The story of a leather jacket begins exactly where it will end: in the grass, where a calf, like the one I once saw nursing under a eucalyptus tree in the Uruguayan sierras, is born. Still wet from birth, the day-old baby cow suckled as my guide, Lucie, and I watched nearby from the saddles of our Appaloosas. Our ride had taken us through the thicket of a neighboring cattle farm, which tends to happen often in a land where property lines are faint.

I had come to Uruguay with a burning desire to sharpen my Spanish and step outside the trimmed hedges of my hometown in suburban Virginia. What I ended up learning while calling that country home for three years far surpassed these initial yearnings. Between riding through pastures with the cattle and delving into the legacy of leatherwork at the shop where I worked in Montevideo, I began to draw a line between the calf, the pastures that nourish her, the hands that protect her, and the leather saddle from which I could both observe and participate.

This interspecies give-and-take, this reverence for the land and what it yields, I learned, is the legacy of gauchos. These cowboys of the south are descendants of native people and European immigrants and stewarded the land long before lines were drawn on it. Nowadays, their sense of patriotism – rooted not in the nation state but in the wild patch of Earth upon which Uruguay lies – is upheld by their living lineage. Quietly resisting the demands of a world motivated by efficiency, Uruguayans see a sustainable future on the horizon by protecting the very stretch of land before them, where gaucho culture still pulses with the unhurried rhythm of everyday life.

To trace the line of production of a leather jacket in Uruguay is to trace a story marked by the rugged romance of the place, one where hide is the protagonist, the land and its inhabitants, the supporting characters, and criollismo, the motif. While the essence of criollismo is difficult to define, it’s part of the genetic code of Uruguay — a small yet wide open country where cattle outnumber people three-to-one.

The calf I saw under the eucalyptus tree grew by grazing the green pastures where the Earth breathed her into life. Frankly, there aren’t many poetic ways to describe what happened to her once she was strong enough to be slaughtered for human consumption. But having witnessed a similar event, when a sheep raised by a friend’s late father was slaughtered for our Christmas meal, I will say that such a moment of primal despair eventually delivers you to feelings of respect, appreciation, and even beauty.

“I see it as our identity,” my friend, Tavo, said of criollismo. Born and raised in the countryside where his family’s land was surrounded by cattle farms, he built the leather shop where I worked to preserve the heritage of his rural roots and invite others to experience the spirit of all things criollo. “It’s a sentiment of being rooted as a nation connected to the figure of the gaucho, nature, and people from the countryside, yet in the historical context in which we find ourselves,” he said.

A leather hide is derived from the grown version of the calf I saw that day on horseback. Once held by the herd, by the steppe, cared for by paisanos and veterinarians, her body is divided for us.

The hide is then delivered to Marcelo, who’s been working for over thirty years at the fourth-generation, family-owned tannery where Tavo sources most of his leather. Marcelo is an expert, yet modest when it comes to his know-how.

“My father was the one to teach me everything at the tannery,” he said. In his process, no part of the hide goes to waste. The leather is treated with the tannins of trees rather than chemicals, and water is recycled for the following batch.

I accompanied Tavo to Marcelo’s tannery one day to pick up some new material. “The tanner’s job doesn’t pay well, but I have no other choice,” Marcelo told us. “There are very few people left in this line of work.”

“For that reason, Marce, you are not poor,” Tavo said. “You are one of the privileged who maintains this trade and who has the knowledge. One of the survivors who is going to bring it back.”

Marcelo nodded in agreement. Modern day consumer culture has threatened his trade, but the call to conserve these traditions has been answered by people like him and Tavo.

After purchasing some leather, Tavo and I took a slow walk through the tannery, where every step of the undertaking was on display. Tanning drums taller than a house spun steadily, their slow revolve a symbol for the cyclical nature of the story at hand.

“Leather has accompanied me since I was a kid in different ways, forms, and products,” Tavo said. His hometown lies deep in the Uruguayan interior, where, against a backdrop of folk music and gaucho traditions, his parents taught him that the integrity of things and people alike is often found at the source.

“Working with leather transports me beyond our workshop in Montevideo. It transports me to the campo, my childhood, my upbringing,” he said.

Tavo brought the hides back to the shop and passed them off to Edison, a craftsman, a cutter, and a professor of all things leatherwork with almost 60 years in the trade. Despite his aging joints, Edi’s hand remains steady. He can thread a needle just as quickly as he can outwit you, while he cuts along pattern lines his muscles seem to know by heart.

“I protect leatherwork in our country by protecting the legacy,” Edison said. “Very humbly, I try to teach what I can to whoever likes the trade and has an interest in learning.”

His day’s work was fashioning a cropped leather jacket inspired by an embroidered blouse Tavo inherited from his father. My job was then to give the jacket personality by fastening studs and pearl buttons. Making the final touch, I watched smoke rise from our old branding machine as I stamped the inner collar.

After I hung the finished jacket on the shop floor, a neighbor, Mauricio, strolled into the shop. He works for the city of Montevideo caring for old trees and planting new ones throughout the urban landscape of an otherwise rural country.

“You know, all of God exists in this table,” Mauricio said as he knocked his blistered knuckle on the weathered workbench in front of me. He went on to lyricize about how the wood used to make the table came from a tree that once stood tall with the help of the rain and the sun, and even the person who harvested the material, who cut and hammered the pieces together, were all God.

He left me behind this very table, which I now recognized as holy, gazing at the leather jackets I’d hung nice and neat in their place. While tending this boutique and workshop, I clocked countless hours staring at our wearable creations, while upstairs, Edi, Tavo, and other artisans hammered away in the workshop, striking studs into hide against the beating of old Singer sewing machines. I was surrounded by a sight, sound, and smell — oh, the smell — that together wove the fabric of my days. But on this day, Mauricio’s visit uncovered an almost spiritual layer to it all.

On the heels of his homily, I noticed how each jacket that hung before me told its own story. Some were tasseled with metallic details, others came as raw as leather can be. Some combined textures of wool felt and fuzzy cow hide, taut cotton canvas and sheepskin so buttery you couldn’t help but question its authenticity. I began to think of the jackets in the same way Mauricio thought about tables: long before each jacket was cut and sewn to keep someone warm, the very material from which it’s made once encased some other beating heart.

I’ve since returned to the United States with the lens of criollismo as my most coveted keepsake from my time in Uruguay. Here in Virginia, criollismo reminds me that this symbiotic relationship with our environment and the creations it brings forth is by its very nature unbound by borders, hemispheres, or lines. And if we must use lines to draw a place, let it be the long and limber lines of legacy that give it shape.

Whenever someone tried on a jacket, my favorite selling point was this: If you’re lucky enough to outlive the piece, it can be buried in the same ground that holds the remains of the beating heart from which it came: in the grass, where the story ends and also begins.

This story was originally published in The Ranchlands Review, Edition 03: Lines.