Voyager: Travel Writings (33 page)

The greatest disappointment, of course, was that I would not make it to the summit of Cotopaxi, which since my first arrival in Ecuador had become my heart’s desire. But the distinction between failure and disappointment is important. I had not failed; I was disappointed. I’d learned, certainly, that I was more than capable of doing this extremely difficult thing, but I had not been able to do it. A strange mix of melancholy and elation, then, accompanied me as I made my slow way back down the side of Sincholagua and plodded across the plain toward our tents. At the camp, I rested awhile, eventually setting myself the task of gathering firewood, so that when my companions returned cold and exhausted, they’d be greeted by a blazing fire.

They were back by nightfall, a thoroughly dispirited bunch, even George and Laurie, after having been forced to turn back well below the summit. My fall had left the group depressed and discouraged, and several of them were still struggling with altitude sickness. Despite my campfire, everyone retired to his tent early in a funk. I was in considerable pain and had to lie on my back all night long, as cold as I have ever been and as uncomfortable, and slept only intermittently and for a few minutes at a time.

The next day we broke camp—although I could but stand and watch while the others did the work—and, when the bus arrived, loaded it with our gear and rode across the
paramo
and up the long, winding track to the parking area at the foot of mother Cotopaxi. From there, it was a steep 2,000-foot hike up to the hut, the
refugio,
which was located at 16,500 feet, where the glacier began. Determined to make it at least that far up the side of a mountain that I had come to love, I walked ahead of the others, whose climb was slowed by the weight of their backpacks. It was a sad, lonely walk for me. Regardless of how strong I felt, regardless of my ability to deny the pain of a busted collarbone, there was no way I could join the others now—no way I could swing an ice ax, haul a heavy backpack, cling to a rope, and make my slow way up to the windblown summit and see the sunrise from above the earth. Still, I wanted
to climb as far up the side of the mountain as I could, to get at least as far as the
refugio,
and I trudged stubbornly ahead until I made it.

Afterward, I descended alone to the bus and rode back to Quito, where I spent the night at the Alameda Real Hotel. The next day I hired a car and traveled for three days—waiting for my scheduled departure for home—in the Indian villages of the north, day-hiking through the twelve-thousand-foot-high
lomas
up there and spending my nights in small hotels. It was interesting travel, and solitary, the way I usually prefer it, but anticlimactic and lonely. I missed my fellow trekkers—the bumptious Fred and his walking sticks; my tentmate, Special Agent Mark, whose love of equipment was exceeded only by his surprising love of seventies quasi-metal music by groups like Rush and Pink Floyd; Doctor Beth, calm and disciplined and thinking constantly of her new baby at home; Michelle, anxious and fatigued and suffering from altitude illness, but courageously keeping on nonetheless, as if her whole sense of self-worth depended on having climbed these mountains; and, of course, my old Adirondack chums, George and Laurie, who, on returning home, would tell me everything I missed; and finally, our garrulous guide, the incomparable Alex, whom, if he learned to cook, or hired someone who could, I would follow anywhere. But most of all, I missed the mountain, Cotopaxi, looming over my shoulder, blocking the sun, inviting me, like a grand seductress, to come back, come back and try again.

FOX AND WHALE, PRIEST AND ANGEL

T
hree years after my attempt to climb Cotopaxi in 1997, I returned to the Andes for an even more difficult climb, Aconcagua, at 22,834 feet the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas. On the tenth day, at 16,170 feet, the wind rose and the temperature dropped and light snow began to fall. Two days before, under a cobalt-blue sky, we’d hauled ourselves and our gear over slurry talus and scree from the base camp at Plaza Argentina across the rock-scabbed skin of the Glaciar de Relinchos to Camp One. On a broad ledge where the glacier squeezed between one of Aconcagua’s uplifted, sedimented skirts and rubble tumbled from the side of her slightly lower sister peak, Ameghino, we pitched our tents.

We double-poled them and lashed them to large rocks with nylon rope, then hauled ice from an exposed slab of the glacier to melt for drinking, cooking, and cleaning, and got the stoves fired up.

We were nine men, six moderately experienced climbers and three guides. With more than six thousand feet still to go, we were exhausted, and one of us, Chris Zanger, the youngest and possibly
the fittest, was showing early signs of altitude sickness: a viselike headache and nausea and disorientation. It had been our toughest day so far. The trail had switchbacked over moraines and alongside deep crevasses where glacier melt splashed over room-sized boulders to the broad Valle de los Vacas thousands of feet below, the slowly ascending valley we’d hiked a week earlier, twenty-seven miles in from the road that runs between Mendoza, Argentina, and the Chile-Argentina border.

Early in the day, I had glanced off to my left and had spotted, trotting along the edge of the crevasse between us, a large red fox. For a long time, the fox over on its side of the crevasse kept wary pace with us on ours while we slogged along, the weight of our packs steadily increasing, it seemed. With each turn in the zigzag trail our breathing became more labored. One breath per step. Then, after a while, two. Then, as the day wore on, three. I stopped and studied the fox. It sat and looked across at me. In this extreme Andean glacial world the sight of a red fox trotting watchfully across a page of a large-print geological history of the planet was like a hallucination. The fox is an animal I have long honored—a personal totem, practically. It’s situated at the etymological base of my first name; its image is tattooed on my left arm. It was as if I had spotted across the crevasse a cousin or a neighbor from home. What the hell are
you
doing here? I almost said. Then it darted behind a boulder and was gone—an omen or a charm, I couldn’t tell which. I asked the man next to me, my Toronto friend David Young, if he had seen the fox.

“Missed it,” he said and kept climbing.

By the time we’d finished supper and cleaned up, the wind was gusting at fifty miles per hour. Snow was falling in tiny pellets. We retreated, three men to a tent. David and I shared a tent with Michael Zanger, one of head guide Alex Van Steen’s two assistants and father of Chris Zanger, the young man suffering from altitude sickness. The eldest members of the group—I was about to turn sixty, Michael was right behind me, and David was in his early
fifties—we’d taken to calling our tent the Assisted Living Facility. Nights we read poetry, mostly from Rilke’s
Duino Elegies,
and listed favorite bebop musicians.

None of us wanted to hang around outside, as we had every evening so far, and watch the sky transform itself into the celestial universe of the Incas, a darkened theater of the old sky god’s birth and death and resurrection. We were too tired, and it was too cold, even with parkas on, and the wind was howling now, up to seventy miles per hour and sustained, making it difficult to talk normally. We’d begun to shout to one another. Mostly it was Alex shouting, making sure that we were prepared for a tough night—he’d attempted Everest twice and knew what to expect. Check the ropes again! Make sure your packs are weighted down with rocks on top! For Alex, this was a military-style expedition, and his role was that of the war-weary lieutenant, whose first responsibility was to get his men, not safely up the mountain, but safely down. We did as told, then withdrew to the darkness of our tents and curled up inside our sleeping bags and waited for sleep.

The sound of a sustained seventy-mile-an-hour wind is like no other, especially when a thin nylon skin is all that separates you from it. It howls like a stampeding herd of prehistoric animals for ten or fifteen minutes straight, long enough for you to start thinking that you’ve grown used to the roaring and can sleep in spite of it, because it’s steady and the volume does not vary. So you close your eyes and unclench your hands and drift toward a dream of home. Then suddenly it stops. Black silence. No one in the tent speaks. You can hear the others breathing rapidly in the thin air. You blink your eyes open and wait and count off the seconds, ten, eleven, twelve . . . and then the howl returns at full volume. The tent fabric slaps against itself like the sails of a galleon in a hurricane, and you pray that the ropes and the double poles hold, because if the tent starts to tear anywhere, the whole thing will be shredded in minutes, and you will die of exposure. The trap you’re in protects you, but barely. It can also kill you.

We’d gone through three consecutive nights and two days like this. We melted snow, cooked, ate, pissed, and washed in our tents, leaving only when absolutely necessary to shit behind a rock. Day and night merged. Time stopped. We feared wasting our headlamp batteries, so we rationed our reading and sought a semihibernated state of consciousness. Sleep we treated with suspicion. At this altitude, when you fall asleep, you neglect to breathe rapidly enough to compensate for the thin air, and periodically you lurch awake, gasping and light-headed and disoriented, as if you’re suffocating. You
are
suffocating. You may even be suffering from cerebral edema, which can be cured only by descending the mountain, a thing we could not do because of the storm. In the middle of the second night, David, who slept next to me, sat up suddenly, moaned, and mumbled incoherently. Talking in his sleep or altitude sickness? I shook him and gave him the only diagnostic test I could think of: “Say something witty, David.”

After a few seconds, he said, “When we landed at the Lima airport, the money changers and taxi drivers outside were like grizzlies at a salmon run.” Then added, “Don’t worry, man, it’s just a panic attack.”

The wind took on a personality. It became a monstrous god with a malignant will, like Melville’s whale, and it was difficult not to take its punishing power personally. I ran down the list of my recent and ancient sins of omission and commission, hoping that if I could find a crime that warranted my execution, I could somehow claim extenuating circumstances, and the wind would stop. For the first time since beginning this climb, I saw that I had put my life at risk. And, unexpectedly, I was ashamed. I thought of my wife and my children and my grandchild: If I die here, once again they will have every right to remember me only with anger.

On the morning of the third day, the whale swam away and the wind stopped, leaving behind a wake of playful gusts, as if to remind us that it was merely absent, not weakened, and might
well return soon. The sky cleared, and the temperature rose into the twenties. We stumbled from our tents blinking and grinning like inmates granted last-minute pardons by the governor and proceeded to change out of our funky clothing and air out our stinking sleeping bags by draping them over rocks and tent lines. After breakfast, we began the climb to Camp Two, 18,900 feet, at the base of the Polish Glacier. The bearlike, affable Michael Zanger, David’s and my personal guide, as we thought of him, would not be with us, however. His son, Chris, whose altitude sickness had worsened, needed to descend at once, and Michael would take him.

On an expedition climb like this, you ascend the mountain twice. You climb high and sleep low at each camp, dividing your supplies and gear into two hauls, so that you can carry the load you don’t need immediately to the next higher camp, stash it, and return to the lower camp for a second night. Three days earlier, on our first ascent from Camp One to Two, before the windstorm hit, as we chugged steadily uphill, the highest peaks of the Andes—gigantic, snow-covered, serrated blades of uplifted rock—had unfolded all the way to the horizon, a literally breathtaking sight, and I had caught the first glimmers of a fantasy evolving into a hallucination, and it had eased my climb considerably. Now, on our second ascent, it returned unbidden, a full-blown hallucination, no longer a fantasy. I was a coca-chewing Inca priest in vicuña cloth vestments, and instead of hauling a fifty-pound pack on my back, I was carrying a young girl, perhaps ten years old. She was drugged against the cold and the effects of altitude, and I had been entrusted by her family and the people of her village with the responsibility and honor of carrying her to the top of the Inca world, to Aconcagua, the Quechuan Sentinel of Stone, to give her over to the god of the Incas, who, in gratitude, would bless the coming year’s crops and keep the village from famine. She was not heavy, though she wore gold amulets on her wrists and ankles and a brilliantly colored dress woven of wool spun from the hair of baby llamas. It was as if her body were
made of feathers or as if she were inhabited by a bird, a condor, pumping its huge wings and half lifting me from the tilted ground as I climbed up and up and the mountains slipped from above to below me.

At one point, while we were slumped on the ground taking one of our hourly rest breaks, I leaned in to David and in a low voice told him who I was and what I was doing here. He would understand, I knew.

He nodded. “Do you know her name?” he asked.

“She has no name,” I said. “She left it in the village for another to use.”

“You’re very lucky,” he said as he stood unsteadily and, grunting from the effort, wrestled his pack onto his back.

There was for me and David a dense, complex context for this trek, one created inadvertently by the week we had spent earlier in Peru, hiking the grassy ridges and pre-Columbian terraces outside Cuzco, gazing on the remnants of the Inca walls in the ancient city, and wandering awestruck across the plazas and through the magnificent stone temples of Machu Picchu. David is a playwright and screenwriter and a longtime friend. Our fevered imaginations tend to fuel each other, and in Peru, we had given ourselves over to wild speculations and intellectually reckless intuitions regarding the history and sensibility of the ancient Incas. In our minds, this landscape was connected seamlessly to the Inca ruins and their sacred art. For us, climbing Aconcagua was a pilgrimage, not merely an assault on one of the so-called Seven Summits.