IT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE some failures in life, so this one was working out great. And as everything unraveled, my wife never once said, "I told you so," God bless her.

By aiming my hammer at a hillside in one of the most remote regions on earth, I'd simplified my tasks in some ways—no building codes! no disapproving neighbors!—but complicated almost everything else. This was no A Year in Provence, in which Peter Mayle drank his way to the keyboard every day, lifting no tool heavier than a corkscrew while contractors rebuilt his house around him. Mayle, for all his famous quibbling with French stonemasons, admitted that he'd never been happier. My mood was blacker than a coal mine, preoccupied by the missing lumber, money problems, and the growing frustration of friends and family, who, two weeks in, somehow stayed sweaty and dirty yet never got to build the cabin they'd been promised. The wheels were coming off, our weeks in Patagonia expiring as a busted play.

Mayle's architect compared building to trench warfare, with long periods of boredom interrupted by sudden fits of violence. The Latin sense of time, he said, was elastic. A "quarter of an hour" really meant "today." "Tomorrow" meant "this week." Any estimate of time preceded by the word "normally," or followed by a hand gesture that involved fluttering the palm, was real trouble. Julito spoke this language. On at least half of the 30 days I was to spend on the hillside, he promised me something that turned out not to be true—the wood was coming today or being cut to the right lengths today or delivered to the sawmill today or chopped down today. The roofing materials were coming. The telephone poles for the foundation were coming. The cement or gravel or tools or provisions were coming. Tomorrow. Definitely. Ciao, problema.

In America, these same delays were completely normal, according to Simon, the engineer. Builders divided all delays into three categories. First was "mobilization," which covered everyone showing up late or a lack of supplies. "Contingencies" meant any setback or unexpected development, like snow. And then there was "mañana," meaning any day in the future.

The mañanas and contingencies mounted. The sawmill truck broke down. The guy who was going to fix the sawmill truck ("Monday!") had a breakdown himself, and two Mondays later it still hadn't been fixed. (Indeed, the sawmill truck was never fixed and, to this day, sits rusting in the lumberyard.) Wire transfers from America wandered off, lost in various Patagonian banks. Every male in Argentina fell in love with my sister-in-law, Amy, and if I looked away for a moment I'd turn back to find the three assistant carpenters offering her advice in a rustic mixture of Spanish, Italian, English, and hand gestures. She meanwhile dug a giant latrine, lined it with bricks, then reinforced it with concrete. It was more like a bomb shelter than a crapper, surpassed National Park Service requirements, and could serve 3,000 Boy Scouts.

At the height of summer, it snowed. It was only a light dusting before dawn, and melted quickly, but my carpenters declared the road to be endangered, descended to town, and didn't return for days. I stalked around, fuming and bitter, practicing my tirades in Spanish. I didn't fire them, only because hiring someone else would put me a year behind schedule.

Only while peering into the carpenters' larder of sausages and noodles, their tent packed with cheese and Cruz de Malta mate tea, did I finally appreciate their utter lack of urgency. I'd never understood why they'd set up a tent camp when their homes, with hot showers, were just half an hour away. Only after studying the careful construction of their fire pit—a two-day job—did I realize their true agenda: They were on vacation.

I wasn't paying them by the day, the week, or the month. They were paid the same amount whether they finished the job in three weeks or three years. From the Argentine point of view, this was not an incentive to hurry but an opportunity to linger—employment was essentially guaranteed for as long as they stayed on the hillside. Why not enjoy it? They would rhapsodize about the stars at night, the red sunsets, the jagged peaks of the Andes. They were, I realized with a shudder, hiding. Hiding from wives, girlfriends, bills, obligations. In that sense, they were like me; the cabin had become their refuge, too. They weren't building a house in the woods; they were on a camping trip that happened to involve a little digging.

Everything I loved about Argentina—the willingness to linger over a meal, the care brought to a cup of coffee, the enthusiasm for new ventures—was doubling back to haunt me. These men were talented, skilled, and hardworking when they needed to be, and happy, even when they needed to be unhappy. The cabin existed only in an idealized, future condition; the best had become the enemy of the good.

After filling another page of graph paper with scratch calculations of my mounting bills, I moved out of the Green House and pitched my tent next to Julito's camp. One member of Team Sawyer blew up and walked off the job. Two marriages went rocky for a few minutes. I was denying reality, becoming irrational, yelling at the locals. Family dysfunction, broken promises, missed deadlines—all darkened the mood.

"You could write an article about this cabin for Psychology Today," Julito volunteered at one point. That same night, Oscar, the cheeriest of the assistants, openly compared our doomed encampment to "El Projecto Blair Witch."