THE THREE (OR FOUR)-DAY BLOW

 It’s summer here in Patagonia, but you wouldn’t know it by the weather we’ve been having the last few days. Whenever we get weather like this, I’m reminded of a 1925 short-story by Ernest Hemingway—part of his Nick Adams series—brilliantly titled The Three-Day Blow. I think I first read the story when I was about twelve, and I recall that the title hit me then. I was making a great effort to learn to write from the American masters, and that title was one of those that you say, “Man! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Young Ernest Hemingway on the UP

But as much as I loved it, I didn’t really get the meaning until I moved to Patagonia twenty-nine years ago. Then, I realized that the title was even more perfect than I had imagined.

In the story, Nick has hiked up to a cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to meet his friend Bill. The cabin is a hunting and fishing hideaway that Bill’s father owns in the wilds of Northern Michigan. It’s early autumn, a dark, windy day for a long hike into the wilderness, but Nick arrives safe and sound. The boys plan to get in some fishing but end up holed-up in the cabin because the first big autumn storm is blowing in. The title refers to the strong winds that carry storms to the Peninsula across the Great Lakes that surround it—Michigan, Huron and Superior.

It is pretty well-known that the Upper Peninsula has some really rigorous weather. The early-autumn storms like the one in the story, eventually usher in the Arctic blast of early winters that are nearly always very long, very dark and very snowy. The Upper Peninsula, indeed boasts some of the snowiest weather east of the Rockies. It averages one hundred-twenty inches of snow a year. But it has certain areas, like Keweenaw (a small peninsula that juts out of the Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior), where the lake effect can dump as much as an annual three hundred inches on this small extension off of the large natural headland that is surrounded on three sides by what amount to a trio of inland, freshwater seas.

What seemed distinctive to me about the weather in Patagonia when I first moved here was that short, sudden downpours of the type I was used to in my native Ohio and in Buenos Aires, where I lived for twenty years, seemed to be an oddity here. Storms were often preceded by two, three, or even four days of strong winds that rocked the giant centenarian beeches around our cabin like palm trees. The winds would only die down when the rain finally arrived, crossing the mountains from the Pacific and Chile, and then stalling for days on end, soaking the surrounding forest and granite crags, before being blown on away by a new front that brought blue skies and more breezy weather.

Flag tree on the Haberton Ranch
at the southern tip of South America

The first autumn I was here, Hemingway’s title immediately sprang to mind: three-day blow. It was the perfect term for the prelude to our Patagonian storms. That—and our huge glacial lakes—is where the similarity with the Upper Peninsula ends, however. Our average snowfall is abundant in the high country, but in the lower-lying areas, far less than anything like what the UP gets. But our winds tend to be stronger and steadier. You get so used to wind, or at least a breeze, that still days seem strange and too quiet, without the music of the wind in the treetops to accompany you.

But the winds here can also be scary-strong and often uproot large old trees and drop huge branches that eventually fail to bear the stress of winds that appear bent on shoving them over. Where I live in northern Patagonia, however, is not even one of the windiest places in the region. There are places, like Río Gallegos, in the deep southern area of Patagonia, where the prevailing winds are so constant year round that they produce a phenomenon known as árboles bandera (“flag trees”), trees so tortured by strong and constant winds that they grow bent in the direction of the gale and with all of their branches on a single side.

The reason I mention all of this is that, for a month now, we’ve been having gorgeous, clear, dry weather. Back in December, I started asking my friend and neighbor, Daniel Pacheco, to make time with his team to fix my roof and sand and re-stain my cabin. I know he’s a busy guy. He and the fellows who work with him do everything from roofing and building maintenance to home construction, fencing, leach-beds and septic tanks. They also do painting and varnishing, tree surgery and logging, as well as land-clearing and lawn care. Spring through fall are his busiest times of the year.

Scaffolding waiting, immutable in the wind

But hey, we’re friends, right? I’ve known him since he was fourteen and I was forty-three, and I’ve been hiring him to do work for me since he was eighteen. So I’ve been nagging him, as I say, since December, to make some time in his busy schedule for me. About ten days ago, he finally said, “Don Dan, next week we’ll start on your place. So last Friday, he and an excellent Chilean handyman named René showed up with roofing materials we’d ordered through our local hardware owner, Félix Lowenstein. Lowenstein also rented us a scaffolding.

Daniel and René set up the scaffolding and then set to work removing the old wooden eave caps, which had rotted out in places. They sealed underneath, and replaced the old caps with anodized metal ones. René declared them “eternal”—I told him if they last another fifteen or twenty years, by any stretch of the imagination, I should be good—and then they ripped up the old galvanized main-beam cap, sealed and insulated beneath it, and then replaced it with a broad anodized metal strip, which they battened down tight with roofing screws.

Daniel Pacheco

Saturday, they had another job but said they’d be back bright and early Monday morning to start sanding. Right on time and in accordance with Murphy’s Law, however, starting Saturday afternoon, summer did one of its infrequent but not unusual disappearing acts. The temperature plummeted and winds with gale force gusts of forty to forty-five miles an hour began to castigate the cabin that evening. They continued throughout the day Sunday and then brought wind-whipped rain showers, settling into a hard squall on Sunday night that thoroughly soaked everything, including the deck and the front of the cabin.

Monday morning, Daniel demurred. The winds were picking up and, although the forecast called for strong wind but no rain, he had his own forecast and said rain was indeed coming. He turned out to be right. Wind battered the house as the rented scaffolding stood there immutable on the deck, stoically awaiting occupation, and the gale once again brought showers that lasted through the entire night.

Early Tuesday, Pacheco sent me a message saying he’d see me Wednesday, that the wood was going to be too wet to sand that day. Fortunately, winds were still gusting to twenty-five or thirty miles an hour yesterday, acting as a natural dryer for the deck and façade of the house.

This morning, I wasn’t taking any chances. At seven-forty-five, I sent Daniel a WhatsApp and asked, specifically, “What time should I expect you this morning?” Immediately, the response came: “Nine, Don Dan.”

And at nine sharp, he and René rumbled up in his 1983 F-100. They were bundled up in caps and sweaters against the unseasonably breezy forty-eight-degree chill. They unloaded an additional extension for the scaffolding, ropes and a disc-sander, and set to work.

René

This afternoon, however, we’re expecting a pleasant sixty-eight degrees and tomorrow, sunny and in the low-seventies. This feels like a new beginning to me. Like the sun is shining anew in my life as well as on my little cabin in the woods.  After a cardioversion procedure in 2017 for arrhythmia, a severe lung injury in 2018, the pandemic from 2019 through 2021 and two eye surgeries in 2022, I’m suddenly feeling fully recovered and ready to go. I’m working on a new book and we’ve started making our little cabin beautiful again after these last several years of neglect.

This morning when I saw the guys setting up for work, all I could ask myself was, “Whatever might lie ahead, whatever remains to be seen, whatever eventuality might be in store, could life be any more wonderful than it is right at this moment? 

But okay, enough contemplation. Now, it’s my turn, to get started on painting and repairing the inside of the house.

Wish me luck!