by Kim Dinan
The cow stood to the side of the trail, leisurely chewing grass. She was tied to a heavy rope that had come untethered. We put the pieces together. The couple we’d passed had lost their cow. The old man must have been trying to track her down. But there was no way he could catch up to the cow and then drag her back home; he struggled to walk himself.
I set off down the slippery trail to let the man know that we’d found his cow. When I caught sight of him, I yelled, “¡Tengo tu vaca!” I was surprised I’d been able to pull those words from some dusty chamber of my brain. The man looked up at me and, having taken his eyes off the trail momentarily, tripped and fell. If he walked any further he would break a leg. He stood only about five feet tall, a good nine inches shorter than me, and couldn’t have weighed more than one hundred pounds. I resisted the urge to just pick him up, throw him over my shoulder, and carry him down the mountain.
Back up the trail, Brian was unsuccessfully trying to wrangle the cow toward home. Together we worked out a system. I stood behind the cow clapping my hands while Brian walked in front of her, guiding her back down the trail.
“Come on Bessie,” I yelled. “Move your butt.”
“Bessie?”
“Yeah, that’s what my mom used to say to our car when it wouldn’t start.”
“Come on Bessie,” shouted Brian. “Come on girl.”
In stages, we inched the cow toward home, Brian tugging at the rope, me lightly patting the cow’s behind and clapping.
“This is something that would never happen at home,” I yelled to Brian.
He laughed. “No kidding!”
The old lady remained where we’d last seen her but now she was trapped in the fence, her bare foot caught on the barbed wire. It occurred to me how desperate the old couple must be to get their cow back. A cow was not always just a cow, I reasoned. A cow could be food and income. An entire livelihood could be tied up in a cow.
Brian handed the tether to me and set about freeing the woman from the fence. She didn’t say a word, didn’t cry out in pain, just stood there with a steely look on her face until her foot was released.
When she’d been freed, Brian and I stood like stumps and waited for instruction. Soon it came: we were to take the cow further down the trail to their casa, a one-room wooden shack with a dirt floor and a corrugated metal roof that we’d passed on the way up. In front of their door was a wooden post. Brian wrapped the tether around it tightly.
We looked at each other and grinned. It felt like redemption from last night’s bad behavior. Somewhere in the universe a metaphysical scoreboard clicked over. Visitors: 1. Home Team: 1. Order had been restored.
The old man clapped Brian on the back and shook his hand. The old woman removed her hat, closed her eyes and prayed. Her lips moved soundlessly as she recited the words. Then she reached out with her gnarled hands and blessed us both.
We said our clunky good-byes to the couple, patted Bessie on the rear one last time and then left the way we came; clambering over sharp rocks and navigating sections of the trail so steep we had to slide down on our butts. It was impossible to imagine how the old couple ever made it into town, especially because they didn’t have proper shoes or, as far as I could tell in the case of the woman, any footwear at all.
“See, we can work well together,” said Brian, an admission that he, too, recognized the space between us. He poked me in the ribs lightheartedly, and I slapped his hand away. We walked in silence, and the weight of everything I wanted to talk about pressed into my chest. After a while, Brian spoke again. “The gash in that old woman’s foot was nasty. I’ve been thinking, what if we used the yellow envelope money to buy that couple two pairs of shoes?”
My disappointment over our unspoken conversation momentarily vanished. I was pleased that Brian was taking the initiative. “I love it.” At one point during our cow rescue I’d thought of giving yellow envelope money to the couple, but we hadn’t packed more than a few dollars on our hike.
“We could just leave the shoes by the door. They don’t even have to see us.”
I really did love the idea. But inside of my head chirped all of the reasons why we shouldn’t do it: We didn’t know their shoe size. What if the gift offended them? Maybe they had a room full of shoes and our assumptions about them were wrong. Who were we to make assumptions anyway? Don’t overthink it, I reminded myself.
There were a handful of shoe stores in town and we passed them all on the way back to La Bib, but we didn’t go inside. The next day we didn’t go either, or the day after that. As the days ticked by, neither Brian or I mentioned the old couple again. I kept hoping that Brian would take the initiative—it was his idea after all—and I waited for him to insist that we go buy the shoes and haul them up the mountain.
Though I wanted to give the old couple shoes, I’d convinced myself that the gift would be patronizing, much like I’d done with Agatha. I wanted Brian to have conviction, to convince me to get over my hesitations and do it anyway, but Brian didn’t bring it up.
Every time we walked past a shoe store in Baños I felt a pit of disappointment in my chest. The yellow envelope wasn’t changing me like I’d hoped it would. After all this time, I was still playing it safe.
• • •
It didn’t take long for me to learn that the kids at La Bib didn’t need me at all. In fact, they gave more to me than I gave them. They helped me learn Spanish. They showed me how to laugh and play more. They taught me to draw self-portraits with Banana Mania and Purple Pizzazz crayons and then, when my artwork turned out even worse than I imagined, they encouraged me to hang it on the wall and be proud of it anyway.
Plus, they’d gotten me to dance. Not on tables, but that was probably for the best.
On music-themed day at La Bib we were instructed to teach the children some popular Western dances. “You know, like the crap you’d dance to at weddings,” explained Blake.
We chose the Hokey Pokey, the Macarena, the Electric Slide and some kind of dance where you put one hand behind your head, grasped the other around your ankle and jerked back and forth like you’re performing the Heimlich maneuver on yourself. I wasn’t sure which dance I dreaded the most, probably the Macarena or the Electric Slide, for the jumping.
We sat the kids down on the bleachers in the theater. It was my job to teach the Electric Slide. I’d danced the Electric Slide at a few weddings, but never sober. Was it two steps to the left, two steps to the right, and shimmy?
Stephanie taught the Cotton-Eyed Joe and Louisa the Macarena. Alice opted for the Hokie Pokie, and I was envious of her choice. Brian and Carver secluded themselves in the media box and assigned themselves the task of playing the music. I tried to give Brian the evil eye but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.
We started with the Macarena. Louisa demonstrated the moves. Right arm out, left arm out, right hand to left shoulder, left hand to right shoulder, right hand behind head, left hand behind head, shake your hips, hop! The children looked on skeptically. I could almost hear Carver and Brian laughing from the sound booth.
The children crowded the dance floor and Louisa stood in front to lead us. The music started and we all attempted to follow. Limbs were flying everywhere; some kids were jumping to the left and some to the right and others were just standing in place dumbfounded. We stopped the music and started again, slower this time, and the kids seemed to pick it up a bit. In fact, they were more proficient than me.
In turn, Alice, Stephanie, and I demonstrated our dances and then had the children repeat them. It was around the time that Stephanie led us all in a frenzied rendition of Cotton-Eyed Joe that the kids started to trickle toward the bleachers. Dancing did not hold their interest. I glanced at my watch. We’d only been dancing for a half hour, and the kids were already bored. We had to entertain them for another hour. Shit.
Since the kids weren’t responding to our dance lessons
we decided to lose the structure and have a dance party instead. We coaxed Brian and Carver out of the sound booth, and we put the iPod on shuffle and danced around on the theater floor. We looked like a pack of drunken monkeys. The kids eyed us wearily. We pulled them from the bleachers one by one and swung them around in spontaneous circles. We formed a conga line and then a tunnel with our arms and the kids danced through it, giggling and smiling.
When the conga line broke up everyone freestyled on the dance floor, and I snuck off to the side to watch. Carver crouched low, moved his hips side to side, and flapped his arms—bent at the elbows—in the most ridiculous chicken dance. Brian stiffly but enthusiastically shook his hips like a dashboard hula dancer. Louisa hopped backward and forward across an invisible line on the floor. They looked like they were all participating in a drug-addled rave, not completely sober adults trying to maintain the enthusiasm of a handful of Ecuadorian schoolchildren.
The whole scene was hilarious. As I stood there on the side of the dance floor watching it all unfold, a wave of unmatched joy washed over me. My friend Kelly once called that flash of jubilance a “Laverne and Shirley Moment,” when you’re suddenly overcome with the feeling of being where you always intended to go. I’d made my way to a tiny Andean town, and an even tinier nonprofit, to dance around with twenty children I could barely speak a word to. I never would have expected I’d wind up here. But I felt so very grateful that I had.
Later, over a beer at the local brewery with the other volunteers, I realized what the children were doing to me. They were disassembling all of the stones I’d stacked atop myself. They were removing the stone of my career, the stone of my hard-packed ideas of success, the stones of the path I followed obediently though it led me in the wrong direction. My relationship with Brain felt more precarious than it had ever been, but I could not deny that other parts of my life were blooming. The children were teaching me to let go.
• • •
Our backpacks were packed and stacked by the door waiting for Brian and me to heave them onto our shoulders. We were headed to the bus station where we’d hop a bus to Cuenca, an old colonial town in southern Ecuador.
But before we went we had one last thing to do. La Bib had just recently built and opened their theater, the one we’d so recently danced in, paid for by a number of donations from former volunteers and even directly out of the pockets of Jane and Blake. They were selling memorial bricks to offset the cost of construction and to improve the theater in the years to come.
My daydreams for Agatha had never materialized, and Brian and I had been too shy and embarrassed to buy shoes for the old couple with the cow. We’d let our awkwardness impact the intention of Michele and Glenn’s gift. But giving to La Bib was a no-brainer, no matter how uncomfortable it felt.
As we prepared to leave, I explained the yellow envelope gift to Blake and told him that I wanted the inscription of the brick we purchased to read Michele and Glenn Crim, Portland, Oregon, USA.
We hugged Alice and Carver, Louisa and Stephanie, and Jane and Blake.
“Thanks for your hard work,” said Blake. “It meant a lot to us and the kids.”
“It meant more to us,” I responded. “Thanks for welcoming us here.”
“And hey,” Brian said, “we didn’t even give blow jobs in the bar bathroom.”
“Well aren’t you a comedian?” said Blake, slapping Brian’s backpack. “You two travel safe.”
We said we would. I picked up my backpack and walked excitedly out to the street. The unknown held an appeal that the known no longer claimed. To the south, Peru beckoned.
Peru
Chapter 5
We kept in touch with Alice and Carver upon leaving Baños, hopscotching south along the same general path, a well-worn backpacker’s trail that knocked us around southern Ecuador.
Alice and Carver emailed to tell us about a great little oasis they’d stumbled upon in the popular surfing town of Mancora, in northern Peru. Normally a tourist hot spot, the beach was all but deserted in shoulder season. They’d rented a thatched-roof bungalow for twenty-three dollars a night. Would we like to join them? I wrote back and told them we’d meet them there.
But in order to reach them we’d need to tackle our first border crossing, and in the middle of the night no less, because we’d booked tickets on an overnight bus.
At the station I’d latched on to another traveling couple, identified right away by their long and unkempt hair, harem pants and backpacks with flag patches sewn onto the front. If the flags they displayed were representative of their travels, they’d visited almost every country in Central and South America. When I asked if they were taking the overnight bus into Peru they answered that they were. Their unbothered attitude calmed my fears a little bit. All morning I’d read online forums about crossing the border before determining that reading on the Internet about South American bus travel was as scary as trying to diagnose the source of a headache on WebMD, where a sinus cold could suddenly morph into an undiagnosed brain tumor. During my research, our little border crossing had degraded into a surefire way to get abducted by drug runners and held ransom until family back home were extorted out of their life savings. According to the Internet this happened all the time.
When I tried to express my fears to Brian, he’d blown them off with a flippant, “We’ll be fine.” So I clammed up and continued to scour the Internet, doubly stressed because I had to worry for us both.
Our travels around Ecuador had taught me that even on the higher-priced tourists buses there was never any guarantee of a working bathroom and, as we boarded our bus to Peru, I saw that it was no exception. A sin servicio sign was taped to the plastic door. I pointed at it. “We should donate all of the yellow envelope money to the bus company’s bathroom maintenance fund,” I said soberly.
Brian laughed. “Seriously though. You better be ready to hold it. It’s a six-hour ride to the border.”
I sighed in frustration and hoped that the three large beers I’d consumed the night before to dehydrate myself in preparation for the ride would do the trick. But despite my best efforts, by the time our bus stopped at the Peruvian border at 2:00 a.m., I was near tears with the urge to pee.
In the pitch-black humidity of a moonless night we deboarded the bus, picked up our backpacks, and formed a line in the immigration office. My fingers fidgeted with my passport, and I fought the feeling that I’d done something wrong, my knee-jerk reaction to any sort of attention from authority. The border guard unceremoniously stamped me out of Ecuador. I resisted the urge to scream “I’ve got drugs in my backpack!” to the Peruvian border official on the other side—though, of course, I didn’t. He flipped through my mostly empty passport, scowled at me, and then slammed his stamp down on the page. The thrill of being allowed admittance into a new country made me momentarily forget about my need to pee.
When Brian had crossed over too, I told him I was going to find a toilet.
He nodded toward the glass doors at another busload of passengers filing in. “You don’t have time,” he said. “Half of the people on that bus are waiting for the bathroom.” Outside, a long line had formed that wrapped around the building.
A bubble of panic rose inside of me. “There is no way I can go another four hours without peeing.” The pitch of my voice climbed high with desperation, and a few of our fellow bus riders glanced up to see what was wrong.
“You don’t have a choice. Our bus is leaving.” He gestured outside where a single street lamp illuminated our waiting bus. The last of the passengers were filing on. We were transferring buses, and Brian assured me there would be a bathroom on the new one. “And if there’s not,” he said, “you can always pee in your Nalgene bottle.”
I flashed my ticket at the driver and stepped aboard. My eyes immediately shot to the back of the bus and I saw, with a great deal of relief, that there was a bathroom. Based on the peo
ple lined up in the aisle to use it and the pungent smell inside of the bus, this one worked.
We settled into our seats. Brian drifted off to sleep. While waiting for the line to dwindle I tried to fix my mind on anything other than my urge to go.
When the bathroom was finally free I held my breath and locked myself inside the stinking stall. The light didn’t work, and in the dark I hovered above the toilet, trying desperately to maintain my balance as the bus jerked down the road. The release was otherworldly and a low moan of pleasure escaped my lips. But as my marathon-length pee came to an end the bus suddenly slammed to a halt. I toppled backward onto the toilet rim just as the overflowing septic pit splashed its contents down my legs, sopping the jeans bunched around my knees and running over my feet onto the floor. I froze and cursed myself for wearing flip-flops. “No, no, no, no, no,” I cried. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Frantic, my hand flailed around in the dark for the toilet paper but when I finally found it, the empty cardboard roll spun listlessly against my fingers. There was nothing I could do. I pulled my wet jeans up over my wet legs and slinked back to my seat.
I nudged Brian awake. “What happened to you?” he asked when he saw my face.
“I fell in the toilet,” I said. “I’m soaked in other people’s pee.”
“God, that’s disgusting. I’m sorry, baby.” A delighted little smirk flashed across his face. Then he added, “Please don’t touch me,” and fell back asleep.
When we arrived at our bungalow three endless hours later my first stop was the shower. But when I turned the nozzle it was broken. Up until that point I’d surprised myself by handling the situation with what I thought of as phoenix-like resiliency. But the broken shower did me in. I lay down on the bathroom floor and cried. I didn’t care about traveling anymore, or writing, or the yellow envelope. It was stupid to think that there was some grand purpose for my life. All I wanted was to close my eyes and wake up in my own bed, take a shower in my own bathroom and have an easy life again.
