By Evan Bak from the University of Vermont
In October 2023, I spent a week doing a homestay with a Chilean family. My homestay grandfather Alamiro came to Chile in the mid-1900s and put a stick in the ground near Lago Brown claiming thousands of acres of land. Born in Argentina in 1938, he came to Chilean Patagonia in its early years of European settlement. It was a remote civilization made possible by horse and ox power. On his property he built a house and two barns without the use of power tools. Brendan, Kyle, and I lived in this house, framed by San Lorenzo, a towering 12-thousand-foot-tall (3706 m) mountain that punched up with almost 11 thousand feet (3300 m) of prominence out of the jagged and magnificent southern Andes.
During the week, we spent a few good hard days building one-hundred-and-sixty meters of fence for a potato field. In the shadow of towering old lenga trees, we dug holes, cut fence posts, placed fence posts, and filled in and tamped down the dirt around them. First, the holes were dug, about hip width apart. Sinking the shovel blade into the grass and topsoil was easy enough, but the deeper we dug the harder it became. After around forty centimeters, we had to reach further down and we could scoop out less dirt. That part was the most difficult; we would lift what little soil we could collect on the front edge of the shovel blade and scrape it up against the side of the hole, knocking off little chunks that crumbled off, sprinkling down where we had just scooped from. The dirt piles next to the hole would form and get bigger, and then slowly start to stay the same size when we couldn’t scoop as much. Whenever we thought we had done enough, Atilio would check the depth and ask for a tiny bit more.
Next, Atilio and Julián would cut two-meter-tall sections off of fallen lenga trunks for the large fence posts. We would hoist these quarter tree trunks up onto our shoulders and walk over to a fresh hole, dropping the post down inside, making sure to move our hands and faces as the posts fell so we didn’t get stuck with a splinter. After the posts were balanced and aligned with the others, we could start filling in the dirt. One person scooped the dirt back in from the pile that had been scooped out, one tamped it down with a dense two-meter-long steel rod, one would hold the post in place to stop it from shifting or tilting, and one would stand along the line of posts watching to make sure it didn’t shift or tilt to a side. Once all the holes got a big post and dirt filled in, we went to get the rest of the fence.
The big posts were new, but the rest were salvaged from old fences, it’s the same fence style you can find dicing up the whole region of Patagonia. In this fence style, you’ve got these big fat posts like the ones we placed, linked by six metal cables threaded through a smaller wood plank every half meter or so, and every five or six small posts they’re linked to the big posts. To find good, reusable posts you can’t just take any section that’s not in use, you’ve got to get a clean section. The oldest ones have plenty of cable breaks and broken posts, so the next oldest is the one to look for. Old enough that it’s not in use, and young enough that it’s mostly intact. As Atilio said, “If you get fifty good meters of fence and find one meter is broken, you have fifty meters of bad fence.” We drove around in the pickup for twenty minutes trying to find the right section, covering the exterior of the truck in scratches from short ñirre trees as we squeezed through a dense dry patch of the valley floor. Once we found the right fence section, we cut all six cables from each fat post and began to roll up the fence along the ground, forming a crude noisy mess of wire and wood. After eighty meters, we stopped and lifted our jumbled five-foot-tall roll into the back of the truck, dropped it back at the potato field, and went back to get eighty more meters of fence. We took the old fence sections and connected them up on the new posts, and then linked all the cables to a boulder in a hole, which added tension pulling the salvaged fence up, and letting us put our tools down.
Each full day we built the fence there was an asado – a bonfire barbeque – which featured the majority of a sheep hooked onto a metal cross and placed in front of the flames to get tender. Once it had cooked, we took turns cutting juicy slices off to eat with bread. Following each lunch, we took a half hour siesta. Full of sheep ribs, thigh, belly, and more, we dozed off on grassy patches, or if you were lucky, with a fuzzy sheep pelt brought from home. Nobody set alarms, we just awoke slowly feeling well rested and content to chug away at the work for another few hours. I definitely would have taken a siesta during lunch breaks when I worked at a supermarket or the sushi restaurant if I had a Patagonian forest to nap in instead of a dingy tile-floored break room or a creaky folding chair between two freezers.
On the second day of our homestay, we harvested our meat for the week. In the morning, Atilio rode out on his horse with the herding dog and moved a few dozen of the sheep into a fenced field. From there, he lassoed a sheep, reeled it in, brought it down, slit its throat, and left it to hang out from a fence. From there, it was skinned, and the guts were taken out and fed to the dogs. Over the course of the week, we ate our body weight in sheep meat. Every usable part of the meat was consumed. We had the bones in soup, big sections in the asados, ribs for breakfast, and pieces of the heart with belly for dinner, among many other bits. I had enjoyed lamb in the past, but this was an all-encompassing tour de force of what was possible with sheep.
Although the family had the sheep roaming free around the valley floor, they understood their impact on the habitat. One way they made up for it was freelance invasive species management. The biggest scourge on the valley vegetation – far more than the sheep – were invasive hares. Every evening, we would head out with Julián and his air rifle, trying to take out as many hares as possible. We walked along the farm section with a giant powerful flashlight, illuminating the hares and looking through the scope, aiming for the head or the heart. When we had covered the area, we walked back to the house, grabbing each hare off the ground. Every time we drove anywhere, he brought the rifle and stopped the truck to take a shot at every hare that he could. A small population would grow in the bed of the truck, and when we got back, they were skinned and given to the dogs.
The only heat source in the house was a wood-fired stove in the kitchen, a huge iron cube with a wood chamber, oven chamber, and several removable discs on the stovetop to adjust heat. Because of its importance, one of the primary tasks involved with living there was getting firewood. There was a good amount of dry fallen wood that we picked up to burn, but when lots of long-burning wood was needed, we went to the old-growth forests to get firewood. Right next to where we built the fence was a towering ancient forest of girthy lenga trees, most were a decade old and taller than 30 m (100 ft). Trees weren’t cut down since plenty had fallen to the forest floor. From these massive, toppled trunks, we cut sections off with chainsaws. We took these hefty trunk pieces and lifted them up onto a gas-powered splitter, which halved the pieces with a powerful mechanical wedge. We kept splitting until the pieces were firewood sized, and once we had amassed a sizable pile, we filled the truck bed, covered the rest of the pile with tarps, and went home.
During the week we spent in the rural Patagonian life, we saw the work it took to establish and support yourself there, and the rewards that come from it. There’s a lot of pride that comes from being a pioneer in the region. It’s a solitary place to be, but with that comes freedom. The people have to work in the elements, which adds challenges, yet they don’t view it as an adversary. It’s not going to be a relationship of harmony with nature, but it’s one of respect and understanding. Although we had read about the rural perspective in Patagonia for classes, I didn’t truly understand it until I worked, ate, and slept in it.