Beyond the Pampas

by Imogen Herrad

  I nod, smile, try to follow. My head is swirling with ancestors.

  43

  THE WELSH NAME FOR THE fertile lands in the West of the province of Chubut, in the foothills of the Andes, is Cwm Hyfryd. The story goes that this was what one of the Rifleros under the leadership of Luis Jorge Fontana (or John Murray Thomas) exclaimed upon rounding a bend: ‘Dyna cwm hyfryd!’ What a beautiful valley!

  There are several words in Welsh for several types of valleys. Dyffryn is a wide, fertile river valley like the lower Chubut valley: Dyffryn Camwy. A steep, narrow valley is called cwm: like the south Wales Valleys, and the rocky valley spotted by the Rifleros on their exploratory trip out west: Cwm Hyfryd.

  In Spanish, it is called Colonia 16 de Octubre: 16 October Colony. Argentines like naming things after dates.

  16 October was the date on which the valley was ‘discovered’. Once this had happened, and it had been duly named and a surveyor had visited, there was land to be had: fertile land in a green valley surrounded by mountains. Large tracts of Patagonian land had been given to the – regular and irregular – soldiers who had fought in the extermination campaign against the Indígenas, but an area of fifty leagues (around 175 square miles) was specifically set aside for Welsh settlers. There would be no lean years of trial-and-error experimental farming here. This was first-rate soil, ideal for growing crops or grazing animals.

  The valley lay four hundred miles away from the coast, and no road whatsoever connected one to the other. The distance was easily – more or less easily – covered on horseback, but anybody intending to live there would need to move themselves and their possessions – tools, clothes, furniture, farm implements, animals – across the trackless desert and a number of rivers.

  Wagon trains of up to eight vehicles would make the crossing from the Atlantic coast to the Andes together; the trip took them six weeks. In some places, the ruts left by the iron-tyred wooden wheels in the arid soil of the desert are still visible today.

  It must have been an odd time in Y Wladfa. On the one hand, progress and modernity were arriving in Gaiman and Trelew and Madryn: the railways and the Compañía Mercantil made consumer goods available and affordable: Welsh dressers and mantelpieces were shipped across the ocean from Wales, furniture and china and clothes from the metropolis of Buenos Aires. Around the stations in Trelew and Madryn, hotels and cafés sprang up. And on the other hand, there were the pioneers rumbling off in wagon trains to start new lives from scratch in the remoteness of the ‘Beautiful Valley’, in their log cabins with no running water, no roads, no shops, no trains.

  The Reverend William Hughes, who had come to Patagonia for his health in the 1880s (and had started his sojourn there by digging irrigation ditches in the middle of winter), decided in the early years of the twentieth century to make the crossing to the other side of the steppe. At that time, the wagon trains had been going for almost twenty years and the journey was more or less a matter of routine.

  Or at least, it was if you were a seasoned pioneer. It seems the Rev. Hughes, for all his twenty years in Patagonia, was not. In his memoirs, he quotes the diary he kept during the crossing of the desert.

  Thursday, 22 December 1904

  Journeyed from Gaiman as far as the beginning of the northern irrigation canal, 18 miles; and a most unpleasant journey it was. The horses refused to do their work: March in the centre doing his utmost to fluster the Black Colt and Pinky, who were harnessed on either side of him. They caught his mood and began to fidget, whereupon the wagon overturned and fell into the ditch we were attempting to cross. Everybody off and into the mud, attempting to pull the wagon free. Impossible. Managed it at last, with help.

  When we arrived at the meeting place, there were John Murray Thomas and E.F. Hunt, awaiting us in their carriages; Wm. Henry Thomas with his family, and E.F. Hunt, both with loaded wagons; also Alfred Hunt and Henry Thomas on horseback75

  The Rev. Hughes, who frequently shows himself as a rather stiff Victorian figure in his writing, all probity and side whiskers, comes to glorious life in those paragraphs. I can see him sitting on the wagon glowering at that headstrong nag March; climbing off into the mud in disgust, tugging ineffectually – and doubtless in an increasingly filthy temper – at the overturned wagon. Throughout his travel diary, there are accounts of his nemesis March escaping at night and running away, drawn by the green, green grass back home in Gaiman. March refusing to let himself be caught and harnessed in the morning. March in harness but in a foul mood, infecting the other horses with his insubordination. To the very end of the trip, the Rev. Hughes – in a quite endearing display of ineptitude – fails to get the better of this four-legged saboteur.

  For all my dreams of venturing out into the desert, in which I picture myself in perfect harmony with nature, I cannot help feeling, when I read his account, that this is how it would actually be: recalcitrant horses, lost items of luggage, mosquitoes, nights disrupted by stony camp sites and howling foxes.

  The wagons travelled six days a week, from Monday to Saturday. Sunday was strictly a day of rest and prayer only.

  That’s if you were a man.

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a rest that awaited us women,’ observed Eluned Morgan wryly, ‘as Sunday was also the day for baking bread.’

  Eluned Morgan, founder of the oldest secondary school in Patagonia (Coleg Camwy in Gaiman) and daughter of Lewis Jones, made the trip across the desert on horseback a few years before the Rev. Hughes, in 1898. She had been born on board ship en route to Patagonia and grown up in Rawson and Gaiman. Although she was educated at a ladies’ college in Dolgellau, she spent her formative years and indeed most of her life in Patagonia.

  How does one bake bread in Patagonia?, it will be asked. ... One digs a shallow pit, filling it with large amounts of wood and lighting the latter. Once the wood has been reduced to ashes, these are removed from the pit and the mould with the bread dough placed inside it, well covered with a lid, which latter in its turn is covered again with the hot ashes. After one hour, one has a splendid loaf of bread.76

  On my list of things to do before I die, this is among the top ten: to bake a loaf of bread in the ashes of a fire in the Patagonian steppe.

  44

  THERE IS A DAILY BUS from Trelew to Colonia 16 de Octubre. Or rather, it is a nightly bus, and its destination is the town of Esquel, the biggest town in the western part of the province of Chubut. Every evening, the bus leaves Trelew, travels nine hours across the steppe and reaches Esquel early the next morning. There is also one bus a week which goes during the day: leaving Trelew at noon and reaching Esquel at nine in the evening. It is not very popular, because it means that you lose a whole day travelling. Except with visitors, who want to see the desert. I take the daytime bus.

  The first time I make this trip, during my first stay in Patagonia, I am the only passenger on board the bus for the first hundred miles or so. Other than me, there are two drivers and a blaring T.V. which plays Hollywood movies with Spanish subtitles. Also the radio, at a similar volume, which the driver has tuned to a local station which seems to specialise in asinine advertising jingles. I wish they’d play something more suited to the landscape, Patagonian folk music involving guitars perhaps.

  I sit on the right-hand side of the bus, in the boiling hot sunshine. Later, when a handful of other passengers comes on board, all of them sit on the other side, in the shade. For good measure, they also close the curtains on the windows, and promptly fall asleep. Those curtains annoy me, you can’t tie them back properly and they interfere with the view.

  I suppose they’re meant to. The plains that for me are beautiful and exciting, exotic and wild, are probably just an everlasting expanse of too much empty space for the people who live here, who see them every day.

  I sit, my open book – Eluned Morgan’s account of her trip west across the desert – forgotten on my lap, eyes glued to the window. The sky is unbelievably blue. The land stretches away on all sides, endless, vast, empty.
At first, while the road follows the course of the River Chubut, there is still much green: grass, trees, bushes. Later the soil gets drier. The land is drenched in sunshine. I hadn’t known there were so many shades of brown: ochre, tan, copper, gold, yellow, sepia.

  After a while, I become aware of something vaguely bothering me, but I can’t work out what it is. Something is not quite right. And then it slowly seeps into my consciousness: we’re travelling in the wrong direction. We should be going west: from the coast towards the Andes mountain range. But here I am and the sun is on my right. It’s just after noon, the sun must be almost exactly in the south. But if we’re going west, the south should be on my left. And it’s not.

  Have I got on the wrong coach? Doubt nags at me until I get up and walk to the front and ask the driver who is not currently driving when we will be arriving in Esquel. (I don’t want to ask outright if we’re going to Esquel, that would make me feel even more foolish.)

  ‘A las nueve, más o menos,’ the driver says, with a friendly smile. Round about nine.

  I’m on the right bus. But how can that be? Finally, the penny drops. I’m in the southern hemisphere. Which means I’m south of the equator. Which means that at noon, the sun is in the north.

  At times the bus stops in what appears to be the middle of nowhere: no settlement, not even a house, no crossroads, nothing. Somebody clambers down, throws a word of thanks and farewell to the drivers, and walks off into the immensity of the desert. The first time this happens, I watch the tiny figure until it disappears from view. As the coach moves off, I can just make out a roof in the middle distance, a small huddle of buildings: the farmstead towards which the lone figure is heading. An irrational wave of fear washes over me, and just for a moment I can’t breathe. How do people manage to live out here, a hundred miles away from the nearest town, the nearest doctor; all alone in the emptiness of the desert? What do they do when they have a toothache? Apendicitis? An accident?

  I use the term ‘cabin fever’ sometimes, jokingly, when I feel a bit isolated after having spent all day at my desk, working alone at home. This is a place where you would get real cabin fever: so far, far away from the world.

  I couldn’t do it. I’d go stark raving mad within months.

  Suddenly I understand the blaring television, the inane radio jingles. They’re proof that the rest of the world out there still exists, the infuriating, annoying, beautiful world of noise and colours and contact and people.

  Hours pass. I have just started to doze off when the bus slows down.

  We have reached a stop for a coffee break in a small village along the road, Paso de Indios: dusty gravel roads, children walking home from school. Inexplicably, a larger-than-lifesize statue of a sheep at the junction of two roads. We enter a nondescript, whitewashed, one-storey building with the word Café painted on the wall. Inside it’s as dark as a cave. Behind the bar an old Pepsi-Cola sign blinks on and off. A few tables and chairs stand on rough wooden floorboards. Two men play pool without enthusiasm. The air is heavy with dust and cigarette smoke and days passing slowly.

  Back onto the coach. More hours of travelling.

  Strange rock formations appear on the horizon: Los Altares, Yr Allorau – The Altars. They are two, three columns of rock, striped grey and brown as though somebody had taken the trouble to paint them.

  I wish the bus didn’t move so fast. I wish I had time to get out, to walk for a few hours in the clear blue air, in the cool whistling wind and the hot sunshine, the unbroken silence. I wish I could make this journey by car so that I could set my own pace. Better still: on horseback like John Murray Thomas and Eluned Morgan; on foot like the ancestors of Sayhueke and Inakayal and Antonio. I want to see the land as they did: to be filled with its silence, with the blue and gold and browns of the days, the absolute, star-encrusted blackness of the nights.

  The coach moves on through the long hot afternoon.

  It is almost dusk, the shadows are long and the light has turned from gold to purple, when we stop in the middle of nowhere. Three people stand by the roadside, and a horse.

  A horse?

  I rub my eyes and look again. Definitely a horse. And three gauchos standing by it. Two of them board the coach, bringing with them a smell of woodsmoke and horses and leather. The third mounts the horse and rides off into the sunset.

  One of the two gauchos on the coach wears a hat: a hard, flat, black hat of the kind that I’ve only ever seen on photos with the caption ‘Typical Argentinian gaucho’. I duck behind the seat in front and try to get a better look without seeming to stare. I’ve never seen a real gaucho before.

  The gaucho turns round, scans the other passengers on board. He sees me. He sees my eyebrows (green) and my hair (blue strand). He stares.

  He can’t believe it. Maybe he’s never seen anyone with blue hair and green eyebrows before. He stares.

  West

  45

  CIVILISATION BURSTS IN on us from all sides. It’s only Esquel coach terminal, but it comes as a shock after a day filled with nothing but far horizons. I clamber off the bus, blinking and bewildered.

  It’s 9pm and night has fallen outside, but in here reigns the harsh glare of bright lights. The air is filled with the noise and exhaust fumes of other coaches. There are people everywhere.

  Someone is calling my name. It’s Dana Williams.

  Dana was my first Patagonian. We met at the stall of the Welsh-Argentine Society on the National Eisteddfod field in Wales. There is a timeless vitality about her, a no-nonsense straightforwardness. I liked her at once. We talked in Welsh and I promised: ‘I’ll come and see you some time in Esquel.’

  Dana laughed. ‘They all say that!’

  Somebody in Gaiman has told her of my presence in Y Wladfa. She runs a B&B near Esquel, and I will be staying with her.

  We go outside to her car. I can just make out the mountains beyond the glittering lights of Esquel: huge dark shapes against the starry night sky. They look like massive cloud banks. There’s a nip in the air. It feels much colder here than in Gaiman.

  I’m in a strange place again, just when I had got the hang of Gaiman. This is my first trip, and Patagonia to me is still huge and unknown; thrilling and frightening. I’m shivering with cold and with excitement.

  We eat in Dana’s living room by the side of a gigantic fireplace, so high I can stand up inside it. The flames hiss and crackle, fill the room with a wonderful aroma of woodsmoke. After dinner, we sit up over glasses of heavy Argentinian red wine and talk until long past midnight. I feel at ease talking to Dana in a way that makes me forget that this is only the second time we’ve met.

  Dana is fluent in Welsh. It was her first language when she grew up on a farm in the chacras outside Gaiman. But at the time, she didn’t like it at all.

  ‘We had to speak Welsh at home when Nain and Taid were there – my grandparents. They spent every Sunday with us, and all day long not a word of Spanish was allowed in the house! I hated it. I spoke Spanish with most of my friends. And of course in school and in the town, everything was in Spanish; and you only heard Welsh round the chapel on Sundays, for the service and the Sunday school. Oedd Nain a Taid yn grac pan oeddwn ni’n siarad Sbaeneg! Nain and Taid got furious when we spoke a word of Spanish. They pretended they didn’t understand, although they did really. They couldn’t speak Spanish, but they understood it all right!’ She laughs, shakes her head. ‘And now look at me, I’ve taken up studying Welsh again, finally! I like it now, it’s a part of who I am. I’ve been to Wales quite a few times, near Bala where my great-grandparents came from. And do you know, I still speak with that local accent.’

  ‘How strange is that,’ I say, and she laughs again.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s strange: you’re German and you speak Welsh. Here we are, an Argentinian and a German, and we’re communicating in Welsh!’

  Communicating in Welsh isn’t nearly as easy in the Andes as it has been in Gaiman. Hardly anybody here speaks yr Hen Iaith. />
  Next morning I catch the local bus to the nearby town of Trevelin: the older and smaller of the two main towns of Cwm Hyfryd. Trevelin means Mill Town. For decades the flour mill was the focal point of the new settlement.

  The air smells of pine trees and wet soil, and, deliciously, of autumn, of falling leaves and wet earth. The landscape is grandiose after the dry flatness of Gaiman. The mountains rear up beyond grey-green hills, brown stone crags topped with snow.

  I wander the streets of the town, call in on a couple of Welsh tea shops where nobody speaks Welsh. I feel forlorn and quite alone. I have hardly any Spanish, and nobody here speaks English or Welsh.

  It starts to rain. The mountains are hidden by low-hanging clouds, mist drifts across hills. Dripping sheep and a couple of bored horses stand in a field. In a weed-infested yard a rusting pale blue truck is seeing out its days. Someone has spray-painted the words Punk Rock across its side panels, but it doesn’t spice things up much.

  I want to find the old Welsh chapel and the manse which serves, these days, as the abode and schoolroom of yr athrawes Gymraeg, the Welsh teacher. Every year, the British Council bankrolls two teachers to come out from Wales to Patagonia for a year, to help strengthen the weakening grip of the Welsh language in Argentina.

  Twice I ask for the way, and am told it by helpful passers-by. But they tell me in Spanish, and somewhere among the right and left turns I get lost. (In Spanish, derecha is right and, unhelpfully, derecho is straight on.) I trudge on through the cold, unwelcoming rain; dreaming of the panad o de, the cuppa I will get if I ever find the chapel.