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.

 

 

Self-Reliance

Caption: Our house in the forest.

Here in the Southern Hemisphere, today is the first day of autumn. Out by the fence, I have three new piles of firewood, each representing the amount of dry timber necessary to fill the bed of my pickup to groaning capacity. Before I’m through, and before the heaviest fall rains begin in late April or May, I hope to have at least fifteen such piles (twenty would be better), lined up and under heavy plastic sheeting, stacked along my fence.

People who have always lived in town will sometimes say, “Oh, so you’re getting an early start.”

Early, ha! I’m already begging the rain and snow gods to hold off until I can get the job done. I recall our first winter here, when, without having any real criterion to go on, I thought I had plenty of firewood to get us through until spring. What a laugh! In the middle of winter, with snow to my knees, I found myself out with a rope, trying to lasso dry branches in the beech trees close to home and jerk them down so as to have something dry to burn in the woodstove and not freeze.

I got a late start this year. Summer was unusually cold and rainy and I kept waiting for the usual drought and warm breezes that would dry out the windfall timber lying on the ground and hanging like snow-broken bones in the thicket, out in the forest. It finally came but just in the nick of time, now at the end of summer. Summer starts in December here in Patagonia, but most of the really summery days we’ve had this year didn’t start until the last week of February.

Some say it’s the Niño current again. Others say it’s global “warming”. Still others say the electro-magnetic grid that holds the universe together has holes in it that make the holes in the ozone layer look like a fairytale wonderland, that Einstein predicted the north and south poles would switch polarity standing Earth on its proverbial head in 2012, and that the Mayan Calendar only goes until December of the year after next for a reason. (So if the world suddenly flips over in 2012, does that mean it’ll be a hot Christmas in the North and a cold one in the South when we all die screaming?)

Caption: Einstein - news to make the world flip.

Me, I think none of us really knows what the hell he/she’s talking about and that, like our ancient prehistoric cousins, we would do well to just watch the signs that presage what’s coming and do our best to react and survive without worrying too much about the best-laid theoretical plans of mice and men.

Last Friday, on my evening rounds of the woods I administrate, I came upon a big patch of anthills. They were not the usual big black ants that you see in the forest, but really tiny red ones. That’s what drew my attention to them. So I stooped down to watch them for a while.

It was a clear, calm evening, not a cloud in the sky, and it had been a beautiful late-summer’s day. There was no sign of rain anywhere and the forecast hadn’t predicted any possibility of rain until Sunday. But the ants were going nuts, hundreds of them, moving from one hill to another, coming out of one hole and going into another, carrying things on their backs, the way ants will when they feel something coming. The latest pile of firewood I had gathered had been left uncovered by our front gate, so the dry breeze could get to it. After seeing the ants, when I got back home, I hauled out a plastic tarp and covered it. Friday night it rained, and it rained all day Saturday too.

Watching the signs is practical. Practicality is twenty pickups of dry firewood stacked along my fence and sawn and chopped in my woodshed.

When we first moved here seventeen years ago, there were only seven houses, scattered as if rolled like dice by a giant, on the hills, and behind the trees and beneath the rocky crags of what had once been a hundred-acre farm on the edge of over 300 acres of natural forest. Except for the summer home of a family from Buenos Aires and a tiny pyramid-shaped weekend cabin of a family from town, our house was the only one in our neck of the woods and the only one whose lot fronted on the lagoon below. What we did when we first moved here was what people here refer to as “doing Patagonia”. That is, carving a place for oneself out of the singularly spectacular, incredibly attractive, yet frequently hostile landscape of the Patagonian Andes.

Like us, the people before us had come here from Buenos Aires. They hadn’t made it. They ran out of money, out of enthusiasm, out of spirit, out of luck. Their misfortune became our dream. We finished the half-completed walls of the barn-shaped cabin they had started and moved in. We came at the right time. Not young, like the couple before us, like so many, who have a fancy more than a dream and the strength of youth and the passion of the moment, but not yet the stamina of persistent survival. We were over forty. We had been through some stuff. We had survived. We had what it took. And we had been visiting Patagonia for twenty years, always dreaming of someday living here. That wasn’t something to be taken lightly.

The first winters were tough. There were things we couldn’t predict. We learned things: You need 500 to 700 cubic feet of firewood to get through a Patagonian winter. If you live in a southern beech forest, expect lots of rain and snow. I've read that they need 2200 mm (about 86 inches) of precipitation a year to survive. So if rainy days depress you and you see beeches, ferns and cane growing where you’re thinking of settling, think again. If you live in Patagonia, expect wind (weathermen call these latitudes the “wild forties”) and lots of it. And if you live above a lagoon, that’s around the corner from a big lake and across the lake is the windward side of the mountains, expect really strong winds. If you live in a place with a street that’s no more than a 600-foot-long rutted dirt track off of a mile-and-a-half-long, single-lane, unpaved, high road, a rear-wheel drive station wagon is not the vehicle you need, particularly in winter and the rainy season. The fact that the calendar shows Patagonian winter as running from June 21 to September 21 is no sign that it will refrain from snowing until June or that it will stop snowing in September (Patagonia’s a lot like Ohio that way). And the fact that the Municipality, twelve miles away through the mountains, claims your area as part of its surrounding township doesn’t necessarily mean that it will provide you with such services as road-grading, snowplowing or gravel replacement. If you’re going to wait around for the City to do the road maintenance you feel you have a right to, you may end up walking a lot of the places you have to go. Get a 4x4 truck, always carry a shovel and a machete or axe and plan on getting out on your own when the snow is up to your bumper.

As constructed when we first moved in, the house was little more than a barn, with thin walls that the wind whistled through and made the heat from the woodstove ineffectual unless you were sitting next to the fire all day. Bottled gas was too expensive to use for heating and the auxiliary kerosene stove was dangerous and smelly. The front windows with a gorgeous view of the lake and mountains leaked wind and water like a sieve into the house when the inclement weather of winter and spring came roaring out of the west over the mountains from the Pacific. The stovepipe ran up the side of the house on the outside and the cold wind hitting it kept it from drawing properly. It took me a while to figure out which woods were the best for fuel and what kind of shape they had to be in so as to be considered good firewood. And while I experimented, I over and over again stopped up the reluctant stovepipe with soot and resin that shoved the smoke back into the house blackening the walls and choking us.

Caption: We finished it and added on.

But little by little we figured things out. I read books about cabin-living, carpentry, home maintenance, basic rural heating systems. I re-nailed, weather-stripped and water-sealed the front windows. I contracted someone to re-install the stovepipe on the inside of the house so that we not only kept it out of the wind but also could take advantage of the heat it radiated. I installed firebricks on the wall behind the woodstove to better reflect and absorb its heat. Lack of insulation was our major problem in winter, so I insulated – polyurethane sheeting over the old walls, 12 mm plywood on top of that, and three-quarter-inch tongue-and-grove pine paneling on top of that. We started making meals that required a lot of cooking time on the woodstove, using gas only for quick cooking and to fuel the tank water heater. I learned by the weight and smell of each type of wood whether it was ready to be used as firewood. I learned to stack wood properly and when and how to cover it. I learned to leave the greenest windfall timber cut and stacked in the rain and snow and wind and summer sun so that it would dry out faster and become proper firewood. We built on, added a carpentry shop to one side of the house and a sunroom/gym to the other. We improved our water system, made it work via gravity, without pumps, piping water directly from a pristine spring into three holding tanks and then into our house. We built a 24-foot diameter water tank to hold an extra 8,500 gallons of water in the dry season, in case of fire. We added a deck onto the front of the house to serve as both a recreational space and a windbreak. We built a free-standing woodshed and a lean-to to keep firewood dry for immediate use. We sold the station wagon and bought a front-wheel drive car and then a 4X4 pickup truck.

Suddenly, it seemed like we had always lived this way. Nothing seemed any longer like extra-hard work or an inconvenience. It all just seemed natural. And the payoff is that we live in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth.

A couple of years ago, some of our newest neighbors (the seven original houses have burgeoned to fifteen today) started seeking “progress”. After a couple of winters as reluctant lumberjacks, they came up with a plan to bring a natural gas pipeline up the mountain to our hideaway.

I was the only neighbor against it. Natural gas would bring “progress”. “Progress” would bring more people. More people would bring noise, streetlights, cleared land. It would mean goodbye to the condor, the eagle and the great horned owl. It would mean a polluted lagoon. Erosion, pollution, deforestation, rules, regulations. It would make this idyllic landscape into a branch of the suburban sprawl. It would make it an interesting neighborhood for burglars and muggers. Thanks, but no thanks.

“But what about the convenience of it?” they asked. And I immediately recalled don Federico, an old settler who had lived here for forty years before we arrived and how he had laughed at me when I saw him one day with a long wrecking bar and wedges, turning over a huge old tree trunk to cut it up for the winter fire and asked if I could give him a hand. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been doing this, Mister?” he asked. “I don’t need any help, muchas gracias. This is what keeps me young.” Don Federico lived to be 90.

So I laughed too and answered, “I’ve been living this way for fifteen years, now. I can’t imagine why I’d want to change my lifestyle, unless it would be in order to be ever more independent. Self-reliance may not keep me young, but it keeps me from getting old.”