Day 3

Feet and fire

Today was a very quiet one. While our European home is craving fresh air and cursing the sun, the temperature here just about stayed on the right side of freezing, and it rained hard all day long. We stayed in, had a long talk over lunch with Jacqueline and chilled by the fire. And we thought.

I thought : What if they all disappeared? What if one morning I woke up without a family? Who would I turn to? Friends? What if they were gone as well? I thought : I'd be alone but I would survive, meet new people, people I'd get to love, people like me. And then I thought about Ishi, 'The last wild Indian'. He was part of the Yahi tribe, who suffered the consequences of living in gold-rich areas during the Gold Rush. Their numbers were quickly shrunk to a handful of people by the helping hand of civilisation, and they eventually starved to death. Ishi wandered alone in the wild for three years and eventually was revealed to the civilised world when he was captured by the civilised men who had repeatedly massacred his people for gold. What a feeling it must be, being the last man standing. Actually, I would imagine a lack of feeling, a total and profound emptiness devouring any will to live. What are we doing anything for if not to share it with those we love at the end of the day? It's a worn-out, cliché idea, but that rings true in light of Ishi's story. Yesterday, when we talked with Jano, I asked him how he felt about the fight to prevent his culture from vanishing. He replied that it would never vanish. He didn't say that like a man with his back against the wall, he wasn't saying it for us to believe. He said it in the most honest and simple way, as if it couldn't be otherwise. He isn't thinking 'What if they all disappeared'. In his own way, with his music, he is fighting so that there never is a Mapuche Ishi, I thought.