Above: A typical wind-battered storefront in Puerto Natales, Chile
Wednesday 1/7/09 Santiago, Chile
***Taken from my journal, this entry is about Patagonia and a woman I met in the southern Chilean town of Puerto Natales***
“Lots of scientists and other people think the giant sloth became extinct thousands of years ago, but we know that’s not true,” Jovita told me in Spanish, straight-faced. She took a drag on her cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the living room. “Everyone around here knows that the sloths lived in peace with the native people up until the Europeans arrived. Once lots of Europeans came in the 1800s, they killed the last of them and now there are none left. It’s a shame, I think.”
Above: Jovita
I didn’t want to tell Jovita that I had heard the reason lots of folks think sloths lived up until recent times (as opposed to 10,000 years ago, as scientists claim) was because the most famous sloth remains discovered, the ones found at The Cave of the Giant Sloth nearby, were well preserved by Patagonia’s frigid climate; when fur isn’t ravaged by dirt and rain over millenia, it can take on a deceptively fresh, not-so-old look. But who was I to say she was wrong? After all, she was the one who lived all her life in the sloth’s backyard.
*****
Patagonia is a place where human life endures. It doesn’t thrive there or flourish like a spring strawberry patch spiderwebbing its way across a field. No, instead it persists. It fights for each harvest, each long, rough road cut into the vast Patagonian steppe, each bundle of sheep’s wool, each meal on the plate. For centuries now, Patagonia has attracted the types of people who know how to squeeze survival from a place.
Although indigenous groups, mainly the Tehuelches, a people rumored to have sparked the naming of Patagonia after Europeans spotted their slightly-taller-than-normal stature and equated them to Patagon, a giant from Greek mythology, have inhabited lands in Patagonia for thousands of years, the horde of Welsh, British, German, and other foreigners that flocked to Patagonia in the last two centuries has largely been comprised of people looking to start life anew, people hoping to seize opportunity at the expense of comfortable living.
Above: Some of the rugged mountains in Los Glaciares National Park
Any place so remote has an allure for outsiders, for people looking to put some distance between themselves and others. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to Patagonia when things got too hot in the states. They asked the government for thousands of acres of land so they could set up a livestock business, got it, and built a home for themselves deep in the wild. After languishing in the stability they’d created for themselves with the farming lifestyle, they started staging their signature robberies again in unsuspecting, unprotected Patagonian towns. Granted, Cassidy and the Kid were some of the first to ever commit such daring crimes in Patagonia and set a precedent in doing so, but their type of people—folks aiming to live apart from their homelands, people looking to capitalize on the pristine environment found in Patagonia—settled far and wide across the land.
*****
Jovita’s grandparents came to Puerto Natales in the early 1900s from Spain. They had heard the land was cheap and found comfort in the fact that they’d be able to use their mother tongue in doing business, in life. Her parents stayed on in the town after establishing a small but successful livestock trading business, one fueled by no more than 20 horses and 20 cows at a any one time. Jovita has lived in Puerto Natales all her life, 51 years, and has watched the town succumb to remarkable changes.
“When I was a girl, I remember bouncing down the road in the back of my father’s one-horse wagon. The roads were all dirt back then, no pavement, and everyone used wagons,” she told me, sparking another cigarette. She tossed the lighter onto the table.
“Even in the late 1950s and early 1960s?” I asked
“Ohh yeah, of course. This was always a sheep farming town, you know. It was very basic before all of these hikers started coming to visit Torres del Paine. No houses had water or electricity. You would have to walk down into the center of town to find a corner with a public water spiggot on it to get water. Carry it back to your house in heavy buckets!” she said, smiling, chewing over the memory.
“How did you like living in the town back then? As a girl, did you enjoy living in a farming town like that?” I asked.
She took in my question and thought about it for a second before becoming aware of the burning cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. Because it was there, she took a long drag on it and, a second later, blew two streams of smoke from her nostrils like one of the dragons I saw in cartoons as a kid.
Above: Jovita liked to put her butts in a compartment inside an old stove in her kitchen.
“Yes, I did like it, I think,” she said. “I liked it most of the time. I hated some things though. Um, for example, I hated when my father called out to me from the barn. Because when he called out to me, when he screamed ‘Jovita!’ like that, it meant only one thing—that he needed my help with a bull. With a, uh, a cutting,” she said, smiling again.
At first I didn’t understand what she had meant. She saw it in my face.
“A cutting of the bull’s…uh…you know…the bull’s…uh…man parts,” she said, laughing.
“Really? So what would you do, would you do the cutting yourself?” I asked her.
“No, no, I refused. My father tried to teach me, but I refused. I just helped him tie the bull up, hold the reins—that sort of thing. Never the cutting, though. I hated that!”
*****
Jovita and I talked for two hours at her dining room table. I had finished my breakfast, had nothing other to do in town that day other than rest and recover from my hike, and felt no reason to wander outside into the howling winds that were rattling the windows. I had spent the night before in Jovita’s small guesthouse. To supplement the income she makes selling the odd cow or chicken that she keeps on her farm outside town, she runs the guesthouse for backpackers.
As we talked, I was awed by the amount of information and folklore Jovita knew about Puerto Natales and the surrounding areas. I have met people like her before, people who have spent their lives living in small towns and, out of social necessity, had absorbed the local legends and quirky stories of the area, but Jovita was different in that she loved talking about these things with an outsider. She saw me as a fellow person, someone interested in her past and opinions, rather than an alien creature from a distant land. She wasn’t reserved and was very open in sharing her thoughts on a wide range of subjects. After our conversation, I rushed to a coffee shop and tried to write down everything she told me before forgetfulness came for me. Below is most of what I was able to remember from the things she told me.
On global warming:
“Now the wind is warm when it blows. It always used to be a little bit cold before.”
“When I was a girl, in the winter, snow always used to fall up to the bottom of the window sills. Always up to the bottom, right here,” she said, pointing to the waist-high window sill in the kitchen. “Now we get no snow in the winter in Puerto Natales. No snow! Can you believe that? This is a change that has happened in 40 years. A very fast change.”
“I don’t see snow on the mountains anymore outside Puerto Natales in the winter and it makes me sad. Looking at the mountains and seeing them look strange with no snow, no white color–I don’t like it.”
On farming knowledge:
“When we kill a cow here, we don’t waste a single part. My father taught me how to stretch a cow skin, how to cut it into horse reins, clothing, whips—everything. I learned how to cut the meat, of course, but I also learned how to use the bones and everything else. I even learned how to use the hooves to make soups and other food. Have you ever tried Cow Hoof Cheese?”
“My kids used to complain when they were growing up about living out here in Puerto Natales, living on a farm. They didn’t like hearing the things I tried to teach them. I wanted them to know all the things my father had taught me. I remember telling them once, ‘If you don’t like this lifestyle, leave. Go live in a city somewhere.’ So one of them left when she got older and she lives in the city now. The others stayed, thank goodness.”
“People in the cities think we’re not as civilized down here, like we don’t know all of the city knowledge that they know. Which, you know, is true. And that’s OK. I like being less civilized! It’s OK that we’re different. Really, I don’t want to know all the things they know in the cities. I know exactly what I need to know to live here in Puerto Natales, in Patagonia. I don’t need to know more than I need to know to live.”
“My husband’s brother still has his farm. A big one. He gives us one cow each year. He kills the cow and gives us the meat in big pieces. We lay plastic on the kitchen table, lay the meat down, and cut it up into very small pieces. Usually it’s enough meat for three months of eating.”
On the rapid development of Puerto Natales:
“This is not the same town it once was.”
“When I was a kid we used to eat the small black fruit of the calafate flower. They used to grow all over a hillside near my farm. My grandkids told me a few months ago that they were going to look for calafate fruit. The hill they wanted to go searching on, the one I used to always go to, is now covered in new houses. To make the houses they plowed the earth on the hill first. I was sure that no flowers grew there anymore. I didn’t want to tell them they shouldn’t go to look for fruit, that the fruit is gone from that hill. So I just wished them luck.”
“It’s hard to find farmers around here now. Lots of our vegetables, meat, and wool comes from other places in Chile. Before we had everything we needed right here in town and we all bartered with each other, trading what we grew or produced. Now most of my friends work in restaurants or guesthouses for the tourists. Kids don’t understand why they should learn the old farming ways because they think tourism, not farming, is where they can make the most money. And it is.”
On the origins of the name of Torres del Paine National Park:
“The word ‘paine’ comes from one of the languages of the indigenous tribes in the area. It means ‘blue’. They called the area Torres del Paine because, between the snow on the mountains, the blue lakes, the glaciers–everything looks a little blue. It’s a blue area.”
*****
If you would like to stay in Jovita’s guesthouse when you visit Puerto Natales, it’s located on Calle Esmerelda and is called Hospedaje Olguita.
