notes on walking the land with Brisa

evening sky in Patagonia after thunderstorm.

After dinner, walking the land with Brisa. Clearing sky after thunderstorm. Sunset flaring off Piltriquitron and across Andes now. You never lose your bearings here.

We’re on a hunt for palitos. Little sticks. I want to make a couple stakes and pound them through the fence where the dogs crawl under. This morning I couldn’t find one of my flip flops. Then we saw it in the Colques’ yard. Negrito or huevito had gotten it, plus some of Layla’s mini-doll family. Now I’m wearing my sheath knife. There’s sauce (not like ketchup, but “sow-say,” a willow-like tree everywhere.

I stop at the first pile of already-cut branches (this stuff is constantly being thinned away from power lines). I find a good palito and start trimming the branches. Brisa watches. She handles knives every day. She works out in the chacra. This morning she and her brother Noel brought us red-leaf lettuce. Even earlier their grandmother Adela had stood at the gate holding a huge green head. We talked for a minute about her two dogs. All the other dogs–Bito, Huevito, Negrito–live outside but these two–a pair of tiny white and brown rat terriers–sleep at the foot of her bed and follow her everywhere. “La patrulla,” I call them. The patrol.

Brisa starts telling me a little of the story. Her grandmother Adela lived in Buenos Aires but came here 40 years ago. “When there was nothing here,” she points all around. “These are her trees,” she points to a row of apple trees.

I don’t fully understand if she just began homesteading here, but at one point she was given lands. “She didn’t have to buy them, they gave them to her,” Brisa says. “Now this is an expensive neighborhood.” She asks me how much I paid for our piece of land and I tell her. I fight against the instinct implanted in me by my family and culture and upbringing to hold this information back. When you’re out here walking the land it has to be all real. It is what it is. “Quince mil dolares.” I say. Dolares is one of the words where I can’t hide my accent.

“I used to live in this house.” She points to a well maintained two story house with a dormer looking out over Piltriquitron. “But then we sold this place.”

Jorge (my landlord) had mentioned something about the Colques losing a bunch of land for some reason that I didn’t fully understand. (I was sick and barely functioning when I first arrived.)

I’ll ask Adela for more of the story sometime when I feel like the confianza is there.

A few things I know for certain though:

• Nobody knows this street we live on by its new official name, “Perito Moreno,” but if you tell the remiseros [taxi drivers] “Callejon de los Colque” they’ll take you right here.

• All these newer, nicer looking houses keep going up around the Colques, including the one we’re renting right next door, but their ‘new’ house itself is kind of unfinished. It doesn’t look ‘middle class’.

• It’s not like a gated community or something–this place, “Barrio Arrayanes,” is still mostly just farm fields. Where our land is currently being used (happily) as a place for horses to graze (there’s thick shrubs of wild rose and fennel, all which the horses love). But I can’t stop feeling that in a much slower but still persistent way, we might all be somehow economically displacing these folks.

• On the other hand, the Colques themselves just seem stoked to have neighbors. Noel and Brisa are over here every day. They watch me type on the computer.

We get the arroyo. There are fish jumping. The sky colors are unreal. I point across a meadow full of lupines. “You see that big Maiten [native tree]?” “Si.” “That’s our land right there.” She nods. “I know you guys have explored back here, right?” She nods again.

view of our land in Patagonia

I carry Layla over the ‘fence’ of tangled sticks that someone (probably the Gauchos wit the horses) has put up. Brisa seems like she doesn’t want to follow us to far into the fields. We see the horses again. She tells me that her mother got bit by a horse and it tore off part of her breast. She doesn’t go near it, but just stays near where we came in, looking all around.

“Well, now you know where it is,” I say, “where we’ll be moving. It’s all just wild rose and thistle right now.”

“Mucho trabajo,” she says.

We walk back to our houses.