Looking back, I deserved to be punished. In fact, in a weird way, it was what I wanted. I saw my epic 35-hour journey to the tip of Patagonia and subsequent six weeks hard graft on a sheep farm with Quinchado, the 65-year-old Chilean gaucho, as a form of penance.
My face had changed since arriving in Argentina and I didn’t like it. You could tell by the jowls, my dull eyes, the hollow cheeks and the scurvy that I had lived beyond my means and my moral factory settings. The only thing for it, other than return to the warm, perfumed embrace of my mother, was to go Wwoofing.
With no interest whatsoever in organic farming, I knew I was going Wwoofing (World-wide opportunities on organic farms) for all the wrong reasons, but I didn’t care, I needed help and a straight-talking gaucho to show me the light.
I should have turned back when the bus company said the only seat left on the bus to Gobernadores Gregores was non-reclinable. I should have turned back when a gang of laughing Paraguayan hookers who looked like they had just raided a primary school prop cupboard, boarded the bus. I felt like Pinocchio trapped on that weird vaudeville-like train to the circus. I couldn’t believe my eyes when, halfway through an omelette roll during a lunchtime pit-stop, a couple of the girls tried turning a few tricks from the roadside.
I had made a pledge not only to myself, however, but also to the estancia owner, Marc-Antoine, that in his absence I would show up, scrub his corrugated iron roof with a wire brush, make sure no one pinched his sheep and shovel the horse shit out of the barn. I had paid my US$30 subscription fee for access to the Wwoofing website and I was determined to see it through. In return for my efforts I was to receive free bed and board.
As arranged, I was picked up from the bus stop by Marc-Antoine’s mate and dropped off at the estancia. A three-legged sheep dog with a stick in its mouth came bounding awkwardly towards us. According to Marc-Antoine’s mate, it always had a stick in its mouth. Bit strange, I thought. The estancia was desolate. Quinchado’s concrete hut was empty. Marc-Antoine’s mate told me to sit and wait in the hut, before leaving me alone with the dog scratching around outside on its three legs.
The little I knew of the gaucho lifestyle came from studying Martin Fierro – Argentina’s most notorious gaucho – during literature classes at uni. He used to wander around on horseback, get drunk and start knife fights. So it came as somewhat of a surprise to find, inside the hut, a teddy bear sitting with his legs dangling over the edge of a wooden sideboard next to a small ticking alarm clock. The hut, which smelt of wood smoke, was tidy and sparsely decorated: Two calendars nailed to the wall, a table with three chairs, a wood-fire stove, a hook from which hung a hunk of meat, a sink and a sideboard stacked with tins of coffee and mate. There was another door – which no doubt led to Quinchado’s room, and possibly even more teddies, so I kept it shut. I waited in that cold hut listening to that ticking clock for three hours before the dog barked, signalling Quinchado’s arrival.
Passing the hut window on horseback with a skinned sheep slung over the rear end of the horse, Quinchado dismounted in an all-in-one blue boiler suit and stood approximately 5ft tall in his wellies. With relief, I realised I would just about hold my own against him if things turned nasty. What looked like a brown, over-sized seagull hopped around behind him as he put away the saddle and cut up the dead sheep. His eyes were two-toned – blue with green-rimmed edges. We shared a mate, he turned on the radio and we sat in silence listening to the messages being broadcast out to the estancias from the town, approximately 60km away.
He was an orphan, he told me. He once worked in a bakery in Chile but got into a fight so moved to find work on the estancias in Patagonia. He preferred animals to people and hadn’t been to the town for two years he said. He proudly showed me a new pair of bombachas he had bought there two years ago and still hadn’t taken them out of the bag. According to the one of the broadcasts, an old gaucho friend of his had died, so Quinchado lit a candle and said he would stay awake until it burnt down, as a mark of respect.
He cooked us a lamb stew on the stove and then asked me why I was there. It turned out that ol’ Marc-Antoine hadn’t bothered to tell him that I was coming. I did my best to explain the Wwoofing concept but he couldn’t get his head around the fact that I had travelled across the country to work for free. In fact, it seemed to annoy him. Perhaps he thought his job was at risk? Perhaps he thought I was just stupid? When he explained that a boy from the town arrived the year before and was paid 50 pesos a day for the same work, I started to wonder if indeed I was stupid. Once he realised I was of no relation to Marc-Antoine, that I wasn’t French, that England wasn’t in France and that I was actually a journalist, things started to go downhill fast. The whole episode was farcical.
He showed me to a wooden cabin on the other side of the ranch. There was no heating, no running water, an upside down horseshoe above the entrance and a sheep’s skull encasing the one light bulb. Work was to start at 8am. I didn’t have an alarm, so he lent me the little clock from his sideboard. Bearing in mind it was mid-winter, the temperature had dropped well into the minuses.
Wrapped in all my spare clothing, frozen to death, my mind started racing. No one knew where I was, civilisation (if you can call Gobernadores Gregores that) was a good 40-minute drive away, and I was stuck on an estancia within rifle shot of a confused gaucho with a penchant for teddy bears. People make their own rules in places like this. This wasn’t a place for me. I didn’t have rough hands and a way with horses. I was a city boy, and a scared city boy at that. Dead on half past ten the clock suddenly stopped ticking. The same clock had been sat on his sideboard for goodness knows how long yet had suddenly stopped within half an hour of me being in the room. I was close to tears. My gut instinct was telling me to get out.
I was pleased to see daylight stream in through the window. So cold was the night that my alcohol-based ointment I was using to treat a wart had frozen in its bottle. Without the use of the clock, I judged it to be roughly 7ish, so headed over to Quinchado to see how things stood. He could see I hadn’t slept a wink, or washed, and just gave a toothy grin. He knew I was close to breaking. He set a few challenges, like getting me to drag a wheelbarrow across a frozen stream and chop a tree trunk with an axe.
I realised, watching him handle the axe that he was as strong as an ox and despite being a midget could axe his way into my cabin, rough me up and have me hanging in cutlets from one of his metal hooks whenever he wanted. That evil-looking bird appeared again and watched us as we took turns with the axe. Quinchado had the thing tamed like a circus chimp. He was able to push its head into the ground so that its beak got stuck in the mud. As I was loading the wheelbarrow with wet leaves the nasty little thing launched itself at me and tried to land on the back of my head. I grabbed the rake and shooed it off while Quinchado flashed his teeth laughing and said the bird knew what I was like. What was that supposed to mean?
I had had enough. Soon after this, the three-legged sheepdog started to bark and ran to the estancia entrance. Quinchado’s ear pricked up and he followed. A truck pulling a trailer full of barking dogs in a cage pulled up. Out jumped Martín. Was this a good or a bad thing? Was Martín my saviour or had Martín come to join the party? The wild barking from the dogs and the wild, thick set of black curls on Martin’s head and his deep-set dark eyes had me worried. His arrival interrupted the labour at least, and we broke for mate in Quinchado’s hut. I sat and listened to them talk about the dead gaucho, the radio broadcasts, skinny sheep, fat sheep, diseased sheep, good sheepdogs, bad sheepdogs, the three legged sheepdog and that bird which was now tap dancing above us on the corrugated iron roof. Quinchado then explained to Martín that I had travelled all the way down by bus from Buenos Aires to cut wood and shovel shit out of the barn for free. Martín was particularly ticked by this story and I noticed his shoulders shake as he sucked on the bombilla.
“Martín, are you heading into town with those dogs after this?” I asked. Quinchado knew what was coming.
“Are you going?” Quinchado asked.
“Yes”, I said, “I have made a terrible mistake and now realise this isn’t for me. I’m sorry for wasting your time and thank you for the food and your hospitality.”
I rushed back to the cabin and threw everything into a bag before joining Quinchado and Martín who were now standing by the truck. I shook Quinchado’s hand, although he opted not to make eye contact. I think he was just blown away by the whirlwind that had been the last 36 hours and was still trying to make sense of it all as I buckled up next to Martín and felt, at last, that things were back within my control.
I gave Martín $20 for his trouble when we arrived in the town and ran to the bus ticket office to organise my 35-hour return back up north. The bus journey now seemed like heaven in comparison to what I had just been through.
I decided to write to Marc-Antoine when I returned to BA to explain that I did make it to his estancia, that I had shared dinner, breakfast and lunch with Quinchado, managed a couple of jobs on the checklist and nearly died of hypothermia before before jacking it in. I explained I was ill-prepared and naive about what to expect and that I had become de-motivated after learning that the work I was doing was previously cash-rewarded. I conceded that it was I who accepted the conditions prior to starting and apologised for flaking.
A disappointed Marc-Antoine wrote back suggesting I should have asked Quinchado for a hot water bottle. Perhaps that was what that bloody teddy was?? Although I don’t think so…
