With Sadness.

Yesterday afternoon, I traipsed back to the Pumalin office after trotting around Puerto Varas, where the summer vacation throngs make for good people-watching and Chilean-custom interpreting. I started chit-chatting about the triathlon relay we were planning for this Saturday. Then Francisco told me, people probably aren’t in the mood for celebration.

“Why?” I asked, wondering if the rainy weather had really depressed spirits that much.

And then I learned the story: on Sunday evening, Carmen’s son Chicho, a long-time Reñihue resident, had jumped in a little two-seater plane for an afternoon farm tour with the farm administrator. A few years older than me, he’s studying agriculture, and decided to spend the summer working at one of Doug and Kris’s farms in Argentina as a sort of exchange program. The plane took off; minutes later, it nosedived into a field of soybeans. Both Chicho and Rodrigo Leconte, the pilot, died instantly.

My story of hearing this news might seem to trivialize it, but I’m trying to explain the shock and suddenness, the impossibility, I felt then. Why hadn’t I known earlier, and why hadn’t the world somehow changed to accommodate this news? And how could something so innocent and fun have ended so tragically? It’s hard to write articulately or originally on the subject of death and tragedy; the greats have been at that task for millennia.

Nonetheless, I do want to say a few things. Although I didn’t know Chicho super well, I appreciated his friendliness (and willingness to put up with my Spanish!) tremendously during my first weeks at Reñihue. I regret that he left for Argentina before I had a chance to get to know him better. In the brief moment that I met Rodrigo, he seemed like a charming, energetic person. It’s hard to think of them gone.

Having felt, and appreciated, the closeness of the community at Reñihue makes this news all the more difficult to accept. Carmen and her family are the rock, the anchor of Reñihue: they’ve lived there the longest, stay there all year, and have put their lives into making it a home. Their family seemed to draw so much strength from each other, appreciating each other as good company. I can’t imagine how hard it will be for them to return to this isolated place, so filled with their son’s memories.

As for me, there’s a growing up moment in realizing that the sense of life being a lark, of hopping into planes and flying around dumbstruck by the scenery, comes to an end when you’re confronted by the seriousness of such activities. The summer, which only really existed for a few days here and there, seems to be over.