Because Our Fathers Lied by Craig McNamara

Author:Craig McNamara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Ua aapi (fresh milk) on Easter Island

Packages sent to Easter Island from the States took three to six months to arrive. Despite the distance, the mail delivery on remote Rapa Nui worked remarkably well. I could count on getting care packages from my loving mother. As sure as the sun would rise each day, they would come. The packages she sent me contained what Mom considered the staples: letters, Hershey’s chocolate bars (the kind with almonds), and packages of Stim-U-Dents for cleaning my teeth. I still carry a small package of these in my car for on-the-road dental hygiene.

In my farm office, I have one of Mom’s handwritten letters from one of these packages. As hard as I’ve tried, it’s impossible now to read her spidery handwriting. I imagine that at the time I was better able to interpret her words. Probably the most important thing was just having that small connection to home, an assurance that she was there for me. I didn’t receive letters from my father, and I can’t imagine what he thought of having a son who had wandered so far off the beaten path.

My emotions, whenever I thought about home, were a mess. Dreaming from within my cave, I didn’t find the clarity and inner light that I had expected to discover when setting out from Palo Alto. I only discovered that the darkness and confusion in my heart had contours and a personality all their own.

On extremely rare occasions, I’d try to make a call from the only public phone on Rapa Nui back to Washington, DC. I can hear my mother’s voice today as it sounded when we connected over that international line: sparkling, chipper, masking her concern for me.

“When do you think you might come home?”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

Perhaps these conversations influenced her to come to Easter Island. I never expected this to happen, but she made the long journey, alone. With Vera, I stood on the runway to greet my mother just as I had been greeted when I arrived. We draped dozens of peepee and puri shells around Mom’s neck. Vera gave her a sun hat made from banana and palm fronds. It was the first time I’d seen my mother in a year and eight months.

We spent a week together. On horseback, then on foot, we climbed to the top of the volcano Rano Kau. On the rim of the volcano, we found petroglyphs of Tangata Manu and Make-Make, spirits of the island, which had been carved in the frozen lava. We made rubbings of these images by laying thick sheets of cotton over the petroglyphs and spreading a local paste over the cloth, capturing the figures. I hoped that Mom would share these with Dad and that she would fill him in on all the wonderful things I was doing. It wasn’t so hard, with her there, to imagine him being there too. He was a good outdoorsman; he would have enjoyed the hiking and riding, making campfires and drinking wine in jugs.

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