Yesterday was Good Friday…all day.
Here in Patagonia, it
was atypical. A gorgeous, sun-drenched day. Frosty in the morning. Clear and
warm in the afternoon. Almost windless. Pleasant in the sun.
This, as I say, is not at all usual. Good Friday is usually windy, dark, rainy and chilly. Sometimes it even snows in the high country. It tends to be raw, with wind chill factors well below the temperature that the mercury marks.
Rain came early,
starting in March, and still the doc refused to let me get out my chainsaw and
axe. If the rain kept up, fallen timber would be too soaked to use until the
next year. I finally broke down and paid
a friend and his son—both excellent hands when it comes to rural tasks—to help
out. Between what I’d been able to get in during December and January, before
my operation, and what my friend and his son gathered in March, I had enough
good firewood to get me through the winter months. But perhaps two-thirds of it—the
part that my friend had gathered—remained under black plastic sheeting out in
the woods. I’d still have to get in there in my truck and get it all loaded and
back to my house. Because once winter set in, there would be no getting into
the woods until late spring. And time was of the essence since there was heavy
rain in the forecast for the almost immediate future.
At long last, earlier
this month, the time finally came that, although the retina still has a way to
go to be back to normal, I was recovered enough to be able to get back to work.
Firewood-gathering is manageable if handled gradually, one truckload at a time.
But getting, say, nine or ten cords of wood loaded, hauled out of the woods,
unloaded, stacked and covered, can be a truly daunting task…especially when
you’re not nearly as young as you used to be.
So, I rather grimly set
to the task. But it wasn’t long before the grimness wore off, as I once again
became one with the forest and nature, breathed in the clean, fresh air, and
began to really enjoy the healthy sweat and strain of loading and unloading,
and the adventure of picking my way into the mountain woodland with my battered—no
more battered than the driver, surely—but ever noble ’95 Toyota four by four
truck.
It was slow going with
me being the only one driving, loading, unloading and stacking. But luckily,
Oscar, the friend who’d lent a hand with the gathering, decided to devote part
of his Easter weekend to also helping me haul and stack. Between Maundy
Thursday and Good Friday—both radiant days, as I say—we managed, working
shoulder to shoulder, with a bit of help from his son after he got off work on
Thursday, and pressing both my Toyota Hilux and his 2005 Nissan Frontier into
service, to haul out the last seven cords of wood and get them stacked along my
fence. That done, we made sure that all the gathered timber was protected from
the elements under thick plastic sheeting. It gave both Oscar and me a real
sense of accomplishment, since we’d calculated four days to do the job and had
completed it in just two.
So it turned out to
really be a good Friday. When I went
to bed last night, it was knowing that my wife and I had all firewood we needed
to get us through the winter months, and then some, since I have a two-cord
reserve in a lean-to, on a small woodlot below our house.
Mind and memory tend to
wander when I’m keeping my body busy with hard manual labor. So with the joy I
felt at the gift that was a truly good Good Friday, it was only natural that I
would recall other somehow memorable Good Fridays. If you’re a Christian—even a
somewhat lapsed Christian—it’s hard for Christian holidays to go unperceived.
They are mile-markers. Another Easter, another Thanksgiving, another Christmas,
another year gone and, thankfully, a new one beginning. So it wasn’t a rarity
for me to identify with related remembrances.
One that sprang to mind
was a Good Friday thirty-odd years ago that my wife and I spent camping under
the maitén trees near Lake Futalaufquen
in the remote Los Alerces National Park in Argentina’s Southern Patagonian
region. It would have been nice if we’d just been enjoying an Easter holiday,
but I had to make it about business. Not that I’ve ever known anything about business. But over the years I have
occasionally ventured into uncharted waters with some scheme or other whose
final aim was always to free myself from the bonds of j-o-b-type work, provide
myself with a way of making a good living and, in the process, give myself the
experiences and freedom necessary to further develop as a writer.
Journalism was always a
good way to make a living writing every day, but a poor choice in terms of time
to relax and think and travel and create, if that was the goal. This was in
early 1988 and I’d been sort of half-hatching this plan ever since my wife and
I had first started tramping around the Patagonian wilderness every chance we
got, while both of us were still living and working full-time in Buenos Aires.
By this time, we’d been frequenting the Patagonian region for more than a
decade whenever we could get away for a week or so. This time was different.
The first that I hadn’t been working regularly for a daily newspaper and could,
within reason, give some rein to my fantasies.
This one involved
bringing small groups of Midwestern Americans—people cut from the same cloth I
was—to Patagonia for a week or so of bespoke adventure tourism on one of the
world’s last great frontiers. I knew I couldn’t do it alone. I would need the
help of some partners—wilderness guides, lodge and campsite owners etc. The
business end? Well, I figured that would shake itself out.
Like I say, I clearly knew nothing about business, and was thus too ignorant to realize that the project was doomed from the outset if the business end of it wasn’t sound from the get-go, but it was a nice pipe dream while it lasted. To make a long story short, however, this was one of my self-imposed “survival training” outings, and the choice of Holy Week was, if not intentional, then at least disregarded, in terms of just how inclement the weather was apt to be in Patagonia at this time of the year. And the underlying purpose was not only recreational, but also aimed at meeting and befriending a semi-reclusive mountain guide named Américo Rosales, who not only knew this wilderness area well, but was also a born and bred native of it. There was, in fact, a pass between Argentina and Chile through the Andes that bore the name of his fairly recent ancestors. It was called the Pérez Rosales Pass.
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| Paso Pérez Rosales |
Américo and his brother
Ricardo eked a living out of the wilderness however they could but their most
lucrative occupation was as fishing and hunting guides. Though they often
worked together, Américo’s specialty was brook and lake trout fishing, while
Ricardo’s priority skill set was as a hunter—mainly, wild boar hunting. But I
was interested more in their noted expertise as mountain guides.
So here I was, in Holy
Week, camped out where both Américo and Ricardo were likely to be, at a
mountain campsite run by their sister’s son, César. Out of the two weeks that
we were camped there in our sturdy but old-fashioned campaign tent, it rained
eight days and snowed one. And although I’d let César know from the outset that
my main purpose in staying was to have a chance to meet Américo, he’d let me
know that if his uncle wanted to meet me, he would, and if he didn’t, he
wouldn’t, and there was nothing either César or I could do about it.
It was in the early
afternoon of a particularly foul Good Friday, while, having decided with my
wife that we would break camp the next day, pack our truck and leave—defeated—that
Américo showed up at our tent, where I was having a cold, damp nap, and invited
me to go walkabout. Telling me that, although it was kind of late in the day,
he thought maybe we could go take a hike up to the top of nearby Mount La Torta
(The Cake)—as if he were saying he thought maybe we could go for a stroll
around the town square. We set out cross-country on the most grueling forced
march I’d participated in since my days in Basic Combat Training, dictated by
the 82nd Airborne at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, nearly twenty years
earlier.
But by the time we got
back down that mountain, with night about to fall, and made our way back to
camp under now-starry skies, Américo and I were the best of friends. That too,
then, had been a very good Friday.
The other Good Friday
that came to mind while I was toiling contentedly in the woods this year was
the one when I was nine. I was old enough by then to be struggling, in my
Christian upbringing, with the concept of the Passion of Jesus Christ. I was
pretty much just happy as a honeybee in clover that I was off school, and would
be off for the next four whole days.
Anyway, I’d caught some
sort of stomach flu at school the week before and, although it hadn’t been bad
enough for my mother, Reba Mae, to let me stay home from school, I was still
having stomach cramps and some intestinal turmoil and was worried that if my
mother noticed, I’d miss out on all the wonderful chocolate, marshmallow and
jellybean treats, which, at that age, were what Easter was all about.
Anxious to ignore “the
bug” and show that I was fit as a fiddle, I quickly dressed, had my breakfast
and was rushing out to play. Reba Mae wanted to know where I was going.
“To play with Steve,” I
told her. Steve was my neighbor. He was a couple of years older than I was but
treated me like the kid brother he didn’t have. He only had a sister and she
was a lot older than he was. Old enough that she had a fiancé.
“Listen,” she said. “You
need to remember that today isn’t just some holiday. It’s Good Friday. So you
really shouldn’t be celebrating, running around the whole neighborhood whooping
and hollering and carrying on. You can go out if you remember that. And I don’t
think you should be going to Steve’s. At least not until the afternoon.”
“Why not?”
“Because this morning you
should be thinking about the Crucifixion of Jesus. These were His last hours, His
moments of doubt and revelation, the time of His greatest suffering and final
agony. You’re old enough to think about what that means. Not only to Jesus, but to us as well, because
he died for our sins and so that we could be saved.”
My mother was not an
overly zealous Christian. She wasn’t one of those creepy people who are always
quoting the Bible, ranting about the saving grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, or
spending an inordinate amount of time at church in competition with other Methodist
women who might seek to establish who was the most pious of them all. In fact,
she despised women who were like that, women who seemed bereft of sin and
sexuality, women who, in Reba Mae’s own graphic words, “wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if
they had a mouthful.” She liked women with a sense of humor and a taste for
adventure. Women who were just the slightest bit naughty. She said the word “nice”
in describing those who wore their piety like a garish mask as if she were
uttering an insult. But one of her quirks was this fervor that seemed to well
up in her during religious holidays. She was adamant about remembering what
each of them meant, or should mean to any good Christian, rather than get
caught up in their more festive and commercially motivated aspects.
I wanted to tell her
that I hadn’t asked Jesus or anybody else to sacrifice anything for me, and also
tell her that I was having a hard time believing that a super-hero, a prophet,
perhaps the most renowned man ever to walk the face of the earth, had given his
life two millennia before so that I would be saved from my sins today. And
while we were at it, what constituted a sin. But I figured those were queries
that might be answered with a slap in the kisser, so let it ride.
Well, that pretty much
ensured that I wouldn’t be enjoying this particular school holiday. Reba Mae had
given me a lot to think about. And as the weather got ever darker and uglier as
the morning wore on into forenoon, I couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something
to this whole Crucifixion thing. Wasn’t the weather, perhaps, accompanying the
agony and the final hours of Jesus Christ, reminding Christendom of the debt it
owed to its Savior? As I watched the dark clouds roll in, I felt a certain
apprehension, a sort of primordial fear, and couldn’t help wishing my mother
had kept her big mouth shut.
Condemned to a grim and
solitary morning, I decided to take a walk alone around our quite long block.
When I reached the corner where Clara’s grocery store was, I checked my
immediate finances and found that I had two dimes in the pocket of my stiff
blue dungarees. This would be as good an opportunity as any to test my stomach
for the hours to come, when the heavy mourning climate of Good Friday (what was
good about it, I wondered, since, beyond how it was sucking for me personally, it
clearly hadn’t been a good day for Jesus of Nazareth) would give way to the
joyous celebration of the Resurrection and the advent of Life Everlasting.
About that, I realized, it was all a matter of faith, but there could be no
doubting that Jesus so put the fear of God into his Roman murderers that the
Holy Roman Empire would eventually come full circle and become the very seat of
Christendom.
Inside Clara’s store, I calculated what my two dimes would buy. I could get a Payday peanut caramel bar for a nickel, which meant that if I also got a six-ounce Coke and drank it there so I didn’t have to pay a one-cent deposit on the bottle, I’d still have a dime left. On a whim, I decided to blow the other dime on caps. For that money, I could get a five-roll box. A hundred shots per roll.
Once I’d made my
purchase, I sat on the grocery store steps drinking my Coke and enjoying my
Payday. It was only then that I realized I had nothing to shoot my caps with
because my cap gun was lying broken at the bottom of our toy chest. Out of sheer
boredom, I could think of nothing better to do than go home, find a nice-sized
rock in the garden, and sit down on the curb to fire my caps by smacking them
with the rock.
At first, I popped them
one at a time. But if one was that loud, how would two sound? So I folded one over another and smacked two at a time. The effect was so much more satisfying.
So what might four or five sound like? And on and on I went, until, inevitably,
I decided to slam my rock down hard on an entire roll. This, I told myself, was
going to be loud! Only thing was,
what about Good Friday? Wasn’t busting an entire roll of caps at once and
making a helluva loud bang a bad thing to do? Wasn’t it maybe even sacrilegious?
I said to hell with it,
brought my rock down with all my might, and immediately got an answer to my
query. Red-hot powder from the deafening blast shot fire from under the rock
and scorched the tips of my fingers black. My sinful ways had been avenged, and
just in time for a violent electrical storm that broke above me and drove me
scurrying home to hide in fear and shame.
Yesterday was a
different kind of Good Friday. A day so beautiful in the fall-fragrant Patagonian
woodland that near sunset, standing panting and sweaty next to my freshly
loaded truck and seeing the sun sparkling like droplets of gold on the surface
of the lake just visible through the trees caused a knot to catch in my throat
and tears to well up in my eyes. What a truly beautiful world it was when you
could hide away where Humankind wasn’t running rampant and doing its damnedest
to end it all. It was the first time all day that I thought of the horrors
unfolding in Ukraine, and reflected that even after the living hells of two
world wars, and of all the horrific wars since, men were yet again seeking to
burn it all down, to use mass violence and murder to satisfy some diabolical
thirst for unlimited power. To seek, in short, to play God in a game that could
only end in self-destruction.
There was no way for
someone of my limited intelligence and spirit to even remotely understand the
power of the cosmos or the Plan of some Higher Being, if either existed and
this wasn’t all just random. But if one did, it was hard to imagine, even on a
Good Friday this indescribably good, how any attempt, divine or otherwise, to
save humans from themselves wouldn’t end up proving a fool’s mission.
