by Drew Whitney, of University of Vermont
Patagonia Student Program – Fall 2019 semester
A week is only 1/52 of a year, 1.9% of a year, 0.026% of the average person’s lifespan. One week never seemed like enough time to impact my whole being before, but if I learned anything from my homestay experience, it was how much a week can change you. I spent the week living on a gaucho ‘campo’. A ‘campo’ is the Chilean equivalent of a ranch, ranging in animal inhabitance from horses, to cattle, to chickens, goats, roosters, turkeys, and most importantly, sheep. The gauchos are the people who inhabit these campos, saturated in the folklore of being unruly and tough horsemen who move through the mountains of South America on horseback with ease, tending to their animals and taking care of their land.
It is hard to summarize the profound experiences and feelings felt in that week, and even more difficult to summarize a person’s entire way of life in one blog post. So different are our routines, dialect, personalities, and beliefs that trying to compare the two seems unjust in a way. Comparisons tend to have a skewed view of two opposite situations, in my opinion. They often denote one side as better than the other, and biases from the comparer’s own personal experiences often skew their observations. As profound as my homestay week was, a week is still not enough time to draw conclusions about a person’s whole way of life. Nor should the Patagonian culture be skewed by another white, American man’s perception and critique. It is something you have to see, live, and experience for yourself to fully grasp the value of the gaucho ways and how deeply rooted their traditions are here. For that reason, I cannot draw comparisons between my way of life and theirs. I can only try to paint a picture from my eyes of a culture so rich and powerful. Both of my host parents, Gabino and Norma, grew up on campos within a few miles of where they live now. Their current property is vast, with panoramic views of the Andes mountains from all sides.
It takes about an hour to hike from the nearest road to their house, or 30 minutes on horseback. Our first day, I, along with two other Round River students, Grace Leslie and Maya Hilty, were greeted on the side of the road by Gabino. In the coming days, I learned Gabino was a cheerful, soft-spoken, and compassionate man. We strapped our packs onto his horse and started the hike into our home for the week. All three of us looked out in awe at the land before us, constantly stopping to ask Gabino how much of the property was his. “All of it” was always his reply. Along with his wife, Norma, they managed all 900 hectares of their campo by themselves. Norma was a bit scrappier, sarcastic and blunt, but she showed her love through cooking and sharing the traditional tea, mate. With Norma, I often felt like I was looking at a future projection of myself 40 years from now; we were very similar.
That first night, Norma cooked us a rice and noodle soup with sheep meat, the main source of protein on their campo. It amazed me that no matter what she was cooking, Norma never used a recipe or even measurements. Throughout the week, she made us breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, never disappointing us with even a hint of bad food. Our main meals were tortas, a fried bread ball, and panqueques with manjar, crepes with dulce de leche spread. It was hard to tell if all this bread is really what they ate for most meals, or whether Norma took our expressions of love for the carbs to heart and only cooked them for us. Either way, none of us were complaining.
Starting the second day, we settled into the routine of campo life, at least the routine that Gabino and Norma were presenting to us. We woke up each morning at 7:30am and spent the next hour sharing mate and eating breakfast, usually tortas with jam. By 9:00am, we were off to feed the 10 cows and five calves, collect eggs from the hens, and let the 60 sheep out to pasture for the day. On our way back from tending to the animals, we would gather wood for the stove from scattered piles around the campo, our heat source for the day. We’d arrive back to the house by 11:00am and help Norma cook the day’s lunch. Again, we relaxed and used the energy from the constant flow of mate to exchange stories and jokes with our hosts. Lunch was usually finished by 12:30pm, and we entered my favorite part of the day, siesta. Gabino and Norma gave us upwards of two hours off each afternoon to relax, read, and nap, while they did the latter.
At 3:00pm, we would regroup to continue the day’s work. We spent many of our afternoons helping Norma to build a garden next to their house while Gabino set out on horseback. This involved digging the existing grass up, hoeing the soil to loosen it up, shoveling sheep poop from the corral to the garden site, and spreading the poop out to fertilize. The hardest part of the work was trying to keep yourself clean from all the feces. One night, hours after we had finished our ‘poop work’, Grace and I discovered Maya had sheep poop stuck in her ear, for god knows how long. We sat on the couch laughing hysterically and trying to explain in short gasps what was so funny to Gabino and Norma.
On our last day, we got to help with the special task of preparing the pregnant sheep for giving birth and having young to feed. This involved sheering the sheep, by hand, around their teats so that the lambs could nurse. Of course, this required catching each of the 60 sheep one by one and getting them onto their backs, a task that turned out to be much more comical that we first thought. Gabino laughed with us, or at us at times, while we chased the sheep in circles around their crowded pen attempting to get one by the back foot. However, once you have a hold of the sheep, you have to flip it over. Gabino instructed us to grab the sheep by the wool on the side of their very, very pregnant bodies and use all of our weight to flip them to the ground, which felt a lot like performing a WWE wrestling move. For the most part, the sheep got the better of us and would squirm and kick away before we could get them down; one even knocked Maya to the ground in her attempts to flip it.
Every evening, we would set off for a sunset hike with Gabino and the herding dogs to round the sheep up and lead them back to the corral for the night. This time allowed us to ask him questions about life on the campo, his opinions of local conservation, and the future of gaucho culture in Patagonia. Like many other gauchos in the area, Gabino grew up living this life. His five brothers all live on campos around the area, helping each other and constantly stopping in for visits. He told us about the threat to gaucho life in the area, something we learned about from a different perspective the week before in the Chacabuco Valley of Patagonia National Park. The park was built, for the most part, with land that used to be a large sheep ranch, bought from the Belgian ranching company, De Smet, by North Face founder Doug Tompkins and other eco-philanthropists. The selling of this land and clearing of the ranch left many gauchos in the area without jobs. Before my homestay week, I viewed the gaucho culture and attitude of wanting to keep their land as campos as old-fashioned and stuck in their ways. I thought all the land should be conserved and protected, even if just for the sake of conserving it. Listening to Gabino tell painful stories of campos all around him, families he’s known all his life, selling to foreigners or wealthy Chilean companies and hearing the passion and fervor in his voice when he told us he would never sell his land, I realized the deep, cultural value the gaucho lifestyle has here.
In that one week, Norma and Gabino gave me something much more valuable than all the tortas, or mate, or panqueques; they gave me a new perspective. Land can’t be conserved just for the sake of conservation, especially according to North American standards. It made me wonder how much Doug Tompkins thought about the cultural value of the campos, and the gaucho culture as a whole, before he rid the land of them. Land their families had been using for generations. Land they have pride for, land that was their whole lives. The explanation that the campos were ‘essentially broke’ at that point is often used to justify the buying of land for conservation. But by who’s standards of broke? Using monetary wealth to judge a culture so tied to the land, so reliant on the land, seems profoundly ignorant to me now. Conservationists as a whole need to think more about the cultural impact of our actions, or a whole way of life, the gaucho life, could be lost for good.
