Back again for a few days of office and home front scramble-age between clients: I’ve spent the last couple of weeks out on the water with a very nice fellow from Rhode Island,
down for his seventh trip to Patagonia and his second in a row with us. We’ve been chasing fish across several old favorite spots of his, plus a lot of new water too in the area of Rio Pico and beyond. A few of the results of our efforts can be seen in the photos here, and I will let them speak for themselves.
As I write I am in fact just back in from my standard “Buen dia” tour with the Negra. We wake up early in the morning when we can to go for walks, and the exchanges that result between myself and the folks we encounter as well as the environment in general always serve to remind me of just how good we have it in this community. Almost everyone we meet greets us with a “Buen dia” (Good morning) and a smile, and between the house and the bakery or wherever else we walk it is a pleasure to watch the city and the sky here come to life. Back in the states I always dreamed of having a farm of my own and the good, pure food that would result. But since when I got back in this morning I had for breakfast a bowl of cereal wet with yogurt I made here using milk from the neighbor’s cow, butter made by the neighbor’s hand from the same milk spread onto bread from the bakery I just walked back from, eggs laid by another neighbor’s chickens, and juice squeezed out of oranges and grapefruit bought in bulk at 
our local verduraria, I am for the most part feeling like I now have the benefits of the farm without doing all its associated work; which is kind of cool too, in a way.
We’re finally getting some rain which will help water levels and the fish here a great deal, not to mention the ranchers and their cattle. I find now though that after having been in the southern hemisphere without return to the north for as long as I have I am getting confused about the seasons. Patagonia doesn’t habitually subscribe to seasons anyway, and over the last couple of years we’ve seen both ice storms in the middle of summer and bright, warm days when it should have been freezing. But I knew maybe I needed to check myself when I asked my mother the other day while on Skype “Wait,... what month is it up there?” She laughed.
Everyone shoot me the news; I’ve got a couple more days of good connection left before I head south again and would love to hear from you, any and all.
Everything outside was elegant and savage and fleshy. Everything inside was slow and cool and vacant. It seemed a shame to stay inside.
~JOHN CHEEVER
