The vanishing tracks of time.

• Author: Garcia, Gabriel
• Position: Impressions of Patagonia, Argentina

WE ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK on a trip through Patagonia, a remote region at the southern tip of the Americas where land meshes with sky and reality and fantasy are often indistinguishable. Criss-crossing the vast plains is the last narrow-gauge railroad and steam engine. It will soon disappear, as will the stations and the people living around them. It may be that the twenty-first century no longer needs them and they will be relegated to the corners of memory. Meanwhile, the local folk reminisce about the days when the passage of time was marked by the arrival and departure of the train.

Teodoro Trinfunovich displays his gnarled and calloused hands and tells how he arrived in Argentina in 1931 after leaving his native Serbia. He had since lived in this humble house in the 16 de Octubre valley, near the Esquel train station, a thousand miles from Buenos Aires. His accent still falters on certain words, but the tone is sweetly cadenced. He apologizes for not having time to shave this morning, but his wife has been ill for several days and, he explains, "We're all alone here. The children are grown up and they live in Buenos Aires. They have their own lives to think about."

We went out to the garden, each of us carrying his own chair. Some hens eyed us skittishly. "Sometimes I miss the train whistle," he confesses as he prepares the steaming mate and hands it to me. "We started laying the first crossties in 1937. Then right outside Esquel we came to the first mountain. The engineer showed us where the train would go. Nobody slept very well that night. We kept thinking about how we were going to dynamite the mountain. The important thing was to listen for the signal that they'd lit the fuse. At least we all spoke the same language--Serbo-Croatian. We covered a hundred meters a day. The first engine that arrived had just been painted: a 1992 Baldwin steam model that crept along after us as we laid the rails 75 centimeters apart. It bore a bronze plaque with the number one. It still comes through here now and then--not quite as powerful as it was, but it's that same locomotive."

Teodoro had a fight with a foreman one cold night in June 1945. He left his job and never worked on the railroad again. But he didn't want to talk about that. He was one of many Yugoslavs who fled to Argentina to escape from the war that was ravashing their country. At that time, Patagonia was looking for European workers to build the railroad. They arrived in Argentina, thinking about the promised land they had envisaged all the way from Croatia or Serbia, regions now so distant in time that they are only a figment of memory for the sole survivor of what came to be known affectionately as El Trochita, the little narrow-gauge railway.

Ivan Franchin came from Bosnia. Because he had been a student in his country, he was elected foreman of the railroad in Patagonia. He was Teodoro's boss and remembers him with great respect. Ivan married a girl of Welsh ancestry in his adopted country. Their son, Jorge Franchin, was 18 when a circus came to Esquel with a bear that would fight anyone who wanted to earn the prize money offered. Sitting on his motorcycle, Jorge tells the end of that story: "I'd always ridden a motorcycle, so I was accustomed to being knocked about. I wanted that money to buy a new bike, so I fought the bear. The first time around it threw me into the crowd. I was bleeding, and my father took me home. The next day, my friends talked me into giving it another try. I fought the bear again, trying to keep from being hugged. I managed to get behind him and knocked him down. That was the first time my father ever got drunk with me. We sang Yugoslavian songs all night long. The circus paid me but it never came back to Esquel. Ever

since then, people call me "The Bear," and I was so popular that they made me a member of the town council. I'd like to go on studying, but between my father's grocery store and the municipal duties I'm pretty busy ... we're constantly fighting with Buenos aires. This is the prettiest town in Argentina, but as...