Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen Page A

toward the refugio, where I would have to spend the night, because my tent was disabled. I felt done with anger, merely bereft, and done with islands, too.
    Riding with me on the boat back to Robinson Crusoe were twelve hundred lobsters, a couple of skinned goats, and an old lobsterman who, after the anchor had been weighed, shouted to me that the sea was very rough. Yeah, I agreed, it was a little rough. “ No poco! ” he shouted seriously. “ Mucho! ” The boat’s crew were tossing around the bloody goats, and I realized that instead of heading straight back toward Robinson we were angling forty-five degrees to the south, to keep from capsizing. I staggered down into a tiny, fetid bunkroom beneath the bow and heaved myself onto a bunk and there—after an hour or two of clutching the sides of the bunk to avoid becoming airborne, and trying to think about something, anything, that wasn’t seasickness, and sweating off (as I later discovered) the antiseasickness patch I’d stuck behind my ear, and listening to water slosh and hammer against the hull—I threw up into a Ziploc bag. Ten hours later, when I ventured back out on deck, I was expecting the harbor to be in sight, but the captain had done so much tacking that we were still five hours away. I couldn’t face returning to the bunk, and I was still too sick to look at seabirds, and so I stood for five hours and did little but imagine changing my return flight, which I’d booked for the following week to allow for delays, and going home early.
    I hadn’t felt so homesick since, possibly, the last time I’d camped by myself. In three days, the Californian woman I live with would be going out to watch the Super Bowl with friends of ours, and when I thought of sitting beside her on a sofa and drinking a martini and rooting for the Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who’d been a star at Berkeley, I felt desperate to escape the islands. Before leaving for Masafuera, I’d already seen Robinson’s two endemic land-bird species, and the prospect of another week there, with no chance of seeing something new, seemed suffocatingly boring—an exercise in deprivation from the very busyness that I’d been so intent on fleeing, a busyness whose pleasurability I appreciated only now.
    Back on Robinson, I enlisted my innkeeper, Ramón, to try to get me on one of the following day’s flights. Both flights turned out to be full, but while I was eating lunch the local agent of one of the air companies happened to walk into the inn, and Ramón pressed her to let me fly on a third, cargo-only, flight. The agent said no. But what about the copilot seat? Ramón asked her. Couldn’t he sit in the copilot seat? No, the agent said, the copilot seat, too, would be filled with cartons of lobster.
    And so, although I no longer wanted it, or because I didn’t want it, I had the experience of being truly stranded on an island. I ate the same bad Chilean white bread at every meal, the same nondescript fish served without sauce or seasoning at every lunch and dinner. I lay in my room and finished Robinson Crusoe . I wrote postcards in reply to the stack of mail I’d brought along. I practiced mentally inserting into Chilean Spanish the s ’s that its speakers omitted. I got better views of the Juan Fernández firecrown, a splendid large cinnamon-colored hummingbird severely endangered by invasive plant and animal species. I hiked over the mountains to a grassland where the island’s annual cattle-branding festival was being held, and I watched horseback riders drive the village’s herd into a corral. The setting was spectacular—sweeping hills, volcanic peaks, whitecapped ocean—but the hills were denuded and deeply gouged by erosion. Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd