Wind Country

Patagonia stretched in every direction, and in every direction it was trying to knock you over. Carlos had been a gaucho for thirty years, which meant thirty years of wind. Patagonian wind was not weather. It was geography. It was as permanent as the mountains, as present as the grass, and approximately as interested in your comfort as a rock. Newcomers asked when the wind stopped. Locals laughed. The wind stopped when you went inside, and sometimes not then. His estancia was small by Patagonian standards, which meant it was only the size of a minor European country. Twelve thousand hectares of grass, rock, and the peculiar emptiness that happened when a landscape was too big for the things living on it. Fifteen hundred sheep. Two horses. One dog, a border collie named Presidente, so called because he governed the sheep with authority but occasionally made decisions that were difficult to explain. The sheep were Merinos, bred for the wind, which meant bred for wool so thick that the animal underneath was essentially theoretical. Shearing day was the moment you discovered whether the shape you'd been feeding all winter was a sheep or a very committed pile of fleece with opinions. Carlos sheared by hand. Electric clippers existed. He had a pair. They sat in the barn, in their case, clean and oiled and unused. His father had sheared by hand. His grandfather had sheared by hand. The electric clippers were there for the same reason some houses had a fire extinguisher — a concession to modernity that everyone agreed was sensible and nobody used. Mornings started before the sun, which in Patagonian winter meant they started in the dark, which lasted until about ten, at which point it became a grey that was technically daylight in the way that a whisper was technically speech. Carlos drank mate in the kitchen. The kitchen was the warmest room because it had the stove and because the walls were thick and because his wife, Alejandra, refused to allow cold into her kitchen with the same firmness she refused to allow dirt, poor grammar, or his boots. Alejandra was from Buenos Aires. She had moved to the estancia twenty-three years ago, when they married, and she had adapted to Patagonia in the way that a river adapts to a canyon — by carving a space that was entirely her own and ignoring the rest. The wind did not enter her kitchen. The dust did not reach her shelves. The sheep, which occasionally escaped Presidente's governance and appeared on the porch with the confused expression of creatures who had taken a wrong turn and discovered civilization, were redirected with a broom and a voice that the sheep respected more than Presidente's, though Carlos would never tell the dog this. "Fence on the north section needs work," Carlos said over mate. "It always needs work." "The wind—" "It's always the wind." This was fair. It was always the wind. The wind knocked down fences, dried out water troughs, and occasionally removed objects that were not properly secured, including, on one memorable occasion, a corrugated iron roof panel that traveled four hundred metres and landed in a neighbour's paddock, where it frightened a horse so badly that the horse didn't come back for three days. The neighbour returned the panel. The horse returned on its own. Neither the neighbour nor the horse discussed the incident further. Carlos rode out after mate. The horse was a criollo, stocky, low to the ground, built for wind the way a submarine is built for water — by being too heavy and too stubborn to be pushed around. Presidente ran ahead, ears flat, navigating the grass with the focused intelligence of an animal that understood its job better than most humans understood theirs. The north fence was down in three places. Carlos dismounted and fixed it. This was not romantic work. This was wire and pliers and cold hands and the wind making the wire sing, a high, thin sound that was either beautiful or maddening depending on whether you were a poet or a man trying to twist wire with frozen fingers. Carlos was the second kind. From the fence line, he could see fifty kilometres in every direction. Grass and sky. The Andes in the west, white-topped, permanent. The rest was space. Patagonia had more space than it needed and less of everything else, and this was either a problem or the point, depending on who you were and what you needed from a landscape. Carlos needed the wind and the grass and the sheep and the horse and the dog and the kitchen where his wife wouldn't let the cold in. He had lived here for thirty years and had never considered the alternative, not because alternatives didn't exist but because considering them would require a kind of imagination that the wind had scoured out of him years ago, replacing it with something harder and simpler and more durable. He fixed the fence. He rode home. Alejandra had made empanadas. Presidente lay by the stove, having concluded his duties for the day. The wind pushed against the walls and the walls held and the kitchen was warm. "The fence?" Alejandra asked. "Fixed." "Until?" "Next week." She nodded. She knew. The wind would knock it down again and he would fix it again, and this was not a problem but a rhythm, the oldest rhythm in Patagonia: wind breaks, man repairs, wind breaks again, and the grass grows through all of it, indifferent and green.