FALL...I PREFER AUTUMN

This time of the year does something to me. As I may have mentioned recently in this space, it’s autumn in Patagonia. It’s a season that makes me singularly restless. It’s not just the existential symbolism—which at this age becomes rather poignant, the fall before the winter of the seasons and of life. I really try not to pay much attention to that. There’s nothing I can do about it and, frankly, I’m a lot freer now than I ever was at thirty or forty.

At thirty or forty I used to pretend I didn’t give a crap. It was an attitude I copped, though a more conscientious professional than I was would have been hard to find. But when things got tough at work, for instance, I’d say, “Hey, I was looking for a job when I found this one,” and I was rebellious enough to say it to the face of whatever boss or client I happened to have at the time. But back then, things ate at me anyway and filled me with stress and nerves and neuroses.

Well, at this stage of the game, when another several decades have passed and any day you get up feeling fit and healthy is a gift, I really don’t give a crap anymore, and nothing is more important to me than whatever I’ve undertaken voluntarily and for as long as it strikes my fancy, whether I’m getting paid for it or not. Nor will I let anything stand in the way of the activity of my choosing at any given moment, and that, for me, is a first. One I’m still trying to get used to. Maybe that’s what people mean when under “occupation” on their social media profiles they put “happily retired”. Maybe they mean that free-wheeling feeling of “not giving a crap” what the rest of the world is doing because their time is now their own. But I wouldn’t know, because I’m not retired. It’s a word I don’t like. It sounds too much like “withdrawn”, and I haven’t withdrawn from anything.

On the contrary, I’m often more engaged now than ever before, more passionate about what I’m doing, more certain that the only thing that is important is doing the things I do to the very best of my ability, because if not, I’ll just be wasting my precious time. I’m not retired, or even semi-retired. And just as I don’t care for the word “retired”—synonyms include former, past, ex, pensioned off, disengaged, elderly, etc.—I prefer the word “autumn” to “fall” (synonyms, drop, decline, descend, diminish, decrease, dwindle, dive, etc.), although in this last case I do use them interchangeably. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m just making better choices of the activities that I take on, and for the first time in my life, the ones I don’t get paid for are just as important to me as those that I do get paid for. Quite often more important in fact.

Take this blog for instance. It is of paramount importance to me, because it’s where I’m visited by my “ideal readers”. I’m talking about people who aren’t reading me because my by-line happens to appear in this magazine or that newspaper, but who are actually coming here specifically to read me! I’ve worked for publications where I was writing for many thousands of readers. And I won’t lie. It was important to have my work in periodicals that were household names for many English-speakers in different parts of the world. But I find myself much more enamored of the hundreds and often thousands of people who take the trouble to read the very personal pieces I write here each month. And even more so of those who share them with others, via the social media or by other means so that my reader base continues to grow.

But even this precious blog sometimes gets sidelined when some other task or factor is temporarily obsessing me. In this particular case, a piece should have come out on the twenty-second and here it is three days later and I’m still here writing. It’ll say April 22^nd on the dateline when I publish it, but that will be a white lie. Though I started writing it in time to publish by deadline, another matter monopolized my attention: the weather.

Early morning in the forest gathering wood. 

Mark Twain is often paraphrased as saying something to the effect that “everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Quote nigglers will tell you that the quip was originally made in print by Charles Dudley Warner, a friend and fellow reporter—Twain did indeed say that “a journalist is a reporter out of a job”—whom Twain may later have quoted in one of his public talks, but never in any of his writing or interviews. But whoever said it knew what they were talking about. People do talk a lot about the weather, especially people from my native Ohio and from my adopted Patagonia, probably because weather—especially all-pervasive weather—in those two places is a predominate force to be reckoned with.  

Now, worry is something else that I’m slowly but surely rooting out. You know, like when you can’t sleep at night and your old habits of worrying yourself sick about things return and you always seem to forget that this has happened over and over again over the years and that things have seldom turned out to be nearly as dire as you expected them to be, so all that worrying was of no use whatsoever and only managed to encroach on and spoil your present moments. After all is said and done, you may realize someday, as I have of late, worry begins like worthless, and if that’s just a coincidence, it shouldn’t be, because those two terms should always be used in tandem.

Off for a morning hike

Practical thought about a situation is worthwhile. Because you might just find a solution. But worrying when a problem is insoluble, or the future unfathomable—as it nearly always is—does nothing more than waste your precious now-time and fill you with anxiety when you could instead be enjoying the present moment. Whatever it is, it’ll be what it’ll be, que será será, as Doris Day sang, and there’s nothing much you can do about it except face it the best you can when the time comes.    

April here is like October in Ohio or Michigan. And like in those places that witnessed my childhood and teen years, the approach of winter is a very big deal. People talk about “how bad it’s going to be” long before it arrives. They worry about being isolated, about cold temperatures, flu and months of gloom. They wonder if winter storms will knock the electricity out and for how long. Will pipes freeze and burst and cut their water supply. Will pipeline heads freeze and interrupt their gas supply. They so often use the word “dread” when speaking in fall of the coming winter. So stop worrying about it and do something about it! Insulate. Make sure you have redundant services. Buy a gasoline generator. Move to a warmer climate. But don’t just sit there and bitch!

Here in Patagonia those precautions can be crucial depending on the year, and the severity and length of the winter. In 2017 and 2018, I had some health issues that limited how much of my own rural labor I could do. In those years, the answer was “none”. I had to hire it all out. And in the following two, I did a lot of my own physical work but still not close to all of it. In those years I worried about having enough firewood to get us through a sometimes five-month Patagonian winter. And the rural workers whom I paid to help me out were always busy with other fair weather projects before they started gathering wood, just in the nick of time, before the rainy season began. So for four years there has been just enough—about eight cords minimum—but not one stick too many before spring.

This year I’m feeling pretty hale and hearty again and promised myself that I wouldn’t be caught out. I started gathering firewood at the end of last year, in the first days of Patagonian summer when it was first dry enough, and haven’t stopped since. By the time the day laborers got around to asking me how much wood I’d need for them to come up with this year, I had already gathered, cut, stacked and covered well over the eight cord minimum. I was going to let my pride take over and tell them that this year the ol’ man wasn’t going to need a thing from them. That he’d done it all himself, and had enjoyed every minute of it.

Last evening light - photo_Daniel Pacheco

But the autumn weather has been spectacular this year with little rain, drying breezes, clear skies and a plethora of windfall timber on the ground. On top of everything I’d gathered myself, I decided to ask the two groups of workers to help me gather another three cords.

So on the twenty-second, when I should have been posting this blog, from first light in the morning until last light in the evening, I was cutting, loading, hauling, unloading and stacking the last three cords. The day’s work I did was the single most intensive day of manual labor that I’ve put in over the last twenty years. It felt wonderful and like a very good day. Night was falling as I covered the last stack with thick black plastic sheeting. I was exhausted and slept fitfully and restlessly from overdoing it. But I had a little smile on my face when, in the middle of the night I heard rain on the galvanized metal roof of our cabin. I had all the firewood in that we would need until next summer and it was dry, under cover and protected from the elements. Nothing could have felt more satisfying.

So for the last couple of days I’ve been writing this blog. It has been the most important task in the world to me for the time it has taken. Today is a stunningly beautiful blue and gold autumn day in this corner of Patagonia. So it also seemed of capital importance for me to get in a four kilometer hike along the mountain road this morning. It was indeed a great day for it. Crisp, clean, bright and wonderful. That hike and posting this blog are the two most important things I’ll do in my life today. Who knows? Maybe ever. And maybe that’s how every day should feel.

 

THE TELEVISION BLUES

I’m having TV withdrawal. TV news withdrawal more than anything else. My pandemic isolation has caused me to go cold turkey, as if I’d been forcibly placed in tele-addiction rehab.

We have DirecTV. It’s satellite television. It’s all we can get out here where we live. I have to say, it pretty much sucks. We have fifty blue million movie channels, all of which seem to have been showing the same dozen movies for the past decade—which they also appear to share with each other (like, “It’s Wednesday, okay, you take Fast and Furious 8 and 9 and I’ll take Fifty First Dates and The Wedding Singer, while to me it all seems like Groundhog Day...forever).

News channels are a paltry selection of local national channels, a couple of Chilean news stations, CNN en Español, the CNN International signal in English and the BBC. We used to have Fox News as well, which gave me something to vent and cuss at when I wasn’t watching CNN or “the Beeb”. But they eventually took it off the schedule, because who in Latin America could possibly give a flying crap about the ultra-American super-nationalist drivel that spews from that signal twenty-four/seven? For jingoistic lies and propaganda, it was far more interesting for South American audiences to tune to the Venezuelan state channel and listen to a load of BS about how good venezolanos were having it under the Bolivarian regime of Nicolás Maduro. What I wouldn’t give for the addition of CBS, ABC and MSNBC!

I know I can watch the news, and, more often, read the news on the Internet. And I do. But I have to admit that I’m a child (I’m talking inner child here) of the TV era. The first generation to have television, that phenomenon of the late forties and early fifties that couldn’t have seemed more like magic that brought the world into our homes. So breakfast or supper without my daily news fix is traumatic, despite having the world at my fingertips via the digital phenomenon of the current age.  

DirecTV comes with a few dozen sports channels that are the big draw for most guys, but which I can’t recall ever having paused on for more than five minutes unless it was for a boxing match—I really hate how the art of boxing is being pushed into a backseat by cage-fighting, which I find appalling. There are a similar number of children’s channels—which are pretty much extraneous noise to two childless and grandchildless senior citizens— housewife mediums (or is it media?), and a slew of reality shows involving hillbilly Gypsies, backwater crocodile tamers, enormously obese brides, treasure hunters, gold-diggers, pawn brokers, little people, tattoo artists, and XL couples who are alone, naked and afraid (and censored which kind of defeats the purpose) out in the wild—I mean if you don’t count the camera crew, guides, handlers and the helicopters flying constantly overhead. It’s all kind of a grotesque sideshow.

Very occasionally there will be a good old movie—not “old” like 1990 or 2000, which I refer to as “yesterday”, but old-old, black and white old—or a classic Western. Although for some reason, despite the thousands of motion pictures cranked out in the golden age of Hollywood, DirecTV can’t seem to find more than five or six (always the same five or six) to show. I mean, The Tin Star and Last Train from Gun Hill might be venerable classics of the Western genre (although I’d take the original Magnificent Seven—Yul and Steve, not Denzel and Cris—over them any day), but it starts getting hard to stay awake for them when you’ve seen them thirty times or so...in a month.

And then there’s that other problem with satellite TV: If it rains hard, you can’t see it—sometimes it rains hard for twenty days straight in Patagonia. If it snows, you can’t see it. If there are solar storms, you can’t see it. If the dish can’t be pointed in the direction of the nearest repeater antenna, you can’t see it. If you don’t have a direct line of sight to the sky from the dish, you can’t see it. If a weed grows an inch too high in front of the dish, you can’t see it. If somebody happens to spit out the window on an otherwise clear summer day and the spittle lands on the dish, you can’t see it.

Well, this is problematic in a place like ours where, despite being perched on a promontory, the house is surrounded by dense forest and tall crags. But when we first got DirecTV installed, we lucked out, because the direction of the repeater was northwest of our deck and the deck looked out over a lagoon that connected with a major lake, at the northwest end of which was the hill on which the satellite repeater antenna was erected. So it was all open sky between here and there. The deck is high and back then, the vegetation around it was low—a few beech saplings, a couple of tiny wild apple trees that we’d transplanted, a few waist-high Douglas firs that the birds had seeded with pine nuts from a nearby property that had exotic pine groves planted back in the nineteen-forties, a few scrub bushes. Nothing tall enough to interfere with our view all the way down to the lagoon, or with the open line of sight between the dish and the repeater several miles away.

But since then, the saplings have grown into formidable, towering hardwoods, the apple trees have flourished, and the little pines have spread like an evergreen tidal wave over the lower part of our lot to form a dark, brushy, deep green thicket, rising toward the sky and blocking any view of the wetland below except from the second storey of our cabin. 

At first the dish was bolted directly to the deck and reception was perfect. My wife and I had neither one ever had anything like cable or satellite TV and we were fascinated by the variety of available channels. More fascinating still were the music channels included in the nine-hundreds. Flip through the channels for a cavalcade of genres and styles: pop, rock ‘n’ roll, blues, soul, reggae, tropical, salsa, standards, big band swing, jazz, modern jazz, jazz vocals, easy listening, new age, classical, opera, hard rock, show tunes, ballads, Music of the Seventies/Eighties/Nineties, etc., etc. So we hooked up the sound through our stereo for better quality. It took us a while to realize that in this case too, it was always the same line-up, so that you could set your watch by Beethoven’s Ninth or by the Boogie-woogie Bugle Boy from Company B.

But then the trees in front of the deck started growing. After a few years, the beech saplings were even in height with the handrail. The apple trees started bearing fruit and shot up higher every year. A native broom grew high and strong on the edge of the property next door—which I would eventually acquire—and gracefully hung its big head full of lavender-blue blossoms over the fence. The process was gradual, of course, and we failed to connect the dots with our also gradually failing signal. When the interruptions to our viewing became ever more frequent, I called the DirecTV technical department and they sent a guy out to have a look.

“You’ve got way too much foliage out there under the deck. No way a clear signal can get through all that. You’re going to have to cut some of that.”

“Oooor...” I said, “alternatively, we could find another place to put the dish.”

He looked at me as if he had a choice suggestion for where I could put it. But then he shrugged, went out to his truck and came back with a toolbox and extension ladder. After looking around, considering angles, checking this and checking that, he said, “How about high up here on the end of the house?” I gave him a thumbs up, and suddenly, we had a nice clear signal again.

As a parting shot, however, he couldn’t help returning to his original solution. “I’m warning you, though,” he said, “it won’t be long before you don’t have a signal again, if you don’t do something about that.” He jerked his head disdainfully in the direction of the stunningly verdant forest beyond the deck, as if he were referring to something shameful.

“You mean like cutting it all down so I can see the same ten movies for the next ten years?”

He pursed his lips, looked down his nose at me and said, “I mean, if you want to keep having TV, this is going to have to be thinned out.”

“Yes, well, I doubt that’s going to happen, so, who knows? Maybe when the time comes, we’ll find another solution.”

All was right with the world again. I had New Day and/or BBC World News with breakfast in the morning, Anderson Cooper 360 with supper and, if I was lucky, there was a movie I hadn’t seen more than a dozen times to doze through before going up to my bed and reading a while until I went to sleep. On luckier nights still, I might even get a documentary about the Civil Rights Era or about some interesting historical personality or event. Those were too precious for them to run again—once or twice, and you’d missed your chance to see it, buddy. But you could see White Chicks at just about any hour of the day or night—for ever and ever, amen.

Anyway, in this ages-long Year of the Plague, the DirecTV technician’s proclamation of bad augury has come to pass. Just as it has been a year in which COVID in all of its variants has thrived, so too has the forest, and it has taken full advantage of a long rainy season and a warm, sunny dry season to grow with unusual impetus.

Long story short, our DirecTV signal has grown weaker and weaker as the foliage has grown higher and higher. Which, if it weren’t for the pandemic, wouldn’t have been a problem. I would merely have called another reluctant technician out to move the dish higher still—onto the gable of the roof if necessary—in order to capture a clear piece of sky.

But in the Year of the Plague there are more important things to worry about than whether I can see my TV or not. After making very real sacrifices in order to mitigate the risk of catching the virus and, perhaps, dying—my wife refraining from traveling to Buenos Aires to see her aging, unwell sister or her younger brother and nephews in more than a year, and I not having been able to travel either to the US to see friends and family there, or to Buenos Aires to visit with colleagues and friends since the end of 2018—having someone completely unknown to us come to the house after, perhaps, going maskless, partying and howling at the moon nightly, to say nothing of visiting multiple homes daily, merely to fix our TV, has seemed to us a ridiculous risk to take.

So eventually it got so we would lose the signal and to get it back I’d have to reboot the decoder and then painstakingly click through every channel until one could catch the ghost of a signal filtering through the tree branches. And then, even more cautiously, go up or down gradually until I got to the channel I wanted. It was an exhausting process. And, in the end, it got to the place where changing channels was just too risky, so I left it on the news channel twenty-four/seven and simply turned off the image and sound when we weren’t watching it. 

Then one day last week, the screen went black, then flashed like lightning, and died. I realized this wasn’t a question of satellite signal. The flat screen, which wasn’t more than six years old, was kaput and refused to be revived. In the troubleshooting manual, it said, “Try not to leave your screen tuned constantly to the same channel, since this can damage the device.” Shit! Who knew?

I thought, “Well good. Maybe this is a good chance to break myself of the TV habit. But how do you kick a habit that started when you were three and is now going on six and a half decades?” My wife likes a little TV in the evening but finds my morning appointment with the news and my running, often profane, commentary a major intrusion in the quiet of the early morning hours. And since she is also an absolutely voracious reader, she couldn’t really care less whether the TV works or not. If I think about it, I don’t need it at all. I do all of my research online. TV is just a little mind candy I suck on between work and sleep. But just you take that candy away from a Baby Boomer! The withdrawal is instantaneous.

All of which got me to thinking about where my TV habit began. In the Jurassic Age of Television, when forty-four million Americans made sure that they were home at the prime time hour for I Love Lucy, or when similar millions tuned in to CBS to hear Walter Cronkite read the news. No twenty-four-hour news cycle. No video recorders. Just the appointed hour when you were there in front of the set to hear Cronkite, or you didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening. He was the trusted name in news, and he “anchored” millions to their sets...forever. But that’s a story for another day...

Well, a few days into withdrawal, my wife brought home a new forty-inch Hitachi flat screen that she bought at the supermarket when she went to do the grocery shopping. We’re “on the list” to get vaccinated, but so far...chirp, chirp, crickets. First thing I’ll do though, once I get a couple of shots of Sputnik 5 in my arm, I’ll get the DirecTV guy out here and get my breakfast date with the news back. In the meantime, we’ve got the eleven seasons of Cheers, the five seasons of Taxi and the nine seasons of The King of Queens on DVD. Hopefully that’ll be enough methadone to get me through until some real TV comes along.