Chasing Che

by Patrick Symmes

  “What does it say?” he demanded.

  I translated the words YES FEAR literally, and he stared at me. “You know,” I said, “like the surfers.” He kept staring. “The ones with the NO FEAR T-shirts,” I added. “Only, I am afraid, so …” Eventually he gave up staring. Some things don’t translate.

  The rain kept up, but there was no place to stop, and I rode along happily, down and up, but mostly down. The rivers were narrow and fast, filled with white flume, and I saw two salmon leap a cataract, their wet bodies twisting through the air in tandem. A few miles farther downstream I crossed the Futaleufú River on a tiny bridge named after a military officer. Sealed up in my rain gear, I saw a quick view of a microbus parked at the side of the river and a pair of kayakers loitering in an eddy, waiting to descend. By afternoon I had reached the Carreterra Austral, the only north-south road in these parts. The road is somewhat famous in Chile: it was pushed through the deep forests of the south on the personal orders of General Augusto Pinochet and was always cited as an example of his good works for the nation. Having overthrown the country’s elected president in 1973, killed more than 3,000 of his countrymen, and ruled Chile despotically for seventeen years, Pinochet should get credit for every single thing he deserves. Unfortunately, the road proved to be the same mixture of mud and gravel as the roads in Argentine Patagonia. The main difference was that on this road the bridges were all named after military officers martyred at the hands of the leftist guerrillas that Pinochet claimed he had saved the country from. Since the guerrillas were few and inept, there were actually more bridges than officers, and so even sergeants and a few privates ended up being honored in outsized plaques attached to unimpressive one-lane bridges.

  I was singing to myself, as usual. I started with “Bee hon sha pon” but then, inevitably, “La cucaracha” began to wend its way back inside the helmet. The road was empty, and there were few vistas in the rain, so I tried to distract myself from singing by composing some notes about Chile in my head. There were always lots of these mental gymnastics on the road. Sometimes if I didn’t want to sing I’d compose indignant letters to the editors of various newspapers, or deliver nonsensical commencement addresses and rambling Nobel acceptance remarks.

  I’d just fixed on the metaphor of Chile as a land of holes in the ground, of anonymous graves and buried secrets, when I struck an actual hole in the general’s road. I was thrown hard to the left, over-corrected to the right, and shot sideways into the bushes at thirty miles an hour, shattering the windscreen, snapping off various bits and pieces of the motorcycle, and cracking a rib.

  Lying on the ground in the rain with the motorcycle on top of me, I smelled smoke and listened intently to sounds: the way each droplet of rain singed into steam when it struck the hot motor; the way the turn signal clicked aimlessly, as if we were going somewhere; the way the tires of a truck splashed through the mud as it passed above me on the road.

  Two minutes later the truck came beeping backward down the road and stopped. A man I cannot remember and his beautiful daughter, who I can, came down the embankment, tied a rope between the bike and the truck’s bumper, and then dragged the machine slowly up to the road. We propped the bike on its kickstand and banged on various bent pieces with hammers. I threw the shards of the windscreen into the bushes. After a few minutes the man apologized and said he had to make it to Argentina by nightfall.

  I thanked him, and he stood there looking at me. “You know you are bleeding,” he said.

  After he left, I plucked one of the mirrors out of the undergrowth and looked. It was true. A small trickle of blood ran down my forehead. I grazed my fingers across the outside of the helmet, which showed only a tiny scratch where I had smashed face-first into the gravelly root ball of a gargantuan rain forest bush. Somehow the force of the crash had passed cleanly through the hard outer shell, two inches of foam insulation, and the lining without damaging a thing, and then broken my skin instead. I pulled off my gloves and found another cut, a bloody scrape on the back of my left hand. There was only a faint scratch on the outside of the glove. My raincoat was ripped through on the left side; the leather jacket underneath had suffered a heavy scrape but held. The skin under there was unmarked, but beneath that something was clearly wrong. I couldn’t think or move much, and I was having trouble breathing, but it wasn’t bad for a motorcycle crash.

  Alberto and Ernesto had gone down some thirteen times by this point. I stood in the middle of the road, in the rain. This was an empty quarter of South America. No one approached from either direction. For a while I wandered around, collecting the broken and muddy possessions scattered across the scene, trying to fit shattered pieces of plastic together, or tie things up, or tape them closed, or wipe them off.

  But mostly I just stood there. Once in a while I would shuffle over, turn the key, and look to see if the little diode came on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MYTOPIA

  Five days and a hundred miles later, the little green fishing smack backed away from the rocks and, turning east, began to plow up the fjord on rough seas. Like most working boats, this one had too many useful qualities to have any elegance at all. A modest sailing mast speared the deck, but diesel engines did the pushing, and the passengers crowded onto benches in the converted hold.

  The surface of the fjord was black and blue like a bruise, and as we pitched heavily away from the ocean the prow slammed showers of spray up and over three Chilean police officers. I stood with these men in featureless green uniforms, their collars turned up against the cold. Eventually a few guitarists in dark glasses and wool sweaters joined us. The cops tried to shield their pistols and the musicians their guitars, but we all got a little wet. I managed to avoid vomiting yet again, at first because the pain in my ribs made it unthinkable and then because the sea grew easy as we moved deeper into the fjord and the walls closed in. Although the cliffs rose almost straight from the water, green vegetation covered them like a carpet. This was temperate rain forest, a confusing mix of conifers and deciduous trees grown to eerie proportions. The climate was soggy and, above the water, so densely green that neither brown earth nor gray stone interrupted any but the very steepest slopes.

  We passed sea lions loitering on smelly boulders, and skin divers taking shellfish from the bottom, and long pens of farmed salmon. After an hour the boat grounded on an unprepossessing mudflat at the head of the fjord, a gentle green cirque of mountains and trees. A blue tractor rolled out of the woods, came slowly across the flat, and began to load up with boxes of supplies that we passed down from the boat. A little path led up the mud. The score of musicians clambered down from the bow, distributed their instruments, and then marched in a ragged column toward the woods. I followed their laughing progress up and into the tree line, beneath a high gate made of hewn poles. A sign over our heads read REÑIHUÉ.

  “Region X,” the bureaucrats in Santiago had labeled this paradise. They did not mean to capture the mystery of the place in that blank name; they were simply extending the system of Roman numerals that the Pinochet dictatorship had superimposed on Chile’s ancient provinces. The tenth region was where the great forests began, a narrow wilderness of old trees, forgotten islands, and saltwater fjords. The forests of Region X held most of the few remaining groves of alerce, the towering, talismanic trees of the deep south that were sometimes more than two thousand years old. The wood of the alerce—properly named Fitzroya cupressoides after Captain Fitzroy, commander of the Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin through these parts—is endangered in most parts of Region X.

  But not here, in the curious little kingdom of Reñihué. I had come following the musicians, who had come following a man, who had himself come following the trees. It was the man, named Douglas Tompkins, who brought us all here with his love of the vast southern forest and his fortune that was even vaster. Founder of the North Face and Esprit de Corps clothing companies, Tompkins had grown disillusioned by the retail world. In 1990 he sold out his s
hare of the business to his ex-wife and her partners for over $150 million. In 1991 he began buying land in Chile. The purchases were done quietly at first, and before anyone had quite realized what Tompkins was doing, he ended up with a thousand square miles of spectacular forested terrain that literally cut the country in two, running from the sea to the mountainous border.

  If Chileans were surprised to find a foreigner controlling so much land in their midst, Tompkins’s next move astonished them: he announced he was giving the land away. The “ranch” would become a 700,000-acre national park called Pumalín, or “mountain lion,” a legacy of the public, preserved forever. He was paying for an environmentally sensitive infrastructure of trails and campgrounds for visitors, and the park land itself would be turned over to a nonprofit foundation run by a board dominated by Chileans. The reaction to this generous, farsighted offer was pretty much what you would expect: Tompkins was accused of being a “secret Jew” (he isn’t Jewish) founding a new Israel, or of being some kind of pseudo-Nazi, or of planning to build a nuclear storage dump on the land, or of being a closet communist. A former defense minister called Tompkins “irritating and out of place.”

  The majority of Chileans were not openly hostile to Tompkins, but there was widespread befuddlement at the idea that a wealthy man would give away huge tracts of land. Philanthropy is a weak tradition in Chile, and landholdings have always been the measure of wealth in Latin America, the determinant of status, even of identity. You were a landowner or you were nothing. You did not simply give away land. There had to be some other motivation for the curious gringo’s actions, it seemed. And, in fact, there was. Tompkins wasn’t simply giving a national park to the people of Chile. Just as his enemies feared, his plans were much more radical than that.

  I plunked my sleeping bag onto the floor of the schoolhouse and watched a few army-issue down feathers escape and begin to drift around the room. Like all the buildings in the compound—the various residences, a plant nursery, and a barn, a dozen buildings in all—the schoolhouse was not simply a schoolhouse but an act of charity and economic largess with a purpose. Tompkins and his wife, Kristine McDivitt Tompkins, a former CEO of Patagonia (the clothing company, not the region), had paid local workmen to build the schoolhouse with local wood, using traditional construction techniques from the region. Reñihué was not just a ranch but a fantasy of an esthetically pleasing, environmentally minimalist lifestyle. There was no electricity anywhere in the compound. There were also no phones and certainly no fax machines. The only communication with the outside world came through a single radio and a grass airstrip where Tompkins landed his Husky. Heat in the buildings came from burning wood. The enormous vegetable garden supplied lettuce and herbs and root foods to complement the locally harvested seafood. The raised garden beds and virtually the entire compound were linked and divided by wooden boardwalks. Even the soil itself was safe from human trampling here.

  Three dozen folk musicians were already living in the schoolhouse when I arrived. They were members of various traditional groups from the surrounding areas of southern Chile, mostly young people although each group tended to be led by an older man with some invisible moral authority. Each conjunto claimed a section of floor in the schoolhouse, and the two-story building vibrated with music. With a dozen hungry musicians I watched the peones dig a hole in the ground near the barn. The hole was lined with rocks heated in a fire and then filled with fat clams taken from the fjord and lumps of potato-dough bread. The hole was covered over and the contents steamed for a couple of hours. Then we dug everything out and nibbled like gluttons. Dogs and cats mingled with the several dozen people who came in and out. I found a few Americans in the crowd, friends of Tompkins’s wife who were on a kayaking vacation. They were pilots and former stewardesses, all trained in first aid. The women quizzed me: “Have you coughed up any blood? Is the pain sharp and electric or wide and dull?” The men took turns squeezing me in bear hugs.

  “If you go to a doctor, all he’ll do is tape you up and tell you not to ride your motorbike for six weeks,” one of the men said, and I believed him because he spoke with the trained voice of the airline captain. The truth was that I’d fractured a rib without breaking it, and it would heal. In the meantime I found it impossible to laugh, breathe deeply, or sit up in bed. In the mornings I had to crawl out the side of the bed, roll over onto the floor, and rise to my hands and knees before I could stand.

  I wandered stiffly around Reñihué looking for Tompkins and finally caught him at the airplane hangar, in the company of a local Chilean politician he was wooing. He proved to be a tall, utterly lean man with the slightly remote look of Bruce Dern. He was warming up his Husky to fly the politico home, and I asked him for an interview, to which he replied “Maybe later.” Those two words were the first and last ones he ever spoke to me.

  The plane taxied for a moment, turned, and pounced into the air with a sacrilegious roar. The sound of the motor circled off the surrounding peaks and the little plane grew smaller and smaller, struggling for height as it headed down the fjord. Aside from his wife, about thirty people—musicians, forest workers, and a few of the local villagers from across the fjord—watched it disappear. Wherever he went, he carried their future with him. That was $150 million flying into the clouds, and the good people of Reñihué had many reasons for wanting to see him come back safely.

  It rained the final and third afternoon, but I set out with my fishing pole into the gloomy forest, following a narrow, barely passable trail through overhanging ferns and across flooded creeks spanned by wet logs skinned of bark. After forty-five minutes I reached the Reñihué River, which rampaged through the landscape in enormous open bends and side channels choked with downed trees. Dimly visible beneath the rain clouds were the slopes of a high range in front of me. I waded far out into the crushing current, slipping and twisting for purchase on the stony bottom, and eventually made it to a long gravel bar with its own side channels and pools. The water was silty with glacial dust, and the rain sheeted down, but over the next two hours I managed to pluck a pair of fat rainbow trout from holds behind a log and a bush. I pocketed the fish and waded back through the dusk, unable to recognize where I had crossed the deepest currents, tripping on sunken logs and crashing into the water face-first twice. Soaked, I battled back up the trail in almost total darkness, slithered over the wet log bridges, and arrived in the kitchen of the schoolhouse four hours after I left, sneezing and bruised and covered with thorns and convinced that Tompkins was a genius who had to preserve the land exactly as it was. Anyone with the slightest sense could see that this was a magic place.

  I put the trout in tinfoil inside the wood stove. The flesh was bright pink, turned the color of salmon by the pectin in the shells of the pacora, miniature green crabs. The musicians and some of the American kayakers stopped around and looked at the fish. “It’s a salmon,” they announced one after another, and I couldn’t win the argument no matter how many times I explained that all trout in Patagonia were pink on the inside. I was just finishing up when the musicians left the building in groups, one after the other.

  The concert was easy to find, since Tompkins, back safely from his air excursion, had fired up the generator to make that rarest of things: electricity. The hangar, emptied of aircraft, was filled with light. Little boys gathered in from the darkness like moths toward the flame and stood in the light-throw of the front door, wrestling and jumping about.

  There were over a hundred adults inside, and I found a seat by sharing a hay bale with an older man from the village across the fjord. I quickly picked out four or five Americans by the fact that they were wearing at least $500 worth of brightly colored outdoor gear each. Tompkins and his wife both appeared in dark wool sweaters made locally, which nonetheless did not particularly make them blend in with the hundred or so small, dark-skinned Chileans.

  The encuentro folklórico, as it was called, featured one band after another, all of them playing more or less the same
style of southern Chilean music. The bands typically featured four or six acoustic guitarists, a few percussionists, and a troupe of dancers. The style was fast and energetic, a quick-stepping, guitar-driven dance music. Since most of the bands were from the island of Chiloé, which you hit if you went straight out the fjord and kept going, most of the music was about lonely fishermen and unrequited love. While the Chiloéan musicians tended to wear wool caps, the smaller number of mainlanders wore cowboy hats and sang about lonely cowboys and unrequited love. One after another, the groups got up, thanked Tompkins, and then played four or six songs and sat back down. The most rocking number featured a lot of quick-stepping cowboys slapping their boots on the ground. The slowest number was a traditional cueca, or “handkerchief dance,” in which a man and woman spun in a slow circle while clutching opposite corners of a white kerchief. It was a pretty dance, and eventually Tompkins and his wife were prevailed upon by the crowd to take hold of the cloth and dance. They did well.

  Gradually I realized that almost everyone in the barn—perhaps a hundred out of a hundred and fifteen—was a musician. There was no audience. Near the end Tompkins got up and gave a speech. He said that the purpose of the encuentro was to let Chilean musicians play for Chilean musicians. He hoped their beautiful music would continue to flourish and that they would all return next year. He said that the global economy was a threat to their traditional culture. He spoke a correct but accented Spanish and stumbled a bit pronouncing monoculturización. A band leader stood and praised “el patrón” for having the concert. He led a cheer for Tompkins that seemed to pain the recipient deeply.