The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  The headwaiter does not laugh in my face but instead nods his approval, snaps his fingers at a passing busboy, orders him to fill my water glass, spins on his heel, and is gone. I like him immensely. When my steak turns out to be the best rib eye I’ve ever eaten, I dub this a superb restaurant and Buenos Aires a sophisticated and welcoming city.

  Then I’m back in the car with Paulo.

  “Good steak?” he asks.

  “Very.”

  “Expensive?”

  “Very.”

  Paulo shrugs. “You’re an American.”

  Then we’re weaving along back roads, slicing between loading trucks, racing to Aeroparque Jorge Newbery. The oceanic Río de la Plata opens on our right and I’m deposited on the curb.

  “Do you speak Spanish?” the ticket agent asks.

  “Badly.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m going to El Calafate.”

  He nods. “I hope you like to be alone.”

  Mery Rios is small and round and can barely see over the steering wheel of her Honda. She will be heading down to Ushuaia for the christening of her grandson next week. She and her husband came here from up north when the military transferred him to this lonely outpost twenty-five years ago.

  “A long time, no?” She takes her eyes off the road and turns to beam at me, in the passenger seat beside her.

  “Yes,” I reply. Mery and I conduct this entire conversation in Spanish. I had no idea that I knew the word for “baptism” or “border dispute.” But apparently, I do. Perhaps I speak the language better than I remember, or maybe it’s a testament to Mery’s clear, precise, and S-L-O-W enunciation. It gives her away as the schoolteacher she used to be, before she retired. She drives a taxi occasionally now, “to help out.” There’s a friendly yet distant quality about her that relaxes me. I like her.

  The drive into El Calafate from the airport is over open and stark land, interrupted by jutting outcrops. There is little vegetation, apart from the occasional lenga tree struggling to survive. Far to the north, beyond the milky aqua of the sprawling Lago Argentino, jagged peaks of snowcapped mountains are buried under a shroud of dense, gray clouds. The sky is vast and dominating, by turns wildly expansive and forbidding. I try to adjust to the magnitude of the vista and am left shaking my head. I sigh heavily and open the window farther. After a checkpoint on the outskirts of town, the only road in swerves through a roundabout and funnels us toward the main drag. Suddenly there are trees, tall poplars and conifers, and more development than I anticipated.

  “How many people live here now, Mery?”

  “Twenty thousand,” she says. “But still, it is muy tranquila—very calm.”

  My guidebook says six thousand. At first glance, I’d put the number somewhere between the two estimates.

  Mery offers me a quick tour before dropping me off at my guesthouse. My first glimpse of the main drag, Avenida del Libertador General San Martin, is a shock. I had expected a dusty strip with a sloppy assortment of ramshackle dives, but instead, a tree-lined promenade bisects a wide and welcoming boulevard. It’s filled with high-end outdoor-wear shops, artisanal boutiques selling handmade jewelry, wine bars, and upscale steakhouses. Tour companies offering to take people of all levels of fitness on all variety of adventure appear nearly every third shop. There’s even a brand-new casino—“Horrible!” Mery calls out when we pass it. The town is more inviting than I expected, and prosperous in a way that makes me wish I had gotten here ten years earlier, before all the success.

  An old trading post that sprang up in the early part of the twentieth century, El Calafate limped along for years, sheltering gauchos tending to the millions of sheep that gave the land purpose. No one else came this way—there was no reason. Then UNESCO named the forty-seven glaciers contained in the nearby Parque Nacional Los Glaciares a World Heritage Site in 1981. This caught the attention of a few hardy adventurers who began to make the five-hour drive over dirt roads from Río Gallegos, itself a far-flung outpost. During the next twenty years, the town grew to a few thousand, and when a local airport was opened in 2000, El Calafate became the boomtown it continues to be today.

  After a dozen blocks, commerce suddenly quits and the vista is broad again and the tundra stretches. The lake is close by to our right. Mery swings into a U-turn without looking and heads back. Near the edge of town she turns and drives away from Avenida del Libertador. The pavement gives out after a block and the roads are loose gravel. We bounce farther and farther away from the center. At a corner lot on a dirt track imaginatively named Road 202, Mery stops in front of a recently constructed, redbrick, two-story house, with large windows that expose an open dining area beyond.

  “We arrive.” Mery beams.

  She walks me to the door and I feel an urge to hug her—we shake hands instead. A bell jingles when I walk through the door. The large room I saw through the window is all blond wood, filled with half a dozen small tables. A curved, purpose-built counter is beside the door; behind it hang a half dozen keys. A black-haired and thin woman of Asian extraction hurries through a door at the far end of the room, closes it behind her, and smiles warmly at me. She has braces on her teeth; she’s in her mid-thirties.

  “Andrew?” she says. Her English is heavily accented by Spanish via Japan. Her name is Maria. She is high-strung, her hands in perpetual motion. She seems both grateful and relieved I have arrived.

  “Can I get you tea?”

  “Uh, sure,” I say.

  She begins to head back through the door from which she emerged.

  “Do you have any green tea?” I ask.

  Maria turns back with delight. “Yes, of course. The tea we drink. I will get it for you.”

  “Thank you.” And I fall into the chair that will, in the instant of my falling, become “Andrew’s chair” for my entire visit. From now on, every time I come in, Maria, or her husband, Jorge, will offer me a green tea from their personal stash, I will feel obliged to accept, and I will sit in this spot. Jorge will then turn the channel on the television in the corner from an Argentinean telenovela to CNN, until the day I tell him that I prefer the Latin soap operas to the news. I will sip from the same small cup each time, emblazoned with two small bunnies and a mother rabbit on the side—Jorge and Maria have two small children. Each morning my breakfast will be set on the table before this same chair.

  My room is up a flight of stairs, the first door on the left. Although there are only six guest rooms, the number on my door says 7. Inside there is a twin bed, a small desk, and a chair. A small mirror is mounted on the wall. A single bulb covered by a paper lamp provides light from above. I find the monastic simplicity of the room a relief. I stand in front of the single square window, overlooking a backyard with sparse grass and a clothesline laden with bedsheets and children’s clothes. The day outside is fading without drama.

  After nearly twenty-four hours of travel and ten thousand miles, I drop my pack. “Where am I?” I say aloud to the empty room. I’m wired and the small space cannot contain me—within minutes I make my way back to town.

  I have a steak at one of Avenida del Libertador’s trendier-looking spots, with an open grill and a robust, healthy-looking crowd that appears to contain more locals than tourists.

  “This time of year it is,” my very solicitous waiter, Nicolas, says. He’s trim, with closely cropped hair and a well-manicured beard. Nicolas moved down from Buenos Aires a year earlier. “It’s much kinder here,” he tells me. So kind, in fact, that I wonder if Nicolas isn’t trying to pick me up.

  I go next door and buy an ice cream from the chubby teenage girl behind the counter, stagger back to my twin bed, and collapse.

  The next morning I’m back on the main street. There’s only a faint breeze blowing through the tops of the poplars. Nowhere in evidence is the infamous Patagonian wind that rips car doors from their hinges or sends picnic tables rolling like tumbleweeds. The sun is shining and it starts to grow warm. Then clouds
roll overhead and rain falls, leaving a chill in the air, then the sun is out and I take my jacket off again—all in the space of twenty minutes. The temperate climate and endlessly changeable weather are nearly identical to D’s native Ireland.

  Beside the town’s only taxi stand there’s a storefront shop with a small chalkboard out front. Viva La Pepa has a dozen empty tables and a lone woman with prematurely graying hair and a sad face standing behind a high bar. She gives me a wary welcome; I order a smoothie and sit opposite her on a high stool. Her name is Julia, and she came to El Calafate from Rosario, up north, six years ago because she was “tired from the city.”

  “Is everyone here from somewhere else?”

  Julia, who is cutting a mango, pauses with the fruit in her hand. “I don’t know anyone who was born here.”

  When I mention children she smiles for the first time. She shows me pictures of her daughter on her phone; I show her pictures of my kids.

  Her husband, Roberto, comes into the shop. He was just at home watching Seinfeld. “We love Kramer,” Julia tells me, and laughs a little sadly. Roberto is a shaggy dog of a man, with long black hair and an unkempt beard. His spirit is as distantly amiable as his wife’s is guardedly pleasant. He works at the new ice museum just outside of town. He doesn’t know anyone who was born here either.

  Julia mentions where I might get a rental car, and two blocks off the main drag I look for the house with the white metal door with no signage. Veronica Riera, who moved down from Chubut eleven years ago, eyes me from under her low-hanging hair and rents me the small Fiat sitting in her driveway. She reminds me to “park against the wind, I don’t want my door coming off.” And I wonder if this is Veronica’s personal car; there are no others in sight.

  I take the lone road west out of town, the lake to my right. Along the water’s edge a dozen pink flamingos take flight from the cloudy turquoise water. I pass a brown and white horse nibbling on long yellow grass. Nearby a black dog chases three gray-crested ducks through the reeds and back into the frigid water. Little has changed about this scene since the explorer Valentine Feilberg became the first European to lay eyes on it in 1873.

  When I get my Fiat up to fifty miles per hour, the steering wheel begins to vibrate, and the entire car beneath me starts to shake violently. After a solitary hour on the deserted and straight road, I come to a T-junction at the base of a large hill. There is no sign. I turn left. It starts to rain. The tarmac carries me around the hill and begins to swerve and hug the suddenly lush terrain. The road dips and curves through moss-covered trees and as I come out of a tight bend, something catches my eye—glowing, a translucent blue and white. I stop my car in the middle of the road.

  “Oh my God.” And then I repeat it like an idiot to the empty car, “Oh my God.” Ahead, but still a good way off, is the Perito Moreno Glacier. The rain falls harder. The clouds are hanging low, the light is dim and dull, the sky is a dirty gray. Despite this, the glacier appears to be glowing—not reflecting light but emitting it, radiating it. It looks like a pulsing, living thing. The suddenness and surprise of the view has filled me with such a feeling of being alive that in this instant I tell myself it is worth any cost I have to pay to ensure the continuing possibility of such moments. Slowly, I drive on.

  Perito Moreno may lay claim to being the only “drive-up” glacier on the planet. A few miles from where I first laid eyes on it, a parking lot welcomes visitors, who can hop out of their cars, march across the gravel, and come face-to-face with the three-mile-wide, twenty-story-high snout of the nineteen-mile-long glacier—just a few yards across the lake. Sheets of rain have begun to lash down. The few visitors from the single tour bus flee toward the snack shop, their thin yellow ponchos clinging to their hunched frames.

  A series of walkways leads from the observation deck down toward the glacier. I follow one, then hear thunder and look to my right. A large sliver of blue ice calves off and crashes into the water, sending out a small tsunami. I walk closer. My clothes are soaked through. Eventually I’m at the end of the walk. I want to be closer still. I want to be on it.

  Back in town, I walk into one of the “adventure” shops on Avenida del Libertador at random and hire a guide to take me out on the ice. The next day, Tachi Magansco, a young and athletic blonde who moved down from Bariloche, leads me to a small boat that takes us across the narrow bay and we begin to climb up the drainage parallel to the hulking glacier. A bird I can’t see makes a screeching sound I’ve never heard before.

  “Uh-oh,” Tachi says.

  “What?”

  “That’s a cachaña; it always starts to screech like that when there’s bad weather coming.”

  The sky is cloudless. We pass a forty-foot waterfall, then drop down into the ravine and sidle up to the glacier. Close up, its edges appear dirty—sediment has risen up and been expelled. Tachi hands me a set of crampons, each with ten two-inch spikes set into the bottom. Then she hands me a harness.

  “In case you fall down a crevice and I need to make a rescue.”

  I look at her.

  “Don’t worry, it rarely happens.” We step out onto the glacier. The brittle ice crunches beneath my feet. My first steps are tentative, as if the three-hundred-foot-thick ice won’t be able to hold my weight. She leads me out over rolling and then jagged undulations on the frozen sea. We walk for an hour. The screeching cachaña was right; the sky begins to cloud over and the temperature drops. The farther we walk, the vaster the glacier is revealed to be. It begins to snow. Quickly, the blue ice gets a dusting of white. Then the clouds drop lower. Then lower. We’re in a rolling portion of the glacier now, giant and gentle swells frozen in mid-movement. The snow dances in front of me. Then it’s impossible to see where the ice ends and the sky begins. I lag back and for a few moments I’m alone, lost in a pillow of white. Above, below, and all around me everything is the same. I can see nothing. I can hear my breathing and that is all. If I didn’t know I was standing I could be floating, like I used to dream about as a young man.

  Before my fear of flying took hold, I used to press my nose against the window as the plane rose up into the sky; I would dream of bouncing on the banks of clouds as if they were a trampoline. I would envision myself doing flips and spins, naked, twisting and twirling in the sky, dropping deep into the clouds and then bouncing back up. I would have given anything, anything, to be allowed to do this solitary flying for a single hour.

  Then the cloud lifts and I can see Tachi looking back at me. I feel caught, exposed. Embarrassed, I grin and we pick our way off the ice.

  Back in El Calafate, I have my nightly quota of side-of-Argentinean-beef from one of the restaurants on Avenida del Libertador, buy my ice cream from the girls in the Helado Shop, and head out of town. When I step off the main drag, El Calafate instantly loses some of its more obvious charm. The roads that lead away from the center become gravel and then dirt, and then quit altogether. Small, worn, and weather-beaten houses cramp one another, close to the road, many with only a single lamp burning. I walk in the gutter along the street—there are no sidewalks—and glance into a bare window. Three generations of a family are huddled in front of a large television, their faces bathed in a bluish, flickering glow. Next door, an old man irons a shirt in the half light, sipping a bottle of beer. Dogs bark at me from the darknesss.

  I’ve seen similar scenes in small towns in Brazil and Cambodia and even the American West—lives being lived with unself-conscious deliberateness. There’s no desire, or no energy, to pretend anything. I see desperate disappointment and loneliness in such scenes of domesticity and routine. I feel far removed and want no part of them. Yet I can’t look away. What hunger of theirs is being fed, when they seem to me instead like scenarios of slow decay? What is it about these scenes that I don’t understand?

  I walk until the road and streetlights give out, then mount a small, swinging footbridge. Someone has nailed a handwritten sign on it, PUENTE BAEZA. I cross the small stream and walk down a dirt
lane; make a left at the house with the black Lab that barks at me every time I pass by; ease past a row of tall poplar trees, planted to offer protection against the fierce winds of summer, their tops only occasionally catching a breeze now; move on past the gray mare whose restraining rope is too long, allowing her to wander far enough for her hindquarters to stick out into the gravel track as she nibbles from the last grassy patch. Then I pick up the stumpy mixed-breed dog who silently escorts me one last block to Jorge and Maria’s.

  When I come in Jorge is waiting up for me. My teacup is already set. He hurries his stocky frame into the back room and returns with a small pot that he places in front of me. Then he flops down on the nearby couch.

  “How was the glacier?”

  “Big.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  Jorge was born in Buenos Aires, of Japanese parents. He first came down to El Calafate in 1999, liked what he saw, bought the property in 2001, built the place himself, and opened in 2004.

  “It’s a good place for family, quiet, safe,” he tells me. “I worked in a factory for fourteen hours a day for eleven years in Okinawa. And now”—he spreads his thick hands wide—“the sky. We have the sky.” There are tears in his eyes.

  I’m touched by his vulnerability, his effort to connect, and his desire to please, yet I’m embarrassed by it in equal measure. As much as I enjoy Jorge’s company and appreciate his desire for domestic security, I find my knee bouncing and I’m always relieved to get away. It is just this kind of limited tolerance for social encounters that confounds a social animal like D.

  I climb the stairs to my narrow room, and under the single bulb I video Skype with her back in New York. She answers quickly; her face on the screen is dim. There is only one lamp lit, over in the far corner of the room. She’s sitting at the dining table back in our apartment. It’s odd to see her there, to be in two places at once. Yet more and more, this duality—being both home and far-off simultaneously—has come to define my once solitary travel.