directions. The first female I had seen since Cochrane walked briskly toward us, smiling and wiping her hands on a pink-and-white flowered apron.
Pointing toward a thin space between two trees just past the corral, she assured us the trail was good from there on. It began at the corral, then went downhill until crossing a stream, and then took off to the right.
“Is it easy to find?” I asked, unsure if I had gotten it right.
“No problema,” she said, laughing at the idea of getting lost.
“Have you lived here a long time?” I asked. I imagined that she had, of course, lived here her entire life, but I desperately wanted to continue talking to the only woman I had seen in weeks.
“This is where I was born, so this is where I live,” she told me as if it could be no other way.
I had lived five places before I was ten years old. For me the place I was born was little more than a name on a map. Her concept of home, like her concept of time, was as foreign to me as mine was to her.
“Do you see many people passing through?” I asked, still wanting to talk.
“Oh, yes, I have seen other people, sin pegamento,” she said.
Sin pegamento, “without glue”? I didn’t understand.
Then I got it. She had met others like myself. People who, for some unfathomable reason, did not have the glue to stick them in place.
Long before I was ready for the trip to end, we stepped out of the forest onto a freshly bulldozed mud track, another reminder thatevery year new roads were being built in previously roadless valleys. The opportunity to live this life that I loved would not last forever, even here.
A road construction crew was drinking maté and eating meat alongside the road.
“Maté, amigos,” the men shouted into the wind, inviting us to join them.
The thought of a little maté, some lamb, and a bit of conversation was appealing, but glancing at Paul and Harry I knew the answer.
“No, gracias,” I said.
We had miles to make. The once-a-week bus from O’Higgins was leaving in a couple days, and Paul and Harry needed to be on it. Maté in the forest would have to wait.
The next morning while we cooked breakfast only six kilometers outside of town, a bus passed us going north.
“There goes the weekly bus from O’Higgins,” Paul joked.
“No, that can’t be,” I said. “The bus is definitely tomorrow, Right?”
“That’s what they told me in Cochrane,” Paul said.
The town of O’Higgins was a neat grid of orderly streets lined with small wooden houses leading to a newly landscaped plaza. Not wanting to become the focal point of the village, we parked the horses on the edge of town. Almost instantly, a man pulled over in an old truck to ask if we had anything to sell. Our expedition, rather than feeling like a huge accomplishment, looked and felt like a yard sale.
The bus that had passed us was indeed the only bus out of O’Higgins that week. Harry and Paul suddenly needed to hitchhike out of town on a road that saw about three cars a week. I was faced with being suddenly, if not surprisingly, at the end of the trail with more horses than I could easily move by myself. Harry wanted a convenient place in town for the night. I wanted a reasonable place to keep three horses for what could turn into quite a while.
The answer to all our dilemmas came in the form of a local official named Ramón. He knew someone driving north the next day and had a pasture to rent just outside of town. The next day Paul and Harry were on their way north, and I was in O’Higgins with three horses. Now what?
Once I was comfortably installed in Ramón’s pasture, my energy lagged. I wanted nothing more than to lie around, read, and watch my horses eat. Was it much needed relaxation after a long trip or a lack of ganas, theenthusiasm for another solo? Handling one pilchero had been tough on sections of that trail. The thought of dragging three horses back over the pass by myself exhausted me.
One day, with nothing else to do, I took off with Chucao to explore the shores of Lago O’Higgins. In the morning, I passed a couple of men moving a large herd of goats.
Within a few hours the trail grew narrow and slippery. The jungle became denser and the trail more overgrown as we worked our way west. The lake narrowed. The ice field loomed closer. Somewhere, well ahead of me was the Rio Pascua, the outlet of Lago O’Higgins, a river so wild and remote it had never been run in its entirety. Only sixty-two kilometers long, the Rio Pascua drains nearly 15,000 square kilometers of wild country. Fewer than a hundred people had ever visited its banks. I wasn’t going to be one of them, not today and not with a horse.
On my way back I heard the familiar call, “Maté, amiga?” coming from the forest. The men I had seen earlier were resting in the shade with their goats. I joined them, first for maté, then for a big chunk of roasted goat, and later a long nap.
How many places in the world was it the accepted custom for a woman traveling alone to stop, eat, drink, and fall happily asleep beside the trail alongside two men and a hundred goats?
The people of southern Patagonia had told me many times, “Don’t worry, there are no bad people here.” They could say that with confidence because everyone knew everyone in the valley. That was, until the road arrived.
Deep inside I knew I was living in a special time and place. I hoped somehow it would survive the coming years. But, change was already brewing. Unbeknownst to both me and the people of O’Higgins, someone thousands of miles away was making big plans for the Rio Pascua.