Andria Hautamaki lives on a ranch with her husband and their baby by a mountain next to a river in southern Chile. Or maybe it’s northern Chile. I’m pretty sure it starts with a “C.” Maybe California?
So, what’s a day in the life like for Andria and her family in Colorado? We’re not sure, because they don’t live in North America. Well, Andria used to, but then she hopped on a plane to fly south and landed in a romance novel, complete with remote ranches and cowboy hats – or in this case, cowboy berets and enough wind to put Wyoming to shame. But like most cowboy love stories, the end result contained far less romance than originally anticipated. It also had less running water, electricity, paved roads and fresh fruit.
Here’s a little more about Andria’s unique lifestyle south of most of the borders.
How it started
It was the typical, age-old story: Young American woman travels to Chile, falls in love with a local rancher, then decides to get married and raise their offspring many miles and a boat ride from the nearest town, surrounded by native wildlife and snow-capped mountains.
Well, maybe it’s not all that typical of a story. But that’s how Andria’s got started back in 2011. Horseback riding adventures drew her to South America, where she bought a horse and stayed with Juan Luis, her now-husband, and his family to learn the ropes of ranching in Chile. “The horse ended up staying at the ranch, and so did I,” she says.
How it’s going
Days on a remote ranch in southern Chile are mostly spent wearing wool clothes and fixing broken equipment. Sometimes the water pump breaks, and Andria has to figure out how to fix it so she can continue to draw water from the river for household use. Or a cold snap freezes the water pipes, and she must figure out how to thaw them. The punishment for failing to solve that problem is to wash cloth diapers by hand, so you better believe she’s got more skills and tricks than a professional plumber.
Keeping a baby warm in a partially insulated house heated with only a wood-burning stove presents another daily problem. Many baby books and blogs advise against blankets or beanie hats for overnight use, probably because they’re written by people who live in town and take power lines and central heat and air for granted. There aren’t many (any?) blogs geared toward moms living in drafty houses with intermittent electricity, so Andria did what mothers have been doing for centuries: figured it out on her own.
The family only travels to town about once a month to resupply, since it takes a long time to get to town and back. The journey involves a boat ride, so Andria tries to plan trips on days without a lot of wind and rain whenever possible. Pretty much all the baby books suggest not exposing your infant to conditions that can cause hypothermia, regardless of where you live.
New developments
High-speed internet, which is most likely how you’re reading this, is still a novelty for Andria. Until 2022, she rode a horse an hour one-way to find cell service on the other side of the ranch, then connected her laptop to her phone’s hotspot to send emails, research stories, conduct interviews, and send photos. As a freelance writer, this is how she filed stories for publications – including Western Horseman – for several years. She’d build a fire to stay warm on cold days, which was most of them. In rainy weather, she’d set up a tent to protect her equipment while waiting for high-resolution files to upload.
On short winter days (that’s the summer season for most of us), Andria would ride home in the dark. If there was an award for Greatest Lengths a Writer Went to in Order to File a Story, Andria would definitely win.
Nowadays, fancy shmancy satellite internet and solar panels allow Andria to sit in her warm, dry kitchen with a cup of tea and access the world wide web at will. She does not miss the internet tent.
Ranch work
Like ranch moms everywhere, Andria juggles mom duties with helping her husband on the ranch and maintaining her writing and photography career. The ranch runs Hereford cross cattle and uses Border Collie cross dogs to gather and move them. Given the shortage of experienced cowboys in the area, the dogs are valued members of the cowboy crew. They basically are the crew, except easier to manage because they don’t go to town on Saturday night and forget to come back to work on Monday morning. Usually.
Andria has chickens and a greenhouse but isn’t much of a gardener. She prefers animals and grows plants such as lettuce, kale, and parsley – things that thrive with little pampering in cold weather.
That sounds about right.
