Voyager

by Russell Banks

  Soon, however, the forest thinned, and the trail broke free of it and led out onto cleared, grassy shoulders, and I could now see—with the broad fields and hillocks spreading out below, and the great peaks of the Valley of Volcanoes gleaming in the distance—how high we were and how far we’d come; and up ahead—with the black, spiky caldera of Pasachoa beckoning at the end of a long, narrow, fast-rising ridge—how far we had yet to climb.

  As we walked, there was a great deal of energetic, almost obsessive talk about training regimens and equipment, which I’d begun to regard as coded talk about bodies—one’s own. Were my companions, without admitting or even knowing it, talking about themselves? It was as if, behind an apparently earnest desire to describe one’s backpack, hiking shoes, gaiters, and crampons, there lurked an almost narcissistic self-absorption. It struck me that I was learning something useful about the younger generation and the true meaning of sports consumerism. On the other hand, I thought, maybe I just don’t have the right stuff.

  Periodically, Alex would stop the party and bid us sit, while he instructed us on walking, breathing, and resting techniques. They seemed to be the same little tricks that, without knowing it, I’d been using my whole life. Consequently, I let my attention wander from the lecture and instead contemplated the surreal beauty of the Andean landforms, so that when, at the next stop, he quizzed us on these techniques, I ended up the bad student again. Perhaps the lectures were useful to the others, and we might need to remember them later, when out on the glacier-covered breast of Cotopaxi, but, for me, when I think too much about walking and breathing and resting, I tend to do them badly, so I tuned out: I was feeling strong as a donkey today, even stronger than on the lomas of El Chaupi yesterday, and didn’t want to screw it up. Risking the role of rogue mountaineer, then, and the loneliness of the isolato, I started separating myself from the group emotionally, and physically, too, and found myself more and more often walking alone, either at the front of the pack or way at the back, as we wound our way slowly up and over the grass-covered humps below Pasachoa and out along the narrowing ridge toward the high dark edge of the caldera.

  It took more than five hours, and, strangely, the higher and steeper it got, the easier seemed the climb. Was this a symptom of hypoxia—altitude sickness? I wondered. Brain damage already? More likely it was the simple, clean thrill of getting out onto the crisp lip of the caldera of an ancient Andean volcano, 12,500 feet up, and the sight of the terraced valley thousands of feet below, the forest crumpled at the base like a dark green blanket, and the conifers spiking the higher slopes opposite like the pikes of an advancing army of knights under the cloudless, taut blue canopy overhead—and in the distance, majestic and serene in the soft afternoon sunlight, the beautiful white cone of Cotopaxi.

  Laurie and I were the first to make the top—as close as we could get to it, at least, without technical rock-climbing equipment, as there was a vertical twenty-foot headwall between us and the true summit—and stood dazed with delight on the small ledge, as one by one the others joined us there, red-faced, puffing, and genuinely thrilled. And for the first time, I was happy to see my fellow trekkers and to be able to share with them this hard-won pleasure.

  Soon, however, even there, the talk turned again to training regimens and equipment and other mountains climbed in the past, and I pulled away and, with George and Laurie, began the descent. We arrived at the bus an hour before the others, just as the afternoon rain began. When all had returned, we rode on to the town of Machachi, several miles south—tired and wet, but cheerful, all in all, for no one in the group seemed to have suffered symptoms of altitude sickness, other than unusual fatigue (Fred and Michelle), and headache (Laurie and Beth), and nausea (Mark).

  At Machachi, we put up for the night at a comfortable old mission-style bed-and-breakfast located next to a railroad station and named, appropriately, La Estación. We were the only guests, and after an ample four-course dinner, the group sprawled around the living room fireplace and listened in dim light to Alex’s account of climbing the north face of Everest. It was a tough story to tell, tough to listen to, for the attempt had ended in tragedy for two men he had been close to, and it had nearly taken his own life as well. As he talked on, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, I found myself surprisingly moved, as much by Alex’s grief and pain as by the story itself. Finally, I was starting to get it, the climber’s mentality—one in which mountains were not a metaphor for life, but were life itself. And climbing mountains, for a man like Alex, was not an allegory for the difficulty of life, but was the difficulty itself. So that an account of failing to reach a summit or of falling and injuring oneself or of a friend’s dying in the attempt was the actual story of one’s actual life. This was the story that Alex, who spends more than three hundred days and nights a year at altitude, was really telling, and as he talked on, I felt guilty for not having listened well enough earlier. I saw that, for Alex, and maybe even for some of my fellow trekkers, the apparently obsessive concern with equipment and fitness and the techniques of breathing and walking and resting was like a Puritan’s concern with his conscience, a Buddhist’s with his koan, or a warrior’s with his weaponry—it’s what gets him through his life.

  The next day found us in the middle of the vast Cotopaxi National Park, at the end of a rutted, almost invisible track ten miles out on the desolate, pampaslike plateau that surrounds Mount Cotopaxi. We unloaded our duffels and backpacks from the bus and watched the vehicle lumber off for Quito, and then we were alone on the enormous, darkening, henna-colored plateau—ten of us, including Alex and two Ecuadorians, Colón, a taciturn, wry, young man who would help guide the party for the remainder of our trek, and Elias, a sweet-smiling native man who would stay in camp and guard our equipment while we climbed the days away. Surrounded by our duffels and packs, we all stood glumly in the cold rain at the steep bank of a narrow, fast-running stream, the Hualpaloma. For the next four days, this 12,500-foot-high treeless piece of the paramo by the Hualpaloma would be our campsite, before we moved on to the Jose Ribas Refugio, the base camp at 16,500 feet, located just below the glacier on the rounded north-facing shoulder of Cotopaxi. There were low, bald, rolling hills in the near distance, pitted and cluttered by volcanic rocks like a lunar landscape, and to the north, beyond the hills, the three cloud-shrouded peaks of Rumiñahui, which we were scheduled to climb tomorrow. Off to the right of Rumiñahui, also lost in the mists, was Sincholagua, scheduled for two days later. And behind us, with only her rocky, broad skirts visible, was Cotopaxi, our final goal, the reason we were here in the first place.

  Alex quickly divided us into pairs—George and Laurie, Fred and Beth, himself and Michelle, and Agent Mark and me—and passed out the tents, and we commenced to struggle in the raw wind to get them pitched. We were all very cold, and the rain didn’t help. Also, we had gotten a late start from Machachi, and it was close to dark. It took a while, but finally we had the small, two-man tents up and our gear stowed inside them. The two married couples were bunked in their own tents, and Mark and I would share one. Colón and Elias shared a tent, and Alex planned to sleep in the floorless cook tent, unless it got too wet. Barring serious rain, Michelle had her single again. While Alex cranked up the gas stoves and prepared our Spartan evening meal of instant soup, powdered potatoes, and boiled carrots, the rest of us retreated to our respective shelters to unroll sleeping bags and change into warmer, dry clothing and hide awhile from the elements.

  This was when I discovered two things that would have a decidedly negative impact on my Andes camping experience. In my hurry to leave home, I’d grabbed a nylon stuff bag from several in the hall closet, thinking it contained my almost-new down-filled sleeping bag, only to discover now that it contained instead an ancient, torn bag that I’d long meant to toss out. It was half-emptied of its down filler, a flattened, moldy sack of loose feathers with a ripped seam at the foot and no zipper at the side to close it around me. Also, I’d somehow left my new inflatable
ground pad behind in the hotel in Quito. Consequently, not only would I be sleeping in the sorriest imaginable excuse for a sleeping bag, I would have to lie in the thing with nothing between it and the cold, damp ground.

  Mark, whose duffel was twice the size of mine and whose expedition pack had more compartments, zippers, straps, bells, and whistles than a sport utility vehicle, blew up a ground pad the size of an inflatable doll and spread his shiny, nearly weightless, elegantly expanding, waterproof, cocoonlike bag over it. I gazed at my tentmate in envy. When he finished, he glanced at my sad sack, politely looked away, and said nothing. I had clearly failed him. Sheepishly, I offered him a Reese’s peanut butter cup, but he declined it, opting instead for one of his high-nutrient Power Bars.

  Later, half a roll of duct tape from Alex’s emergency pack helped patch my sleeping bag, but only temporarily. All night long, my stockinged feet kept breaking through, and whenever I turned in my sleep and yanked my chilled feet back inside, I tore the tape from the side of the bag, opening it to a wave of cold air that inevitably woke me. Fresh feathers spilled onto the cold ground and floated idly in the dark above my face, while Mark snored peacefully from the warm comfort of his cocoon. It was a long, miserable, freezing night, and I was deeply grateful when, shortly after five, I heard Alex walk from tent to tent, waking his charges for breakfast like a drill sergeant.

  Soon I heard the low chortle of the gas stoves heating water for tea and hot chocolate. I quickly dressed, pulled on my climbing boots, grabbed my insulated mug and plastic bowl and spoon, toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap, and stepped outside. The ichu grass, silver-soldered by frost in the predawn light, crunched underfoot as I walked to a spot a hundred yards downstream from the tents, where I performed my ablutions in the dark. My breath made clouds before my face, and the surface of the stream steamed in the cold air. In the east, behind the sharply silhouetted horizon, the night sky was fading to peach. Pale swaths of stars fluttered overhead where the sky was still blue-black, and a chalky three-quarter moon hovered in the west. It was a splendid, affirming moment, and once again, despite my terrible, sleepless night, I was glad that I had come here. The sun struck the entire eastern side of Cotopaxi, setting it ablaze, as if ice could burn, and her cloudless summit rose imperiously into the sky, taking fresh command of the vast, still-darkened plain below.

  One by one, my companions emerged from their tents, and we gathered before the cook tent for breakfast—cold Pop-Tarts, apples, hard rye bread smeared with peanut butter. Another Spartan meal. I filled my plastic insulated McDonald’s mug with hot water and made tea. Then I looked around and noted that my fellow trekkers were all drinking from steaming, high-tech stainless steel personal Thermoses. These were serious people; I, obviously, was not.

  No time to dwell on real or imagined inadequacies, however. Today we were to climb three-pronged Rumiñahui, all the way to the rosy, sunlit summit of the middle prong. It towered in the northwest quadrant, 14,436 feet high, with its broad base at Lake Limpiopungo, a four-mile walk from our camp across the rolling plateau. We filled our packs with the clothing and food we’d need for the ten-hour climb and the changes in weather we’d likely encounter up there, and headed out, the plateau still dark in the shadows cast by the berms and lomas in the near distance and, behind them, Mount Cotopaxi—she-who-blocks-the-very-sun.

  We hadn’t walked more than a quarter mile in the frosty dawn when, as we rounded a long, morainelike ridge, we interrupted a meditating coyote that darted into the darkness as we approached, startling us as much as we had startled it. Then in the distance we began to see horses grazing, semiwild and unbroken, alone, in pairs, and in small herds, lifting their long, angular heads warily to watch us pass slowly by. They were beautiful, small, thick-bodied animals, the same stock as the horses the Spanish rode in on half a millennium ago. Rumiñahui, in Quechua, means “face of stone” and is named for one of the Inca generals who fought the invaders. Now, like equine ghosts guarding and honoring the old native general’s spirit, hundreds of the sturdy descendants of the conquistadors’ horses roamed the paramo at the foot of his mountain. In shape and color, they looked like the horses painted on the walls of Iberian caves forty thousand years ago, and I wondered if the painted horses had performed the same service as these living animals. Perhaps they, too, had been protectors of the spirits of nameless warriors slain by foreign invaders.

  By the time we reached the sprawling, shallow lake, more a marsh than a lake at this time of year, the sun had fully risen in a nearly cloudless sky. We marched single-file around the northern edge of the lake, hopping from dry spot to dry spot, then circled uphill from the lake alongside a narrow, fast-running feeder creek. Alex was in the lead, I was at the rear, and one by one the troop crossed the creek fairly easily. Until it was Fred’s turn. Wearing a Capilene turtleneck jersey, black tights, hiking shorts, and Gore-Tex gaiters, Fred had come out this morning carrying two adjustable aluminum hiking poles with nylon wrist straps attached, and with his long, slightly off-balance stride, he looked more like a man cross-country skiing for the first time than one walking for the millionth. He was the least well-conditioned member of the group, I was discovering, and tended to drop back from the others, puffing and red-faced, and if you got behind him—which I sometimes did, lagging back at the rear to catch some silence and solitude—you had to watch out or you’d get hit in the eye with one of his flailing poles.

  Now, as he rock-walked his way across the stream, he suddenly slipped, and in he went. He was quickly out, embarrassed but hearty and hale nonetheless, striding in wet boots and gaiters uphill in a manly fashion, as if nothing untoward had happened. But it had scared me, and I think scared the others, Alex in particular. It was suddenly clear—from the steep ash and soft-rock slope looming ahead of us and the arroyos that tumbled away on either side—that a simple misstep like that could be deadly.

  I decided to keep some distance between me and Fred’s poles and moved up to the front of the group as we ascended the long, broad ridge that came off the central summit. Around midmorning, clouds moved in, obscuring our views of the terrain above. Before long, we were socked in entirely and had lost sight of the terrain below as well. The temperature was dropping steadily as we climbed, and around noon it began to rain. We stopped and changed into rain gear, hats, and gloves, and plodded on. After a while, the rain changed to sleet. Then hail. Then snow—until we couldn’t see more than a few feet of the trail ahead. Close by, the crumbly black rock took on an otherworldly look, strangely detailed and in sharp focus, as in a high-gloss silver-plate photograph, and the high-altitude flowers at the side of the trail and out along the slopes looked like they’d been candied—chocho de paramour, Colón called it, a tender lavender-blue bud on a tough low bush, and another named, in Quechua, chuguiragua, glowed green, blue, and red through the thin skin of ice and the padding of wet, sticky snow.

  The narrow, winding trail was very slick. Also, the pitch of the slope had increased considerably in the last hour, and we were moving as if in slow motion. Breathing was difficult and came in short, shallow, rapid puffs, and my legs felt like iron ingots. This was hard going. But when I looked back, I saw that everyone in the group was making it—even Fred, whose decision to wear gaiters and lug his sticks along seemed prescient now. No one looked happy, however, and for the first time, everyone was silent.

  We were slogging across a reddish, sandy rise, our boots sunk to the ankles in powdery ash, and might have been climbing the sifting side of a Sahara dune, except that we were at nearly fourteen thousand feet—when, suddenly, powerful beams of sunlight broke through the snow, and the clouds swirled and parted and drew away. We could see! We were above the storm in bright sunlight with a huge blue sky overhead and a long, steep, rock-strewn ridge ahead of us that led straight to the knife-blade summit. This section of the ascent was a hand-to-rock scramble and probably the toughest part of the climb. Yet it seemed almost easy, thanks to the shocking beauty of sky and cliff hovering
above and—as the clouds behind us broke and flowed off to the south—the sight of the long, bony ridges and knuckled arêtes and the deep, pale green arroyos thousands of feet below, where the paramo spread out beyond like a particolored map. Halfway between us and the paramo, two of Ecuador’s seventy-five remaining condors, like black-winged hang gliders, rode the sun-warmed air currents in wide, spiraling loops.

  The last few hundred yards to the summit were a hard pull over crumbling plate-sized rocks. Fred, Mark, and Michelle had slowed considerably, evidently suffering from the altitude, but they kept climbing, even if with tiny, numbingly slow steps. They were not to be stopped, not this close to the summit. Alex fell back and watched them closely, checking for signs of AMS, acute mountain sickness. It’s a common enough syndrome, and its mild form causes nausea, headache, breathlessness, and lassitude. Its severe form, however, is characterized by ataxia—loss of balance, loss of muscular coordination, and mental confusion—and can lead quickly to life-threatening pulmonary and cerebral edema. Rapid diagnosis and treatment is essential, and according to Peter Hackett, renowned author of the bible on the subject, Mountain Sickness: Prevention, Recognition, and Treatment, there are three cures for AMS: “Descent, descent, descent!”

  It’s the guide’s decision, not the climber’s, when to descend, and evidently Alex felt that Fred, Mark, and Michelle were not yet in danger, for they kept coming and finally joined the rest of the group, where we had gathered on a narrow, protected shelf fifteen feet below the table-sized summit. Then, one at a time, in the order we had arrived at the shelf, we each climbed up to the summit itself and stood there alone. Laurie went up first, and after a few moments came down looking stunned with pleasure, as if she’d interviewed a deity.