Patagonian Promises

Editor's Note: This piece is a work of creative non-fiction.

I pulled the bleached bone from the deep red dirt- warm in my hands in the midst of a Patagonian summer- and fingered the smooth junctions of lost life. In front of me, all around me, the setting sun blazed her signal of an ending day onto the hazy landscape of the mountains. Their peaks bled down into grassy plains, filling the great river that carved canyons through the landscape. I felt the earth shift beneath me as somewhere in the endless distance herds of guanacos galloped away from snarling pumas in the world's wildest place.

* This is Patagonia.

I had to keep reminding myself, this is it. I had woken up this morning, warm in my familiar mummy bag, to an overcast sky. My hopeful side overcame my natural pessimism, thinking, perhaps, it was just early and the sunshine wanted a few more hours before making an appearance. My bag had been returned to its stuff sack, the tent poles broken down and hanging heavy again from my worn pack, yet rain still settled on the horizon tucked back behind the closest mountain face- waiting for me to start today's 15kms to La Confluencia, the collision of three rivers; the Nef, running from the West, the Cochrane, entering from the North, both flood into the powerful current of the Baker, her ancestral waters heading South for another 170km.

The Baker enters Chile from the Argentinian boarder, just above Cochrane, and flows due west over the Careterra Austral, the only road in all of Southern Patagonia, until pitching nearly 90 degrees at the Confluencia and carving canyons directly through until she spills out into the fjords of the Pacific Ocean. She is the longest and most powerful river in all of Chile, and I'd been following her flow on foot, walking the length of the great river from entrada to exito before she is damed, and changed forever.

The ominous clouds began dripping just as I arrived at a barbed wire fence, separating me and my river. I raised my pack over my head, feeling the strength I'd gained in 20 days with my life on my back, and threw it over the barrier. This was private land, owned by HidroAysen- the Spanish run, Italian funded hydroelectric energy company who hold the privatized water rights to Chile's Baker River. This 'Golaith' had just passed a proposal to build five dams in Chilean Patagonia, providing energy to run the Copper mines in the North. Having known the beauty of the Baker, the idea of her ecosystem forever changed disturbed something deep in the pockets of my heart, and before doubt could corrupt passion, I found myself, alone, climbing over 7 feet of barbed wire, descending to the Confluencia, Dam Site #2.

* 12/8/13 Dia Viente

There's a certain silence shared by the three rivers, the wind and the dusk as they collide into each other- as if they have a pact to keep still or keep consistent for just so long- until the stars can peek out and soak this world in their grand silence. The sky is a bright map of inviting constellations tonight, projecting their strength and assurance to every hopeless wanderer who care to look up in awe at the dark hours of the night, and find hope in a blackened sky. I have not found the moon the past few nights, who has been such a bright and faithful guide on my Northern excursions. Maybe she will make her comforting appearance tonight, to keep me safe by the water's edge. It's not the rivers raging current, or the pumas creeping in the dark, or the illegality of tonight's campsite that I fear... it's tomorrow, knowing the river is one day closer to an unfortunate fate. The river is murmuring me to sleep now, a whispering lullaby under the stars.

* 12/9/13 Dia Viente Uno

Today is a much different day than yesterday- the air has a quiet and peaceful breeze- clouds drifting quickly away to let the sunshine spread her warmth along the land. I'm eating my breakfast of a sliced up, slightly rotten apple and cold instant oatmeal with a mug of hot coffee- boiled with water I borrowed from the colliding rivers- atop a rock at the mouth of the South fork, the Cochrane, looking over the Baker. I think even if I spent a lifetime looking at her waters, I would never stop being in awe of her color. The blue is such a pure, cystaline shade, like no river I've ever seen. And for this reason alone I don't understand why her rarity must be ruined. Why do men always feel the need to own the world?

*

As I sat there, having borrowed water from her banks to nourish myself, to cleanse, to sustain my own life- I knew to keep the precious balance of this karmic place, that I owed the Baker something in return. So, I made her a promise. I gently knelt on her rocky banks and dipped my hands into her turquois current, letting her water run like smooth veins on my skin, and swore that I would never stop fighting for her freedom. I would do everything I could to keep Goliath off these banks, and let her water run free to meet the ocean as it always has, and always should. I would speak for the voiceless. I would share her natural force with hope in a world that could see past the commodification, past themselves, to respect what we cannot control. The Baker will remain sin represas, that is my promise.

* 12/20/13 (at the fjords of the Pacific)

There are things in life that exist purely, elements much stronger than humans can comprehend. We think with our machines and our needs, that we can justify and control what is wild. We are building a broken world we will regret, self-destructive when our brash actions leave our children thirsting and at war. Voy a Volver.

*

My fingers grazed the bone I'd found, dried out and cracking from the sun. This was a part of life, this loss. Some die for a purpose, and some just fade; all that's left over the hollow skeleton of a once thriving place.