By Jack Burnett of Bowdoin College
When Gabe dropped us off for our one-week homestay at a campo with Nano and Jeannette Arratia, we weren’t really sure what to expect. Nicole, Seth, and I hopped out of the van at a bend in the road and shook hands with a man we would later learn was Nano’s son. His name was also Nano. We threw our stuff in the back of a jacked up, patched up, beat up pickup truck and hopped in the high-walled bed. We waved goodbye and hurtled down a dirt track, bouncing and twisting through sparsely wooded grazing land. The truck had massive suspension, and Nano yelled happily as he ploughed the car through the Río Maiten twice. He even stopped in the middle of the river to fill his water bottle, leaning out his open door to dip it into the rushing water just inches below the floor. Soon enough, we bounced through the main gate, arriving at the three-room house that would be our home for the week.
The other Nano, older Nano, greeted us in the yard and chickens, dogs, and a pair of calves all heralded our arrival with their respective squawk, bark, or moo. After exchanging greetings and gruff handshakes with the 73-year old gaucho, we headed off to work immediately. Over the next four hours, starting at 4:00pm and ending at 8:00, we chopped and stacked wood and cut and stored hay in a small barn for the winter, stuffing it through a small doorway that required effort from every limb as we were enveloped in piles of the stalks. We capped our first evening off by slaughtering a lamb with elder and younger Nano, skinning and butchering the animal in time for dinner.
After the chaos of our first day, our schedule fell into a more natural rhythm. Wake up at 7:30am. Drink Mate until 9:00am. Work from 9:00am to 1:00pm. Lunch and Siesta from 1:00pm-4:00pm. Work from 4:00pm until 8:00pm. Dinner at 9:00pm. Our favorite soap opera, “Yo Soy Lorenzo,” at 10:00pm. Repeat.
Before traveling to Chile, many people told me that speaking Spanish would be difficult because Chilean accents can be hard to decipher. In Chile, people told me that Patagonians in particular have difficult accents to understand. Before heading off on our homestay, Nicole, Seth and I were warned about gaucho accents, and how difficult the gauchos, many of whom live alone up in the hills, can be to speak with.
They were right.
My high school-level Spanish was no match for elder Nano. While I was able to have full conversations in Spanish with his wife, Jeannette, about topics ranging from Chilean politics, family, and American university systems, most of our interactions with Nano were dictated by a series of grunts and gestures. Nano thought our confusion was hilarious, rarely slowing his speech or emphasizing specific words, opting instead to chuckle and proceed to do whatever he had asked us to do himself.
The vocabulary we were able to use with Nano became directly related to our primary work: repairing livestock fences. “Postes,” (Posts), “pala” (Shovel), “línea,” (wire), and “barreta” (pry bar) began to expand beyond their meanings as we goofed around with him, yelling the words or changing the lyrics to pop songs to contain them while we worked (both the Fleetwood Mac and Dixie Chicks versions of the song “Landslide” were adapted). The stern, harsh-looking gaucho would crack a smile, calling for a break so we could rest and joke about the farting cows nearby or throw sticky burrs at one another’s flannel shirts. As the days passed our conversations by no means improved, but our rapport did. Rather than standing around in silence as we worked, we cracked jokes in English, Spanish, and our new language of noises and gestures that kept us entertained through tedious work in the hot sun.
My conversations with Jeannette, while not as focused on humor, were equally enjoyable. She is very involved with the local wool producer’s association, Association Gremial Río Baker, serving as its first female president in 2017 and currently sitting on its board of directors. The organization sells all of the wool produced by small campos in the Río Baker area, cutting out middlemen traditionally involved with wool purchasing from small, rural sheep farms so that they can set up better deals. She travels frequently, meeting with buyers and distributers in Chile and Argentina, and communicating with larger manufacturers in China. The aggregation of all wool produced in the Río Baker Valley allows these small farms to compete in the global market, getting better prices for their products while still producing the wool on small scales.
We did not always agree on things in these conversations. But perhaps the most important conversation we had during meals and Mate drinking revolved around Parque Nacional Patagonica, an institution that many campo owners in the area despise. After I asked her bluntly to talk about her views, Jeannette told us how, from her perspective, the Park destroys their way of life and is a blemish on this otherwise beautiful region. It is a puma breeding ground, she said. The pumas breed in the park and their young establish territories on neighboring campos, killing sheep, cattle, and goats to the point that campo owners have been forced leave their land once too many animals are killed. To kill a puma to protect his livestock, a gaucho needs exhaustive proof—multiple photos, another person to verify their sightings, and more—that the same puma occupies their land. This proof is almost impossible to obtain while living the isolated, low tech lifestyle of the campos. She suggested some form of reimbursement from the park or the state for puma-killed livestock but said that such a program would likely never exist.
Her perspective was immediately valuable. As a conservationist from another country with no direct ties to this area, I have always thought the park was a good thing. Yes, at Round River we have talked about its drawbacks for the local community, but none of those seemed as pressing or important until this conversation with Jeannette. Parks like the PNP can take up productive land and conservation efforts focused on large predators like puma can harm surrounding ranching operations. All of these factors must be considered in the decision-making surrounding protected areas so that people do not feel as disenfranchised as Jeannette does. Effective conservation can only occur if it engages local communities, rather than antagonizing them.
The night before we left, I asked Jeannette what she loved about living on a campo. Shedding a few tears, she first described the hardships associated with the isolation of living a one-hour hike from any road. It was so difficult for her not to be able to get her son to a doctor when he needed it. Not having basic food items in bad years could be stressful and monotonous. But, despite all of that, every morning, she could wake up and have the people who matter most to her, her husband and son, close by. She could pick her schedule and live a life dictated only by the weather and seasons. The independence and self-sufficiency of her lifestyle is unparalleled, she said, and she would not trade it for the world.
