AUTUMN SONG AND FALL REFLECTIONS

Autumn has come right on schedule here in Patagonia this year. Sometimes we’ll get a couple of extra weeks of summerish days, but not this year. Summer started out chilly in December and the beginning of January. But then the weather turned hot and dry for around eight weeks. Late the week before last, the wind changed and gusted to forty-five miles an hour over the mountains from the Pacific, and it poured down rain for an entire day with the overnight temperature dipping to the forties. And when the sky cleared, suddenly it was autumn.

Fall is a beautiful time of year in the mountain forest. It tends to be fresh and bracing with only occasional rain until May when the wet season begins. Any time after that, you can expect rain or snow or both, with annual precipitation in the Andean forests totaling anywhere from eighty-six to one hundred seventy-seven inches, most of it falling and/or accumulating between May and October. 

In late May or June, I’ve seen it rain for twenty days straight, while it snows in the high country. Then it will clear up for a few short days and start raining all over again. July and August usually bring the heaviest snows, but I’ve known it to snow off and on well into the spring months of September and October. And very occasionally, there might even be a freak snow just a few weeks before summer officially begins on December 21—like in 2003, when it snowed a good six inches on my birthday, December 9, which is as if it were to snow in my native Ohio on June 9.

Hard rain for weeks at a time tends to quench the human spirit. But hardwoods love it, which is why this region is home to some of the most fabulous woodlands on earth. Millions of acres of them. Some foliage, like the deciduous Patagonian beech, the wild apples, the wild cherries, the wild plums, the alamo poplars and the ñires turn a stunning palette of colors in autumn—fiery reds and flaming yellows. The leaves of the “live” Southern beeches in the lower country thin out and so are tinged here and there with splashes of gold before showering the ground with their hue when the wind howls. And the leaves of the alamo poplars delight not only the sense of sight, but also the sense of smell with the rich tobacco-like fragrance of their leaves lying on the damp ground toward the end of fall. 

While there’s a great deal to enjoy in this season, I can’t help being reminded of the tale of the ant and the grasshopper. It’s easy to let the days slip by and not be prepared for what’s coming. Most urgently, I have only a few more weeks left to make sure that we have enough firewood to get us through, say, five months of cold weather. There have been years that I’ve been caught short and we’ve had to make do toward the last of the snow and cold rain with damp wood, a clogged, reluctant chimney and a too chilly cabin. But not lately. For years now, fuel has been my top priority in the late summer and early autumn when the windfall timber is still dry and the days fine.

In the early years here, I spent summers using whatever money I could save up remodeling the inside of the house to better winterize it. The original owner and builder—who ran out of money, left it half-finished and returned to the big city from which he’d come—had constructed it in the manner of a shed. He had spared no expense on the exterior which is all weather-resilient native Patagonian cypress sawn leaving the bottom edge with the natural contours of the lumber (a technique known in Spanish as “canto muerto” and in English, I believe, as “ripped edge”), but the interior was all rough-cut quarter-inch overlapping boards that were second and third selection discard and so full of cracks and holes that the cold wind whistled through them like through a screen door. No matter how much timber you burned in winter, it was always freezing in the house and the cats spent their long winter days huddled around the woodstove. 

So little by little, one wall and one section at a time, I put up a continuous layer of polyurethane sheeting over the old wall, nailed plaques of twelve millimeter plywood over it, and then fitted and nailed on three-quarter-inch white pine tongue-and-groove over that. Between work obligations and other daily chores, the job took me a couple of years to complete, upstairs and down,  but it was so satisfying to feel how snug the woodstove now kept the house in the cold autumn and winter months.   

This year I’m really ahead of the game. I’ve been gathering, cutting and stacking firewood since early February whenever time allows. I need about eight cords of firewood to get through a normal winter. I have over six already and am still working. By the end of March, I should be set. And then anything else I can still gather in April will be my reserve timber for a rainy day...or week...or month...or however long winter decides to last.

Sometimes in dark, nagging moments, I wonder how many more years I’ll be able to do this. But then I realize that the whole reason I can do it is because I keep doing it. It’s what helps keep me “young” and strong.

During my “upbringing” in what was then pretty much a little piece of Patagonian wilderness, I had good examples to follow. First and foremost, my maternal grandfather, Vern Weber, who had never had any patience with bellyaching. He had been an Ohio drover and tenant farmer from his youth through his middle-age years. And for twenty of the last twenty-four years of his life, he was superintendent of the main cemetery in my town. Although in that job he could have hired done the grunt work—like digging graves, pruning trees, mowing grass and landscaping—and just acted as a foreman, he didn’t. He worked shoulder to shoulder with the men who worked for him and proved daily that he could work circles around them in searing heat and freezing cold and still have power to spare. And he kept doing that into his seventies. Tall, rawboned and tenacious, he was, pound for pound, one of the strongest men I ever knew, despite spending a lot of my young to middle years in weight rooms in the company of bodybuilders, wrestlers and fighters. 

But here in Patagonia, I had local heroes to admire as well. My neighbor don Federico Miranda was the first, since as soon as I arrived on the piece of land I’d purchased, he appeared out of nowhere to ask me who I was and what I was doing there. That was the first lesson I learned from him, that out here, where, back then, it was even more like the Wild West than it is now, you didn’t just sit on your porch and mind your own business. The surroundings as a whole were your business, and you needed to establish a territory in which you were the guy laying down the rules. That is, unless you wanted squatters, poachers, rustlers, sneak thieves and ruffians to make your life miserable. 

Many years later, when I was having some stress-related heart issues, my young cardiologist asked me what I did for a living. When I explained a little about my job as a free-lance writer, editor and translator (jobs with savage deadlines and long unbroken hours of work that couldn’t be more sedentary) he said it all sounded really stressful.

“What do you do for a hobby to relax?” he asked.

“I’m the private warden in charge of seventy acres of natural forest,” I said.

“So what do you do?”

“Well,” I said, “although it will eventually include some common-sense forest management, up to now it has mostly been about fencing it in and driving out intruders who have been using it as a free source of lumber, firewood, topsoil and flagstone.”

He looked surprised and said, “Well, I imagine they aren’t too happy about that.”

“No,” I said, “sometimes, though not often, things can get pretty hostile.”

“But doesn’t that cause you a lot of stress? I mean, I think something like that would really stress me out.”

I laughed and said, “Yes, you would think, right? But no. Saving that forest from decimation, being in charge, having control, gives me a real sense of calm. And it eases a lot of the frustration of my day job just to get out into nature.”

Patagonian woodpecker (male)

And still to this day, there is nothing that gives me greater inner peace than walking the old trails of that forest to find that if I didn’t open them up a little with my machete to keep being able to get through, they would soon be grown over. And that the only sounds I hear are of my own rustling footsteps and those of the woodland birds—buzzard hawks, owls, giant woodpeckers, burrowing parrots (when they deign to come down from the heights to feed on the wild fruits of fall...and the occasional garden), doves, huet-huets, austral thrushes and a host of others.

But back to don Federico. In the early part of his life he had been a rural worker on an estancia—one of the sprawling sheep and cattle ranches found in the high living desert and steppe land of Patagonia. Later, he moved down to town—town being the ski resort of Bariloche—when his then patrón opened a four-star hotel. But later, he moved back out of town to what was then still a very wild and woolly place, the land that contained what now are my very own two acres of woods, which then formed part of a ninety-eight acre farm owned by the Esquerra family, after whom the lagoon that borders on my property is named.

There, he met and married a widow named Adelia, the daughter of a one-time foreman. She lived in a little red house on a plot of land that the owners had given her father. Her family had been part of the early history of this area, which only goes back a little over a century—unless you happen to be a descendant of the Native Tehuelches—here as they were, from the days when the region was first receiving white settlers.

Daniel (right) and son, Matías

When the family subdivided the farm into lots and sold them, Adelia remained in the little red house where she had always lived and don Federico stayed there with her, doing odd jobs for the handful of new neighbors and for a hotel built on nearby Lake Moreno in 1949. It wasn’t until they were quite elderly that the two moved down to a little cabin they built closer to the highway and Adelia’s son Omar moved in with his second wife and some of the youngest of her many children. I’ve known Omar’s oldest stepson, Daniel, whom I’ve mentioned here before, since he was fourteen. He’s now forty-one and has been doing every manner of rural upkeep for me since he was nineteen. He, his two brothers, David and Juan, and his twenty-two-year-old son Matías remain my go-to guys for every logging, pruning, digging, clearing, fencing, painting and rustic construction job required at home and in the seventy acres under my care.

Don Federico gave me some survival pointers in the most laconic of manners—a teaching method I was already used to from my days hunting with Grandpa Vern although, admittedly, Vern’s laconic country ways were often accompanied by a good swift kick in the ass, when the lesson didn’t seem to be penetrating your skull. Don Federico, on the other hand, imparted terse, didactic data. If it took, fine. If not, you were on your own.

For example, early in the summer that my wife and I moved in, he took me on a walk of my own land and the fiscal land below it along the lagoon. He showed me every spot in the heavily wooded land where I was likely to find windfall firewood. And then he took me on a brief tour of every firewood stash he had along the swampy shore of the lagoon and said, “This is all yours now. You’re the one living on it.”

I said, “Oh no, don Federico. Please keep the firewood you’ve cut and come get more whenever you wish.”

He looked mildly annoyed and said, “No, this is your pago now and you’ll have to defend it. Don’t let anybody come around here walking off with your firewood, not me, not my stepson, no one. It’s yours and you’re going to need it.” 

He was right. That first winter was tough. I’d paid cash for our land and house and was strapped to say the least, since we had abruptly cut ties with the city and I was out of work until I could find a way to make a living. So I didn’t have the money to buy certain things that were absolute necessities, like a good chainsaw. I was gathering and cutting firewood with an arc saw, an axe and a machete, which was slow going for someone doing it for the first time. Then my sister-in-law took pity on me and surprised me with the only chainsaw she could afford, a small, canary-green Poulan, made in Canada. It was a great little saw, but was more suited for pruning than logging, so the wood that I gathered was basically branches ranging from the size of my arm to that of a mailbox post.

When don Federico happened by one day that first autumn, he said, “Nice leñita.” The term was disdainful, translating as “Nice little firewood.”  

“Yeah, makes a nice fire,” I said.

“Do you have more stowed somewhere?”

“No,” I said defensively, “but I’m getting a pretty a nice stack built up here.”

He gazed at it judiciously. It was perhaps two cords and of light firewood that was going to burn fast and hot.

“You’ll need more,” he said, offering no other judgment.

“Yes, I know, I know,” I said still defensively. “But if I need more later, I’ll just go get some.”

“You won’t be able to,” he said. No further explanation. This was his dictum, take it or leave it. And then he walked on with a perfunctory, “Adiós.”

Well, I didn’t gather nearly enough wood that first year and often remembered don Federico when I was out all winter with snow up to my knees jerking dry branches out of the trees with a makeshift lasso. Arrogance, I learned, was bad counsel. 

One fall several years later, I happened on don Federico when he was using his big Stihl chainsaw to cut the trunk of a dead and fallen beech that was so enormous that he had to first cut from one side and then from the other in order to embrace the entire circumference. When I came along, he had gotten a pry bar with a fulcrum under one side of the tree and now was trying to get one under the other side. I assumed his plan was to roll the massive trunk to a better position for his next cut.

“Buen día, don Federico,” I said. “Can I give you a hand?”

He stood up straight, sweating profusely, hands on his hips, looking at me appraisingly, and suddenly, what I was asking struck him funny. He laughed genuinely and said, “Señor, do you have any idea how many years I’ve been doing this alone?” Then, without further ado, he went back to work and I walked on.   

Federico’s friend and rival, don Ojeda, was part of the Chilean diaspora in the area. Roughly the same age, they had a kind of Matthau-Lemmon relationship that reminded one of Grumpy Old Men without all the banter. A rugged-looking man with a black mustache, few remaining teeth and a faded black hat, he made his living with a yoke of oxen and a high-wheeled wooden cart, doing whatever kind of work required the brute force of man and beast. He was always breaking in new working cattle because whenever one of the team could no longer pull its weight, he butchered it for meat. But in the meantime, he talked to them, giving them gruff orders—tiráaaa, estaaaiii, vamos, hooooo (pull, stay, let’s go, whoa)—touching, not hitting them, with the point of his extraordinarily long cane pole if he was riding on the seat of the cart, or walking in front of them with the cane over his shoulder and resting on the yoke, with no need for rope or rein to get them to follow. He and his team of animals would sometimes hike many miles to extract logs or firewood from mountain forests wherever there was a patrón to hire them. And their working relationship appeared seamless, man and beast as one. 

Once when both he and Federico were in their eighties, when my wife saw Ojeda and his oxen going past, she greeted him and he pulled up to say hello. She happened to mention that it had been months since she had seen don Federico and asked if Ojeda knew how he was doing now that he had moved down to the neighborhood near the highway, where the other man and his family also lived. Ojeda took a deep breath, shook his head and said, “He’s not looking so good. I’ve seen him look better.”

A couple of weeks later, don Federico was up visiting his stepson and decided to drop by to say hello. He showed up at our door looking spry and agile as ever, although, for the first time in his life, he was wearing eyeglasses.

“Ooooooh, don Federico!” my wife exclaimed. “It’s so good to see you.”

Don Federico beamed. But what she said next wiped the smile off of his face.

“How are you doing? I asked don Ojeda about you and he said you weren’t well.”

“I’m fine, señora,” he snapped. “What does that old man know about me?!”

Both men lived well into their nineties, and both remained active until a few short years before their deaths. Their resilience is one of the things I think about when I’m out in the woods alone gathering, cutting and hauling deadwood. Why should I have to stop doing this? They didn’t. Why would I? Why worry about it?

Loading my truck with wood the other day, I popped over the steep hill I was working on to inspect the work Daniel and his crew are doing for me in representation of the company that owns the land. The pandemic has forced our hand. Local people who haven’t been able to go anywhere else on vacation are populating undeveloped lake shores for the summer. Usually they are just day-trippers, hikers and kayak enthusiasts, but occasionally they are would-be campers or even the infrequent squatter, out of work and out of a home. 

Daniel's brother David sets post

These last two are the ones I have to watch out for, and this year the problem has been so serious that I’ve had to take on an assistant to help me keep vigil along the lake shore—a quarter of a mile of it as the crow flies but considerably more counting every cove and inlet forming the western edge of the seventy acres. Camping and fires are prohibited everywhere but authorized campgrounds, of which there are none in these parts.

Never before, in the seventy-odd years that this has been private land, has there been any need for a fence above the coastline. But there’s always a first time, and this year is it, since on several occasions we’ve had to invite campers to leave who had set up their tents and built their campfires in the forest promontories above the lake, exponentially increasing the risk of a forest fire, to say nothing of their trespassing. I also earlier this summer closed an internal road that had been open since 1949. We had no problem with neighbors taking a walk there or gathering firewood along the sides of the road, but more and more we were finding holes in our fences and signs of intruders in the forest. So in January, I had a relatively unscalable gate put up and closed it to the public.   

Even though the land belongs to the company I work for, the local authorities require us to leave a swath with a breadth of one hundred fourteen feet open for limited public use along the lake shore—swimming, fishing, hiking and boating but no camping and no fires—so we’ll still have to keep an eye on the coast after the fence is up. And the thirty-five meter rule means the fencing has to be done on some rough mountain terrain high above the lake. So that’s our late summer and early fall project. 

This would seem like a cyclopean task for the uninitiated, but for Daniel and his boys, it’s all in a day’s work. This is what they do.

As I’m loading the truck, I’m thinking what a gift it is to be part of all this. An even greater gift to be in charge, to be making it happen, to be protecting the land.

I’m also thinking about the people who didn’t make it from last year to this one. The reason is because as I’m Ioading the wood, I can feel my hair sticking in the sweat on the back of my neck and I’m thinking about how way-too-long it is. That makes me think of my barber, José Luis Dip, whom I used to go to for a military-style cut every three weeks before I became a pandemic-hermit. José and I had gotten to be friends over the course of the nearly twenty years that he cut my hair. But for the past year, I haven’t had a haircut and so, haven’t seen him. He used to make a comment now and then on my Facebook page, and I’d ask how he was doing, but I’d heard nothing from him lately. I figured he was busy. He was diabetic and had had cancer a couple of times and beaten it, but he kept busy no matter what.

Last week was José’s birthday. I picked out a digital card to post on his timeline and that’s when I found out that he had died. He had passed away, in fact, just two months after he cut my hair for the last time in early March of last year. I liked José a lot. He had a very positive philosophy and lived life day to day. He also really gave a good haircut. Better than any other barber I’ve ever had. So, long hair—the longest it’s ever been in my life—may end up trending for me. 

Dr. Carlos Escudé

I’m also thinking about another rebellious, opinionated, highly political old man like myself. His name was Carlos Escudé and he was quite renowned in Argentina as an erudite sociologist, political scientist and author. He was well-known in international intellectual circles, as well, having studied at Oxford after graduation from Argentina’s Pontifical Catholic University, transferring on a Fulbright Fellowship to Yale from which he received his doctorate in political science, and later being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, before his days as an internationally published author and a visiting professor at Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Chapel Hill. 

But to me he was just this witty, eccentric, sharp-penned “trouble-maker”, with whom I shared a long mutual admiration and an occasional pen-pal debate. He was a year older than I am, so we had shared a lot of Argentine history, and our earliest debates were on the Falklands War, in which we had both had a deep political, personal and philosophical investment.

Early last year, he put out a video on YouTube of him doing a one-man protest in front of his Buenos Aires apartment building against the city’s mayor for restricting the movements of anyone over seventy as one of the coronavirus lockdown measures. He said it was age discrimination and argued against it in interviews on national TV. The measure was later declared unconstitutional.

At the time I wrote to him on Messenger and said:

I celebrate your grand spirit, Carlos. There are so few of us elders whose souls have not been seized by discomfort, disease and the aggressive prevailing society, so let's hear it for the crazy old coots! We’re few, but we recognize each other. I’m sending you a hug and I only hope your courage will be tempered by prudence, but only to the extent that you can continue for many years being a cantankerous old bastard like me. 

Cheers brother!

Carlos died of COVID pneumonia on New Year’s Day this year and his wife succumbed to the virus last October.

And he and José weren’t the only acquaintances lost and who have made it plain to me that, in these difficult times, it’s such a privilege just to still be seeing the sun come up each day.       

These are some of the things that go through your head when manual labor, alone out in nature, clears your mind of all of the extraneous nonsense that life throws at you. Whatever you’re doing at any given moment is all that matters because it’s all that there is, although some moments, like this one, loading my truck with firewood, are so much better as possible finales than others. It’s a veritable celebration of life.