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.

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            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!