Chasing Che (14 page)

I
plunked my sleeping bag onto the floor of the schoolhouse and watched a few army-issue down feathers escape and begin to drift around the room. Like all the buildings in the compound—the various residences, a plant nursery, and a barn, a dozen buildings in all—the schoolhouse was not simply a schoolhouse but an act of charity and economic largess with a purpose. Tompkins and his wife, Kristine
McDivitt Tompkins, a former CEO of Patagonia (the clothing company, not the region), had paid local workmen to build the schoolhouse with local wood, using traditional construction techniques from the region. Reñihué was not just a ranch but a fantasy of an esthetically pleasing, environmentally minimalist lifestyle. There was no electricity anywhere in the compound. There were also no phones and certainly no fax machines. The only communication with the outside world came through a single radio and a grass airstrip where Tompkins landed his Husky. Heat in the buildings came from burning wood. The enormous vegetable garden supplied lettuce and herbs and root foods to complement the locally harvested seafood. The raised garden beds and virtually the entire compound were linked and divided by wooden boardwalks. Even the soil itself was safe from human trampling here.

Three dozen folk musicians were already living in the schoolhouse when I arrived. They were members of various traditional groups from the surrounding areas of southern Chile, mostly young people although each group tended to be led by an older man with some invisible moral authority. Each
conjunto
claimed a section of floor in the schoolhouse, and the two-story building vibrated with music. With a dozen hungry musicians I watched the
peones
dig a hole in the ground near the barn. The hole was lined with rocks heated in a fire and then filled with fat clams taken from the fjord and lumps of potato-dough bread. The hole was covered over and the contents steamed for a couple of hours. Then we dug everything out and nibbled like gluttons. Dogs and cats mingled with the several dozen people who came in and out. I found a few Americans in the crowd, friends of Tompkins’s wife who were on a kayaking vacation. They were pilots and former stewardesses, all trained in first aid. The women quizzed me: “Have you coughed up any blood? Is the pain sharp and electric or wide and dull?” The men took turns squeezing me in bear hugs.

“If you go to a doctor, all he’ll do is tape you up and tell you not to ride your motorbike for six weeks,” one of the men said, and I believed him because he spoke with the trained voice of the airline
captain. The truth was that I’d fractured a rib without breaking it, and it would heal. In the meantime I found it impossible to laugh, breathe deeply, or sit up in bed. In the mornings I had to crawl out the side of the bed, roll over onto the floor, and rise to my hands and knees before I could stand.

I wandered stiffly around Reñihué looking for Tompkins and finally caught him at the airplane hangar, in the company of a local Chilean politician he was wooing. He proved to be a tall, utterly lean man with the slightly remote look of Bruce Dern. He was warming up his Husky to fly the politico home, and I asked him for an interview, to which he replied “Maybe later.” Those two words were the first and last ones he ever spoke to me.

The plane taxied for a moment, turned, and pounced into the air with a sacrilegious roar. The sound of the motor circled off the surrounding peaks and the little plane grew smaller and smaller, struggling for height as it headed down the fjord. Aside from his wife, about thirty people—musicians, forest workers, and a few of the local villagers from across the fjord—watched it disappear. Wherever he went, he carried their future with him. That was $150 million flying into the clouds, and the good people of Reñihué had many reasons for wanting to see him come back safely.

I
t rained the final and third afternoon, but I set out with my fishing pole into the gloomy forest, following a narrow, barely passable trail through overhanging ferns and across flooded creeks spanned by wet logs skinned of bark. After forty-five minutes I reached the Reñihué River, which rampaged through the landscape in enormous open bends and side channels choked with downed trees. Dimly visible beneath the rain clouds were the slopes of a high range in front of me. I waded far out into the crushing current, slipping and twisting for purchase on the stony bottom, and eventually made it to a long gravel bar with its own side channels and pools. The water was silty with glacial dust, and the rain sheeted down, but over the next two
hours I managed to pluck a pair of fat rainbow trout from holds behind a log and a bush. I pocketed the fish and waded back through the dusk, unable to recognize where I had crossed the deepest currents, tripping on sunken logs and crashing into the water face-first twice. Soaked, I battled back up the trail in almost total darkness, slithered over the wet log bridges, and arrived in the kitchen of the schoolhouse four hours after I left, sneezing and bruised and covered with thorns and convinced that Tompkins was a genius who had to preserve the land exactly as it was. Anyone with the slightest sense could see that this was a magic place.

I put the trout in tinfoil inside the wood stove. The flesh was bright pink, turned the color of salmon by the pectin in the shells of the
pacora
, miniature green crabs. The musicians and some of the American kayakers stopped around and looked at the fish. “It’s a salmon,” they announced one after another, and I couldn’t win the argument no matter how many times I explained that all trout in Patagonia were pink on the inside. I was just finishing up when the musicians left the building in groups, one after the other.

The concert was easy to find, since Tompkins, back safely from his air excursion, had fired up the generator to make that rarest of things: electricity. The hangar, emptied of aircraft, was filled with light. Little boys gathered in from the darkness like moths toward the flame and stood in the light-throw of the front door, wrestling and jumping about.

There were over a hundred adults inside, and I found a seat by sharing a hay bale with an older man from the village across the fjord. I quickly picked out four or five Americans by the fact that they were wearing at least $500 worth of brightly colored outdoor gear each. Tompkins and his wife both appeared in dark wool sweaters made locally, which nonetheless did not particularly make them blend in with the hundred or so small, dark-skinned Chileans.

The
encuentro folklórico
, as it was called, featured one band after another, all of them playing more or less the same style of southern Chilean music. The bands typically featured four or six acoustic guitarists, a few percussionists, and a troupe of dancers. The style was
fast and energetic, a quick-stepping, guitar-driven dance music. Since most of the bands were from the island of Chiloé, which you hit if you went straight out the fjord and kept going, most of the music was about lonely fishermen and unrequited love. While the Chiloéan musicians tended to wear wool caps, the smaller number of mainlanders wore cowboy hats and sang about lonely cowboys and unrequited love. One after another, the groups got up, thanked Tompkins, and then played four or six songs and sat back down. The most rocking number featured a lot of quick-stepping cowboys slapping their boots on the ground. The slowest number was a traditional
cueca
, or “handkerchief dance,” in which a man and woman spun in a slow circle while clutching opposite corners of a white kerchief. It was a pretty dance, and eventually Tompkins and his wife were prevailed upon by the crowd to take hold of the cloth and dance. They did well.

Gradually I realized that almost everyone in the barn—perhaps a hundred out of a hundred and fifteen—was a musician. There was no audience. Near the end Tompkins got up and gave a speech. He said that the purpose of the
encuentro
was to let Chilean musicians play for Chilean musicians. He hoped their beautiful music would continue to flourish and that they would all return next year. He said that the global economy was a threat to their traditional culture. He spoke a correct but accented Spanish and stumbled a bit pronouncing
monoculturización
. A band leader stood and praised “
el patrón
” for having the concert. He led a cheer for Tompkins that seemed to pain the recipient deeply.

Patrón
is a common term in Latin America, but in English “the patron” had a medieval ring that I could never get out of my ear.

W
hen Tompkins ran Esprit in San Francisco, he banned the chewing of gum by his employees. Smoking was banned; also coffee, which he must have felt endangered his workers in some way. He once closed a factory in San Francisco rather than allow the employees to unionize,
explaining that a union was incompatible with his vision of a new workplace paradigm. This utopian streak flourished in the free space of southern Chile, fueled by an unlimited budget and welcomed by economically hungry locals. Tompkins was popular, as the sincere and formal messages of thanks from each band in the barn showed. Everyone called him “Don Tompkins,” an honorific slightly less freighted with feudal baggage than
patrón
but still indicative of his authority.

Tompkins was a good
patrón
. He built the schoolhouse in which I was sleeping for the use of the village children. He hired their fathers at above-market wages to build his walkways and maintain trails and roofs; he sold their locally woven sweaters at a little gift shop and paid handsomely for the food they harvested from their waters; and he treated the locals with respect touched only lightly with condescension. In a profile of Tompkins,
Outside
magazine compared Reñihué favorably to Tolstoy’s utopian farm estate in Russia—never mind what this said about social progress in a century.

Tompkins was not simply out to save the locals, however. He was planning on saving the surrounding forests, then all of Chile, and eventually the world. The master plan for this was called Deep Ecology, a stew of radical environmentalism and technophobia that aimed at nothing less than overturning the profit motive in Western civilization. Deep Ecology argued that recycling and trail cleanups and other popular forms of environmentalism were “shallow” ecology. Tompkins had launched the Foundation for Deep Ecology to advocate for these views. Brochures lying around the schoolhouse explained the foundation’s agenda: a serious decrease in the earth’s human population and a rejection of economic growth, profit, and “technology worship” as the guiding principles of life. “Basic economic, technological, and ideological structures” would have to be changed and “the resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.”

Culture, ecology, and economics had been fused at Reñihué into a seamless vision of the correct way to live. There was no separating these elements: the forest could only survive if the locals were paid
well to do something other than cut it down; the locals could only survive if their traditional lives, from folk music to wood craft to weaving, were preserved; the foreigners could wash their money of its original sin by planting lettuce and banning telephones.

It was no wonder Tompkins was hated by some segments of Chilean society. He denounced free trade agreements exactly at the moment Chile’s government, major press, and business elite were pushing hard for a NAFTA-like free trade agreement with the United States. Tompkins blasted “market-based economic systems” in a country obsessed with
el libre mercado
. He bought and took off the market 700,000 acres of forest in an economy where forest products were a crucial source of foreign exchange and a region where timber jobs were a staple of life. He advocated a population decrease in a Catholic country where mentioning birth control was still controversial. His schemes were self-consciously radical, and no matter what you thought of them—I found them a mix of technophobic nonsense and visionary thinking—it was obvious why Chileans reacted with confusion, shock, and sometimes hostility. Deep Ecology promised to “quell the present drives of our society,” but a lot of poor people in Chile felt their best shot at a future was in those capitalist drives. Virtually all of the rich people felt that way.

Tompkins was doing good, but of what kind? The Grand Tetons of Wyoming were saved by the Rockefellers, who knew that some things belong to the world and were willing to finance the transaction of preservation. The problem with Tompkins wasn’t his plan to save the land, it was his plan to freeze the people in place. The conflation of a natural ecosystem with a “natural” culture was dangerous; it condemned the Chileans to not becoming what they might become. The
encuentro folklórico
was designed to preserve the old ways, but what was so pure about their music anyway? The guitar was invented in Arabia, not Region X. Much of the best music in the world—including their folk songs—was the result of cultures blending, subverting one another, and twining into new forms. In every practical way, Tompkins had created a better space for himself and those around him—but he had also created an illusion. Inside his magic
circle of money, he had stopped the tide of life like some antipodean King Canute. But outside the fjord the regular world went on without him, still polluting, still consuming, still spending, still assimilating cultures and creating anew. He seemed to have withdrawn from all hope of collective action; of grasping, dirty, public life; of patient, blundering adaptation. I left Reñihué grateful for its beauty and, perhaps, the example. But this wasn’t activism; it was defeatism.

I had little doubt what Che Guevara would have said. Tompkins was exactly the well-meaning bourgeois reformer that violent revolutionaries always find so threatening. But I could also hope that Ernesto Guevara would have been grudgingly impressed by Tompkins, whose example of philanthropic conscience is rare enough in our day and was virtually unknown in the Latin America of the 1950s. It was no wonder the Chileans were paranoid about him. If Tompkins had taken up a gun—or better yet, paid someone else to—the Chileans would have known what to do (shoot him or strike a deal, depending on how good his connections in Santiago were). But this way, he had them foxed. They’d never met a petulant, post-capitalist plutocrat before.