Estancia Valle Chacabuco (The Regions Largest Sheep Ranch)
SAMUEL’S PUESTO HAD a strange time warp feeling. As if I had never left, I could clearly see Harry, Paul, and I spreading out our odd conglomeration of mismatched maps under the lone cherry tree, trying to piece together a route to O’Higgins. Yet, branches that had been in full bloom in November, now hung heavy with ripe cherries. These rosy yellow cherries, called Heart of the Dove, were proof that time had not stood still. As if there could never be enough, I crammed two or three at a time into my mouth. It was my first taste of fresh fruit in months.
While the past was amazingly vivid, the future was fuzzy and unknown. Lindsey had returned to Coyhaique, and Sam was out of town. I wanted to continue riding, to go north, to travel the wide open grasslands between here and Chile Chico. I needed a plan. I needed horseshoes, food, maps; mostly I needed the ganas to keep going alone. That would come with a couple days’ rest, I assured myself. With nothing better to do, I climbed high in the cherry tree and stayed there until the sun sank low over the hills and my belly ached from so much goodness.
Friends, neighbors, and the man at the bank all invited me to endless asados and maté sessions. My list of social obligations grew large enough to stop all progress in a northerly direction. Still, in that lovely Chilean way, everything—talking with Don Leonitis Ascencio about horseshoes, Tamango getting restless and jumping the fence, trying to get ahold of someone in Chile Chico about putting horses on the ferry—was all part of the process. The seamlessness between work and play that comes naturally with farm life was new to me. Whether literally or figuratively, I come from generations of punching a time clock.
I looked, asked, and called around for a truck to take one of my horses north. It was a bit un-gaucho, but I didn’t want or need the challenge of dragging along an extra horse.
Eventually I found someone who could take my horse to Coyhaique, but the price would be affordable only if I waited until he had a full truck load of animals.
“When would that be?” I asked.
“Soon, maybe one week,” he responded.
“Absolutely less than three weeks?” I asked, knowing full well how things worked.
“Absolutely,” he replied.
The important thing was that Chucao would arrive at my friends’ farm in Coyhaique before I did. I decided to leave my smallest, youngest, and least experienced horse. I would miss him.
A couple of days later, I rode out of town with Arraquien, Tamango, and the truck driver’s word that he would bring Chucao first chance he got. Not far outside Cochrane, Arraquien began to limp. What was this, some kind of joke? Hadn’t this exact thing happened before? By the time we got to the Reserva Tamango, where I planned to camp, it didn’t appear to be a joke.
“Tu caballo tiene una problema,” were the words the ranger used to greet me.
I knew my horse had a problem, but I was embarrassed to hear it from him. This was a man whose opinion I respected. I had met him briefly a couple years earlier. These days he worked at Reserva Tamango, studying the endangered huemul. With nothing I could do about Arraquien’s problem at the moment, I set up camp with the resolution I would take him back to Cochrane if he was still limping the next day.
That evening the rangers invited me to dinner in their cabin. A hundred-and-twenty huemules—about ten percent of the world’s population—lived in the Tamango and Chacabuco area. And these two men knew each of them as individuals.
“They all have a name or at least a number. The females are the most important for keeping the population going. We watch them the closest.”
If one-hundred-and-twenty animals were ten percent of the world’s population, there weren’t many huemules left, I thought.
“Pumas occasionally kill huemules, but it’s habitat loss, hunters, and domestic dogs that have brought the huemul to the brink of extinction,” a young female volunteer from North America told me.
I was curious about her, but we continued to talk about the huemul in Spanish. To do otherwise would have been rude.
Slowly, due to nature reserves like Tamango, the deer were beginning to show signs of recovery in Aysen. The huemul stands opposite the Andean condor on the national shield of Chile. The survival of both these species is a matter of national pride.
After dinner, as we rambled through the woods, commenting on every woodpecker hole and animal track, I rediscovered the joy of sharing something I didn’t know I had been missing, a mutual love for la natualeza. Wandering in the woods with naturalists, who took delight in each living thing, was different than walking in the fields with farmers, who saw the land primarily for what it could produce. It was midnight before I left their easy companionship and went to my tent.
In the morning, I woke early. Not wanting to bother anyone, I made coffee and breakfast in my tent. When I showed up at the cabin all packed up to go, my new friends had breakfast waiting for me.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to bother you,” I said.
“The people, they do not like it when the people are separate,” my ranger friend told me.
How many times did I need to learn how to accept Chilean hospitality? What was it about my cultural upbringing that led me to believe that I was always a bother? Did people where I come from desire to be always separate?
I longed to wander off in search of huemules with my newfound friends, but it was late in the summer and the deer would be well above timberline on the northern aspects. It would be a full day’s hike to find them. Arraquien was still moving stiffly. I would have to take him back to Cochrane. What if the truck took Chucao to Coyhaique in the next day or two? I worried. Obviously, Patagonia’s sense of endless time had not yet sunk in.
I returned to town with an impatience and frustration that didn’t fit the place, my neighbors, or even myself very well. By noon I had left Arraquien behind and was back on the trail headed north with Chucao in tow.
Arraquien, of all my horses, would suffer the most from being left alone. Chucao constantly lagged and tugged on the lead rope. Thoughts of dragging a reluctant pilchero all the way to Coyhaique put me in a deep funk. I ambled along cursing my fate. As I passed the now empty ranger’s cabin, I wished for the twentieth time that I was out counting huemules.
Even traveling on a good trail through mature lenga forest couldn’t break my mood. The gap between the way things were and how I wanted them to be haunted me throughout the day. Any Patagonian would have given two seconds’ thought to the fact that they had to leave their best horse behind and then, grateful that they had another horse, simply accepted things as they were. After months on the trail, I was a still an apprentice.
In barely perceptible ways the country began to change. Glimpses of vistas reminding me of the Big Sky Country of Montana appeared through holes in the forest. A skyscape of stacked lenticular clouds hung as if levitated over the mountains far to the east. A fancy white orchid, its petals laced with green veins, shot up beside the trail on a tall stalk with large grass-like leaves. The pico de loro (beak of the parrot) was an indigenous flower of the pampas, the wide open landscape about to embrace me.
As the country broke open, so did my mood. I imagined myself racing though this open hilly country at a full gallop, blonde hair whipping behind me, saddlebags flying. Instead, I settled for a good fast walk and an occasional trot. The horses seemed to feel the exhilaration of space as well. It was the fastest we had traveled in days.
All trails eventually funneled together and deposited me in the backyard of the headquarters of Estancia Valle Chacabuco, the third largest sheep ranch in Chile. Tidy white houses with green trim and well-maintained lawns lined a new gravel road. The place felt orderly, rigid, and controlled, a bit too much like the British countryside for Patagonia. In contrast to the friendly family farms I usually passed through, I felt awkward here. There was no one around to either stop me or welcome me. Marching my ungainly parade through the neatly kept grounds felt like an intrusion. I had no other option; my only exit was in front of me.
Between 1930 and 1970, the eastern half of Patagonia had gone from being the home of guanacos—a wild cousin of the llama—to pasture for sixteen million sheep. Now a hundred dusty sheep waited in a corral outside a long wooden sheering barn. Between overgrazing and the relentless Patagonia winds, the sheep waiting to be shorn were so covered in the topsoil of the region that they appeared brown.
I could hear men shouting over an electric buzzing sound. Inside the barn at least a dozen men were working. Agarradores grabbed sheep and tied their feet together. Esquiladores did the shearing. Playeros cleaned the wool from the floor, and velloneros tightly packed the wool into huge bags. Outside, the grounds were deserted.
It wasn’t apparent by the spotless buildings or tidy green lawns, but times were changing in Patagonia. Established in the early 1900s, this ranch had, in its heyday, grazed over 85,000 sheep on 500,000 acres, but falling wool prices and the desertification brought on by overgrazing were taking a toll. By the mid-1990s wool prices had hit a record low of thirty cents a pound. On the day I passed through, Estancia Valle Chacabuco grazed only 25,000 sheep.
Unbeknownst to me, an even bigger change was looming just below the horizon. Two unique circumstances were converging—the surge of money behind a boom in the manufacturing of outdoor clothing and equipment in the United States and a wave of philanthropy, the desire to give back to the places that inspire us. Unable to see into the future, I never imagined the trim lawns and shearing barns of Estancia Valle Chacabuco as headquarters for the regions’ largest national park. This land had been on the Chilean Park Services’ national priority list for more than thirty years, but it would take outside money to make it happen.
Within the next four years, this 174,000-acre Estancia would be purchased by Conservacion Patagonica, a private land trust set up for the conservation of biodiversity. Someday, behind the willow trees along the creek, will stand a modern visitor center powered by the sun.
Over the next decade, Conservacion Patagonica’s president Kris Tompkins, formerly of the Patagonia clothing company, along with her husband, Douglas Tompkins, founder of North Face and Esprit and his partner organization Conservation Land Trust, would work to protect over three million acres of prime habitat in Chile and Argentina.
Passing through the Estancia unnoticed, I turned east, down what would turn out to be a long, fence-lined dirt road. Over the next decade the new landowners would remove over four hundred miles of the fence line that now separated me, if only by a wire, from that open space I so craved.
Not far beyond the Estancia headquarters, a band of guanacos surprised me. A male, a dozen females, and their young stood highlighted on the crest of a hill. I could not tell the male from the others by size or shape, but it was obvious who was in charge. When he noticed my presence he sprinted to the highest rock, stopped in plain view, and yammered at me. His loud trilling voice was otherworldly, but his message was clear. I was an invader. He posed for my camera, backlit by a stack of purple lenticular clouds.
This tactic of stopping where he could get a good view of his enemy served his species well for avoiding pumas, but it made him an easy target for men with guns. Fifty million guanacos once inhabited the arid areas of Chile and Argentina as far north as the west coast of Peru. As early as the 1800s, the trade in baby guanaco hides was decimating the population. Only one in ten chulengos (young guanacos) managed to evade hunters who pursued them on horseback, throwing heavy stone balls linked together with rope between their running hooves. Like the Techuelche themselves, only a small percentage of the original guanaco population survived the 1800s.
By evening, I found it hard to believe that guanacos were considered vulnerable. I had seen hundreds of them. Elegant and endangered black-necked swans swam in Laguna Cisnes (Swan Lagoon). Flocks of pink flamingos rested along the shores of other shallow lakes. A couple of condors, a fox, and a skunk added up to constitute by far the biggest wildlife day I had ever had in Patagonia. After a hundred years of heavy use by humans, this area still included at least a representative sample of all of its original inhabitants. I was starting to realize that in a land of special landscapes, this one was extremely precious.
That night a swamp separated me from the river and made getting drinking water a chore. The reality of traveling alone with two horses was sinking in. It would be me who saddled and unsaddled every horse, set up every camp, cooked every meal, washed every dish, and in this land of poor grass, moved the horses several times every night. On top of that, Chucao needed a new pair of front shoes, and I hadn’t seen a house since the Estancia.
A few kilometers ahead was the only structure marked on my map, a place called Casa Piedra. The beautiful old stone house sat back in the alamos just the other side of the Rio Chacabuco. A saddled horse was tied in the yard, a sure sign of people nearby, but I saw no one. The river between us was running deep, swift, and brown. I contemplated crossing. The water was so laden with muddy silt I couldn’t tell how deep it was. Imagining it to be well over belly deep on Chucao, I decided against it and moved on.
Little did I know that the Casa Piedra would reappear in my future. Nearly ten years later, I would sleep in the stone house, track radio-collared pumas, and help remove pine plantations as a volunteer for Conservacion Patagonica.
Late the next day, I saw a gate, a corral, and from deep in the brush off the road, smoke rising from a stack. What luck, two men were in the yard shoeing a horse. I rode in and, breaking tradition, asked immediately if they could shoe my horse.
They urged me to unsaddle and take a rest.
I was quickly ushered into their small plywood house to drink coffee by the woodstove. One of the men looked familiar. He wore a blue ball cap with yellow letters that said, “Maipo,” the name of a canyon near Santiago. I had recently seen that hat, but where? My mind frantically ticked backward.
“Up river, when I bought this horse?” I asked him.
He broke into a wide grin. “Yes, I am Luis. I know you and your horse as well.”
He had been at the asado that night with Don Ascencio in the Colonia Valley.
It was assumed that I would stay for dinner. It impressed me that every man in the countryside knew how to make bread, a skill that I had managed to get well into my forties without learning. Single men usually made sopaipillas, a simple, delicious deep fried bread made with baking soda. If home-baked yeast bread was in the house, it usually meant a woman was in residence. However, Luis pulled fresh yeast-raised bread and roasted lamb from the oven.
The sun had slipped below the horizon, but on this mid-summer evening it would be hours before soft blue twilight melted into darkness around ten o’clock. It was obvious I was going nowhere. There were stories to tell.
Over dinner I picked up critical information about the next day’s travel. The trail did not go anywhere near where it was shown on the map. I would need to cross the river much earlier than expected and look for a fence with a gate. From there I would head up the Valle La Leona (Valley of the Lion).
“Are there still pumas in the valley?” I asked Luis.
“Oh, si,” he said.
The other man got up and proudly produced a fresh puma skin and skull from the back room. The golden blonde coat was soft and inviting to touch, but the hardened skull held a haunting expression deep in its hollow eye sockets.
“I killed it this September,” he said.
“How many pumas have you seen in your life?” I asked, trying to cover up my horror at seeing a wild animal that I had never seen alive presented in the form of skin and skull.
“I don’t know for sure, but I killed them all,” he assured me.
“How many sheep do they kill a year?” I asked, trying to understand his motives.
“Oh, various,” he replied, his eyes wide open.
I thought pumas were protected in Chile, but I wasn’t sure. I doubted it would matter.
“Aren’t you afraid to camp near pumas?” Luis asked.
“Have you ever actually heard of anyone killed by a puma?” I asked in return.
Neither of the men could name anyone, but like the wolf in the western United States the cougar still held a reputation as a vicious killer. Leoneros were men employed by the Estancia with the specific job description of tracking and killing pumas. In the early days of sheep ranching, a man could get twenty days’ pay for slaughtering a puma.
I assumed that nothing except a new generation could change things here. I was wrong. Within a few years this would be Conservacion Patagonica land. Former puma hunters would make use of their tracking skills as rangers protecting the animals they once hunted. Years later, I would hear a former leonero exclaim, “Paid to kill pumas, paid to protect pumas, paid all the same.”
The next day, I found the trail easily, a wide, smooth path ascending above a deep gorge. Big mountains and a bigger sky dominated the landscape. To the east, one last stunning mountain, Mount Lucas Bridges, towered skyward before the Argentinean pampas stretched out flat all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
One morning, sixty some years earlier, Lucas Bridges, one of the first estancia managers and the man charged with opening the rich Baker Valley to ranching, headed for the top of this mountain. He lit a fire on top to prove he made it. But that is not his story.
Lucas Bridges was the third European child born in Tierra Del Fuego. However, history doesn’t start there.
In 1830, Captain Robert Fitzroy returned to England from Tierra del Fuego with four Patagonian natives. His plan was to “Civilize and Christianize” these children of Patagonia and through them spread the gospel in the land of fire.
Two years later, the second voyage of The Beagle set sail with Captain Fitzroy, the three Patagonians who had survived their time in England, and the young naturalist Charles Darwin. The plan was to return the young converts to Patagonia along with a missionary keeper and evangelize the natives. Only a few weeks later, the first missionary in Patagonia was found hiding from his potential converts, and the young Patagonians had been left to return to their former lives as best they could.
It seemed the natives were not taking kindly to being saved. Thirty years later, when Reverend George Pakinham Despard—the third missionary to attempt to settle this windy place—departed in despair, one person was left standing on the shore. Reverend Despard’s then nineteen-year-old adopted son Thomas Bridges, the first permanent settler in Patagonia and the man who would become Lucas Bridges’ father, had decided to stay.
Lucas Bridges, like his father Thomas, learned to speak the native languages. The last twenty-five years of his fascinating life were spent as operations manager of this tremendous piece of land at the head of the Baker River.
The estancia’s initial contract with the Chilean Government specified that “land access through Chile must be provided for materials and goods.” The result was the Sendero de Lucas Bridges, a famous trail which bridged glacial rivers and etched its way across two thirds of a kilometer of vertical cliff, linking the navigable part of the Baker River to the rich Colonia Valley. Pack trains of a hundred animals, each loaded with fifty-kilo bundles of wool marched over this treacherous trail only a few times before the route was abandoned in favor of an easier, more profitable route through Argentina.
The Chacabuco Valley had never been forested or burned. Grassland was the natural state of the open steppe. At the far end of this gigantic valley, near the Tamango Reserve, I had marched out of the lenga forest into the open sky. Soon, I would be back in the safety and comfort of mature lenga forest.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that this land would be purchased with the intent of linking the Tamango Reserve to the south and Jeinemeni Reserve to the north in order to create a 722,000-acre national park. With a new national park the size of Yosemite, a bridge for two, now separate, populations of huemul was also in the making.
The next afternoon was hot and calm. Thankfully we traveled in the shade of mighty lenga trees. Just over the pass we got our first introduction to what was to become the bane of our existence. Tabanos, a gigantic version of the horsefly, swarmed around us, taking huge chunks of flesh from any unprotected spot.
Tired of dragging Chucao, I decided to ride him and use Tamango as pilchero. Tamango knew the drill and simply followed along without the rope. I was congratulating myself for figuring this system out when we came across a dried-up lake. Tamango suddenly dropped to his knees. A dust bath was just what he needed to rid himself, if only temporarily, of those horrid, biting tabanos. He lowered himself to the dirt, and before I could turn around and gallop back yelling and waving, he was fully over onto his back, rolling on our gear.
As I hammered smashed cooking pots back into a usable shape, I remembered a man I had seen at a trailhead. He had gently lifted two cardboard boxes from his pilchero, and unwrapped a hundred eggs, each carefully nestled in a piece of newspaper, not one of them broken.
Just in time, Lago Jeinemeni, clean, blue, and sparkling in the hot afternoon sun, came into view. Saddles stripped, the three of us waded into the cool, sweet water.
Coming out of the mountains and dropping into the desert, I saw the first people I had seen in days. Two English tourists sat beside the road, the woman waving so frantically, I thought she was hurt.
“Lorry!” she hollered.
In the distance, a truck was approaching. I wondered if she was going to throw herself in front of the truck in her desperation to get out of there.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They will stop.”
And they did. Torrie the “lorry” driver offered them a ride on top of his load of firewood.
“There is a nice place to camp with water and grass just ahead,” he told me. “Some workers are building a puesto, just stop by.”
I was delighted to hear it. I was afraid I had passed the last green grass and water for a long, long way.
The puesto José and Francisco were building was made of adobe. Trees are rare here. Dirt is abundant. Adobe is cool in summer and warm in winter, and it doesn’t rain enough in a hundred years to erode the bricks.
The men were scavenging bricks from an old, tumbled-down puesto nearby. “When these run out we will begin to make more,” José explained.
When I asked him how they moved the bricks, he replied, “A mano, poco a poco.”
Little by little they were bringing them over by hand and mixing a cement of mud, cow dung, and grass to hold it all together. Francisco pointed to the fence around the outhouse. “That is so the cows don’t eat the outhouse in winter.” I tried to imagine this land in winter, a land so sparse that adobe looked like good fodder.
This was serious desert country, a scary, intimidating kind of hot that I was not accustomed to. As an Alaskan I had spent most of my life learning to keep myself warm. The wind sucked moisture from my body. One day, I huddled in the shade of a calafate bush, afraid to move until nearly sunset.
In the last chapter of Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the plains of Patagonia using only negative statements. “Without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains,” But, he goes on to ask, “Why then . . . have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory?”
At night and preferably mid-day, as well, I needed to find an oasis. One afternoon tall alamo trees surrounded an area of green grass, wild mint, and rhubarb growing beside a spring. I threw off saddles, feeling I had arrived in heaven.
Seconds later, hell, in the form of millions of minute biting terrorists called pulcos, arrived. For the next hour or so I kept moving in circles, swatting myself as I bounced from one tiny patch of shade to another, while my horses ate.
Suddenly, Tamango looked up from grazing and walked away. He was full, or the bugs were now worse than his hunger. So, he left. Not down the road from where we had come, but up toward the mountains, looking for a breeze. Without a water bottle I headed after him, unsure of how long I would last. I pleaded with him not to take me on a long hike. Fortunately, he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and waited for me. He just wanted to let me know it was time to leave this bug-infested place.
Walking a dusty dirt road through what looked like Wyoming but felt like Texas, was like living inside a blow dryer. We camped in an abandoned road construction camp. Old underwear, broken bottles, girlie magazines, and a filthy fire pit were my companions that night, but there was grass. Around about midnight the temperature cooled and the bugs became bearable.
A few miles farther on I encountered a small shrine at a rocky intersection. Inside a wooden box, a dainty figurine of a dark-skinned young woman with long black hair and a red peasant’s skirt lay on her back nursing a baby. Stacked around her were hundreds of plastic 7UP bottles and glass jars filled with water. Hot and always thirsty, I took a deep drink. It appeared that the saints were indeed looking out for me.
I later learned the legend of Difunta Correa, a young woman who died of thirst in the early 1840s while following her husband’s battalion across the desert. When she was found, the baby boy at her breast was still alive, having survived off his mothers’ milk. Santuarios de Difunta Correa appear frequently in this dry country—beacons of hope and symbols of survival in a hostile land.
While I rested beside a hundred bottles of water, Torrie came by in his rickety red truck and stopped to add another bottle of fresh water to the collection.
“There is a boat leaving for Puerto Ibáñez in an hour,” he told me.
We took off at the fastest pace I could convince Chucao to go. I arrived at the ferry terminal window, fully loaded and sweating buckets, only to be greeted by the sour-faced woman inside.
“Horses, no,” she said.
I tried to explain about my phone call last week . . . and that they had said . . . and they promised . . . and . . . but . . . My arguments were of no use.
The answer was no! They took animals, but only in trucks.
Standing there in the sun, thinking about a few more weeks of riding on the road to get around the lake and all the blind corners and steep drop-offs that lay ahead, I saw a truck pull in. Could it be empty?
“¿Tienes carga?” I asked the driver,
No, he was returning empty.
He decided to help me. We would load the horses first, then talk about a price.
With no loading ramp handy he backed up to a huge pile of gravel. I was supposed to walk my horses up the loose pile and into the back of his hot, orange plastic-covered truck. It worked fine for Tamango. Pulling and panicking, Chucao refused to go. For the umpteenth time that trip I wished for my Arraquien.
Time was audible. The ferry would leave whether or not we were on it. I pulled him, sweet talked him, swatted him on the butt; the answer was no!
The driver said he knew a better place and took off at high speed. I could hear Tamango stomping alone inside. I traveled as fast as I could behind him with Chucao in tow. When we got to a slightly more solid pile of dirt, the driver wrapped the rope around a stanchion on the truck and started winching Chucao inside. When he got him close enough that his next step would be into the truck, Chucao reared like the wild black stallion still inside of him. Front hooves high in the air, the halter snapped and my boy was running free in the streets of Chile Chico.
Honoring me with his trust after all I had done to him, Chucao waited for me and patiently allowed me to slip a rope over his withers. I tied a knot in his halter that I knew would not hold a tenth of the force he had just put on it.
With the same fever I had begged him to take us, I now begged the driver to let Tamango out of the truck and leave us behind. But I was no longer in charge of the situation. The driver had seen a chance to make some money that the company did not know about, and he was putting these animals in his truck.
My poor horse had a rope around his neck and another under his front lip. The guy was winching him into the truck with his lead rope wrapped twice around the stanchions. A man off the street was recruited to help out by hitting him on the butt with a branch.
Chucao lunged into the truck with Tamango, and the driver took off for the ferry at a tire-squealing pace. I rode in back with my animals, afraid for their lives if they fell, afraid for my own if hooves started flying.
Big macho Tamango appeared completely tranquilo, but his body gave him away. He was sweating profusely and his rear legs were trembling.
I could feel it. We were stopped. Then I felt the gentle movement of a boat. We were aboard. Under the tarp it was about 110 degrees. I talked the driver into opening up the trap and letting the lake breeze in. I stepped out of the truck into a completely different scene. A gentle wind was blowing across a turquoise lake, and passengers were out of their cars, taking in the fine summer day. I stood outside, letting my sweat dry and my panic subside.
Upon arriving in Puerto Ibáñez at the other end of the lake, it became obvious that the driver was planning on taking us all the way to Coyhaique. The road from Ibáñez was under construction. With no desire to ride through more road construction and my horses finally inside the truck I decided, for once, to go with the flow. Besides, there was a good unloading ramp at my friends Carolina and Patricio’s farm outside Coyhaique. I definitely didn’t want a repeat of the show I had just experienced.
Even driving what I thought was way too fast, it was dark when we arrived in Coyhaique. We arrived at Carolina and Patricio’s farm at midnight, and the horses calmly stepped out of the truck, put their heads down, and quietly began to graze. An important lesson was mine: horses live in the moment. The trauma of putting them in the truck would upset me for days.
The driver stood by while I emptied my wallet and deposited everything I had down to the random pesos in my pockets into his palm. It came to within a few hundred pesos of his price. That would have to do. I would be okay here without money. I had friends.
The next morning I woke up confused. Clean flowered sheets and sunshine streaming through a window? Where was I? Everything had changed so suddenly. Then it came to me. I was in Carolina’s guest bedroom. Tired and dirty, with my face aching from too much sun and wind, I knew I had been on a trip and it was over. I wasn’t ready to be back.
Carolina and I had met when she was a young NOLS instructor-in-training. Now she was the director of Spanish Programs and a new mother. She and her husband Patricio were wonderful friends and hosts. They assured me I could stay as long as I liked, and Patricio reiterated Carolina’s promise that they would be happy to take care of my horses as long as I wanted to leave them there. Still I felt awkward. That familiar feeling of believing I was always a bother wouldn’t leave me alone.
The worst thing was my Arraquien had not arrived.
A familiar process began—hitch into town, call the truck driver, miss him, wait three hours for the phone store to open after siesta, miss him again, leave a message, hitch back out to the campo, try again the next day. My mood plummeted.
Eventually,I reached him.
“I will have a trip to Coyhaique soon, very soon,” he promised me.
There was no way I could leave Patagonia without Arraquien safely in his new home.
Living on the farm helped save me from my own foul mood. Whenever I visited the little cabin out back where Patricio and Carolina’s cuidador José lived, four-year-old Ali Miguel and his brother Moses ran to greet me. The boys adopted me. Or did I adopt them? We did everything together—catching horses, climbing the cherry tree, looking for lost sheep. Tough campo kids, they understood many things I did not, like where the hens hid their eggs, and how to hang from the highest branches so you could get the last of the cherries. I adored them because they adored me. They made me feel wanted, something I was sorely in need of.
One day I rode Chucao to the upper campo with Patricio. On the way home, Patricio, confident he would win, challenged me to a race. I gave Chucao a squeeze, and he shot forward with all the sprinting power he had. I rose from my seat and clung to his neck the way I had seen jockeys do. We bolted through the flooded spot at the end of the pasture, muddy water flying into our faces. After 475 kilometers and three months on the trail, we poured through the pasture lengths ahead of Patricio and his finest horse. I was so proud of my little Chucao. He had done a lot of growing up on our journey. Maybe I had too.
Cerro Castillo was having a traditional festival and a few people I knew were going. Exactly as advertised, it was a demonstration of skills useful in campo life: sheep shearing, calf roping, cow milking. A full-size log was supported by two structures much like goalposts. With one man above and the other below, teams competed at cutting two-inch planks from the log with a huge crosscut saw. In another demo, rounds of logs were efficiently sliced with a machete into shingles.
Both distanced and protected by my own walls, I was moody the entire weekend. It bothered me that many of the people of Coyhaique were witnessing their own heritage for the first time, as if their parents’ lives were a display in a museum.
I needed assurance that this life still existed, when an elderly woman from the audience stepped forward and quickly, efficiently demonstrated how to tie a load onto a pilchero. Still, it was painfully obvious that the people showing off their skills that day were getting old. Part of my own life was also becoming history.
The promised, “next week,” the truck driver had spoken of had come and gone. With only a few days left until my flight to Alaska, I had no plan, no Arraquien, and no money. Should I get on a plane to Alaska or a bus to Cochrane? What would I do in Cochrane, ride Arraquien to Coyhaique? I had trusted the driver when I paid him. I needed to trust him now, but getting on a plane for Alaska without my horse safely in his new home was something I sorely did not want to do.
In the end that is exactly what I did.
Two weeks later I got an email from Patricio and Carolina entitled, “Horse in Home.” My Arraquien was safe.