A donkey wandered by. It stopped to watch us for a moment, then nibbled at the grass between the graves and continued on its unhurried way. The men stooped low to read each gravestone and look for familiar names. Both Mennonite and Catholic graves had a startling number of young women and children. The Mennonite dates of death were regular, a few each month, enough to keep sorrow near and raw. By the time they left Puerto Casado they’d buried 168 bodies, a tenth of their original force.
The dates and names were hard to read on the weathered headstones. We lifted them out of the mud to expose their faces, grunting as we fought against the will of nature. Some of the lettering looked like it had simply been scratched into the wet concrete with a nail.
“This woman was born in 1902 and died in 1925? No, that must be 1927. A young woman. Maria Wiebe. No, not Maria…Agatha, must be…A...gath—ya, Agatha,” Rudy mumbled to himself as he crouched down to examine a headstone, tracing the letters with his fingers.
“Ah, this is our dad’s sister that lies here,” said David as he brushed moss off a stone a few metres away. “Hier ruht in Frieden Sara Fehr. It’s a child, one year old. That was my aunt.”
The stone was leaned against another grave, so we couldn’t be sure which grave it belonged to.
“Why has no one come here and fixed these graves up?” I asked. “It doesn’t look good, you know, that the Mennonites left these graves like this when you live just a few hours away. Where is your pride?”
David hmm’d in noncommittal agreement. “We don’t come here much, so I guess no one thinks about the graves.”
It wasn’t a very glorious part of the story, this graveyard. Same as those pioneers who gave up and returned to Canada. Their story was also rarely mentioned.
Eventually, the surviving Mennonites travelled inland on the narrow-gauge railway built by the Casados to haul wood to the tannin factory. The railway extended 145 kilometres into the bush. We piled back into the pickup truck to follow their route and stopped at the railhead, named Kilometer 145. Bits of twisted rail and rotted sleepers poked through the undergrowth. The old wood-fired train itself was nowhere to be seen.
“I always imagine how it was when our poor people arrived and Casado was a rich man. Look at this house here,” David said as he slapped his hand against a solid wood post of the train station, which had been refurbished as a museum piece. The buildings were whitewashed, the yard orderly and neat. An ox cart with giant wheels, designed for the rough Chaco trails, stood beside the old railway, as if waiting for more Mennonites to arrive.
“Casado said he would build the rail the whole way, but he never did, so the last ninety kilometres they had to go by ox cart,” David said. The Mennonites still grumbled about the bad deal their ancestors had received.
Women and children, tools, household goods, and sacks of seed were taken off the trains and reloaded onto ox carts and dragged deeper into the Chaco. Some of the furniture and quilts had travelled all the way from Russia to Canada, then were bundled and packed up for yet another fresh start. The deeper into the Chaco they travelled, the more difficult it became. Many became dismayed when they realized that this was what they had waited for: a dry and thorny place where scrubby bush made travel hard, where snakes and wildcats and endless tropical afflictions waited to pull you down into the dusty ground.
A series of way stations were built along the ox path, where the drivers rested their livestock, sheltered from the heat, and recovered from the brutal travel. A Mennonite historical society had restored the main shed and a few small adobe outbuildings at Hoffnungsfeld (Field of Hope), little more than a rough clearing with packed earth that faded into the surrounding bush. The buildings had hand-hewn wooden doors and were dark and dank inside. The brothers gravitated to the shed, filled with antique farm machinery, harnesses, and wagon wheels.
David stood in the middle of the shed, arms outstretched.
“In here, with family and children. In the heat, with the flies. Just terrible,” he said, and then clucked his tongue. “This was the only route into the Grand Chaco back then. Everything had to come this way, and if you became sick, you had to take this route to Asunción, which took ten days round trip. Now you just take your phone, and you can be connected in seconds.”
We’d spent all day reminiscing, debating, and poring over a history whose glorious portrayal could not cover up the suffering and loss at its core. Our mood, so jovial at the start of the day, had become sombre. Had it been worth it? Were the Mennonites in Paraguay any closer to heaven than those they’d left behind in Canada? Or did they endure all that suffering only to end up back where they started?
We trudged through the prickly trees to return to the truck. In the morning I’d seen the brothers put fishing rods in the truck. When I’d enquired where we’d go fishing, they’d answered with a sly wink.
“Na yo, let’s go fishing,” David said now as he clapped his hands in an attempt to stir us from our melancholy. “We can always still go fishing.”
We returned to the long, narrow road that slashed across the Chaco. The sun had broken through the clouds and dried some of the puddles, leaving hard ruts in their place. The truck swung and lunged through the ruts, kicking up stones that clattered against the fenders.
Beside the road were large pits, dug to provide soil to build the road, and then turned into fishing ponds. With the recent rains they were filled to overflowing, which had multiplied the fish, or at very least the fishing stories.
“I spoke to someone who said he’d fished in one of these ponds last week. He said he caught so many fish that he couldn’t even relax. Every time he sat down, he had another one on the line,” Rudy said as he tried to revive our mood.
“Well, that sounds like work,” David said. “I don’t know if I feel like working today.”
“Ah, a bit of work for some nice fish. That’s not a bad deal,” Rudy said.
Peter slowed the truck at several ponds to peer through the trees that ringed them. Most were impossible to reach, blocked off by ditches full of rainwater. Peter was given rough directions to one that was both accessible and reportedly home to fish. He watched his odometer as he measured the distance from Puerto Casado accordingly.
“Eighty. It must be a bit farther,” he said.
Then a few minutes later we came to another pond and Peter tapped a forefinger on the odometer. “Well, this is the one, according to the numbers anyway.”
He steered us down a rough track that led to the edge of a pond that was larger than the others. We dug out fishing rods and tackle boxes.
“We need to make room in the truck box for all the fish I’m gonna catch,” Rudy said as he tied a hook to his line.
“Ha! We should have brought a trailer to haul them all home, because I plan to fill the truck box myself,” David answered.
“I feel bad, coming all the way from Canada to catch all your fish. I can just watch, if you’d prefer,” I said.
“After ten fish you can stop and leave the rest to us,” David said.
Peter said nothing. He was already walking through the knee-high grass to the water’s edge. Soon everyone had found a spot along the shore and fell silent, casting their lines into the glassy pond. Water spiders, their legs cartoonishly long for their tiny bodies, skittered across the surface. The shallow pond was filled with purple water hyacinth and our hooks snagged their roots if we didn’t reel in our line fast enough.
“Psst,” Rudy whispered, as he pointed across the water. “Look.”
Two herons, stark white against the lush green vegetation, pranced along the edge of the pond. Their long necks undulated with each step. Then they took to the air, skimming over the water before they soared higher, trailing long dainty legs.
First Rudy caught a fish, then David, and within an hour each of us had at least one. Sometimes the fish escaped before they were pulled ashore and the men
muttered as they cast their lines in pursuit. The air had begun to cool. The insects that had put up a deafening clamour at high noon were falling silent. The light turned a deeper orange with each degree the sun fell towards the horizon. The trees filtered it into a dappled glow that made us squint to see where our lines had hit the water. For the first time the Chaco seemed bearable to me, even pleasant. It must have been the unseasonable rains that did it.
Rudy broke the peacefulness. He yanked on his rod, tip pointed at the water as he bowed it with effort. He paced up and down the water’s edge, jerking at the line.
“Argh! This one isn’t coming loose,” he said as he tried to pull the hook out of the weeds.
“Maybe it’s just a big fish. The one you said you were gonna catch would be about that size I think,” David called from down the shore, grinning.
Rudy already had his jeans down to his ankles, revealing skinny white farmer legs. He hopped on one foot, then the next, as he pulled off socks and shoes. David and Peter hooted with laughter, but Rudy ignored them. He waded into the water, fishing rod in one hand, his other outstretched for balance. The water reached his crotch and he yelped.
“I should have known to bring clean underwear on a trip like this,” he shouted. David and Peter snickered and carried on a whispered derisive commentary as they watched from the shore.
“Dip in and out a few times and those ones will be clean enough. Not dry, but clean,” Peter shouted across the water.
Rudy waded deeper until he reached the spot where the line was snagged on the bottom. He yanked it free and waded back to clamber up the bank, wet grass stuck to his bare legs. His underpants hung heavy and wet like a full diaper and he looked down at them in dismay.
“How are we gonna explain your wet pants to your wife?” David asked.
“She knows better than to ask questions,” Rudy said as he pulled his jeans back on and resumed fishing.
David set his rod down and returned to the truck to unload lawn chairs, a cooler, and a few armfuls of firewood. I started a fire while David rummaged around in the cooler. Once the fire was crackling, he positioned a steel stand over it, and atop that a cast-iron pot. Then he added noodles, tomato paste, chilies, and ground beef.
“I thought you had better taste real Paraguayan giso while you’re here,” David said. “It’s a stew the ranchers around here make when they’re out herding cattle.”
The smells from the pot wafted to the water’s edge, where Peter and Rudy cleaned our catch.
“Well, we didn’t even need to bring the giso,” Peter said as he held up a bag of fish fillets. It wasn’t quite enough to fill the truck box.
“Ya, it’s good we caught some. But I wasn’t confident that we would get anything, and I didn’t want our guest to go hungry,” David said as he filled bowls and passed them to us with a few galletas, the hard water crackers that had evolved from ship’s biscuit.
Here, not far from the Paraguay River, the Chaco was wetter and more lush than in the east, and the moisture allowed larger trees to grow. A light breeze whispered through tall palm, eucalyptus, and white quebracho trees. The red quebracho was long ago chopped down to make tannin, but the white ones remained, even though they were highly sought after to make fence posts and for timber. The sun had slipped behind the forest and the heat of the day had faded.
“Ahh, this is Paraguay. It was terrible at first, but now look. What a place,” David said. He reclined in his lawn chair and wiped giso from his chin.
“I wonder if our parents could have imagined that someday we’d have time to go fishing like this,” Peter said. “Not because we’re hungry, but just for fun.”
I grunted to show I was listening, my nose deep in my bowl of giso.
CHAPTER 18
Argentina
The Farthest Wheat Field
I was ready to accept that there was no clear Mennonite identity that I could frame and hang on my wall as a certificate of me. Some Mennonites made me feel like I belonged and others made me want to shed my cultural identity. Just like how I embraced the company of the biker fraternity, but didn’t call myself a biker. Mennonite was a label I liked to give myself, and I was gaining confidence that I had the right to do so. There were others who used the same label, and their use gave it new meanings, and that was okay.
Just like the second- and third-culture friends I had around the world. Born to Chinese and English parents, raised in another country, with different passports. Their grandmothers didn’t share a common language. “Which one do you identify with more?” I’d ask. They always looked back confused at having been asked for an answer that didn’t exist. My travels had taught me that identity can be complex, but I’d somehow thought my identity would be much simpler. I was a white English-speaking male from Canada; my only unique label was Mennonite. How complicated could it be?
In the end we all pick and choose whether we want to keep the buggy or buy a car, choose an English name or use our Chinese one. Language, faith, family traditions. As soon as we expose ourselves to any foreign culture—and we Mennonites expose ourselves every time we move—we have to start choosing. It’s an inexact science, what we keep and what we pass over, so everyone ends up with a different quilt.
Sometimes we find others with matching quilts, but often they’re hard to find. My trip had helped me see how many different patches there were to choose from when we made our own quilts. And my quilt was far from colour coordinated, some of the patches clashed with the others. There were a lot of quilts out there that didn’t look anything like mine, and that made me feel a bit Oot bunt. Oot bunt, mismatched, like Greta described herself on Spanish Lookout. But I’d seen enough quilts. I had all the context I needed to know who I was.
I was ready to go home, but there was one more colony to visit. When I’d plotted my journey on the maps taped to the walls of my Hong Kong apartment, I’d had to get on my hands and knees to study this last spot, way at the bottom of the map, where Mennonites had gone to be themselves. The most southerly colony. I’d drawn a black circle around its name: Remecó, on the northern edge of Patagonia.
I knew no one on Remecó, so I drove up and down its dirt roads, asking for the vorsteher—the reeve or administrator of the colony. It was the week before Christmas, but there were no decorative lights or Christmas trees on the colony, no angels on front lawns. Just neatly trimmed yards, flower gardens, and trees, everything a bright midsummer green.
I was directed down the road to Hans Loewen, and when I found him he invited me into his house, where he introduced me to his mumtje—his quiet, smiling missus.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“Na, I’m mumtje Loewen,” she answered, looking at me quizzically.
“No, I mean your own name.”
She gave a short laugh and looked at Hans, confused.
“My name is mumtje Hans Loewen.”
“No, your first name. The name your parents gave you.”
“Oh. Na, it’s L—Lena,” she said with a stammer. “My name is Lena.”
Hans and Lena had come here as newlyweds with about eight hundred other Mennonites from Mexico more than twenty-five years ago, for all the usual reasons. Now there were twelve hundred Mennonites on the colony. No electricity or cars, just sticking to the Old Colony ways. They had five children, ranging from their eldest daughter, who was married with two children of her own and lived in a small house on the edge of the farm, down to four-year-old Peter, the apple of everyone’s eye.
“It was hard at first,” said Lena, who I soon discovered could be quite chatty once the ice was broken. “The stores here didn’t have any of the things we knew back in Mexico. In fact, we still import cloth from Mexico to make our clothes, because here they don’t have the patterns and material that Mennonites use.”
But what they did have was privacy to live the way they wanted to. The
landscape was so expansive it made me gasp. The blue sky was impossibly large and present, a constant factor. Ripe grain crops shone golden in the sunshine. Fat doves squatted on the dirt roads by the hundreds, taking flight as I rode by. It was warm by day, with dew falling in the cool of the night. And there, with fertile soil all around, they hand-milked their cows, butchered their own pigs, grew grain and vegetables, and drove tractors with steel wheels.
“You are welcome to stay for a few days,” Hans said.
I was happy to eat at their table, but I preferred to sleep in my own tent, beside the shed. As soon as I began to erect it the family crowded around, having never seen a modern camping tent before.
“Look, Sush! You can crawl right in!” Helena, one of the daughters, said as she held back the flap and bent over to peer inside the tent, gathering her skirt around her knees.
A white, fringed scarf covered her hair and neck, and over that she wore a wide-brimmed white hat with a purple sash that kept her pretty face in shadows. Her dark dress ended at her pale ankles. Heavy black leather shoes, grimy with dust, completed her outfit.
Nine-year-old Sush, bespectacled and shy, worshipped her seventeen-year-old sister, her eyes never leaving Helena. Sush knelt in the entrance of the tent and twisted her neck to look up at the mesh ceiling.
I showed them my foam sleeping mat and the children took turns squeezing it and feeling its odd waffle-like surface.
“It’s not very thick,” Helena said with a giggle.
Next, I unpacked my sleeping bag and fluffed it up. I showed them how to crawl in and zip it up.
“A blanket with a zipper!” crowed Sush.
“When I’m on the road I set my tent up wherever I find a good spot, and that’s my home for the night,” I said.
They looked at each other and laughed. I showed them my set of nesting camp pots and the collapsible stove and gas bottle. I set it all up on top of a bike pannier. With the click of a lighter I had the stove hissing and a blue flame licking at the bottom of a saucepan.
Menno Moto Page 25