A Dental Expedition

            Author Zadie Smith’s debut novel is called White Teeth. It’s broad story spanning three generations and addressing issues of race, class, gender, and education and, despite my prejudice against fiction, I’m reading it right now and have I’ve devoured most of its 550 pages. But that’s not the point. The point is that Smith uses an extended dental metaphor throughout the novel, which I don’t fully understand yet because I haven’t finished reading but still find clever. Chapters are entitled “Teething Trouble,” “Molars,” “Canines: The Ripping of Teeth,” and my favorite figurative title, “The Root Canals of Mangal Pande,” in which the character’s history and origin are mined. However, save for one character’s complete toothlessness, none of the book’s plot concerns anything to do with teeth.

            My life, on the other hand, has begun to revolve around my teeth. Despite brushing twice a day throughout my childhood, I’ve never seen a dentist without receiving a long report of bad news. An addiction to gum (mostly sugar-filled gum I realize now), a general familial aversion to doctors, and bad genetics exacerbated the problem, which is why I’m now 23 with a seemingly unsolvable number of cavities, broken teeth, and infected nerves. True, the six or so teeth that show when I smile look lovely, well-proportioned and perfectly straight even though I’ve never had braces. But I would trade that superficial nicety for general dental health in a heartbeat.

As early as 14, small pieces of teeth began breaking off and landing on my tongue without warning. I frequently reach into my mouth to pull out tiny grains of canines, or bigger apple seed-sized pieces of molars off my tongue. It’s an instinctually sickening sensation to witness your own body crumbling apart, and though it happens often, I always feel nauseous and panicked when I hold the glistening, white morsels in my hand and hesitantly explore the new vacancy with my tongue.

“Calcium-shaving minced-molar/ pulp…” is a line from an uncharacteristically twisted poem I once wrote about addiction. Readers have always found those words the most grotesque, which I marvel at, because, for me, it’s the most truthful, concrete description in the poem. The exorbitant cost of dental visits and root canals, and my unfortunate habit of thinking things will go away if I ignore them long enough, has prevented me from solving my problems. Years ago, noting my otherwise perfect health and happy life, I melodramatically decided that it was simply my fate in life to deal with perpetual calcium shavings and minced molars.

Until now.

It was at my mother’s suggestion that dental work here would be cheaper, and Mathias’ insistence that I deal with the problem, that I walked into Dr. Guzman’s office off main street in Pucon and asked for an appointment. The secretary looked surprised to see a giant in her office but then composed herself and asked “Tienes una carie?” I smiled, wishing my problem was as simple as a cavity, and told her there were a lot of issues. We agreed on scheduling an evaluation and since then I’ve been back three times: for the initial assessment, a root canal, and another session to prepare the excavated tooth for a crown. This has become my Mouth Month and I’ll meet with him a couple of times a week for the remainder of my stay in Chile. He’s doing Mathias a favor by squeezing in as much work on me as possible in the time that remains and I am grateful.

During the first visit the dentist asked me if I had general pain from my teeth and I said no. A more truthful answer would have been:  “I have an intricate knowledge of my teeth and have developed an elaborate system of ingestion which usually runs without me thinking about it and allows me to avoid pain. I’ve mapped the routes food may safely take through my mouth and know precisely which teeth can handle chewing which food, and which are too brittle. I choke more frequently, from swallowing bigger pieces to avoid chewing, and keep most food between my front teeth, moving it to the final, right side molars when grinding is absolutely necessary. I let my tea cool to a bland tepid temperature, I don’t put ice in my drinks, I swallow ice cream immediately, and I only breathe through my nose when it’s cold outside or I’m running. I let my granola swell into mush in my milk, I suck on tortilla chips instead of crunching, and I grate my carrots. By doing this I rarely have pain.” I don’t say any of this to him, but I still fantasize about chewing with both sides of my mouth and letting ice cream linger on my tongue.

Last November, shortly before Thanksgiving dinner, half of one of my canines unexpectedly cracked off in my mouth. From the outside it still looked normal but the inner half was gone and chills ran up my arms and down my spine whenever my tongue accidentally passed over the hole and jagged remnants. In March, as it was bound to, the rest of tooth broke as I, Oh the irony, idly pushed a piece of gum around my mouth. Chewing gum literally made my teeth fall out. It was vanity more than anything that motivated me to face another dentist. It was not the certain pain I feared, the eventual aching horror of the rot reaching my nerve, but rather the ugliness of the hole in mouth that I would not be able to hide from friends and family once I returned home.

And so, I’m taking advantage of this rainy month, of the few riders, of there being another helper here to do the work, to get (some of) my teeth fixed. Most of all, I’m taking advantage of the fact that everything will (incredibly) cost me less than a quarter of what it would in the U.S., and more importantly, this dentist is kind and sympathetic. Every American dentist I’ve ever seen has considered it his/ her responsibly to make me feel fully and acutely guilty for the state of my mouth, as if I enjoy the pain and bizarreness of my hole-filled mouth and have deliberately encouraged my teeth to crumble into countless tiny grains. While the dental work here in general is less expensive, not having to endure a lecture-from-on-high is priceless.  

Five Riders, Four Days, Three Falls, Two Guides, and One Runaway

Five weeks ago, before I traveled Patagonia and the dripping Fall arrived to Pucon, I led my final trek, a four-day ride to the Rio Blanco hot springs. The group of five tourists came together haphazardly and was the oddest collection of riders I’ve had.

Julie and Siegfried were young, athletic, beautiful, and in love. From Bruges, Belgium (“Did you see the Colin Farrel movie? Same place!”), I marked them as a hip couple . Siegfried has what has always been called a “chiseled” face- strong chin, strong brow, deep set eyes, all tough skin and hard angles. He’s the type of charismatic man that women describe as “handsome” without really thinking, and then, upon reconsideration of his face, pause and say, “well, he has character.” Mathias suggested we put him on Chocolate, one of our fastest, hardest-to-stop horses, despite his inexperience. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Siegfried. Later we found out he’s a sky-diving, base-jumping, shark-diving adrenaline addict who says things like, “Seven of my friends have died in jumping accidents” as if he were confessing that he reads the daily paper.

Julie is a bit older than me and seven years younger than Siegfried. Tall, lean, cheerful, and effortlessly feminine, she insisted on helping me prepare dinner and steered the topic towards boys, men, love! Together we chopped onions, shared stories, and wiped tears from our eyes, both of us swearing they were just from the onions. On the second day of riding she was thrown from her horse, a dark gelding named Rebelde, as we wound through the dense, muddy rainforest. While not particularly courageous animals, horse are especially terrified of wasps. The stinging pain from an unknown, invisible enemy drives them into a bucking, rearing, galloping frenzy and Julie was off within seconds, crying and fleeing the wasps herself. She sipped my water as I walked a few minutes with her and assured her that, “No, it wasn’t her fault, expert riders have a hard time on wasp-scared horses,” and, “No, you’re not holding up the group, forget about them,” and, “No, you’re not being silly, you’re allowed to cry, take your time.” Fallen riders are more embarrassed by the fall and their own tears than they are concerned about their safety.

Unmani, a wrinkled, sixty-seven year old woman from Germany who lives in Chile, stands just over five feet tall. Her laugh is harsh and cackling, the kind that bursts forth in response to unfunny jokes and sends listeners jumping out of their seats, but she’s sweet and fared better than I expected over the difficult terrain. She spoke German with the other guests and gushed forth Spanish when talking to our guide, Aldo, but found me altogether too baffling to talk to. That I am an American girl who looks somewhat German, although I don’t speak the language, and can converse in Spanish, never ceased to confuse her.  “Willa,” she’d say, “Ich habe- bah! I have problemas with mein pferde… caballo… horse… bah!” It was always like this: the cyclone of thoughts in her head spun around and touched down on words in three different languages, producing a fractured GermSpanglish sentence until she grew too frustrated to continue, threw up her hands and walked away cackling.

When Julie suffered acute back pain from her fall, Unmani took her to a tent a performed an hour long shiatsu massage, which Julie professed enormously successful. But, with communication between us hindered, it wasn’t until after the ride that I learned that Unmani is her spiritual name, adopted when she became a traditional healer and massage therapist.

Rudi, a German doctor, joined the trip spontaneously, having arrived to the ranch with his wife the day before we departed and decided that yes, he’d be up for the adventure and that she could entertain herself for three days. He rode Pehuen, a thick, frisky young gelding, and made a habit of riding last, holding Pehuen back for minutes at a time and then galloping wildly to catch up to the group. At night, as we shared stories around the fire, he’d say, “Yes! I was really trying to avoid all that dust- didn’t want to get so dirty, so I made Pehuen wait,” or, “Oh! Pehuen is such a lollygagger, constantly had to run to catch up.” Having spent many years in Scotland, his accent was accordingly colored and his statements carried that inevitable United Kingdom air of superiority, which wasn’t fully his fault, but had the same effect. “It seems to me that the horses are really quite eager to run, ahn’t they?” he asked me the night the ride ended and my temporary authority evaporated, “So, what I’m wondering is why you insist on making us walk? Why cahn’t we just let them run?

Torsten arrived to the ranch a week ahead of the ride with his glider parachute in tow. After six weeks in arid Iquique, Chile, otherwise known as paragliding paradise, he was ready for a change in scenery. A thirty-six year old from Hamburg, Torsten has the luck and luxury to live life the way it ought to be lived: he works for years at a time as an engineer on power plants and then travels, spending his money on unique adventures around the world.

 Above everything else, Torsten is a joker. He has a remarkably nuanced grasp of English, is full of zinging one-liners, and makes jokes about situations long before it’s appropriate to joke about them. On the third day of riding, the pain in Julie’s back was so intense that she opted to stay at camp and await our return in the evening. Late in the afternoon, as the rest of us rode a hot, dusty trail out of the mountains, Torsten looked up into the sky and, seeing three circling vultures, laid a hand on Siegfried’s shoulder and said with profound, sincere sympathy, “Oh, bad news… It looks like they’ve got to her. I’m so sorry.” On the final morning, Aldo reported that all horses were ready and healthy, save Rebelde who was mysteriously and utterly missing, without leaving a hoofprint to follow. As Aldo went off for an hour and half in search over the surrounding countryside, I wandered the campsite, avoiding my bored riders and returned to find that Torsten had hung a mock noose from a tree and gently informed the others that it was probably their only way out of the mountains.

Luckily, Aldo eventually returned with a frightened, burr-covered Rebelde in tow. He’d jumped the fence the day before, too scared to stay alone in the paddock without his friends and ran about three miles up into the mountains before Aldo found him. (Remember, Julie didn’t come with us the second day and so Rebelde as well stayed behind). So finally, at 11:00, two hours behind schedule, the seven of us started our final day of riding, headed toward Caburga Lake and the trailer which would take us, and the horses, back to Antilco.

We rode quickly, trying to make up time, and lunched briefly on the side of one of Caburgua’s tributaries where Aldo changed a horseshoe and the riders gorged on blackberries. We were due to meet the trailer at 4:00 p.m., but at 2:00 we still had at least three hours of riding left, so Aldo kept a fast pace, and, though every bounce, jolt, and jump sent painful vibrations through Julie’s back, we all kept up. For the most part. With the blackberries hanging huge and juicy along the trail, Rudi developed a new trick. Day Four was the day of Wait to Pick the Blackberries and then gallop to catch up.

With dark clouds creeping closer every hour, still worried about Julie and unnerved by the missing horse episode and my riders looking more and more exhausted and bloodied by branches, I was eager for the day to end.  Around 3:00, as our trail narrowed to less than a meter and ran halfway up the steep cliffs that rise from the lakeside, I heard three noises at once: an unknown horse whinnied; something heavy crashed through the trees on my left (the Cliffside of the trail), and Julie screamed. I jumped from Rohan, tied him, and rushed to the front of the line, my stomach flopping, sure I’d find Julie crushed beneath a horse at the bottom of the cliff.

But there she was, standing at the edge of the cliff, her face white and her hands to her mouth, crying. When I saw that all the other riders were safe as well, my stomach settled and calmed because if they were safe, I felt, ultimately everything was and would be ok. “I fell off, Julie blurted out, “I’m fine, but…” She inhaled, place her face back in her hands and turned away. It was mere seconds since I’d arrived at her side and it was now that I turned to the cliff and saw Tornado, 30 feet straight down, wedged between a boulder and a tree near the shore of the lake. He was our pack horse on this ride, piled high with five long sacks and two saddle bags, and the great bulk of it all had snapped all branches and bushes clearing a path as he rolled down the undergrowth of the cliff.

I yelled at my riders, uncharacteristically harshly, ordering the grown men to Stop! Stay up top! Wait!, and then slid down the cliff to Tornado’s side where Aldo was already working furiously, cutting every piece of rope, cloth, strap he could find to free Tornado from his pack. As they loosened, he threw the sacks away without caring where they landed; expensive tents and personal items lose their importance when a horse’s life is at stake. The saddle came off in destroyed pieces: the frame here, a sliced girth there and slowly, despite Aldo’s frenzied work, Tornado was separated from the bulk that trapped him. It was then that I saw his left hind leg, pulled and twisted grotesquely behind him, stuck on a rock four feet above his other hooves. With his leg thus, a boulder bigger than himself pinning him from the right, and tree trunk eight inches in diameter crushing him from the left, Tornado could not move though he flailed in a vain, terrified effort to get out.

I stood by his head, speaking in a low, soothing voice and kept my head on his neck to prevent further struggles. Aldo began chopping at the tree trunk, the machete swinging in swift, identical motions, and woodchips flying to all sides. Within five minutes he’d cut through. Winded and sweating, he leaned back and spluttered, “He should… be free, give… it a try.” There was no ground ahead of Tornado, only an uneven field of massive boulders. Even if by some miracle his hind leg wasn’t already shattered, he would surely damage something in the effort to cross these boulders. I tugged on the rope around his neck, once, twice, three times. Finally, with a slap from Aldo, Tornado lunged forward and clambered over the boulders, slipping and tripping, until he found smoother ground at the water’s edge.

I know nothing more vulnerable than the look of true fear in a horse’s eye. Tornado stood there, trembling and shuddering, his whole huge body vibrating with fear and pain. I stood alone with him, as the waves lapped the shore, petting his neck, reviewing his body, talking to him. By some inexplicable miracle, the leg was sound. After falling 30ft off a cliff and crashing over boulders and tree trunks, Tornado only had a few deep scrapes.

Getting him back up the 30ft was unexpectedly simple: a nearby lake house had an access path from the beach to the trail. What was more difficult was convincing my traumatized riders to continue. The trail remained narrow, at the cliff’s edge and we had hours of riding left. Julie cried; Seigfried lost his head and yelled at me; someone cursed and said “What if? What if he had had a rider?” Torsten kept them in line, smiling and forcing laughter and refusing to let people dwell on the disaster. The truth is, it was because of the pack that he fell. It was a freak accident in which he bumped strangely against a tall boulder, overcompensated trying to rebalance, and then lost his footing over the edge.

We reached Mathias and the waiting trailer at 6:00, clothes torn, horses and riders bleeding, will power depleted, and managed a one rousing chorus of “We Are the Champions” before sliding off our horses and into the van, safe and homeward bound.

 

Rudi, Unmani, Julie, Aldo, Torsten and Siegfried

Photos: Antilco and Guides

I've been recently combing through Mathias' hundreds of photos to help organize our new Campo Antilco facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Campo-Antilco/111174638964995?sk=wall, and thought I'd share some highlights of the farm and people I spend every day with.

Antilco, seen from above, next to the Liucura River

An asado and sausages cooked over the campfire on freshly chopped bamboo stalks. 

 

 Palomo roaming near the chicken coop, and Esperanza grazing in the field beneath Villarica volcano.

Alejandra saddling Moro

Aldo on top of Sollipulli Volcano

Luis

Aldo and Luis in front of the campfire

Sam, another helper who arrived in March, and me at Laguna Geppinger

The Fall

The Fall

It seems that everything here is falling.

Summer fell away, taking with it the throngs that congested Pucon’s streets only a month ago. Greedy twilight, which creeps in earlier and earlier each evening, chased away bathers and hikers and, sadly, most of our riders. Markets that once buzzed with North-face clad backpackers and stiletto-wobbling women from Santiago alike are now vacant. The vendors sit idly, watching soap operas on tiny TVs, absent mindedly knitting, hoping I’m the magic gringo they’ve been waiting for who’s come to spend big. In this way, I disappoint a great number of people by doing nothing at all.

The sun has rolled away, fallen back, shining from a distance now with half-hearted rays. We haven’t had a continuously sunny day in two weeks and often wake to temperatures below freezing. It seems that in this part of the world, in this precipitous valley of Southern Chile, the sun doesn’t even bother fighting. It spends half the year in hiding, timidly poking around bully cumulo-nimbus blobs. Even when I plead with it directly, asking to emerge momentarily to warm the purple fingers of my riders, it slips away further, fading out, leaving only the message that its job is over and we are now fully in Fall’s domain.

And, of course, as locals will tell you with shaking heads and a grim look of acceptance, the rain falls. Relentless, over-turned tubs, plunging earth-bound floods of rain fall. What were once trickles of run-off are now swollen creeks, the creeks are gorged rivers, and the Trancura River gushes under the bridge with a tumbling, deafening roar. We are ants inside a timpani drum and bury our heads beneath our blankets at night to block out the pounding sheets of rain on the tin roof.  The horses, tied to the hitching post when a down pour comes, close their eyes, hunch their shoulders and turn their rumps into the wind. When the rain turns to stinging hail, pelting their coats and bouncing off the picnic table like ping pong balls, they hang their necks lower and wait. Mathias built his house with tall, spacious ceilings, and walls with more windows than wood. “When it rains at least six-days a week, four months a year,” he says, “and it feels like everything, the sky, the clouds, the mountains, is falling down upon you, I wanted to make somewhere to go that had space, lift, and a sense of elevation.”

Swaths of gray haze don’t so much as fall as instantly appear, blotting out clear blue skies and crisp mountain views in less than ten minutes. Two days ago I left the ranch on a ride under spotless skies. I told the young Venezuelan couple how lucky they were to have come on the only clear day we’ve had in April. But, before we reached our halfway break we were within a shapeless, gray world, galloping without ponchos through blankets of rain. These clouds don’t drift; they don’t slowly conjoin across the sky, reaching out to one another like magnets to form a continuous cover. No, they drop in, curtains released from an unseen above falling to signal a new act.

*****

            Almost as soon as the fruit ripened it too began to fall.  The great, sprawling pear and apple trees swelled with an unmanageable quantity of fruit this year. When the winds and rain arrived, our lawn disappeared beneath a carpet of pears which sent out a siren song and now the fifteen foot path between the house and barn is a war zone of buzzing, swarming, sugar-crazed wasps. So, I rake. I rake the pears into one pile to shrink the wasp zone and I rake the worst apples into buckets and take them to the pasture to ease horse catching.

            And although the apples and pears and yellowing leaves fall on their own, plunking loudly on the roof every few minutes to remind us that Autumn is here, I instigated some of the falling myself today.  Ale and I climbed high into the canopies of the apple trees, secured our footing, grabbed a branch, and shook. “Prepare yourself for an apple storm!” she shouted, as hundreds of small scarlet green orbs crashed to the ground.  These we collected, filling three large grain sacks, and Ale took them to town to juice. They’ll come back as 100 liters of chicha, or cider, which we’ll recant into fifty or so plastic bottles and Mathias and the family will drink through the winter.

*****

            Esperanza, our stocky, paint mare, tripped last Thursday, stumbling in three grand, lunging steps which brought her nose to the ground and snapped her bridle in three places. Her thick, portly Brazilian rider, perched precariously atop a too-small saddle, stood no chance against this assault to his balance. He sailed head-first over her neck and landed with a thud six feet away. He groaned in muted panic and rolled over to his side, gasping for air to fill his vacant lungs. In a moment of rare tranquility, my horse Moro stood still while I rushed to the rider’s side. The visible damage was minimal: a small scratch on the right hand, streaks of dirt on his previously spotless, light blue zip-up. I can’t speak for his confidence and ego, but like his ribs, I’m sure they were bruised. I nursed him back into words and smiles with juice, a sandwich and a falsely bubbly mood, and then helped him back on Esperanza for the ride home. At which point, the rain began to fall.

*****

            It is fully Fall now. I turn the gas heater on in my room at night and huddle close to the wood-burning stove after rides. Mathias has begun his “winter work” of redesigning Antilco’s webpage, and I pass the stormy days inside, rewriting all of the websites’ text. Last week Sam and I brought five horses to their winter pasture, which is two miles down the road and has a barn where they can escape the freezing rain.  At the end of May, Sam and Sebastian will bring the other thirteen horses there as well, leaving them for two months to recoup before work begins again in September.

            I have a full month left here, but somehow the illusion of my immersion in another world is already slipping away. Home seems closer… summer, fall, and winter plans in the northeast occupy my thoughts and I count the days until I’ll see family and friends again.  It’s unwelcome, this disconnection. What I most love about Antilco is how fully and easily I sink into the lifestyle here, how any other life, any other past or present, seems only a dream. That fantastical, isolated feeling is fraying and I don’t fully know how to prevent it. I try to look less toward the future and hold on to the present I have here, because thirty days is nothing. And, like the apples and pears and rain, I will soon fall as well. I will slip out of this exciting, exotic pause from traditional life and into something else, which will no doubt be a great many things, but will not be Antilco.

*** If you have Facebook, visit the new Campo Antilco page and check out the beautiful photo albums of our rides!

The Rider of Rohan

       I’m wearing brand new jeans, clean Levi’s without any rips that my mom sent me as an early Easter present, and the legs are already wet through. I had hopes of keeping these jeans in nice condition, but the gray horse hair on the inseam tells me that was a vain wish. We I left the ranch ten minutes ago and my horse is already dripping sweat and white lather foams up where the reins rub against his neck. My inner thighs are against the saddle and my calves are protected by half chaps, but the six inches above and below my knee rest on the sweaty sides of the horse, which is why my pants are wet.

            We’re riding toward Villarica Lake, Sam (the new helper), Mara, two Danish girls, and I, and although they’re horses walk calmly, mine is prancing like a pony on parade. I ride at the front of the group, where he’s calmest, and I keep my hands low on his neck, pulling gently on the reins to ease his dancing. Mara looks over at me and laughs, saying, “Willa, you look so concentrated!” And she’s right. I don’t worry about guiding because Sam is here and she can take care of the Danish girls. Instead, all of my attention is focused on riding smoothly and keeping my hands soft and quiet on his mouth. Maybe, if I am perfectly tranquil, he will be too.

About a month ago, before my last four-day trek at the beginning of March, and before I traveled Patagonia for sixteen days, Mathias and I drove away from the farm one morning, bouncing over potholes and watching the sun flood the valley. Forty-five minutes later we pulled down a driveway before a modest, one-story farm house and greeted the bent, seventy-something owner. He was a man of few words, but was proud and preferred to handle things himself. Mathias warned me that he could be a bit gruff, and that as I was a blond, gringa girl, it would probably be best if I didn’t meddle too much with the horse we had come to buy.

Days earlier Mathias had gone to scout the horse and he returned, fidgeting and beaming, bubbling with excitement like an antsy boy anticipating a new toy. “It’s a gift, to ride this horse,” he told me, and then smiled, “It will be the most beautiful horse I’ve ever owned.” In general, Mathias does not coddle his horses. He is a smart businessman and his horses are not pets. He owns eighteen of them and every one earns its keep. When a horse becomes unrideable, it is sold. With this mentality, it’s not often that I hear him gush about pretty horses, but he was smitten with The Gray and it was with enthusiasm that I arrived to the farm that morning, eager to see the horse that had so excited Mathias.

 The weathered farmer greeted Mathias formally and led us to the paddock where two thick, stocky grey criollos stood. The man slipped a rope around the broader one’s neck, and I had to agree, he was beautiful.  A dark, silvery grey colored horse, he has an exotic look, with a black stripe running the length of his spine from mane to tail, and a quintet of dark zebra stripes on each leg. He is short, perhaps only fourteen hands, but has broad chest, a round, wide rump, a straight, strong back, and thick muscular neck. His mane is a darker color that the rest of his coat and is rather comically thick. The forelock reaches halfway down his face and fans wide, covering his eyes. In the tradition of rural Chilean horse culture, half of his mane is shaved: from his ears to midway down his neck is a ridge of hair, not unlike the broom-like decoration atop ancient Greco-Roman helmets. He is a compact little gelding, but clearly powerful and beautifully formed.

His owner betrayed his eagerness to sell the horse though. He was sure to tell and demonstrate every minutely positive aspect about his horse: “See how easy he is to catch? I just walk right up and loop the rope on.”…. “He’s strong; a fence like this, four, five feet high? He can clear it, no problem. BUT, of course he respects fences... just a bit of barbed wire and he won’t go anywhere.”….. “See his feet? They’re in great shape because he’s easy to shoe. Just pick up any foot and he stands still. Very easy to shoe.” Mathias nodded and agreed with the man’s assertions, but he didn’t need any convincing. He happily passed the man the money and I climbed up, said goodbye, and rode the horse back to Antilco.

As we rode together for five hours through the countryside that day, I came to know the horse a bit. I decided to call him Rohan, after the race of powerful horse-riding people in Lord of the Rings.  If ever a horse deserved a strong legendary warrior name, it’s Rohan. His every step hints at his potential power. Even his walk is tightly coiled as if he could spring forward at the slightest cue. He carries his muscled neck in a perfect, hooked curve which gives him a powerful, dignified look. When we ride, Sam tells me over and over again how beautiful he is, and he does seem to captivate onlookers, holding their gaze for several minutes at a time as we pass by.

I realized that first day that Rohan is by no means a horse for inexperienced riders, and also has some key faults which make him inept as a guide horse. It turns out, beauty isn’t everything. Which is why I’m riding him today, as I did yesterday and the day before, and the day before that. Business is slow at Antilco, so instead of guiding I’ve made Rohan my priority. He was trained to be a rodeo horse, which in Chile means herding a cow in a ring and pinning it with absolute precision against the wall. He’s bred to be highly strung and excitable and those traits have been reinforced his whole life. So now, on our way home from the lake, when we could be walking calmly, he throws his head up and down and the sweat from his face flicks back and hits my face. I can’t tell if it’s raining or its just Rohan’s sweat/spit/lather that keeps hitting me. His hooves criss-cross each other and his backend swings wildly from side to side, as if there’s a wheel loose and he can’t control where his butt goes. He can not only walk but also lope to the side, and when he feels the slightest pressure, even the touch of my finger, on his rump, he bucks. It all makes for good entertainment and Danish girls watch in awe as he twirls, sidesteps and spins with incredible agility and speed. And for a few moments, I’m entertained as well. If I ignore the growing dampness on my legs from his frenzied sweat, I can pretend I’m rodeo rider.

But when he swings, mid prance, to the side, slamming his full weight against the leg of the smallest Danish girl, I remember why his dance routine is dangerous. Rohan’s inquietude comes at the cost of his sanity. When he reaches this frenzied state it is near impossible to calm him down again and he is oblivious to his rider, to other horses and riders, and most troublesome, to the landscape. He could swing his backend suddenly and turn right off a cliff, or in a crazed moment of backing up he could slip into a pit. And the hard truth is that we can’t use a horse to guide, no matter how beautiful and strong it is, if it can’t be a composed leader. As a guide, I need to move up and down the line of riders to talk to everyone; I need to secure my reins under my thigh and reach to adjust the girth of another horse without worrying that my horse may throw me off; most of all, I need to be able to concentrate on the other riders instead of on my horse.

So I test my patience today, and will continue to do so the rest of my time here, in the hope that he’ll settle into a better tempered horse. I ask Mathias to give him more time, more chances because Rohan is a horse with character and dignity, and although he’s slowly driving me crazy, I respect him. Some rodeo horses calm and some don’t, and I could be wasting my time, but I’m happy to spend the next month working with him because I think he’s worth taking the chance.

When I returned from my two weeks in Patagonia I saw a new name plate nailed up in the barn with Sombrillo painted on. Mathias gave him an official name in my absence which basically translates to “shadowy.” When I asked Mara to use “sombrillo” in a sentence, she said without hesitation, “Severus Snape is very sombrillo.” I’m having trouble embracing the new name though, and as long as I remain his trainer, I will continue to think of myself as the Rider of Rohan.