Musings from the poet`s home

Has it really been only two weeks since we left our snowy, cold home? It feels more like two months, and with all we have seen it might well be. Even though we didn't have a "program", and I don't feel rushed, there are so many impressions to take in, store, and internalize that I have a hard time keeping up.

This last week took us from the vineyards of Santa Cruz to the rough beauty of the ocean at Isla Negra, from the steep hills of Valparaiso to the ancient Araucaria forests around volcano Llaima, until, after a six hour drive on narrow gravel roads winding up and down the hills of the Inter Lagos region, we arrived here in Villarica, a pretty little town of about 40,000 on the shore of beautiful Lake Villarica.

From our room on the second floor of the "La Torre Suiza" hostel we have a view of the slightly smoking Villarica volcano, its snowy cone, sticking out of a fluffy bank of white clouds, an amazing sight against the deep blue sky. One can climb this volcano and look into its crater, feel its hot breath, before sliding down using an ice axe as a brake - Magnus and Courtney did this last year - and Johann is seriously contemplating taking part in a guided tour.I, on the other hand, am afraid the 2600 m gain in altitude, 1000 m of this on foot, might be a bit too much for my heart, so I will be content to view it from below.

My heart didn't need the workout of a climb to beat faster - this country has other means to achieve that.

A week ago today we said goodbye to the vineyards of the Santa Cruz region and took a bus back to Santiago, and from there to tiny Isla Negra where Pablo Neruda spent many years of his life. Nobody but us got off the bus here, and even the few craft stands on the sidewalk didn`t change the little village`s sleepy disposition. We shouldered our backpacks and walked up the dusty road to check into "The Poet's Madness" hostel, breathing in  the spicy scent of the huge Eucalyptus trees along the way.

Hungry, we walked down to the village again a little while later, found a panaderia with a choice of buns and cheese, and a botilleria where we bought a bottle of wine, and decided to have lunch down by the sea, only a couple of hundred meters away from Pablo`s house. Here, there was little beach, only huge boulders acting as a bulwark against the elemental force of the ocean. Never before had I been face to face with a sea like this, wave after wave throwing itself against the rock, roaring, hissing, a living thing capable of incredible force. Oh, I could well understand how Neruda not only loved the sea but feared it! Every time I watched the wall of water come closer, inky blue-black changing to turquoise until it became almost transparent just before spending itself on the rocky shore, I felt it take my breath away, leaving me gasping,  heart beating rapidly.

 Still, I wouldn`t have moved back an inch as long as I was safe, so exhilarating was it to feel the ocean`s spray on my face. Pablo, on the other hand, was said to have sat in his white sail boat high up beside his house, watching, but safely out of reach of the waves.

He was fascinated with anything connected with the sea and with ships, which is apparent in his two houses in Valparaiso and Isla Negra, both of which I was able to visit, though not the one in Santiago. They both have a splendid view of the ocean, in Valparaiso high up on one of the many hills, with Neruda`s study in a little tower room at the top of `La Sebastiana`, as he called it affectionately, the long half moon of bay stretching out far below. He came here a few times a year even when he didn`t live here permanently anymore, and always for New Year`s, the biggest party of the year in Chile, when fireworks light up the entire 30 k stretch of coast for half an hour.

The stolid stone house at Isla Negra which Neruda bought unfinished and had finished over a long period of time  was supposed to look like a ship. Rooms are filled with an incredible amount of collected items, bought in antique stores and found on flea markets, or given to him by friends (after well-placed hints). Knick-knacks, kitsch and beautiful pieces share shelves and walls, peacefully co-existing in this place that shows Neruda`s joy to play and create for the pure fun of it. There are masks from New Guinea and Africa, a butterfly and beetle collection, and a papier-mache horse, big as life. This was one of the things he was especially proud of: walking to school in Temuco where he grew up, he had seen this horse in front of a saddle shop every day and remembered it fondly even as an adult. Several times he asked the owner to sell it to him, but without success. Finally, forty years later, the shop burned down, but not the horse in front of it, and Neruda was able to buy it. He had a room built especially for this horse, where it shares space with a few other items with a somewhat agricultural purpose.



Many, many of the things displayed are reminiscent of the ocean: not only the figureheads of ships, bull`s eyes in the walls, doors so low that even I had to be careful not to hit my head, much more Neruda himself who was not a small man at about six feet, and a girth indicating his delight in food and drink, but also nautical maps from the 16th and 17th century, nautical instruments, and a sea shell collection housed in a room added by the Neruda foundation for the very purpose of displaying it. Its prize item is the tusk of a narwhale Neruda bought in Denmark.
Sea shells, curved side up, are embedded in cement in one of the entrances: good foot massage, he said; an impressive collection of ships in bottles, all done by a German craftsman, are displayed on shelves in windows facing the ocean.

Here, then, he composed so many of his poems, worked diligently and with discipline eight hours a day, getting up early. He loved entertaining, often had friends over, liked red wine and whiskey and would not give up his nap even for visitors. His fondness for stained glass shows in many of the doors in both houses, and his collection of coloured goblets is impressive. He is said to have claimed that even water tastes less bland when drunk from a coloured glass.

Standing in front of the place a little below the house where he and his third wife Matilde found their last resting place, overlooking the ocean, I hear his heartbeat in the rhythm of the sea, his voice carried on the ever-present breeze.

Poet's Obligation

To whoever is not listening to the sea

this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up

in house or office, factory or woman

or street or mine or harsh prison cell:

to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,

I arrive and open the door of his prison,

and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,

a great fragment of thunder sets in motion

the rumble of the planet and the foam,

the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,

the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,

and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.

So, drawn on by my destiny,

I ceaselessly must listen to and keep

the sea's lamenting in my awareness,

I must feel the crash of the hard water

and gather it up in a perpetual cup

so that, wherever those in prison may be,

wherever they suffer the autumn's castigation,

I may be there with an errant wave,

I may move, passing through windows,

and hearing me, eyes will glance upward

saying "How can I reach the sea?"

And I shall broadcast, saying nothing,

the starry echoes of the wave,

a breaking up of foam and of quicksand,

a rustling of salt withdrawing,

the grey cry of sea-birds on the coast.

So, through me, freedom and the sea

will make their answer to the shuttered heart.

(Pablo Neruda)

Musings from a vineyard

Oh no! I almost erased all the previous "practice" blogs when I tried to clean up a bit - thank goodness there is the "return" arrow that allowed me to get everything back.

This is the kind of thing that happens when you decide to write a blog entry after walking home through a vineyard around midnight, an almost-full moon lighting the way, Orion, loyal companion though he may be even in the southern hemisphere, a bit mixed up, standing on his head; after a dinner of tacu tacu with seafood in a creamy sauce at a Peruvian restaurant here in Santa Cruz on the Chilean wine road. Well, it's probably not the tacu tacu that did it, and not the lucuma tostada (toasted eggfruit) I had for dessert, either. If anything, I could attribute it to the three bottles of Laura Harding wine we shared among the four of us over the course of about three hours.

The four of us: that means Johann, and two agronomists of Bayer Crop Sciences who are spending time here in Chile - Temuco, to be exact - to work with Chilean seed companies and farmers to produce canola seed that is to be grown in Canada in 2011 . We met up with Andrew and Kelsey the day before yesterday at Chillan, about 400 k south of Santiago.

To get there was the first test of our theory that we could travel through Chile by bus without speaking much Spanish.
We landed in Santiago on Monday and spent a couple of nights at the hostel "Rio Amazonas" not so far from downtown. This was a recommendation from Magnus and Courtney who had stayed there last year, and it proved to be a wonderful place to start out from. While it was not in any way luxurious it was totally adequate, had a lot of atmosphere, was in a great location, and we felt very much at home.
It was an ideal place to start our adventure, as we had to walk only a few blocks to the metro which took us into the vicinity of pretty well everything we wanted to see. We both realized very soon that our travels in Argentina, our stay in Buenos Aires, a couple of years ago had made it a lot easier for us this time: we felt a lot more confident than we did the first little while then.
Our explorations of the city worked out more or less well. A strike by municipal workers prevented us from visiting the National Library, a supposedly amazing building with a wonderful collection of early South American literature, and the bigger of the two landmark hills of Santiago, San Cristobal, and with it the Botanic and Zoological Garden. Garbage removal was also very erratic during this time which gave the city a dirtier appearance than it probably would like to present to visitors. Anywhere else we went so far we were amazed at the cleanliness and orderliness we found, the amount of workers dedicated to picking up, sweeping,  and tidying.
We did see the smaller of the two hills, Santa Lucia, very close to downtown. A maze of walkways leads up to the top from which one has a good view of the surrounding city, though not much beyond: haze (pollution?) hides the mighty Andes from view much of the time.

After getting acclimatized, adapting easily to the relaxed pace this country has to some, though not quite the same degree as its neighbour Argentina, we were ready to move slowly south towards the city of Chillan where we were to meet Andrew and Kelsey. Our friendly hostel host called a taxi for us, and without a whole lot of trouble we managed to get on the bus to Talca, a city of almost 200,000 about 400 km to the south.

I was a bit shocked at my own unsensitivity, or maybe simply forgetfulness: we explored the core of this city on foot, and while I noticed the many building projects that were going on, the rubble piles lying around here and there, the cracks in the often old buildings, it didn't occur to me that this was damage from February's  earthquake until the hotel owner mentioned it when we checked out the next morning. How little we are affected by things beyond our immediate periphery of vision! Here in Talca, only about a hundred kilometres from the epicentre, the damage was extensive. Our hostess told us that she, her husband and son had been thrown to the ground from the force of the earthquake, and that part of their building had been damaged, too, though they were very lucky compared to many. Not far from us, she said, not a single house was left standing within a whole block. Please consider to come back another time - to see what our city is capable of offering, was the silent implication. How could I not feel guilty for not even noticing!

It opened my eyes for the next part of the journey, at least, and while the damage in Chillan is by far not as much there is still some.

And yet, it is not the earthquake damage, or even the potential for another quake, that made the biggest impression on me so far. If I were to describe Chilewith one word - the Chile we saw so far, which is a good part of the central third, it is, without a doubt, fertile. The rich volcanic soil nourishes the most amazing plant growth, from sunflower and sugarbeet fields to fruit orchards and vineyards, from the mora (blackberry) hedges lining the dusty dirt roads, thick and forbidding as barbed wire, to the thick green canopy of interlocking weeping willow branches in river valleys and depressions. Wherever there is water it will grow - and wherever there is none soil will be bare and very dry.

There is so much I could talk about, from touring canola fields to tasting wine, and at some point I will, but for now this will do.

Tomorrow we will leave the luxurious surroundings we found ourselves in because somebody else had made reservations for us here at the Hotel Terra Vina in Santa Cruz, with a view of grapevines in the front yard and the snow capped peaks of the Andes in the background.

It will be an "adventure day" where we will try to make our way from here to Isla Negra by bus - except there is no even remotely direct bus as far as we can see right now. It will be interesting to tackle this task without much Spanish, but the way is as important, if not more, than getting there, isn't it?

What will be waiting for us at this place that is neither an island nor black? Pablo Neruda would know: he, after all, lived here for about twenty years of his life, inspired time and again by the ocean, the wind, the araucarias, his fellow countrymen, and love.

With luck, I, too, will hear the voice of what called to him.

Actually, I believe I have started to hear it already: it is the voice of a beautiful country cradled - and sometimes battered - between the mighty forces of mountains and ocean.

It is the voice of Chile.

Temporary title change

Temporary title change

No musings from the farm today - there has been no time, and time is the one requirement for musings. In fact there will be no musings from the farm until the middle of January. Instead, there will be "musings away from the farm".

It is a strange feeling not to be home for Christmas; we have never done that, and it would not be my first choice. But cirumstances require it, and there will be so many things to do in the next while that we might not notice it too much.

Winter has returned for good now, and it could well be that the foot or so of snow will not melt before April. We, however, will escape it for awhile: tomorrow afternoon we will leave for Santiago, Chile.

What might it be like, this country of desert and wineyards, orchards and icebergs? What will stir my heart so that I need to write about it?

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Trees: more than just firewood

The fire crackling in the fireplace is suggesting warmth, and as long as I sit where I do, feet almost touching the fire screen, the promise is even fulfilled. I fell asleep in my favourite chair for a while, the beech-framed tan leather one from Ikea that has acquired the well-worn look of twenty years of use, no longer immaculate and supple, but a bit glossy along the contours of my body, bleached from the sun pouring in through the big window letting in the afternoon sun, bearing faint traces from spilled coffee to a baby's burp after nursing.

Watching the flames curl up around the big chunk of poplar I'm slowly shaking off sleepiness and inertia, two not unusual states of mind after a long day in the city.

Saturdays have been dedicated to Maya's track training lately, and today she had her first indoor meet. While we got to watch the sun rise in previous weeks, we left too early for that today. Instead, Venus, the morning star, hung huge and golden high in the eastern sky for much of the drive. The sky's faint red hue slowly intensified to a deep crimson, the silhouettes of trees intricately etched into this canvas.

I love trees in winter! No longer are their leaves the focus of our attention, from the first hint of tender green, no more than a promise, the coolness of their shade, the rustling when stirred by a breeze, to the dazzling display of gold against a deep blue sky. No longer is there simply "a row of trees": now, each one shows its true personality, be it young and straight or old, bent, gnarled, crowns half missing, not obeying any law of symmetry, leaning one way or the other, home to the untidy nests of magpie and crow and the perfect weavings of robin and gold finch. All this, hidden for the summer, is finally revealed, with the silhouette of a snowy owl on the top branch as the crowning glory.

Again hoar frost is making everything beautiful, even the old and the ugly. There is a myth that half a year after a hoar frost it will rain, giving hope to dwellers of a country often enough plagued by drought. Maybe it is a good thing to harbour that hope in the middle of winter, to imagine tidy green rows of newly emerged wheat and barley in June receiving the moisture they need to grow. We, if we are farmers or not, live on hope, after all.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Getting unstuck

We get so stuck in our ways, so predictable. We grow up, find our place and become comfortable in it, follow behaviour patterns developed over time, and everybody knows what to expect from us, including ourselves.
While this is right and good, and the world functions on the principle of a certain order, it can also lead to monotony, rigidity, and, yes, in extreme cases to premature aging.

Our bodies, too, are not quite what they used to be anymore, and yesterday, during a visit to our cousins, one of us lamented that it was hard to touch her toes, something she had always been able to do. And you could do a headstand! I said, referring back to another Sunday in that same living room, probably twenty years earlier. A 'handstand person' myself,  a headstand was something I had never been able to do; maybe it takes different personalities. I remember being so impressed by her ability then, by the process of unfolding into that position. Could she do it still?

Headstand

It’s a matter of finding your balance, she says,

getting down on her hands and knees,

carefully positioning her hands

before she bends her head to the floor

plants it firmly so that it touches

somewhere between forehead

and crown. I haven’t done this in a while.

We watch, fascinated; none of us

have done this in a while,

this strange thing: moving

in an unexpected way, foreign

to middle aged bodies, to minds

not used to deviating, or if so

not letting on.

She pauses, as if in prayer,

gathering calmness. Slowly

her feet leave the floor

inch by inch. Knees bent,

toes touching, she

is a Native carving,

frog or turtle, we

the circle of worshippers.

We tried out other forgotten abilities : doing the splits, sitting double-double (an invaluable skill when playing jacks, because your legs are neatly out of the way), and undoubtedly would have moved on to tongue rolling and ear wiggling in time, including demonstrations of each.

It might be a little harder to touch our toes, but at least we still try!

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Thank goodness for natural gas!

November Evening

The days are short now, the moon

a smudge in the starless sky,

it smells like fall. Wet leaves

cling to my shoes,

a branch brushes my face

when I walk up to the house

from the shop, finding easily

my way in the dark: often

my feet have walked this path,

day or night, they know

where to go. No light necessary.

The cat, left alone for the day,

appears from between the trees,

his black form, tail raised

like a flagpole, barely visible,

calling softly

to make his presence known.

Soon he’ll be snoring

on his favorite chair.

I, however, will go out again

late at night, choosing

the dark, breathing deeply.

This is what I wrote only last Sunday after we came home from the Thanksgiving dinner at our friends'. 

Now, however,winter is here - no doubt about it. For a few days it wasn't quite sure if it should really set up camp here, but it seems it has made up its mind for good now, at least for the foreseeable future, which means, in our area, about the next four months.

As usual, the transition is the hardest. The first few days of temperatures around the freezing mark always seem so cold, no amount of clothing seems to be enough to ward off the cold. This is true for outside as well as inside, where the thermostat surely should guarantee that 20 degrees really is twenty degrees - still, it feels as if I'm going about my housework in a refrigerator, suddenly.

After a few days of this, however, the body adjusts. It must be the body, because it certainly isn't the weather that has changed. On the contrary, it has the tendency to get much colder rather than warm up. For three days now the temperature has not gone above -13 C, and it dipped to -27 overnight a couple of times. The aforementioned adjustment has already tricked me into believing that this is actually not so bad; it could, in fact, be a lot worse. There have been years, after all, when, at -30, a strong wind whipped flimsy Halloween costumes around kids' legs on the short way from their parents' running car to the welcoming doors of the neighbours.

This morning I took Maya to her track practice in the city. We started out at 8:30, the exhaust from the car a thick cloud, the steering wheel cold under my hands. We turned left onto the gravel road from the driveway, drove up the hill - and there it was: the sun, a promise only the moment before, breaking the glowing face of the south-eastern sky. Every aspen tree, every barb on the wire along the road, every blade of grass covered in a thin layer of hoar frost suddenly blushed, a high-flying plane drew a glowing line across the sky, disappearing while it was created - such a fragile, transient thing.

Yes, it is winter, and it is cold. But this is where I live, and winter is part of it - a part that could be a bit shorter, admittedly, but has its own beauty.

Now, where did I put those mittens .....

Saturday, November 13, 2010

You asked for it!

And this one - the first - is for you, Andrea!

The clock has been set back, and evenings are suddenly so much longer, the ice on the pond hasn't melted for almost two weeks now, and the butter is as hard in the morning as if it had spent the night in the fridge - winter is definitely on its way. Still, fair weather has been lingering, and the little bit of snow we had on the ground when I left for Cortes Island is long gone. Even though it is only marginally above freezing the ever-present sun gives the illusion as if it were otherwise - especially from behind the window. Soon, however, this will change, we are told: next week will be the first snow week of the season. Then, Christmas lights won't seem quite as much out of place as they do now; I will never quite understand why some people feel the urge to put them up even before Halloween. Maybe it simply is the fact that it is easier to do it when the fingers are not numb with cold yet.
For us, getting ready for winter means things like getting hay for the three cows and their calves (for the last time; next summer they will be sold, and we will be without cows for the first time in fifteen years), putting away the high-pressure washer to prevent it from being damaged by the frost (a fact Maya obviously hasn't grasped yet; she took it out again yesterday when we weren't home to wash the pickup, couldn't get it going, and left it outside ...), and hauling a few loads of grain to the elevator.
Fall season also means visiting friends, taking in marketing courses, and attending agricultural exhibitions. Mostly, I leave the last two to Johann and the boys now, but yesterday I did come along to a farm show south of Edmonton, the biggest of its kind in the province. Oh, I believe I am turning into a dinosaur, or a nostalgic old fool: the accumulation of huge machines, the glistening metal, the amount of money tied up in even one of them leaves me more disgusted than enthused. It brings back memories of Johann's and my trips across Alberta and Saskatchewan in the fall of 1980, rental agreement for six quarters of land in hand, in search of our first tractor, cultivator, combine, seed drill, and trucks, from one used machinery dealer to the next, climbing up countless metal steps to sit in countless tractor cabs, the excitement of the choice, of the prospect to soon use this on our own farm. Where has it gone, this excitement? Now, I'm entirely content to leave machinery, marketing, and new purchases to someone else, helping out when needed, but otherwise rather occupied with other matters. Necessity has given way to choice, and finding the balance will result in a different scenario than it did thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago.

Huh, that's an excursion into the memoir that is still asking to be written, it seems. The funny thing is that, just now, a couple of those soon-to-be-sold cows were bawling very close by, so that I got up to see if they had invaded the front lawn under my window (they hadn't!). In the process I pulled the chord from the laptop and was left "powerless", afraid that I had lost all I had written so far (thankfully that turned out to be not the case). Call it "revenge of the beast".

Fall also means hunting season around here, and people dropping in to say hello after a late afternoon of driving around in search of prey. Much as I don't like that (even though I, too, will prepare and eat the meat), it is nice to welcome friends we don't see more than once a year, like tonight. No rack of deer tonight, however, but pork tenderloin. :o)  Before that, however, there is a house to be cleaned after more time spent away than at home in the last two weeks, and a trip to the city with Maya for her track training. She just got a letter from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia on the east coast, outlining their track program. It seems the recruiting process has begun, and, for me, the process of slowly letting go the youngest of my children.

Yes, the process of letting go ... children into the world, and now a piece of writing into the world of blogging. Scary, I tell you! :o)