A postcard from Patagonia
Plus: in-person events this week in Miami, Washington DC, and New York City.
Dear friends,
I’m really grateful to those of you who replied to my first letter. It’s not an easy thing to send a note like this out into our noisy world, and your responses were like a warm hug. Yafa wrote from Pittsburgh to share her family’s fascinating story of migration from Syria to Mexico City. David, from Toronto, discovered that we have relatives in common from the Jewish community of Baghdad. So many others sent words of encouragement from London, Buenos Aires, and beyond. I mean it when I say that I want to hear from you, so please write me back! We are such a global community, and in the coming weeks I hope to share some of your amazing stories — and to meet some of you in person (see below for more about that).
This week, I’m sending a retrospective postcard from Patagonia, southern Argentina. Four years ago, in March 2020, I was on a reporting trip there—exploring the remote Península Valdés, on the Atlantic coast, where orcas hunt seals on the beach and penguins swim in frigid, turquoise waters—when a message came that changed everything.
I was seeking solitude. That was what I said, at least, when people asked me why I wanted to meet an isolated gaucho on the Patagonian steppe, far from civilization. In a world that was so fast and so busy, I wanted to spend time with someone who lived in relative silence.
I met a sheep-herding family, and the ranch manager told that I could spend the night with a shepherd called Pereira, who lived in a small brick hut on a cove called Caleta Valdés, 40 miles from the nearest town. Pereira had no cell phone signal out there, so the only way to let him know I was coming on such short notice was with a note from his boss, which I was to hand him upon arrival. This is the note:
pereira.
jordan is going to sleep with you tonight in la caleta. let him in. make him comfortable.
i am juan castro.
Three hours later, after driving down some seriously bumpy washboard roads in a rented sedan, I met Pereira. He was a few years older than me, a young man in his late twenties. He lived in almost complete solitude for weeks at a time, tending to his sheep and checking on their water wells.
We spent hours talking, drinking mate (the national beverage of Argentina) and having torta frita (fried dough). We cooked puchero, a traditional Argentine stew, with fresh lamb and root vegetables. When we finished eating, Pereira pulled out an acoustic guitar. “All of us who work the land, we’re known as gauchos,” he said. “And every gaucho has his guitar.”
He played milongas, folk music, and cumbias camperas. I asked Pereira why the songs all sounded so melancholy. “Because the life of the gaucho is solitary,” he replied. “We’re all human beings; we feel lonely, and sometimes there’s no one to talk to. So what do we do? We sing.”
When he handed me the guitar and asked me if I knew how to play, I sang some American folk songs—“You Are My Sunshine” and “Goin’ Across the Mountain” and “Red River Valley”—and when I roughly explained the Spanish translation of the lyrics, Pereira remarked on how similarly lonely they were. I told him that where I lived, people would do just about anything not to be lonely; that it was easy to feel like you were a part of nothing in the United States, even in the biggest cities or the friendliest towns. (I talk about this a lot now when it comes to our family histories—how it’s easy to feel like we don’t entirely belong to any singular identity category, when in reality we are often beautiful mixes and fusions of more than one).
Each night, Pereira listened to the radio, one of the few AM signals that reached his hut. The broadcaster read aloud messages for the solitary gauchos (mensajes al poblador rural) sent in by family members trying to get in touch. The messages brought all sorts of news: requests of items for the men to bring when they next came home, or a planned time to make their way to a hilltop with faint cell service and expect a phone call.
“Mario, the family says that everyone is healthy and well,” the broadcaster announced that night in one message, as the speakers crackled to life. Another message, later on, reported a wallet found with someone’s IDs inside. Sometimes, in the saddest of cases, the radio is the only way a gaucho might learn of a death in the family and know to get back home in time for the funeral. Pereira said he never missed the show.
There were no radio messages for Pereira that night, which made him a bit sad. I would have never expected that there might be a message for me. But indeed, albeit indirectly, there was.
After the notices to the rural shepherds, the radio station broadcast the world news. It was there, on the edge of a cove on the Patagonian coast, when I learned that the first case of the coronavirus had reached New York. “A neighborhood called New Rochelle,” the host said. Five blocks from the house where I grew up.
I didn’t know what to say. “I live there,” I told Pereira.
“That’s very far away,” he replied.
“I know.”
“Will you go back?”
I did not know the answer.
It sounds strange, but after that, we turned off the radio and I almost forgot about what I had just learned. A problem for tomorrow, I thought. Pereira took out his guitar again and we began to sing some more, to chat some more, until it was time to sleep.
Under the cover of a million stars, Pereira led me outside to another one-room brick hut, which had several twin beds. Each of us unfurled a dusty mattress onto a wooden frame. Pereira fell asleep almost immediately, his breathing steady and calm. I was distracted by the sound of eerie cries coming from the seashore, piercing the stillness. Counting the cries until I fell asleep, I waited until morning to ask what they were. Pereira told me later that they were the yelps of penguins.
The next morning, we said our farewells. I had come seeking solitude, and left as isolation was on the cusp of becoming the mandate of the world.
It is hard to believe that this month marks four years since my time with the gaucho Pereira. If I close my eyes now, I can still smell the humid room—still hear his guitar, his radio, his voice. He was the last new friend I made before the pandemic began, before the world began to irrevocably change.
“Don’t forget,” Pereira had told me when I left, handing me the slip of paper that served as my passage to his outpost the day before. I thanked him, got into the car, and drove off. Still today I can tell you where that slip of paper is, tucked into one of my notebooks.
All my best,
Jordan -
Come join me at one of my remaining March events for Stranger in the Desert:
Miami, FL - Sunday, March 24 at 4 PM: Books & Books (RSVP)
Washington, DC - Wednesday, March 27 at 6 PM: The Chastleton Ballroom (RSVP)
New York, NY - Thursday, March 28 at 7 PM: The Jewish Museum (RSVP)
I always love reading your stories as I travel with you vicariously.
love this!!! thanks for sharing.