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
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