My success also signaled a crisis in my marriage. In recent years, with each of my prospecting trips—trips I had taken all my married life—Vita had drawn away. Before the cobalt strike I’d been in the Zambian Copperbelt, pioneering the mining of high-quality emeralds. I was gone for months at a time and on each home leave saw a growing distance between Vita and me; with her objecting more and more to my absences, I knew I’d have to work to regain her trust. What made this hard was that, although I always returned, I made the mistake of the committed—the single-minded, the selfish—traveler, who regards travel as a mission. I stopped coming all the way back. I was distracted by a new venture. Having seen the exploitation of children mining cobalt in the Congo—a subject that Vita herself was outraged by, as a board member of the agency Rescue/Relief—I became involved in the mining of ethical cobalt in Idaho.

Then something unexpected happened. Vita did not scold me for being away. She said she happened to be preoccupied, she clucked and went about her business; and if you were outside this marriage looking in you’d feel all was more or less well, because so little was said, two busy people, life returning to normal, no raised voices, the marriage ticking away.

But that ticking, which was in fact a silence, something like acceptance, was ominous. It seemed to indicate that we were too far apart to talk—not a peaceful silence but a shadow of distrust, and now I felt our marriage was hollow and unrepairable.

I didn’t have another woman. I had work and prospects. My business was booming—I was content. But I was alone.

No anger, no yelling. It was not hatred, because hatred is passion, and passion means caring. It was worse than hatred. She was indifferent and loveless. She simply didn’t care.

I had returned home to find a different Vita. She reminded me that she had asked me not to take the Idaho contract, that she was (as she put it) “perimenopausal,” and hadn’t I been away long enough in our marriage? I told her that although I constantly referred to what I did as “my work,” I did not regard it as work. I loved being active, I enjoyed the challenges of being outdoors—of bad roads and tent camps—hauling technical equipment into the wilderness, to locate a mother lode. It was treasure hunting, involving risk and expense. And my months of diligent prospecting in Idaho had paid off.

Vita was not impressed. I said, “It wasn’t easy—I missed you.”

“I told myself you were dead. I got on with my life.”