Spanning four seasons, 10 countries, three teaching jobs, and countless buses, Patagonian Road chronicles Kate McCahill's solo journey from Guatemala to Argentina. In her struggles with language, romance, culture, service, and homesickness, she personifies a growing culture of women for whom travel is not a path to love but to meaningful work, rare inspiration, and profound self-discovery. Following Paul Theroux's route from his 1979 travelogue, McCahill transports the reader from a classroom in a Quito barrio to a dingy room in an El Salvadorian brothel, and from the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires to the heights of the Peruvian Andes. A testament to courage, solitude, and the rewards of taking risks, Patagonian Road proves that discovery, clarity, and simplicity remain possible in the 21st century, and that travel holds an enduring capacity to transform.
Review
"Kate McCahill is a blues traveler, singing for citizens of the world who have no public voice. She depicts beauty within despair, allowing us to hear a comforting melody in an unsettling breeze and see the gorgeous colors within a bruise. If a feeling of loneliness pervades her essays, so do feelings of wonder and pleasure. It's simply impossible not to share her joyful and frequently bewildering sensations of travel."
- Sascha Feinstein, author, Black Pearls
"Oh, what a stunning and gorgeous book this is, and one I can't wait to gift my daughter when she's ready. The story of a young woman's year-long trip through the long and winding highways, foot-paths, city streets and dusty back roads of Central and South America, Patagonian Road reminded me of my own journeys and made me pine for the ones I never had. It also expanded my understanding of what the journey is -- McCahill's rich and vivid and complex tapestry of landscape, culture, geography, ecology, and economics,shows us, lyrically and with great tenderness, how the individual is part and parcel of a much larger whole, and how we can't find ourselves without finding the world outside ourselves. I lived and breathed every place this book touched down and when I turned the last page my heart ached for the journey'send."
- Robin MacArthur, author, Half Wild: Stories
"Elegantly written and beautifully observed, McCahill's journey takes her across mountains and cities, into the reaches of culture and history, and into the self. Much of this is experienced from the seat of a bus, surrounded by a sea of humanity, both part of and an observer of the passing scene. A love affair is lost, new ways of being are found, and the adventurous McCahill turns herself not just not an intrepid traveler but into a fearless writer. By turns charming, scary, vivid,and reflective--Flung is a treat for the reader who need not buy a ticket but only open its pages to be transported."
- Miriam Sagan, author, Black Rainbow and Searching for a Mustard Seed: One Young Widow's Unconventional Story
"With her Lonely Planet guide in one hand and Paul Theroux in the other, Kate McCahill backpacks from Guatemala to Buenos Aires losing love and finding a whirlwind assortment of ex-pats, aid workers, travel junkies, and locals. Patagonian Road is a millennial's adventure story, roughing it in the age of Skype and cell phones,through a Latin America still in recovery from decades of revolution, American meddling, and authoritarian misrule."
- Douglas Glover, author and editor, Numéro Cinq
"Vivid ... insightful... A beautiful debut."
- Kirstin Valdez Quade, author, Night at the Fiestas
"A compelling addition to the growing genre of solo travelogues by women who end their journeys stronger, more self-aware, and more connected to the world."
- Emily Dziuban, Booklist
"Debut author McCahill measures her yearlong memoir on the Patagonian Road in seasons and countries. We follow her through markets, on buses, in hostels, barrios, brothels, streets, and mountains, as she simultaneously captures the solitude as well as the wonder of the path...where Theroux is confined to the rails--no immersion--McCahill plunges in, body and soul...This welcome (and timely) call to explore foreign borders, as well as our own comfort zones, is highly recommended."
- Benjamin Malczewski, LIBRARY JOURNAL
"McCahill's travels as a young woman will appeal to creative writing students. Her prose is lively and at the same time wonderfully reflective. There is a touch of poetry, too, that will inspire all aspiring writers. When she and a friend arrive in the Andes: "We moved without speaking along the ridge, toward the meadow, and the wind smelled of ice and grass. It was as if this high-up place might whip the dust off of us and along with it the worry, our anxieties, dissolving like sugar in water, or wisps of clouds off the surface of a deep emerald lake" (153). You can't get much better than that."
- Marilyn Sides, author of THE ISLAND OF THE MAPMAKER'S WIFE AND OTHER TALES and THE GENIUS OF AFFECTION
"Kate McCahill is a fearless explorer, and in her travel memoir Patagonian Road she leads us on a long and alert path through Central and South America, describing people and places that she encounters and that, fortunately, we as readers would otherwise never meet. The narrative tension of this beautifully written book is the taking in so much of the world while fighting forgetfulness. Forging a supple language of remembrance, McCahill announces: 'You are alive, a voice inside me says, and the words fill me.' Her words fill us as well, on this journey that unfolds as a series of unexpected gifts."
- Philip Graham, author of THE MOON, COME TO EARTH: DISPATCHES FROM LISBON and THE ART OF THE KNOCK
"McCahill writes as much about the inner changes wrought by travel as she does about the landscapes and people of the places she visited. Bypassing most tourist spots, her eyes were opened to the privilege she had known and to events of which she'd been unaware; everyday people told the shocking truth about the effects of US intervention in Central and South America, of disapproved-of governments toppled, of fear, of loved ones "disappeared"; she met fellow travelers who were often more exotic than the locals, and she saw poverty that stopped her breath...This is poetic writing, spare and deep, that unashamedly plumbs the depths of the solitary heart as it is pried open to learn that "it is in feasting on the unknown that we come to know ourselves."
- Kristine Morris, FOREWORD MAGAZINE, "Spotlight Review"
Paperback: 350 pages
Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project (May 1, 2017)
Language: English
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
About the Author
Kate McCahill lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is a member of the English faculty at the Santa Fe Community College. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Santa Fe Literary Review and holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her first book, Patagonian Road: A Year Alone in Latin America (SFWP), was published in 2017. McCahill's essays and stories have appeared in Vox, The Millions, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere.
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