Viedma, Argentina

The Old Bridge. Viedma, Rio Negro, Argentina.  Photo by Olga Ricci.

Greetings from Patagonia.  The last time I was here in Viedma was ten years ago as an AFS exchange student in 2002-2003.  Visiting here again is the closest to using a time machine I've ever come- around every corner a memory jumps out to surprise me. 

I recently came across an email I sent to family and friends after my first month here ten years ago, which I will share here below.  It's difficult to resist the temptation to edit it.  There are moments when I want to reach back through time and slap myself for being such a sullen whiner.  I remember a friend wrote me back: "I love it!  You sound like a nostalgic old man already." I share it with you here as a snapshot in time.

September 15, 2002

Hola a todos-

Every time I tilt my head up towards the sky there is a neatly shaped V of birds tugging in the summer, they’re going South to Patagonia.  I am jealous of these birds as they migrate down to the end of the world, to where I very much wanted to stay for my time here as a an exchange student. Perhaps they are Arctic Terns, which migrate 11,000 miles each year from Patagonia to Alaska. Perhaps these same birds have flown over my home back in Wasilla. I wish I knew more about ornithology.

I chose Argentina for my host country because it was a Spanish speaking country with a wide swath of mountains running up and down it’s Western longitude that I had always dreamed of seeing one day, but apparently AFS (American Field Service, the exchange oraganization I’m with) has done their best to send me as far away as possible from those dramatic horizons here in Viedma, across the continent from the nearest hill.

I confess for my first week after arrival I could not have invented too many positive comments about here.  My plan had been envisioned somewhat like a six month expedition somewhere further South, someplace where everything would be unrecognizably distinct from back home and ideally I wouldn’t have to go school because it would be my job to stay home and tend the family llama herd.

However, do not let me give you the impression that I am totally distraught. Although I am not exactly in the exotic picture of South America I imagined, I am learning how to make the best of it, “aprovecho” (I make best use of it). There is beauty in anything and everywhere. There is art waiting to be realized in the piles of trash and heaps of pruned branches that people dump at the edge of town. There is a romance to the wheat fields freshly ploughed for spring and the ranches that fold forever in to the flat and featureless horizon. There is an aura of timelessness that hangs above the river winding lazily through town like fog on a cool morning.  There are many convenient aspects of living closer to a city that I am learning to make use of.  I enjoy riding a bike to school, a badass “Beach Commander 2000” that looks like a 1970’s concept of a mountain bike. And if I had hoped for a more spectacular landscape here, perhaps my host family had hoped for a more exciting person than myself.  I swear I’m doing my best to be a lot more social than I am normally. It sounds like my friends from school here are even going to make me go to “El Boliche”, the dance club. Though you know I would rather spend the evening sealed inside a cardboard box with glass shards and fish entrails than in a dance club, I am going to try it. Another thing I am looking forward to is to try out a kayak. Kayaking is a popular sport here since you are never more than a five or ten minute walk away from the riverside. Apparently Viedma has the most people per capita in all of Argentina who own kayaks.

Aerial view of Viedma, Argentina.

Allow me to share my first impression of where I shall live for the next half-year. I arrived in a zombie trance after a twelve hour bus ride in the dark from Buenos Aires to Viedma. I awoke just as the bus was pulling into the station and through blurry eyes, waiting at the platform outside my window I spotted two very hopeful looking people whom I had seen before in a picture that my host family had sent to me- they were my new parents. The striking, trim woman with thigh- height leather high heels and a smart dress was Bella, my host mother, and the tall man with dark hair in khaki slacks and a t-shirt and thick glasses was Tony, my host father. They took me to my new home where I immediately fell asleep.

When I awoke, I didn’t know whether I had slept for an hour or three days, no idea where I was, why, how, etc.  After lying in bed and racking my brain for the next minute or so I remembered all the traveling I had done during the last few days, and with a sickening wrench of my stomach, for the first time I truly wondered what the hell I got myself into and how I had ended up here.

Downstairs my six new family members were all having lunch. My new family includes my parents Bella and Tony, my two younger sisters Pilar and Belen, and two younger brothers Jose and Roberto. Two days later though we took the eldest son, Jose, to the airport to leave for the U.S. to be an exchange student as well.  I guess I’m his replacement.

After a lot of confused albeit amicable conversation with my new family over lunch, what appeared to be an unhappy marriage between an ancient Volkswagen bug and a small truck full of excited looking people pulled up to the house honking the horn emphatically gunning an ill-sounding engine. I followed Jose as he shuffled out of the house and we piled into this little creature with five other friends of his to go cruise town. We went to go "dar vueltas", literally, to go in circles. Everyone except myself had dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, and were dressed head to toe in denim clothes designed to appear as if they were well-worn. They wore jeans with pre- faded material and pre-ripped holes from the use years of use they never had, cigarettes hung casually out of their mouths and they spoke rapidly in a tongue incomprehensible to my muddled ears.  The main road here goes adjacent to the Rio Negro (the river) through the middle of town, a half-mile strip of pavement which we drove up and down no less than twenty times accelerating over speed bumps as if they were jumps and slowing down occasionally to whistle and yell at girls.  Everyone kept chanting something about "Chupe". (The verb "chupar" means "to suck".  Later I learned that “Chupe” was Jose’s nickname which had evolved from Jose to Giseuppe to Chupe, which changed my idea a lot about what I had imagined they had been talking about in the car.)  The little city sped by over and over as they all asked me if I like to drink, do I have a girlfriend, do I like to party, and if not they told me we’ll get busy with all that right this weekend.

We live in a big brick house in the city. Here the houses are constructed so that usually two houses share the same wall. If I walk outside and look down the street I can see about fifteen neighboring homes. Quite a change from the seven acres of woods surrounding my home back in Alaska. The Rio Negro is maybe four hundred meters from our house. It is an enormous body of water, maybe four hundred meters from shore to shore.  I greatly enjoy its presence. Just to have a large body of water near the house is a thrill if you’re not accustomed to it. They tell me in the summer everyone goes to the shoreline to spend the day, to swim, nap in the shade, have a picnic.

If I were to sum up my first three weeks here so far in a word it would be: confusion. It feels as if I’m never quite completely sure what’s going on or what I’m supposed to do.  From what I have seen so far it is pretty much the exact opposite of Alaska, but all the people here have been incredibly kind to me.  My family here are all wonderful people, I have a lot less responsibilities, and school only goes until noon. As far as the language, it still feels like everyone here has collaborated to play a clever trick on me. It is as if every time someone speaks, their words pass through some devious, invisible filter that scrambles them into a string of incomprehensible gibberish. I had imagined that the three years of Spanish I studied in High School would help out a lot with my efforts in mastering the language, but I have found that I still have miles to go before I sleep and I can actually understand what in the world all these people here are talking about all the time. I have found that the easiest people to talk with are my youngest siblings, who have smaller vocabularies and usually speak more slowly. It is already hard for me to write this in English so I suppose I am going to learn the language whether I want to or not.

I have been spending a great deal of time running, though it is tough to be so self- motivated- I miss the cross-country team. Some days it feels like everything sneaks up on me all at once and alI want to do is go home. There are days when I would give anything just to see one pathetic little mountain, to have some thick woods where I could go for a quiet walk, to have all my hammers and saws back in my callused hands and to have some dirt back under my my fingernails, so these are the times when I go for a run. I search for someplace I have not been yet, usually as far away from the city as I can go.  Running clears my head, it makes everything seem more tolerable. I’m ready to give anything another chance after I have run far enough. I run down lonesome dirt roads out in the country and the cows look at me funny across the barbed wire as I run by, their gazes follow me as I pass as if I were holding a string attached to each of their snouts. I stir up flocks of prismatic parrots nesting in the scrub brush and they swarm above me in hundreds screeching angrily at my presence.  The animals are all surprised to see something that passes on feet rather than wheels.  Some days when the clouds look just right I can pretend they are mountains, the tall white pillars in the distance are something solid and tangible rather than just suspended ice particles.  The sky grows pink then red and finally purple like a swelling bruise, like a fistfull of melted crayola, then ultimately healing in to blackness. The stars appear and fill the sky in a completely different pattern than back in Alaska. Everything is better.

I don’t want to hog the computer anymore. I think Pilar (fourteen year old sister) has friends to chat with. Hope to hear from you.  

Love, Ben