Fable

At a small table in a green room at an estancia in the province of Chaco, Argentina, 6 men sat around a table drinking 7-UP. They had driven in a few hours earlier from Patagonia and Paraguay and immediately a torrential rain had started. The first 30 minutes of downpour had sprayed their faces on the porch and even as they filled their glasses at the table, hi-volt lightning made silhouettes of the palm trees outside. 

Among them were farmers, investors, and scientists. They talked of green rings on grasslands and tree trunks wide enough that you could floor your house with timber from just one of them. They talked of woods on a mountain so thick that to cultivate the land you can only enter, first, with machines. (The scientist asked them if they had considered silvo-pasturing). A small black moth landed on a glass; a large yellow one flew too close to the ceiling lamp and created shadows on the wall. Conversation turned to how to create earth (bio-organisms) and how to create money (loans of $1- guarani- with 24% interest). Much interest hovered around how, in Paraguay’s chaco, you can grow carrots with the girth of a two-week piglet. 

When the men had bid each other good night - after first discussing their morning exercise habits - I slipped off to my green bedroom and found two frogs in my bathroom. One was small and silent; the other was large and chirping. I caught the big one and put it outside. When I returned to my room, lightning lit up the sky outside. 

Ranch #2 - El Blanquillo

When we got to the ranch on Sunday, the clouds weren’t yet heavy with rain. Wally fixed the tank and went to change the fence with the Aussies .PIlar saddled up the horses and I struggled to get squirmy Milly into a pair of grey sweatpants. She kicked off her Crocs when Pilar came out with the horses and once we had saddled - blanket, recado, cincha, pelo, sobre cincha - she climbed on top of the pelo and sat there while Pilar gave a calf a dose of antibiotics.

When we rode out to drive the cows from one pasture to another, the rain was lining up  on the horizon and we trotted off faster pulling out long grasses and checking the levels of the creeks we passed through. In the pasture Pilar whistled and give a broad sweep of her arms that sent all the cows moving but when she sent me out further to round up the ones hiding over the hill I couldn’t help yelling a little, anda vacas, vacas vamos, vamos chicas,  timing my whistles with the speed of my horse, and all I wanted to do was gallop, vamos vacas, looping back around tightening the circle following the last cow through the gate as the wind picked up and brought the smell of wet earth from farther away, riding faster up the hills, Milly’s hands in her hair starting to fear the wind and so many birds flying up from the grasses. 

We closed down the windows in the main house and secured the barn’s rolling sheet metal door with a pole on the inside and picked up the gaucho’s laundry which had already flow off its clothesline. While the wind ran around and we waited for Wally and the Aussies to get back from the fence, we ate stale biscuits from a big cardboard box and Pilar put away glasses from the dish rack that looked like they’d been washed long ago. 

We drove in the silence of a loud rain and hit at least three frogs and maybe a skunk on the dirt roads. Copperhead Road played twice and reminded me of the last time I rode a horse, in another hemisphere. 

The Road to the Ranch 2

2. 

As much as with cows and sheep, I’ve been spending time with babies. PIlar has 3100 of the first two species, and two of the second. Milly will be three in July, and Josie is a little past one. In the pickup truck, 150 kilometers, two and a half hours:

“WAHHH” is, I think, the only accurate transcription of a baby’s call. 

“Joe-sie Joee,” Pilar’s husband, Wally shouts gleefully, a paragon of Australian accent, when Josie lets one loose after a particularly big bump in the road. 

“Shosie Sho,” is Pilar’s softer call, equally delighted in the diaper-bottomed cherub. 

Milly muchi seems a fitting name for Milly, the almost-three-year-old with crazy blonde curls, whose English vocabulary so far is limited to “Look!”, a few words of Baa-baa black sheep, and “Ouch!” the name of Wally’s sheepdog. 

Ouch runs alongside the truck as we drive slowly over the fields. Milly runs as best she can across the backseat, sticks her arm out the wide open window. “Ouch! Ouch!”

When we come to a gate, Pilar hops out and opens it with Josie under her arm. She hops back in and Josie cries. 

Milly: “Mamaaaaa!” 

Pilar: Milly, Mama esta’ hablando. Milly!”

Milly: Mamaaaa

PIlar: “Queres un galletita, Milly?”Milly: “Siiii!!! 

“to me: shshooahekak galletita (translation, you want some of my cookie?”

Mucha gracias milly!! She shakes around her curls and continues to break down the crumbs in her hand. She stares out the front windshield and then hops up and runs over to the window again with glee to look at the cows. 

“Papa, Moocowwwww!!!”

Wally drops his voice deep -  “Moocowwww” - and Mily shrieks with delight. 

It’s dark both times we leave the ranch, with two and a half hours ahead of us. Pilar nurses Josie in the back seat while Wally lets his iPod shuffle through songs alphabettically. After Brown Eyed Girl, Milly gets sleepy. Wally turns the music down and she sleeps, a small pink creature safe in a dark car with her dad at the wheel. PIlar keeps her eyes open, holds Milly’s hand.

The Road to the Ranch 1

1. 

PIlar is thin, with dark hair and simple gold hoop earrings. She wears khaki shorts and a flowered blouse. In the pickup truck on the way to the ranch, the first day, she talked first about sheep flies and fecal samples. 

Our soil is shallow, and you can see that the grass is more yellow where it’s most shallow. It’s been a few rainy years, llovedores, good for the grass but not necessarily for the animals. In dry years, their fleeces are heavier. In wet years, the rain washes the grease from the wool and they get flies, too. We have to drench them this week or next to kill the flies, the maggots, the screwworms. The Haemonchus, she wrote in my notebook. We have to check all the animals two times a week. I take fecal samples to know if we need to drench them. 

it’s 150 kilometers from Wally and Pilar’s brick house in Salto to the ranch, but it takes about two and a half hours. After the first 30 KM, you turn off the asphalt and follow dirt roads that have huge divits from the lumber trucks that make the same trip every day. Pilar drives out two or three times a week and often spends the night. 

We have 5 people working on our ranch now, which is unusual, most people have just one or two. It’s hard for me to find good quality people. I spend half my time trying to manage them. Fifteen years ago, before the economic crisis of 2002, people were careful, knew how to take care of things. But now they’re growing up town and only then looking for work in the campo. it’s much harder, to teach something to someone when they’re 18, 20. 

PIlar manages 1400 hectares of grazing land with 2000 sheep and rams and 1100 cows. Wally drove the truck around the whole property so she could show me the grasses. She started transitioning the animals from set stock, where they stay in one paddock, to rotational grazing, about 7 years ago.

The animals look better, to me. I have less bare soil and I have fewer tracks that stay set into the earth. The leaves are wilder and they grow back faster. The water stays longer. and even in 2008, when i was just starting, a year when many many animals of my neighbors died because of drought, I didn’t have very many die. 

At the highest point in the ranch, on the best pasture, we stopped the truck. The sun was setting and all the grass looked even and green. A few Nnandu, ostrich-type birds, bounded along in the next pasture over. PIlar used her iPad to snap a photo of our backseat - me and her two daughters, Milly and Josie. “Milly muchi, Josie Jo! photo with our visitor!” Then she turned to the land, slowly moving the screen across the horizon for a panorama. When she shows those photos to the next people who ask about her work, she will be able to pick out each paddock and underline each creek, point to the shadows or highlights marking where the earth is driest, where the cows won’t graze, where the grass is sweetest. 

Ranch #1 - Estancia Panagea

The country is incredible. It rolls, dark and light green, until it pops up in all the shapes you learned about in geometry - trapezoidal plateaus, cylindrical groves of trees. At Estancia Panagea, which has been in Juan Manuel’s family for three generations, the cattle (1100) and the sheep (1800) roam in eight different pastures, rotated by grass growth, on a total of 2400 acres. 

This was the baby step ranch, for me. It’s a fully working ranch and rural veterinarian station, but it also receives up to 20 guests at a time. There’s no electricity and the toilets flush with water you draw from the well, but the gaucho’s wife cooks for you. You saddle up and ride your horse with Juan and the gaucho, Bilinga, but the ranch would run fine if you weren’t there. I went to get my feet on the ground with this whole land management research thing, and to get a little more experience on a horse before I end up somewhere where they don’t teach you. 

On the first morning, we ate eggs from the chickens and semiduro cheese from town and smoked ham from some antecedent of the pigs sniffing around in the back yard area. Juan brought us to one of the back paddocks where we learned to saddle up the horses with a sheepskin on top of blankets and saddle. Five of us rode out into a far pasture with Juan and Bilinga, who speaks a clipped mix of Spanish and Portuguese which is typical of the area around Tacuarembo. They’ve had a lot of rain in the summers for the past two years, Juan said, and the grass in the unused pastures was long and green. We chased back a bull who had accidentally not been castrated (“we can’t let him be around his sisters,” Juan said, “we will mess up all the stock”) and ran him into another herd of cattle, who needed to have their blood tested before being sold at auction on Friday. We brought them and their calves to a fenced in area behind the house, a caramel stream. 

Siga vaca, vaca anda, vamos vacas, vamos chicas !! Juan and Bilinga did most of the moving, kept up a steady stream of words and whoops. 

In the afternoon, we worked with Bilinga to separate out the cows who needed blood drawn. The vet arrived, a lanky guy wearing a red beret like Che’s and baggy jeans. He came with a wide-eyed kid, a neighbor’s grandson, who wore a squished, brown, broad-brimmed hat. We stood in the pen with bamboo sticks and first chased out the mothers and the calves who were too young to leave them. Then, half the rest into a pen, and then into a run, maybe 6 at a time. With James, an older Brit with one blue and one brown eye and a propensity for pointing out when the bull was mounting a heifer, I was in charge of marshaling them into the run. Vaca, Vaca, Anda! Wielding a stick made me feel oddly protected, even in the swirling, pooping pen.

There were calves who were recently castrated and needed a bright red antibiotic gel to heal up. Bilinga ran into the mass of cows to chase out each one and wrestle it down, lightfootedly, laughing like a kid playing tag. He and Joe, another American, would hold it down while he rubbed on the gel. 

In the afternoon, we went out again to push the cows to a new pasture, but I think we messed up, 12 of us on horses, half taking photos, too scattered to move any herd of animals in one direction. Juan seemed to say eff it, and we all went for a long ride instead. The Dutch were loud and sunburned and making what sounded like off-color jokes. James’ horse kept farting. The evening turned golden and when we got back to the house we had more semiduro and big bottles of beer. 

The next day, we rode out and spent the morning with sheep, herding them and treating their hooves for a parasite that grows when the ground has been wet for too long. In the treatment pen, we pushed them through gates by hand, their wool thick and springy like a memory foam mattress. We moved yesterday’s cattle back from their pasture to the pen behind the house by riding behind them strategically and everyone started to take on the phrases of Bilinga and Juan - vamos vacas, vamos ey ey ey, adding in cries and whistles with shy smiles until we allowed ourselves to pretend we weren’t just visiting. 

In the afternoon, it rained. We had to bring in one more flock of sheep and fewer people decided to ride out. I kicked my horse when she stopped moving and then kicked myself for not being a more forceful presence on the horse to begin with. Or something. Working with animals seems to require both a faith in yourself and a patience with the other and its ability to hear you - a combination of force and sensitivity. 

Juan chased down a lone sheep in the clearing rain. It was one with an especially bad foot infection, limping. He spent twenty minutes away, working to bring it back to the herd, and when it was back, trailing its compadres, he reminded us that we needed to go slowly, with patience, because if we moved the rest of the herd too far ahead, this one would lose hope. We slowed down, stopped the yelling. Juan was walking behind the sheep, talking softly but firmly - vamos oveja, vamos chiquito. 

En Transito #2, Tacuarembo to Salto

I had never imagined that people lived in Curacao, the Caribbean island next to Aruba, much less that they traveled to Uruguay. In fact, at least six of them, a motley crew of friends around 40 years old, exist. They were fun company at the ranch and were kind enough to offer me a seat in their car on the way to Salto. We spoke in Spanish and English, which are only two out of the four languages that get mixed into their native creole, Papiamento. Dutch and Portuguese are the others. 

The drive was gray and beautiful. I crossed peeing near ostriches by the side of the road off my lifetime bucket list:

(That gray blob in the middle of the photo is a ñandú, a South American bird related to the ostrich).

En Transito, Montevideo to Tacuarembo

On Monday, I took a 6 hour bus to Tacuarembo, what you might call the gaucho capital of Uruguay. I drank Paso de los Toros, a fizzy grapefruit soda, and tried to train my eyes to see land - what’s pasture, what’s cultivated, what’s dying, what’s rich. All I saw from my window was land, other than a refrigerator factory and a big meatpacking plant as we neared Tacuarembo.

We pulled in to the station an hour and a half later than promised, and an hour later than the pickup time for the ranch where I was headed. Juan, the ranch’s owner, had suggested by phone that I take a taxi, 30 km, to kilometer marker 189 on the Rt. 31 to Salto. He’d pick me up there at 8 pm.

After a brief consideration of hitchhiking (too time-consuming//too chicken shit) this is what I did. The taxi driver told me about people’s shopping habits in this part of Uruguay so near to Brazil (food across the border there, household goods here), and what Mujica, the current president, has not done well (education, income security). 

We slowed to marker 189, next to a bridge and a whole lotta empty fields, and he let me out and drove off. An invisible cow mooed. I felt very alone and very aware of the fact that I was in a place I did not know. 

Te ubicas? Is something that they’ll ask you when giving directions. Do you locate yourself? Every time I hear it I imagine myself as the pulsing dot on a GPS. Y la verdad, right then, I did not ubicate myself. Not as the tiniest dot.

I got there at seven thirty and waited. 8 came and went - 8:10, 8:15, 8:30, 8:35. I tried to be patient to the fact that time is different in this hemisphere. In hindsight, this was not a long time to be waiting, but it felt endless.

(Above: Hoping to survive and Instagram this lovely selfie).

Just as the sun was approaching its nice little hill beds and I was beginning to scout out the right place to create a sleeping bag from a backpack rain cover, quick-dry towel, and bag of bathing suits (pillow, duh), the yellow truck that had looked parked up the road maybe two running minutes away moved as if to turn around. I RAN. What if it was Juan — who not only had seemed very organized but also has a Swiss wife — and he had been waiting, and given up on me?

It was him, and he had seen me, and he directed the truck to me. I felt foolish and overjoyed. I climbed in and babbled to him about my reporting as we drove the 10k on dirt roads to the ranch house. The clouds were turning an absurd shade of sunset purple as if they, too, were thanking the Peruvian taxi driver’s gods for delivering me from feeling lost. I asked him if he had always known he would stay on the land where he had grown up. Absolutely, he said. Es mi lugar en el mundo."

Montevideo

(Drinking maté on the rambla overlooking the water)

My hostel is an old palace, with high ceilings and marble stairs worn from use. I think all of us staying here wander through it a bit surprised that we can have so much space and beauty. 

I walked part way from the bus station through quiet Sunday streets, past an empty plaza and a full playground, past kids playing hopscotch in the street, past a couple that walked with arms intertwined and their free hands each holding a maté gourd. Sorta like Starbucks. 

The busdriver lit up when I told him I was so excited to be in Uruguay, that me I was in love with it from afar and had to come see. 

A few of us from the hostel walked to the rambla to watch the sunset and saw it slipping into the water like on fast forward. Then we bought groceries and broke a bottle of wine in the hostel kitchen while we were roasting potatoes. The couple from Colorado shared their thoughts on Uruguay's weed policy.

From the hostel terrace at around midnight, we watched an old man putter shirtless on his balcony across the street and heard rock music coming from the glow behind the shuttered door of another old palace. 

I think I dreamed that the sun set even faster than it had in real life, but that didn't matter because as soon as it disappeared into the river it would pop back up, to set again like a cracked egg. 

CrAzY dAY in BA

I set off three hours ago, a cheap Nokia phone (in need of Argentine SIM card) and the address of the ferry company office in my notebook. I had big and exciting plans, claro: to get an Argentine SIM card and a ticket for the ferry to Uruguay, which I thought, if paid in pesos at the crazy “blue dollar” exchange rate, would be $40 cheaper than if I paid online with my credit card at the official exchange rate. I have a list of “things to do” like I don’t know, learn more about the ranch management techniques I’m in theory reporting on starting on Tuesday, but $40 seemed worth the effort of wandering around Buenos Aires.

The Movistar cell phone store was closed. Saturday afternoon, I remembered. People stop here, hang out, sleep. I headed to the ferry office, which I knew closed at two. I walked through Belgrano, which every guidebook has described as leafy and residential and which is, in fact, leafy and residential. Each block, more shopkeepers rolled down their metal grilles. A mom and her little daughter carried plastic grocery bags to their door, unlocked it, went in, closed it. I could hear them walking up stone stairs. The shutters in their living room would be closed, I imagined, to keep the space cool. Maybe the TV would be on. They would eat a simple lunch of milanesas, dry pieces of bread, an insalatita of lettuce and tomato. Then there’d be a siesta. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the BuqueBus store was closed too, an hour and 15 minutes early. It seemed appropriate to buy a weird tank top with eyes on it at the store next door, to make up for this fact. I redirected to the BuqueBus terminal.

In the Subte from Olleros to Juramento, the part of me that’s been warned about everything that could go wrong for a gringa with an iPhone hesitated for a sec to sit in the only empty seat left. The guy across from it looked a little sketchy. His eyes were blank, and he wasn’t clean, and he had a little cart with what looked like garbage lashed to it, some plastic toys that maybe he was selling. I sat after this second, because come on, Charlotte. 

The Subte hurtled along and I realized the wash of calm I felt was because a guy stood five feet away from me playing something beautiful on violin. I wish I knew more about classical music. It felt like swimming.

The guy across from me, the one I had been wary of, was watching the violinist with rapt attention. He nodded his head to the beat, as if it were cumbia and not Mozart or whatever it might have been. The woman with her arm around him was wearing acid washed jeans and red lipstick, and the bottom two feet of her long hair, pushed on one shoulder, was bright blonde. She tapped along. The violin guy smiled at them and when the subway came to the next stop, my stop, he started playing bluegrass.

On, on. At the Subte exit there was a bookstore. Because of the money I was sure I would be saving on my ferry ticket, I felt entitled to buy myself a book. There’s a Uruguayan author named Eduardo Galeano and this book of his looked like he had written 200 daily themes and given them illustrations.  This felt relevant. I bought it, wandered to the bus, got on the bus, felt pleased with myself and the city I was seeing. 

At the BuqueBus terminal, the woman told me foreigners couldn’t pay in pesos, and actually the ticket was 647 pesos, not 524, with tax. Sore feet, thirst, an extra $30 down on the ticket…I regretted the shirt, the book, the 3 hour wander. I hailed a cab with a combination of guilt and need for self-indulgence.

The driver was Peruvian and after we had established my nationality he told me that even though I had a boyfriend (hehe, stories we tell) let’s not be moralistic here, you Americans, so moralistic, if you’re traveling alone in South america you can totally cheat (hacer el cornudo, if you’re wondering). I hope you find a nice Argentine guy, he said.

He told me he was studying history and he asked me if I was religious. Si, de una manera, I believe in something, I said. You studied history, do you know the story of God? he asked. I myself have been studying it, I’m an autodidact. I just have so many questions about the Bible and I’m not sure I can believe it.

I had already paid, but he idled the car and kept talking. Hay montones de dioses, he said. There are tons of Gods. Somos todos dioses. We're all Gods in some way. Suerte, good luck. 

I got out of the cab and the afternoon felt a little more productive, then.

Mari

Maria Elena teaches in a Catholic school, but she’s a sinner, she laughs. 

I’m not married, and here they are, she says, pointing at her daughters. And they have different last names.

“Imaginense if they found out at the school,” she laughs and Javier re-fills her glass. He is Jennifer’s boyfriend and he’s being a good sport, being the only guy at the table, because this is the Rincon de las Amazonas, the Amazon’s lair.

Maria Elena teaches in a Catholic school, but she believes in the Pachamama. She still has the bag of red Paraguayan earth that Jennifer, the intern before me, brought her 6 years ago.

Her first daughter is named Inti, the Quechua name for the god of the sun. Her second daughter, who explodes with a good joke before going silent for another hour, is named Maite. Google shows me it’s a Basque name that means loved one, but I had remembered Mari telling me it meant goddess of the Volcano.

Maria Elena teaches in a Catholic school now, but she started teaching in the barrios in Quilmes where she grew up, and that’s where she wants to go back. She prefers the neighborhoods, she says. She is of the neighborhoods where the garbage gets burned in the streets and ten year old kids bring their four year old brothers to after school programs just so they have something to do in the afternoon. 

The one time I saw Mari teach in one of those centers, she was doing a unit on the indigenous people of Argentina. She had the kids bend branches into dream catchers, like the Mapuche in Patagonia make, and write three dreams to hang from them. 

She built her house herself. Inti’s dad was gone. Maite’s dad was in the picture, but Mari laid the bricks herself and made most of the money to pay for them. She taught at these state-supported after school centers and cleaned toilets at a campsite in the summers. The last time I saw it, the house was simple, unfinished brick on the inside. The plants she kept in soda bottles gave the kitchen a spring green tint, like the inside of an aquarium. 

I don’t think the plants were there, this time, but the trees she planted around their yard have grown tall to shelter and hide the house from the dirt road.The walls are finished, now, and painted white on the inside. She, Inti, Maite, and her new partner, Ubaldo, spent the summer painting the outside bright blue with green and red trim. 

Now, they are one of the oldest houses in the neighborhood. At dusk, we walked along the dirt roads to buy packets of empanada dough and Inti, who just started university for zoology (que emocion, Mari said, I was all in tears when I accompanied her) told me about a government loan program for building houses in neighborhoods like theirs. Progreso, it’s called. The metal struts of these houses stuck up into the sky on the way to the store, and the lightening bugs clustered in dusty bushes. I'd like to study them, Inti said. How they light up!

From the Archives

The last time I was in Argentina was six years ago. I landed in Buenos Aires this past Monday, at 4:30 in the morning with both the remnants of half an Ambien and an airplane coffee in my system. I muddled my way by various buses straight to La Plata, the nearby university city where I spent two months in 2009 working for an afterschool organization called Educaser. I arrived on my host parents' door sweaty and sleepy and feeling, strangely, like I was eighteen again, un-baptized of college, a year in the NYC jungle, and recent months of re-discovering home and re-routing "career" plans. (Is there a word that means career that isn't so terrible? Please let me know).

This weird feeling of time travel continued on Tuesday, when I visited my friend Mari Elena on the other side of La Plata. In honor of that feeling,  I present to you an email I wrote to a friend from my host family's creaky PC after the first day I met Mari:

***

hola che,

writing you finally because i have been meaning to forever, and today was so cool i forced myself to find a computer and sit down for more than 2 minutes. 

this morning was a crazy mess like any you might have when you're trying to get used to living in a new, foreign place--i'm in la plata now, my 2nd week, starting working (supposedly) one of these days. i'm living with a host family and was trying to get to what i thought would be my first day on the job and was wayyy late because our shower didn't work and i had to connect a pump or something to the well. of course the buses weren't really running right either. then i got to the office of my organization feeling overwhelmed and was told that actually i wasn't going to start today, that the director was still on vacation and that i would start tomorrow, so i should go meet one of the past interns and go with her to see her friend. so half an hour later i was on a bus heading out into one of the outer barrios, into the country, with this woman jennifer who has been here for a year and has gotten so involved with the organization (which does after school programs and cultural education for kids up to about age 12) that she just sent in a request/proposal to the argentine government and is meeting with the health minister in a month. she also just came back from paraguay and basically glowed with the travel bug.

her friend is one of the teachers for the organization and bought the piece of land her house is on by selling bread and cleaning toilets during the crisi in 2000. she and her friend built the house with their own hands, and i swear the whole place, wooden ceiling and plants growing in empty pomelo bottles and yard and trees and field and sky stretching far away, is magic. we sat outside from about 2 pm to 9:30 talking about everything, drinking quilmes and mate and eating empanadas and something made me so comfortable that i was thinking in spanish/castellano (i always say espanol by accident and then feel like i'm being un pc haha). i wish i could descrive the scene better--maybe i'll take some more time later and write a real description but i don't want to bore you with a novel, i just wanted to say i understand what you meant when you said this place was crazy. we had some epic nights and no sleep and 5 peso wine in buenos aires and the vivaciousness of the argentines in general is loco but today was just wild, mind blowing. like even if i don't need bug spray and jungle clothes to go exploring i'm going to stumble across something shivery.