On the Atlantic Ocean, Heroes, and Cheap Socks
And why it’s never quite like they say in the books
Some time in the fall of 2013, leaving Bolivia behind, I felt an inexplicable urge to see the Atlantic Ocean again. At that point, I’d been on the road for about five months; I’d crossed Peru and Bolivia, I had seen the Pacific Ocean, the Andes, and the Amazon, and in the face of all the strange and wonderful things of the New World, the Atlantic sounded a little like… home.
It hugged the shores of Europe, and in the North, it met the Baltic Sea, and near the Baltic Sea was the place where I was born. I wasn’t ready to go home yet, but I wanted to remember it, just for a moment, to wave hello, to send a message in a bottle and see if anyone was out there listening.
Besides, it would make for a magnificent quest.
Leaving La Quiaca, I headed steadily south to Santiago del Estero and, beyond it, to Rosario, descending into the lowlands of northern Argentina. The land was green, so green and so vast here. The surreal sands of the Altiplano and the jagged, menacing peaks of the Bolivian Andes slowly receded and gave way to a gentle landscape of rolling hills and idyllic pastures with herds of grazing cattle; lofty wrought-iron gates stood at the entrances to sprawling haciendas, and beautiful, long-limbed horses cantered playfully along neat, white-painted wooden fences.
As I rode on, I thought I could already smell the salty air of the ocean from afar. I skirted Buenos Aires, a city of over thirteen million people, and headed instead for La Plata. Here, I hoped, I would finally see my beloved Atlantic - and I would find something there.
It had once felt like the uttermost edge of the world to me. I was barely eighteen years old when my friend Tom and I hitch-hiked across Europe for the first time and found ourselves in the small town of Ortigueira in northern Spain. I’d never been this far away from home, and it was the most exotic place I had ever seen, and beyond it lay the ultimate magic: the Atlantic Ocean.
Tom and I sat on the beach, staring at it, soaking it up. We had no money and nowhere to go, so we camped on the beach, caught crabs, danced the nights away at the Ortigueira Festival, and returned abandoned shopping carts to a local supermarket so we could collect the one-euro coins and buy food and kalimotxo - a cheap red wine mixed with Cola. The local Galicians likely thought us unkempt barbarians, but we didn’t care.
We made it to the Atlantic Ocean! Us, two sunburned misfits from an Eastern European country no one’s ever heard of.
If someone had told me then that someday I’d be looking at the Atlantic from the other side, I would have found it a cruel joke. Things like that happened in Kerouac’s books; they didn’t happen to me.
Now, as I sped towards the Argentinean seashore entering the tiny little town of Magdalena, adrenaline rushed through my veins; it was so close - I could smell the clean, fresh air and the salty water. I opened the throttle wider. Soon, I’d see the deep, dark blue of the Atlantic.
But when I finally reached the shore, it looked all wrong. There was no surf; the water was a murky brown color, and it was behaving oddly.
It was flowing.
Feeling indignant, I consulted the map, and I realized that this wasn’t the Atlantic just yet. This was the estuary of Rio Plata. Sitting on a bench and looking out into the turbulent brown stream, I felt lost. This was not how I’d imagined it.
I thought the sun would be shining, and I’d see the brilliant blue of the ocean and wade into it, knee-deep, wide-eyed, and, looking out towards the horizon, Something Very Important would dawn on me.
Instead, I had come across a lonely cement bench on a deserted beach by a muddy river, and the weather was grey and overcast and dismal. I lingered a while, but no secrets, important or otherwise, felt like revealing themselves to me in Magdalena that day; I climbed back on my bike and rode off, suddenly feeling small.
A few days later, I finally saw the Atlantic in Pinamar, and it was the right shade of blue, and the sun shone brightly, and the waves crashed onto the shore in just the right rhythm. I dumped the bike in the sand, took my shoes and socks off, and put them down ready for my Big Atlantic Moment, but then had to run back because the wind caught one sock, so I had to trot after it and grab it and weigh both socks down with a rock. Only then I finally waded into the water, knee-deep, wide-eyed, and the icy cold water hit my feet and my shins, and I looked out towards the horizon, and it was just the right sort of hazy; the water was so, so cold, but I kept staring, squinting against the sun until tears began streaming down my cheeks and my feet felt numb, and then I had to get out and dry my feet and put the socks and shoes back on, and pick the bike up, and start the engine feeling profoundly baffled.
Because the thing was, heroes in books and movies never had their socks carried off by the wind whenever they did any meaningful wading into oceans or staring out toward horizons. Heroes went out into the world, wild, beautiful, and courageous, and the world would reveal itself to them, and they would Understand It All, and the sun would set and reflect in their deep, weary gaze, and then the credits would roll.
That day in Pinamar, I began suspecting that maybe I couldn’t find it not because the world was being capricious, but because I wasn’t a hero. Maybe I wasn’t anyone at all, and when the credits rolled, I would have nothing to show for it. There would be no wisdom and no soulful sunsets, no revelations or revolutions, only a lone, cheap supermarket sock carried by the wind along a deserted beach.
I found a little hotel on the outskirts of Pinamar and got some Argentinean wine in cartons, and hid for three days, curled up in bed, staring at the wall, sleepless. It didn’t make sense, none of it. There were no answers at the end of my pilgrimage to the Atlantic.
Oh, to hell with it, to hell with it all. I called an old friend of mine on Skype; sulking, I announced to him that this was it.
“This is the end, dude”, I told him, hoping he would grasp the dramatic nature of my situation.
“Don’t be a dick”, my friend replied. “It never is”.
I hung up, feeling very much misunderstood.
And then it hit me.
That same broke, sunburned, eighteen-year-old hitchhiker who once thought Ortigueira the most exotic place on the planet and who would have laughed at the idea of ever seeing Argentina?
That sneaky little bastard made it to South America, after all.
And maybe it wasn’t very heroic or soulful, maybe my navigation was frequently off, and I occasionally had to weigh my socks down so the wind wouldn’t carry them off, and maybe moping about in Pinamar with a carton of wine wasn’t very poetic nor meaningful, and maybe I still had a long way to go, but when it was all said and done and the credits would roll?
I’d have a whole goddamn road to show for it.
Image: @rtwpaul
Another stop on the vast road. Your writing is so beautiful and even more respect that it’s not your native language. I followed your adventures for years before i even met you! Can’t wait to see you again soon for another adventure!
Nice to start to read you and realize that you have visited my country, Argentina! I hope you come again soon! Pato Marelli