by Oskar Robinson of Montana State University
We drove south from Cochrane on the Carreterra Austral, bags packed with our camping gear and work wear for the week away. Quincy and I will be spending our homestay at the campo of the Pizarro’s located in the valley of Lago Brown between Cordon Esmeralda to the north and Ventisquero Calluqueo to the south. This valley has scarce populations, with less than 10 campos to the entire valley of over 60km in length, 7 of which are campos of the Pizarro family. We will be living at the campo of Artelio Pizarro, a father of the 3rd generation of Pizarros in the valley. This campo is rich with the history of this Spanish family and their immigration from Europe to Argentina first, and then Chile. As is custom of many Chilean campos, your progeny work on the campo and eventually will inherit it to carry it onward. Artelios son, Julian, lives and works at the campo full time and they both also care for Artelios father, Alamiro, who is a 2nd generation Pizarro who first moved to the valley with his parents and 9 other siblings from Argentina.
We bump and jump down the carraterra in the morning of Saturday the 15th to get to our destination after dropping off three other students at another lovely campo on the way. This dirt road follows beautiful Rio Tranquilo far into the valley where it splits south to its headwaters of the glacier-fed Laguna del Tranquilo. The valley, filled in with Nirre trees and scattered grazing livestock, is flanked to the south to some of the largest mountains in this region. This caught my eye as soon as Los Jinetes and Monte San Lorenzo came into view. San Lorenzo had only been a dream in my mind, planted by locals mentioning it, but now it was actualized. My eyes glued to this impressive peak of 3,706 meters, I hardly realized when the van pulled into the campo. We dump out of the van where Julian goes to unlock the door, locked. He then tries his hidden key spot, not there. Maybe the first evidence of what a fully machismo male-dominated household looks like, he grabs the wood splitter sitting outside to go pick the back door, “Bienvenidos”. The initial impressions were slightly overwhelming due to the vast amounts of butchered meat hanging from every knob, nail and hook and increased by the puma-killed lamb hanging over the wood pile. But alas, this campo is in a truly pristine environment that is jaw dropping to any North American. The current house on the property was built by Alamiro and is scattered with photos of his family’s past in the valley. Quincy and I got a tour of the main compound as well as of the old family house further east on the flank of Lago Brown. The vastness of campo astounded us when we learned from Artelio that just his campo exceeded 3,000 hectares. The scale of this piece of land is hardly put into numbers accurately when you can’t see to where it extends into the high peaks and glaciers of the San Lorenzo Massif. Coming from a very developed country, it surprised us that mountains such as these behemoths could be owned by a private person and not protected publicly or even more surprising that nobody in the Pizarro family has ever gone up and explored in these mountains. There are very different ideals when you have grown up on a Patagonian campo versus a first-world America. The physical labor you put in is a direct result of your livelihood, why would they care to head up into these mountains when they know this form of physical labor won’t result in any physical gain for the campo.
The first meal was, without much surprise, a lot of boiled lamb meat and potatoes. Formally, we all sat together and indulged in heaping amounts of food, unbeknownst to us that this was one of two meals that occur in any given day. The structure of a day became a somewhat nice rhythm to break up what I have always known to be how things are done. We would wakeup at 7:00 each day and then gather with the five of us to drink Mate around the wood stove, an activity that on my own I would never allow to consume 45 minutes of lovely sleeping time. The conversations were slow and consisted of checking in on the days tasks, discussing what may have occurred with the livestock overnight, and generally just waking up. There were three separate mornings in which we had to discuss the events of puma kills of their lambs during the night. I never would have guessed that pumas interacted this much with gaucho lifestyle based on the statistic I have heard that livestock is the source for only 4% of a pumas diet in Patagonia. These occurrences brought us into friendly debate over government regulations over hunting, gun control in general and later brought us into more social politics, many of their opinions seemed a surprise to us. The gun control in Chile is much more comprehensive and controlled than in the US; Julian has been going through the process of gaining permits, performing mental checks and taking courses in order to use a gun legally. He showed us all the paperwork and described its complexity, but was in agreement that it was a positive good to restrict unnecessary types of guns for hunting and to assure that they were in the hands of people who can mentally handle it. Regardless, Julian and Artelio were very much into the pizazz of fancy American guns such as Winchesters, and we had a running joke that if I would get him a Winchester from the states he would bring me up to San Lorenzo by horse for the week…
After our morning mate, we would cook up something quick, usually a large pan of lamb which we would eat with bread before heading out into the days task. The days task for us though, turned into a week-long task, as Artelio had a large project in mind. He decided that with many hands we should tackle digging out a new ditch to drain a swamp that was muddying up a close section of horse pasture. We didn’t anticipate that this project would occupy each day of our homestay, and maybe not the most stoked about it, but by the end we were darn-near professional ditch diggers. This ditch brought up many thoughts between Quincy and I and even some discussions over shovel and champa between the lot of us. It became a conversational debate over local ecological knowledge and how our strong beliefs to agree and follow customs and traditions might be very detrimental to swapping our collective role to a more sustainable culture. Much of what determines how the Pizarro family acted was engrained in “costumbres” or customs. This was the reason why the grandpa refused to eat hare or trout, the reason why the gaucho card game of Truco had to be scored in a precise way, the reason why Artelio didn’t feel a tinge of concern for clearing the 30 year old Nirre trees for his ditch. Each aspect of their lives as gauchos is rooted firmly in customs, and there isn’t much questioning alternative methods or maybe issues with current systems. Related to the ditch, it seemed as though, customs were preventing Artelio and Julian from thinking about maybe alternative solutions. I aim no blame to them, they simply have grown up with a mindset of do whatever to graze your livestock the best you can and provide for your family. This mindset or similar mindsets are not exclusive to just this culture, the same is throughout the US and even globally. We are a hard and fast species in what works for us individually. Especially in an ecological frame of mind, most of what we learned from tradition, post indigenous society, is incongruous to the health and biodiverse functioning’s of the global ecosystem. For example, the more we learn how mycorrhizal fungi and trees share resources when in need, the better we can implement sustainable forestry practices to protect old growth mother trees and still utilize the wood for material. We may have thought we would do no harm by cutting all the trees and the biggest trees for ourselves, after all its what many of our ancestors have done, but it doesn’t mean it is the right way to go about things. Education and science are key components to this. Maybe by clearing all the nirre from the width of the ditch, it is actually removing a very important riparian buffer zone critical to keeping their water sources clean, providing habitat for a whole swath of important species and additionally, most important in their minds, creating the necessary structure of roots to hold the stream bed in place and prevent further flooding. We have to create checks on which aspects of local ecological knowledge can still be applicable and which need to get updated for a more science-based society. This ditch opened a can of worms, too many to discuss here, but a good reminder of how we need to be cognizant and adaptive to all the systems that we create for ourselves.
We dug ditches until about 13:00 everyday when we would slumber back to the house, throwing machetes, covered in mud and ready to load up on more calories. This large lunch was a time to regain strength, eat some more lamb, play some Truco and then all head for a much needed siesta until about 15:00. We headed back to work on the ditch promptly after, each day walking further into the nirre pasture as we made progress toward Rio tranquilo. This certainly was the most beautiful ditch in all of Patagonia. Austral Parakeets flocked through the trees, Chunchos (Austral Pygmy Owls) would sit up high on dead branches supervising; we would see Patagonia Sierra finches, Andean condors, Carpinteros, Caracaras, Aguilas, and Poroteras to name a few. The landscape is green with spring, the Nothofagus leaves are breaking bud, Yellow Orchids bloom alongside Anemone multifada of the same shade. This family seemed proud of their land, proud of what they have done with it. Artelio had gone to show me their water source at one point early on, not more than 20 meters from their house and just 3 meters above where we started digging our ditch, a tube stuck directly into the water source. This water went directly to their house where they could use it for whatever they like. Artelio with a smirk sat me down at mate one morning and said, “We are the only ones who use our water source, and it is fully free”, he then proceeded with, “We don’t have to buy any meat, we create it all”, followed by all the lena and Madera we use comes directly from our land. Their campo was the source of mostly everything they needed. Throughout the week we learned of the scale of what they were managing in their 3000 hectare campo. They had 600 sheep, 100 cattle, 60 chickens and turkeys and 45 horses. With the cattle, they sell the males for meat and keep the females to reproduce. Five of the horse are for riding and herding, while the others standby. The chickens and turkeys provide extra meat and eggs. Most importantly for this family, few sheep become the sustenance of their whole family and all of the sheep produce more or less top grade wool to be sold globally for merino wool products. Artelio is the president of the Rio Baker Wool Cooperative, one of the largest collectors and sellers of wool in the region of Aysen. Artelio manages this operation of wool and also is on two global wool congresses, one based in Uruguay and one in New Zealand. One could say he is wooly informed on the woolrld. All in all, behind the invasive procedures that a campo such as this one can have on the landscape, this family has an impressive connection with their land and their belongings. The amount of green space and wildlife in this valley after all makes the American grazing industry seem like a joke.
After our second work period, we would gather back up at the house to share a beer and trade cultural references. Julian has learned an impressive amount of English from the likes of American video games, hard rock and roll and Star Wars. This adds a dangerous combo when doing any activity. When pulling out a chunk of the ditch, “Use the Force” would follow, when hunting hares in the nighttime, “They are advancing rapidly”, when wrapping up in the evening or to start our morning out right, we would hear “Its a good day to die, but tomorrow is better”. This small English comic relief helped to ease the constant translations and energy associated in speaking another language, but that was also maybe my favorite part of the whole process. It feels crazier than sci-fi to be able to understand and converse in an entirely different language than your own. By the end of this homestay, I had talked politics over their beloved dictator Pinochet, learned the functionings of their daily subsistence, met over 25 people who had come and visited them over lunch periods during the course of our stay…all in Spanish. Besides from the beauty of ecological diversity that our planet has, it is pretty unique that we can have such cultural diversity among our own species and different languages are just one of those aspects that are super ‘bacan’. As a break, Artelio gave us one afternoon off from working. Quincy and I took advantage of this opportunity not to rest, but to head off for the mountains to the south with an effort to get into Argentina. After a 16k journey and 1000 meters later, we had not only bagged an Argentinian peak but gotten to view the entirety of the Pizarro campo and stare up at the humongous glacial mountains on the other side.
By 9:30, we were all so tired that one round of Truco would have us all itching to get into bed. Sooner than we knew it, we were being whisked away by the Round River van, still staring up at San Lorenzo like nothing had happened. It might just happen that I return to the Pizarros campo in December to take a go at summiting this beautiful behemoth standing over the Aysen region of Patagonia.