Bratwurst

I am standing at the kitchen sink. Suddenly it feels as if I was observing somebody else. I am a poet and a writer, but this, too, is part of who I am.

I have a bundle of bratwurst casings in my hands. I bought them this morning at the Butchers and Packers Supply in the city, standing in front of the cooler for a while, unsure what I needed. Hog casings, I had been told, as sheep casings would have been too small to fit over the metal pipe of the stuffing machine. The numbers - 29/32, 32/35, and more – don’t tell me very much. What do they stand for? I opt for the 32/35, taking the bag out. Pig guts – that’s what this is. About a kilogram of them.

Back in my kitchen I carefully lift them out of the bag, making a salt path from the countertop to the sink. The salt makes them feel dry and gritty, not much like I would have imagined intestines at all.

It reminds me of the first time I touched a snake, a cobra brought to our grade three classroom by a man traveling from school to school to show German children animals they would never see otherwise, at least not in a small village, far from a zoo, in the early sixties. The snake wore a kind of sheer curtain over its head, which gave it a resemblance to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother in my book of Grimm’s fairy tales, and was lying quite still on a table, watched over by the snake man. We were invited to touch it. Some of us were afraid, some found the idea repulsive, but to me, gatherer of earthworms and tadpoles, salamanders and other creeping creatures, it was nothing less than a great wonder. What did I expect? Something akin to the slick moist skin of a newt? Certainly nothing quite as dry and cool and almost brittle as the scaly skin of this huge reptile, unflinching under my shy caress.

And now I’m holding these sausage casings, clean, sterile, bone-coloured bundle, covered in salt to preserve it, as different to the touch from what one might expect as the cobra was to me then. My task will be to separate the strands of gut, unravel the bundle like a messy ball of string. I have done this often over the past thirty years – one of the many tasks mastered that I would have never imagined learning while I was growing up.

I knew about butchering – any child growing up in a village in Northern Hesse at that time did. Starting in late fall, all through the winter, it was a part of village life, like the scream of the big rotary saw cutting logs for the winter. Although there were only a few full-time farmers many of the families had agricultural roots. The men might have jobs at the tire factory in the next town, or work as woodcutters in the forest, or have a trade, but the barn beside their houses had room for three or five sows and offspring, and often a few cows for milking, too. The pigs were mostly used for the meat supply for the family.

                Besides the butcher who ran the modern butcher shop on the west end of Goddelsheim there was another who was the so-called ‘house butcher’. When the weather turned colder he would be asked to come to peoples’ houses and butcher one of their pigs for them. He did the killing and was responsible for making sausage and whatever else needed to be done, but the pig’s owners helped with everything.

When, as a child, I heard the squeaking of a pig on one of those butchering days I would cover my ears and sing loudly to tune out the horrible sound: I hated the thought of the animals being put to death.  It wasn’t so bad once they were dead, had become meat and bones and blood, the part that had been the living animal gone and soon forgotten. This was practical stuff, work that needed to be done in order to have supplies for the winter, to fill chimneys with hams and sausages to be smoked, shelves with canned liver and blood sausage, head cheese or canned seasoned ground pork. These people did heavy physical work and needed hearty food.  

My father was the village teacher, and bees were the only animals we kept. I never was involved in the greasy, messy work of preparing a pig for preservation, and my knowledge was limited to the screams I heard and what I gleaned walking by a farmstead on an errand on butchering day. We had farming friends, and they would bring us a sampling of the fresh sausages and a container of the very tasty ‘Wurstebrühe’, the broth in which the sausages had been cooked.

At 23, newly married and living on a farm, with little money and full of enthusiasm to be self sufficient as far as possible, I was eager to learn the skills necessary for a farm wife. The most important one was to cook hearty meals from scratch; putting in a big garden, and canning and preserving the fruit and vegetables grown in it were high on the list as well, and so was looking after our own meat supply. Johann’s Aunt Dora was my ever-willing and available source of much information concerning cooking and gardening; she lived close enough for me to ask. Largely inexperienced in these matters I needed a lot of help, and phoning my mother or my mother-in-law for advice was out of the question: phone calls at $1.28/minute could only be justified for important things like birthdays, Christmas, and the successful conclusion of harvest.

My mother-in-law taught Johann the intricacies of cutting meat and me how to make ham, salami and liver sausage during her visits. She herself had learned how to do this by watching the house butcher on their own farm, and enjoyed doing it. I believe she was happy to pass these skills on to a daughter-in-law who could use them as much as she had done as a farm wife.

How thankful I am for these two strong women! Without their guidance it would have been even more challenging to cope. I learned from them how to make good use of all available resources, to be frugal and yet have so much, to pay attention to small matters.

                Most importantly, they taught me by example that it doesn’t matter what kind of work one does as long as it is done with joy and pride. And that is true even for sorting out bundles of salted pig intestines to be used for making sausage.

Lago Vintter -- Cerro Rinon

On our way to town a few days ago a movement in the snowy field to my left caught my eye. At first all I saw was a magpie engaged in a strange dance, twisting this way and that right above the surface, fluttering up a foot before pouncing again. Only after a moment I saw the mouse, a good sized vole, rising up on his hind legs, fighting for his life. No mouse hole close, it seemed, and the cards were stacked heavily against him, even if the magpie obviously had a healthy dose of respect for its intended supper. I don't know how this played out, as I watched it only in passing, but chances of the mouse's survival were very slim.
Why is it that I find myself sympathizing with the mouse? The magpie, just like the mouse, only did what it needed to do to survive, yet it seemed unfair somehow, a David and Goliath situation.


Sometimes it is not quite as clear who the predator is and who the prey. It doesn't always have to do with size, either, as the following experience will show. Back to Rio Pico, or rather to Lago Vintter, where we - miracle of miracles! - finally arrived in the yellow camionetta after another 40 km on the bumpy gravel road leading northwest from Rio Pico. We spent four wonderful days there with Gretel and Nikita, treated royally to great food, wine, and the obligatory 'Vodka Nikita' - but more about that later.


In Patagonia, the weather is unpredictable even in the summer as we had seen two years ago when snow covered the surrounding hills one morning. Knowing this makes it very important to make use of good weather for outdoor pursuits like hiking, and thus we decided to follow our hosts' suggestion and hike up to Cerro Riñón, their ‘house mountain’, the day after our arrival.

Starting out from the lake we climbed steadily through the lenga forest for the first while, pure joy for a tree lover like me. This is real old growth forest. Nikita’s neighbours had started to harvest some of it at one time – illegally: these trees are protected. Lenga and their smaller cousins, ñire, seem to be the only trees that occur naturally right around here, plus bushes like the calafate, wild gooseberry, wild currant and a few others whose names I don’t know.  On the forest floor I found the topa topa, as the Sand Lady’s Slipper is called here, the fat yellow violets I admired on my first visit already, and, close to trickling little waterways, a beautiful flower with tubular red blossoms.


When we left the shelter of the forest behind our destination still seemed far away, and in this zone of rock and rubble we were now exposed to the wind. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, two huge birds appeared from behind us: the condors Nikita had told us about! They circled once above us, and disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

The rough, rocky, sandy road, accessible with a four-wheel drive vehicle, descended for a bit to a small brown lagoon, surrounded by a moderate expanse of green, fed by a couple of small rivulets coming from the snowfields higher up the slope. This slope was the final barrier we had to cross.

I was a bit apprehensive, the sliding and my ensuing panic on the descent from Torres del Paine still too fresh in my mind. The slippery hillside with rubble and dirt suggested more of those moments of feeling out of control. Johann encouraged me, told me this was not so steep, but when he started to climb I realized he was not following any path. Again I was scared: Nikita had talked about a path, hadn’t he? Where was it? This felt wrong!
Johann kept walking uphill, though, and I followed, soon realizing that it was not as bad as I had thought. The first little while we stepped on the sparse growth of alpine regions, and once again I was amazed at the variety of blooming plants that survived under these harsh conditions.

Soon we left that behind, entering territory of sharp, mostly small rocks that didn’t move much when we stepped on them. We kept walking horizontally along the slope, climbing slowly, in serpentines, passed between two snowfields, and after ten more minutes we had reached our final destination for the day, a rocky outcrop jutting out high over the lake.
An iron pole marked the spot from which we could finally see pretty well all of Lago Vintter. It narrowed towards the Chilean side, only an appendix at the very end. What a huge body of water, at 76 km in length! And hardly anybody lives here, no boats dotted its shining surface.  

We moved down a few steps into the protection of the rocks to get away from the wind, and unpacked our lunch, feasting our eyes on the magnificent view. Suddenly a huge shadow fell on the rocks beside us. We looked up to find the condor sailing not far above us, staring down at us, turning his head this way and that.  Not long and he was joined by another, followed by two more. Majestically they drifted past, checking us out at leisure.

It felt a bit strange to be looked at this way. Could these birds carry us away like Roc, Sinbad’s legendary bird, if they had chose to do so? No need to worry, in spite of their impressive appearance: condors are vultures and feed solely on carrion. They never attack. Knowing that we could calmly sit and watch them disappear around a corner, awed by their huge feathered feet, their enormous wings, the long-beaked head.  

We sat for close to an hour, watching them rise up on the current and disappear again, undisputed lords of the sky in this part of the world.  Nikita told us that their numbers have increased significantly in the last twenty years or so because they are under protection now, and most people abide by this. They used to be hunted mercilessly because farmers feared for their lambs and calves, but thankfully this myth has been dispersed. Nikita said they fly far to find food, up to forty kilometres per day. He thinks that they nest somewhere close to where we were.

Rested and thankful for this amazing encounter we finally started the descent. We had decided to take a different route for the way down, and shortly after we reached the lagoon we entered the forest instead of climbing again to the bare knoll where we had first seen the condors on our way up. It was beautiful, this walk through the green forest, a large swamp teeming with wildflowers to our left. Not long, however, and the road split again, one rising to the right, the other descending steeply to the left. No more uphill! we had decided earlier, even though I was a little uneasy: this was not quite how Gretel had described it. We were too tired to even consider climbing back up, however, and started to follow the rocky road down. It was a looong way down, we found – we had done quite a hike on the way up. And then this road did an unexpected turn as well, rising – oh no, this wasn’t right! We could see the island right across from where we were, and knew then that we had a fair distance to go east – and down – still until we were back home.

The forest on the downward slope was so thick that we couldn’t see the lake at the bottom, but we knew it was there, and that’s where we needed to get to, so Johann started to take the most direct route, finding his way through the dense growth along a small creek tumbling down.

It was very rough going, steep, the underbrush making progress difficult, calafate and other thorny bushes tearing at our clothes and skin. The worst thing, however, were the horseflies. Never in my life had I seen so many at once! Hundreds buzzed around us, worse than mosquitoes in a really bad year at home, eager to taste some fresh German-Canadian blood. There was no way to chase them away when attention and hands were needed to grasp tree branches and tree trunks for support. At the beginning of the hike I had used a lenga switch to keep them at bay; then there were by far not as many, and that method had worked quite well. In the open higher regions they had not been a problem. Now, however, in the relative calm, protected conditions in the forest, heat rising from our bodies, they attacked mercilessly.

Finally our helter-skelter descent ended on a road of sorts. Now, hands free, we could return to our tried and proven methods of repelling the murderous horseflies: I broke off another lenga twig, while Johann used the slap-and-kill approach.

Gretel and Nikita said it was an exceptionally bad year for these pests, and that on days like these Lino, the hired man, will not go into the forest to cut wood for fear of hurting himself with the axe; those horseflies could drive a person crazy.

As I said earlier: it is not always easy to say who the hunter is, and who the prey.   

Rio Pico

Weather conditions have not improved since the interlude two days ago, the wind is still blowing, daytime temperatures hovering around -5 C, roads are barely passable if at all - I better go back to the Patagonian summer, then.

We had the whole morning to spend in Gobernador Costa, and I decided to have a cup of coffee at the little restaurant at the front of the hosteria and write the few postcards I was going to send north. Johann, in the meantime, went for a walk through the little town. Our bus would leave sometime between eleven and twelve-thirty, depending on the source of information, and as we were right beside the bus terminal there was no big danger of missing it.

 I was the only customer at that time of day, except for a little mouse that appeared from behind my chair and scurried over to the window where it disappeared between some potted plants. I kept an eye out for his return, but he stayed hidden. I can’t say I objected.

Johann came back after about 45 minutes: the town was bigger than it looked at first sight, roads branching off to the town centre south of the long Avenida Julio A. Roca. He found a bank and even a tourist information, from which he brought back a nice little illustrated brochure extolling the beauty of town and area – in Spanish, of course. In fact, among all the people we spoke with in Gobernador Costa – and there were quite a few – not a single one spoke English. How nice to be at a ‘real’ place again, away from the hordes of tourists (to which we belonged as well, of course ...)!

The bus came in shortly before noon. Only a few passengers were waiting to get on, and not many got off. Among them were two gauchos in full regalia, this time not dressed in felt slippers and boinas but  leather boots and wide-brimmed felt hats, white shirts and black leather vests. Each of them carried a saddle and a huge trophy: obviously they were coming home from one of the Gaucho festivals that happen all over Patagonia in the summer.

Once again we were on our way. 85 km to Rio Pico – and we still didn’t know if anybody would be there to pick us up, or how to continue if there wasn’t. Once again it was hot and sunny, a slight breeze bringing some relief. The houses on the outskirts of Gobernador Costa were either brick or adobe, big and well kept ones right beside others on the verge of caving in. I noticed more flowers than at our first visit to Argentina, rose bushes now in full bloom. Was this simply because everything was not quite as new as last time so that I was able to experience it more intensely? Surely there must have been flowers then already.

The country started to look familiar soon after we left town. I even recognized a small flat lake where we had seen flamingos after we left Lago Vintter by car two years ago on our way back to Buenos Aires. This time there was almost no water left in the lake, and I don’t know what happened to the flamingos. Strange, actually: two years ago we were here a month later, and it was said to be a very dry year, and if it rained a lot last year – as we knew it did from Gretel and Nikita – I couldn’t quite understand how the lake could have contained water then and not now. People are worried about drought again, and winds are supposed to be really bad this season, too.

What I hadn’t noticed in 2009 was how much greener it gets the closer one comes to Rio Pico. The arid, pampa-like conditions gave way to more pasture land, with a few estancias along the road.

Rio Pico awaited us with its main street almost empty, more restaurants and shops than I would have expected in a small village of about 1000, a park with trees, a few benches and a swing set, and finally, at the round ‘plaza’, the bus terminal with white lace curtains. Several vehicles were parked along the road in front of it, awaiting passengers from the bus. Had one of them come for us? Our hopes dwindled with every one that opened its doors to release an obviously Argentinean person, none of them with white or blond hair. Hmmm. What would we do if nobody showed up, if our messages hadn’t been received?

First things first. We sat down on the grass in front of the bus terminal and took out bread, cheese and salami and had lunch. We would decide how to continue after. The lazy siesta atmosphere was taking hold of us, too, main street quiet in the early afternoon glare. A man walked by with a horse, small clouds of dust rising from their feet, and stopped at the little creek running between road and park to let it drink; once in a while a car drove by.

                                       Entering Rio Pico   

                            

How should we proceed, then? Our options were rather limited: no buses drive out to Lago Vintter, and we couldn’t reach Gretel and Nikita by phone. Well, the first thing we needed to do was to find out which road led out of town to Lago Vintter. We’d shoulder our backpacks and start walking, and hope that someone would take us along for at least part of the way. It was only about two, and days were long. Even in the worst case - if we had to walk the whole thirty-eight kilometres - we should be able to make it.

This is how far we had got with our planning, our lunch not quite finished, when Johann suddenly said, “There she is!” “NO!” was my first reaction. But the short woman with reddish-blond hair waving excitedly from the open window of an old pale yellow Chevrolet camionetta  coming to a rattling halt across the street was Gretel, without a doubt. “So ein Zufall! (What a coincidence!)” she called to us over the roar of the engine.

It wasn’t a total coincidence, of course, but they had indeed not had any news of us until that morning when they went to town thinking we’d have to arrive sometime. Finally able to check her phone at one of the places in town with cell phone reception Gretel found my two messages. 

How good it was to see her again - and what a relief to know that we didn't have to walk all the way to Lago Vintter! 

Interlude: Musings from the Farm.

"Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?" John Keats wonders in his ode "To Autumn".

I, too, ask this question, but unlike Keats who goes on to say, "Think not of them, thou hast thy music too", I have a hard time hearing the song of this season. Or is it really the rustle of treetops bent and twisted by the wind, the hoarse calls of ravens and magpies trying to conduct a conversation while battling the elements? Maybe I simply have to adjust my thinking. 

Do I sound disillusioned?

I have to admit it is a little hard to keep up my spirits when one gets stuck about half a mile from home with a four-wheel drive pickup at seven in the morning - four days into spring!

It snowed steadily for the last two days, not those thick flakes that almost cover your eyes when you lift up your face, but very fine stuff, almost bordering on drizzle. It is difficult to take this snow seriously; much of it melts upon contact with the ground, and it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference if the snow cover is sixty or sixty-two centimetres deep.

This deception lasts only so long as we stay in and around the house, however, sheltered by the bush in the east, thus unaware of the fierce south-east wind. We always know about west or northwest wind which has much easier access to the house and announces its presence with rattling windows and clattering chimney.

There are other ways of finding out about the wind, however. Watching the top of the tallest spruce tree bend low, the one I can see from my bed in the morning, towering above the surrounding poplars, is a good indication, and so is the phone ringing at a few minutes past seven. Nobody phones at that time of day – nobody but Doris, the bus driver, and it almost always means that roads are poor.

Twice in a row this happened this week. Maya is the only student on the bus on our two-mile stretch of road, and two days ago Doris asked Johann if he could take Maya one road over to the west so that she didn’t have to negotiate the blown-in area with the bus. At that point we could still get through with the pickup ...

The snowplough cleared one side of the road later that day, and yesterday morning the bus had no trouble. In the afternoon, however, it was a different story already: Doris had to drive all the way around the block (a detour of 10 km) to come in from the south.  

Our neighbours to the north, too, resigned themselves to that approach after pulling a stuck van out of a snowbank north of their house last night, not wanting to succumb to the same fate. She phoned to warn us about the poor road conditions, and plans were made for this morning to leave for town together at seven, when Johann was going to take Maya to an early Badminton practice. It would be safer to travel in tandem in case something went wrong. Also, a phone call to the county office hotline had given them reason to hope that the roads would be cleared by morning: two snowploughs were supposedly working in our area.

No such luck: they obviously hadn't got around to our road yet in the morning. Instead, the neighbour had cleared a path through the drifts with his little tractor and the snow blower, as they informed us shortly before seven; it should be fine. Johann and Maya left. Only about ten minutes later, however, I heard the front door: ‘Oh, we’re stuck,’ Maya mentioned, almost casually. The problem came a couple of hundred meters before the neighbour's place already: while the path to the north was clear there was a stretch of road before that which proved non- negotiable even for the pickup. No school for Maya, then.

Familiar procedure: plug in the tractor for an hour (or it doesn’t start), then drive down to where the bush on the east side ends and the open field begins, where the wind suddenly has access to the road, sculpting drifts higher than the wheel wells, hard enough for me to walk on. Access, too, to my face, assaulting it with a fine, hard mist of snow, not at all pleasant at a temperature of -7. Our brave old tractor, aided by the snow chains it has worn since the beginning of December, once again did its job.

Now, at the end of the day, the roads have been cleared. Very little snow has fallen since this morning, and we are hoping to have free passage now for a while.

But wait! Just now the mournful whistle of the train and the distant rumbling of its wheels, much louder than it should be, is interrupting my dream of a road free of snow drifts. Only when the wind is blowing from the east or southeast can we hear this so clearly. Here we go again ...


                  Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

                                                  
                                                Indeed.

Gobernador Costa - now what?

The days are considerably longer than at the time of my last blog entry, and we are getting close to the spring equinox – such a nice word, isn’t it? Night and day of equal length, darkness and light in balance.

Yesterday I saw the first flock of starlings; they seem to go by date rather than the weather, because rarely there is as much snow left around the middle of March as this year. What will they eat? How will they survive? And yet they must be confident they will, and their presence is as certain a promise of spring as the drumming of the woodpeckers staking their territory and the suddenly changed song of the chickadee. No longer is there only the idle chatter around the feeder, but from the surrounding trees also sounds the melody that, according to German folklore, encourages farmers to “sharpen their plough shares”: two short high Ds followed by a longer B: “Spitz die Schar’, spitz die Schar’!”  

It will be a while, however, until we can pay heed to that call, as there are still two feet of snow on the ground, and only occasionally does the temperature reach the freezing mark. It is not unreasonable, then, to let my thoughts wander back to South America. There are still a few loose threads to tie up, after all.

                                             

A few weeks ago I told of our long bus ride along the ruta 40, on our way to visit Johann's relatives  Gretel and Nikita at remote Lago Vintter. While they spend the winter months in Buenos Aires with its much gentler climate, they live in Patagonia during the summers, renting out cabañas, cabins, mostly to sport fishers. We had visited them two years ago and had loved both them and the location, and now that we were so “close” we decided to spend a few days there again. They knew of our plans, and we had given them a rough idea when we would be there, but the exact date and time would depend on the bus schedule, which we had not managed to find out via the internet.

As soon as we had bought our tickets in El Calafate, a couple of days before we embarked on the 23-hour bus ride, I wrote Gretel an email to let her know when we would arrive in Gobernador Costa, about 120 km from Lago Vintter. There, she had written earlier, they could possibly pick us up, although it would be nice if we could make it to the little village of Rio Pico, still 40 km by gravel road from Lago Vintter.  She had also mentioned that it would probably better to phone them than to email as they were more likely to check messages on the phone.

What we hadn't quite understood before we got there was that they don’t have any phone or email access at Lago Vintter now but have to drive all the way to Rio Pico to check for messages, and if Nikita is the one going to town email messages don’t get checked at all. 

Not seeing any reply in my mailbox the day after I wrote I decided to try phoning. The internet place I used offered Skype, and ear phones hung on a hook beside most of the twenty or so computers, so I tried my luck – in vain: the number I was trying to dial was “not valid”. Hmmm. Well, we had one more day before we had to leave, and surely there would be an answer: they knew we were going to arrive sometime in the next few days. But no email came, and yet another attempt at phoning resulted in what seemed like a wrong connection: a female voice – not Gretel’s –spewed several sentences in Spanish at me, and I – by now able to find out about bus schedules and order a meal if the person I was dealing with was right before me and patient - didn’t understand a word. I assumed I had the wrong number, and we had no further means of reaching them. Oh well. We’d manage somehow – we were seasoned travellers by now, weren’t we?

Thus we started the journey I described a few weeks back. The bus, filled with tourists from all over the world, made its slow but steady progress northward.  The landscape didn’t change a whole lot after our breakfast in the middle of nowhere: quite flat, with sparse vegetation mostly in variations of beige, silver, and pale green, interspersed with neat mounds blooming in at least three shades of yellow, which, upon closer inspection, probably all would have proved to be generously equipped with thorns, spikes, or bristles. Some of the hassocks of grass looked like porcupines, long dark spikes with light grey tips.

                                           

Once more the bus stopped, in the dusty little town of Rio Mayo at the bottom of a steep hill, the sheep shearing capital of Argentina, as we found out from the Lonely Planet.  It looked totally deserted, probably because it was Sunday – but we would never find out: we were not coming back.  Between Perito Moreno (the town, not the glacier) and Rio Mayo we rumbled over a particularly rough stretch of road, but soon after Rio Mayo we finally reached pavement, and at least for a while travelled relatively smoothly.

The mountains had come into view again, and slowly we got closer. Closer, too, came our final destination. Would anybody be there to pick us up? I didn’t really let myself think beyond that, however. We would deal with it when the time came.

It was after five o’clock already when we passed two big metal arches framing a sign claiming that we had reached Gobernador Costa.  The town seemed to stretch for a long time along a single road, and I was already getting a bit worried that the driver might have forgotten that we wanted to get off here. Finally he stopped, across from a YPF gas station with a long line of cars waiting for service. As foreseen we were the only passengers who wanted to visit this charming place that was described – again in the Lonely Planet – as ‘a place where children are just as likely to snap pictures of you, the tourists, as you of them’, in other words a place not usually frequented by foreign visitors to Argentina. Well, we could see why ...

Our searching eyes didn’t alight on any known vehicle or person, although there was a busy coming and going at the gas station. Given the distances and state of the roads this didn’t necessarily mean that we had to give up on the idea of being picked up. Maybe there was an email message now to give us further instructions. I asked a passer-by where I could find an internet place; he told me there was none. With my limited ability to make myself understood and the equally limited ability to understand everything I was pretty sure that I simply hadn’t computed this information correctly. A town of that size – and no internet! Every little place we had passed through had had internet so far. But an attempt at communication with the cashier of the gas station led to the same conclusion: no, there was no internet here, only phones, a couple of booths at the rear of the little restaurant belonging to the gas station. Well, I might have to try that route again, but we weren't quite ready for that yet.  

The bus stop where we had been dropped off didn’t look like the ‘bus terminal’. Indeed, the cashier at the gas station informed us, the terminal was three and a half blocks down main street. Maybe that's where they were waiting for us! We shouldered our backpacks and followed the sidewalk to the terminal, again, however, we were out of luck. The terminal itself was closed, but we found an open door at the rear which led to a saloon-like room with a blaring TV. An elderly couple was glued to the screen. With an effort the woman tore herself loose just long enough to tell us that there would be no bus to Rio Pico until the next morning. Of course not - what were we thinking? A bus connection to a village of maybe 500 on a Sunday evening?! What time tomorrow, we wanted to know. About eleven, she thought, turning back to her show. Not that this information surprised us. We probably could count ourselves lucky that there even was a bus the next day.

Which options were open to us now? The worst of this was that we had no idea if Gretel and Nikita had a) got our message, and - if they had – b) they were planning to pick us up at Gobernador Costa that night. There was no way to find that out.

Right beside the bus terminal we found a small hotel. If we were going to stay in town overnight we would need a place to stay – but so far we weren’t sure of anything.  We found an older woman in an apron at the reception who was very eager to give us a room for the night, but so far we didn't even know if we were going to spend the night in Gobernador Costa. Good to know, at least, that we would have a roof over our heads.

Back to the gas station, then, to try the phone again. This time I decided to leave a message after the gush of Spanish words -what would be the worst that could happen? A very puzzled Argentinean scratching his head over a message left on his phone in German. If it was indeed Gretel's phone, however, she would at least know that we had arrived in Gobernador Costa, would wait for a while at the gas station, and would spend the night at the hotel beside the bus terminal if they were looking for us. Also, I gave her the estimated time of departure for the morning.

Satisfied that I had done all I could under the circumstances I rejoined Johann in front of the gas station. Now it was my turn to keep watch over the backpacks, while he went off to buy a large bottle of beer. I spent the time watching the customers at the gas station: a few men - mostly older - with boinas, the traditional Basque hats, wearing not their high leather boots but felt slippers: so much for the Romantic idea of the gaucho. He, too, a man to whom his comfort is more important than his pride, a man who could let his guard down and just be "normal" at this place unblemished by misguided tourists? 

We drank our 1 l of "Iguana" beer sitting on a low brick wall, keeping an eye on incoming traffic, and when we still hadn't spotted Gretel or Nikita after almost two hours we made our way back to the hosteria we had found earlier.

The room was neat and clean, and the landlady insisted on taking us to the bathroom, where she turned on the cold and hot water tap - to show us that there was water, we assumed. Oh, good! We were really looking forward to a shower: after the bus ride I was itching all over, with or without reason I wasn't sure, but this had been the only bus so far that looked grubby. It was also the only bus we had been on that had only tourists on board ...

Johann, who showered first, cautioned me: the jet from the hot water faucet wasn't very forceful. Well, okay - but did it have to stop altogether by the time I was ready to rinse the shampoo from my hair? Still, it was nice to feel clean again, and my anxiety concerning the next leg of the journey had abated somewhat after we had found a place to sleep and done all we could to inform our relatives of our plans. Things would develop the way they would, and we'd get to Lago Vintter - somehow ...

The simple life

For the last few years we have been part of a wonderful Family Day-weekend get-together that combines the opportunity to spend time in the mountains with a fun group experience. We – Johann, Maya and I – first took part in 2006 when Maya was only eleven, and Magnus and Courtney plus our “third son” Ben and his wife Steph came along a couple of times as well.

Usually the group – varying in its complete constellation, but with the same core – spends Friday night to Monday morning at the Ribbon Creek hostel in Kananaskis Country west of Calgary. This year, however, the hostel had been booked by a different group already, and we had to find other accommodations. As we like to have the whole place to ourselves for the thirty or forty people the range of possibilities isn’t all that big, and we ended up renting Mosquito Creek hostel north of Lake Louise. All any of us knew about it was that it was supposed to be ‘rustic’...

It's a loong drive from home (Kananaskis as well, but this even more), and we could only leave after Maya came home from school. By the time we were on the road it was almost five: another hour of sunlight, another hour and a half of decent light; after that there were four more to be driven in the dark, much of it on mountain roads. It was a beautiful night, however, and the roads were fairly good. We had chosen not to take Hwy. 2 south to Calgary and then go west to Banff and Lake Louise, both very busy roads, but go cross country and get to Banff Park via Rocky Mountain House and Nordegg, then arrive at the hostel from the north. I drove after the first hour and a half, and for much of the last three hours the other two were asleep, which suited me just fine. Going west on Hwy 11 I was all alone in this moonlit mountain landscape, and it was magical! There is the small issue of wildlife on the road, of course, and I was very aware of that, but the snow is deep in the ditches, and it was very cold; the only animals we saw was a herd of elk very close to Nordegg.

We weren't totally sure where the hostel was, only knew that it was north of Lake Louise and should be pretty close to the highway. National park campgrounds and hostels are usually well advertised, however, and finally the headlights lit up the yellow letters "Mosquito Creek" on their brown background. By then it was 10:30, and my "crew" had just woken up again. The turn-off looked a bit adventurous, with two tire tracks leading downhill in very deep snow - not like something one should tackle with a Toyota Corolla! 'Wait', said Johann, 'don't drive in there! I don't think we'd get back out ...'  Great! Now what? Only a few yards further on, however, there seemed to be a second access which looked a lot more promising upon inspection. A bunch of cars was parked in a cleared space below, and we had indeed arrived at the right place. The first access was for the campground, only used in the summer, obviously, except for some tough back-country skiers with 4-wheel drive vehicles.

Well, we had found the right parking spot (and saw somebody we knew unloading his car right away) - but where was the hostel? All we could see at first was a wall of snow. Once we got out we spotted a couple of entries into this wall, pathways through waist-high snow that, after 100 m or so, ended at a few dimly lit buildings: we were there, thank goodness!

Most of the others had arrived already; some were in bed, some huddled around a not very warm fire in the common area, some busy putting their stuff away in the kitchen. Somebody had a sled, which proved to be very handy to get our things from the car, including a cooler and a tub with foodstuff. But why was everybody puttering around in the near-dark? Well ... this place is rustic, as I mentioned before, with no indoor plumbing, no electricity, and only a small tap providing water for the kitchen from a reservoir, and we were supposed to use the solar-powered LED lighting sparingly, which makes sense, of course.

So Maya and I, aided by the small cone of the flashlight, followed another path in the labyrinth to the ladies' dorm, Johann a different one to the guys', and we made our beds with the bedding provided, encouraged by one of the people already in bed to switch on the light for this purpose, which made it a lot easier. Every dorm had twelve beds, not all of them in use, and another building housed the three families with little kids.

The main building consisted of the kitchen (with wooden tables and benches), closed off quite effectively from the cold entrance with a comforter nailed to the frame, and the common area with the aforementioned fireplace which, as we found out in the next couple of days, was able to heat up the room quite well if one started the fire early enough. Here, a few people were talking, the flames dancing behind the window of the iron stove giving just enough light for us to make out their shapes. We greeted friends we had met on these occasions in previous years, but also a few strangers who we'd have to look at more closely in the daylight to be able to recognize them again.

A glass of wine helped to counteract the effect of the copious amounts of coffee I had drunk during the drive and made me think of sleep, and by midnight the group split up and went their different ways. Now it became inevitable to check out the one building still missing from the assembly: the - brrr! – outhouse. The thought of having to get up in the middle of the night instead held no appeal whatsoever. At close to -30 this took a bit of determination, of course, and the fact that the beam of the flashlight revealed a toilet seat sparkling with a furry covering of ice crystals didn't make it any more inviting to dwell there - but what can you do? It was either that or the snow bank, and the toilet at least had - if thin - wooden walls and was off the ground. I hadn't registered it then, but a toilet seat cover cut out from a foamy hanging on the wall proved to be the peak of luxury on subsequent visits to this place. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

This first night was ... hmmm ... a little challenging. It's never quite easy to share a room with a group of people for the night, and when your feet are like two lumps of ice seemingly not belonging to your body it is really hard to fall asleep. The blankets, too, had a tendency to slip off into the dark, and I lay there listening to the quiet but consistent snoring coming from the next bed over, trying to get my feet warm without rubbing them vigorously which, I was afraid, might result in a mass-waking. How would I ever fall asleep? And how, for that matter, had the others managed? After what seemed like hours of lying awake, I came up with a solution: I retrieved my fleece jacket from the bottom end of the bed and stuck my feet into the sleeves as far as they would go, wrapping the rest of the jacket around my calves. Finally! It wasn't a ticket to hours and hours of blissful oblivion, but at least it got me warmed up.

I must have fallen asleep, too, because I was startled from some dream or other twice after that, once by an angry shout - somebody else's dream, more violent than mine - and again by a quiet whimpering which I took to be Maya's at first. She was in the bunk above me, and I carefully screwed myself up to be able to reach her. My probing hand found a face relaxed in sleep, however (and I'd hear about that in the morning: 'whatever for did you touch my face tonight, mom?') Twenty-five years of being a mother made it easy enough to go back to sleep when I was reassured that the child needing a mother was not my own ...

The next time I woke up the pale light of morning was seeping in through the windows - thank goodness this night was over!

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While the sun took its time to find its way to the hostel itself, tucked into a loose spruce forest, the snow-covered massive wall of the mountain across the road was soon touched with a glorious golden glow: the promise of a beautiful day ahead. Now we could get an idea of the outlay of the place, too, and as always things looked a lot different in the daylight. What a charming place this proved to be, huddling in the deep snow, roofs pulled low! The buildings were a lot closer together than they had seemed the night before, and we marvelled at the tunnel-like paths connecting them and leading out to the parking lot. Somebody had done a lot of shovelling!

The kitchen area bustled with activity, every burner on the two gas stoves covered with pots filled with water for coffee and tea or bubbling porridge, and pans in which slices of bacon sizzled beside generous amounts of scrambled eggs. The windows had steamed up, and a chatter of cheerful voices indicated that everybody was getting ready for a day of outdoor activity. As usual, some were off to the slopes of nearby Lake Louise for downhill skiing or snowboarding, others – Johann, Maya and I among them - wanted to make use of the groomed cross country ski trails in the area, explore the country on snow shoes or just go for a walk. We had no extreme back-country skiers among us, but many come to the mountain parks for that as well, even though the danger of avalanches is ever present, and this year seems to be particularly bad: several people have been killed already when they ventured where it wasn’t safe.

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Once the sun had disappeared behind the mountains the hostel filled with its inhabitants again, returning from their various adventures. Everybody had had a good day, even though it had been fairly cold with a high temperature in the mid teens and some wind. Soon the kitchen was once again filled with the sound of clattering pots and happy conversation: time for one of the highlights of this weekend, the first of two potluck dinners. These are no ordinary chilli and meatball affairs, however, although those, too, can sometimes be found alongside such exotic delights as dolmadakia, spanakopita, tahari, and a variety of salads, to be followed by the most wonderful desserts.

Washing dishes was a little more complicated at Mosquito Creek than it would have been at Ribbon Creek: water, carried over to the sink in buckets from a small tap in the opposite corner of the kitchen, needed to be heated on the stove first, and some planning was involved to get the work done as efficiently as possible. It is not such a bad thing to “do without”, however, not only for the teenagers who might have never experienced this before but also for us baby boomers, so used to our comforts that we most often take them for granted.

How good it feels to share in this sense of community, be it by cooking and washing dishes together or clapping to the lively strains of fiddle and guitar music afterwards, by playing games and catching up on the events in the lives of friends we see but once a year!

We learned that we indeed can get by with a lot less luxury than we are used to, which doesn’t hurt anybody – but I’m sure nobody will complain if we have to make do with indoor plumbing once again when we meet at Ribbon Creek next year!

Wind - Torres del Paine

 Last time I wrote that it was getting harder and harder to find back to the summer landscape we had left only a short time before, and today it seems farther away than ever. After another brief mid-winter thaw that left the deck glistening with rain when I went to bed last night I woke up to the silence that comes with a fresh snowfall, when sound is muffled and doesn't carry very far. Funny that it should be noticeable from inside, but it is.


Soon the snow was moving by the window almost horizontally, and silence gave way to the wailing of the wind.It fiercely attacked and tried to shake loose everything that wasn't firmly attached, rattling window panes and shrieking in the chimney. And suddenly I was back in Patagonia ....


When we were in Argentina two years ago, we spent the bigger part of one night hanging on to our tent stakes because we had foolishly thought we had outsmarted the wind by putting up our tent in the protection of a hedge. During the night the wind shifted directions, however, and showed us that we really didn't know what it was capable of. Since then we have learned that, when travelling in Patagonia, there is no use complaining about too much wind: it simply is a fact of life there, and it is best to embrace the wind as a sometimes annoying but loyal travel companion.


Of course, it sometimes sleeps during the night, even forgets to get up in the morning, which happened on the first day of our stay in Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile. We had travelled from Puerto Montt through the Patagonian channels on a "Navimag" ferry and disembarked three days later (and about 1200 km further south) in Puerto Natales, where we arrived in the late afternoon of January 3rd. Our friends Wilfried and Doris had booked a hotel in the Park, and we had hoped to find a place at the Refugio Las Torres, not far away from their hotel. My attempts to inquire about the booking process and availability were met with the same standard package in two different emails, which didn't answer my questions at all, and we finally decided to trust that there'd be room. If necessary we could sleep in Koch's SUV: we had our sleeping bags with us, after all, even though we had opted against a tent for Patagonia this time.


We were late getting off the ferry in Puerto Natales, had to pick up the vehicle, do some grocery shopping, get a message out to friends and family that we hadn't even noticed the earthquake near Temuco earlier that day, and still had a one and a half hour drive ahead of us. My confidence that we'd certainly find a place to sleep was waning with the fading light - even if there were still beds available, would they let us in close to eleven at night? And if not, and we needed to sleep in the car, would they ban us from the parking lot of the fancy hotel? And was it even permitted to just sleep by the side of the road in a national park in Chile? Suddenly I saw a mountain higher than all the snowcapped ones awaiting us. Johann was unperturbed.
A bridge so narrow that we had to fold in the mirrors to cross it had all of us worried about reaching our destination that night, but with the encouragement of some kids in the car behind us we overcame that obstacle, too, and soon arrived at the refugio.

How could I have doubted that a place that calls itself a refugio would take in weary travellers? Yes, they did have room for the two of us, in a six-bed dorm in which four guys were snoring quietly already, and we just had time to go through the check-in process before the generators were turned off for the night and we were left in the dark, me scrambling to climb up to the top bunk without knocking anything over and waking everybody up. Big sigh of relief!


The view I had from that top bunk the next morning made up for all the worries the night before: I was looking straight at the three "torres"  after which the park is named, glowing in the early morning sun!

One of the things I had tried to find out with my email inquiry was if there were kitchen privileges at the refugio. It turned out that there was no kitchen use available, although one could eat any or all of three daily meals prepared there. Thus we gathered our bread and cheese and palta, avocado, and had breakfast under the low-hanging branches of a small tree outside, guarded by a circle of thorny calafate bushes. An abundance of birds, from the funny, long-billed bandurria to swallows and chipping sparrows, entertained us with their morning songs, the sun was already warm, and the slightest of breezes stirred the long grass. A perfect day to go hiking up to the foot of the Torres!


Some of the men in our dorm, Americans about our age, had done the hike the day before, and we knew to expect a partly strenuous but very rewarding climb that would take us most of the day. The four of us were on our way at nine, so it would be no problem to get back when it was still light.


The path led by the fancy Las Torres hotel through fairly level terrain for a little while before it started to get steeper. A group of about twenty German tourists with walking sticks soon overtook us. Johann, who had, together with Doris, climbed Villarica volcano with a guided group the week before, showed us what he had learned about pacing oneself and conserving energy, and we made very slow but steady progress during that first ascent. I was much too excited about the wonderful flora to be much concerned with anything else on that stretch of way: there was the strange pale beauty of the Porcelain Orchid, the vivid golden calceolaria tenella, better known as slipper flower for very obvious reasons, and, weirdest of all, its cousin, the sand lady's slipper (calceolaria uniflora) that looks more like a creature with telescope eyes and a wide open mouth than a plant. It's especially funny to come upon a whole group of them: no caricature could
give a more perfect impression of a choir in action!

   

                                                                                                        

                                                                                 

After a lunch break away from the crowds gathered at Refugio Chileno we entered a beautiful old-growth lenga forest. Lenga, ñire and cohüe are the three varieties of southern beeches that can be found in Patagonia. Their leaves are much smaller than those of the European beech, and they are very slow growing, but they can get up to 800 years old. The walk through this forest with its widely spaced trees whose branches formed a closed canopy over our heads reminded me of early summer walks in the beech forests of my native Germany, the sun painting patterns on the forest floor where it was able to penetrate the green umbrella shielding us from its heat. Here, walking was easy, the soft ground under our feet a welcome change from firm rock and small rubble. Small glacier-fed creeks tumbled over rocks, sometimes disappearing underground for a while, their banks lined with moss and lush green plants.

Slowly the grade increased again, and became quite steep for the last ascent. Here, we scrambled over rocks big and small, and the sun, unfiltered by any trees since we were above the tree line now, beat down mercilessly. I was starting to feel the shortness of breath I have to contend with for the first day of strenuous hiking when we go backpacking in our Rockies in the summer, although I didn't carry even a small pack this time. It was hard work, and as always the uncertainty how far we had to go made the final leg challenging.


Looking up, we had seen a few people on a big outcrop of rock which seemed to take forever to reach, but suddenly a little army of "inukshuks" greeted us from a flat boulder, cheering us on, or so it seemed, and in less than five minutes we were gazing at the milky blue surface of a glacier lake at our feet, from whose far end the mighty towers jutted up into the almost clear sky: we had made it!

Together with about thirty other hikers, tucked in a niche between some big rocks away from the wind that had started to pick up and from most of the crowd, we enjoyed the view that presented itself to us. As always in the presence of these ancient mountain giants that have weathered so many storms, have stood silently long before any human being ever laid eyes on them, I became silent, too, and again was aware of how small and insignificant we are, swarming like ants on that mountainside, forever drawn upward to stand as close to the sky as those peaks. I had been hot on the way up, but now I was shivering, and my hands were almost numb: the wind drove the icy glacier air right at us. It was time to turn around.




Again the challenge lay in the steep section we had to traverse first. The gritty surface didn't afford much hold, and we stepped carefully, every once in awhile loosening small rock slides with our feet. Johann again led the way, and at one of the steepest sections had missed the only barely recognizable path, taking a shortcut across the scree. We had followed, not paying attention to the markers either, and I suddenly found myself slipping, looking down the steep slope at my feet and at the small figures of other hikers far below me. A brief moment of panic, but Johann's outstretched hand helped me to gain firm ground again. There had not been any real danger, but the mind sure can play strange tricks!

As usual, the descent was a lot faster than the ascent, and a lot less strenuous. Now we could enjoy the view of the valley opening up before us, the mountains on the other side, waterfalls  hanging from their sheer rock face like strings of pearls.


As long as we stayed in the shelter of the ñire forest we were protected from the wind, but on the short climb after the Refugio Chileno the wind got ever more forceful. When we turned the corner at the top it suddenly hit us so fiercely that I felt it could lift me off my feet with only a little more effort. It was an uncomfortable feeling on the narrow path, the steep mountain flank below, and I was glad that the gusts were not very frequent, and I not a featherweight. Resting for a moment to enjoy the view we noticed that the wind was playing games not only with us: a small waterfall on the opposite side of the narrow valley was turned into a “water rise”, the water actually blowing upward before falling down!

No wonder they put up warning signs like these here:

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