“You do understand that as soon as we decided to get married you’re going as far away as you can get. Literally to the end of the earth,” D says.
“What’s your point?” I ask.
I’m already waiting by the elevator when I put down my pack and return for one last good night. I slip into the bedroom and can hear D singing to our daughter. When my eyes adjust to the dark I can see that D is lying beside our daughter in bed. She’s crying softly.
“Sweetheart, what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she says, wiping her tears.
I sit on the edge of the bed and lean in to embrace her. I brush our daughter’s fine blond hair back from her face, tell her I love her, and rest my hand over D’s heart. Her hand moves to cover mine. The three of us sit for a while like this in the dark, with only the sound of our breathing, back and forth.
On the corner in the fading light, I search for a cab. My arm, extended out toward an approaching taxi, feels frail and insubstantial in the still-too-cold March air. I’m aware suddenly that this is my departure, the moment my trip begins. I look at my watch. I toss my backpack across the seat, climb in, and experience my first flash of excitement about the journey ahead.
“Kennedy,” I shout to the driver through the Plexiglas partition. I sit back and open the window; a harsh late-winter blast burns my ear.
The day has been long and fraught with the usual strain of imminent departure. My nine-year-old son from my first marriage had to go back to his mom after lunch today. On “transition days,” as we’ve come to call this weekly switch-off, my son and I often get into a fight. I’m upset he’s going away and he’s upset—about what, I’ll never truly know. Usually, the fights are easily resolved and we hug and I tell him how much I love him. He says, “I love you too, Dad,” and I feel I have at least one more day before our relationship deteriorates the way mine did with my own father.
We were playing soccer in Central Park. He beat me ten to nine. “Did you let me win, Dad?” he asked.
“My knee is still bad, but when it’s better you’re in trouble.”
Then we waited on the sidewalk in front of our apartment for my former wife and her partner to pick him up on their way out of town. The switch-over usually takes place at school, where the moment of handoff is invisible and easier on everyone. Or we wait upstairs and my son’s mother and her partner come in, occasionally for a cup of tea, but more often we just stand around and fill the time with casual chatter as we wait for my son to get his shoes on. But today D was working and when I suggested that my son and I wait downstairs, she kissed him good-bye and we slipped out.
My son was hugging his mom hello when her partner pulled me aside and stuck out his hand. “Congratulations,” he said.
“For what?”
“Oh, well, you know . . .”
“Oh, right.” Last night I told my ex-wife that D and I were finally going to get married, in August—after the nearly four-year engagement. “Well, I mean it’s no big deal, at this point,” I lied.
“Hey, listen,” he said, “at this age—you know.”
I nodded. My ex-wife’s partner is a solid guy, and I’m sure he does know. I myself have never been able to be so sure. I thanked them and waved good-bye as they drove off.
Back upstairs, I found D silently moving around the apartment. I tried to engage her in conversation, asked how her work was going, what she was thinking.
“When you’re going, I wish you would just go,” she said. “You’re asking me all these questions but I can feel you’re already halfway to Patagonia.”
She was right. Whenever I’m about to leave on a trip, I’m distracted and overcompensate. I’m too solicitous and overly interested. Morning departures are easier—I just get up while everyone’s still asleep and slip away.
At Ezeiza international airport in Buenos Aires I funnel toward customs. Down a long corridor, I move quickly past people shuffling along after the ten-hour overnight flight. I didn’t sleep. I never do. It has become impossible for me to relax on a plane. Once carefree in the air, flying has become the receptacle for my anxiety and fear—an obvious desire for an impossible control. The higher the levels of stress in my life, the greater my yearning for such control, thus the greater my discomfort while flying. That I can see all this does nothing to alleviate my irrational responses. Images of calamity race through my mind and even the slightest turbulence has me jumping in my seat. I decided long ago that my fear wouldn’t stop me from traveling, but still, flying haunts me, even when I am nowhere near a plane.
I have a recurring dream of being in a low-flying jet as it races along, swooping down, flying beneath highway overpasses and tilting wildly to slip between buildings and trees. Often, in mid-dream, the wings are sheared off. Other times the dream starts earlier in the scenario. The plane is about to take off, I’m boarding but can’t find my seat, and then we’re in the air and the low, drastic maneuvering begins. Rarely am I aware of others on the plane. Only occasionally will an air hostess appear and behave as if everything is completely normal, raising my already elevated stress level. These dreams always wake me with a start and have only intensified in recent years, despite the fact that I’m a “million mile” flyer.
In the arrivals hall there’s a sign in Spanish, dividing people into two lanes. I bypass the crowd struggling to read it and pick the shorter queue. The flight was two hours late, and I need to get across town to the domestic airport, to catch a three-hour flight down to the Patagonian town of El Calafate.
The line snakes slowly forward. When my turn arrives, the immigration officer flips through my passport. She’s looking for something. Then she speaks in rapid and clipped Spanish. My Spanish is poor in the best of scenarios, and rusty, but in my exhaustion, I panic. I’m back in Mr. Gonzalez’s tenth-grade Spanish class, the one I flunked and had to repeat.
“Do you speak English?”
“Little bit,” the immigration official says, holding up her thumb and forefinger very close together. “AC/DC. And the Clash.” Then she begins to sing, “Should I stay or should I go? Na-na-na-NA-na-na-na-NA.” Her singing is loud. Her long, loose black hair flies as she flings her head forward and back. I wouldn’t have taken her for a headbanger. I step back from the window and look around. No one is paying any attention. When she finishes singing, her face is flushed and she’s smiling. “You need to pay entry fee,” she says, and points me toward the back of the long line.
Heading across town I call D from the back of the taxi. She is walking around the reservoir in Central Park. She’s high from exertion, happy. She sounds close yet far off.
“Are you going into town for an hour, luv?”
“No,” I reply. “My flight was late, I need to get across town if I’m going to make my connection. I can get a bite at the airport.”
“Airport food, yum.”
I look out the window as we pass a billboard for McDonald’s—DOBLE MCNIFICA.
“Go into town, luv,” D says. “Get a steak. You’ll make the flight, you always do. God knows when you’ll get a decent meal again down there at the bottom of the world.”
I ask the driver his name and where I can get one of Argentina’s famous steaks. Paulo’s gaze shifts to the rearview mirror. He lifts his eyebrows. I nod and he swerves across two lanes, exits the highway, and heads toward Puerto Madero. Ten minutes later we pull to a stop outside a red brick converted factory.
I’m ushered through a cool dark room to a seat at the last free table on the back terrace, beside the restored canal. The tuxedoed headwaiter hurries over. I try to think of what the correct words for “rib-eye steak” might be in Spanish. Just to be sure I’m being understood, I point to my ribs and then my eye as I say them.
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.
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 relentless 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 investment 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.
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.
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.