Artisan Fair in El Bolson, Patagonia. Photo: Laura Bernhein

Yesterday we went to the artisan fair. It’s as close to being as perfect of a “shopping experience” as I could possibly envision (probably because it doesn’t resemble shopping). Each weekend artisans set up around 200 booths along the backside of Plaza Pagano, the large park in the center of town.

If it were any bigger it would be overwhelming, at least to someone who hates buying things as much as I do, but the way it is right now you can traverse the whole thing in 7 minutes with your liter cup of local stout in hand, or spend all day and get virtually everything you need to set up your house.

Like most places in the world, mass produced furniture in Argentina is straight up garbage. The day before we’d looked at tables (all the ‘department’ stores wanted 225 pesos for folding tables, or much more–up to like $800 for crappy dining room sets). But then at the fair we met Sergio, a carpenter who has a shop here in town. He makes rustic furniture, big chunky benches and chairs all out of native cypress that lasts forever. The material is all harvested locally.

rustic benches out of native cypress

We bought two little benches for Layla, plus a coat rack, all for $50, then asked him about making a coffee table. We told him the size we wanted. He He went back to his shop to get a piece of wood he thought we’d like.

In the meantime we went around the fair. We found a woman who’d made these beautiful lamps. We visited Lorena, who I’d met earlier and bought a doll from. The doll’s foot had come off–we gave it back to her to re-sew. Layla saw a mini bed that you could carry dolls around in–with tiny blanket, pillow, all handmade–and we picked that up ($10).

On one end of the semicircle there are several food vendors selling all locally made cheeses, jams, fruits, mushrooms, empanadas, French fries, pizza, beer, honey, cakes. Lau got huge wedge of veggie-tarta (like a quiche) for $2. I had empanadas and beer. We took all of this under some shade trees in the park where circles of people–mostly Argentines, but also groups of travelers from the US, Israel, and other countries–sat all around rolling joints (personal consumption of marijuana was legalized in 2009) and drinking beer or mate, having picnics. To the east, framing the entire scene was Mt. Piltriquitrón with its jagged comb ridge, some of the teeth still filled in with snow.

Artisan Fair in El Bolson. Photo: Laura Bernhein

Several things are noteworthy about this particular fair in this particular place:

• The fair in El Bolsón has its roots in trade. There was no monetized economy (it was all based on barter) until the early 1930’s.

• Unofficially, this seemed to be the first fair of the summer season. It was hot (lots of people walking around with sunburns), and the rain, which had fallen for two straight weeks before this, had finally stopped.  During the 6 months of winter / rain, the fairs continue to happen, but as many people have told me here, “you’re just barely surviving.”

• There was one family begging for money.

• There were no police (and no need for any.)

After lunch I went back to see Sergio. The piece of wood was beautiful, a rough-cut slab of cypress 18” wide by 5’ long by 4” thick. He asked me how much of it we wanted for the coffee table.

“Todo la madera.” I told him (the whole piece.) “How much?”

“180 pesos.”

“Listo,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

We were getting a custom made coffee table for $47.

I told Sergio our address (“we live beside the Colques”) and it turns out his sister lives in the house across the street. He told us he’d drop of the little benches and the coat rack later that afternoon. The coffee table would be ready Wednesday night; he’d drop it off around 8.

It might seem strange to note all of this, but for someone who grew up in suburbia where almost everything you buy is disposable, purchased out of some seemingly urgent need (“Shit, the printer broke!” “Well, we needed to go to Target anyway, you said you needed a new computer desk!”), buying things from the person who made it (and made it just for you) seems like something totally original. It’s a different way of connecting with place.

These are our next door neighbors. They’re natives of El Bolsón. Right now they’re harvesting lettuce. The other day I played soccer with Noel, one of the boys who lives there. Later I asked him if he’d been up in the mountains. I pointed all around (there are big mountains in every direction.) He shook his head. The whole conversation made me slightly embarrassed. I was looking up at the cirques and crevasses and snowbands and Noel was right here on calle Perito Moreno, ground level. He told me he could get some lettuce for me if I wanted.

What makes some of us have the need for placefinding while others seem simply ‘placed’? Is it just, as my friend Corey Sonnett said last night via skype that “we’re all programmed differently?”

Jorge (the landlord here) told me, “later this summer you’ll see the entire family get together. There will be like 80 of them. All buena gente.”

This is the ethos behind the Home Ground Project, an ongoing collection of terms and descriptions of land feature that points towards the intimate and interwoven ways in which people adapted to living in the New World, particularly North America.

Home Ground: Language of an American Landscape

One “bristled with more than a hundred colored pushpins, each bearing a tiny paper flag with a Deni’ina place-name on it, the Athabaskan language spoken by the indigenous people still living there.” The other map—representative of its “relatively new landlords”—had less than a dozen English names.

The disparity “dramatizes a truism about belonging, about intimacy with a place,” Lopez writes. “Given a much larger frame of reference, [it] amounts to an observation about modern loss and belonging that many of us can identify with.”

This recognition of “modern loss and belonging” has always been at the heart of Lopez’s writing. From his early work, the introspective River Notes, Desert Notes, and Field Notes, through his comprehensive volumes of natural history– Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men, to his recent collections of short, and sometimes magical fiction, the overarching theme is always one’s relationship (or lack of) to place.

Home Ground continues examining this relationship, while offering new sets of tools for readers to do so as well. An enormous work—480 pages and 102 illustrations—the book brings together a community of 45 writers—Terry Tempest Williams, Gretel Ehrlich, Charles Frazier, William Kittredge, Robert Haas, and Jon Krakauer among others—to define over 850 words and phrases related to landforms and water.

In addition, hundreds of quotes—from Faulkner to Twain to Dagoberto Gilb—serve as reminders of the defining roles the land itself has always played in American Literature.

While many of the terms come from science ( ecotone, river capture, dendritic drainage, or glacial drift), the real treasures of Home Ground are the folk terms. Handed down from Indians, brought by explorers, or simply amalgamated by homesteaders, loggers, and farmers, these are terms like looking glass prairie, hassock, gulch, vale, draw, lek, cuesta, kiss tank, morro, ciénega, vega, and nunatak. Words whose precise meanings and stories are forgotten as economic growth displaces / consumes the communities where they were once everyday language.

Lopez writes, “It has become a commonplace observation about American culture that we are a people groping for a renewed sense of place and community . . . It is with these thoughts, about the importance of belonging, of knowing the comfort that a feeling of intimate association with a place can bring, that we began work on Home Ground. We wanted to recall and to explore a language more widespread today than most of us imagine, because we believed an acquaintance with it, using it to say more clearly and precisely what we mean, would bring us a certain kind of relief.”

I kept thinking about a phrase that occurred to me on the hike up: placefinding. There seem to be plenty of words categorizing what we are, but so few that adequately describe what we do. From the time I was a college sophomore and the 10 years of official ‘work’ that followed, my title was educator. But what I really did was search for different places (and if not search, then just ‘find’ the place, wherever it was or wherever we happened to be).

Skill-wise, I taught people how to paddle. I led people down rivers (Chattahoochee, Nantahala). I taught people how to set up no-trace camps, and camped out with both adults and kids in the Tallulah headwaters, and along the Chattooga. We explored forests from the Piedmont region in Georgia to Edisto Island, out to alpine montane in Colorado.

Then, as now, there was always some ostensible ‘mission,’ whether it was learning the local history of the region or how to identify trees or build shelters. But looking back on it, the real lessons were the places themselves.

If I was trying to teach anything, it was simply to share the act of placefinding, the feelings it gave you. That by going wherever it was with the understanding (or at least trying to understand) that the places you found, no matter how you initially perceived them, always had their own histories, connections to other times, connections to other people with their own stories–many of which had been lost–and that, if you simply spent time listening, watching, asking questions, if you simply allowed yourself to get into the flow of whatever the place or terrain was, you would keep learning and discovering more about the place and about yourself forever. It wouldn’t end.

I stood in the wind a bit longer looking at the town below. The scale of the place seemed tiny compared to the mountains. Somehow this always helped me walk back down there into it. I had a name now for what I was doing. On the way back I stopped in a windbreak and wrote it on the inside of my arm.

Then I drank a beer in town and started this blog.