Yesterday a family of Mapuche Indians stopped me in the street (addressing me, damnit, as Usted Señor) and asked me if I lived here. I realized that as of 3 days (long enough for me to stop pulling in on the front gate to go out) this was technically true.
I didn’t know the address they were looking for, but for a few seconds I was somehow both in the scene and watching it from somewhere else (that future place you go in your mind when you think ‘I’ll write about this?’) as the old man pointed through the rain and said he’d heard it was más p’allá.
Of course this scene shouldn’t ‘stand for’ anything more than itself, as this way of thinking has led people to do weird and evil shit (like decimate the very people who helped them survive their first seasons after arriving in the Americas, then set up a national holiday “giving thanks”) since the beginning of time. This was just one man asking another for directions as has happened and will continue to happened in stadiums and forests and bus terminals and above rapids and in muddy streets everywhere in the world forever.
Try to ‘draw out’ this direction-giving into a spiritual thing or a religion or anything else and you’ve gone from pro to amateur. Keep it at ground level and just give the man directions or smile and tell him you don’t know but you’re sure he’ll find it up there más p’allá.
–excerpt from “Notes on Going Pro for Thanksgiving” at Matador
I planted the first tomato seedling. Took my time patting the dirt probably more than I needed to (or can you ever really pat it enough?) Planting tomatoes in the corner of your new lot right as the sun drops behind the Andes seems downright auspicious, something that calls for some kind of ceremony (a joint?), although like most things that can lead to potentially higher levels of stoke downstream, it’s also a ceremony in itself.
Earlier in the day I’d purchased two cherry tomato and two tomate redondo seedlings as well as two sprigs of basil, all potted in Dixie cups. The Garden of Eden for 5 dollars.
I dug in easily next to the fence with a small plastic backpacking trowel, unearthing worms that twisted in the dark soil. The ground here in this part of Patagonia is ultra-fertile, layers of volcanic ash from Andes mixed with Pacific maritime precipitation. As Claudio, the remisero (Argentine taxi driver) reminded me yesterday, this place used to be all chacra, or farm..
Having spent the previous couple hours setting up things in the new house (something which sounds better in Spanish–Armando -‘arming’ -la casa), I felt a strange and unprecedented tenderness towards my two new coffee mugs, cutting board, and shower curtain (perhaps also a result of loneliness). The takeaway is that the whole evening I was in a single no-thoughts-just-action mode, although writing about this now I remember on the way out to the side-yard a few mental replays of the chorus from “Gardening at Night” by R.E.M seemed to break into–or perhaps add to–the flow. From Athens, Georgia to Patagonia, Argentina. So much of life seems about closing certain distances while keeping others open.
But back to the coffee mugs and the cutting board: there’s something to be said for re ‘arming’ your life in a new place. The problem is when you’ve done it so many times (putting flowers in the empty wine bottle in the 14th new kitchen in your life) that you’re no longer asking the right questions. The pertinent question is never why but where followed closely by when.
Since the bus dropped me off two days ago (the streets nearly flooding, the Israelis and everyone else disappearing into remises or into the rain) I’ve found where to buy shower curtain rods and coffee mugs (la papelera). I’ve found where there are good sticks to pick up as you’re walking through Arrayanes on your way to town (packs of street dogs – helps everyone know who’s who). And I’ve found at least one place and time to plant tomatoes.
Entrance to Barrio Arrayanes, El Bolsón, Patagonia, Argentina
Six Israeli dudes get on the bus with me at the terminal in Bariloche. My Jewish Bros. Last year they were all probably serving in the IDF. Manning checkpoints, driving tanks, looking through scopes and down sights aimed at various animate and inanimate targets. Now they’re all traveling in Patagonia wearing Nike low-tops and not looking worried about shit. They’ve got a young American or maybe Canadian girl with them. I feel jealous somehow. In the terminal it’s cold and windy. There’s the usual diesel smoke from idling busses. Down below, Lago Nahuel Huapi looking cold and windblown, irreducible. If I were a kite surfer maybe I’d be seeing all of this with different eyes.
I’ve just come from 20 straight hours of travel by bus. Santiago de Chile to Osorno, Osorno to Bariloche. Some kind of gnarly congestion had erupted in my sinuses the night before, a leftover from the Santiago smog. I don’t know how people look at traveling as ‘glamorous.’ Most of the time it’s a kind of suffering, really.
Rolling out through Bariloche now. The ugly and depressing monobloques section of town. Traveling to Mexico with my family once we passed through a similar looking outskirts and my my mom cried behind her sunglasses (I could tell by the way her chin moved). I don’t know why she cried and I doubt she’d remember if I asked her. At the time I had the feeling it was because she thought maybe we’d made some terrible mistake and all of Cabo San Lucas was going to look like this. Coming too close to cinderblock wall and tin roof reality makes it harder to maintain a ‘vacation’ pretense.
I unwrap another Halls mentholyptus for my throat (my only food for the last 2o hours). The girl sitting next to me has the big round face of a Mapuche. On the ride to Bariloche I heard a young American kid blathering about how the Mapuche were “the most successful tribe in South America at staying in the woods and resisting assimilation.” Of course he couldn’t know that the last part of his statement inadvertently described my ‘game plan’ and in fact the very reason why I was traveling now.
The bus is out of Bariloche and winding through the caminos sinuosos to El Bolsón. There are big woods to hide in here where you can prevent assimilation, or perhaps better said, actually be able to assimilate. It’s not easy getting down here. You really have to want it. Twenty hours in a bus leaves you needing some serious water, food, lying down completely flat and closing your eyes. Looking around now, 4 out of the 6 Israeli kids are asleep as is damn near half the bus, all of us headed to this next place, El Bolsón, Patagonia. Raining hard and the Cordillera completely fogged in now. I’m glad I packed my hunting boots.
downtown El Bolsón, late spring snow on Cerro Piltriquitrón
downtown El Bolsón, typical vehicle
House at the entrance to Barrio Arrayanes, where we live in El Bolson