On a chilly Easter Island morning, my dad and I cut through the wind toward the sunrise on a bent and broken scooter; he drove, I clung to the jump seat. As the sky filled with gold and faded into blue, I gripped onto my father’s jacket with frozen hands and hunched behind him to avoid the wind. For a few minutes, alone with the long-eared Moai—those famed statues that seem to bear a strange wisdom as the ocean winds slowly wear them down—my dad and I appeared to be moving in step with one another, making easing that intricate parent-child dance of respect and responsibility.
Three weeks earlier, he’d stepped off the plane in Santiago, and our reunion was strangely quiet. We both seemed cautiously optimistic about what we would find.
I’d been studying in Chile for five months, figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Dad’s life was also in transition—he’d moved into a new house and had just left a girlfriend of over two years. He came to travel with me for three weeks, taking advantage of my Spanish, before we headed home and I entered my senior year at Georgetown.
I can easily say that my father and I have a closer relationship than most. My mother—the love of dad’s life—died of cancer when I was twelve. The last eight years have been a strange struggle to cope and grow on both of our parts. Dad retired to usher me through high school as a full-time father, and we’ve long depended on one another as much as close friends as family. But as I’ve slowly taken on responsibilities for myself, we’ve gone through the same fights every family does when a child enters college.
Easter Island was the last stop before heading home, a bookend to the last official summer break of my life. Together, Dad and I had pushed our way through the horde of tourists in Peru’s Sacred Valley, in Cuzco, and at Machu Pichu. We hoped to find something different in Easter Island, the most isolated community in the world—2,000 miles from the coast of Chile, 1,300 from its closest island neighbor. Only one flight crosses the lonely blue miles from Santiago each day.
Despite that, we were barely able to get the Moai completely to ourselves; there was almost always a family loitering around their rental car, snapping pictures of one another, staring dumbstruck at the statues.
On a whim, we rented a motor scooter late one night and planned to make our way to the largest collection of Moai, “Ahu Tongariki,” at sunrise. My father had experience driving a scooter from decades ago, when he was in college. I trusted him enough to hop onto the back and hold on tight. And after nearly turning the bike over in a wide turn or two, we worked our way east along the rugged southern coast, cutting through the cold wind and sea spray.
We dodged potholes and feral horses to Tongariki, a site with 15 statues, some over 50 feet tall. They were first toppled centuries ago in an age of clan warfare, scattered by a tsunami in the 1960s, but rebuilt 15 years ago with the funding of an eccentric Japanese billionaire.
That sunrise at Ahu Tongariki was ours. No one else came between its start in utter darkness and its end in the etherial morning light. We took pictures of one another, and stared up at those wind-worn statues, all in a line, peering inland—a jury of the ancients, left behind in silence by the culture that raised them.
We remarked about the solitude, the long shadows the Moai cast. Nothing of the conversation sticks out in my mind. There wasn’t much we could say. Out there, on a tiny speck of land dead in the middle of the endlessly roaring ocean, surrounded by an air of enigma and the towering remnants of a glorious past, my father and I were utterly dwarfed. We were simply quiet, grateful spectators and, in that, we found a balance between respect and camaraderie, between father and son. Those thirty minutes made the entire three-week trip worthwhile.
And then we had to go, back to town for breakfast. In that enormous silence, we hopped back on the scooter and took a last look back, for one of those inexplicable, peaceful and oh-so-temporary moments. The clutch slipped out, and the scooter jerked us back toward town, where our clumsy dance patiently waited to begin anew.
