By Jonathan Yardley

Sunday, January 27, 2002; Page BW02

THE LAST COWBOYS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
The Story of the Gauchos of Patagonia
By Nick Reding
Crown. 291 pp. $24

The question that haunts this book is, "What was it like for a man and woman suddenly to wake up one day and have an entirely different idea about the size of the world and their changing place within it?" The man and woman are named Duck and Edith. They live in Chilean Patagonia, a slender thread of land at South America's southernmost tip, sandwiched between the Argentine Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. They are gauchos, a breed of creature supposedly long extinct: "How could the gaucho be dead? And how might the fact that Duck supposedly did not exist be affected by the other central fact: that he was now connected by [a new road] to a place that was two centuries further into the future than he was?"

Whether these questions actually are answered by Nick Reding is certainly open to debate, but in a way they really are beside the point. Though it is interesting and useful to reflect upon what happens when an old, isolated culture is suddenly exposed to, and tempted by, all the lures of modernity, what matters most about The Last Cowboys at the End of the World is that it introduces us to people whom few of us have met and who, if they haven't vanished yet, surely will do so within a generation or two -- not so much vanish, to be more precise, as disappear into the faceless population of urban society, taking with them their strange, distinctive customs, language and history.

Reding stumbled onto the Patagonian gauchos. Soon after graduating from college in 1994, he took a job as a fly-fishing guide with a man from Minnesota who had decided to open a lodge for (presumably well-to-do) hunters in Patagonia: "He'd leased some land and fishing rights on a ranch called Santa Elvira in exchange for fixing up the dilapidated main house, which was where the four guests a week that the agent in California had promised to send him would stay." A new road had made the area accessible by truck from a city called Coihaique, and possibilities for tourism seemed attractive.

The job lasted four months, at the end of which Reding went to New York, where he studied writing. But he couldn't get the place where he'd been and the people he'd met there out of his mind, particularly Duck and Edith and their three small children. He thought he'd like to write a novel about them, imagining their lives in this distant and somewhat terrifying place, but he needed to see and learn more. In March 1998 he returned, and stayed for more than a year. Most of the time he lived in a tent he pitched near Duck and Edith's house, or shack, because he didn't want to impose on their privacy, but he also hung out with other gauchos and, toward the end of his stay, spent some time in Coihaique, "the only place in an area the size of Mississippi . . . where the twentieth century is in full swing" and to which Duck and Edith had ventured in hopes of making the escape Duck so desperately desired.

It is commonly assumed -- by anyone who takes the trouble to make any assumptions at all -- that gauchos are Argentine. My encyclopedia calls the gaucho a "cowboy of the Argentine Uruguayan Pampas," and adds, near the end of the single paragraph devoted to the subject, that "an extensive gaucho literature was developed in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil." No mention of Chile at all, though it does say that European settlement of the Pampa more than a century ago "marked the beginning of the gaucho's gradual disappearance." Yet Reding was indisputably in Chile, and these were indisputably gauchos.

Presumably they got there by working their way across the Andes from Argentina, a formidable undertaking indeed. Whatever the explanation, there they were, with their ponchos and their sheep-wool chaps, their nomadic ways and their distinctive dialect, a mixture of Spanish and Argentine Portuguese and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for good measure. Reding has made a heroic effort to reproduce the language of an oral people. He also has tried to portray the distinctive people of the Chilean outback, but these tasks were difficult, as he suggests in describing the language of the people of the area known as Cisnes:

"The illiteracy rate in Cisnes, as it is in nearly all of rural Chilean Patagonia, is above 95 percent, so that, without written words to learn the 'right' way to speak (or the 'write' way to speak), the gaucho dialect is itself all but a separate language, a kind of linguistic free-for-all. Or an unending collection of dialects, because each puesto (literally, 'place'; or as it is translated indirectly, 'dwelling') was differentiated by its own particular slang. Never mind the difficulty of a banker understanding a gaucho: neighbors who lived four hours on horseback from one another were often hard-pressed to keep track of the nuances of conversations."

Reding himself seems to have handled the dialect with considerable aplomb, learning to speak fluently "in the gaucho accent, half-Argentine and half-Chilean, all campesino." Yet as he readily admits, his position among these people who fed, sheltered and befriended him was always ambiguous, because he was writing a book -- which Duck and the others knew, though what it meant to them is not entirely clear -- and because he was American and thus might "come to represent for [Duck] everything he couldn't have -- if the idea of the Outside, seen through me, would make Duck drown in his own desire for change."

As this suggests, for the American reader The Last Cowboys at the End of the World may prove more interesting as an account of how another American fared in this hard, unknown place than as an account of the place itself. That would be forgivable, since Reding did go through some experiences that can politely be described as interesting, and he did have a few scares along the way. But he tries, and for the most part succeeds, in keeping the focus on the gauchos themselves.

In so doing he has assembled a lot of detail: informative, surprising, amusing. A gaucho wedding, for example, is nothing more than a man saying to a woman,"Vamos," or "Let's go," which is just how Duck and Edith did it, honoring "a gaucho tradition . . . and a sort of small act of rebellion against the notion that things need to be somehow officially sanctioned." There is the potent herbal tea mate, the drinking of which is "the fulcrum of social life and a ritual repeated ad infinitum among the gauchos," as well as pisco, a liqueur that Reding calls "like Scotch to Scotland, Chile's defining drink," though he fails to mention that the best pisco is distilled in Peru. There is the hanta virus, "a microbe that incubates in rodent feces, urine and saliva" and that, when it infects humans, has a fatality rate of about 50 percent. There are the extremely casual attitudes toward sex that produce "cross-pollination . . . as inevitable as it was acceptable."

The gauchos are, for all their crudities -- and their language, however musical, is crude in the extreme -- a lovely and endearing people, but they are also trapped by history and geography. "People in Cisnes," Reding came to believe, "did [bad] things not because they were evil, or even unkind, but to lash out violently against the unbearable weight of the boredom and the isolation and the fear of what the loneliness might drive them to do." If this suggests that Reding's tale comes to an unhappy end, suffice it to say that the truth is far more complex, and interesting, than that. •

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardley@twp.com.