Surprising encounters

It's almost the end of August, and after a long summer break it is time to return to "Musings from the Farm". I know there is still the open ending of our "escape" from Argentina, and I hope to return to that in time as well. Right now, however, the farm is a lot closer than South America, and here, too, every day can bring a new adventure.

Take yesterday, for example. ...
                                                 
Tonight while digging potatoes for a late supper I saw something crawling slowly across the dirt where I had just pulled a potato plant. As far as I can determine it was a tiger salamander, probably a grey tiger salamander. It's an amphibian found in the northern states, too. I took him in my hand to get a good look at him: his skin felt smooth and cool, and he was about as long as my hand head to tail, dark grey (or maybe dark green) with paler spots, a typical newt head, and the neatest feet: his front feet had four toes, the hind ones five. They looked like perfect little hands, so delicately formed.

I put him right back where I found him, and I suppose he'll now have to dig a new burrow. Of course I felt bad to have, however innocently, destroyed his home. A few years ago I had found a salamander much like him in the garden, too, that time in the strawberry patch which was then about where the potatoes are now. I wonder if it's still the same little guy. I read they can get really old, up to eighty years. Amazing, isn't it?

A bit later.

By now it was getting pretty dark. I took the laundry off the line and saw something fluttering above, doing an elegant dive every once in a while: a small bat on its nightly hunting excursion. They, too, I don't see very often around here, so you can imagine my thrill at watching it. Two in one day - hard to beat that, isn't it?

Right now I'm still waiting for the rye bread to finish baking. At harvest time sandwiches are our staple food, so I decided to bake a bit in advance to not be stuck in the middle of combining.

I read some poetry by Jane Kenyon earlier today. When, you ask, do I have time to read poetry? At naptime - one has to keep sane one way or another! I've liked almost everything I've read from her, and this struck me as particularly poignant in my state of mind this summer:

Not Writing

 A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.

(Jane Kenyon)


There is one more encounter that, to me, belongs with the other two although it happened very early this morning, simply because it was another surprise from the natural world.

I woke up from a noise in the living room when it was still dark: Stanley, our cat, who had managed to escape detection last night when I went to bed and had spent the night snoring on the couch or one of the kitchen chairs. He has a way of making his presence known at night when he wants out, so I groped around in the dark until I found him and stepped out on the deck.

It was surprisingly mild, and the sky was bright with stars. As always the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia greeted me, and the tiny cluster of light that makes up the Seven Sisters. But there, just above the tops of the poplars in the southeast, I saw three well-known stars lined up: Orion's belt! So it's that time of year again already, time for my favourite constellation to appear in the night sky. I had no idea he was up and about at the end of August already, the companion of my fall and winter nights, and if it hadn't been for Stanley I probably wouldn't have found out for a while.

The difficulty of leaving

Not long ago – though long enough ago that it was still hockey season - trying to watch the news, I was startled awake from a slumber induced by a seemingly endless report on the hockey playoffs: my subconscious, obviously more awake than the rest of me, had caught the words ‘volcano eruption’ and ‘Chile’. It was just a short mention, and by the time I was fully alert it was over, but a check of Google quickly brought me up to date: Puyehue volcano in south-central Chile had indeed erupted, for the first time since 1960.

The photos were spectacular: a 10 km high cloud of gas and ash against a deep blue sky, others with volcanic lightning putting any fireworks to shame. Normally I would have read it with interest, maybe thought briefly about the effect it might have for its surroundings, vaguely relieved that nobody had come to harm, but it would soon be forgotten.

As this volcano, however, is in a region where we travelled not even six months ago, these news touched more than the surface: we had seen this volcano and many others, seemingly at rest, had become aware of their steady presence in the lives of the people of this beautiful yet geologically troubled nation. They have dominated the landscape since long before any humans roamed their slopes or tilled the fertile soil enriched by their ashes, asleep, sometimes for long periods of time, but unpredictable and always there.

 When we saw it last, we were not thinking of the potential danger it could pose; our minds were on other things, and we had just begun to breathe a little easier after overcoming the last hurdle in an unforeseen obstacle course.

In my last South America blog entry I talked about our stay at Gretel and Nikita’s on the shores of remote Lago Vintter in Patagonia. While the last leg of the journey to get there was quite an adventure we had found the bus system in Argentina as well as in Chile excellent: busses were modern, clean and comfortable – and very reasonably priced. For the most part we just went to the bus depot and bought our ticket (this was a bit of a learning process in the beginning, I have to admit, mostly to do with the language barrier, but with every new part of the trip it got easier). Only once we had the feeling that it might soon be difficult to book a ticket for a certain time, and that was right before Christmas when everybody went someplace for the holidays, often using the bus as mode of transportation. Other than that we never had trouble to book a seat, usually had the choice of where we wanted to sit.

With that in mind, and after conversations with other travellers who had crossed the border west of Bariloche where we, too, wanted to cross, we weren’t worried about the last part of the journey, the way back to Santiago. Everything had gone so smoothly, and we didn’t give it another thought. We had bought our tickets from Temuco, where we had left part of our luggage before going south with our friends, back to Santiago for Sunday morning, with enough time to get safely to the airport Sunday night; that we had decided not to leave to chance.

Nikita was going to take their daughter Monica and grandson Jan to Esquel on Friday; they wanted to catch the bus to Buenos Aires from there, and there was room enough for us to come along to this bigger town with good bus connections. Perfect!

We said good-bye to Gretel a little before six on Friday morning, after a last breakfast together. Would we see them again? Last time we were quite as unsure about that, and yet not even two years later we were back. Now that we had eaten the fruits of the Calafate bush we were bound to return, if the Tehuelche legend can be believed.

We had last driven this road on our way to Lago Vintter in February of 2009 with our little rented Opel Corsa, and it had taken us forever: ripio, the Argentinean version of gravel roads, is very hard to negotiate with a small car. With Nikita’s ‘Rodeo’, a kind of SUV, it seemed to be a lot easier, and this time I actually got to enjoy the beautiful lush landscape instead of keeping my eyes on the road the whole time: Nikita knows this stretch of road like the back of his hand, and big rocks sticking out in the middle of the road pose no problem to him.

A little before ten we arrived at the spacious modern bus terminal in Esquel, and while Monica and Jan got ready to board their bus Johann and I immediately checked which bus companies went to Bariloche, our last stop in Argentina from where we would take the bus west across the border, to Osorno and from there to Temuco. There were several, as we found out, so we had a good choice and could compare prices.

This was not going to be our main focus for very long, however; soon we would be concerned with more basic matters. To Bariloche? Yes, at about four in the afternoon, the lady at the first bus company told us.  And from there? Monday afternoon. Monday afternoon?! This didn’t help us at all, and we went on to the next company’s counter. This time, however, it was even worse: the next bus with available seats would leave on Wednesday. By then we had planned to have overcome our jetlag already! No more luck anywhere, it turned out: we could get to Bariloche, but not across the border to catch our flight home.

Now what? Which options did we have? According to Nikita there was a flight service available; he had used it a few years back. When I checked it out online it turned out that this airline wasn’t operating any longer. LAN, however, was, and when Nikita inquired on our behalf they were very helpful: of course we could get a flight from Esquel to Temuco!  Big relief – until we found out that we had to fly to Buenos Aires first and from there to Temuco, for a lot of money and much too complicated.

What next? Nikita’s sister Nina lives in Bariloche, four hours north of Esquel, and he thought she might know of more bus companies. When he talked to her on the phone she named several we hadn’t tried yet, but upon inquiry they, too, turned out to be booked out. Also, Nina said, Bariloche was full to the brim with tourists, hotels totally booked out, and she, too, had no room in her house because she had visitors. She called several friends with hotels or B&Bs, but the same reply everywhere: no room in the inn.

What were we to do? We were getting ready to call Air Canada and postpone the flight till the middle of the week, trying, without real success, to get enthusiastic about extending our holiday: as much as we liked it here, mentally we were now homeward bound. Once again I got a booth at the locutorio, the internet place, and was in the process of opening the Air Canada site when Nikita received another call from Nina.

This time there finally were some good news: Nina had found a way for us to cross the border. It turned out that there is a taxi service specializing in this endeavour, where a taxi and driver are hired for a certain distance – in our case to Osorno on the Chilean side – for a set price. These taxis, while expensive, were available for the next morning, and she had also found two beds in a hostel in Bariloche, another difficult feat, as we had found out. Thank goodness!

We booked the bus ticket to Bariloche for four in the afternoon, Nina made arrangements with the hostel and the taxi company for us, and we said goodbye to Nikita early in the afternoon. How fortunate we were to have such helpful relatives! This would have been very difficult without them.  

(To be continued)

Morels

A few days ago I received a phone call from people I had met earlier this spring through our friend Ben. This couple, a retired vet and his wife, live about three quarters of an hour south-west of us in a beautiful forested area, and they talked about gathering morel mushrooms right around their place early in the spring.

Morels? I was much intrigued: while I had heard about them growing up – in German they are called “Morchel” – I hadn’t ever seen them except in pictures. I had eaten them, however, although nowhere in our northern climates, but in Patagonia at Gretel and Nikita’s. They, too, gather them in their beech forests in the spring and dry them for later use. Gretel, who could perform amazing feats on the wood-burning stove in their little cabin, had served them in a cream sauce with a huge trout caught in Lago Vintter, and I thought I had rarely tasted anything that good.

Busy with seeding at what I assumed to be prime morel time I had put them out of my mind: maybe next year I’d be able to go out and hunt for them. Then came Linda’s phone call: she wanted to let me know that they had just found a good supply of morels not far from their home, and she thought I might quite well have success finding them in our own poplar forest. What did I have to watch for, I asked her. Were they easy to see? Did I have to scrape away any leaf litter? No, I was thinking of truffles, of course, and oak forests, and pigs, underground mushrooms that bear a certain likeness to potatoes ...  Morels, she said, are not hiding where they grow; they poke out of the ground, their hats dark grey or brownish, their stems cream coloured. They could be anywhere – or not.

Thus Carl and I struck out later that evening and made our way through the bush across the house, aided by Leo, our now four-month-old German Shepherd puppy who is always eager to embark on new adventures. It was near dark already, however, and our mission ended without finding one of the delicacies.

The next day I managed to escape Leo – he is not always helpful and tends to bring a certain element of unrest to any situation – and entered another piece of poplar forest, this time a little further away from the house. Hunting for morels, of course, is yet another excuse to walk through the tangled wilderness that goes as forest here, and I am very happy that not everything is ‘tamed’ for grain farming. While it would be nice to have walking paths like the ones I remember fondly from my childhood in Germany there is a certain attraction to bush left to its own devices.

I entered the bush following a narrow path coyotes and deer seemed to use, but soon it got lost among the thick underbrush. Climbing over tree trunks fallen so long ago that they were soft and spongy under my feet and sometimes didn't bear my weight anymore I tried to find another opening to continue my quest. Progress was slow, since I was scanning the forest floor for signs of the elusive fungus. I knew I had to look for something resembling an elongated honeycomb wrapped around a stem, and that morels love old leaf litter. There was a lot of that, admittedly, and it was wonderful to walk on that soft underground, so unlike the clods of earth in a newly cultivated field. 

The sun slanted through the tender green canopy, a few lazy mosquitoes whined around my head, and a deeper hum drew my attention to a wild gooseberry bush covered in star-shaped blossoms: a big bumble bee clung upside down to one of them, obviously enjoying the sudden feast after the table set so meagerly for the first weeks after the long winter.

There was more to come: wild black currants, pale yellow clusters of blossoms just opening, joined by the darker gold of bracted honeysuckle, while the showier twining honeysuckle was still holding off. A purplish leaf, rolled tightly, caught my attention, and soon I found others open already, glossy, not quite green yet, a thin stem topped by a tight cluster of buds: wild sarsaparilla, a member of the ginseng family. The name, to me, seems to carry magic, evokes a good old wizard. It is quite prominent in spring, unlike its ‘evil’ relative, Devil’s Club, spiked with poisonous thorns and not frequent in our area.  

The strong, glossy leaves of wintergreen kept company with sweet-scented northern bedstraw, its leaves arranged in loose whorls spaced along weak creeping stems. ‘Waldmeister’, it is called in German –Master of the Forest- and for many years I have thought to gather it and make a refreshing spring punch popular in Germany, the so-called ‘Waldmeisterbowle’.

Carefully I bent hazel twigs away from my path, set a shower of white petals falling when I tried to evade a Saskatoon bush, and, slipping off a big trunk I tried to use like a balancing beam, took hold of the first twig that stretched my way, which unfortunately happened to be a wild rose. I’d have to pull out the prickles later.

Dogwood bushes, too, were now fully covered in leaves, but that couldn’t hide the fact that many of them were neatly trimmed: moose love them, and ample amounts of moose droppings showed that they had given sustenance to these great beasts during the long, hard winter.

I was getting quite close now to the other side of the bush, and the mysterious half-light started to brighten as the sun could reach in better from the edge. And there it was, one of my favourite woodland sights in the spring: the delicate blue and pink bells of the lungwort nodding on long tender stems rising from hairy leaves.

In spite of careful searching I still had not found a single mushroom – but who cared! I had spent a wonderful hour in the forest. Who could ask for more?

As for the culinary delight we were going to have to do without: maybe I could replace it with another, and finally make a Waldmeisterbowle, now that I knew where to find the sweet-scented bedstraw. All I needed for that would be some dry white wine and a bottle of champagne, and I certainly wouldn’t have to look long and hard for that!

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.