BACK TO THE FOREST PRIMEVAL—PART TWO

Cured by electrocution, the arrhythmia was over with and I regretted not having done this ten years before, instead of living a decade of uncertainty in which one day, I would feel just fine and the next I was tired and weak, with my heart hammering out of time and in wild syncopation.

Now I was good as new and took advantage of my renewed health to improve the quality of my hikes along the mountain road leading up to our rustic neighborhood from the highway. I was back up to a couple of miles nearly every afternoon and was feeling great. I was also ready to start hiking in the forest again.

When I speak of the forest, I’m not talking about the bucolic rural woodlots that I hiked and hunted with my grandfather when I was a boy, back in Ohio. Those were what my Grandpa Vern referred to as “clean woods”, meaning that most of the underbrush had been cleared and that a lot of the trees were second-stand timber, although there were indeed, I recall, some really impressive Ohio hardwoods—oak, pin oak, elm, hickory, sugar maple, and star gum, among others. And they grew on the largely flat surface of the west-central Ohio landscape, which made for relatively easy hiking.

This piece of natural native Patagonia forest for which I am the private warden is as different as night and day from those woodlots back home. It features towering trees and dense underbrush that, even where it permits you passage, snatches at your clothes and skin, and in places, completely blocks your path—unless you take the precaution of carrying along a machete—with impossible tangles of dog rose, blackberry, Spanish broom and thorny scrub surrounding wall-like islands of canebrake. It is also topographically challenging, with steep slopes, deep ravines and soaring crags. It was wonderful to be back there again, although, for the moment, when I first returned, I stuck to the logging trails that my assistant and I have kept open throughout the years in order to gather and truck out firewood.

But then, less than five months after my arrhythmia had become nothing more than an unpleasant memory, I had a really stupid accident. I slipped on the ice and free-fell six feet into our patio, landing on a rock, breaking a rib and puncturing a lung. I won’t go into detail. I talked about the experience thoroughly here at the time:http://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2018/08/brush.html  

Suffice it to say, however, that I didn’t realize I was having massive internal bleeding until too late and nearly bled out. It had reached the point that when I was in the ambulance slipping from consciousness for the umpteenth time in several hours, and just after I overheard the rescue worker who was with me in the back of the vehicle tell the driver to step on it because he couldn’t find my pulse anymore, I remember thinking, “This is way easier than I always thought. You just close your eyes, go to sleep and don’t wake up anymore.”

Recovery from this really idiotic mishap has turned out to be quite prolonged, and I’m still not a hundred percent cured. But I’m doing about a thousand percent better than I was at first when fluid in my atrophied right lung made me feel like I was drowning whenever I had to climb an even moderately steep incline. Since then, I’ve gotten back, little by little, to taking my afternoon walks with my wife the two and a half miles down to the highway and back up to our home. At first she had to patiently wait while I gasped for breath every hundred yards or so on the inclines. But lately I’ve had to stop less and less and have been breathing ever freer.

So much so that, in recent weeks, I’ve finally returned to tasks that I’d had to suspend and delegate, like gathering, sawing and splitting firewood, a job I’ve always enjoyed and that has helped keep me in shape, since we need about eight or nine cords of wood a year to survive the cold season. As such, I’ve also returned to “the forest primeval”.

At first it was like sneaking into a place where I didn’t seem to belong any longer. Everything looked strange and overgrown. But little by little, the familiarity of it came back. For all intents and purposes, as its warden, it’s as if the property belongs to me. And that made my return a little like in certain of my dreams when I’ll walk through a door into a vast and amazing landscape and suddenly come to the realization that it was there all the time and mine to explore and enjoy.

This seventy-odd-acre forest is wild and uninhabited, but I know it from top to bottom and from side to side, so many years have I been walking and protecting it. Except for the occasional intruder or my assistant Daniel and his son Matías, I’m usually all alone here. And this is why, as much as a place like this can, it feels like mine, or at least like I’m borrowing it for as long as I can, or for as long as I live.

I feel a pang of sadness for this year that I’ve lost. I love this forest and have, literally, fought for it on occasion. But then I tell myself that I’m lucky to be coming back at all—lucky, in fact, to be alive. So I start walking my old rounds again, checking for intruders’ tracks, trying to detect places where standing timber might have been cut, looking for holes in the perimetric fencing, while making mental notes of where fallen deadwood is down so as to come back later with my truck and chainsaw to cut it up and haul it home for fuel.

There’s more of an excuse than ever to linger here, since, right now, I’m in charge of a new fencing project. This involves nearly six hundred sixty yards of new chain-link and barbed-wire fence in a place where it was never necessary before. It’s the boundary between “my” forest and the property of the late former Nazi SS Captain Eric Priebke.

Priebke had lived a quiet life in Patagonia after escaping to exile in Argentina following World War II and was a respected community leader in Bariloche, the ski town located twelve miles from my home. He had never tried to hide his identity and it wasn’t until he was already elderly that new interest in him was raised when US newsman Sam Donaldson did an exposé on him, identifying him as the officer in charge of the Ardeatine Massacre in Italy during World War II.

Donaldson even traveled to Bariloche, looked up the former SS officer and interviewed him. As he had been all his life, Priebke proved open and unrepentant—except regarding the two people he himself had executed to show how it was done and who he said still haunted him. He had been following orders, he indicated, and, in his memory, the 335 people he and his men had slaughtered were “terrorists”, not innocents. He ended up being arrested by Interpol, fifty years after the fact, and extradited to Italy, where, after a four-year process of appeals and trial, he was eventually convicted of war crimes. He died in captivity, in Italy, aged one hundred, in 2013.

Anyway, after Priebke’s arrest, we very seldom saw his family out this way anymore, so the visible face of the property was Don Pedro, the caretaker, with whom I became friends. Late last year, however, someone evidently leased the land from the Priebkes to open a nautical club, since, both their land and the land I administrate open onto a broad strip of lake front. The internal roads on the Priebkes’ property were broadened and a lot of brush cleared. This left the southeast boundary of “my forest” vulnerable, and we started to see cross-border paths being hacked open in the dense thicket.

I decided to nip the problem in the bud before there began to be unauthorized camping and campfires and furtive pilfering of green trees for posts and fallen trees for firewood. I have an excellent relationship with the Buenos Aires investment firm that owns the land, so I contacted them requesting funds, and within a week, we were clearing a work-path along the property line and I had called in a surveyor to properly mark the fence-line.

There are only two ways to get to that boundary line—from the highest point on the land and from the lowest. Entering from the highest means plunging immediately into dense thicket and woodland. It’s a place that lives in almost constant twilight and where your perspective is short-range and intimately in contact with soaring hardwoods from which you often can’t get back far enough to see their tops.

The native forest is interspersed with compact patches of exotic Douglas fir—known locally as Oregon pine—that thrives in this mountain soil. It has been seeded in parts of the woods by the wind and birds that have carried it from the property that borders on the other side of this one, and that houses a now defunct hotel, built in the late nineteen-forties when this was all still part of Argentina’s first and largest national park. Back then, not nearly as much was known about preserving native species and the European descendants who created the hotel grounds catered to their Alpine and American nostalgia by planting pine, and sequoia among other types of exotic trees, with no clear knowledge of or regard for how they would propagate. There are now some magnificent specimens of these trees, and anyplace that any native trees are cleared, the firs seem to be just waiting to take over.

Argentine preservation purists detest these non-native species and see them as a plague. But I take them without prejudice and consider myself fortunate to be able to enjoy both the native woodland and the groves of Douglas fir that remind me of visits to the pine forests of Michigan when I was a boy and those of Germany when I was in the Army.

Approaching the southeast boundary line from the lowest part of the forest is a completely different experience. In this case, I enter by the main gate. There is an internal road, covered in grass and leaves,  that plunges headlong into the woods, rises and curves to the west, and then descends sharply parallel to the lake, which is on the other side of a wooded ridge, hidden from view. The road snakes east, then west, then almost straight south through pine and beech forest, and, finally, further downward to the lowest point on the property. This is a marshy area known locally as a mallín—grassy, spongy lowlands that are pleasant, flowered meadows in the spring and summer, and that turn to boggy swamps in late fall and winter when the rains come.

Entering the mallín after almost a year of not getting back this far into the forest, I recall the first time I came to this sector so many years ago. You emerge suddenly from one of the darkest parts of the woods, into an immense clearing. The feeling then and now is like standing in the nave of a roofless cathedral, the tall spires of towering hardwoods on high-rising hills all around. These are southern beeches, a live species that, despite the snow that often blankets the area in winter, never loses its leaves. There’s another species, often called the Patagonian beech, that grows higher up in the mountains (elevations of above two thousand seven hundred feet), and that loses its leaves in winter after treating spectators to a color show of brilliant reds.

Standing here now, it has only been a few days since the iconic Notre Dame de Paris burned, destroying a millennium of architectural splendor. In one of the newscasts about the fire, I heard experts say that there were no longer trees large enough in France to reproduce the beech-wood beams that had held up the structure of that great cathedral for centuries. I scan the wide circle of tall beeches surrounding me now on every side. It is a veritable and breathtaking natural cathedral, and for the time being at least, I have the privilege of being it’s grateful congregation of one.                                                                                                                                                           

Self-Reliance 2 – In the Forest Primeval

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

-From “Evangeline” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-

Autumn is hard upon us and the days are growing shorter. Less than a month ago I could make my rounds in the forest until well after eight at night. Not anymore.

My rounds are no longer the leisurely walks of summer. No longer contemplative. Or rather, no longer just contemplative. Or perhaps, contemplative in a different, more concentrated, more focused way. Now, I go with a set and urgent purpose: to gather enough suitable, dry firewood to get us through the winter.

Admittedly, I have a good start. There are now eleven pickup-loads of wood stacked under heavy sheets of black plastic along the fence, in a neat pile about twenty feet long by four feet tall by three feet deep. But I’ll need another four pickup-loads to get us through the worst of winter. And unless I’m reading the signs wrong, it may well be a hard one. Twenty loads, then, would make me feel a lot more secure. It’s only mid-April (like mid-October in Ohio, I remind myself, because what I learned as a boy in the rural Midwest is still my yardstick and my standard) and already we’re getting some freezing temperatures in the mornings, even if afternoon temperatures reach levels that my mother, Reba Mae, used to refer to as “sweater weather” – afternoons when a shirt with undershirt and vest are comfortable, but when you can still work up a sweat gathering firewood.

The chilly mornings mean fog and a low cold-cloud cover until almost noon. On days when office work keeps me from going to the woods early in the afternoon, I still hike in through the underbrush on my normal rounds just before sunset and free up all of the windfall fuel I can find, propping it against tree trunks to let it air in the wind. In this season of the year, I never go to the woods without a machete, since I tend to abandon the rude paths and forge headlong into the thicket, watching for signs of fallen branches. The timber lying on the ground is a liberal mix of green and “dry” wood. The beech (coihue) that grows under an altitude of 800 meters (2,625 feet) is “live” – not so the southern beech (lenga) that grows just below the timberline in the snowy upper mountain forest, and that flames scarlet in autumn before it sheds its leaves. Also “live” are the radal and the Patagonian laurelwood (laura). Winter scenes in Ohio were always “black and white” because, there, about the only non-deciduous trees were occasional pines. Snowy winters here are “green and white” and these are the trees, along with the native cypress and the exotic North American pines (mostly Douglas firs), that make it so.

The leafy beech, radal and laurelwood really suffer during the snowiest winters. It’s as if they were from another era, when this was a warmer clime – like the ferns and cane and vines that flourish in the underbrush – and never adapted to the change. Their foliage catches and holds the heaviest, wettest snows that weigh down their branches. Still days and heavy wet snows are these trees’ mortal enemies. The snow’s weight rips the branches from their trunks and sends them crashing to the forest floor. The radal with its larger, rounder leaves suffers the worst, sometimes growing so heavy with snow that its trunk will split open like a book. 

When they’ve turned to deadwood, all of these are good to feed the woodstove – though the dense, hard laurel is the one that will hold a fire for hours and the hardest one to find. The dead dry laurelwood, then, has become my “gold”. I no longer see dead, fallen trees as a reminder of my own mortality, but instead, let my heart soar at the sight of the laurel’s skeleton, which, even in death, remains more useful than I’ll ever be.

I’ve set some rules for gathering firewood in these seventy-four acres:

-No cutting standing timber, even if its dead. It’s only fair game once the wind lays it to rest on the ground.

-No laying bare the forest floor to get to the windfall. Birds and rodents and lizards live in the underbrush and feed on its fruits. A “clean” forest is a fauna-less forest, and the idea is to preserve this natural habitat.

-No cutting green timber to reach the dry. If you can’t get to the deadwood without destroying the live, it’s not yours to have.

-Under NO circumstances will the cypress be considered firewood. This one I imposed because the noble nature of the Patagonian cypress (one of the region’s three main native conifers, the others being the Fitzroya – or alerce – and the monkey-puzzle tree, also known as the araucaria araucana or pehuén) makes it much sought-after for use as outdoor siding and fence posts. It’s not uncommon for local boys to allege that they’re gathering “firewood” when they are, in fact, gathering posts for a fencing or construction job. Nor is it uncommon for them to cut cypress green if they can get away with it. If this rule weren’t enforced by people like me, it wouldn’t be long before there weren’t a single stand of cypress in the forest, except where the rocky crags made it too hard to reach.  

These simple rules were made for others who occasionally come to the forest for fuel. These are now a privileged few, members of families that had “worked” this woodland long before I ever got here – several generations before. Truth be told, they come here little now – some because they now have natural gas piped into their homes, others because it’s easier for them to go someplace else, where the warden isn’t so picky about how they work. Because that’s the other rule: If they want to get firewood from the grounds I care for, they have to ask permission, tell me where and when and show me what they plan to cut. Otherwise, they can expect me to come down on them like gangbusters.

That, in fact, was how I got the job. That was when a rich city slicker showed up in his Cadillac SUV, accompanied by an arrogant foreman, whom he put in charge of “cleaning up” and fencing a half-dozen enormous lots he had taken over, a couple of which were next to mine. From the start, I didn’t hit it off with the foreman (Octavio was his name), whose idea of a forest was a bunch of trees standing in bare dirt. Left to his own devices, when his boss drove that shiny Caddy back to the city, his first mission was to slash and burn the forest floor.

Then it was time to fence, and that’s where Octavio and I clashed head-on, or rather, where I clashed head-on with the leader of his work crew.

The story of why I felt this was any of my business, however, starts way before:

When my wife and I first showed up here seventeen years ago, we were stunned by the natural beauty of the surroundings and immediately ended a search that had taken us years of travel and months of house-hunting in Patagonia. This was it. The search was over. After one adventurous real estate agent showed us the place – others had no idea where it was and weren’t really interested in finding out – we came back alone to have another look. As soon as we pulled in under the century-old beech by the dirt track in front of the house and got out of the car, a wiry man with a leathery face and a stubborn jaw appeared out of nowhere and, by way of greeting said, “Did you buy here?”

I said, “Buenas tardes,” and stuck out my hand. He limply took it in his rough paw and gave it a perfunctory shake, but firmly repeated his question.

“Did you buy here?”

I knew the tone well. My grandfather had been just such a tough-as-whet-leather rural type, with the same kind of no-bullshit eloquence. The question wasn’t, “Hello there! So nice to see you. Did you lovely folks buy this place? Oh how nice, we’ll be neighbors and have tea together!” No, no, it was more like, “Did you buy here? Because if you didn’t, you’d best keep right on moving, stranger, ‘cause you’ve got no business here.”

Back home, in a remote rural place like this he might have underscored his question by carrying a double-barreled shotgun loaded with birdshot or rock salt in the crook of his elbow. Here, however, the weapon of choice among the natives was more casual, a machete, say, or an axe. But in this case, all the guy had in his hand was a coligüe cane walking staff, which didn’t look very threatening…not to me, anyway. However, once I got to know this man, don Federico Miranda, I would realize that, had he wished to that day, he could have dropped me like a sack of potatoes, so adept was he with that cane. On more than one occasion since his sixty-fifth birthday (he was now well over 70), he had done so with other men, by means of a swift, smart crack on the temple or behind the ear. (One of his step-grandsons once described him as “the meanest old man I’ve ever known”). But don Federico wasn’t mean, just hardened by his life as a rural laborer and sick and tired of city slickers finding ways to grab pieces of wilderness that they had no right to. Him, he’d soaked this ground with the sweat of his labor all his life. And he’d earned the right to play warden.

I said, “We haven’t bought it yet, señor, but we really hope to. We were here with the real estate agent and decided to come back for another look on our own…if that’s all right?”

So don Federico relaxed and showed us around. When we moved in, he was the one who sold us our used woodstove, the one who showed me the trails and where to find windfall firewood. If I asked him for advice, he gave it and when I didn’t, he sometimes stood by in bewildered amusement, watching me try to figure out on my own how to survive in rural Patagonia. His advice was as laconic as his greeting had been.

“Better gather firewood while you can,” he said, our first autumn here.

“Well, I’ll get what I can now, and if I need more later, I’ll gather it then,” I said.

“You won’t be able to,” he said bluntly. That was his advice. Take it or leave it. When it started raining in mid-May and didn’t quit until the second week in June…when it started snowing, I understood what he meant. That was the last year I left the issue of firewood “for later”.

So anyway, when don Federico decided, after half a century of living “up here”, to move “down closer to the road” where it was easier to get his wife the medical attention she needed at the time, a new self-appointed forest warden was required, and I, as the only man living on the edge of the woods, was “elected”. The “job” didn’t require much – just a love for this spectacular natural area, a willingness to challenge environmental predators, and the self-confidence to do so with no legal authority whatsoever.  I became the one who, when strangers showed up and started poking around in the neighboring meadows and woodlands, would appear out of nowhere and ask, “Did you buy here?” And if the answer was “no”, I would have to say, “Then you have no business here,” and be ready to back my words up.

For years, I protected the surrounding hills and forest on the sole strength of my convictions. That was usually enough. There were a few minor incidents in which the police had to be called in. One in which a judge acted in my defense. But it wasn’t until this foreman called Octavio and his men came along that things came to a stand-off.

At some point during their fencing of the absentee-owner’s land, they decided not to spend any more money on “store-bought” posts and started invading the seventy-four acres of forest adjacent to our home to cut young green cypress trees and use those for posts instead. By my calculations they had already cut over a hundred from deep in the woods before I was on to them.

First I called the police. I was told by the duty officer that if the posts were being cut on private land and used on private land, they couldn’t act unless the owner of the land from which the posts were being taken filed charges. I had no idea who the owner was. For as long as I had known the area the forest had just been, well, the forest. I had never thought of it as belonging to anyone. Only as a natural area that needed protecting.

Then I called the forestry service. They also asked if I was the owner and when I said I wasn’t, seemed to lose interest. They said they might send somebody “one of these days” but that for the moment they had neither vehicles nor men to spare. But then I recalled that the Border Guards (a paramilitary force that often fills the gaps left by other law enforcement and security forces in Argentina) had an Ecology Division, so I called them. I was in luck because the officer in charge was new and, as the old Spanish adage goes, “a new broom sweeps clean.” The officer listened patiently and with interest to my story, asked me a few questions, and finally said, “Maybe I’ll come out that way this afternoon and have a look.”

I never expected what came next. In fact, I was discouraged after the call because I knew I couldn’t go up against this band alone, especially since they were backed by a landholder with money and influence. But that afternoon, the officer arrived…in a Unimog duce-and-a-half, with five heavily armed troops in the back-end, plus a plainclothesman and driver, and two motorcycle troopers for an escort. The officer hopped down from the truck, introduced himself and asked, “Where are they?”

I said, “Get into my truck and I’ll take you.”

He obliged, after twirling a finger over his head at the truck-driver and at the two motorcyclists, and barking, “Follow us!”

Like I said, we came down on them like gangbusters: twenty-five freshly cut green posts, chainsaws, axes and other tools, all impounded, and the work gang’s boss, written up for not having proper authorization or receipts for the posts.

How word got back to the owners of the land, a thousand miles away in Buenos Aires, I’ll never know, but they almost immediately got in touch with me through a local real estate agency – which, it turned out, had an axe to grind with the foreman. What would it take to get me to administrate that forest permanently? My answer: A full power of attorney as its warden.

And so this piece of forest primeval, this piece of nature, this piece of paradise, has become an integral piece of my life. I’ve fenced it, put up gates and put up no trespassing signs along the dirt road that separates the rugged, craggy, north section that borders on a lagoon from the hilly, boggy, south section that fronts on a glacial lake. I walk it and hike it and guard it as if it were my own. I barely open the trails I use for my rounds, keeping them as hidden from and inhospitable to others as possible. I’ve let its perimeters grow over with impenetrable thickets of dog rose and thorn bushes to discourage invaders who might jump the chain-link fence. Where furtive poachers cut holes in the fence, I immediately have it mended and crisscross it with barbed wire to let them know I’ve been there and that I have my eye on them. If they tear down a no trespassing sign, I put one right back up and redouble my rounds of that area until I’m sure the poachers have been discouraged. If I find them, I send them packing. If they hide from me, I look for them. If they run, I give chase. It has worked well. Lately, the only tracks I find when I’m on my rounds are my own. But every now and then, someone will try me, to see if I’m still being vigilant. They keep me on my toes. They keep me from getting lazy.

My gathering of only the driest fallen timber is as much a favor to the woods as it is to me. Clearly, I benefit by having a source of fuel, but so does the forest, because by removing it in the dry season, I am removing a potential fire hazard. This is a place where the wet season is intense, with heavy rains and snows for months on end. But the dry season is equally so, weeks and months when one match, one careless smoker, the sun on a piece of broken glass or a single flash of lightning can trigger a fire capable of consuming the entire forest. The forest needs me like I need it. It needs me to protect it from the exploiters and the uncaring, to protect it from decimation. It’s a job that makes me feel both proud and humble. Mostly, it makes me feel happy and privileged.

This afternoon, I’ve overstayed my welcome. I know the lay of the land so well by now that I dare stay longer and longer. If there were a full moon, I could make my way through the forest by night. But just the words “forest primeval” denote a condition of preeminence. I have delighted to the golden glow of sunset, seen the last rays of light filtering through the trees, as the sun sank behind Mount Capilla. Now, as I struggle to disentangle “just one more” dry fallen branch from the grip of the undergrowth, the fading light is gray. I feel the evening breeze rise and stir the leaves on the bushes. I hear crossed branches creak and groan like the timbers of a phantom ship. The humidity rises like a chilly hand from the forest floor and holds me in its grasp. I pluck my earlier abandoned sweatshirt from a nearby bush and slip it on. A roosting huet-huet (wet-wet) looses a warning shout that stands the hairs on the back of my neck on end. An owl whistles low, then lets out a sardonic cackle. It’s late, these sounds say. Go home. By night the forest is ours. You have no business here.

I swiftly make my way along the trail to the closest gate in the last of the fast-vanishing twilight. It’s new moon and will soon be dark as pitch. I get over the gate and onto the road home, almost at a trot. And I think to myself, “I’m the warden, the forest’s caretaker. Without it, I’m nothing but my everyday identity. The forest doesn’t belong to me any more than it belongs to its deed-holders. We’re only its guardians. The forest primeval belongs to itself. In a perfect world, we should be judged by how we treat it.