WINTER IN THE ROARING FORTIES

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.”