Days of Wine and Roses

Don't read too much into the title, I just like the way it sounds. 

It is April now and I have 10 days of overlap between the cabaña and the casa. I make a trip each day to stock the cabaña with soap, black beans, flaxseeds, potatoes, and various canned fishes and shellfishes. During the first trip, a black pup poked his head out of the grass on the side of the road and started running behind me on the ride back into town. He now joins for every trip, meeting me when I leave the cabin and tagging along until I cross the Río Simpson. He seems to be following some sort of animal instinct to follow my bike, but my humanness wants to believe that he senses my openness to companionship during this phase of the adventure. In a more selfish sense, he also provides a reason for motorists to avoid killing me, as they would need to mow down the two of us… The expression on his face is of excitement, as in, ‘oh you’re going for a ride??? I wanna come! All my humans are super boring and stay at home all day…’ The ride itself can be invigorating, a ‘flow experience’ as they say... large divots in the road present an opportunity to bank turns; I fly over terrain that would be nausea-inducing in a vehicle.

Sometime around this transition, I come to realize my solitude fully, not so much ‘alone’ – this is the feeling I get when attending a social event where one is expected to have another human at one's side at all times – but self-reliance, soulitude. As in, if I move for the summit in thick aguanieve and wrench an ankle between boulders, it’s on me to get my body out. As in, if I get a flat tire, I need to patch it (I could hitchhike…) As in, if I spend all my money in a couple months, it’s on me to figure out another source of income, or get myself back to the U.S. I may go caffeine-free: the instant coffee isn’t worth drinking; the mate is delicious, but an unnecessary expenditure. A beaned-up bum beaming bullshit decaffeinated descriptions, nonsense into nothingness.

I will certainly not miss the sounds of Coyhaique – every house has a dog that barks at any other creature passing by. For every housed dog, there are two to three unhoused dogs, who tend to gather around 4am and try to visit the housed dogs, starting a barking frenzy that lasts until sunrise.

In my final days living in town, I go out of my way to meet new folks, enjoy the convenience of walking to events. I find myself sitting down to dinner at the house of a Couchsurfing host I ‘met’ while searching for housing, along with two Hollanders, another Coyhaique native, and a viajero from Brazil fresh off the trail from an adventure in Cochrane. He serves cordero (lamb), a traditional Chilean meat, along with some eggy potatoes (hoooeee!). After a few glasses a wine, he begins to argumentatively challenge the utility of science and my ‘professional presence’ in Coyhaique, (paraphrasing) ‘science is ruining the world, my mother farmed her whole life without any modern knowledge and lived past 90, look at what Monsanto’s doing in Brazil…Science isn’t just about seeking knowledge, it’s about making money…’ Although I agree in some ways, I find myself defending my particular niche of ‘environmental observation,’ gathering weather and climate data for the purpose of understanding current patterns in flow, and how these patterns may change in the future. Still, he is insistent on the idea that science should never take place since it can be used for profit. This is the first time someone has actively challenged what I’m doing here, and makes me wonder whether I should avoid science that has a ‘conservation flavor.’ I am certainly a naturalist hiding in engineer’s clothes (out of necessity, for no one will pay you to be a naturalist in these times…) but I tend to fall back on western knowledge. 

I met a lovely lady on Tinder (what a world) who doesn’t mind my lack of Spanish fluency; in fact, she seems to enjoy teaching me Chilenismos, and hearing my take on everything. We meet for coffee. She lives in Puerto Aysén, the oceanic small-town alternative to Coyhaique, and had come to town for the day turning in academic paperwork. The coffee is absurdly delicious – I hadn’t had a decent brew in weeks, and feel damn near drunk after an Americano with two shots of espresso. Excellent conversation, don’t quite remember what we talked about…Chilean spanish? We walk to a scenic spot that looks out south over the Río Simpson valley, including the bridge I cross traveling to and from the cabaña. She points out the piedra del indio -- turns out this is a different rock than I initially thought. Everyone is always talking about the piedra del indio, streets named after it, so I naturally assumed it was the most prominent rock in town – turns out the big rock is called Cerro Mackay, and piedra del indio is a mostly nondescript formation, aside from the fact that it resembles a face. I get deep into work-mode this afternoon so I can head to a farm en el campo tomorrow evening and visit Puerto Aysén on Sunday. Flexible scheduling, remote working…

I have decided to fatten myself up for the winter – I’ve tried this many times in the past but haven’t had a great deal of success. I recently found a source of harina de maiz to make arepas – not sure why I have this hankering deep in southern Chile...So far, I’ve had some success in adding layers of thermal insulation to my body via the combined consumption of arepas and butter. Maybe not an excellent long-term choice from an inflammation perspective, but damn delicious and perhaps practical.

Saturday the housemates, players of drums, and I cram into a couple cars and make for el campo, some seven of us in a small 4WD Nissan. A friend has some family who farm a pristine river valley somewhere in between Coyhaique and the coast. After many rowdy kilometers on rocky roads (more like horse trails), across streams, along steep ledges, we find ourselves in foggy mountain paradise, cows, sheep, horses grazing grass, shelters like sheds dotting the landscape. A rushing stream cuts the valley, steep wooded slopes lead up to the snowy cerros above. At the end of the road is our cabin for the night -- the farmer spends his Saturday and Sunday in town, and kindly offered up his space for us. The rain is steady but we make for the cascada before nightfall – along the way, we find apples, pears, unknown berries that don’t sit well in my stomach…Hooting and howling, we descend a steep slope toward the sound of the cascada, catching a glimpse through the trees of the stream as it surges down to the bouldery bowl below – I wade, the water bone-chilling, spirit-awakening, life-reminding. The evening is drums toom katta takka toom a vegetarian feast, arepa with cheese, wine.

Conveniently, the route back to Coyhaique converges on the route to Puerto Aysén – I hop out at the right spot and hitch a ride toward the coast. Of course, the driver knows all the housemates and lives at minga alegre, the permaculture camp on the edge of Coyhaique. Mid-afternoon on a rare sunny day in Puerto Aysén, I find an ice cream shop with wifi – the cashier doesn’t make me purchase anything – and message my friend, ‘I’m here!’ She meets me and graciously gives the grandest tour of town, all the good river spots, the plaza, abandoned boats, suspension bridge (longest in Chile? second longest in South America?) Puerto Aysén feels completely different from Coyhaique -- although we are still some 15 kilometers from the coast, I feel the presence of the sea; lush hillsides rise out of the river, guarding its gentle passage west. Blue and green, gone are the golden slopes of the inland mountains rising steadily toward the Argentinian pampas. High above, the nevadas shine in the sunlight – here there are no routes leading up, only the condors know the alta montaña in this coastal landscape. The river itself breathes with the tides –Puerto Aysén served as the region’s port until the Río Aysén filled with sediment in the 1960’s, and Puerto Chacabuco became the primary port. We eat an empanada, sit by the river until the sun peaks behind the cerro, and I hop on a bus back to Coyhaique.