Blood Lake (35 page)

As we pass the entrance to the Ariel Air Force Base, the road starts getting slick with water. After a few kilometers, it's several inches deep. People coming the other way are saying that the Río Bulubulu has overflowed. Just short of Boliche we come to a complete halt. The water is two feet deep, and soldiers are politely telling us to get off the freaking bus.

They say the roads are washed out and all vehicles must turn back, but if any of the passengers want to, they can walk about five kilometers south and cross the Río Culebras by rope bridge.

It means River of Snakes. Oh, joy.

We wade through thigh-deep muddy water 'til the shopping basket in my arm begins to drag, so I switch arms on and off until a dumb fatigue slowly sets in, sinking its iron hooks into my irritated muscles. By now I'm ready to toss the damn basket, but I need to carry it with me at least until I get near the foothills.

We finally reach to the Río Culebras. From where I'm standing it looks like the fourth day of creation, and God hasn't had His coffee yet.

Soldiers and local men are waist-high in muddy water, helping women clinging to a thin rope across the turbulent river.

This is it?

“Where's the bridge?” I ask.

“Washed out yesterday,” comes the answer. “All we've got is this rope.”

I wait while being slowly sautéed out here under the pitiless noonday sun, worried that pretty soon I'll be bright red. And I don't know which is worse, getting a nasty sunburn or giving myself away as a
serrana
.

When it's my turn, two smiling teenagers in mud-soaked T-shirts help me off the bank and into the water. The river's current is brutally powerful, and I'm trying to keep all my gear dry. Shit. Even the old women are crossing the river better than I am. They're used to this. I'm not. The water's nearly up to my chest, and I'm wearing the wrong clothes. My dress is tight and clingy, and these stiff shoes are now agony, causing me to clumsily misjudge the underlying surface. I slip into a hole that everyone else managed to avoid, and lose the grocery basket while failing to keep my survival bag from dropping into the water.

“
¡Ay, caracho!
” I can't help cursing my bad luck.

The waterlogged bag seems to triple in weight as I pull myself up and get the rope under my left arm, creating a wake that batters my face with astonishing force, rough hemp fibers cutting into me. I throw my right arm over and hang there with the rope sawing away at my armpits. But I'm breathing. I wait for another surge of strength, and keep going to the other side.

Strong arms wet with greenish brown camouflage drag me up the muddy riverbank, where men with heavy boots ask me too many questions.

“Who are you?”

“What's your name?”

“Are you all right?”

“What's in the bag?”

“Where are you from?”

“When did you—?”

“Why—?”

“How—?”

Ernestina appears at my side and tells them to leave me alone already. I'm totally drained.

My knees sink into the wet mud and my head sags. There's no clothes dryer for fifty miles, and it's insanity to go climbing mountains in wet clothes. Even I'm not
that
crazy.

They think I'm upset about my lost groceries.

When I raise my head, a girl about Antonia's age is
walking barefoot up the muddy road, holding a heavy toddler nearly half her size. Refugees from somewhere. They both look at me. The toddler still has a baby-fat belly and cheeks, but his wide, sad eyes show that he already understands all about the shitty hand fate has just dealt him. The girl has straight black
mestiza
hair parted in the middle, and her eyes bore into me, asking for something I cannot give, yet also showing pity for me. And the horizon of mud stretches far and wide behind her.

I stare at an abandoned pickup truck wallowing in wet silt, disgorging mud from every orifice like some postmodern allegorical sculpture of the sin of gluttony, and I ask myself what the hell I was thinking, trying to save the whole damn country by myself.
Todo el santo país
. Then Ernestina bends over, holds out her hand and says, “You'll have plenty of time to rest later. Let's go.”

Half a mile onward the road re-emerges from the gray glop and we get a ride south to Churete, pop. 12 1/2. Then we climb aboard a banana truck, a real modified clunker that sits eight in a plywood piano box with holes cut in it for the steering column and the pedals, which discharges a cubic mile of black hydrocarbons at every turn of this twisty road. Our kindly driver takes us past Puerto Inca and leaves us with a nod and a wink just outside of Jesús María, near the feet of the sleeping giants where my new companion dwells.

When we get there, Ernestina starts a fire so I can dry my things off. She looks them over in great detail but doesn't say a word. By late afternoon I'm changing into my fire-stiffened jeans and she's feeding me much-needed sustenance and offering me a tempting place to stay for the night. But no.

I've got to keep moving.

I stamp the caked mud from my hiking boots and with rough, rope-burned hands push open the splintery pine door that has weathered a thousand tempests and put my weight onto the sagging boards of this dark, dingy
cantina
a couple of
leagues in country, up in the lush, wet hills of the western ridge.

Agua Caliente. You gotta wonder what else they've got to offer in a town called Hot Water.

The sun settles swiftly into darkness.

Darkness breeds mystery.

I am the mystery.

Eyes glassy with drink and candlelight watch the rugged female stranger approach the bar, order a
canelaso
and sip half of it. Ears buzz straining to catch slithering sibilants in guarded tones.

She needs a man who knows the mountains.

They find such a man. Wiry and strong, with a drooping gray mustache. He is called Fredo.

I tell him I need someone to go with me as far as Cuchichaspana, a place called Burnt Pigs, right in the middle of Cajas. I can take it from there. And I expect him to provide cooking pots, provisions, rope and a tent. Yes, I can pay.

Then it's settled, he says, he'll see me before sunrise and I say, No, I need a place to stay. I'm going with you. (Where I can keep an eye on you all night long.)

He knows what this means, so I lay down the green leaf until he accepts. You don't fuck around with something like this.

A man who knows what to expect is as good as two men.

I don't let him out of my sight, don't let him speak to anyone else until he gets the gear ready, until he says, “Well, then, it's time to sleep.”

We depart in darkness.

The Andes is the youngest major mountain chain in the world. Unlike the broad high plains of Bolivia to the south, here they're a narrow, snakelike backbone jutting up from the flat coastland, studded with smoldering snowcapped volcanic peaks reaching as high as twenty thousand feet on the eastern and western ridges, with a string of fifty-mile-wide
basins running between them, where the mountain people built their sun-dried cities of clay.

And so the thick-skinned
serranos
huddle together in the snug, sleepy valleys, leaving the high wilderness with its jagged, wind-scarred peaks, and deep, murky lagoons to the crows and the outlaws.

On a flat map, it's only about twenty miles in a straight line from Agua Caliente to our old hideout in Cajas. But the Andes aren't flat, are they? It's more like sixty miles stretched out, and the trail rises more than fourteen thousand feet in some places. That's why I need someone who knows the western slope. I know the east slope of the intermontane
cordillera
, but it will take a couple of days to get there, and I'm not spending the night alone at twelve thousand feet. For some reason.

Right now we've got a long way to go, zigzagging up slippery muddy paths bordered by thick wet foliage.

Hours stretch by without words.

We've been climbing all forenoon in silence when Fredo asks me, “You want to go there by the Yanacocha?”

“No. It's too cold there.” The rocks around the Yanacocha are so high the water looks dark even during the day. Hence the name: Black Lagoon.

“
Bueno
. We'll go by the Tukyacocha.”

“There are some dangerous bogs around that lagoon.”

He stops, turns around, and faces me.

“All right, all right, the whole trip's dangerous,” I say. “Lead on.”

Cajas has such cheery place names: Tukyacocha, Ataucocha, Ayapampa. Trap Lagoon, Coffin Lake, Cadaver Valley. And of course farther north there's good old Blood Lake.

But once you haul yourself up there, you've got some solid rock under your feet. Right now, we're still in landslide country.

We stop for lunch and survey our progress. The coast stretches out like a great, green blanket a couple of thousand feet below. But a solid sheet of gray, rain-bearing clouds is rolling in from over the Pacific, right above us.

We continue climbing.

There is a place where the hot, wet air from the coast meets the cool, crisp air of the mountains, forming an impenetrable white mist that obscures the world for miles at a time, a place where the sun never shines. There are probably some species right here in this narrow strip of earth that have never seen the sun, and which don't exist anywhere else. By sundown we reach this magical place.

Fredo warms up some
canelasos
, advising me that sugar and alcohol is good for keeping your blood pressure up while you climb. He gets no argument from me.

We sit around the campfire warming our food, and actually speak some words.

“Got your face a bit red down in the valley,” Fredo observes.

“Yeah.” My skin feels stiff and leathery, and one drink makes me so loopy I crawl into the tent to pass out before I try to do something hilarious like float off the mountain.

I shiver and draw my blanket in closer around me.

Don't be fooled by the thick clouds. At this latitude, the sun's ultraviolet rays fly right through them. And so the Ecuadorian Andes is one of the few places on earth where you can get a sunburn
and
freeze to death at the same time.

I awake to blackness.

The nights are twelve hours long here. A long time to stare into darkness.

Eventually the clouds thin out, revealing fragmented pieces of sky. Strange stars circle in unremembered orbits, except for a few old friends like the Southern Cross that start to take shape above me.

We set off before sunrise, as the mountains start to emerge, cutting sharply into the sky. I had forgotten how the Andes look by the first early morning light. So distinct. They look like they were made yesterday.

The wet, green grass gives way to brown scrub and
saw grass. The mud changes to packed, wet earth. The air grows thin and cool, bone-penetratingly dank, and the moss-covered cliffs lose their tops in the white, misty clouds. We inhabit a thin region of color and shape, sandwiched between thick layers of impenetrable mist. A narrow band indeed.