GOOD FRIDAY

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.

I was particularly grateful that the good weather held—Maundy Thursday had been spectacular as well. The reason I was glad was because the eye operation that I’d had in February had kept me from making hay (firewood, actually) while the sun shone. Doctors told me I’d have to be patient. It was a delicate operation on the retina, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything strenuous until it was fully healed. But I was watching the short window of good weather that Patagonia provides exclusively in the summer months (late December to mid-March) slipping away, and my woodpile wasn’t getting any bigger. And firewood, in Patagonia—having enough to be sure to get through the winter—is a matter of survival.

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.

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 82^nd 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.