The Hooker from Patagonia
I first met Ollie at the recruiting meeting for the university rugby club. He was a blond, wiry Welshman and was also a freshman, also new and, as it turned out, a neighbor in my dormitory1. The morning after our first practice, I remembered waking up sore and shattered and heard a dull thump on Ollie's side of the wall. His legs were so tired that when he had jumped off his top bunk, they couldn't hold up his weight and had collapsed like a pile of laundry.
photo by Ed Belenky ... omg, we were children
On any given year, the rugby club had a dozen foreign veterans like us -- Canadians, Frenchmen, Trinidadians and Irishmen who had been playing as teenagers. Ollie had been playing for forever, mostly as a hooker. A rugby hooker starts play by wrapping his arms around the shoulders of two beefy teammates known as props. The props grab him by the waist and together they have to support his weight enough that his legs can kick and thrash if he needs to. The hooker and props face off against their opposing trio in a scrum, locking heads against their opponent's shoulder in what looks like a cross between group Greco-Roman wrestling and those nature videos of caribou or elephant seals shoving against each other to establish their mating hierarchy. A ball is thrown between the opposing teams, and it is the hooker's job to hook the ball with his legs and kick it back towards his teammate, all while the opposing hooker is kicking out and trying to get the ball back and the opposing props are shoving forward trying to regain possession. It's the basketball tipoff or hockey faceoff except with 800 lb's of muscle, cleated shoes and a persistent non-zero chance of spinal cord injury. There are many ways to be a badass in rugby and being a good hooker was one of them.
We were bonded by an odd mortar of mutual expatriatism, road trips to away games and hours spent in violence between consenting adults. However, as with many of my college friends, we lost touch after graduation, chasing the various definitions of what we had wanted to be when we grew up. I was moving in with arcanus and plunging headlong into the whirlwind of Manray, netgoth and Shelter parties; and if it was one thing that I did not share with any of my rugby teammates, it was a CD collection.
Yet, also as with many college friends, Ollie and I found each other again, many years later, on Facebook. We caught up over beers and told each other of our lives over the past 10 years. He had gone into corporate life and hated it. Walked out the door one day, threw away his suit and became a carpenter. Inside the Greenspan housing bubble, he got into buying and flipping houses on the North Shore and had started ploughing the profits from that into a doggie daycare service. When we met up, he had just gotten back from a few months spent in Patagonia, doing construction consulting for an ecolodge in Chile and trekking around Torres Del Paine. I had just gotten back from Tanzania and after telling him about the crowds on Kilimanjaro he said,
"you have to get yourself to Patagonia. There are places out there that are crowded, yeah, but so many other places where you can go and not see a single soul. It's still wild ... but won't be that way for long."
At the time, I already had my eye on doing a 1000k in Vancouver Island, so I shelved the idea for later. silentq and I typically alternate years where one of us determines the vacation destination, but we chose to swap places in 2010 so that she could pick an Alaskan cruise with her parents on 2011. So, I had started mulling over whisky distillery bike touring in Scotland, camping in Yellowstone and trekking or cycling through New Zealand; then added Patagonia in with that lot. I dropped by The Globe travel bookstore and started doing research. My parents and sisters had just come back from a South American cruise and had fabulous things to say about Buenos Aires and Torres Del Paine, which swung me more towards doing this trip, but I was also struck by the massiveness of the place and paralyzed by options.
Patagonia straddles South America's Andes mountains in both Chile and Argentina from the Rio Colorado to Tierra Del Fuego. It's a million square kilometers in size, twice the size of California and five times the size of New England. It has swish ski resort towns like Bariloche, in the Lakes District and former penal colonies like Ushuaia on Tierra Del Fuego at what seemed like the very end of the world. In between, there were massive ice caps, glaciers, penguin colonies and villages of third generation immigrant Welshmen who had never seen Caernarvon and spoke Argentine Spanish. It was tempting to visit but mystifying to decide where to spend the precious few days that we had for vacation.
There was also the fact that, over the years, at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, I have watched documentaries of explorers struggling through whiteout conditions on the Southern Ice Field and mountaineers getting trapped on a knife edge of rock in the winter, and it generally seemed a little intimidating. It was the edge of civilization -- no ATMs, no cell service, be prepared.
Seeking advice, and another excuse to hangout, a year after our last meeting, I took the commuter rail up to the North Shore and met up with Ollie at his house and bounced itineraries off him. We stood around his kitchen table as he pulled out maps and unfolded them and traced his journeys.
"This place, Campamiento Italiano, is a decent campground, but you want to push on a bit further ..."
"... from here, you've got a really short hike to a fantastic view of the Cuernos and Valle Frances. It's like a cathedral of rock and ice."
"This spot ... really rather windy. Gets less so after you get to this point, here, but then you'll miss the wind because you'll realize that it was keeping the bugs at bay."
"... you can head up the Carretera Austral and visit Pumalin. You know North Face, the clothing company? The founder bought up all of these acres of alerce forest and turned them into a protected nature preserve."
It was all very Royal Explorer's Club. You could almost imagine us holding pipes in one hand and pointing at a frescoed map in a wood panelled room lined up with hunting trophies. Afterwards, we got dinner at a restaurant that was owned by one of his doggie daycare clients. Leaning on the bar, we swapped dreams and ideas, places that we wanted to see and parts of the map that drew our eye.
"One of the things, I got from rugby," he said, "is that you shouldn't say that you're going to do something that you aren't going to do. If you're not sure, keep your mouth shut. If you don't think you're in for it, then step back. But if you're going to say that you're going to do something; you'd better do it. I've got guys on my staff who aren't the sharpest or brightest but they show up every fucking day to do work, so they get the best work. With me, I told myself that I was going to be my own boss, and I figured out how I was going to do it. Yeah, it's hard sometimes. That trip to Chile was the first vacation I had in forever, but I don't regret doing it.
"It's no good to have these dreams if they're just going to be dreams."
We leave for Argentina in four days. There will be waterfalls and mountains and glaciers and Japanese ryokans in the midst of the pampas. I cannot goddamn wait.
1 and, yes, that means that he is one of the few people in the world who can corroborate the Tequila and Shakespeare story ... or at least everything up "Until I woke up in a hospital bed ..."
photo by Ed Belenky ... omg, we were children
On any given year, the rugby club had a dozen foreign veterans like us -- Canadians, Frenchmen, Trinidadians and Irishmen who had been playing as teenagers. Ollie had been playing for forever, mostly as a hooker. A rugby hooker starts play by wrapping his arms around the shoulders of two beefy teammates known as props. The props grab him by the waist and together they have to support his weight enough that his legs can kick and thrash if he needs to. The hooker and props face off against their opposing trio in a scrum, locking heads against their opponent's shoulder in what looks like a cross between group Greco-Roman wrestling and those nature videos of caribou or elephant seals shoving against each other to establish their mating hierarchy. A ball is thrown between the opposing teams, and it is the hooker's job to hook the ball with his legs and kick it back towards his teammate, all while the opposing hooker is kicking out and trying to get the ball back and the opposing props are shoving forward trying to regain possession. It's the basketball tipoff or hockey faceoff except with 800 lb's of muscle, cleated shoes and a persistent non-zero chance of spinal cord injury. There are many ways to be a badass in rugby and being a good hooker was one of them.
We were bonded by an odd mortar of mutual expatriatism, road trips to away games and hours spent in violence between consenting adults. However, as with many of my college friends, we lost touch after graduation, chasing the various definitions of what we had wanted to be when we grew up. I was moving in with arcanus and plunging headlong into the whirlwind of Manray, netgoth and Shelter parties; and if it was one thing that I did not share with any of my rugby teammates, it was a CD collection.
Yet, also as with many college friends, Ollie and I found each other again, many years later, on Facebook. We caught up over beers and told each other of our lives over the past 10 years. He had gone into corporate life and hated it. Walked out the door one day, threw away his suit and became a carpenter. Inside the Greenspan housing bubble, he got into buying and flipping houses on the North Shore and had started ploughing the profits from that into a doggie daycare service. When we met up, he had just gotten back from a few months spent in Patagonia, doing construction consulting for an ecolodge in Chile and trekking around Torres Del Paine. I had just gotten back from Tanzania and after telling him about the crowds on Kilimanjaro he said,
"you have to get yourself to Patagonia. There are places out there that are crowded, yeah, but so many other places where you can go and not see a single soul. It's still wild ... but won't be that way for long."
At the time, I already had my eye on doing a 1000k in Vancouver Island, so I shelved the idea for later. silentq and I typically alternate years where one of us determines the vacation destination, but we chose to swap places in 2010 so that she could pick an Alaskan cruise with her parents on 2011. So, I had started mulling over whisky distillery bike touring in Scotland, camping in Yellowstone and trekking or cycling through New Zealand; then added Patagonia in with that lot. I dropped by The Globe travel bookstore and started doing research. My parents and sisters had just come back from a South American cruise and had fabulous things to say about Buenos Aires and Torres Del Paine, which swung me more towards doing this trip, but I was also struck by the massiveness of the place and paralyzed by options.
Patagonia straddles South America's Andes mountains in both Chile and Argentina from the Rio Colorado to Tierra Del Fuego. It's a million square kilometers in size, twice the size of California and five times the size of New England. It has swish ski resort towns like Bariloche, in the Lakes District and former penal colonies like Ushuaia on Tierra Del Fuego at what seemed like the very end of the world. In between, there were massive ice caps, glaciers, penguin colonies and villages of third generation immigrant Welshmen who had never seen Caernarvon and spoke Argentine Spanish. It was tempting to visit but mystifying to decide where to spend the precious few days that we had for vacation.
There was also the fact that, over the years, at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, I have watched documentaries of explorers struggling through whiteout conditions on the Southern Ice Field and mountaineers getting trapped on a knife edge of rock in the winter, and it generally seemed a little intimidating. It was the edge of civilization -- no ATMs, no cell service, be prepared.
Seeking advice, and another excuse to hangout, a year after our last meeting, I took the commuter rail up to the North Shore and met up with Ollie at his house and bounced itineraries off him. We stood around his kitchen table as he pulled out maps and unfolded them and traced his journeys.
"This place, Campamiento Italiano, is a decent campground, but you want to push on a bit further ..."
"... from here, you've got a really short hike to a fantastic view of the Cuernos and Valle Frances. It's like a cathedral of rock and ice."
"This spot ... really rather windy. Gets less so after you get to this point, here, but then you'll miss the wind because you'll realize that it was keeping the bugs at bay."
"... you can head up the Carretera Austral and visit Pumalin. You know North Face, the clothing company? The founder bought up all of these acres of alerce forest and turned them into a protected nature preserve."
It was all very Royal Explorer's Club. You could almost imagine us holding pipes in one hand and pointing at a frescoed map in a wood panelled room lined up with hunting trophies. Afterwards, we got dinner at a restaurant that was owned by one of his doggie daycare clients. Leaning on the bar, we swapped dreams and ideas, places that we wanted to see and parts of the map that drew our eye.
"One of the things, I got from rugby," he said, "is that you shouldn't say that you're going to do something that you aren't going to do. If you're not sure, keep your mouth shut. If you don't think you're in for it, then step back. But if you're going to say that you're going to do something; you'd better do it. I've got guys on my staff who aren't the sharpest or brightest but they show up every fucking day to do work, so they get the best work. With me, I told myself that I was going to be my own boss, and I figured out how I was going to do it. Yeah, it's hard sometimes. That trip to Chile was the first vacation I had in forever, but I don't regret doing it.
"It's no good to have these dreams if they're just going to be dreams."
We leave for Argentina in four days. There will be waterfalls and mountains and glaciers and Japanese ryokans in the midst of the pampas. I cannot goddamn wait.
1 and, yes, that means that he is one of the few people in the world who can corroborate the Tequila and Shakespeare story ... or at least everything up "Until I woke up in a hospital bed ..."