The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  I pick up my computer and give D a tour of my room. I show her the single bed, the desk and chair.

  She laughs. “Perfect for you.”

  “I know. Isn’t it?” I smile back. Over the distance, our different needs find a way to amuse us and bring us closer.

  “I found a poem by Hafiz today that reminded me of you, want to hear it? It’s called ‘This Place Where You Are Right Now.’ ‘This place where you are right now / God circled on a map for you . . .’ ”

  As she reads I can see and hear her acceptance and appreciation for what it is I’m trying to do on the road and why it’s important, not only to me but to our future. It’s a generosity that will be severely tested in the coming months. When she finishes the poem, we’re silent for a while, just looking at each other on-screen.

  “Dani and Michael invited us up for the weekend when you get back. They’re having a dinner party.”

  “Okay, well, let’s think about it.”

  “I said yes.”

  D watches me nod my head.

  “Do you ever think it’s strange that you never want to go out with anyone?”

  “I want to go out with you,” I say.

  “That doesn’t count.”

  “I think that’s all that counts.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “Do you ever think it’s strange that you want to go out all the time?” I ask.

  “No, I don’t. I like to go out with people. I like people. It’s normal. And fun. Your never wanting to see anyone, that’s what’s strange.”

  It’s a conversation we’ve had many times, but the distance allows a playful, even flirtatious tension to fill our familiar words.

  “And can we please go dancing when you get back? I can’t believe that we never go dancing; I used to go dancing every week. I need to dance.” D abandons herself while dancing—while I’m too hamstrung by self-consciousness.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll go dancing,” I say. I have no intention of going dancing.

  “So I’ve been thinking about the wedding, want to hear it?”

  The first time we started to plan a wedding, four years earlier, we made a guest list in two columns on a yellow legal pad. D’s column ran to well over four pages. Mine petered out somewhere in the middle of the first page. We decided to get married in Dublin and then we changed our minds and decided on New York, and then it was back to Dublin. We picked a date, and then changed it, and then changed it again. Time went by. D’s parents wanted to know what was going on. We picked another date and then canceled it. On the surface, logistics seemed to overwhelm us, but there was an underlying tension between us that needed to be addressed. The very idea of coming together started to push us apart. D also struggled with her new life in America. The relentless drive for success that defines life in New York and supersedes time with friends confounded her.

  “Is every relationship in this city a work relationship? I just want to have a cup of coffee and a chat.”

  She lamented the distance from her family to a degree that did not abate over time. “I would like to be able to walk over to Mum and Dad’s house. I’d like to see my brothers. You live ten minutes away from half your family and you never see them. I mean it’s crazy, who am I with? What is the Universe trying to tell me?”

  Eventually we just stopped talking about the wedding.

  I joked that it took D a year to like me again after she put on my ring. But then it stopped being a joke. By the time she had come to terms with the idea of our marrying, I had grown skittish. We struggled for power—over everything. We settled into a pattern of simmering tension, slowly escalating to open conflict, followed by a silent retreat and then tentative coming together, before a broaching of tenderness and acknowledgment of our love, and the subsequent rediscovery that there seemed to be something bigger at play holding us together than our own wills. And then the cycle would begin again. The kids also fell into a dynamic of relentless bickering.

  One afternoon during this period, after a particularly bad spell, I picked up the phone, and my son, who was with his mother for the week, was on the line. He never called during the day. He was struggling not to cry.

  “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” I said.

  “Dad, I don’t think I can come back.”

  “Sweetheart, why, what’s going on?”

  “My sister and I can’t get along.” His tone was very formal, very grave.

  I tried to downplay their squabbling. “That’s completely normal, all siblings fight. I fought with my brothers. It’s totally normal.”

  “No, Dad, this is different. We don’t get along, we never will. It’s something else.”

  “What, sweetheart, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with deep sadness.

  But I knew. From the start, the kids mirrored D’s and my relationship, absorbed it, were affected by it, and reflected it back to us—the good and the bad.

  I promised I would take care of it, that it would all be okay, hung up the phone, and cried. I stared out the window, listening to the sound of drilling from the street below. After a while I walked into the bedroom, where D was on the bed, reading. I sat on the side of the bed and she put her book away. I didn’t speak for a while and neither did she. “What are we doing?” I said finally, turning to look at her.

  D held my gaze and then began to cry. I cried some more too. We hugged and said nothing else. Later, after a dinner in which even our normally talkative daughter was quiet, I told D about the call with my son.

  She nodded. “He’s a very sensitive person.”

  The next morning when we woke, an unspoken decision had been reached. A few days later my son returned as scheduled, everything was the same, and yet it was different. Instead of using our considerable passion for each other against one another, we returned to the baseline of support and appreciation that had somehow been turned on its head. Suddenly we were allies again, with the goal to unite, not battle to gain victory and confirm incompatibility. Our lives, all our lives, shifted.

  This time, D is suggesting we simply tell our friends that we’re getting married in Dublin.

  “Maybe we just have it in Dartmouth Square,” she says over Skype. Dartmouth Square is a small park across the street from where D lived when we first met. It’s an elegant neighborhood green encircled by Georgian row houses.

  I have a vivid memory of looking out D’s bedroom window during a purple dusk and watching hundreds of swallows circle and dive in unison, screeching until they settled on a tree to perch for the night. Many afternoons I pushed our daughter’s stroller on the path that wraps around the park—around and around and around, trying to get her off to sleep. And when my son was four he dressed as Superman on Halloween and raced around that same path, disappearing behind the hedge, his red cape flying, until he reappeared at the next opening and then disappeared again, only to appear at the next opening.

  “We’ll just tell everybody who wants to come to bring along a picnic and come celebrate the afternoon with us.” I watch her sip tea over Skype.

  “Sounds simple,” I say. “I like it.”

  “Mmm . . . we’ll see,” D says.

  There’s something in the way D says “We’ll see,” and I know that things will never be that simple.

  Jorge has noticed that a fairly good-size pool of oil has formed under the engine of my Fiat. I’m grateful, because today I’m headed a few hundred miles north, to the village of El Chaltén.

  On the way out of town I stop by the house with the white metal door. Veronica opens it a crack and peers out at me from under her hair. When she hears my stumbling Spanish she remembers me, and then we’re both on our knees, watching oil drip slowly from the engine of the Fiat. She nods knowingly and offers me the keys to a similarly battered vehicle, same make and model, parked across the street. This one doesn’t begin the death rattle until I hit seventy miles per hour. I race north over the recently paved tarmac.

  After a few hours of r
elentless and barren earth, Lago Viedma comes into view on my left. It’s the other massive, glaciated lake that anchors southern Patagonia. I turn left onto Highway 23, and within a half hour I’m approaching El Chaltén. The jagged tower of Mount Fitz Roy, one of rock climbing’s crown jewels, presides over the village of one thousand—but is nowhere in sight. A dense and gray blanket of clouds is entrenched just above the tree line.

  Common are stories of climbers who come halfway around the world to conquer Fitz Roy, only to leave without ever attempting it, or even seeing its famous peak, so domineering is the infamous weather. I’m not interested in scaling the mountain, but I’d like to hike its slopes and get a look at the cragged peak that graces virtually every calendar of Argentina. A light rain is falling as I cruise along Avenida San Martin, El Chaltén’s wide and sleepy main drag. A skinny dog chases my car.

  It’s a strange little town. Nothing much existed here a decade ago, other than a ranger station, some primitive shelter for a few hard-core climbers, and the occasional gaucho passing through. Then, when the airport opened in El Calafate and tourism started to hit, a town was hastily constructed. They forgot a few things—like a bank and a gas station—and when I go into the town’s only pharmacy, they’re out of Band-Aids.

  Maybe it was the drive, or the fact that there is no one hanging around town, but I feel unsettled, anxious. I eat with my back to the wall at a corner table in an empty restaurant and realize that I’m lonely. It’s something I rarely feel, but when I do, I usually experience it as a pleasant sensation. Only occasionally does loneliness sadden me, or fill me with anxiety, and when it does, it takes me by surprise and leaves me feeling adrift, as if I have misplaced myself somehow.

  I walk back out of the restaurant into the cool midafternoon breeze. The rain has stopped and I walk right out of town and up into the mountains. I focus on my steps, concentrating on the rhythm of my movement. I hike for several hours. Something in the repetition and measurable progress of walking brings me back to myself.

  Lost in an insular pattern of random thought, I don’t notice when the clouds lift, until I look up and suddenly see Mount Fitz Roy for the first time. The late-afternoon sun is painting its jagged spire a golden brown. I stop in my tracks.

  “There you are,” I say aloud.

  The following morning I set out for another hike, out to Laguna Capri. The day is bright and the granite, sheer face of Fitz Roy cuts up into the sky above me. My hike is simultaneously exhilarating and grounding, the way walking over earth far from pavement is, yet when I return to town late in the day, I’m struck again with feelings of loneliness.

  Everyone here in El Chaltén is just passing through or is here only to service the needs of those who are. There is a lack of the self-possessing permanence that is required to maintain solidity in so solitary a position. Unlike El Calafate, where people seem to have found a haven, El Chaltén strikes me as a way station, a stunningly beautiful one to be sure, but a way station nonetheless.

  I always lose confidence when I’m in transient places like this, and feel as if there’s something I don’t understand, something that the others around me do. Perhaps these are the feelings that people like Jorge and his wife, and the families I saw through the windows in El Calafate, are striving so hard to avoid.

  Virtually everyone I met there had a quality about them that was both independent and yet part of something bigger. I began to wonder, while hiking on Fitz Roy, if that comfortable duality I felt in El Calafate was a homegrown sensation. What was it about the town that bred some special form of independent ease? Was there something in the water that cultivated solitary yet communal characters? Or was it because everyone I met in El Calafate was a transplant from somewhere else? Was the town a magnet for loners looking for a place to fit in and belong? Whatever it was, I don’t feel it here in El Chaltén.

  So before the sun quits for the day, I hop in my Fiat; glance at Fitz Roy, stark against a cloudless blue sky in my rearview mirror; and beat it back to El Calafate.

  Jorge and Elizabeth embarrass me with the sincerity of their warm welcome. My retreat to the safety of domesticity isn’t lost on me, yet when Jorge’s mother, a tiny woman who speaks no English and is visiting from Japan, insists I share some of her homemade sushi, I wish I had gone into town for dinner. My seesawing social sensitivity has always been maddening to D, and in moments like this, I can understand why.

  So many times I’ve committed us to a function, only to be sitting at a table with strangers or standing at a cocktail party, suffering, while D whispers in my ear.

  “You knew we were going out tonight, luv. It was your idea. Now you don’t want to be here; what’s up?” she has said to me more than once.

  I decide to try to find someone, anyone, who was actually born here in El Calafate. To see if perhaps they see things differently from me. My search eventually leads me to town hall. Several men and women sit behind a long desk. When I explain what I’m after, they stare at me for a while. Then one of the vaguely friendly ladies remembers an older gentleman named Nuño, who she thinks grew up in town.

  A search through the phone book is made, the number found, and a call put through. Nuño’s wife says he’s out, but she’ll tell him when she sees him and maybe he’ll come by town hall and talk to me. So I wander off, say hi to Julia at Viva La Pepa, have one of her crepes, and drift back to town hall.

  Nuño is there, waiting for me. He’s a small man, stocky, with tightly trimmed hair, thick glasses, and a bandana around his neck. He’s wearing a black boina—a Patagonian beret. He looks like he could be from the Basque region of Spain. Everyone at town hall is very pleased that they could help me. Hands are shaken all around. Nuño and I walk out to speak in private.

  Immediately, Nuño has difficulty deciphering my horrible Spanish—apparently it’s not as good as Mery Rios led me to believe. I struggle to understand his rapid-fire, slang-filled dialect. Nuño worked on estancias, shearing sheep, herding cattle, and at the airport taking tickets, and thirty more jobs. He’s retired now, at seventy-three, “but still working, of course,” he says with a smile.

  It turns out that Nuño wasn’t born in El Calafate after all, but in a tiny village called Río Mitre a few miles away. When I ask him if it’s true that things here used to be so dire that the government paid people to move to El Calafate, Nuño stares at me.

  “Otra vez,” he says. I repeat the question. His eyes narrow, his square chin drops, and he launches into a long, rambling answer filled with rapid and clipped consonants. His hands begin to wave violently. His face is flushed. He is getting very worked up. Who would say such a thing? He wants to know. Not him.

  I apologize, assure him I must have misunderstood, and gently touch his arm in solidarity. He shakes me off and drags me across the street, in search of someone who can translate. Nuño doesn’t want to be misunderstood. I tell him I know a woman who works in a restaurant where I got some juice who speaks pretty good English. He grunts. There are no traffic lights in town yet; we almost get hit crossing Avenida del Libertador. We enter Viva La Pepa, and I wave to Julia.

  “Hola,” she says, and smiles. She’s happy to see me return. Before I can explain, Nuño launches into a tirade and Julia translates, as best she can, what Nuño has already told me. Julia’s English becomes halting and fractured under the pressure of Nuño’s assault. At first she looks at me with an apologetic furrow in her brow. Then her frustration begins to show. Soon, her anger at me for bringing this scene into her world of quiet reprieve cannot be hidden. I apologize and try to usher Nuño toward the door. He won’t budge; he is adamant that he be understood, that things are clear. When a paying customer finally comes into the shop, Julia turns her back on us without hesitation. Out on the street, the old man is still very upset. “Estoy preocupado,” he says. He’s worried, very worried, that I just don’t understand him.

  I assure Nuño that I understand—but perhaps I don’t. His pride in his home, his unapologetic inve
stment in it and attachment to it, these are things I’ve never experienced. What kind of solidity might these feelings have offered me if I had? He storms off without shaking my outstretched hand.

  It is still dark the next morning and the wind blows hard on the bow of the Francisco de Viedma. The engine drones belowdecks. The predawn clouds hang close. The largest freshwater lake in Argentina looks black beneath the boat. When the sun breaks the horizon, for a few minutes light shoots up onto the low ceiling of clouds, reflecting back down onto the suddenly turquoise water, and everything is alive. The snow line is low on the mountains that meet the water’s edge. The metamorphic rock glistens. The boat passes a small blue iceberg—an orphan from the Upsala Glacier. It feels too warm for snow, yet snow begins to fall. A rainbow forms on my right; an austral thrush darts past, just above the whitecapping glacier milk. I’ve not always had the gift to know when I’m happy in the moment, but the wind ripping across my face, the spray from the lake biting my skin, and the rapidly changing light are so exhilarating that it’s difficult to breathe. I’m aware of storing the moment away, like an emergency supply of food.

  Eventually, the snow turns to an icy rain and chases me inside the cabin. The sky grows lower toward the lake, and fingers of deep gray clouds reach down to only a few feet above the windswept, choppy water. My exhilaration wanes and the morning takes on a wistful mood as the boat pushes farther up into the northern arm of Lago Argentino.

  The eighteenth-century Swiss author Madame de Staël once said, “Travel is one of the saddest pleasures in life.” As I watch our progress through the window my thoughts follow the pace of our movement and allow a melancholy feeling of isolation and separateness to unfold like a soft blanket spreading out beneath me. I have the luxury of indulging in this state only occasionally, when I’m alone and far from home. It has no place in my relationships with my children or with D. It’s a mood she has little patience for—a shadow of the child I was, not the man she shares her life with—but it’s one that’s been indispensable to my internal rhythm.