THE WOODLAND I LOVE

For the past month or so, I’ve been focusing, when I’m not busy with my day job, on taking back my woods in Andean Patagonia. When I say my woods, I’m taking attributions that I don’t deserve, in a strictly legal sense. But in terms of my intimate relationship with this piece of land—seventy-five acres of natural forest adjoining my own acre and a half of woodland—in a very real emotional, spiritual and physical sense, it might as well be mine, since I’ve been its private warden for the past twenty-five years, fifteen of those with an actual power of attorney from the owners, a family-operated Argentine development company.

Company headquarters is more than a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires, and the owners have always appreciated my dedication and initiative. For New Year they send me wine or champagne and sometimes when the CEO or his brother come with their vintage Ferrari or Maserati or Alpha Romeo to participate in the Vintage Car 1000-mile Race in the Andes, they’ll stop by for a visit or invite me to a meal.

I negotiate the work required directly with the CEO of the firm. I bill the company for the labor and materials required to keep internal roads open and cleared of fallen trees and to mend fences and gates. But I have never charged for my own administrative services. I never wanted it to turn into a job. I see it more as a pleasant and useful mission that floods me with joy and fulfillment.

My loyal assistant, the one who puts together a crew every time there’s hard work to do, is Daniel. I’ve known Daniel ever since he was a wild little pseudo-bandido horseman of fourteen. He’s forty now.

Daniel grew up in a home with no father and several sisters. His two brothers were younger, so it fell to him to help out his mother from an early age. He was already working as a horse trekking guide in the mountains when he was twelve.

He could very well be resentful, and whine about how hard he had it as a kid, but he isn’t and he doesn’t. He’s grateful that he has always lived in the great outdoors. He seldom goes to town and when he does, he feels out of place and jittery as a dog in a canoe. Everything he has, he has earned. And yet he maintains a dignified gratitude for those of us who sought to help him along the way.

Daniel

He is a good father. He has attempted to ensure that his own four children never want for anything, but that they learn the value of honest work. He became a father when he was nineteen. I remember when he brought the baby, Matías, to show him to me. Now Matías is in his early twenties. He works daily at his father’s side and is just as skilled, serious, resilient and reliable as Daniel has always been.

Daniel had started doing some work for me when he was seventeen. Besides being a highly skilled horseman and equestrian trainer, he had a natural talent for rural work—gathering and preparation of firewood, posting and fencing, tree-felling and surgery, land-clearing and lawn care. He did each of these jobs with the same meticulous quality. But his lack of confidence in himself meant that he usually worked for someone else.

I saw how good he was at what he did and encouraged him to step up and work on his own, to do his own contracting. I didn’t have any more than part-time work for him and couldn’t afford a full-time assistant. But after about a year of getting to know him, I bought him his first chainsaw. He was grateful but couldn’t understand why I would do something like that. I told him it was important to me to see valuable people advance and that I knew all too well how hard it was to be on your own from an early age, to be working on a tightrope with no safety net below.  We’ve been friends ever since.

That year he started cutting and splitting firewood for the neighbors and from then on his business as a top rural hand began to flourish. Today he, his eldest son and his two younger brothers have honed their skills in fencing, gate-building, well-digging, leech-bed construction, masonry, electrical installations, plumbing, tree-surgery, logging and carpentry. They seldom want for work.

Matías

Daniel and Matías act as my assistant woodland wardens as well. They help me keep the place under surveillance and to run out poachers who come to steal timber, topsoil and natural granite flagstone. We’ve been effective. There are fewer such marauders all the time. And the forest now is usually a quiet, solitary place.

For the last couple of years, I’ve leaned a great deal on Daniel and Matías, while recovering from cardiac electric shock treatment (known as cadioversion) for chronic arrhythmia and then from a fall in which I punctured a lung and nearly died. The recovery was slow and sometimes over a rough two years, I felt like I would never be the same again. But this year, I’m back!  I feel great. I no longer have breathing or heart issues. And I’m taking control of the forest again.

For the last month or so we’ve been taking advantage of the good Patagonian summer weather to hack and saw our way through crushed-down underbrush and fallen trees. Last year’s was a harsh, long winter, and a major snow in the middle of it had catastrophic results in the beech forests, where, in soft ground, century-old woodland sentinels heaved over and fell under the crushing weight of three feet of wet, heavy snow. They hauled smaller trees to the ground with them and smashed the undergrowth below into a matted tangle.

Spring and the first few weeks of Patagonian summer (December through March) were unseasonably cold and wet this year, and we all ended up burning the remainder of our winter firewood stock. It wasn’t until the weather got decent enough to get out and start gathering windfall timber again that we could ascertain the extent of the casualties among vintage beeches.

Daniel and brother David clear a fallen

centenarian.

Dozens of trees were down, some split down the middle, others, especially the ones in the swampy bottom land, uprooted completely.  And a number of them had taken out internal roads and fences with them. Virtually all of them were still green and vital. It will take years for their wood to dry out enough to be fit to burn in our stoves. But in the mammoth trajectories of their falls, sometimes covering the equivalent of half a football field or more, they dragged down a lot of deadwood with them.

So after organizing the clearing and fence-mending operations with Daniel and his crew, I have returned to a happy task that, for a couple of years, I’ve had to depend on my assistants for—the gathering, sawing and stacking of the ten cords of firewood that my wife and I will need to get through the next winter. And to do it before the rain and snow begin in May. In my ’95 Toyota Hilux, that’s about thirty or so truckloads, and I’m thoroughly enjoying every single trip.

Typically, I do this work in the last hours of late afternoon. We’re so far west that in early summer, sunlight lasts until nearly ten at night. Now, even in the waning days of summer, it still remains light until eight-thirty. So this leaves me time to go to the woods for two or three hours once I’ve finished my day’s writing work.

There is something fascinating and magical about being alone with your thoughts in the woods at that hour of the day, watching how the dense, tangled landscape changes as the sun drops lower and its acutely oblique and golden light casts eerie shadows and spotlights objects that one would otherwise never notice.

The hoarse, stuttering whine of my chainsaw chewing through fallen timber, the ring of my machete opening a path or the thonk of my axe biting into wood are the only sounds that split the silence, except for the warbles, screeches and twitters of birds gathering their last sustenance before roosting for the night. And then, as the light fades to dusk, and the night breeze rises cooling my sweat as the sun sinks behind Mount Capilla, there is only the clonk, groan and rustle of the branches and the first hoots, hisses and cackles of the owls that own the forest night.

As my truck climbs out of the bottom land to where the woods clings to the mountainside above, in the shadows of the retiring day, I see something large gracefully rise and soar ahead of me along the road that burrows through a tunnel of pines and hardwoods. At first I mistake it for a buzzard hawk straggler. But then I realize that the wingspan is too wide, the flight too ponderous. And then on a rise where the waning light still reaches, I see it clearly and stop.

I shut off the engine, set the brake and climb gingerly out of the cab. It’s a great horned owl. A juvenile, still a soft tawny grey, its head round and horns small. Its wingspan was perhaps a yard wide. But by the time he is full grown, that span will reach four and a half feet or more.

I lament not having a better camera with me. The one in my cellphone will never capture him in this light. But perhaps it’s better. I just stand still, afraid to move for fear of spooking him. But he’s not scared and we are both there for a long moment, contemplating each other, he sitting on a low branch, his pupils so dilated that his eyes look black, and I, looking up at him, breath held, standing stock still behind the open door of my truck.

He bobs his head, walks back and forth on the limb like a parrot on a perch, gazing at me as if wondering who and what I am. Then he nods my way again, and makes a gentle, throaty cooing sound before letting out a cackle and soaring off deep into the forest.

As I climb back in behind the wheel of the Hilux, start the engine and turn on the lights before heading on down to the gate, I can’t help thinking that the owl’s visit was no accident, that he maybe just dropped by to say, “Welcome back.”