The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  When I was no more than ten, possessed by the same sense of separation, I put on my winter clothes one evening and went outside. My brothers and I rarely went out after dark, but I wanted to make angels in the snow before it melted. The tail end of the afternoon storm had turned to sleet and freezing rain, so a hard sheet of ice covered the snow on the ground. My boyish weight didn’t crack the crusty top layer to the fluffy snow beneath unless I stomped hard with my boots. Since angel making wasn’t possible, I lay on my back, atop the hard icy shell, and looked up into the cloudless night sky. I breathed deep, again and again, to see the condensation rise. After a while the stars beyond took my attention. It was the first time I had looked up into the night sky for longer than a few seconds.

  As a boy I was prone to worry and fret, but that night, as I lay still under the stars, a feeling of calm spread over me. I suddenly had a conscious realization of what it felt like to be alive. I had never considered my life, but now, in that instant, a flood of gratitude washed over me and I felt an expansiveness. Softly, the distance between the stars and me disappeared. I wasn’t closer to them, or they to me, but the distance became insignificant, pliable. The size of my body swelled and I was huge—for a boy who was very small for his age, this sensation was thrilling. I was no longer bound by the rules that governed physics; size and distance became changeable, then vanished entirely. I grabbed at this feeling, in order to possess it. But in my clutching, it began to slip away. I softened my grasp and the sense of fluidity returned, I rode it like a wave. I have no idea how long this went on, but eventually my brother Peter came outside and found me. I asked him, “Do you ever feel like you’re changing sizes?”

  He just looked at me.

  For years after that night, I had occasional, accidental moments in which my sense of size and perspective shifted and I felt like I understood something that I normally forgot. Feelings of separation dissolved, yet I was aware of my ultimate aloneness. This paradox provoked in me a sense of freedom and relief—relief that what I was always aware of on a faint, subconscious level was a strong and satisfying truth.

  After nearly four hours we are deep into a narrow finger of water and the end of the lake comes clear as a thin line on the horizon. As the boat gets closer, a cluster of tall trees becomes visible, and then several low, pale yellow buildings emerge, set back a few hundred yards from the shore. Beyond, a snowcapped mountain range interrupts the vista that would otherwise continue without limit.

  When I disembark, José Argento, a young Argentinean with black hair and olive skin, is there to greet me. “Welcome to Estancia Cristina.”

  The sudden silence after the long boat trip, coupled with the almost oppressive expanse, has left me with little to say in return. He leads me away from the shore, but after just a dozen steps I stop and look around once more.

  When he speaks, José has read my mind. “You feel so small when you see all this.”

  “Yes,” I say. Then I am grinning like a child on Christmas morning. “Yes.”

  The Catherine River is a few hundred yards inland. The original buildings of the estancia are set close to its bank, secluded in a grove of poplar and sequoia planted long ago. A restored water wheel sits on the river’s edge. The stable is off to the right.

  The ranch used to work huge numbers of sheep back in the early twentieth century, when fleece was known as “white gold,” before the bottom fell out of the market with the invention of synthetic fiber. Like most estancias, it continued to run cattle for a time and now welcomes a small number of guests to help keep the doors open.

  I’m led to one of the three simple and small outbuildings. The large picture window in my room contains a view across the river and the arroyo, up the vast golden valley, and into the snowcapped peaks of Mounts Masters and Moyano and Masón. The view is shocking in its scale, and through the window frame it looks frozen, like an Ansel Adams photograph in color.

  I am unsure how to settle myself. I step outside into the fifty-four thousand acres set amid hundreds of thousands more in the national park. There are no other guests at the estancia. The idea thrills me. I stand awkwardly beside one of the buildings, unconsciously hovering close to the security it offers, as my ears ring with the silence around me.

  I strain for even the slightest sound. There is no breeze through the poplars or the long grass. The mountains, freshly covered in snow, look like cutouts in their stillness. The horses down by the stable are far enough away to move without sound. I hear no birds call. The vista before me appears impenetrable.

  Suddenly José is beside me. “Want to see some of the property?” he asks.

  We bounce along a hopeless dirt track in his truck, up into the mountains. We pass through groves of beech trees, their leaves turning orange and red in the Patagonian autumn. Upland geese fly up out of an unnamed lake. Just below a ridge, the questionable road becomes impassable and we scramble to the top on foot. When we crest the ridge the Upsala Glacier confronts us, rising up and wedging itself between Mounts Cono and Agassiz.

  A cloud below begins to drift up and over toward us, partially obscuring the view down into the valley. Then, as if a switch has been turned on, a gale-force wind slams into us, and I stagger back. José laughs. Then large clumps of snow are being hurled at us, horizontally. We’re enveloped in the cloud. I can see only a few feet around me. Now frozen rain stings my face. I take it for as long as I’m able and then step back down off the ridge. Just a few feet below the precipice, the air is nearly still, and the snow falls in fluffy, happy clumps. José is already heading back to his truck.

  “Just follow the valley back down,” he shouts over his shoulder. “There’s a trail most of the way.”

  “Where are you going?” I holler back, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

  “I have work to do, I’ll see you at dinner.” He slams the door, and the truck bounces away and out of sight.

  I hike down into the Cañón de los Fósiles, with snow falling on my shoulders. The rock is slick underfoot. And then the weather passes. The sun pours down and I peel off a layer of clothing. Then the wind begins to swirl and it’s cool and soft again. Within half an hour I experience the four distinct seasons—a typical Patagonian afternoon. I walk back down into the valley, past Lago Anita, another glaciated lake. I pass the skeletal remains of a guanaco, a Patagonian llama, probably killed by a puma, lying in the sun. Knotted clumps of gray fur lie beside bones that have been picked clean by the condors. Its small white skull is gleaming in the sun. This guanaco must have been young—its teeth are still perfectly in place. A few feet away, the bones of its intact rib cage jut toward the sky like outstretched fingers in what seems a desperate plea. A femur and hip bones lie within reach.

  Cristina’s yellow buildings are just dots on the valley floor below. The endless expanse I saw from my room, the valley that I looked out upon as alien, that seemed impenetrable in its vastness, becomes familiar terrain as I descend.

  At the Catherine River, a three-foot salmon is facing upstream, making no progress, only the tip of its tail, barely swaying back and forth, helping it hold ground. I cross the wooden bridge to the other bank and watch. Exhausted and dying, trying to return home to spawn, the fish will make it no farther upstream; its journey will end. How long has it swum to return to its birthplace, how many hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles, to get this near to its goal and no closer?

  At dinner, alone in the dining room, I see José briefly.

  “Nice walk?” he asks.

  “Nice walk,” I reply.

  After dark I step out and look up into the sky for the Southern Cross. Whenever I see it I know I am far from home and I get a childish thrill. Beside the lake, in the original sheep-shearing shed, stands the estancia’s “museum.” The door is open. I switch on the light. The smell of livestock is still strong.

  In 1914 a young English couple by the name of Joseph and Jessie Masters, who had been wandering Santa Cruz for nearly fifteen years, sailed
up this northern arm of Lago Argentino and staked a claim on land that they and their son, Herbert, would live on for the next eighty years. Random items of the Masterses’ family life have been preserved and are strewn about the shed in a vague semblance of display. Two photographs of the young couple in 1900 hang near the door below the corrugated iron roof—the husband with his dandy’s mustache, his bride in a cameo-like profile. There is nothing about these photos that hints at the strength of character that must have enabled them to live in this remote outpost a century ago.

  The night wind whistles through the gaps in the wood plank walls. A cotton press stands beside a long wood dining table. A lone black and white photo of the family, seated around the table, is propped beside it. A copy of the Illustrated London News dating from the sixties, milk bottles, a puma trap, all sit unadorned, without commentary. I flip through the radio logbook and land on a page from 1957. Wooden oxbows and hand plows are on display beside a ladies’ purse. I’m awed by this couple and envy the kind of partnership they must have had to sustain, survive, and evidently thrive and raise children here. Their youngest daughter, for whom the estancia is named, died of pneumonia before they could get her to help. What must they have felt about their life choices at that moment? My own daughter has twice had pneumonia, and my fear for both my children’s safety hovers over me, humming in a perpetual state of quiet alert.

  My feeling isn’t so much one of nostalgia for a past I never knew, it is more of an active yearning, an anxiety that these people knew something of how to live, that they possessed information that I need. I examine each object, again and again, looking for clues. I’m heartsick for people who lived a century ago.

  I walk around and around, circling the room, becoming more and more desperate to take in as much as possible. I probe these touchstones, these relics of lives well lived. If I could show this to D, perhaps it would explain to her, better than I ever could, the courage and stoic harmony that I admire; perhaps she’d see in all this what I have no words to explain.

  The next morning I am on a colt named Pantriste, high in the hills above the estancia. The horse belongs to a young cowboy named Michay Gonzalez Guerrico. He wears leather chaps and a black boina, pulled down over the left side of his forehead. Like their American counterparts, Patagonian gauchos tend to be impassive, insular, and extremely macho. Michay is all this.

  All morning we climb higher into the mountains, the horses picking their way. Finally we arrive at an overlook and Michay dismounts. He sits on a log and peels bark off a small twig. When a condor sweeps overhead, Michay silently points up toward the sky, so I won’t miss the sight. I don’t know how he saw it; his eyes never left the twig in his hands. Back at the stable, when I thank him for the ride, he nods.

  The following morning we’re on horseback again, climbing up to a different view. When we stop, Michay tends his horses and then sits a good distance away. I turn over my shoulder to look at the hanging glacier on Mount Masters. The milky turquoise of Lake Pearson is below.

  Then, for the first time in two days, Michay speaks. “The quiet,” he says, “the silence,” and gestures out toward the valley with his chin.

  I want to laugh but stop myself. I wonder what D would make of Michay’s social ease.

  Later, I sit by the estancia in the afternoon sun, and take pictures down by the river, and watch birds picking at the grass. I can imagine myself staying here for a long time, alone and content, at the end of the world.

  I have found several places in my travels where I’ve experienced a similar sensation—the bare and rocky Burren in the rural west of Ireland, on a remote northern coast of Brazil, in central Wyoming, and at an unlikely spot in Hawaii. Places where I felt received by the land, where my perception of the world and of my place in it fell into sync. I recognize that sense of belonging instantly.

  That I didn’t feel that connection in my boyhood home in suburban New Jersey is no one’s fault, and that I’ve traveled enough to have found it on several occasions has been one of the biggest revelations in my life.

  The sun sinks behind the ridge, and the air is instantly cooler. The wind picks up and I leave the river, heading back toward the main house. Smoke is coming out of the chimney. I stand on the stoop until the first stars replace the sun. I take such satisfaction and comfort in being alone like this—together with the ancient feeling of familiarity and security it brings—that I question my willingness to relinquish this sense of insular freedom, in order to open myself to D, and wonder if it could remotely supplant the satisfaction of this moment, or if it’s even possible to reconcile the two.

  The next morning I linger over breakfast, staring out over the valley for a long time. I revisit the museum, the stables, the river. I hike back up into the foothills of the mountains, where I can see my return boat coming across the glacier-milk lake.

  Once on board, I stand on the stern and watch Cristina recede. After a long while, I go inside to sit down. Then instantly I return to the rail. Only after a long while are the buildings lost from view, and then the tall trees become indistinguishable from the land and the mountains that have dominated my world become just a few jagged ridges in a range of snowcapped peaks. I feel compelled to watch until the boat turns out of this northern arm of Lago Argentino and Cristina is gone. The light dies without event and the lake below and the sky above grow black. The wind blows hard and cold. I feel untethered, as if I have left something important behind that I may never find again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE AMAZON

  “A Dirty Trick Life Plays”

  “No, you didn’t tell me.”

  “I did, sweetheart.”

  “I think I would have remembered you telling me that you were leaving for the Amazon on Monday.” D slides her hand free from mine in the back of the cab. There have been a lot of logistical conversations lately and maybe this one slipped through the cracks.

  “You just got back from Patagonia this morning,” D says, and turns to look out the window. We’re in gridlock on Eighth Avenue.

  It started as a family trip—D, the two kids, and myself, going down the Amazon. It was D’s idea, or more correctly, it was our daughter’s idea. She was sitting on my lap while I looked at photos someone had sent me—an elegant, wood and steel, luxury Amazonian riverboat chugging downriver under a blue sky, pink river dolphins, and large purple butterflies.

  “I want to go on that boat, Daddy,” my daughter said. “I want to see those dolphins.”

  D walked over to have a look. “Me too.”

  The next day when I came home, mother and daughter were looking at the photos again. And then later, when my son saw them—“Oh, yeah, Dad.” I knew that the Amazon was in our future.

  I obtained an assignment to write about it. Plans were set in motion. Departure was scheduled around school vacation, plane reservations made. Then someone mentioned mosquitoes. And malaria. After some intense scanning of the Internet, D ascertained that the section of Peru to which we were headed had the highest instance of malaria in the Amazon, perhaps the highest in the world. “I’m not giving the kids that medication,” she declared, “it’s completely toxic. It makes people insane.”

  There went the family trip—but by then I was committed. The plan to head upriver, deep into the Amazon with the kids, was in line with both D’s and my desire to raise them to be comfortable out in the world. That there would be other travelers on the boat mattered little; I could easily imagine us carving out our own little universe on board. But the idea of going alone, trapped with a dozen strangers on a small boat, fell right into the kind of travel, and the kind of situations, I have spent a lifetime avoiding.

  The week I’m home is spent digging out from things that didn’t get handled while I was in Patagonia. D spends her evenings going out with friends—“When you’re not here, I have to hunker down. Now I’ve got to go out or I’ll go nuts.”

  On the afternoon of the third day I brush the small of her back as I
walk past her in the bedroom. D turns and we look at one another. Her eyes well up. She puts her arms over my shoulders, linking her fingers behind my neck. “I know you’ve got to go, and that you’re a travel writer and it’s your job and all, but this is a lot. We need you.”

  D’s willingness to emotionally invest in others and make herself vulnerable allows her to inhabit her humanity to a degree that still baffles me. Why would anyone who is so strong-willed, so self-sufficient, want to make herself vulnerable to someone else? D would say that what is most important in life is family, connection, and community. Loving someone, she will say, is the only thing that matters and is worth the price of relinquishing control.

  “It’s a dirty trick life plays,” I once said to her, “what loving someone does. It’s a horrible feeling, caring so much about someone. How vulnerable it makes you. I hate you for how much I love you.”

  “Thanks, luv. That makes me feel great.”

  “And the kids—all the things that could happen . . . It’s completely ridiculous to love someone so much. I hate it.”

  “You might not want to mention that to them.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s a dirty trick life plays. And once you’re in, you can’t get out.”

  We sit down on the edge of the bed and D tells me about the wedding plans that are taking shape in her mind.

  “I think the picnic idea is fun. Dartmouth Square will work great, and whoever wants to come can just come,” she says.

  To believe that any social event that D is involved in planning might ever be this simple is to be willfully naïve. She grew up in a family that ran a hotel. They planned and carried off elaborate banquets, weddings, and large events on a weekly basis. D is most comfortable in a swarming and chaotic crowd. That her own wedding will be a simple picnic is an idea I greet with skepticism.