Yesterday I took the nena up to Cerro Perito Moreno. I’d woken her up early and she was tired. There was knee-deep snow and almost no wind, no clouds.

It was our first day as papi/hija without mami. You stayed back at home resting (or actually ‘nesting,’ getting doormats and baskets and clothespins).

After playing in the snow for a while the nena said “refugio,” and we went up to the shelter. We sat by the fire and ate chocolate. She kept talking about a girl we’d seen before who had a penguin doll. She remembered the name of the doll. She thought they’d still be there.

Later she called for the juajita. She wanted to sleep.  I took her out on my back and she was asleep in a few minutes. Out in the forest, snow was falling from tree branches. Each fall make a little glittering curtain. I hiked up several switchbacks and stopped at a vista looking across the valley. The precordillera was more snowed-over than I’ve ever seen before. There were thick avalanche trails in the notches.

I kept ascending. I thought about different things like how the people below were all sledding and crashing into each other in the same place, following the same lines.

From the way the snow was piled against the Cohiue trunks I could see from what direction the storm came.

I stopped again where an arm-sized stream of melt-water was pouring through an open place in the hillside, then disappearing in the snow below my feet. I could feel the nena’s belly moving against my back with each inhalation and exhalation. I wrote in my journal:

keep
breathing
words

It seemed like a good combination of sounds and ideas.

Keep breathing words.
Breathing words keep.
Breathing keep words.
Words breathing keep.
Keep words breathing.
Words keep breathing.

There was the water sound, the nena breathing, the huge ridges in every direction, my boots in knee-deep snow.

Sometimes you can feel yourself as a tiny animal breathing for a few seconds on earth.

Later I went back down and could feel her waking up, squirming.

Whenever she wakes up I always whisper to her.

“Hey baby, we’re in the forest,” I whispered. “How are you?”

“Good,” she whispered back.

“Do you want to get down?”

“No,” she whispered.

I looked back and could see her looking at snow falling from branches, the glittering.

I think this is all we’ll ever have.

And it’s enough.

Can I take some?

And can I borrow their wheelbarrow also?

(I just assume they have a wheelbarrow because they work the fields.)

She says something about the dirt that I interpret as Don’t touch that shit; with this barrio you never know.

She starts explaining how she helped people here get luz y agua twenty years ago and later those same people called her sons thieves.

She says to go out into the fields where they cut the road and just pull the tierra negra from there.

She says they don’t have a wheelbarrow,  they use the patron’s. ²

What about a strong bucket? I ask.

We walk to the structure behind their house.

The fat kid whose mom rents part of the Colque’s house follows us over there.

It’s a half-finished two-story concrete bunker.

They want to rent it out this summer.

They’re not working the fields anymore.

Pretty soon there won’t be fields to work anyway.

On the floor are buckets for mixing concrete.  She flips one over, bangs it on the floor, and hands it to me.

On the way back I show her the beds for the vegetable garden I made.

She says Qué Lindo.

On the way out she gives me a patch of green onions seedlings.

Later I’ll give you some strawberries too, she says.

I go out to the fields looking for the piled up dirt she’s talking about.

It’s Sunday and there’s nobody working.

All the dirt is gone, I don’t see anything.

I walk back and see one of Abuela’s sons.

They all look like her.

I ask if he knows To whom this dirt pertains.

I use the subjunctive Pertenezca, as if dirt belonging to someone were purely hypothetical.

Anna, he says.

He nods to the house across the street.

I go and clap in front of Anna’s gate.

A daughter I’ve never seen before sticks her head and breasts out of the door and asks Si?

I say something about bucketfuls of tierra negra. Is it ok?

She says Let me ask mom.

She comes back out and says ‘Sta bien.

On the way back to get the shovel I see Carolina.

One of the barrio puppies walks out to the middle of the road towards us.

I tell her how they ambush our front and back door.

She explains how they run inside their house their house too.

We talk about how the lady renting from the Colques never feeds them, just lets them run everywhere.

She asks if I knew that Pedrito is sick. He’s in the hospital now with menangitis.

I tell her I didn’t.

She says he’s going to be alright though.

I ask her how it’s going in Bariloche.

She calls it Bari.

I ask if they have a wheelbarrow. She says let me ask _____, a nickname for Sergio I don’t fully understand.

She asks if I want to come get it.

Later while wheelbarrowing loads of dirt back to the garden all different thoughts and images run together:

1. Anna’s father, the old man with palsy, opening the curtain and looking out.
2. Somebody I’ve never seen before pulling a tape measure across the opening to the fields.
3. The Colques’ dog, Bito, lying on a gravel pile, barely seeming to breathe.
4. Every time I look around it seems more open here, more trees cut down.
5. Opening of a short story started but never finished:

I got up thinking about rivers. There was a certain stream I could see, an eddy lapping and cutting into a sandbank. It made me think of things washing away, eroding, like the way I signed my name, the letters collapsing into one another, missing the line they gave you to sign on by a little bit more each year.

By the fourth wheelbarrow load, Layla is helping me.

We bring her small trowel so she can shovel too.

After filling the beds we rake them out.

I tell her I need to start cleaning up now.

The puppies are sort of camped out in the pile of fenceboards stacked beside our house.

I clean up some of their shit from the corner.

There are all these cardboard boxes here that I don’t know what to do with.

The smallest puppy watches me break down one of the boxes and stuff it in a garbage bag.

She’s shivering.

It’s gotten cold, there are cloud moving in after 4 weeks of sun.

I think: light a fire.

I dig out a small circle of grass in the back yard.

Layla watches me light it and says Qué Lindo.

I turn 8 cardboard boxes into ash.

I ask Lau for a glass of wine.

Later I transplant the green onion and strawberries to the new beds.

The puppies lie in a pile by the fire.

They don’t have names yet, they’re just the Grande, the Mediano, and the Chiquito.

The Grande and Mediano fall asleep by the fire and look like Bito, like nothing will ever happen.

The Chiquito looks around every time a dog barks, every time a car starts, every time a door opens, then she looks at you hard like Damn, what’s happening, and please,  can’t you do something?

____________

¹ topsoil

² the landowner’s

Deadline: Sept 10

No bullshit entry fee.

Layla had on a dress that was too small for her, panties, and her Dorothy shoes.¹

She was playing with rocks in the driveway.

I’d just handwashed and hung out to dry two loads of clothes.

There was an hour left of sun.

Lau had gone to yoga.

Layla threw down her rocks then walked farther down the road.

It was cold in the shade and where she was walking was shaded.

She leaned against a wooden post, then walked out in the middle of the road.

I told her to come back.

She walked back a little then stopped and picked up other rocks.

Sh said “tomá” and wanted me to take the rocks.

I said No you keep the rocks.

I said Let’s stay by the house.

There was this weird fucking pull to stay near the computer and keep working.

I opened the gate like we were going back inside.

Somewhere between 15 to 45 seconds passed where I wasn’t really thinking about anything or paying attention to anything.

Layla went back out to the driveway.

I pushed myself up on the concrete posts by in front of our house.

It was warm in the sun.

I did 10 leg lifts.

I jumped down and then walked towards her and we held hands.

We walked towards where they’re building condos at the end of the street.

There were sounds of skillsaws and grinders.

One of the workers nodded to me.

It was all sunny out in the fields beside the condos.

I realized we’ve lived here 9 months and never walked there together.

At the east end of the fields there were men cutting up the poplars.

They’d cut down the trees and were going to turn the chacra into subdivisions.

I thought how before I didn’t come in here because this was a farm where people were working.

I thought how now was some kind of last chance and that later you wouldn’t be able to walk around like this anymore.

The fields had been left all winter.

We saw tiny purple flowers.

Layla said Muchas flores.

We kept walking.

Julio had gone on ahead and was nosing the greenhouses.

I whistled for him to come back.

Layla took off her shoes.

We walked past a section of broccoli.

We walked along rows of beets.

I pulled a beet out of the ground and showed it to her.

She carried the beet like a baby.

She said “tomá” and wanted me to take the beet.

We walked to the back side of the chacra where a creek flows through and there are apple and willow trees.

Julio started digging and snuffling at something in the ground.

Layla got down right next to him.

I said Watch his paws he might get you.

I said Julio what you doin?

Layla said whatsee doin?

I said He’s found a raton or something in there.

I said His favorite thing is looking for ratones you know?

Julio kept digging and then jumped a few feet over and drove his snout into the ground.

A fat and stunned mouse flopped out of the other side of the hole then disappeared in the stalks.

I said Juli the raton just jumped out and you missed it dude!

I said C’mon dude let’s go.

Layla asked things and I told her I didn’t want him to get the Raton, that he had food already.

We held hands and walked by the creek.

I asked her if her feed hurt and she said no.

We got closer to the guys cutting firewood.

They kept their truck idling while they cut and loaded and I thought “jesus they’re smoking themselves out.”

Then I thought “people here like to leave the engines running because they’re used to them not cranking.”

Layla said this part was hurting her feet.

I picked her up.

We passed the truck and one of the paisanos nodded.

Juli had run back and was still looking for the mouse.

I whistled through my hands like nobody knows how to do down here and the paisano who’d nodded looked at me.

Juli came running towards us and I said That’s our bud!

On the other side of the truck was the direction where they’d felled the poplars.

Layla wanted to balance on one of  trunks.

The sun was just a couple minutes from setting.

The light was on the trunks and the fields and the different houses that were being built in the valley.

I held Layla’s hand as she walked on one trunk and I walked on another.

We got to to the limbs that were once the tops of 100 foot poplars and which  still seemed to be budding even though they’d been cut into 100 sections.

We stepped down into the fields again.

Everywhere on this side were little shoots of kale.

I picked a couple and chewed.

I couldn’t believe how sweet they tasted.

I passed some to Layla and thought how there was something that was promised although I didn’t know by who, or if “promise” even was the right verb, but that it was there whatever it was and that we’d fucking fucked it up forever but somehow were getting a little bit of it back right now.

__________

¹ruby red slippers with all the sparkles in the toes worn out

(a) this story by Blake Butler

(b) the latest blog poast by Sarah Menkedick

(c) new tracks from Deerhunter

(d) proposition 8 being ruled unconstitutional

(e) dude planning to freefall from space

(f) Daniel Britt’s notes on hanging with mercenaries in iraq

(g) late winter conditions at cerro catedral

We were in this Cohiue forest, soft-packed snow in the middle of the roadbed, a half a foot of powder along the banks. Nobody around. The angle of the roadbed and the conditions were perfect.

In Argentina they call sledding “culo patin,” or ass-sliding. We went for it.

Immediately after the first culo-patin-ride she was saying “otra vez, otra vez.” We walked back up and I told her we could try snowboarding. There’s almost no better feeling than a board floating up in the pow and carving these big quiet turns in the middle of the forest. Check the size of that Cohiue in the background. I heard Layla give her first “Yoohooooo!” as we hit this particular turn with a bit more speed and flow.

This shot below gives a good sense of how the terrain is here in Rio Negro, Patagonia. On the horizon is the pre-cordillera, a comb-ridge / extended range of flatirons with different sections (Los Repollos, Cerro Piltriquitron). On the other side of that is the pampas, the desert. The valley in between is this super fertile farmland, the basin containing El Bolson, Lago Puelo, El Hoyo, and to the North, Bariloche.

The mountain we’re riding is the shoulder of the Andes. The peaks(and the border with Chile) are another 2 hours’ ascent. The terrain here is temperate rainforest. The understory has these Caña Colihue plants, or canebrakes. Out of all the tree-riding I’ve ever done, I think this terrain is my favorite. There are creekbeds everywhere, which, when filled in with snow, create these long serpentine waves and ramps and gulleys through the forest.

————–

notes:

1. all photos by lau bernhein
2. if i’d thought about it beforehand i would’ve brought layla’s helmet. not that it wasn’t safe (it was super safe), but just to start the ‘protocol’ from the very first day: you go riding, you wear a helmet.

Operating on Stoke got hacked last week. Sorry for anyone who opened this blog and got a warning message. I’ve since had it scanned for malware (various times) and we’re good to go again.

The only thing is that in all the hours and frustration of trying to get everything restored, the subdomain site MIXTAPE WRITING ended up getting “nuked.”

Thanks to everyone who participated in that project.

Alright, getting back into the flow.