The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “I found him walking on the side of the road with a large knife sticking out of his cheek, covered in blood. I picked him up and drove him to the hospital,” Carlos told me. “He got blood all over my jeep, and the next time I saw him he threatened to shoot me if I came near.”

  I buy a bottle of water from the sour patron, attempt conversation, receive a few grunts in reply, leave my car, and head into the jungle. A short way down the trail, I come to sign welcoming me to Parque Nacional Corcovado. The trail leads me into dense vegetation, under mango trees and through strands of bamboo. I climb over the sprawling roots of massive strangler figs. Eventually the trail dumps me out onto a long stretch of deserted beach under sweltering sun. Just offshore, a bull shark, its dorsal fin clearly visible, keeps pace. A harpy eagle lands high up in a cecropia tree. Macaws, always in pairs, eat from almond trees. I see toucans, and black and white king vultures. When the trail leads me back into the jungle, I’m attacked by a swarm of stingless bees as I stop to watch an anteater have lunch. I leap around, shaking and pulling at my hair, jumping from one foot to the other, swatting, cursing, spinning. Then the branches above me begin to shake. I duck. A troupe of spider monkeys is throwing nuts at me from above. I run away. A woodpecker is rapping somewhere. Hummingbirds whiz past. I grab a fallen coconut, hack it open with my knife, and drink down its too sweet water. I pull a banana from a tree and eat it. A little farther on, a huge mammal, a cross between a horse and a giant anteater, blocks my path. Apparently this is something called a Baird’s tapir—Carlos had told me I might see one. What he neglected to tell me was whether it was aggressive or not. I stand for fifteen minutes in my tracks and wait for it to finish nibbling at whatever it is it’s eating and move off.

  After nearly six hours of walking I come upon a river, the Río Claro. It’s thirty yards wide, and since I’m only a hundred yards inland and close to the ocean, it’s a tidal river, and it’s rising. I’ve been warned of alligators in the rivers of Corcovado. And sharks, like the one I just saw out in the ocean, are known to frequent the rivers’ brackish waters as well. But it is late in the afternoon, the ranger station I’m headed for can’t be more than another hour away, and I’ll never make it back to where I started before darkness falls.

  The riverbed is slick. Quickly, I’m waist-deep in the Río Claro. I can’t see into the murky brown water. With as much speed as I dare, I pick my way across, looking neither left nor right, knowing there’s nothing I could do if I were to see a fin or a pair of beady eyes gliding my way. National Geographic has dubbed Corcovado “the most biologically intense place on earth.”

  I arrive at La Sirena ranger station soggy, sore, and satisfied.

  The Osa Peninsula is largely off the grid. Most places outside Puerto Jiménez operate on generators or are solar or hydro powered or some combination of the three. I’ve had no cell phone connection and only very occasional Internet service since I arrived. I did receive one message from D, telling me that I need to fill out forms for our wedding in Ireland. The forms need my parents’ names and ages, my witness’s name, the date of my previous marriage, and the date of my divorce. My signature is needed. Nothing can move forward until these forms are filled out. Because processing paperwork like this in Ireland can take several months, all this needs to be done now. Repeat, now.

  This is simply D’s way of saying, “Don’t forget us back here, carrying the load. There’s work to be done. And you are getting married, you know.” What exactly she expects me to do about this at La Sirena ranger station in the middle of Corcovado National Park, miles from a proper Internet connection or even a phone, is unclear.

  Accessible only by a day’s walk, similar to the one I have just made, or, in an emergency, by small aircraft—which explains the long patch of low cut grass doubling as a front lawn—the ranger station is a humid oasis, a series of low-slung, plantation-style huts painted green. There are bunk beds in dormitories and communal bathrooms. The shower is an open pipe protruding from the wall. Hikers’ clothes hang from lines out back in a futile attempt at drying in the near 100 percent humidity. There is no electricity here. When it gets dark, you go to bed. Yet there’s an air of survivors’ fellowship among the thirty or so hikers who have made it here. Somewhere, somehow, someone is playing Eddie Vedder.

  In an Adirondack chair on the deck, I rub my swollen feet and prop them on the rail. I make passing conversation with a woman from Canada, and then a family of dark-haired Spaniards—a mother, a father, and their two teenage children—take seats near me. I watch their uncensored irritation and familial ease with each other.

  When I was growing up, my own family never strayed very far from home. Each summer when I was still quite young, my father would take my two older brothers and me on the one-hour car ride down the Garden State Parkway to the shore, where we stayed with my uncle’s family for a few days at their home on Long Beach Island. My father’s brother frightened me—he was rough in a way my father was not. He had a deep scar that ran from above his right eye far down into his cheek. His hair was unruly, his manner brusque and direct. His chain-smoking and well-meaning wife had deep black rings under her eyes and drifted through the house like a specter. Their many children ran wild and struck me as peculiar. The ocean, two blocks from their house, often swarmed with jellyfish and the sandy bottom was potholed, so that I was never sure, when I stepped, how deep my steps would go.

  My mother, who didn’t care for either the shore or my uncle, never joined us on these trips, but she did come with us on our annual journey across New Jersey, west to the Pocono Mountains in neighboring Pennsylvania. Each winter we would load into the Country Squire station wagon with the faux wood paneling, and my brothers and I would try to spot license plates from different states to make the seemingly endless two-hour ride pass. We always went to the same lodge, high up on a hill. It was an all-in-one facility—three meals a day in the sprawling dining room. My father’s chest visibly swelled when the maître d’ remembered his name each year.

  In the evenings before dinner my mother liked to go ice-skating. She was a solitary person, and skating revealed a playful exuberance that I rarely saw otherwise. My glimpse into this hidden side of her made me want to skate as well. She told me I was a natural, but I was never very good—though I was proud she wanted me to join her. She recognized in me a solitary quality similar to her own, and it created an unspoken bond between us. It was a closeness unique within the family—one that did not go unnoticed by my father.

  My younger brother, Justin, was born when I was eight, and soon thereafter, my mother became ill. This, coupled with a new baby, essentially ended our modest travels. Except for when my father took my two older brothers and me to Bermuda—a trip designed to give my mother some much-needed rest. I was nine. None of us had ever been so far from home, and my father had never had solo care of the three of us. He juggled our divergent desires as well as could be expected given his limited day-to-day experience of our needs.

  Stephen was set up at the golf course each morning and then not seen again until dinner. Peter wanted to go scuba diving and since my father couldn’t leave me alone, he lied and told the instructor that I was ten. We took lessons in the hotel pool before setting out for the sea.

  “Jump in and wait under the boat,” the instructor told my brother as he helped me with an air tank I was not strong enough to support.

  “Wait under the boat?” I remember my brother repeating, his eyes wide. Then, for half an hour, we dove in the cloudy water and I heard my own breathing with an acute regularity I never had before. Only once did I panic and dart to the surface.

  But it is riding on the back of my father’s rented moped that dominates my memories of that trip. I wasn’t old enough to ride my own, but I was old enough to feel uncomfortable holding on to my father’s midsection as we darted through the streets. He would occasionally turn his head in the breeze and say, “I love you, pal.” Only as an adult did I come to realize what it was that made
me uneasy about my father’s declaration. What I heard was not the simple statement of his affection but the desperate need for appreciation behind his words. I didn’t want my father to be desperate.

  Sometimes I can feel a similar yearning for validation when I tell my own son that I love him. To place the burden of emotional bolstering on a child is unreasonable and confusing, yet my son seems to have a better sense of himself and his place in the world than I did at his age. He simply ignores me when I express my love for him from this place of need, or he dismisses my prompting with a distracted, “Okay.”

  One afternoon in Bermuda, my father stopped the scooter at a port and we met a man with a long and bushy black beard who said he was a captain. My father was, and still is, a gregarious man with an easy charm. He is instantly likable, and the years have softened him. But in my youth, his explosive and terrifying anger ran roughshod over our home—its potential emergence, provoked often by things of which we were unaware, hovered over every encounter. Only later did I come to realize that his anger rose from his fear—fear that he wouldn’t be able to care for his family, fear that he would never be who he felt he should be as a man, fears I now understand. But that his anger did not stem from some dark and secret place made it no less terrifying.

  My father chatted with the captain at the port for a long time, like he chatted with so many people, and despite my protestations he insisted I have my photograph taken with the bearded man.

  It is the only time I remember him taking my picture. I was embarrassed—for myself, but also for my father. He seemed so vulnerable taking my picture, and it paralyzed me even further. In the photo, a small and skinny boy wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt that says BERMUDA on the front is standing like a stick figure, arms hanging straight down, staring at the camera without expression, beside a squatting man with a full beard and a big grin.

  Sitting now, rubbing my feet and listening as the two Spanish teens say something to their parents I’m not fluent enough to decipher, but understanding exactly what they mean when they shake their heads, hunch their shoulders, and stomp away from them, I lean over and reassure the parents what a memorable thing it is that they’re doing.

  “Well, it’s almost destroyed us,” the Spanish mother says without a trace of humor. But, later, at the communal dinner, they are all laughing together, the loudest, happiest group in the room. I wonder how long it might be before my small family is up for a similar trip. Before the sun goes down, the mosquitoes descend and a girl from Colorado offers me her herbal insect repellent. I spray it on, to no effect.

  Coming up the lawn, a group of ten young men stride toward one of the outbuildings with the casual assurance of a pack. I haven’t seen them before. They fan out in an almost perfect pyramid behind the obvious leader. Several men are shirtless. Some wear hastily knotted ponytails. Most have tattoos and nearly all of them are sporting leather anklets or necklaces, many with small totems hanging down, obvious trophies of their rugged travel to remote destinations like this one.

  I am instantly made uneasy by the gang. They are all at least ten years younger than me, but I feel childlike and inadequate in their presence. I have never traveled in or been a part of such a group—not even as a child running around my suburban neighborhood.

  That I have been so strongly identified in my acting career as a member of the Brat Pack is one of the stranger ironies of my life. And that no such tightly knit unit of actors existed in reality mattered little; it was a snappy nickname and it captured both the fascination and the judgment foisted upon a group of fortunate young actors. The last thing any actor wants is to be stereotyped and pigeonholed; this, coupled with the pejorative aspect so many associated with the term at the time, made it a moniker I tried to run from. But as time has worn on, both the label and the actors branded with it have grown in my affections (although there are members of the Brat Pack with whom I purportedly spent many a wild night whom I have never met). Most have had long, varied, and in some cases very interesting careers. It’s a testament to a talented cluster of actors that movies made nearly three decades ago still hold such resonance for several generations. And maybe because I know what the label felt like, and how we all struggled with it in our own ways, when I see other Brat Pack members now, in films or on television, I feel a kinship with them I feel with no other actors. Perhaps we have finally become a pack at last.

  But did I become a self-reliant loner because I was never welcomed into such a tribe, or did I realize early on that my desires could never be met in the rhythm of a group? The answer is impossible to discern from the myriad adjustments I’ve made through life. What is certain is that the sense of vulnerability that gathers between my shoulder blades as the gang of young men stride by—unaware of my individual gaze, but very conscious of their attractiveness as a group—is that this feeling is nearly as old as I am.

  Yet unlike in my youth, when this sense of insecurity could pervade my consciousness for days and weeks at a time, these phantoms of my past move through quickly, without any real power to harm. I observe myself with a slight detachment. My thoughts then veer to something my nine-year-old son said to me recently, as I was tucking him into bed for the night.

  “Dad, I feel like there’s a distance between me and the rest of the world.” His clear insight and simple articulateness shocked me, then saddened me and made me fear for him. When my reflexive reactions subsided, I relaxed and identified with him.

  “I’ve always felt the same way,” I told him. I wasn’t sure what else to say. “But it’s part of what makes me me, so it’s okay. You know what I mean?” I said.

  My son was quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, and then surprised me by reaching out and hugging me close.

  This sudden mood switch, the fact that the sense of isolation and inadequacy I was experiencing while I was watching the gang of young men was quickly supplanted by this memory of close connection with my son, does not slip by unnoticed. I slap a mosquito and blood splatters on my calf.

  Screaming howler monkeys wake me before dawn, and I have a problem. I had intended to head back in the direction from which I came, but I had no cell phone reception on that side of the peninsula. It’s Mother’s Day. I need to make a call.

  After breakfast I hustle a ride on a small supply boat that’s heading north. I’ve been told that I might get a signal once we come around the point leading into Drake Bay, the other port of call in the Osa. Both my children would be wild with excitement at the sight of the dolphins leaping out of the water and racing just off the bow; I have other things on my mind. When I scheduled this trip I was unaware Mother’s Day would fall during the time I was away, and when I realized it, and broke the news to D, I received only a frosty, “Oh, really,” in reply.

  From the sea, the coastline is a series of rugged, densely vegetated hills leading to jagged cliffs that occasionally open out to empty beaches. The wind begins to pick up and the water grows choppy. The bow of the boat slams down into the whitecapped waves. When we come around a point and enter a large bay, the wind dies and the surface of the water settles to a glasslike reflection of the hills above. A few houses become visible among the palms. Several boats are moored not far offshore. There is life here.

  Whereas Puerto Jiménez is a rough-and-ready backwater, Agujitas in Drake Bay is a banana-republic-type idyll of dirt lanes and heavy palm trees, climbing up the hill from a crescent-shaped beach (that the beach is infested with small, red, biting ants is not apparent at first glance).

  I disembark and march to the top of the hill, looking for a signal. Halfway up, two bars of reception flicker onto my phone; I dial, hear it ring, and I get D’s message. I force my voice into a casually upbeat tone and promise to call again.

  I call my mother and leave her a message as well.

  Suddenly there’s a chorus of voices singing and I follow the sound to an open-air church. Hundreds of people fill it. When the singing subsides, the preacher begins to shout into a microph
one, too close. His voice is distorted with static and feedback over the damaged PA system. Whenever his voice drops lower, a muffled woofing echoes out. Occasional calls of “amen” come back from the crowd as he preaches. Farther up the hill I find an open restaurant and order a pizza—but am told there is no cheese in the village.

  When I finally get D on the phone, she is not happy. Not because I’m away on Mother’s Day, but because my son has upset her.

  “I’m trying to make a video for Mum’s seventieth birthday and I’m getting people to sing to her. And he was just really rude about it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, it’s fine, he eventually did it. It’s fine.”

  The child/stepparent relationship is a balancing act that can leave everyone feeling in the middle and often powerless, especially the child. But it doesn’t stop me from being angry with my son from afar. “What did he say?” I ask again.

  “When I asked him if he’d like to be in the video, he said, ‘I’m not in your family.’ ”

  Considering the affection my son has for D’s parents (he is constantly asking to go see them in Ireland), and theirs for him, and given D’s attachment and commitment to family, there is nothing he could have said that would have upset her more.

  This behavior reminds me of my son’s reaction upon hearing that D and I were finally getting married.

  “Why?” he wanted to know when we told him about the wedding. “Everything is good the way it is, why do you have to get married?”

  “Everything will still be the same, nothing will change,” I explained.

  “So if nothing will change, then why do it?”

  “Well, it will bring us even closer.”

  “No it won’t,” he protested. “I’m not gonna come.”

  Eventually, and after many conversations, it became clear that my son felt he would be left out of the family—after all, his sister was D’s and my child, while he was merely my son—despite D’s obvious love for him. (“I’ve always thought I came into your life because of your son,” she once said to me.) As much as I’ve tried to comfort him and assure him that his being excluded from our family is an impossibility, his doubt obviously still lingers.