The Obligatory Transition Post

            It’s difficult knowing where to take this blog, now that the horses are gone and I spend my days among Hamptonites.  There is a lot more to say about Chile, about Antilco, my adventures, the horses and the Bosses, so I’ve decided to keep writing, though I’ll probably worry less about sticking to any overriding theme.

A week ago I was excited to come home. The promise of family, friends, a visit to Dartmouth, and briny Montauk lifted me through the drawn out goodbyes and endless “lasts.”  Now, I find myself perpetually on the edge of my seat, with the bizarre sensation that something is about to happen, though I can’t remember what. I’m expecting something, but it’s a phantom longing and I’ve no idea what it is.

            Perhaps this is the inevitable letdown- the clichéd culture shock. But I’m not shaken.  Standing alone with my backpack while throngs of suits and stilettos powered through Penn Station’s rush hour, I was hardly rattled by the sudden rural idyll to urban chaos transition. And that’s what people usually talk about, isn’t it? They note how trees become skyscrapers; lean, rattling trucks morph into monstrous SUVs; and the meandering farmers are replaced with forward-leaning New Yorkers who hold their coffees-to-go high as they push through crowds.

            I nodded along as my friends sympathized with my transition, and agreed that, yes, the culture shock is difficult and it’s been a hard transition from Pucon to New York to parties at Dartmouth. But it wasn’t true. The jarring difference in setting is hardly troubling. No, what is harder to figure out is why, for the first time, there feels more like home than here does. It’s not simply that the two places are different and I’m struggling with the change. The real issue is that there feels right and here feels, somehow, wrong.

            Maybe that feeling will ease and fade away. I sure hope it doesn’t. Life in Chile, in rural Pucon, wherever “there” was, is something I inherently and fully understand. I get it. The daily rhythm, their perspectives, and their core values are all scripted in my native, natural language. Everything makes sense there. And maybe that’s the sense of peace I tapped into. When at Antilco, I feel like a mislead character who’s finally wandered back into the right play.

Here, however, is starting to feel like one of those bizarre dreams in which everything is familiar but just a bit off. Friends’ conversations, strangers’ interactions, discussion topics…  I find myself made anxious and physically uncomfortable by a lot of it. Because, it seems to me, still in my Antilco mindset, that none of their chatter matters.

And then something occurred to me.  I didn’t realize that the inspired, idealistic dreaming my peers and I did in college was only dreaming. I didn’t know their liberated fantasies were, for the most part, just fantasies and that they were giving themselves four fun years before getting right back on the mainstream track for the rest of their lives. That realization made me wonder if what I’d been thriving off in Chile, that electric, raw lifestyle, is really just a different sort of temporary sojourn from society. Maybe “college” means the same thing to America’s youth as a “backpacking” means to the rest of the world: they both provide a temporary hiatus from wage-earning life where participants can experiment, dream, seek thrills, and pursue happiness. Maybe those buoyant people with whom I sunrise hiked, and shared cramped hostel rooms, and bummed around winding city streets, and motored across turquoise glacial lakes, and went into the woods for weeks at a time with nothing more than a tent, a horse, and some food will all go back and spend their life doing things they don’t really care about.

I’ll guess I just have to see… and in the meantime I’m hoping this slight, persistent anxiety will stay and remind me that, for a short time at least, I found a place where it all made sense.

Sam, Remo, me, and Mara in front of Villarica volcano

Lying in Liminality

            “Confieso que he vivido.” Pablo Neruda

So here I am, curled up on a hard, green airport bench in sticky Panama. Women with stilettos and too-tight pants are waiting on line behind men with slicked hair and crisp shirts. A grey-haired, cartoon version of Bill Clinton is a head taller than everyone else on line and leans over, casually stooping to test his Spanish on the diminutive man behind him. Babies cry, business men pound their blackberries, and someone is stuttering in broken English. And although my shirt sticks to my body and my feet are too warm and soft inside my shoes, the sun has gone down and my overnight in this airport is dwindling.

And I’m here. Completely here- holding my nose and blowing to try and clear my ears and thinking about my parents and my brother and his lacrosse game which I’ll hopefully be home in time for tomorrow. And wherever I was forty-eight hours ago is of no consequence until an impossibly slender, effete man leans over my bench, squinting at the departure screen. He is so close I can see the tiny label on his pants pocket, which reads:

BOSS

HUGO BOSS

And there it is, the sign that hurls me back, sending this low ceilinged room full of anonymous masses flying away and replaces it with the family living room and the four loved ones I’ve left. How many times I sat on the couch, folding clothes, and turned over the sleeves of Mathias’ black t-shirt, the one with the “BOSS” label and thinking that if my surname were Boss, I would where nothing but this brand. I think dressing myself would always bring a tiny thrill with such labeled clothes. Like the canvas tote I’ve carried around South America which reads “Johann” beneath the bust of Bach.

Saturday night I fell asleep in Pucon and woke up in the smoggy urban din of Santiago. (In fact, that’s a harsh assessment. Actually, I had a pleasant day getting lost in the Parque Metropolitano, wandering the colorful Bohiemian neighborhood, and touring Pablo Neruda’s house. But no matter how pleasant it was, Santiago had the misfortune of being a sad postscript to my four months in Pucon.) Night busses are a magical thing- you can wave goodbye to your family and friends, seven of them gathered on the platform to see you off, the waves prolonged and faces growing more pained as the bus rolls backwards and creeps out of the station, then fall asleep, dream away the distance and awake worlds away to the attendant handing you a juice and cookie, as if to say “Good morning, welcome to Oz, have some sugar to soften the jolt.”

Two American girls came to the ranch on Saturday, forming part of my strange, last ride at Antilco. “Look, fellow countrymen to ease my transition,” I joked to Mathias. Their simple silliness saddened me though, and as one leaned down and ruffled her horse’s mane, saying “Good Gurrrl- that’s what I always say to my dog- kinda the same right?!,” I realized just how much I might be losing by coming home.

And I led my last ride with a detached melancholy, thinking I should be sadder, wishing I had a more electric group my last day, taking in the yellowing trees, rocky pastures, tumbling river with that forced moment-for-moment recollection that isn’t genuine but is summoned when you know “next time” isn’t anytime soon.  It was a simple whimper of a ride. Even the volcano exhaled.

Now I have this structurally appropriate liminal phase which I will spend in its entirety trying to get comfortable on a hard, green bench. Here I am nowhere. Despite having spent around twenty-three hours in its airport, my passport says I’ve never entered Panama. Four tiny letters on a man’s pants pull me to Pucon; everything else tugs me to Montauk. I am strung to both without access to either. Like the moments when you’ve realized your dream is just a dream but aren’t yet awake.

So I will lie here on this bench, dining on chocolate and finishing The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is an appropriately contemplative book for my philosophical liminality, until I fall asleep. Then, another night will disappear and I will be that much closer to home.

The Boss Family

I lied in my last post; I came back here for more than the intangible IT. I came back for this family. I may be filled with run of the mill two-days-left sentimentality, but I have to think that some sort stars aligned to bring me here.

There was no hole in my life for the Boss’s to move into. When I arrived two and a half years ago I wasn’t lacking a supportive family infrastructure or a close-knit upbringing. They are certainly not the family I never had. Because I did have that. I have that. I wasn’t looking to be taken in and I didn’t need to be adopted. Which I suppose it what makes it all the more surprising that I have been.

Mathias, Karin, Remo and Mara are an intimate unit, a far more coherent group than I’ve found in the stereotypical scattered, frantic American families. Karin’s relatives are nine hours away in Santiago and Mathias, the only son of older, now deceased parents, has none to speak of. Being transplants to Pucon the two have no long-time ties to the area. They’ve made tenuous friendships over the years with fellow German expats, parents of their children’s classmates, and co-workers, but the number of house-visiting acquaintances is small. The long distances between towns and villages, and the rough roads that penetrate the countryside where friends live, keeps them further isolated, and as a result, more interdependent.

The whole family eats dinner together every night. There is no ceremony, no pageantry, but the daily ritual of eating dinner together is, I think, somehow casually sacred to them. Mathias sits at the head of the table, cuts the steak, rabbit, duck he’s stuffed full of carrots, apples, tomatoes, oranges, and serves it out; Remo and Mara sit on the sides perpendicular to him, ladling their dishes full of potatoes and all the saucy, creamy components of the meal; Karin sits next to Remo hopping up and down and up and down to switch off lights, bring a new dish to the table, turn up or down music, or push the vegetables closer to my plate when Mathias isn’t looking because she knows I’m trying to avoid potatoes; and Sam and I round out the end of the table, looking forward to our dinner with the hunger that comes only from all day outdoor work.

There is nothing cloying or cute about it, but they are happy. Mathias and Karin love each other. They are loving and unembarrassed by it and when I get Mathias really talking about the decisions he’s made in his life, he is proud, deeply proud, for having made such a beautiful life. When Karin calls, he answers the phone with, “mi amor?,” or “mein schatz?” They fight about the other driving poorly, or the dishes being misplaced on the shelves, but they never look for excuses to argue and that’s the difference.

Remo and Mara, although they’ve grown up in an international environment with people from all corners of the world passing through their house daily, have a narrowed view of the world. I asked Mara if she would consider studying in Germany or the states, and she looked shocked and said “NO! That’s so far.” Of course, it’s not so far, but at this point, Remo and Mara don’t yearn to expand their world beyond Pucon and their family. Mara is thirteen and Remo sixteen and they are affectionate with their parents in ways which would shock a lot of Americans. Mara holds her dad’s hand during dinner and Remo, a full head taller than Karin by now, wraps himself around her shoulders, kisses her cheek, and lingers by her ear before heading up to bed. They are that rare breed of loved, doted upon, adored children who have escaped becoming spoiled or precious.

I’ll miss dinner conversations, which aren’t deep or electrifying, but are easy and functional and an entertaining display of language acrobatics. Karin shares news from town, Sam and I report on the day’s ride, and Remo and Mara give updates on grades, studies, friends and movies, and it’s all discussed without tears, angst, shouting, demands or threats. Thoughts are fractured units without a cohesive language and sentences jump split midway between German, English and Spanish. Karin, while perfectly fluent in German, always initiates in Spanish. Mathias follows suit, but yells and curses in German; it is his language of frustration which I think has as much to do with his associations with German and Germany than with the actual consonant-heavy harshness of the language. Once after reprimanding the dogs in sweeping, severe German, he smiled and said, “You just don’t get the same effect in Spanish.”

Remo and Mara are impressively fluent, nuanced English speakers which is partly due to

their parents speaking the language and there always being English speaking workers in the house, but has more to do with their obsession with movies. They watch a movie most nights of the weeks, if not more than one, usually in English, and there movies I’ve seen which they haven’t.  As a result, their English is relatively unaccented, their vocabulary is modern, casual and varied, and they have a strong grasp on youth slang. They insist on speaking to me in English, answering in their third language even when I begin in Spanish. I don’t share their stubbornness and am frankly self-conscious of my Spanish around them, which compared to their English, is infantile. Mara has a cute habit of slipping into frantic, runaway Spanish when she’s emotional; a heated story about the particular injustices of her life and mistreatment at the hands of an incompetent math teacher is told in squeaking, gushing castellano.

            Maybe I’ve fallen so fully into this family because I fill a unique niche.  Karin and Mathias are a bit too young to be my parents; Mara and Remo are a bit too young to be my siblings. I’m not an extra daughter or another sister. I am the aunt or neighbor who the girl next door who was the right amount of different to fit in. There are huge slices of my life they know little about, but I’m sure that goes both ways, and it doesn’t matter. Because when I’m here, even though I’m a different person than I am in the states, they know the Antilco me thoroughly.

On a recent and unusual drive alone with Mathias, I told him I was thrilled that, after so much time here, I was finally getting a chance to do some of the run-of-the-mill things, like go to Temuco, a local city, and visit Kathi and Conrad, friends of the family. Mara, I told him, is frequently shocked that there remain things like this I still haven’t done. (“..And my uncle- you’ve met him, right? WHAT?! You haven’t? How is that possible?”) As we drove, Mathias paused, then said with disarming sincerity, “You know, Mara doesn’t say that because all the other helpers do those things and she can’t believe you haven’t. She’s surprised because you are so much part of the family and she doesn’t understand how you don’t know something the family is so familiar with.”

That left me speechless.  Somehow it seems unfair to descend on a family with such intensity and then pull out of it just as suddenly. I appreciate Karin’s gentle mothering, winking eyes, and buoyant hospitality. I’ll miss the long hours of talk with Mathias, which range from politics and literature to the business side of Antilco, and stop frequently on topics of language. “I love your language,” he says and is the perfect conversation partner for my own geeky interest in words and English. Remo still seems far from seeking out his own path and life, preferring the cocoon of Antilco, but we are closer than we were two years ago and he comes to me enthusiastically with movie and music reviews.

            And Mara… who I’ve fallen in love with most of all. She’s grown up in all sorts of physical and emotional ways since I was last here and is now a sweet, caring, thoughtful thirteen year-old, and a fantastic rider.  And beyond the plainer, uglier truths that I fill the general place of “role model” that all tween girls are looking for, and that she flatters my ego by adoring me, there is something deeper there and I look forward to her getting home from school everyday. Yesterday, I didn’t wait that long and rode to her school myself to pick her up, leading her horse with me so we could ride home together.

            Last Sunday, in the burnt light of Autumn, Sam, Remo, Mara and I saddled horses for fun and set up jumps in the back pasture. We went round and round for hours, teaching the horses to jump and doing tricks. We put on the capes, one blue and one green, my mom made them two years ago and galloped with the material rippling behind us, imagining ourselves elves and warriors. An idea from Mara sent us back to the house to collect play weapons, bamboo swords, toy pistols, bows and arrows, and then we were out to the vast pasture down the street. We’d each chosen a character and had sketched out a vague story line and now all that remained was to act it out. There is nothing quite like playing cowboys and Indians when you can actually spur your horse into a gallop to chase down the bad guy.

 We’re all going out to a party tonight together, a fundraiser dance organized by all the 18 year olds in the area, and we spent tonight getting ready. I now have glitter on my nails and some borrowed jewelry and Mara and I have made escape plans and secret codes to help each other deal with unwelcome male attention. She and Remo have sworn to tell people I’m nineteen and I’ve resolved to slouch all night, in an effort to blend in somewhat, and though part of me feels ridiculous going, I was touched when they came storming in the house one afternoon to invite me. And honestly, on my last night in Pucon, there is no where I’d rather be than with the two of them.

Thoughts About Leaving

In less than two weeks I will be back stateside, on eastern Long Island, sitting in my high school auditorium, watching my brother’s spring music concert. From here, amidst the yellowing leaves and apple-infused breeze, a New York spring seems distant. We are eating thick soups and boiled chestnuts, and sipping homemade fermented cider as the days grow shorter and colder. The poplars are carpeting the ground yellow, the fruit trees are bare and my body desperately wants to store up for winter. But when my plane lands in Newark on May 17th, I know that I’ll shed the trappings of Antilco and slip effortlessly into the states. Montauk will replace Pucon with the same ease as a tank top will overtake my flannel.  

It’s usually like that: my spheres of reference give way to each other, without transition, in surreal seamlessness. Like bubbles touching, allowing me to hop between and continue my game of hopscotch. I’ve been jumping worlds for the past five years and the change is always easier than I expect because there is no baggage to transfer between experiences, only myself. Montauk, Dartmouth, Pucon, Franconia… my worlds are insular and beyond a handful of people, they share no common links. Scene, setting, characters, costumes and my own role change, I adapt, readjust and continue living. I wonder if represents some level of callousness that I slip in and out of these wildly different roles and worlds so easily.

So though New York, salt air, and my family seem like they should be farther away than a simple plane ride, I know that the instant I step off the plane Pucon will replace Montauk as the distant, intangible dreamscape. The high-excitement treks I led this summer, mainly the crossing of Sollipulli, are already drifting to foggy regions of my memory. I can recall moments in piercing clarity, but somehow the greater experiences themselves seem unconnected to who I am now in this moment. “Once I rode a horse across Sollipulli” is the same kind of detached, grey remembrance as “As 12 year-old I fractured my elbow.”  I know I did it. I can summon the feelings of fear, pain, and writhing worry and recount details of the event. But there’s a disconnect and I don’t have the same clear access to these memories as I did in the immediate aftermath.  It’s like they’re all balloons, intact and buoyant, floating high above me, tugged along by one slender string.

I’ve stopped fearing change and transitions- taking advantage of the opportunities that arise in my life has worked well for me so far and I trust that I’ll make it back here one day, and if I don’t, well, there will be a reason. So while I’m not overcome with a feeling of loss or a fear that this great adventure is ending, I am anxious about losing hold of the great emotional, physical and intellectual freedom that Chile has afforded me. I didn’t come back here for the mountains or the rides or the adrenaline rush of pushing horses over cliffs and crossing glaciers. I returned because there is something intoxicating about this raw, pure life where every day is electric and I am alert through all of it.

What I will miss is the fevered youth and promise of adventure that fuels a whole subculture of people on this planet. We’re all circling the globe, zooming along our individual orbits, and we pass each other with tiny explosions of excitement, exchanging stories from our disparate lives which are ultimately driven by the same desire to just do it, to live it, to see it all and never sleep for missing a single second of the ride. There are legions of travelers with packs on their backs and Dean Moriarty in their soul with no aim except to be present when the sparks fly.

The most poignant letter my father ever wrote me recounted his experience hitchhiking from New York to New Brunswick in 1971.  He told of hippies in vans, college-aged Mainers, farmers’ sons, and his patchwork trek northward. He wrote that the great excitements of the trip were those interactions. “We're all just scouts gathering experiences we can share with the people we adjudge to be most like us,” he wrote and I think it sums up my experience in Chile better than any words I can string together.

On a trek two year ago I spent an evening in Pitraco, a high mountain valley, with a 20-year-old Dutch couple. Our backs on the tall grass and our eyes towards the stars, we talked and laughed and spun stories from our short, magical, zany lives and none of it meant anything but we talked with such ferocity because the fact that we shared the same energy felt like the only important thing in the world. And we kept returning to the unbelievable wonder of it all- there we were, high in a valley in the mountains, with the universe casually unveiled above us and we were throwing inspiration, tossing electricity back and forth, cradling it momentarily before lobbing it back. We could look at each other and say, Hey! I get it, you get it, who cares if they don’t get it, because here we are.

            And the next day they left and I never saw or heard from them again. Since then there have been others, countless others whose paths I’ve intersected and again diverged from. And with all of them driven by the energy of youth and passion and a thirst for that feeling of being thoroughly, electrifyingly alive, I’ve shared something and learned something. I’ll miss the conversations that crescendo, climax, and then forever pause.  I’ll miss the ease with which you can share your soul when you know the receiver will both understand and then pass out of your life forever. I’ll miss that fierce, vibrant fever which sizzles within many of my riders and makes my days much more than simple horse/rider wrangling.

            I guess being a scout and witnessing sparks and tossing electricity is possible anywhere. Somehow it’s just seems easier here in these pulsing mountains than back in the American routine. So, while I have an eye toward home, and must remind myself that soon beach fires will fill my nights instead of house-warming stove fires, I’m thinking more about this indescribable energy that I lose track of when I’m in the states. When I’m here, it is the only thing I know, the only thing that makes sense and launches me into every day with confidence and ebullience. But it shakes loose when I make my jump back. At least it did last time, somewhat. This time, I’ve twisted my mind every which way trying to figure out how to hold to whatever this IT is I found here.

            I’ll also miss the way the sun hits my right shoulder everyday around 4:00 pm as we ride home. The sun’s rays hit me at an angle as we ride the wide dirt road in this section and cast a simple shadow: the silhouette of a faceless rider in a brimmed hat atop a compact, curved-necked horse. It is the exact design of our logo and in those moments I forget I’m just a blond American girl and I think, “I am Antilco.”

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