Voyager: Travel Writings (29 page)

I climbed back into the Hummer and headed out to reconnoiter with the friend who’d loaned me her wilderness cabin for a few days. I knew only that it was a dozen miles from town and had no water or electricity and was located on the bay. Two hours later, my friend’s directions in hand, I drove the Hummer off-road. It was after 10
P.M.
, but the sky was milky white. It felt like midafternoon, and the difference between what my watch said and what the absence of darkness said was disorienting and made me feel uncomfortably high.

The Hummer shoved its burly way through chest-high brush and ferns, over washes and gullies, and then up along a tilted ridge to a clearing, where the lane stopped in front of a small, slab-sided
cabin with a short deck. I shut off the motor, stepped down as if walking ashore from a large boat, and stood in the middle of the ferny clearing for a few moments, savoring the silence and the view. Below the cabin was the bay, and across the bay was the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, a vast, mountainous wilderness area split by three glistening white glaciers, a world where no Hummers roamed, where most of the salmon fishing was done by bears and the native people, where there was nothing like the Homer Fishing Hole and the white spruce trees had not yet begun to die.

After a long while, I went inside and made a fire in the woodstove and uncorked the bottle of red wine I’d picked up earlier in town. Out the window I saw the Hummer sitting in the brush, looking like an alien vehicle sent to earth in advance of a party of explorers scheduled to arrive later. I sipped wine and wondered what the space people, when they finally get here, will make of our planet. All those dead trees! All that flooded land and the dead villages that once prospered alongside the bay! And the dead and dying rivers and seas! The space people will shake their large, bald heads and say, “If the humans had stopped devouring their planet, they might have saved themselves. Those Last Days must have made them mad.”

THE WRONG STUFF

T
wo days and three nights in Quito adjusting my sea-level cardiovascular and respiratory systems to the ninety-three-hundred-foot altitude, and I was out of there. Enough already. Enough hanging around the crowded, noisy New City cafés on Amazonas; enough window-shopping and strolling the jammed, narrow streets of the Old City; enough of tourist hotel life and of gloomy Spanish colonial churches and bleeding, thorny icons; and enough already of the international cadre of mountain climbers—those slender, tanned, super-conditioned young men and women in hiking shorts and T-shirts, those jaded connoisseurs-of-climb lounging around the patios of the hostels and outfitters on Juan León Mera like Aussie surfers waiting for the perfect wave. It was all very charming, even exotic, but not what I had come to Ecuador to see or do. So I was out of there, headed finally from the city into the mountains. And traveling the way I like best—alone, and by public transport—riding the packed Latacunga bus south from Terminal Tereste to El Chaupi.

It was a bone-dry morning, cool and clear, with an endlessly high sky above the mountains that ringed the city like Inca ruins. I gaped at the otherworldly scenery from the open window of the bus, while the rest of the passengers—men, women, children, and
babies alike—stared up at the dubbed
Star Trek
rerun on the TV screen at the front. In minutes, the top-heavy bus had chugged its way up and out of the congested bowl of downtown Quito onto an arid ridge where it lumbered southward along the potholed Pan-American Highway. Goats with eyes that flattened sunlight like coins and an occasional melancholy cow foraged on the trash-strewn shoulders of the highway. Scrawny blond dogs trotted purposefully along the median strip as if late for an appointment while huge, smoke-belching trucks and rattling old cars and overloaded commuter buses fought one another for the right-of-way in a mad, mechanized, sixty-mile-an-hour rugby scrum. At the edge of the road, thousand-foot cliffs dropped through scrub and eroded, bloodred arroyos to the vast, tin-topped barrio spreading like an effluent along the broad valley south of Quito.

It was scary up there. But exhilarating, especially after the relative confinement of the last few days, and no one else on the bus seemed scared, not with Spock and Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship
Enterprise
watching over us. So I let it go and rocked happily along with the others—black-haired, dark-eyed natives, small, calm, cinnamon-colored people who smiled politely at the oversized, gray-haired
yanqui
with the backpack and squeezed over to make room for him.

I had come to Ecuador to climb in the Andes, like those elegantly tanned athletes back in Quito—although they all appeared to be twenty-five to thirty years younger than I and gave every indication of being in much better shape than I have ever been. They had the body fat of ten-speed bicycles. Even the ponytails on the men looked functional. The women in their nylon short-shorts and mesh T-shirts and running shoes looked like they were built to rescue men like me from ice crevasses and had been taught by counselors how to do it in a nonthreatening way. I was in my mid-fifties, and for more than six months had trained in pain for this, and it did not comfort or reassure me to see people who seemed genetically programmed to climb these twenty-thousand-foot peaks
between workouts. So I was glad to be away from them, at least for the day.

Most of the year, I lived in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, where for exercise I took occasional day hikes and played a little tennis—aging boomer guy-stuff, nothing strenuous. It was my good friends and neighbors back home, Laurie and George Daniels, who had first signed on for this trek with Rock and River Guide Service and talked me into joining them. They are wonderful, intelligent people, owners of a small independent bookstore and health food store in Keene Valley, but they, too, were twenty or more years younger than I, built like gazelles, and they were experienced climbers. Laurie did triathlons and was a rock-climbing guide. George had a ponytail. I was, therefore, secretly relieved that on this first climb, my test run at altitude, they had decided to stay in Quito with the other members of our expedition and help Alex, our guide and wagon master, buy supplies. If I had made a serious mistake and had wasted six months of nonsmoking, lung-bursting, muscle-developing daily exercise, not to mention several thousand dollars in transportation and equipment costs, I preferred to find out alone.

An hour out of Quito, the bus shuddered to a stop and dropped me and my backpack off at the side of the road, then rumbled on to Latacunga. I was suddenly the only human being in sight, and except for the steady rush of the wind, it was absolutely silent. The sun was shining brilliantly, and the air was desert dry but cool, barely fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Across the highway was the entrance to Cotopaxi National Park. A dusty, rutted track led through eucalyptus trees and over humpbacked ridges, where it wound across the plain toward Mount Cotopaxi in the distance—the highest active volcano in the world, and the object of all our desires on this trek. In nine days, after several preliminary conditioning climbs of somewhat lower mountains and a day of “snow school,” learning how to climb a glacier, we were scheduled, Laurie and George and I, our guide Alex Van Steen, and the four other
yanquis
in our group, to climb to its 19,400-foot snow-covered summit.

Not today, however. Despite the blue sky overhead, I couldn’t even
see
Cotopaxi today. It was shrouded in clouds, a vast, white, shapeless mass that rose like a storm from the
alto plano
in the east and blotted out the horizon. For some reason, I had started thinking of the mountain as She, as the mother of all volcanoes in Ecuador’s fabled Avenue of the Volcanoes. Chimborazo, in the north, at 20,561 feet, was the slightly taller father, an extinct volcano nicknamed El Viudo, the widower, and no longer smoldering. Cotopaxi, La Viuda, boiled beneath her snowy cap, and long plumes of steam rose regularly from the crater. The last time she erupted was 1928, and the slopes and plains that surround the mountain are covered for miles with ash and room-sized ejecta from that eruption.

Today, though, I was after smaller game—the three twelve-thousand-foot peaks of El Chaupi.
Lomas,
they’re called, “hills”—towering behind me in the west and tied together by a scalloped, narrow twelve-kilometer ridge. I turned, grabbed up my day pack, and started walking. A mile or so ahead of me, the land rose abruptly from the valley to the first of the
lomas
. Soon, I feared, my body will tell me that I am a vain, deluded, late-middle-aged fool and should have stayed home. But, on the other hand, I thought, if I am lucky, perhaps my body will call me master and will say, Where to next? Rumiñahui? Only 14,436 feet. Or how about Sincholagua? Great views of Cotopaxi, and only 16,500 feet! And in nine days, master, the great Cotopaxi herself!

It was not so much the climbing that had made me anxious, because I knew I’d put myself into pretty good shape and had climbed alongside George and Laurie back home over the summer, and God knows,
they
were in shape. It was the altitude. Over the years, I’d hiked long chunks of the Appalachian Trail and climbed most of the higher Adirondacks and White Mountains in New Hampshire, but this was the first time I’d ventured this high. I’d heard and read too many stories of perfectly fit climbers of all ages getting to twelve and fourteen thousand feet and succumbing suddenly to altitude sickness—nausea, blinding headaches, disorien
tation, hallucinations, even unconsciousness and permanent brain damage. It’s like seasickness, only a lot more dangerous: some people get it, some don’t, and regardless of how much climbing you’ve done in the past, you can’t tell in advance which you’ll be this time out. Back in Quito, on first arriving from the States, I was noticeably short-winded, but only for a day, and by the second day was able to walk the city, uphill and down, with relative ease. I was cheered to learn that George and Laurie, on their first few days in Ecuador, had suffered somewhat more than I. Still, this was three thousand feet higher than Quito, and at two hundred pounds, I was hoofing a lot more body weight than either George or Laurie, and it was all steadily, steeply uphill.

Another hour of climbing, first through cultivated slopes and terraced hillsides, then out along a treeless, fast-rising ridge with spectacular views of the valley below, and I was halfway up the first, the smallest, of the three peaks, Loma Sal Grande. I was breathing heavily, but without much difficulty, feeling strong and competent and very relieved. No light-headedness, no nausea, no headache. No noticeable brain damage. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much more difficult than climbing in the Adirondacks, and in a way easier: these Andean mountain paths—old winding goat and donkey trails—were smoother by far than the rocky, root-tangled trails at home.

But I didn’t want to get overconfident—this was the first real test of my training program, begun halfheartedly eight months earlier, during my annual winter residence in Princeton, New Jersey. A half-pack-a-day man, the first thing I did was quit smoking. Then, to the boom-box throb of alternative rock, I began lifting free weights in my suburban basement three afternoons a week, and on the other days rode my bicycle along the old canal towpaths from Kingston to Lawrenceville. Although at the time I wore a fifteen- to twenty-pound spare tire around my waist, I wasn’t terribly out of shape—your typical moderately aging exercised ex-athlete, I guess. But I hadn’t tried to put myself into condition for serious, sustained
athletic activity in decades, not since the days when little more than a slight swerve in my daily routines got me fit again. Now, however, it was taking a complete, wrenching reversal of direction, and I hated it.

In May, when I returned to upstate New York, I got serious. Five mornings a week, I climbed one hour steeply uphill and one down on a two-mile path into the state forest adjacent to my land, gradually reducing my total time over that course to an hour and forty-five minutes, then an hour and a quarter, until I was able to make the circuit in less than an hour, practically running the whole way. Once a week, sometimes twice, I took a daylong hike up one of the higher mountains in the region, Algonguin, Giant, or Marcy. Also, three afternoons a week, I bicycled for two hours up and down the Adirondack back roads, logging more and more miles each time out, taking on higher and longer hills, until, by late August, when I made the long, steep, five-mile ascent through Cascade Notch to Lake Placid, I was drawing incredulous stares from passing motorists—Who
is
that gray-haired idiot? By mid-October, it was dark from 5
P.M
. till 8
A.M.
, and the snow had started to fly, so I had to switch from hiking shoes to snowshoes and put my bike away, but no matter—I was as ready for the Andes as I would ever be. As ready, at least, as I was
willing
to be.

All the way up the winding trail to the summit of Loma Sal Grande, I’d been unavoidably faced away from mother Cotopaxi; my view had been mainly of the three linked peaks ahead. The path through shiny tussocks of
ichu
grass was smooth enough, thanks to generations of donkeys, milch cows, goats, and their keepers, but the trail was narrow and vaguely defined, and several times I wandered off it onto a dwindling tributary and had to clamber over tipped, hummocky fields of the tough, knee-high grasses to get back on route. The solitude was splendid. I met no other climbers—no humans at all since the three native women I had spoken to back at the highway, who had given me directions to the path and giggled shyly at my broken Spanish.

It had gotten much cooler as I ascended from the valley floor, but I was still in T-shirt and hiking shorts, kept plenty warm by exertion. The humidity was extremely low, and the steady wind blew my skin and clothing dry. I knew that I was losing a lot of moisture and was glad that the heaviest item in my day pack was water—two full liters bought this morning at the
bodega
next to my hotel in Quito. I was also carrying rain gear and a fleece jacket, in case the weather changed, and extra socks, an emergency medical kit, a spicy Argentine chorizo and chunk of hard cheese for lunch, and, for snacks, several Reese’s peanut butter cups, from the carton in my luggage hauled all the way down from the States.