It has been pouring down rain for three days and three nights non-stop.
It’s as if someone unzipped the sky and all the water in the world poured out. Oddly
enough, even though everything outside is a soupy, muddy mess, I am grateful.
First, because it is raining instead of snowing—although it does occasionally
come with snow mixed in but then quickly turns back into rain. Second, because
it has been enough rain to finish washing the trees clean of accumulated snow
and enough to help melt off part of the twenty inches that were still on the
ground from a devastating winter storm a week ago.
Last week was a rough one for the region. The only people grinning were
those whose tourist trade depends on the ski slopes of Mount Catedral, located
about midway between our house and the town of San Carlos de Bariloche twelve
miles away. And even they weren’t all that happy to begin with since the snow
storm hit precisely at the start of winter vacation season. With the Bariloche airport
shut down due to the snow emergency, thousands of travelers headed this way
from Buenos Aires, Brazil and other cities and countries around the world were
stranded in the Buenos Aires hub, a thousand miles from here, until the snow let
up and the landing strip could be plowed.
To be clear, the seasons here in South America are exactly opposite to
those in the Northern Hemisphere. So, weather-wise, June here is like December
in the States, July is like January, and so on. We’re now in the midst of our
winter season.
No one predicted this big snow. Accuweather’s forecast was for some snow
in the high country but only a wintry mix of rain and snow down below, with
scant accumulation.
They say that if you don’t like the weather in Bariloche, wait around an
hour and it’ll change. But I’ve never found that to be true in the two and a
half decades that I’ve lived in the Andean-Patagonian region. The weather may
often be surprising. But it seems to me that each stage of the weather moves
with agonizing slowness to the next. Major
rains are preceded by three or four-day blows with winds gusting to gale force
off of the Pacific on the other side of the mountains. And once it starts
raining, especially in late-autumn or early-winter, as well as in the
springtime, it can, like now, rain hard for days on end. The most enduring
rains that I recall have accompanied the first onslaught of winter, and have lasted
as long as twenty days. And in wintertime the rain is occasionally followed by
heavy snow.
The same is true when it quits raining. Usually, by late November, the
rains are pretty much over until at least March. There are exceptions. Some
years you’ll have a damper summer than others, but the norm is very wet winters
and very dry summers, although just about anything can happen in between. I can
remember one dry season when the rains and snows stopped in October and didn’t
return until May. It happened back in the nineties after an unusually wet
winter in which we had snow on the ground—sometimes as much as two and a half
feet of it—non-stop from June through September. The following spring and
summer marked a freakish-bad drought-year for the dense hardwood forests. Centenarian
beeches, which require at least twenty-two hundred millimeters of rain a year
to survive properly, died by the hundreds. We’re still cutting firewood from
some of those dead giants twenty years later.
When new arrivals to the region say—with something like barely muted
terror in their eyes—that they never knew it rained so much here, I always tell
them that if they can’t stand the rain, they need to move elsewhere. The
immense forests, the million and a half acres of Andean woodland national park
that surround Bariloche, wouldn’t exist without abundant rain. These are
forests so dense and water-dependent that scientists refer to them as “cold
rainforests” and they share a lot of characteristics with the tropical
rainforests found in the north of Argentina and in neighboring Brazil and
Paraguay: abundant ferns, “live” hardwoods, dense cane breaks, and other lush
and verdant species.
But despite fairly regular weather phenomena and four distinct and
usually recognizable seasons, this remains part of an area of the world that
meteorologists call “the roaring forties”. This refers to the latitudes between
forty and fifty degrees in the Southern Hemisphere where strong west-to-east
currents are stirred up by warm air from the Equator and frigid air from the
South Pole, Earth’s rotation, and a scarcity of landmasses to serve as natural windbreaks.
As a result, the weather is indeed capricious.
A symbol of this windy region is the “flag tree”—not a particular
species, but vegetation that, in the windiest areas of “the roaring forties”,
takes on the shape of a flag fluttering in the wind, from having its branches
persistently and forcefully blown from west to east as they grow. Also iconic
are whacky-weather change ups, usually mountain cold snaps in the warm season
of the year, like the time it snowed six inches for my birthday in December,
which would be like getting a formidable snow in early June back in my native
Ohio. Or like the time I chose summertime as the best time to build a nine
thousand-gallon watering tank because it would be warm and dry out, and the
workers and I all ended up drinking hot coffee and shivering in our winter
jackets because a big wind came and the temperature dipped to near freezing in
mid-February, which is like mid-August back home in Ohio.
It’s all part of the intricate climatic tapestry that governs this
extraordinarily beautiful region of the world. And if you’re going to make your
home in “the roaring forties”, then, you have to be willing to “do Patagonia”,
as they say here, meaning that certain hardship is the price you pay for living
on one of the last great frontiers of nature.
But sometimes it’s hard to look at these weather phenomena
dispassionately and from an objective and realistic point of view. Sometimes,
when you’re at your least objective, it seems as if the weather were your enemy
and out to get you.
That’s how it felt last week. It was a phenomenon that I’ve only
witnessed one other time since I’ve lived here. When it rains a cold hard rain
for several days, pushed over the mountains by the wind from the sea. And then,
suddenly, the rain changes to a wet, heavy snow, big splotches of snow that,
instead of floating down in dreamy flakes, land in fat, sloppy wads that make a
slushy thudding sound when they hit the roof. Just as suddenly, the wind stops
completely and the snow storm parks above you for the duration.
The snow is too wet to slip from the rough bark of the big trees and
there is now no wind to shake it loose from their branches. And so, it
accumulates...and accumulates...and accumulates. And you keep thinking that it has to stop any time now, but it doesn’t,
it just keeps on coming down and piling more and more weight on limbs and foliage.
And then, when it has piled up a foot or more and is exerting a crushing weight
on the trees, enormous branches start snapping like twigs and come crashing
down. Some trees get top-heavy and tumble over in their entirety.
If you’re lucky, they miss you. If not, they don’t, and it’s all she
wrote. This time, the forest showed us its love. It respected our house and
vehicles and only slightly damaged one of the woodsheds. But it dropped huge
limbs all around us in a night that was a lot like living through a shelling
attack.
By the time the snow stopped, after two unnerving days, over two feet of
it had accumulated. It had wreaked havoc with phone and electrical lines and
blocked roads everywhere in the immediate region. Then it turned colder and it
all froze in place.
That was Saturday and Sunday of a week ago. On Monday, we started
venturing out of our dark caves like hunkering animals to assess the damage and
to see how to make our way down to the highway and to civilization to acquire
fuel and supplies. It took a good half day for two neighbors and me, with my
chainsaw, to buzz through and remove enough fallen timber to blaze a trail with
my trusty ’95 Toyota four by four Hilux.
I bought this truck used from a mountain guide, but it has been mine
since 2001 and I can’t think of any good reason to get a newer one. I’ve had
many an offer from guys who wanted to buy it from me and I tell them that
barring any prior fatal pickup truck mishap, the Toyota and I will very likely
end our days together with a Viking funeral.
So once some timber was cleared and with three neighbors in tow, I
dropped the Hilux into all-wheel-drive low and powered through a mile and a
quarter of snow-choked mountain road down to the highway, with snow up to the
bumper and dragging belly all to way. And then did it all over again, but this
time going up instead of down, once we had acquired a stock of provisions and
of gasoline for our chainsaws and my generator.
For five days, I generated my own electricity, until the municipal
snowplow from Bariloche finally made its way out to us and cleared the mountain
road so that the power and light cooperative would deign to venture up from the
highway and reconnect us. Bariloche is officially a “sister city” to Aspen. But
if you think the services in any way reflect those of America’s winter
playground in Colorado, think again.
Electric power lines that long ago should have been placed underground
remain aerial and wend their way through dense woodland. A running feud between
the electrical coop and National Parks keeps the power company from clearing a
strip of land where high and medium tension lines go through. The result is
that, as soon as it starts to snow, you can expect to suffer light cuts. And if
the snow is heavy, you may well be without power for a week or more. Bariloche
is a village, basically in the middle of nowhere, whose population has grown to
the size of a city. When I first visited the place in the seventies, its
population didn’t reach twenty thousand. Today it’s over a hundred thousand.
Infrastructure hasn’t kept pace and municipal services lag far behind demand. A
municipal insider told a neighbor of mine that while the city owns eight
snowplows, only two or three are ever operable. Since priority is given to
keeping open the road to the ski complex on Mount Catedral and to the downtown
area, this means that in a major snow emergency, neighbors living outside of
the micro-center of town are pretty much on their own.
But this lack of, well, everything
tends to make us all a lot more self-reliant. Those of us with four by four
vehicles pull out our neighbors and each other. And we clear our own roads when
trees are down.
I went to my mechanic’s shop last week to have new contacts placed on my
battery cables, but when I arrived, he’d left a message for me to come back the
next day. I later found out that since he hadn’t heard from an old friend and
client of his for several days and knew the guy lived up in the mountains in a
remote area, he tried to call the fellow. When he got no answer, he didn’t
hesitate to climb into his truck and make the perilous trip in the snow to the
guy’s house. His friend lived up a steep grade on mountain road that hadn’t
been cleared. He knew the guy was in poor health, suffering from acute
prostitis and a kidney disorder, as well as heart problems, so he was about to
attempt to get to the friend’s house in nearly three feet of snow when he saw a
provincial highway road grader at work clearing the highway. Mario, my
mechanic, pulled up beside the driver, signaled him to stop, and somehow talked
him into clearing the mountain road up to the friend’s house.
Mario found his friend holed up with no food, no power, no fuel, no heat
and only semi-conscious under a pile of covers, shivering in his bed. He got
the guy out of his house and to the hospital where he was checked into the ICU.
A few more hours and he wouldn’t have made it. Mario, to my mind, is a hero.
Someone who cares. Someone who is always thinking of his friends and clients.
Someone who doesn’t stop at worrying, but leaps out of his comfort zone and
into the fray, taking charge and doing what needs to be done in an emergency.
He’s what it means to be a true frontier Patagonian.
Sometimes I tell myself maybe I’m getting too old for this crap. It’s
all too easy to start thinking that way when you’re staring seventy in the face
just a few months down the road. But then I realize that I have the privilege
of living in a place that doesn’t permit complacence, a place where you have to
do certain things just to survive, a place that requires you to stay on your
toes and not give in to old age.
In Patagonia, you can’t take living for granted. And, as an old friend
who lived to be ninety once said, “It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”
