A House in the Sky (5 page)

After a time, we figured out that the most accurate information
could be milked from our fellow travelers, the Brits and Germans and Danes with their own tuberous luggage and varying tales of inconvenience and whimsy, which they were happy to narrate over rounds of cold beer. We swatted mosquitoes and traded bits of highly subjective data. Ana from Portugal knew a good place to get laundry done. An Aussie named Brad had just come back from a mind-blowing trip to Angel Falls and said that everyone should hire his guide.

Worrying became too much effort. When the bus didn’t come or the ceiling fan didn’t work, or when a Swedish girl talked us into joining her and nine other backpackers as they hitchhiked a nighttime ride with a sea captain bound for Trinidad and we ended up seasick and miserable on his treacherously seesawing boat deck, I realized, in the end, there wasn’t much I could do about it. Travel was good for my anxious soul. Which is not to say that I relaxed completely. When we made land in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the deep black of early morning, spattered in vomit and haunted by the ocean’s violence, the port authorities handcuffed our boat captain right on the dock and marched the rest of us off to a detention center for not having visas. I did, in that moment, start to sob.

But being in motion made me easygoing in a way I hadn’t felt before. I relaxed my stance on fruit-eating, for starters. The offerings were too rich and could be found on practically every corner. We ate meaty bananas and sweet green guavas. We pushed the Swiss Army knife into the thick rinds of fresh melon and used it to scoop the candylike pulp out of yellow soursop fruit, landing it directly in our mouths. We’d also started to shed bulk and weight from our packs. We handed off our Tupperware to villagers, left Grandma Jean’s jug of hand sanitizer in a filthy hostel, and gave away a pile of clothes.

Jamie’s dark hair grew coppery and sun-streaked, his skin brown and sleek from days spent outside. I, too, felt tanned and lithe, as if I’d been born for warm air. The sun brought back the freckles I’d had as a kid. Jamie and I picked out the most captivating postcards we could find and sent them home with messages trumpeting the general magnificence of everything. On Margarita Island, off the north coast of Venezuela, we found wide, soft beaches and leggy palm trees that
swished in the sea breeze. We pitched our yellow two-person tent in the backyard of a budget hotel for a week, striking a deal with the manager to use the bathrooms, paying under half the regular room rate. With the money we saved, we ate shark sandwiches and drank cheap rum at lunchtime.

We became friendly with the local girl at the front desk who collected our rent money every afternoon, stashed our passports in the hotel safe, and sold us bottles of water and golden empanadas filled with tangy cheese that she’d brought in a paper sack from her village. She was about twenty, like me. Peggy was her name. She had round cheeks and a shy smile and stuffed herself into low-cut tops and long skirts. She spoke a stunted but versatile English. Her village was about ten kilometers away. “Why don’t you come there?” Peggy said one evening as I was trekking through the lobby with my toothbrush and contact lens case. “You can meet my family. We’ll cook you food.”

In retrospect, it was a small thing to do—taking a taxi to Peggy’s town, meeting her vast family of
tíos
and
tías
and little barefoot brothers and cousins, allowing her to show us to a nearby beach, a five-minute walk along a brushy path, where we could pitch our tent for free. At the time, though, it felt large. The beach was a stunning half-moon of white sand rimmed by arching palm trees at the mouth of a sheltered cove. There were no signs of human trespass—no bottlecaps shipwrecked in the sand, no yachts drifting offshore. Peggy brought us a batch of doughy empanadas and sliced pineapple at dinnertime, and with the sky starting to go purple and the evening breeze lifting, she left us. Our isolation was freakish and exciting. Jamie and I waded around in the warm water, watching schools of small bluish fish flick through the shallows. If we’d zoomed upward and looked back down, we’d have been half recognizable to ourselves—a young woman, a young man, caught in a textbook paradise, aimless and happy and utterly alone.

It occurred to me that we were also unfindable, that without giving it a thought, we’d stepped off the travelers’ grid. Peggy’s village wasn’t listed in the guidebook. We’d told no one where we were going. My joy dissolved quickly, my mind tracking through our inevitable disappearance. The police would find their way to the hotel we’d left
and to our taxi driver. The taxi driver would lead them to the village. The villagers would point them to Peggy, and she would walk them to the beach. And there they’d discover us splayed and long-dead in the sand, our tent in weathered tatters, Jamie and I having been struck by lightning simultaneously, or drowned in the strong undertow and washed back ashore. Probably, though, it would be bandits, and the bandits would have been smart enough to march us off the beach before robbing us and killing us and burying our bodies where they’d never be found.

I fell asleep that night petrified and uncertain, clinging to Jamie’s back as he dozed in the tent, bolting upright every time the wind luffed the trees or a frog urped from the woods. This, I supposed, was what a frontier felt like, a knifepoint between elation and terror.

We woke to the early sun blasting through our tent, the air inside steamy and suffocating. Jamie kissed my forehead.

We’d survived. Of course.

*

Something was unfolding for me, especially as one long bus ride led to a second and a third and we floated ever deeper into Venezuela, following a loose plan but not a schedule. The effect was narcotic. I watched the countryside stream by in tangles of brush and dense cloud forest, punctuated every so often by the sight of a scarlet macaw or a small village built near a cacao plantation.

The last bus dropped us at a town called Santa Elena de Uairén, near the border of Brazil. We found a hostel and slept under a tent of mosquito netting in a room painted a jarring shade of turquoise. The next morning, after some haggling, we hired a Pemon Indian guide and hiked off into the foothills.

It was two full days of walking almost straight uphill along a switchbacking trail before I saw what I’d come for: the view from the top of Mount Roraima, which was less a mountain and more a mystifyingly huge plateau, a nine-mile-long windswept slab of sandstone, so wide and high that it created its own weather. Its sheer walls dropped several thousand feet to the grasslands below; white waterfalls threaded
down its sides. For five months, we’d sat with Roraima on our coffee table in our little apartment in Calgary, its pie-wedge shape occupying the pages of our most treasured issue of
National Geographic
. And now the looking glass had flipped. We were like fantasy characters climbing around a picture that had gone three-dimensional. Here were the pinkish quartz crystals spilled by the thousands across the slopes of a valley; here were the jewel-colored hummingbirds and the tiny prehistoric-looking black frogs we’d marveled at in the photographs.

“Can you believe it?” I heard myself saying to Jamie over and over. “Can you? I can’t.”

The two of us sat on the rocky rim of the mesa, our feet dangling over the abyss, saying nothing. Below, clouds spiraled into tufts and pompadours, forming an eery white fence line that cut us off from everything that lay beneath. It was as if we were poised at the edge of a witch’s cauldron or sat at the prow of a great ship in the center of an otherworldly ocean. I had seen this place in the magazine, and now we were here, lost in it. It was a small truth affirmed. And it was all I needed to keep going.

O
n our way down Mount Roraima, Jamie stumbled and broke his foot, causing us to cut short the rest of our grand South American tour. There was no talk of my continuing on without him. We were two rural kids on a limb, each afraid to make a move alone. We flew back to Canada, both of us tired. Somehow, even as we drifted through another year together and managed another backpacking trip, this one through Southeast Asia, the end of our relationship already felt prewritten. We were both restless, realizing we’d gotten serious too young. The breakup was painful and slow. When Jamie finally stormed out of our place one spring evening in 2003, saying he was leaving for good, what I felt was mostly relief.

I tried to keep myself busy. I got a new restaurant job, working at a place called Ceili’s, an upscale corporate hangout styled to look like an Irish pub, with planked wooden floors and piped-in jigs and shanties. The money there was better than at the Drink. I took as many double shifts as I could, intent on saving for more travel.

For the first time in my life, I was living alone, renting a tiny bare-bones apartment in downtown Calgary. Between restaurant shifts, I dipped in and out of the Wee Book Inn, buying travel narratives and old magazines and stoking a new set of plans. I got a Lonely Planet guide for Central America—a brand-new, updated one—and started bringing it to the restaurant to read on my breaks.

At work, I’d become friendly with a girl from Vancouver Island named Kelly Barker. She was petite and pert-nosed, with electric green eyes that made people on the streets stop and stare. She had a long, trilling laugh, black hair that tumbled like a Breck Girl’s past her shoulders, and she never seemed to get tired. She did better in tips than just about anybody in the restaurant. One summer Friday, Kelly and I went for a late lunch at a restaurant called Earls. Our restaurant had been quiet, and so was Earls. We ordered artichoke dip and a round of high teas—a slushy, tall-glassed rendition of the Long Island iced tea. I pulled the Lonely Planet out of my bag to show her pictures of Costa Rica, my destination of choice. Kelly had traveled around Europe with her family and done a student exchange program in Mexico, but she’d never backpacked.

“I think I should come with you,” she said.

“Of course you should!” I said.

We calculated how much tip money we’d need to finance ourselves and how much time it would take us to earn it. We started by planning a three-week trip, but three cocktails in, we decided we needed at least six weeks. I moved on to reading descriptions of Guatemala. Kelly removed her shoes and listened to me read as she fiddled with her straw. “There are swing bridges over a waterfall,” I was saying, flipping pages. “Butterfly garden, coffee plantation . . . Oh, it looks like there’s a spiritual retreat where you can learn how to meditate and stuff.”

“Yes,” Kelly said, to all of it. “Uh-huh, yep, and I bet there will be boys in Guatemala.”

By the time our lunch check arrived, we’d scrapped putting an end date on the trip and were now thinking we’d fly to Costa Rica, backpack through Guatemala and Nicaragua, and hop a flight to St. Thomas, where Kelly was positive we could get resort jobs that would have us waitressing right on the beach. From there, who knew?

We blew through the door of the Adventure Travel Company just before it closed, jovial and fully drunk and driven to make it all real before we thought better of the idea. Composing a serious face, I planted my elbows on the counter. “We’d like two tickets to Costa Rica
for six weeks from now,” I announced. Kelly stood next to me with a lopsided smile. The travel agent was only a few years older than we were but wore a blazer and had a sensible haircut. She looked from me to Kelly and back, as if attempting to channel our mothers.

“Please,” I said. “We’re one hundred percent serious.”

*

Kelly was right. There were boys in Guatemala. About five weeks into our trip, having already traversed Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras, we rode several hours out of Guatemala City on a chicken bus, one of the old American school buses that totter around Central America, repainted in carnival colors, bearing rooftop racks mounded precariously with luggage and stray farm goods. We got off in a chilly Mayan town called Todos Santos, and there, in a damp little low-ceilinged restaurant with yellow walls, we happened upon Dan Hanmer and Richie Butterwick.

Yes, those were their names, like two characters out of my old Archie and Veronica comic books, like two boys in varsity letter sweaters. Only they were British. Dan Hanmer was sandy-haired and blue-eyed and went to the University of Exeter. Richie Butterwick was a law student. Both had the ruddy glow of travelers, minus the backpacker grizzle—the unkempt, unshaved, beaded-bracelet look that caused a lot of men, Kelly and I had decided, to start looking like trolls. They spoke in arch upper-class accents. They laughed and peppered us with questions as we unloaded our travel stories with the appropriate riotousness and charm—how we’d qualified for our scuba licenses in Honduras, been eaten by sandflies on the beach in Panama, and gotten caught in a nasty storm on top of a volcano in Nicaragua.

For the next couple of days, the four of us went everywhere together, hitching rides in the pickup truck beds of Mayan farmers, watching horse races at the annual All Saints’ Day festival, hiking to some hot springs set on a hillside between pink-flowering hibiscus. Richie Butterwick and Dan Hanmer were big laughers. They extended courtly hands to pull us into the back of the trucks.

At night, lying on our beds back at the guesthouse, Kelly and I had fits of laughter over the scenario. We said the boys’ names in British accents, adding, “Well then!” and “Cheerio!” The truth is, they were nice guys with interesting things to say. Also, something exciting was happening. As the four of us caught another chicken bus and relocated ourselves down the road to Lake Atitlán, as we piled onto the overgrown patio of a little vegetarian café and ordered bowls of black bean soup with mounds of salty guacamole, as Richie and I continued to swill beer like old buddies, Kelly and Dan Hanmer had begun to stare meaningfully into each other’s eyes.

“Are you falling for Dan Hanmer?” I asked her as we lay in the hammocks outside our room one evening. Both Kelly and I had been living chastely as we traveled, flirting with male travelers but always stopping short of an actual hookup. I was teasing her, and his name was just so fun to say. We would talk about Dan Hanmer for years to come, and he would always be Dan Hanmer—never Dan, never that guy we met in Guatemala.