Between Extremes – Brian Keenan & John McCarthy

In the days before internet, roaming South America with a backpackful of curiosity and doubt, I met two other soulful explorers high in the Peruvian Andes. Over the following weeks, we shared trials, delights and other lessons of travelling and became firm friends. Thirty-seven years later, Ian sent me this travelogue and the past stirred in me once more.
 
The journey is through Chile. I recalled a particular image here and there, “the varnished curve of Brian’s closed, upper birth” on the Tamuco to Santiago train, although I was sick by then and my memory preserves few clear moments of that country.
 
Ian’s intention was, I know, more to evoke the lands that we knew together, Peru and Bolivia. The impressions that remain, the heaving first gear of the bus engines, the acrid stench of rotting produce in the streets, the silent faces in a village at dawn, the unknowable land stretching away. He also reminds me how fellow travellers can have quite different experiences of the same events. And how much does the self we know match the person our friends see?
 
The powerful background to Keenan and McCarthy’s trek is the infamous and long incarceration that they endured together in Beirut under Islamic Jihadists. One of the fabulous stories they told, to keep the flame of hope alive, was that they would farm yaks in Patagonia. In 1995, five years after their release, they met again to make their trip of discovery, not to find a farm in earnest, but to travel as liberated men, to meet the vast and varying wildness head on and fulfil a karmic promise.
 
I don’t know why the Sunday Times described the book as “funny” (as if an account of travels has to be amusing or it’s not worth the bother). It’s more interesting than that. From the desert of Arica to the other desolation at Puerto Williams in Tierra del Fuego, the book is written in tandem, one man’s diary entry followed by the other’s. The more laidback Keenan has Neruda and the revolutionary O’Higgins as his spiritual guides. McCarthy is the detailed organizer. In the end, for all that their personalities and interpretations differ, it is interesting how much they coincide. Both think that their way is for the best and, with their differences and similarities, an arduous odyssey pushes onward. They are mature enough, their friendship more than deep enough to see it through, even if “the profound need for mutual support we had in Beirut is not now so vital.”
 
What they don’t do is dwell on their years of terrible imprisonment in a tiny cell. They hardly ever refer to it. But the reader knows. Their journals are characterized by a poetic worldliness that they both have. Keenan is imaginative and lyrical, McCarthy equally insightful and also, when the mood takes him, elegantly poetic also.