The Tin Can in the Beech Tree

Out on the central plateau of Chubut, the wind blows from the west with such steady, unhurried force that the southern beech trees grow sideways. Their trunks lean against the cordillera and comb all their branches toward the Atlantic, holding their russet autumn leaves out like flags that never quite drop. Between one corrugated-iron roof and the next lie fifty miles of golden coirón bunchgrass, basalt ledges crusted with orange lichen, and the long saucer-shaped shadows of lenticular clouds stacked over the mountains.

All day, a house out here belongs entirely to the weather. The battery radio on the kitchen table sits silent with its dry cells pulled out and resting beside the kettle so they do not drain into the cold. Only when the sun drops behind the granite peaks and the sky bruises from indigo to plum and persimmon does the shepherd walk out to the gnarled lenga tree on the rise, check the rope halyard tied to the trunk, and make sure the empty tin can is hoisted high into the top windward bough.

A thin copper wire drops in a long, gentle catenary from the bottom of that tin can to a white porcelain insulator under the eaves, and from there through the wooden window frame to the table inside. At seven o'clock, the batteries go back in, the kerosene lamp warms the four panes of glass, and a room fifty miles from the nearest paved road fills with the voices of neighbors: a sister saying she will arrive on Thursday's wool truck, a schoolteacher sending word that the river ford is passable again, a daughter in town wishing her father a happy birthday.

I wanted to paint that twenty-minute truce between the steppe and the dark—the way the whole landscape seems to lean eastward with the wind, while a single salvaged tin can gleaming in the treetop catches what is left of the daylight and turns it into company.