Nice Fish

Just some picture of my life

Above: Rio Desague
Bordering our property

Tres Monjas, a view from the road side of the property.

Greg contemplates the river.

The humble cabin with the Rio Azul raging below in the background.

Opposite view from Tres Monjas. Who could ask for anything more. Ahhh, maybe electricity? Nah! Who cares with this view.

Making apple Chicha

Greg and a visiting dog. He stayed one day, got in the garbage and left. He apparently uses the same barber as Greg.


We head up here to Nono's farm to help make apple chicha in an ancient contraption in one of their outbuildings.

The pressing side where all the good stuff comes out.

The grinding, chewing side. Apples go in and are ground down through, dropping into a wooden trough. Later, we feed the pressed apple bits to the two pigs.

Two days later, Nono and Ismael took us to a spot on the Rio Desaugue, a half mile up from our house where we lassoed some monster salmon. I'm waiting for photos to post because if I told you how big these fish were, you simply wouldn't believe me. Yes, lassoo!!!!

A Day in My Life

An old friend wrote and said, in part, "What do you DO? I mean, what is life like there?". Maybe he was imagining me throwing on my sheepskin cloak and slinking out into the frozen hinterlands to hunt rabbit and wild boar. Well, not quite. Anyway, here is what a typical day might be for us (excluding going to town and making the futile attempt to finish errands and buys supplies):

We wake up with the sun, or light (as it is now mostly cloudy, or overcast. Greg makes me coffee and stokes the woodstove and has his home-made granola. I have my coffee under my nice fluffy, warm covers, then go downstairs carrying my empty coffee cup and our candle holders. I get my second cup of coffee and set in front of the fire with my "wax bucket" and clean off the candle holders and reset them with fresh ones for night. Then I might write a letter as I have more coffee, and then wash up last nights dinner dishes (wasn't worth the waste of candle light the night before).

Greg and I dress up for the day...adding socks, flannel shirts, boots...and get about the day. He usually goes out to cut or stack wood and clear paths, and pick out wood that might make nice shelves. I fill up the wood box, which is actually a giant basket I made, and he takes out the ashes. I might chop up vegetables to spread on a screen to dry, or toast up some chopped garlic and peppers to save for winter. I might make some beef jerkey, or start on some more granola. I might go out and build a smoke fire for the peppers and jerky, or rake up around the house. Or we might tape off and paint or varnish a bit more. There is always sanding and varnishing to do. Or I might take a pail of pig food up to Nono's house (kitchen scraps) and pick up rocks for around the front porch on my way back.

I start on dinner around noon, or shortly after. Make bread, start some pasta sauce, things like that. Turn my drying vegetables and peppers. Water my indoor garden. Re-organize the tools that sit in the living room and are always in disarray. If it's nice out and not raining, I hang out my feather comforters in the sun, and my pillows balance in the windows upstairs. Paint a little.

As the day grows dim, and it does so now earlier, and earlier...I take the candle holders with fresh velas and set them where they go. Make a salad out of beet greens, or carrots, or whatever I have. Get supper almost ready and feed the fire. I might go out and wheel around a few barrows of split wood and stack out back.

Then it's dinner time and we always have a lovely feast. Two nights ago I made fresh linguini and a basil, toasted garlic tomato sauce which we had with my fresh bread and a beet green tomato salad. After dinner, and sometimes before, we light the downstairs candles. We watch to fire in the woodstove. I tease out some more wool and stuff pillows for the furniture. We let the cat in, play with it a bit, then take our candles upstairs, light a few more and snuggle into our lovely, decedent bed to read until we fall asleep, or the candles burn out.

Some days we go to town, come here and check the internet and news, buy supplies. Today I bought rain gutters for the front and back porch, envelopes, brown wrapping paper and tape. No one had the long, thin screws I need for the shelves Greg and I are making for books. But always...we long to be back out at our house, with the warm wood fire, stunning views of the mountains and glaciers and the rivers raging down below.

Other variations might be making a coat rack, or sewing a quilt, or planting plants outside for next spring. Sometimes I get caught up in a book and just read. Or I might hike with Nono, or hang curtains, or unload the truck of canning jars and supplies. Other days we trek up and down to the hydro house and wonder and wring our hands about why it doesn't work. I might scrub out some clothes and hang them by the wood stove, or collect herbs and dry them there too...oregano, basil, or mint.

And on other days, or afternoons, I write. The spirit of Isolina calls me and I sit down and write a story about her. And when that happens, I break only to make food for Greg. Nothing more. Dishes pile up, the floor gets gritty, and the story flows. And, I write letters to family which I send, and go unanswered.

A day in my life.

Futa before and after Volcan Chaiten

It is almost one month away from the one-year anniversary of the Volcan Chaiten awakening, and I was searching for a certain YouTube video of the event for someone, and happened across this one, which is Futaleufu specific. I know that the Chaiten people had, and have it much worse, I'm don't want to take anything away from the hardships they had, and continue to have. But I liked this video because it represents what our lives were like here.

While many people, organizations and government entities pitched in here in Futa, the army guys from Coyhaique, the Bomberos from Valdivia, the truckers from Osorno...the glue in the whole situation were the Carabineros. There wasn't a task they did not perform. Evacuation, water distribution, impromptu ambulance service, road-side assistance, general welfare checks, passing out masks, delivering messages, locating wood for heat, and giving up a recreation room for a team of emergency volunteer vets. They traveled by truck, horse and foot out into el campo to deliver messages and supplies and check on folks who had no way to get anywhere. Toward the end of the video you will see the Chilean head of the Carabineros visiting Futa...he probably picked up a shovel and helped out. Sadly, this much loved and respected man died in a helicopter accident not long after, in Panama, on a trip to discuss training Panamanian Police in the tradition and caliber of Chileno law enforcement Carabineros.

Photos above: Tres Monjas, a view from where I live now in Chile with no electric; a picture of Greg, Nick, Dess and Chris, my lovely family;, me at age 18 - shipping out to Germany as a Tank Turret Mechanic, and then a picture of me at 46 - in Panama, with coffee bushes on our coffee farm in the background. I am plucking a chicken a farmer gave me after giving him a ride of 30 miles up into the highlands. Life is an adventure. I feel Lucky Tonight! Life is good.


I hate birthdays, but it is, at least, an occasion to reflect. I reflected with Greg...our life and adventure so far, and since he rarely pays attention ( I COULD have had a facelift and he wouldn't notice...gotten Double D's and he'd just give me a passing questioning glance), I sent him the link for futalandia, specifically the New Movie Post. He laughed, then was introspective, and then a little emotional, then in the end, laughing with eyes a little moist. And it stands still, as the post that most describes what our life is like here, and how it is a roller coaster. The New Movie encapsulates our life here, our ups and downs. Our joys and disappointments, and finally, even if it is just for the moment, our "coming to terms" with the details of, and the results of, our adventure.

So, here is New Movie, again....



A New Movie...I'll pitch the screen play...

Picture this! Survivor meets Nights in Rodanthy meets Grapes of Wrath. Kick in a little bit of of 28 Days and you have Futalandia! The short pitch is, we have an exploding volcano, freezing, isolated nights, pickup trucks with no tire chains trying to navigate two feet of snow on gravel roads, the woman is pushing a pickup truck while it slides back - almost over her, a diet of beans and suspect smoked pork ribs. Crawling out of a small wooden cabin to dig a hole in the harsh dim light of a Patagonia winter to take a crap...ground frozen, toilet paper rolls down and over a ledge...Spring time...one six pack of cerveza, chilling in the sparkling river, then gone, tumbling over rocks into a raging cascade, gone. Licking volcanic ash from your teeth when you wake up in the morning from a night of snoring under 20 pounds of blankets. Fingers shaking with hypothermic tremors in an attempt to start a fire with wet, ash-encrusted wood.

Then....THEN! The glorious four weeks of summer arrive and it's 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the river is cold and lined with wild roses and fuchsia. A woman, soon to turn fifty, and having not seen herself in a mirror in years, still imagines herself twenty year old. She sits on her front porch, down along a path that leads to a rushing river. The still, snow-encrusted Andes rise up all around. She lays a notepad on her knees and fishes a felt pen out of the lint-lined pocket of her torn, stained chinos, and writes:

"Sit for awhile in a Patagonia forest, along a river or a stream and as you grow quiet ...There! Something will catch your eye - a movement. But you turn, and there is nothing but the quiet forest. No stirring breeze at all, but the shadows move. The river is humming a G-chord now, but by sundown it will have erupted into harmonies.

"Around the house," she continues to write and sip from her mug, "the morning sun warms the bottles of bar and chain oil and they expand and burp. The fresh sawed lumber bakes in the sun, lazing down in a break between the canopy of cohaique trees. It's too early but I have a coffee cup of wine anyway. I sit here and think of all our adventures in foreign places. Picking up and starting over for the sheer adventure of a new culture. Here...I find I've bitten off more than I can chew.

"And just as we were ready to say "Uncle!", a wise man I don't know told me, "Take Smaller Bites." Ahhhh....Patagonia.

"And so, I'll try. Definitely. Because in leaving Patagonia, I'd leave my soul behind. We thought of returning to Panama. The Devil you know is safer than the Devil you Don't Know! Then...this anonymous person on the internet wrote and essentially said to me, "It's not the Devil - it's just a different animal."

"And so, I need to learn this animal, Patagonia. Learn it's ways and idiosynchracies. Because really, if I made a "plus" and "minus" list, the plus list would be long. And the minus list would only say, "It's Hard."

There are so many things in between this and the end of the film. And THAT is what is so exciting. All the stuff in between. But let me just clue you into the end. It is not a spoiler....


Just before the last celluloid frames of the filmstrip flap over the reel, (thwap, thwap, thwap) and it is placed back in a metal can and laid upon a shelf forever...the woman, not looking too much older than her fifty years long ago, sits on a porch swing with a handsome, equally elderly man. They are both slightly senile and fragile. Dusk slides into night.

Up through the Cohaique trees, the bright stars of the Patagonia night shine and the river is singing. The old woman turns, just slightly towards the old man, raises her long lovely hand toward his gentle old face, and slaps him.

"What the Hell were you thinking, moving us here?!"

THE END

Food in Chile, and other random thoughts

I'm trying to think of how to ramp up my energy level, and all quick avenues are ridiculous. Seems like the best way is just to do a little more each day...walk a little further, take fewer breaks, continue to eat better. Also, of course, the hardest...smoke less. Make fewer "lists" which is actually a time-consuming activity undertaken to avoid actually DOING something. I could wallpaper my bedroom with the "to-do" lists I have made since moving to Patagonia.

Eating: Most of what we eat here is the most basic of basic. The meat is almost exclusively local, free-grazed, the chicken, cows and even pigs. Most of the produce is local, although some comes from Central Chile where I cannot verify if it is sprayed with chemicals. That said, I eat a hell-of-alot more healthy here, though variety is lacking, than I did anywhere else I have lived. Costa Rica and Panama were the dumping grounds for pesticides and fertilizers long banned in the US. I don't know about Central Chile, but here in this area, people simply don't have the money to fall into that Catch-22, and rely on rotating crops, grazing, and age-old remedies for maintaining a sustainable farm.

Go into Nono's barn and you will not find jugs and barrels of pesticides, or bags of hybrid seed. You will find barrels of chicha, and bags of seed potatoes and tools and farm equipment that looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. We all buy our flour from a granary across the boarder in Argentina which comes from local fields farmed by the Welsh farmers much like it was a hundred years ago, and ground in the same granary founded a century ago by the founders of the town.

Much of the food we eat in the US is a disgrace. Processed process foods, so that how some of it is even labeled food is beyond me. How we treat the land, and animals that give us food is a disgrace. Few even know what real food tastes like anymore, or how it is produced. My eggs have an orange yolk and stand up when cracked in a pan. My beef is lean, so lean that ground beef will not hold together for a hamburger for lack of unnecessary fat. Butter is pungent and pale. No such thing as Velveeta (which is NOT cheese) or Chicken McNuggest (which is barely chicken). Lack of variety here is a small price to pay when I consider that mostly I see my food, know how it comes to be food, and how it affects the land. Aside from fruits, most of my food comes from totally organic land, and the animals graze and all that sits on my dinner table is part a great, sustainable, non-toxic process.

Exercise. I wonder if anyone in the US, paying for those wonderful Gym Memberships realizes how silly that is, from this perspective? They drive to a Whole Foods Store to buy "organic" food, then drive to the gym to exercise. Hhhhmmm. I've started to walk up to my neighbor's farm a little over 1 kilometer away (uphill) instead of wasting fuel by driving there. Yup...my hip hurts, and I huff a little, but more and more, it's less of a chore. Next, I will venture the other way, over the bridge and around (2 kilometers) to Blanca's farm for honey, and cheese. To be honest, at around $5 a gallon (538 pesos a liter) my motivation is more monetary than health.

Smoking. I smoke way too much. A horrible, horrible habit. I see that Chile tobacco prices, while cheaper than the US, are not what other Latin American countries put forth. I can buy a carton of Marlboro cigarettes in Argentina for about $13 US, and it is about the same in Panama. In Chile, a pack is around $3 for Marlboro, and the next comparable brand is ...LUCKY STRIKE. Chile puts pictures of cancer victims on the packs, diseased-dissected lungs. Does this discourage me? No. But price gets attention. I hope -despite my ranting addiction - that all countries continue to tax the shit out of tobacco products. I can burn through a carton of Argentinian Marlboros in a week for $13, but when I visited Manhattan where they were $8 a pack...you might guess I curtailed my intake.

To-Do Lists. My mother rearranged and cleaned the house. That was her mania. Mine is making lists about rearranging and cleaning the house. Add to that things to get done, what needs bought, ingredients and plans. This is a mania to feed my other illness...procrastination. I hope to acknowledge this on a daily basis by getting up, not picking up a pen and paper, and just picking the first thing in my line of sight and FINISH THE TASK AT HAND. Quit being so scattered. A list is a wonderful thing if you make it for the purpose of not forgetting. But, I don't generally forget. This shit list just keep growing and rolling around in my brain, and at night in my dreams, and it undermines any productivity I might accomplish. I can make a list of 10 things to do, do two, and sit and admire my list. Such is my mania and illness of list making, chaos and procrastination.

...In other news and updates...I have one new cat. She is about 9-months old, and was just spayed last night. The vet, Daniella, dropped her off today. She's not happy right now, and misses her three-legged dog companion who has been her constant companion since Daniella rescued both. I'm not necessarily a cat person (cat toys, all that stuff) but I like this pretty, wild-striped cat. Daniella says she does not like to be indoors which will make her two days of recuperation a little uncomfortable for her. Right now she is resting in the crumples of an old sheet on the chair. No name yet. We have to wait until she tells us what her name is. How do you say "Rat Catcher" in Spanish?

That's all the news I care to divulge from Futalandia...the hydro project is an on-going fits and starts situation, and it's best I just announce "the LIGHTS ARE ON" in a post, instead of wasting keystrokes and emotions back and forth, up and down.

What if...Just an Ideal

What if I, as a mother, and a grandmother, found that I had something in common with a mother and a Grandmother in Iran, Iraq, or North Korea, or any other country? What if, a kid, ten or 14-years old, found that he had the same dreams, loves and desires as some other kid in any other country in the world? We do have some common desires, I think. And what if we said to our respective leaders...STOP! We have no common reason to desire war. None.

Sounds like a simple, stupidly simple concept. But I have a sincere feeling that there might be a woman blogging, or who would blog, in another country, who might have the same deep convictions as I do...that we do not want war, and that we are sick and tired of men waging it.

Women are a significant portion of the population, not to mention, a progressive force in the world. And if nothing else, women have learned to say no. And to say yes. They are learning to have their say, but not enough people are listening. And there are enough good, intelligent men to join us. Women and children suffer disproportionately when countries war, or societies collapse or famine hits. Women hold up societies whether or not they are democratic, or dictatorships, or fledgling emerging nations.

I would like to seek out women around the world who might want to join in a global initiative to stop war, and genocide, and hunger and greed. I know the solutions are not easy, but dialog starts with just one person not just talking, but listening to another. If anyone knows of any womens initiatives for peace and power out there, let me know.

Dot Dot Dot

My Aunt Dorothy, or "Dot" as her close friends and family call her, is a gem. She is 70-years old now, never married, although I just don't understand that, unless it was a matter of supply and demand. She is a lovely woman, with a wicked sense of humor that was lost on the largely prim, Presbyterian population where she lives. She has laughing grey eyes, she is slim, hearty and giving. She teaches a progressive youth-group class at the West Eagle Creek Church, where the average age of a youth-group attendee is between 55 and 70 years of age. She still sneaks a fag (cigarette) and likes a little "cocktail" on the sly, but just once in awhile.

Aunt Dot dated a guy once when I was young. His name was "Dick", and he was a scandal! He openly smoked, said bad words, and drank beer. It was rumored that he was actually married to someone else, though there was never any proof. I often wished that Dick had married Dot, but then who is to say how that might have turned out. I have never asked Aunt Dorothy about him.

Dot finally retired. She worked for over 50 years at the same factory painting plastic parts for autos and assorted electronic devices and microwave appliances. She bowls on two bowling leagues, and takes little trips here and there and, as she recently told me in a letter:

"I have a 1000 pc puzzle on my kitchen table. About 1/3 done. If Jaunita (my other Aunt) doesn't come Sunday and help with it I'm putting it back in the box." Later, in her Valentines' Day letter to me, she says, "A woman just moved to here from another town. She is divorced and has two sons. Maybe I can chum around with her. Her name is Dorothy. I hope she is happier than my neighbor lady that is twice divorced. I'll see."

I am missing my Aunt Dorothy tonight. Because while she might seem simple in words and in her activities and expectations, I remember her absolute "life force" of joy, and fun, and twinkle impish sense of humor. My Dad has this trait too. She also sent me a copy of the Centennial Farm Certificate she recently received for the farm I am so fortunate to have spent summers and school vacations on, in Ohio. I am missing that it is probably not possible that she would ever visit me here, because she would be, aside from my mother, the one person who would find absolute joy in the culture of Chile.

Dot Dot Dot! Love ya!

That Music! A Cornicopia of Ear Candy.

One of the things I miss without electricity, is the opportunity to endlessly listen to music, and music programs like this one which features folks, jazz, blues, and music of the world including indigenous recordings many from the Smithsonian's vast collection of recordings. This program, Tapestry of the Times from WYPR out of Baltimore, is one of the best public radio programs I've found. You can download the podcasts for free on itunes.


http://www.tapestryofthetimes.org/

An example I liked, one of the first episodes I listened to is here: http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wypr/local-wypr-791058.mp3 It includes some Kentucky Bluegrass, Comanche Flute music, a cowboy song, Langston Hughes reading a poem, two Afghanistan musicians, slave calling from Georgia, and Pete Seeger and more. If you love music, and learning, this is something you shouldn't miss.