In May Jimmy and I left our home near the Pacific ocean and began a journey toward a life far from the sea. In the months since, on the road and here in Buenos Aires, there has been much we’ve missed. We both miss having a home with a place to put our things and to settle in to. We miss most of our things which still live in storage as our apartment here nears completion. We miss our friends the most. We miss the ease with which we knew how to get things done in San Diego, a town familiar to both of us. This week we got to spend some time with one of the things we have missed a great deal, the ocean.
Our friend Gabriel allowed us to use his family’s beach place. We were very grateful as we otherwise couldn’t have gotten away at this time and the quiet outside the city was a gift to both of our souls. Gabriel and his family have a small vacation apartment in a town five hours south called San Bernardo and it’s most compelling feature is being a block from the Atlantic ocean. Gabriel met us at the bus station, having spent a few days there himself before us. He got us settled in and then headed back to the city to begin his work week. We stayed for three nights and did mostly nothing but soak up the silence and enjoy the time to be at rest. And we walked on the beach.
San Bernardo is a small beach town that lives for January and February, the summer vacation months in Argentina. Most of the year it is almost deserted, it’s occupants on hold for the two months when their entire annual income is created. It is not easy for a town to make do on two months a year, even two really good months. Most of the town is in a state of disrepair and it seems a place that can’t quite keep up with the cruelty of nature and time. Buildings are crumbling, some that were never finished to begin with. It is obvious that some of the buildings we saw were in progress when the economic crash hit Argentina in 2000 and maybe some got frozen in time, half completed, in other crashes years before that. Never finished these buildings slowly succumb to wind and rain, sun and vandalism and plain old gravity. Other places such as the place we stayed, have sustained damage from poor construction or years of neglect. The walls, floors and ceilings are warped from water damage no one has money to repair. The furniture is falling apart. The windows are cracked but wont be replaced until they actually break. Old broken things fill every space as if it is better to have a lamp that hasn’t worked in years than to have no lamp at all.
It is still cold in San Bernardo now, further south than Buenos Aires the sea winds are strong and they bite a little. As we walked the windy streets snuggled in fleece we found few people. The locals are there, as always and they are busy, gearing up for the season. The few other visitors in town seemed to be owners of vacation rentals coming before the season to spend some time in their places and make sure everything is ready for the first renters. There is no on going care of most places during the year so the owners come in, pay the taxes and other bills, fire the property managers (who’ve clearly been remiss), clean things up a bit and spend some time on the beach. Restaurants are starting to open but without their full menus available. Often the fresher choices and the varieties of things that tourists expect were not there yet. Not enough people yet, we were told, in a couple of weeks they’ll have those things.
There was a feeling that the town was holding it’s collective breath and bracing for the two month storm that will blow through leaving money and disarray in it’s loud and vibrant wake. We heard more than once that during January and February you can scarcely walk down the sidewalks or find a seat in a restaurant for the mobs who roll into town. Prices are higher too then and the service, nothing to write home about in Argentina anyway, goes south.
Not all the buildings in San Bernardo were crumbling. Just as we decided the town was lost to time we would round a corner and find a sparkling clean building in good repair with a well trimmed lawn and flowers in front. A smiling man would be clipping or cleaning or painting something. The best I could figure is that some of the owners are smart enough to find a hard working handyman who wants to retire by the sea and give him a place in their building in exchange for keeping it up. These were the exception. I made mention to one of these hard working gentlemen that his building was the best kept, the cleanest, the prettiest. He smiled widely, proud of his work, proud it had been noticed. I spent a lot of time in the shiny new coffee shop, trying hard to be like Starbuck’s. They had WiFi and comfy couches but are better than Starbuck’s because they sell beer. It’s nice to sit in the evening with a beer and read email and the news. Starbuck’s should consider that. They could have their own special brands. Some of the restaurants were being painted, stores stocked, arcade halls readied. It wasn’t all crumbling. No, San Bernardo will put on it’s lipstick and get up and dance again this year, sore feet and all, because that is what people do, they carry on.
My favorite parts of visiting San Bernardo, a place I will never see again, were fresh seafood pulled out the water in front of the restaurant where we ate lunch, the warm, warm, soft sand under my feet and between my toes (even in the face of the cold wind) and the big puppy who befriended us on the beach for our first walk there. He reminded me of Buster, not because he looked anything like him but because of the way he’d be jumping on me one minute, sand in his big paws, and lying next to my feet resting the next, content to be with me. He was a bit of charm in a place that is trying hard to be charming but can’t quite pull it off.
We spent the six hour bus ride back to the city mostly in silence. We sat on the second deck right in front, floor to ceiling glass and the long road stretching out in front of us. We passed dusty little towns with big concrete arches at the entrances. We passed some big concrete arches that didn’t go anywhere, just sitting out there alongside the highway looking forlorn like some entranceway to a lost world. We passed cows, dead and alive, oh so many cows. My favorite part of the bus ride both ways was passing by a big lake with hundreds of trumpeter swans. Having flown south for the winter, they were paddling around the warm lake waters of South America, waiting until it is time to head North again....
0 comments:
Post a Comment