Otoño en el Campo (Fall on the Campo)
THE ENTIRE FLIGHT down I worried that I was making a huge mistake. Two years had somehow slipped by. It was fall going on winter in Patagonia. With a long, dark Alaska winter behind me, why was I headed back into cold and darkness?
My life had changed in predictable North American ways. My former bosses at the Alaska Avalanche School, where I had worked for years, had moved on. I was the logical person to take on the directorship—in fact the only person willing to take the job. As an instructor it had been easy to waltz home mid-winter and teach the rest of the season. As director I was committed. From October until April, I had a job. Against all best intentions, I was climbing the corporate ladder. Springtime in Patagonia had been ripped from my life.
My friends Paty and Scott, a Chilean-American couple living in Alaska, had offered their campo for me to live on. Other than a strong desire to be in Patagonia, I didn’t have much of a vision. I didn’t even know exactly where their campo was. I figured I’d stay until the snow flew, it got too dark and cold to ride horses, or I came up with another plan.
I landed in Balmaceda on the only windless day I had ever experienced in that town. The sun was high in the sky and still gave off a warming glow. A dusting of fresh snow glistened on the peaks, but the valley bottoms were still covered in lush, green grass. The ñirre leaves were a deep auburn that put fall in New England to shame. Happiness flooded my veins as it always did when I arrived in Patagonia.
My friend Raúl gunned the engine. His four-wheel-drive jeep pushed through mud puddles halfway up the doors. Once again, my rich resource of friends were making life easy for me. Paty and Scott’s was a lot farther off the main road than I expected, and the two-lane track to their house much worse than I ever imagined. When we arrived, it was raining hard and nearly dark. From what I could see, which wasn’t much, the house was a cute Alaska-style cabin made from half round logs.
A strange feeling slipped in. I didn’t remember the cabin, but this valley, I had been here. Only a few days into my first horse trip, I had taken a short cut. This road had been a trail. Nimbus and I had met our first gaucho at the gate a bit farther on.
The cabin wasn’t new. Had I passed right by it? Where was Nimbus now? In fact, where was the girl I had been back then? So green, so scared. What would she have thought if someone had told her she would someday return to live in this valley?
“You should camp in your tent tonight. The place hasn’t been aired out in over a year,” Raúl told me as he quickly dropped me off.
The baffled look on my face gave away my ignorance.
“You know about Hanta virus, don’t you?” he asked.
Hanta is carried by rats and mice. The virus becomes airborne and gets into people’s lungs. Abandoned buildings are prime habitat. I had seen billboards advising farmers about the disease, but never thought the warnings would apply to me.
Raúl must have read the look of horror that crossed my face. “Don’t worry, you can air the place out in the morning. Hanta virus is killed by fresh air and sunshine, but you should still wash everything down with bleach before you move in.”
“Sure, no problem,” I said with a confidence I did not feel.
“If you feel sick, like you have the flu, you should get yourself checked out by a doctor. Hanta can be fatal if you don’t treat it,” Raúl reminded me as he drove away.
Tucked in my tiny nylon shelter, listening to the rain hit the walls in sheets, I tried to keep my spirits from plummeting. For weeks I would be concerned about every small headache or unsettled stomach. The scared girl I had once been was trying to push her way back in. I shoved her away. How many times in our lives do we get an opportunity to try out a life we think we want?
The next morning everything looked entirely different. The previous night’s cold rain had put a fresh, crisp snow line halfway down the mountains. Cerro Sombrero, freshly painted white, rose fifteen hundred feet above the campo. The Estero El Arco tumbled and splashed in front of the cabin. Was this charming little creek named for the brilliant rainbows that always seemed to hang in the western sky, or for the big rainbow trout that rested in its quiet pools? Drinking water gurgled out of a natural spring nearby. Best of all, behind my little cabin was a big pasture with knee-high grass untouched all summer. I was finally going to live with my horses.
I took inventory of my new home. The fence needed a few minor repairs. If I cleaned out the dilapidated pole barn, my horses would have a place to stand on nights like the last one. Cautiously, I opened the cabin door.
Paty in her womanly wisdom had set out rags, a broom, and a fresh bottle of Clorox. There was no furniture in either room, but I figured I could pound something together from the boards left in the pole barn. My biggest problem was that the cast iron cook stove—the center of life in every kitchen in Patagonia—was missing.
What truly disturbed me was that the woodstove had been stolen, not by someone who was destitute and cold, but someone with a truck. Whoever took my stove had driven in here in the kind of four-by-four truck few could afford.
I could buy a stove and leave it here as a present for Paty and Scott. On this bright, sunny morning anything was possible.
If I was going to fix up a campo, I needed tools: a hammer and nails, a shovel, an ax, a length of wire for the fence. In my shed in Alaska, I had all of these things. I had arrived in Patagonia with a mountain of outdoor equipment, but my entire tool collection consisted of a Swiss Army knife. What had I been thinking?
My neighbors had accumulated over generations the basic equipment needed to run a farm. Buying things I already owned felt ridiculous and wasteful, but possessions at the other end of the world did me no good. Also in my shed back home were two kayaks and a half dozen pairs of skis. If I were to move here, I would need to ship everything I owned to the other end of the Earth or buy it all again. The ecological consequences, not to mention the financial reality, of either option was daunting. Wasn’t simplifying my life what I was looking for?
A few days later, fog still hung cold and damp in the valley as I tromped out the dirt road toward town. The first hard freeze of the season crunched underfoot. Villa Frey, the tiny town Veronica grew up in, had a store, a phone, and twice-a-week bus service to Coyhaique.
Already craving social interaction, I started my day in town with maté with Veronica. Outside Chile I have never had the kind of female friendships that centered around the kitchen, yet just sitting, even silently, in Veronica’s kitchen felt good. Two kittens born too late in the year to grow up in the barn played on the floor behind the woodstove. Yet, something was missing.
During the Alaskan winter I had just left, even on the shortest days, my girlfriends and I got out for a quick, exhilarating ski on the mountain behind town, nearly every day. Those moments, of breathing hard and laughing in the snow with friends, saved my winter sanity. There would be no women in the campos to ski with this winter.
That evening I returned to the campo with my newly purchased tools, a kerosene heater, and five gallons of fuel tied to my back. The kerosene heater was a cheap, stinky, temporary fix for a cold house that would only get colder. What the place needed was a three-hundred-dollar woodstove, a hundred dollars’ worth of stovepipe, the tools, and expertise to install it properly and a truck to haul it all out there.
In Alaska, I had built my own cabin, but I had done it with the help of a multitude of friends, power tools, and a logging truck. Here, I had settled for a cheap to buy, but expensive to run, oil stove. It didn’t make me feel strong or wholesome or anything else I had imagined I would feel living on a campo.
In a few days the fences were mended, and I was ready to bring my horses. I walked out to the road again. The puddles had diminished significantly and the edges were now coated with a thin veneer of ice.
Carolina and Patricio were living in town, waiting to move back out to their campo until their new baby, little Cristobal, was a bit older. José was living alone on the farm. Tamango was saddled and standing under a huge willow tree when I arrived. He looked terrific, but, being Tamango, he couldn’t have cared less about me. Arraquien looked fat and healthy. He lifted his heavy head and laid it in my hand. He remembered me, and he loved me. For this he could have flat feet, a tough-boy attitude, and a spoiled-child temperament, he would always be my horse. Chucao’s black coat was shiny and soft to my touch. I put my face to his withers and breathed in the sweet horsey smell of him. I was seeing the horses in the fall after a summer of fat green grass instead of in the spring after weathering a winter of blizzards without a barn. Not my strongest, too young to be truly mountain savvy, too small to be my best river crosser, Chucao was built tight, compact, quick to turn, the horse I always swore I would have if I lived on a campo. Arraquien and Tamango were my tough Patagonian tractors. Chucao was my Ferrari.
I threw a saddle on him, and we went for a welcome-home ride to the top of the campo. He moved like a horse who wanted to run. I let the crisp fall day and the movements of a willing horse sink into my work-weary soul.
Early the next day, I saddled Arraquien and threw a halter on Chucao. We were going home. Tamango would have to stay for now. José needed Tamango around the ranch more than I needed three horses standing in my pasture.
Before the sun hit the valley floor my tropé and I headed up to the top of the campo. My plan was to exit through the gate I had used for years, pass through the nature reserve, bypass Coyhaique as I had done before, and arrive at Pancho’s before dark.
When I got to the gate in the upper most corner of the campo, it was wired and nailed shut. Whoever had rigged this was serious about keeping it closed. If Patricio had done it, he wouldn’t mind if I undid it, passed through, and then re-wired it. If the rangers had closed it, I could simply ask for forgiveness and drop the name of Orlando, a long-time friend, who was now the head ranger.
A wimpy pocket knife was again my only tool. I twisted and pulled and banged nails with rocks. Twenty minutes into the process the gate was no closer to opening. Dejected, I returned to José’s cabin.
Maté in José’s tiny kitchen brought things into perspective. Why would it matter if I went home today or tomorrow? Still, the difference between the way things were and the way I wanted them to be was causing me great distress.
“Why don’t you just go the other way around town?” he asked.
I had no idea there was another way around Coyhiaque’s busy, car-packed streets.
José carefully described a series of roads on the eastern edge of Coyhiaque.
A left here, a right at this corner, by a few government houses, I could touch just the outer edge of Coyhaique. If I was going to go I needed to get moving.
“Gracias,” I said, the traditional response that lets your host know you are finished with the maté session.
When I first came to Chile this particular custom had truly baffled me. My parents had taught me to say “thank you” every time anyone offered me anything. When the maté came my way I said, “gracias.” The gourd and its contents were immediately withdrawn, leaving me confused and maté-less.
Not far into José’s proposed route I realized getting through town was definitely going to suck. Even on the back roads cars stacked up behind us, their occupants staring out the windows mouths wide open in disbelief. Behind us, a taxi driver laid on the horn. Chucao danced sideways into the middle of the narrow road. Hadn’t this guy seen horses in town before? Then again, if he moved here in the last five years he probably hadn’t.
“Mama, caballo, Mama, caballo.” A little girl ran out of one of the government box houses that lined the street. She appeared to be about four years old. No doubt she had never seen a horse in town before. Maybe she only knew horses from picture books. I wanted to let her pet my horses, feel their sweet soft breath on her cheek, but the last thing I wanted was a rodeo in her front yard. I needed to keep the momentum going forward, the horses’ nervous energy positively directed. Still, I felt sorry for the girl when her mother called her back indoors.
I crossed one last main street and was able to turn south. Soon, I was blissfully back on country roads. It was now raining a familiar Patagonia downpour, the kind that has no intention of letting up any time soon. The days were getting shorter fast. By the appearance of the sky, it would be dark long before I got to Pancho’s. I pushed my already cranky beasts into a good trot.
It was fully dark when we got to Pancho’s house.
“Hola,” I hollered from the metal gate a hundred yards from the house. A dark, hooded figure on a black horse, I surely resembled the grim reaper.
Pancho came out anyway.
“Hola, Nancy, Pasé,” he said, grabbing Arraquien’s lead rope. “Last time you were here, it was a night just like this. Remember?”
ALMOST TEN YEARS later Pancho and I would be sitting in his kitchen listening to a torrential downpour on the roof, his two children playing on the floor, and he would remind me, “Whenever it rains like someone opened a trapdoor in the sky, I know I will see you soon.”
IN THIS REGION where most houses are uninsulated, a thick smoke hangs in the air above Coyhaique on winter days and truck loads of wood, often still green, caravan into town from the countryside. In contrast, Pancho and Cuchi’s warm, friendly, straw bale house sported a solar panel and a homemade wind-turbine in their front yard.
“Straw is cheap, readily available, and well insulating, a natural building material for the region,” Pancho said. “People stop on the road to check out our house all the time. Maybe it will catch on.”
But, what Pancho really wanted to talk about was his latest creation, an organization called Esquela de Guías. All the guiding jobs in Patagonia’s budding tourism industry were going to outsiders. “Why should all these jobs be going to foreigners? Wouldn’t tourists prefer someone who was born and raised in the area? Couldn’t rural Patagonia use a little income?”
As a guide in Patagonia for years, I was one of those foreigners making my living from the world’s last wild places, yet I thoroughly agreed with him. In the two years since we had visited, he had created a school teaching local Patagonians to be wilderness guides.
Every summer plane loads of visitors flew through Alaska’s native villages on their way to the great Alaskan wilderness, most with guides, most leaving not a penny behind in the local community. Over the two years I had been away I, too, had created a guide-training program, this one for rural Alaskans. It was uncanny, but it wasn’t a coincidence.
Patagonia and Alaska—two distinctly different rural communities at opposite ends of the earth, both with a rich human and natural history and no real source of income—were my heart’s twin homes.
Pancho and I stayed awake until the early morning hours, discussing how to best preserve the life we enjoyed, not trying to avoid inevitable change, but to move forward with grace.
Another long day of riding brought me home, and I settled into the multitude of daily chores needed to keep myself alive: food to cook, water to haul, laundry to do by hand. All over the world women were doing exactly this. It all seemed so temporary. All these chores would need to be done again tomorrow. Was the difference that these women were laboring for their families? I doubted that for me the drudgery would be any different if I had a slew of kids to take care of. I longed to put in a garden, tend it carefully, and watch it grow, but it was May, nearly winter in the southern hemisphere.
On clear days, I took the horses for long rides in the woods. The mountains behind the cabin were laced with old, ox-cart roads. Sometimes the trails ended abruptly in an opening where logs had been pulled from the woods by oxen. Sometimes they ran for miles across still green forest floor, through the brilliant rust-colored lenga forest. It would take me weeks to figure out where they all went. I had always considered getting to know the lay of the land around your house a worthwhile use of time.
Some days I would gallop Chucao in circles in the pasture, running, dodging, changing leads. Just for the fun of it, I’d pretend we had a herd of cows to move. I tried to get each horse out every other day. That meant I needed to ride every day. I told myself the horses needed the exercise.
One afternoon I was pounding a makeshift table together outside the cabin when a visitor, a teenage boy, who lived up valley, stopped by. I wanted to invite him in, but I had no maté and no stove to heat it on, no chair to offer him. What kind of neighbor was I? I feared that this was exactly what he had come to find out.
We chatted awhile, but the young man remained on his horse. I wanted to go riding with him, but horseback riding was something you did when you needed to go somewhere. No one except me rode wildly in circles. The visitor, all too soon, went on his way.
The weather was as good now as it would be until spring. Maybe I could slip in one last horse trip before winter. The morning I left was cool, but not cold. The previous night’s frost hadn’t even frozen the puddles. Maybe we were in for an Indian summer. I had barely gotten off the road system into wild country, when I met a man carrying a fence post.
“Where are you going?” the man asked.
“Lago Atravasado,” I replied.
“You can’t get there from here,” he said.
“¿Porqué no?” I asked.
“It’s closed,” he said, walking off with his fence post over his shoulder.
A hundred yards farther a locked gate stopped me in my tracks. The man’s matter of fact, “esta cerrada,” echoed in my ears. Did it not matter to him that you could no longer travel through this valley on a horse?
Was this guys “Oh well” attitude just another manifestation the of Patagonian people’s amazing ability to accept what is? Or was it the beginning of the end of a lifestyle I loved? I couldn’t wrap my head around it being both.
Foreigners and people from Santiago had moved in, bringing their habits with them. When roads arrived so had strangers in automobiles. The woodstove in my cabin had been stolen. Patagonia was changing. It disturbed me deeply.
I gave up and tried an alternate route. Cow trails wound between small tightly packed hills. Small pocket lakes filled every hollow. My disappointment about not getting to Lago Atravasado simmered, but the intricate landscape pulled me in. My horses were happy. They didn’t care where we were going. There was fat grass, the moon was rising, and the night was exceptionally warm for this time of year.
A few days later, a scruffy looking sheep dog mix, probably Border Collie or Australian Shepard, appeared out of nowhere. Dogs often followed my ungainly parade for a quick mini-adventure, but they usually went home after a few kilometers. This one didn’t.
“Fuera!” I yelled at him in the tone I had heard others use.
But, I had a soft spot for Australian Shepherds. My best friend for fourteen years of my life, and all of hers, had been an Australian Shepherd.
The little brown-and-black dog sported a frayed rope around his neck. Did he belong to someone nearby? There were no farmhouses in sight. Part of me wanted him, my days were lonely on the campo. Maybe the more animals I had the better.
“Come on, be realistic, the last thing you need is a dog,” I told myself. I would be going back to Alaska at some point. Leaving my horses was hard enough. What would I do with a dog?
I threw rocks at him, careful not to actually hit him. Nothing worked. He was coming on our parade.
At lunch break, I held a chunk of meat in his direction. I had just thrown rocks at him. Now I was offering him food. He approached, then ran away, tail tucked between his legs. I needed his friendship, but didn’t want an attachment. Which one of us was more schizophrenic?
Just outside Villa Frey he disappeared. Maybe he went into town searching for the inevitable open garbage container. Maybe he had been here before and knew someone. Either way, I told myself, it was good that he wasn’t following me. I already missed him.
Back home, I tried not to think about the little dog. Lots of dogs wander the streets in Chile. The next day dawned clear and blessedly calm. Cerro Sombrero was beckoning. The neighbor’s gate was open. I rode through.
When I first moved into my little cabin, I had stopped at the their house. A barefoot boy stood in the yard, staring at me. His mother peered at me from behind the front door. A man came out of a tool shed.
Praying that they were friendly, I asked for permission to cross their land.
“Si, por supuesto,” he said. He seemed confused about why I had come out of my way to stop at the house and ask. There had been no invitation to come in for maté or stop by again later.
Arraquien huffed up the steep incline toward the base of the mountain where we entered the lenga forest. Auburn leaves were still on the trees and green plants covered the forest floor. The Christmas-red flowers and green leaves of the copihue wept from the walls of every crevice. Occasionally, a three-petaled, pure-white trillium still bloomed, an innocent but sexy bride peeking out through the foliage of the forest floor.
A couple of hundred feet overhead, patches of new snow covered the greenery. A thousand feet up permanent snowfields glistened, white with fresh powder. Summer, fall, and winter existed simultaneously. I tied Arraquien in the last patch of open forest before the mountain steepened up. Drawn by a powerful urge, I headed uphill on foot. Immersed in what I know to be heaven, I was puffing upward through my favorite forest on earth covered in six inches of new fallen snow, when I noticed that a set of cloven hooves had wandered the forest floor, green tracks in a white landscape.
In eight years of traveling the remote backcounty of Southern Chile I had seen exactly one huemul, but I recognized these prints. I did not expect to actually see these elusive animals. Just knowing that these gentle forest creatures were living nearby made me happy.
Suddenly, I got the feeling I was being watched. The soft, brown eyes of a doe were calmly observing my every move. Branches became antlers as a buck stuck his head out from behind a tree, curious as to what type of creature had entered his forest. To my amazement, the doe came striding toward me. The Inuit believe that in the distant past animals and people spoke the same language. I stood motionless, wishing I understood, both honored and thrilled to share their forest. We stared at each other for minutes, or was it hours, until the two wandered quietly into another part of the forest.
A decade of protection from hunters and the establishment of nature reserves seemed to be making a difference. I had just seen my second and third huemul. Within the next few years huemules would become a common sight along a nearby section of the Caraterra Austral. The symbol of wild Patagonia was coming back.
I clambered upward through a long patch of thick forest. One moment I was standing, nose to branch, in thick undergrowth, the next I stepped out onto an open gently sloping snowfield forming a long, perfect ramp to the ridge. After growing up hiking through the scattered, wind-beaten, krumholtz of the Colorado high country, I’m always amazed at the abruptness of timberline in Patagonia, the way the alpine world materializes without warning.
Topping out on the summit ridge, the North side of Cerro Castillo towered in the distance. On the shady, southern face of Cerro Sombrero, I was surprised to see long running, half-bridged crevasses arching across the entire slope below my feet. The map said nothing of a glacier on this mountain. La Patagonia, she is always full of surprises.
One short scree scramble, and I was on top of the Sombrero. A long ridge stretched out toward yet another summit, and then another, but this one would have to do for now. I had a horse tied in the woods.
A full-on giggling glissade down the thirty degree snow ramp brought me swiftly to the edge of the woods. Slowing down, becoming more observant, I walked quietly through the huemul’s territory just in case I was to be blessed with seeing them again. They had vanished. Upping my observational level helped me find the exact spot I had left Arraquien.
I found him impatiently pawing the ground. I saddled quickly, and we headed down. The sun set more north than west these days and always sooner than I expected.
The gate was still open as we trotted through the neighbor’s farm. My mind was still on the lovely day in the mountains and the huemules when something hanging from a big pine tree beside the trail caught my eye. Furry, brown, and black, I had to look right into its eyes to be sure. The empty, dead eyes of the little dog stared back! He was hanging by his homemade rope collar, as if he had been put there for me to see. I felt sick to my stomach. A flood of could-have-beens and should-have-dones came pouring in and the tears came pouring out. Why hadn’t I turned around to look for a farm as soon as I noticed he was following us that first day? Why hadn’t I followed him into Villa Frey? Why hadn’t I wanted him? A friend was something we had both sorely needed. It was all too late. The little guy was dead. I felt like throwing up.
I wanted to be as far from where I was as I could get. I let up on the reins, encouraging Chucao to run full out for home. Hanging on but not really caring if I fell off, I clung to his neck, my tears falling into his mane. I wanted to be thousands of miles away. I wanted to live next to people who did not kill stray dogs.
At the cabin I threw what food I had in the house in my saddle bags, along with a pot, a sleeping bag, and a tent. In half an hour, I was gone. We traveled south toward Lago Elizalde. Darkness caught us near the same place I had slept so many years ago with Nimbus. This time my camp was a sad, dark hovel, a place run to in desperation.
The next day, I turned toward the Rio Mogote Valley. The map showed seriously mountainous country up there. I was sure to get dead-ended at some point, but I didn’t care. I wanted the solace of rugged country. I wanted to be turned around by cliffs and glaciated mountains, not by a locked gate.
Despite all my promises not to push the horses too hard, it was cold, late, and much to my dismay we were still on the road system when we were forced by darkness to camp. In the morning we passed a little campo near the end of the road with a small wooden sign that said, “camping.” Too bad we hadn’t stumbled upon this place the night before.
Once again, uncertainty began where the road ended. The map showed the trail staying on my side of the river, but it promptly disappeared into the Rio Mogote. Would I be crossing and re-crossing this frigid river all the way up the valley?
To my amazement an ox-cart trail ran the entire length of the valley on the other side. Dug into the hillside with steeply cut banks, the old trail proceeded up valley at a gentle grade. Miles of huge logs laid down like corrugated cardboard protected the trail from erosion.
At two p.m., which was solar noon, last night’s frost hung heavy on the bushes, and I was still waiting for the sun to come up over the northern wall. Then it hit me: In this deep, east-west facing valley, the sun wasn’t going to come up again until spring. Tonight’s frost was going to accumulate on top of last night’s and on and on until snow came to bury the valley. It was also highly probable that no one would enter this valley again until next summer. If an accident were to befall me, I would be on my own.
An old saw mill and a decrepit pile of boards explained the ox-cart road. People had been hauling logs out of this country, possibly for decades, but the land didn’t have the devastated look of a clear-cut. Old trees mixed with younger trees and a full canopy covered a diverse forest floor. Where were the stumps? Either this was an extremely old cut or this valley held an exceptionally rich ecosystem, one that recovered more quickly than most.
Too many hours of darkness hung over my camp, like a sad memory. With nothing to read and nothing to do, I crawled into my sleeping bag in all my clothes and piled horse blankets on top. The evening turned into exactly what I feared it would, a long, cold, restless night.
During the day, finding the trail and keeping the horses moving occupied my mind, but at night the questions rolled in. What was I doing here? I wasn’t raising sheep or even growing a garden. I would either have to go home to my friends’ campo or go home to Alaska at some point. I couldn’t stay here and freeze.
The next day I was determined to climb up into the sun, whether or not I could take the horses with me. Bush-whacking upward on foot, I felt my own exhaustion. Raising my legs up and over downed trees felt like lifting lead. Was this how my horses felt, as well? Still, I craved an open view of the huge glaciated peaks surrounding me and a moment, however brief, of sunshine in my life. Climbing was the only way I was going to get it. In the entire valley there appeared to be only one way a person could gain the ridge without a partner and a rope. The mountaineer in me was frustrated by that lack in the same way the younger mountaineer in me had been frustrated walking miles of muddy horse trails without a horse. I set my sights on a small, open, sunny spot well above the river. I pushed hard, scrambling hand over hand up wet scree. I had to get there before the sun abandoned even that spot.
I arrived in time, stripped off my wet shoes and socks, and plastered myself against the warmish rock, breathing in the last, sweet fifteen minutes of sunshine the day had to offer.
Thankfully, clouds came in and that night was warmer. Still, by morning I had been flat on my back in a tiny space for twelve hours when I convinced myself to get up. There was no use waiting for sunrise.
Back on the trail, I felt tired all the time. Was it mental? I didn’t feel stressed or scared out here, but I didn’t have the joy I normally felt waking up in the mountains. I was ready to leave this cold, dark, beautiful valley.
The farm with the “camping” sign was my next destination. Even from the outside, it looked inviting. Everything the residents needed was close at hand—an orchard, chickens, a big vegetable garden.
“We hardly ever have to go to town,” Hortencia told me. “The grand kids come out here. We have an extra house for the family when they come. It is way too cold to camp. You can stay there.”
I objected, told them I was happy to camp, but they wouldn’t hear of it.
“Oh no, camping is for summer. It is winter now,” her husband Luis said.
I took note, fall was now also officially over. As I settled in with this family, their welcome warmed parts of me that had been cold for weeks. Over maté I learned that Luis had lived in Villa O’Higgins.
“Do you know the old trail to O’Higgins?” I asked.
“Of course, I traveled it many times,” he said.
He didn’t seem shocked that a gringa had ridden to O’Higgins, or that I was now wandering around the Rio Mogote in almost winter. Neither of them mentioned the obvious fact that I was traveling alone. At last, people who didn’t think I was nuts, or at least didn’t let on.
Later that evening I got the story of Hortencia’s family. She was one of ten kids raised not far from here. Thirty years ago she married Luis and moved to this campo.
“I raised three children here. That was long before the road came in. When the children needed shots we would all ride into Coyhaique. We put a small one in front of each of us and the oldest would ride behind.”
Three people on one horse all the way to Coyhaique? To me, that sounded uncomfortable, but to her, these were happy memories.
When her oldest was six they sent him to boarding school in Valle Simpson.
“That lasted one year. The other kids, they made fun of him and stole things from him, so I moved into town. I had two in school by then. We rented a place to stay in Valle Simpson. I worked two jobs and took in laundry to pay for it.”
Next she had followed her kids to Coyhaique while they finished high school.
“We only got to come out to the campo on holidays and summer vacation back then,” she said.
All over Chile women had used the exclamation “Que valienté,” to describe me and my horse trips. I had heard this from women who had ridden home through snow up to their horses’ bellies to save their sheep, from women who rode the same trails I did, in a blizzard, pushing a hundred goats, from women, like Hortencia, who had given up everything so their children could go to school. A life without hardship had left me bored and dissatisfied. I didn’t see anything valiant about wandering around Patagonia on a horse for fun. Did simply doing something other than what you were born into make you valienté?
“Now my kids are all grown, so I live here with my husband. Our three grandkids come visit often. Life is good again,” she said. “When I go to town the television is always on and the kids attention is elsewhere. Better the grandkids come visit me here.”
Pictures of her kids growing up entertained us the rest of the night. Patagonia is a small town. One of Hortencia’s photos was of Pancho and Cuchi, with a wagon-load of kids. My friends looked so young, their own kids yet to come. Time goes by whether you are paying attention or not.
The conversation broke long enough for sleep, and we picked up where we left off in the morning. When I left, Hortencia gave me enough bread and cheese for lunch, dinner, and the next day’s breakfast. When I went to pay them for camping they tried to refuse. It was my turn to lecture. “You can’t have a camping business and not charge people for camping,” I reasoned. They had given me the gift of friendship and conversation. The camping I would pay for.
I left Luis and Hortencia’s in a good mood. I wasn’t sure of what lay ahead, but felt more capable of dealing with whatever that might be.
Not far down the road, a man in a brand new four-by-four jeep pulled up beside me. His face did not tell of years spent in the Patagonian sun. He was from Valdivia. He had just purchased a huge campo up the Rio Bravo.
“Oh, que bueno,” I said, expressing my approval, even though I knew nothing about it and had no idea if I approved.
As it turned out, he had never seen this campo.If his campo was indeed where he was describing it, he wouldn’t be driving there, even in that fancy jeep. His best chance would be to drive to the end of the road, take a boat across the lake, and hire horses to take him up valley from there. Finding either a boat or horses was highly unlikely this time of year. I considered for a second inserting myself and my horses into his wild scheme, but quickly decided against it. There had been enough craziness in my world lately.
Confident he could buy his way wherever he wanted to go, he motored on. I had forgotten to ask him what he planned to do with this campo he had never seen. I imagined living there was not in his plan.
“He probably plans on selling it for a lot of money in a few years,” I said aloud after he was gone.
My next encounter was even more disturbing. A car suddenly stopped, and two men hopped out. I flinched, but they just wanted to talk. Maybe they hadn’t ever seen a gringa on horseback before. It took less than twenty seconds for the conversation to turn to the dreaded, “Estás sola?”
I didn’t answer. They could see that for themselves.
“No tienes miedo?” the tubby one asked.
I tried my well-practiced line. “Afraid of what? There are no snakes, no dangerous animals, and the people are all wonderful.”
“Si, pero donde estás tu companero,” the tall one asked.
The question, “where was my companion,” struck a painful cord that was far closer to the surface than I expected after all these years.
“Estás muerto,” he’s dead, I said.
They had no more questions.
I marched on, fuming and ranting.
“Is that a reason I should stop living?”
“Should I shut myself up in a house?”
“Should I go home to live with my mother, until another man comes along? That’s what people here would do.”
For the second time that day, I was talking aloud to someone who was no longer there.
Back on the campo I built a tiny twiggy-fire for hot water and ate the last of Hortencia’s bread. Tears that had been just under the surface for days welled up but I didn’t cry. I was too far out, too unstable, and too far from home to let that happen.
If there is truly one person for everyone, if soul mates are real, I was lucky, I had known mine. I had experienced the deep companionship of having a true partner. We had spent most of our twenties together, exploring the world’s wild places, and building a cabin in backwoods Alaska. Later, he died climbing a mountain in Nepal. A decade and a half and a thousand adventures had passed without him.
Alone on the campo there was plenty of time to think and too much time to worry. If indeed soul mates meant there could be only one, I was doomed to travel alone.
But, I still had a life to live. I wasn’t going to miss out on mine, especially because, at twenty-seven, my best friend already had.
Maybe I could go visit the family of the boy who had come by on horseback a while ago. He had seemed friendly. Maybe I could get to know them. In the wind and drizzle of an early winter evening,I started walking in their direction. I hopped a couple of fences and trudged across a long, open field. It was rapidly getting dark. I hadn’t brought a head lamp. The sliver of a moon lolling just above the horizon would be setting soon.
I stopped. Was I nuts? Would the neighbors think I was crazy to come visiting at this hour? I stood in the middle of the field paralyzed by indecision. Again I saw myself as others would see me, a distraught, confused gringa standing in the dusk in an open field, unable to move in any direction.
The tears I had been fighting all day finally came. I missed Paty and Scott and the children they would surely have. I saw myself, years from now, as my neighbors would come to know me, a looney old lady alone on a campo. For all the things that I loved here, it was time to go.
If only I had been able to see into the future that night, what lay ahead would have amazed and comforted me. Six years later, this campo would again be home. My life would be filled with puppies, chickens, horses, friends, children, and, best of all, Fredrik, the man who would become my husband.