Pursuit of Passion in Bariloche
What actually counts as a passion in life? How much of it do you need to live a fulfilled existence? Can it be cobbled together in small bits, like a quilt made of scraps of fabric but warmth-providing in totality, or does it need to be more centralized, a blaze that burns through the contours of your life, defining them by its reach?
One of the goals I have for my trip is to better understand my own passions—what drives me, what I want to design my life to maximize for—and what that means for questions like “where should I live?” and “what should I do with my own and only life?”
I don’t have answers, but I do have some thoughts; I had a few epiphanic realizations during my five days in Bariloche that helped elucidate them for me, and I’d like to tell you about them. I’ll do it through three different moments, presented in chronological order and with the benefit of a week or so of added reflection.
Over the last three weeks, I have spent a previously unimaginable amount of time and number of footsteps climbing up mountains. I think I convinced myself, after finishing some really tough hikes in El Chaltén, that maybe hiking was a passion of mine; maybe I could spend a lifetime chasing that euphoric moment when you’re facing a summit view of mountains and lakes and sprawling forests and you want to ball up the whole of human history and roll it off the ledge in offering to Mother Nature and her awesome power.
Now, that was a clearly a bit of cognitive dissonance, because as real and powerful as that feeling was for me, it was always bookended by moments of extreme doubt on the way up (could I actually reach the peak?) and general malaise on the way down (hurting knees, desire to be warm and clean and to not have to re-trek the path I just arduously climbed up). But I figured maybe that was just normal, and that life-changing passions don’t have to make you feel one hundred percent fulfilled one hundred percent of the time.
So on my third day in Bariloche, I set off on a two-day hike up to Refugio Frey. I planned to hike for 4 hours the first afternoon, get set up in the refugio for the night (I was bringing a sleeping bag but would be sleeping on it indoors—y’all know I’m done with tent life after Torres del Paine), do a few hours of shorter hikes around the lakes up there, then wake up the next morning and hike halfway to Refugio Jacob and back for 4 hours or so, then return the way I had come.
I was going alone, because I think I prefer hiking that way—you get to set the pace, you get to stop (or not stop) when you want, and while it’s less fun than hiking with a perfect partner (where you can talk and laugh and go slack-jawed over beauty together and the miles pass like moments because you’re having too much fun to pay attention), it’s way more reliably wonderful (nothing is worse than being stuck on a trail for 8 hours with someone who annoys you even just slightly—every step, every breath grates and your thoughts quickly become murderous). I had my daypack stuffed to the brim with enough supplies for two days of hiking—snacks, weather gear, a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a Kindle—and a sleeping bag borrowed from Stephen, a lovely British man I met at my hostel, carabinered to my pack’s shoulder straps. It was probably the heaviest pack I’ve ever carried (which shows you how uninitiated I am to the world of hiking—it couldn’t have been more than 20 pounds).
The way up was beautiful, a mix of packed gravel and boulders, leading me first through a dry forest (featuring either actual bamboo or a close cousin that grew on either side of the path and clacked together in the wind), then up through several switchbacks that dropped me at (quite almost literally) the edge of a cliff and gave me beautiful views of one of Bariloche’s gorgeously, obnoxiously, impossibly blue lakes, then through a forest filled with summer flowers, and then back up, for the final hour, a rocky ledge to end at Lago Toncek and Refugio Frey itself.
By the time I reached the top, my back was throbbing from the weighted climb and my left shoulder blade felt like I’d shoved a thistle underneath it. I’d started hoisting my sleeping back up underneath my pack like a Victorian lady’s bum roll halfway up the climb, to better distribute the weight and cushion my back, but it didn’t do much. I was looking forward to putting my things away and hiking unencumbered for a while.
I dragged myself to the refugio, pulled open the heavy wood door, and was immediately reprimanded for bringing my backpack inside. I returned outside, peeked at the sky—a foreboding grey that promised rain—and begrudgingly left it to the elements while I sorted out my stay.
The woman running the front desk/kitchen/rental shop (there was just the one wooden counter in front of the stove where she performed all commercial duties) had me sign the guestbook, told me that I was in bed #13, and gave me an overview of the house rules: no shoes upstairs, no bags anywhere inside, and dinner orders—choice of pizza or goulash—needed to be in by 6 p.m.
I decided to head upstairs and check out the sleeping situation. I sat on the narrow bench in the front hall unlacing my hiking boots, sneezing at the cloud of dust released from my laces, then trudged upstairs in my socks, with Stephen’s sleeping bag under my arm.
You know how sometimes thoughts pop into your head fully formed and with the full conviction of your entire being behind them? The moment I walked into the bedroom one alighted: “You will not be sleeping here.”
There weren’t beds—just two giant platforms running the length of the room with numbers Sharpied onto the plywood base to delineate the assigned sleeping berths. Each person got about two and a half feet of lumpy communal mattress to roll their sleeping bag out on. The mattress was covered in a pilling blue fabric that reeked slightly; there were no visible bedbugs but I could only imagine how happy they’d’ve been to reside there.
The only people in the room when I entered were three Argentinian children (I’m guessing—they were using vosotros a lot so I think it’s likely) who were jumping on the top mattress and screaming and flailing about. I stood at the base of berth 13, immobilized mentally by the scene in front of me and then physically by the two ex-US Marines who walked down the narrow walkway and unfurled their sleeping bags in spots 11 and 12, salivating over the bottle of whiskey they planned to consume with dinner. They sealed the deal for me—I was not spending a night in a sleeping bag in a stale-smelling glorified hayloft filled with screaming children and large drunk men. Especially since I’d have to pay $300AR for the privilege ($15US but still—that’s a regular hostel dorm bed + a beer).
I went downstairs, calmly re-laced my boots, crossed my name out of the guestbook, hoisted my heavy-ass and entirely unnecessary pack back on, and began sprinting down the mountain.
That’s not hyperbolic—I legitimately sprinted down like I was being chased by the robot in “The Ruum” (pop this link into a new tab to read the short story later if you haven’t come across it before—I read it in the 8th grade and still think about it on a weekly basis—it’s great science fiction, believable and terrifying and humanity-defining).
I was trying to make the last bus, which left at 8:10 p.m. I didn’t start my descent til 4:30, and I knew I had to make better time than I did on the way up.
Sprinting was a great idea: I finished the first half of my descent, which had taken me two hours on the way up, in forty minutes. Sprinting was a terrible idea: somewhere just past the halfway point, I tripped on an exposed root and almost went flying off the mountain. I caught myself, tested my ankle, and figured I could put weight on it for a while longer; I slowed to a trot and paced myself through the next quarter of the hike. I was still passing other hikers at a decent clip. Once I emerged from the forest, I had to slow to a literal crawl to navigate the boulders, and when I found myself back on the trail, my burst of energy had long passed and I was exhausted, muddy, and wet (did I mention it was raining this entire time? It was raining, my old North Face jacket’s liner was peeling and snowing white flakes of plastic all over me, I refused to stop to take off any layers but I was sweating through my pants and two shirts, and my backpack was soaked through since I hadn’t thought to line my back with garbage bags like I did for Torres del Paine and El Chaltén).
I trudged down the path, thoroughly spent and thoroughly sure of another thing: hiking is not my life’s passion.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s beautiful and inspiring and a great use of an afternoon—but I am decidedly not a trekker. I do not like sleeping outside. Or even inside in places without running water and freestanding beds. If you set me on a path with a pack and provisions and a week’s worth of hiking to do, I would cry. If this was the only vacationing I could do—walking up mountains and then back down them—I would picket (I’d make signs to advertise my cause—signs featuring cheese tastings and wineries and art museums and beaches and opera houses and lakes). Hiking is something I hope my future has lots of, in day-trip quantities, but it is not something I would design my life around. Good to know: possible passion, slaked.
Right when I was debating just rolling my body down the hill Sonic-style, a stray dog loped past me and doubled back to nip at my sleeves. Zomi—she had the same kinetic energy as my old roommate so I named her thus—was like a guardian angel. She walked next to me for a while, then ran ahead and waited for me to catch up if I was going too slowly.
Zomi and I made it to the end, finally, and I looked at my watch: I had finished the descent in two hours and fifteen minutes, just over half the time the ascent took. I slunk to the ground in the bus station and was beyond pleased to pull myself onto the 7:10 bus when it came by twenty minutes later.
When I got back to my hostel—I’d borrowed the cell phone of a visiting American in the bus terminal to see if there’d be a bed for me; they confirmed and I returned there, the prodigal daughter—I caught up with the two Australians and Stephen, who I’d been hanging out with for a few days.
The Aussies, Mitch and Dario, are both chefs. It was Mitch’s night to cook—they alternate—and I’d arrived just in time to get added to the distribution list for Mitch’s homemade spaghetti Bolognese. He dashed to and from the kitchen and the sitting room, wooden sauce spoon in his hand and apron tied neatly behind his back, darting in and out of our conversation until he came out to join us for good, bringing bowls of pasta dripping in rich sauce. We ate with gusto, complementing the chef, and the dinner table conversation turned to food. Mitch let us in on his favorite way to make garlic bread—sauté the garlic, melt the butter, brush onto toasted bread. Dario told us stories about hellish Saturday services and he and Mitch indulged in our questions as to how much of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir was broadly applicable to all kitchens all over the world. Listening to them talk, and to the sounds of Mitch sharpening the hostel’s knives against the steel he’d brought with him as the rest of us dragged garlic bread around the edges of our bowls, another crystal-clear thought: that is what designing a life around passion looks like.
Passions, really; Mitch and Dario are also committed hikers, and are here in Argentina doing several multi-day treks all around Patagonia, and Dario’s also an avid photographer, waking up at 3 a.m. on said multi-day treks to capture starscapes before strapping camera equipment into his pack and heading out on a cool 20km. Everything they do, they do with gumption and the full weight of their abilities. Listening to their life stories is like looking at a Piet Mondriaan painting—the colors are singular and they clearly delineate the canvas. I sat there thinking about what my own looked like. Something Impressionist? No bold brushstrokes, but maybe soft, uncommitted lines that somehow result in a pleasant tableau?
Whatever it is, it’s not a still life—no apples plump in the sun, no cheese clustered on a plate, no singular alighting focus on food. I had been thinking that maybe food, and the cooking and consuming of it, was a deep passion of mine; I imagined I’d pursue culinary experiences on this trip and write columns on them. (I still will—I have one coming on the Argentinian asado and the gastronomic and economic relationships between food and wine here—please get excited.)
But comparing my interest in food to Dario’s and Mitch’s, I realized that I didn’t have enough conviction in it for it to be a central force in my life decisions. I’m not going to go to culinary school, like they did; I don’t dream about opening up my own restaurant, like they do. And beyond the educational and professional trappings of an interest in food, I realized something, sitting there at the table with them: I like food because it’s transformative. It is a living metaphor. It takes one form, then, with human intervention and ministration and creativity, another, and then still yet a third, when it’s consumed, and the consumer gets to have her own story with it. I like being in the kitchen, and occupying that middle space, getting to apply my life and traditions and education and ideas to raw material, but I especially like being at the end, getting to appreciate a finished product, in a way that’s nearly identical to my appreciation of a good book or a good piece of art. Or a good vista from the pinnacle of a long hike.
But what does that mean I am? What does that reduce me to? A passive consumer of beauty? It might be different if I was also a committed contributor to the pool of beautiful things, but, as I’m finding out as I try to pursue more writing more seriously than I have in a while, I don’t think that I like to produce as much as I do to consume.
Part of that is my extroversion and preference to be part of a community. Even a community of creators is a lonely place; creation requires intense communication with the internal self above all, and those aren’t my favorite conversations to have.
Part of that is probably laziness. Look even here, at what I’m spending my writing time writing about—my own life, my own experiences, things that I have to spend very little time to construct and give depth to. I like this kind of writing best. I’ve had a few bursts of creativity and character sketching over the last few weeks, but I don’t like forcing my thoughts into a space I have to build from scratch—I much prefer to let them loll about in my own reality, tonguing at memory to find a true description or a clever connection, and capturing a bit of my day on the page. Not crafting a whole new world.
And part of that is probably ability, too, combined with a disinterest in doing something if I can’t do it excellently. I don’t know if I’m a good enough writer to be a novelist (even if we ignore the work preferences and habits above), or at least a novelist I would revere (and what other kind is worth being?). I’ve picked up dozens of books in the last few weeks alone and been unimpressed with bland prose, uninventive plot, shallow characters. But I’ve also not been able to imagine producing something better.
I’m reading Vanessa and Her Sister by Priya Parmar right now; it’s about Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf and their lives (literary and love) in early 20th century London. It’s exquisitely written, and it’s made me think I could excel in a life like those of their less-talented friends: running around to art exhibits all day, then sitting around in salons all evening, debating what color best represents love, then spending the whole next day writing long and clever letters full of side references and inside jokes that recap every moment from the night before, and then getting dressed up to go make fun of whatever’s playing at the opera.
In a way, that’s basically what I’m doing on this trip, though in South America in the 21st century, where there’s decidedly less clotted cream and decidedly more women’s sufferage.
But. That’s not a life committed to singular passions. That’s a life committed to consuming art and beauty with casual offerings to it, and that somehow feels like something less than meaningful.
But it is a life that makes me more consistently happy than I’ve ever been before—is that enough?
Everything that gives me joy is so easy to define and so easy to pursue here. Good food, good views, new people, long conversations, bodies of water, new perspectives, good literature, connecting with old friends, trees and flowers and animals and the sun at every point in its arc across my sky—I get to love those things and I get to go out and find them. And I do. And then sometimes I get to photograph them or write about them or show them to the people around me.
Is this what a fulfilled life feels like? Is it my mission, my calling, to surround myself with beauty and the time and a like-minded community to appreciate it with? Is that enough? Does not having one all-consuming—life-, location-, career-consuming—passion mean that I’m missing out on some higher plane of existence? Or does a commitment to create and, more often, to appreciate stories, in whatever form they take, from books to paintings to dishes to businesses, constitute a passion in pieces, a federated model of defining my life that can still govern it effectively?
I don’t know, you guys. I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel what I imagine true master chefs and writers and sculptures feel in their kitchens and writing rooms and studios. I don’t know what career I want to have for the next 50 years, or even the next 5. I don’t know why I expect passions to produce tangible, creative results (when clearly they don’t need to).
But I do know that I’m happy, and that the most happiness comes when I get to share these experiences with others. When I get to be part of a team, of a community. Thanks for being part of mine as I run after hedonism and the truths it’s teaching me. Let’s figure out what I should do next, together, when I come rejoin the real world.
I promised you three vignettes, and the last comes here, after I already mined the first two for truth; it is the proof that completes the theorem.
My last day in Bariloche I actually spent in El Bolsón, a tiny hippie town about 90 minutes south, a better-developed and less perfectly-placed version of El Chaltén. George, a New York-based composer (he writes soundtracks for movies! like Jack Black’s character in The Holiday!…which he’s never seen and teased me for being so well-versed in) had a rental car and was driving down, so Stephen, the Englishman previously mentioned, and Sophia, a Spanish woman volunteering at the hostel (like I’d done in Puerto Natales, but with way better results), joined him.
The day unfolded like the plot of an indie movie. It couldn’t have been more picturesque and ironic if we’d tried.
We start by picking up a Brazilian hitchhiker. Carlos is sweet, with braids and short-shorts and a big smile; he doesn’t say much beyond “hello” and an overview of his travel plans, until I put on Frank Ocean’s “Biking” and he erupts into song. Carlos, Sophia, and I belt out the line “I’m bikin’ uphill and it’s burnin’ my quads” and I laugh and tell them about the 30km bike ride I’d done around Bariloche’s lakes earlier that week and how that repeating that line got me through at least six arduous climbs.
We drop Carlos off at the beginning of a hiking path, and 10 kms later, we’re stopped by border control (El Bolsón is located close to the Argentinian / Chilean border and there are lots of postings where they randomly search cars or people). We send Sophia, our only native Spanish speaker, out of the car to assist them; it turns out they needed a translator to help them ask questions of a lost old British couple, so to make them feel at home, we send Stephen out, too. Then it’s just George in the front seat and me in the back. He grabs the guitar Sophia brought and starts playing and we start singing all the soldiery songs from Mulan, serenading—from behind closed windows—the border control officers with “You’re unsuited for the rage of war/So pack up, go home you’re through/How could I make a man out of you?” Again: I’m laughing so hard my whole body starts to hurt.
We pile back in the car, pass unscathed through border control, and finally make it to El Bolsón, but our delay means we missed the breakfast opening of the café we’d been recommended so we set out to fill our day before returning after siesta hours. We look at art and eat pizza and drink beer and tell each other the stories of our love lives—this is the serious get-to-know you scene in the movie; we’re halfway through The Breakfast Club at this point—and then we break off into pairs to dig deeper, into families and cultures, as we swing and slide and sit around El Bolsón’s public parks.
We gather back together under the half-shade of a crab apple tree and George brings the guitar back out again; turns out he, Stephen, and Sofia all play. They take turns playing their favorite songs (George even shares a few originals) and we all join in when we know the words; we close our eyes and hum when we don’t. I’m laying on Sofia’s scarf on the grass, the sun warming my legs, and I feel thoroughly content.
And this is one of the exact moments I just wrote about, that I just realized I love and spend my life pursuing. I have no talent to add to the mix here—I can’t pick out the chords of a song after listening to it for 15 seconds, like George; I can’t effortlessly thumb through riffs, like Stephen, I can’t sing with such sweet conviction it gives my audience shivers, like Sophia—but I can lay there, and I can let my life take root there, and I can appreciate that moment with every cell in my body. I can sing along and request songs and talk about what those songs mean to us based on when we first heard them and with whom. And so I do.
We’re thirsty now, after all that singing, so we meander back to the café, strumming and singing down the streets like a proper band of roving minstrels. After cappuccinos and lattes we walk back down the main street to get ice cream, tasting all the exotic flavors—mate, beer, sambayón (featuring egg yolks, wine, and whiskey)—and settling on variations of chocolate and dulce de leche. George walks over to admire the playing of a man busking near the shop and they get into a bit of a dueling guitars situation; we cheer him on from our bench like proud parents.
After ice cream, we take up residence on the grass outside the café, where we have more space to play but can also mooch off the café’s wifi, as to coordinate with Dario and Mitch, who left Bariloche later than us (since Dario was getting a hand-poked tattoo from one of the hostel volunteers, who happens to moonlight as a tattoo artist—that scene is B-roll for the movie) and are on their way to join us. We’re doing some lovely covers of Coldplay and Johnny Cash both when an Argentinian teenager comes over to ask: “Do you speak English?” and then, once receiving an affirmative: “Need weed?” I’ve never been so typecast in my life (we were sitting in the dirt playing guitar and admiring the sunset so I can see why it fit); we laugh and say no, then pack up our ragtag band to have one last beer together before driving back to Bariloche.
And that was it: my last day in and around Bariloche, perfect in its simplicity and authenticity. Sunshine, music, new friends, ice cream. A simple equation for a deeply meaningful day and, writ large, a life.
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