BACK TO THE FOREST PRIMEVAL—PART TWO

Cured by electrocution, the arrhythmia was over with and I regretted not having done this ten years before, instead of living a decade of uncertainty in which one day, I would feel just fine and the next I was tired and weak, with my heart hammering out of time and in wild syncopation.

Now I was good as new and took advantage of my renewed health to improve the quality of my hikes along the mountain road leading up to our rustic neighborhood from the highway. I was back up to a couple of miles nearly every afternoon and was feeling great. I was also ready to start hiking in the forest again.

When I speak of the forest, I’m not talking about the bucolic rural woodlots that I hiked and hunted with my grandfather when I was a boy, back in Ohio. Those were what my Grandpa Vern referred to as “clean woods”, meaning that most of the underbrush had been cleared and that a lot of the trees were second-stand timber, although there were indeed, I recall, some really impressive Ohio hardwoods—oak, pin oak, elm, hickory, sugar maple, and star gum, among others. And they grew on the largely flat surface of the west-central Ohio landscape, which made for relatively easy hiking.

This piece of natural native Patagonia forest for which I am the private warden is as different as night and day from those woodlots back home. It features towering trees and dense underbrush that, even where it permits you passage, snatches at your clothes and skin, and in places, completely blocks your path—unless you take the precaution of carrying along a machete—with impossible tangles of dog rose, blackberry, Spanish broom and thorny scrub surrounding wall-like islands of canebrake. It is also topographically challenging, with steep slopes, deep ravines and soaring crags. It was wonderful to be back there again, although, for the moment, when I first returned, I stuck to the logging trails that my assistant and I have kept open throughout the years in order to gather and truck out firewood.

But then, less than five months after my arrhythmia had become nothing more than an unpleasant memory, I had a really stupid accident. I slipped on the ice and free-fell six feet into our patio, landing on a rock, breaking a rib and puncturing a lung. I won’t go into detail. I talked about the experience thoroughly here at the time:http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2018/08/brush.html  

Suffice it to say, however, that I didn’t realize I was having massive internal bleeding until too late and nearly bled out. It had reached the point that when I was in the ambulance slipping from consciousness for the umpteenth time in several hours, and just after I overheard the rescue worker who was with me in the back of the vehicle tell the driver to step on it because he couldn’t find my pulse anymore, I remember thinking, “This is way easier than I always thought. You just close your eyes, go to sleep and don’t wake up anymore.”

Recovery from this really idiotic mishap has turned out to be quite prolonged, and I’m still not a hundred percent cured. But I’m doing about a thousand percent better than I was at first when fluid in my atrophied right lung made me feel like I was drowning whenever I had to climb an even moderately steep incline. Since then, I’ve gotten back, little by little, to taking my afternoon walks with my wife the two and a half miles down to the highway and back up to our home. At first she had to patiently wait while I gasped for breath every hundred yards or so on the inclines. But lately I’ve had to stop less and less and have been breathing ever freer.

So much so that, in recent weeks, I’ve finally returned to tasks that I’d had to suspend and delegate, like gathering, sawing and splitting firewood, a job I’ve always enjoyed and that has helped keep me in shape, since we need about eight or nine cords of wood a year to survive the cold season. As such, I’ve also returned to “the forest primeval”.

At first it was like sneaking into a place where I didn’t seem to belong any longer. Everything looked strange and overgrown. But little by little, the familiarity of it came back. For all intents and purposes, as its warden, it’s as if the property belongs to me. And that made my return a little like in certain of my dreams when I’ll walk through a door into a vast and amazing landscape and suddenly come to the realization that it was there all the time and mine to explore and enjoy.

This seventy-odd-acre forest is wild and uninhabited, but I know it from top to bottom and from side to side, so many years have I been walking and protecting it. Except for the occasional intruder or my assistant Daniel and his son Matías, I’m usually all alone here. And this is why, as much as a place like this can, it feels like mine, or at least like I’m borrowing it for as long as I can, or for as long as I live.

I feel a pang of sadness for this year that I’ve lost. I love this forest and have, literally, fought for it on occasion. But then I tell myself that I’m lucky to be coming back at all—lucky, in fact, to be alive. So I start walking my old rounds again, checking for intruders’ tracks, trying to detect places where standing timber might have been cut, looking for holes in the perimetric fencing, while making mental notes of where fallen deadwood is down so as to come back later with my truck and chainsaw to cut it up and haul it home for fuel.

There’s more of an excuse than ever to linger here, since, right now, I’m in charge of a new fencing project. This involves nearly six hundred sixty yards of new chain-link and barbed-wire fence in a place where it was never necessary before. It’s the boundary between “my” forest and the property of the late former Nazi SS Captain Eric Priebke.

Priebke had lived a quiet life in Patagonia after escaping to exile in Argentina following World War II and was a respected community leader in Bariloche, the ski town located twelve miles from my home. He had never tried to hide his identity and it wasn’t until he was already elderly that new interest in him was raised when US newsman Sam Donaldson did an exposé on him, identifying him as the officer in charge of the Ardeatine Massacre in Italy during World War II.

Donaldson even traveled to Bariloche, looked up the former SS officer and interviewed him. As he had been all his life, Priebke proved open and unrepentant—except regarding the two people he himself had executed to show how it was done and who he said still haunted him. He had been following orders, he indicated, and, in his memory, the 335 people he and his men had slaughtered were “terrorists”, not innocents. He ended up being arrested by Interpol, fifty years after the fact, and extradited to Italy, where, after a four-year process of appeals and trial, he was eventually convicted of war crimes. He died in captivity, in Italy, aged one hundred, in 2013.

Anyway, after Priebke’s arrest, we very seldom saw his family out this way anymore, so the visible face of the property was Don Pedro, the caretaker, with whom I became friends. Late last year, however, someone evidently leased the land from the Priebkes to open a nautical club, since, both their land and the land I administrate open onto a broad strip of lake front. The internal roads on the Priebkes’ property were broadened and a lot of brush cleared. This left the southeast boundary of “my forest” vulnerable, and we started to see cross-border paths being hacked open in the dense thicket.

I decided to nip the problem in the bud before there began to be unauthorized camping and campfires and furtive pilfering of green trees for posts and fallen trees for firewood. I have an excellent relationship with the Buenos Aires investment firm that owns the land, so I contacted them requesting funds, and within a week, we were clearing a work-path along the property line and I had called in a surveyor to properly mark the fence-line.

There are only two ways to get to that boundary line—from the highest point on the land and from the lowest. Entering from the highest means plunging immediately into dense thicket and woodland. It’s a place that lives in almost constant twilight and where your perspective is short-range and intimately in contact with soaring hardwoods from which you often can’t get back far enough to see their tops.

The native forest is interspersed with compact patches of exotic Douglas fir—known locally as Oregon pine—that thrives in this mountain soil. It has been seeded in parts of the woods by the wind and birds that have carried it from the property that borders on the other side of this one, and that houses a now defunct hotel, built in the late nineteen-forties when this was all still part of Argentina’s first and largest national park. Back then, not nearly as much was known about preserving native species and the European descendants who created the hotel grounds catered to their Alpine and American nostalgia by planting pine, and sequoia among other types of exotic trees, with no clear knowledge of or regard for how they would propagate. There are now some magnificent specimens of these trees, and anyplace that any native trees are cleared, the firs seem to be just waiting to take over.

Argentine preservation purists detest these non-native species and see them as a plague. But I take them without prejudice and consider myself fortunate to be able to enjoy both the native woodland and the groves of Douglas fir that remind me of visits to the pine forests of Michigan when I was a boy and those of Germany when I was in the Army.

Approaching the southeast boundary line from the lowest part of the forest is a completely different experience. In this case, I enter by the main gate. There is an internal road, covered in grass and leaves,  that plunges headlong into the woods, rises and curves to the west, and then descends sharply parallel to the lake, which is on the other side of a wooded ridge, hidden from view. The road snakes east, then west, then almost straight south through pine and beech forest, and, finally, further downward to the lowest point on the property. This is a marshy area known locally as a mallín—grassy, spongy lowlands that are pleasant, flowered meadows in the spring and summer, and that turn to boggy swamps in late fall and winter when the rains come.

Entering the mallín after almost a year of not getting back this far into the forest, I recall the first time I came to this sector so many years ago. You emerge suddenly from one of the darkest parts of the woods, into an immense clearing. The feeling then and now is like standing in the nave of a roofless cathedral, the tall spires of towering hardwoods on high-rising hills all around. These are southern beeches, a live species that, despite the snow that often blankets the area in winter, never loses its leaves. There’s another species, often called the Patagonian beech, that grows higher up in the mountains (elevations of above two thousand seven hundred feet), and that loses its leaves in winter after treating spectators to a color show of brilliant reds.

Standing here now, it has only been a few days since the iconic Notre Dame de Paris burned, destroying a millennium of architectural splendor. In one of the newscasts about the fire, I heard experts say that there were no longer trees large enough in France to reproduce the beech-wood beams that had held up the structure of that great cathedral for centuries. I scan the wide circle of tall beeches surrounding me now on every side. It is a veritable and breathtaking natural cathedral, and for the time being at least, I have the privilege of being it’s grateful congregation of one.