Search, Find, and Improvise

The house is empty, the sky is gray, and except for the rain on the roof, Antilco is quiet. Karin, Mara and Remo are away in Santiago for a week, visiting family, and Carmen and Monica both left on Monday. Jogi, Mathias’ German friend who comes to stay for two months every summer, is gone for several days kayaking, and the rain continues to pour for the second day in a row. Yesterday morning Ale and I led eight Swedish riders through the clouds and fog and downpour for a frigid half-day ride. My fingertips turned purple within minutes and didn’t regain circulation until I was in front of the fire four hours later. Today however, the tourists have stayed in their hostels and Mathias and I are alone at Antilco. Two weeks ago, we often sat down to dinner as a group of nine, and with the kids on summer vacation, the house bustled all day. This peacefulness came suddenly.

With no ride to prepare, I cleaned and folded the ponchos from yesterday’s rain ride; laid out ten pairs of wet leather half-chaps to dry in front of the stove; packed away sleeping bags which had been drying; and built up four  tents, recently back from a trek, inside the house so they could dry. Most of the post-trek work consists of drying gear, and rain complicates that work. By noon I’d dried and fixed everything I could think of. So I made myself a cup of tea and decided to tackle Mathias’ latest project: saddle bag production.

The Chilean counterpart to Americans’ consumerism is resourceful and improvisational problem-solving.  When the plastic strap on a horse brush breaks in an American stable, it’s discarded and a new one is purchased. Here, a strong piece of leather is found, cut to size, and nailed to either side of the brush to create a new handle. Instead of replacing broken things, Chileans find a way to fix them. The flexible plastic buckets we use to feed the horses often split down the sides so we mend them with wire sewed in crude, Frankenstein stitches. Metal tools are decades old, and by now are on their 5^th or 6^th replacement handle, made of bamboo which grows in the forests, or whittled out of wood. When the unconditioned leather on headstalls wears through, we cut another small piece of leather and reinforce the weak part, using glue and thick thread to strengthen the joint. Most bridles are at least five years old and have an equal number of the tiny leather reinforcements.

The strict “fix what you already have” work style is strong in this area because it’s rural and populated by many poor farmers who have no other option. But it’s become instinct for the general Chilean as well. Even Mathias, a proud German who takes every opportunity to deride Chileans’ habits and inefficient work ethic, appreciates and admires their ability to solve problems using only what they have. When something breaks, Americans ask, “Where can I get a new one?” while Chileans wonder, “How can I fix this.”

Sebastian, the worldly, charismatic seventy-one year old who works year-round at Antilco, has mastered the art of improvisation when it comes to farm repairs.  He is constantly thinking of new ways to fix, reinforce, or mend existing structures, and often ponders a break silently for a moment, says “jyah!,” goes scurrying into a shed for the perfect piece of wire, or leather, or wood, and comes back with an ingenious idea to fix it.  Together, Sebastian and Mathias, who for years made a career of understanding how things work as a mechanic in Germany, have all the buildings, saddles, gates, fences and tools patched up and running beautifully. Sometimes, Antilco seems like one giant piece of art.

So, back to the saddle bags. Saddle bags are made of leather and are a symmetrical construction; a broad piece of leather spans the horse’s back and one bag hangs at either side of the horse behind the riders’ legs. They must be tough because treks are rough. They’re dragged through dense bamboo thickets where the paths are barely wide enough for the horses, and scraped dozens of times a day up against trees and boulders. Leather tears, buckles snap off and there is much repair work to be done when a trek returns. Confronted with this problem, and always wanting to make his business and gear presentable and top quality for his clients, Mathias took the Chilean quality of resourcefulness to a new level and decided to make his own saddle bags.

For weeks, rolls of leather have filled the small room next to his office, along with plastic bags full of metal rivets and buckles. In his free hours at night Mathias has been drawing patterns for different pieces and experimenting with cutting methods and size. Two weeks ago, after his first foray into Chilean eBay, the eighty-year old leather sewing machine arrived. When he found it didn’t operate properly, Mathias predictably spent a week deconstructing it to understand how it works so he could fix it. He became a man obsessed, and built a cardboard model of the inner mechanical workings and muttered “maldita maquina” while studying it.

Eventually he cracked the system and now completely reveres the 1931 Singer for its sturdiness and longevity. Using his now tested and approved patterns, he’s cut piles of straps, buckles, flaps, siding and panels and marked how they all fit together. When I asked how the machine worked, he gave me a cursory introduction and left me with a pile of straps. The straps, which will be used to close the bags, are made of two identical pieces of leather glued together which needed to be stitched for extra security. For six hours I plunged into saddle bag production, rotating the wheel by hand because the motor runs too fast, and feeding the leather slowly past the needle to maintain straight lines.

            Throughout the day I moved on to more complicated sections, and by 7:00 I had halfway finished a new saddle bag and it looks beautiful. I suppose I’m learning the age-old lesson about what pride there is in making something by hand. But I am proud of it. I spent the day in and out of the barn, searching for the perfect rivet and hammering it together, gluing leather then bringing it back to the house to stitch it. It could have been tedious, but as the rain pounded on the tin roof and Mathias and I appreciated that neither of us were out trekking, I was strangely intrigued by and invested in the whole project.

Chileans see broken things as a puzzle. Every hole, snap, break, tear is a miniature riddle and it’s just a matter of finding the right material or tool that will fix it. I find this outlook makes the work more challenging in a wonderful way and fills my day with puzzles to solve.