Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) (2 page)

“Yes, yes” he says. “One hour.”

Edgardo, I will soon learn, is a walking ball of misplaced concern. Conversations with him flip-flop between the poles of “I heard you the first 100 times” and “that would have been good to know.” All information is provided on a need-to-know basis, yet all of those words are subjective. Specifically “information” and “need.” I go back to my room and locate the warmest clothing I can find, which amounts to the fleece vest. I lock my passport in a counterintuitively communal safe operated by a janitor. I put my camera in my pocket.

As I’m getting ready to leave, I feel a sharp pain in my side. I go to the bathroom to find that there’s both a Coto
maxi
joke
and
a crampon joke to be made — but no one around to get it.

•••

Edgardo arrives two and a half hours later.

When he pulls up, I see that his Jeep features an orange and red flame extending from door to bumper. Dragon not pictured. He fusses with a tarp on the top of the Jeep, pulling hard at ropes. When I ask him if I can help, he says nothing. When I ask him if he’s sure I can’t help, he tells me I should get in the car. I open the passenger door to find that I am not alone. A second man reclines in the back of the Jeep. It would seem the “we” that needed to see about the size of my feet was not royal but literal.

This second man I will come to know as Victor. Victor’s primary contributions to our journey include pointing out gas stations, eating massive quantities of fruit, sleeping with his arms crossed, and pulling off Oakleys. He guy-nods me as I climb into the passenger seat. A small hill of pistachio shells and orange peels at my feet along with a warmth emanating from my seat fabric tell me that Victor’s perch in the backseat is a recently acquired one.

“That’s my assistant,” Edgardo explains over my shoulder.

Both of them laugh. I know in my heart the joke is about their friendship and not my soon-to-be-unsolved murder case, but my unease regarding a second person operates on two levels. The first is the one in which I’m in no mood to be kidnapped in a foreign country. The second one is the one in which I refuse to pay double. It’s hard to say which is more pressing.

So I sit in the car, feeling perfectly helpless as Edgardo moves about like a window washer. As he straps our supplies to the roof, a first aid kit comes loose and the windshield in front of me is showered with plastic matches and energy bars and moth-like Band-Aids, as if all were being beaten from The Piñata of Death. Edgardo and I lock eyes through the glass. He picks up a six-inch hunting knife and shoves it back into the bag. I reason that I can take 36 hours of pretty much anything. This is willfully off-base logic with zero anecdotal evidence. If, right now, you came up to me and clicked a pen in my ear 36 times in a row, the chances of my ripping it from your clutches and gouging your eyes out with it are good.

Trips to Cotopaxi work like this: You drive out of Quito, a city whose traffic patterns mirror those in Los Angeles on a Tuesday at noon. Once on the outskirts of town, it’s another few hours to the base of Cotopaxi. There are a vast array of road types at your disposal. Wide ones, short ones, narrow ones,
long, straight, curly, fuzzy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, HAIR!
Anyway. You will find one road so bumpy, you’ll want to keep your jaw ajar so your teeth don’t chatter. Soon the towns decrease in size. The crumbling 1960’s parking structures have long since faded from view. The clotheslines have become less and less covered in clothes. The occasional one-story pastel house every half-mile dots the green landscape. Say, watch out for that donkey! You keep vibrating up a “road” whose air quotes grow increasingly pronounced. Try not to listen as your bladder curses the day you dragged it into this world. Hold onto the handle above your window and —
what did I say about the fucking donkey?
— swerve your vehicle to avoid hitting the animal. Drive straight into a river. Stop the car. Realize it’s not really a river at all but a swamp saved from stagnation by a pipe of brown sewage coming out of a hill. Lift any electronics off the car floor because you’re about to open your door into bacteria-infested rainforest water. Wave to your new friends, the mosquitoes. Quickly realize that you weigh exactly enough to be of use by exiting the car but too little to be of use pushing it back onto the road.

You’re going to want to stand there for a while, like the useless bag of pasteurized milk-fed bones you are. Distract yourself from whatever it is that just bit your neck by humming the theme song to
Family Ties
. Realize that you know only two lines of this song and one of them is “sha-la-la-la.” Once back in the car, go through the gate to Cotopaxi National Park. From here, it’s a short drive to the last patch of land not at a 90-degree angle from Earth. The plan is to park, hike 45 minutes up to a cabin located at 15,700 feet above sea level and eat as much as you possibly can. Then make sure you’re asleep by 7 p.m. so that you can wake up at midnight and hike the measly six hours to the 19,347 foot summit before the sun rises, screwing you from above with avalanches or from below by melting the path out from under you.

Do the whole thing in reverse.

Now, I have to assume that much of that reads as par for the course for even the dilettante climber. I wouldn’t know. I was not she and the decision to spend two days up a mountain instead of bargaining for alpaca scarves was a thin one. The simple but constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a drama to the operation of a local ATM. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure before embarking on any path.

•••

Quito is unattractive in the rain. Lush green hills look patchy and weighted down. Laundry soaks on the line. Cars honk. Drops come into my eyes from a crack in the gray window. Edgardo’s musical tastes lean toward German rap, which makes me feel like we’re the bad guys in a post-apocalyptic novel for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has ever heard German rap. The music doesn’t stray too far from this genre except for a few plays of Ace of Base’s
The Sign
, a track that I pretend holds emotional significance in order to get Edgardo to skip it.

About an hour outside Quito, Edgardo pulls off the highway without warning and runs away on foot. Maybe Americans are just unnecessarily diligent about telling each other where we’re going all the time. If I hear a funny noise in the engine, I say “do you hear that?” I don’t just stop the car, get out and leave everyone inside thinking I’ve embarked on a one-man game of Chinese fire drill in the middle of a five-lane highway. Or say you and I are having a discussion at a party and I have to go to the bathroom. I excuse myself. I don’t simply turn around and run like a startled horse. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to, say, pull over unannounced and go on a search for pot for 30 minutes in a random village while an overly inquisitive but otherwise tolerable American tourist waits in my car.

I have no idea what this little pit stop has to do with getting to Cotopaxi. Victor popped out of the vehicle almost as fast as Edgardo, so he’s not even here to give me inscrutable Oakley-blocked looks. The gas tank is full. Maybe Edgardo has to pick up a quilt his grandmother made him or something? The landscape outside features chickens, torn advertisements for soda and shirtless children. There’s also a soldier with a gun so large strapped to his back, if he were a drunk girl and this were Halloween and the gun was angel wings, we’d be in for a lot of silly doorframe antics.

I push down on the door lock. Then I pull it up again.

I shut my eyes. When I was 4 years old I came down with pneumonia and I hallucinated that the air in my room was packed with bees. To avoid getting stung, I took refuge in the safest place in the world: under the covers. But of course there were bees there as well. Being either inside or outside of this Jeep feels like the same kind of choice.

I open the glove compartment to find a series of unmarked CDs, ratty gloves, antacid and some travel-sized spray cologne. I pick up the cologne. It has the silhouette of a boob on it and rust on the bottom and I am not even tempted to remove the cap. I get out of the car and lean on it, which makes me feel like a prostitute but I don’t mind. I reason that prostitutes seem more fearless and harder to kill than already-kidnapped women locked in a car. A chicken runs by with a couple of kids following behind. Easily distracted from her own survival, the chicken stops to peck at a half-eaten paper plate of food.

When Edgardo finally returns, he barks at me to get back in the car and tosses a large bottle of water on my lap. Quito is not Tokyo, no, but it is not
Khartoum, either
. There is absolutely no way it takes this long to locate bottled water. I raise one eyebrow at him. If drugs have been introduced to this vehicle, I think I’ve earned some.

“Drink,” he says, adding, as I open the bottle, “you will need it on the mountain.”

I pull the bottle from my lips like it’s poison.

“Do I drink the water now or do I not drink the water now?”

“Now drink,” he says, starting the car.

I unscrew the cap again.

“Drink it on the mountain.”

I have seen many films with scenes like this. I don’t need to be part of one myself. If
Cast Away
,
127 Hours
,
Alive
,
Touching the Void
and
Panic Room
have taught me anything, it’s that you should never leave home without a lighter, a bottle of Gatorade and a Swiss army knife. At this point, the abandonment/confinement genre of film is so established in our culture that people who do leave the house without an EpiPen basically deserve what’s coming to them. But the survival stuff is never the worst part. The worst part is those innocuous scenes, before the epic journey, the ones that appear to have nothing to do with anything. Chop off my arm, feed me butt cheek, lock me in a room with Jodi Foster — these will never be the moments that move me as a viewer. It’s when the trapped hero or heroine thinks longingly of some basic household staple or some nonsensical conversation that my stomach lurches. Nothing is so gruesome to the human imagination as regret.

I am careful to drain the bottle down to the plastic rib equidistant between the top and the bottom.

Soon there are no more shady towns to be found and no more donkeys to be avoided. The landscape becomes drearily flat as we drive over miles of open lava-worn ground. Wild dogs appear from nowhere and run after the car, barking. It starts to rain harder. The cold air whips through a crack in the dashboard and I worry about my clothing. If I ask too many questions, Edgardo tells me to be “tranquillo.” He isolates the word for effect, simply saying “calm,” not bothering with the “yourself.” I’m no expert in South American culture, but I’d bet you all the rice and cabbage in Ecuador that treating a woman like a Victorian hysteric when she asks about long underwear does not go over well.

“Pichincha,” Edgardo points across my chest, breaking the silence.

“I see,” I nod, though I am already starting on a path of indifference regarding the mountains.

Victor reaches silently through from the back seat and offers me cereal puffs from a plastic bag. I shake my head. We stop the car at an adobe-style house complete with a stone path. It is bare bones but at this point any evidence of human intent registers as a luxurious. We haul our belongings — which for me includes a backpack stuffed with an old sleeping bag of Victor’s, various climbing equipment, beans and a chocolate bar. I push on a wooden door and poke my head into the house and see a musty rug, a small kitchen with 20-year-old appliances and a ladder leading up to a floor covered in hay. It’s somehow colder inside than out and smells of mildew. Then again, so do I. Victor comes in behind me. He looks up at the rafters, puts his hands on his hips and whistles appreciatively.

Edgardo appears behind us.

“We cannot stay here.”

“It’s
fine
,” I say, fishing in my pack for toilet paper.

I am fond of this role reversal.

“We have to go to the refuge,” he says plainly and glares at Victor, who should know better.

Apparently, we are trespassers. This little hacienda is not our destination. It costs quite a bit of money to rent and other people have done that already. This evening’s destination is another 1,200 feet north and we will be climbing there on foot. We stopped here only because it was raining and Edgardo thought this might be a good spot to layer up on the porch. I unfurl two pairs of snow pants, a sweater and my fleece vest from my backpack but I am having trouble with the boots. Exasperated, Edgardo grabs my leg, one hand behind the knee and the other on the boot, quickly forcing me to sit on a stone bench. He starts lacing up my boots for me. This would verge on maternal if it weren’t the most violent corset-style lacing session of all time. I don’t know what kind of mother Edgardo had. Mine used to take a heart-shaped cookie cutter to my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.