Welcome to Cagalandia

Holy shit this place, Cagalandia it is called by the patron: Thomas Matthew Verster (TMV), is fucking intense. It is so named to mean Fuck-Up Land but the Spanish is can be indistinguishably translated as Shitland. It is a beautiful slice of backcountry temperate rainforest accessible only from a narrow, rocky beach a few kilometers up the estuary from Raul Marin B, usually by two-hour paddle in a weak-floored fiberglass canoe.

And by intense, I do mean intensely parenthetical, as TMV is an extraordinarily parenthetical man, in thought and deed. There is so much to do and yet it is entirely unclear what we are doing: Cagalandia is not a farm, we´ve netted one salad worth of greens and a few kilos of potatoes; there are three goats but they don´t do anything but eat piss and make shit for the dead gardens; we have occasional electricity from a waterfall-powered car alternator (gasoline here is precious as uranium); I´ve yet to see a rat yet we´ve been instructed that killing them is the priority, and indeed their presence is everywhere apparent.

The best verb for what we are doing is camping: We have successfully harvested many kilos of muscles (shelled and smoked), twenty-five crabs in one trap in one day (about one kilo each), and some shitty cabiertas (wild nuts) which taste alright roasted. Our alimentation is supplied generously by TMV, who won´t ever let us forget it. Our patron is the source of all intensity here, and most of everything else. We carried 750 kilos of gear and food out here two weeks ago (by motorboat) and only now have we chanced to return to RMB (by canoe) to ferry TMV on the first leg of a ten-day banking trip to Puerto Montt. (Incidentally every parcel of gear and food was labled TMV RMB.)

When Max and I return to Cagalandia it will just be us and Pascal a French-Canuck, and Jon, another USer. We´ve looked forward to this day like Christmas as a break from the intense teacheriness and social ineptitude of TMV, a Dutch-American ex-pat. We´ve decided that he is or has become a moderate sociopath; when he was young, he couldn´t get a job in the West but made money teaching English and selling things on the street in Japan; in good owning-class fashion, he obsessively saved this money and was able to buy Cagalandia fifteen years ago at a small fraction of it´s current value; his life since has consisted of making some headway on his projects here, and then going off traveling for months at a time and coming back to find his shit totally fucked up by robbers or incompetent employees or rats, and having to start many things over again. We returned with him from his most recent three-month trip to Japan and witnessed the full intensity of this crazy lifestyle as he passively shat on his friend Megumi, who had kept away robbers for three months, for letting rats eat so many tools. She took off the next day, despite his protests, ferried to RMB by sailboat (a Hobicat). After much friction and frank discussion, TMV, Max, Jon, and I have come to some understanding with eachother, enough that he trusts Cagalanida to us for the next ten days, or perhaps he will encounter delays...