by Maggie Downs
All of us huddle together for a picture inside the shelter.
“This will be the photo they’ll run on the BBC after our bodies are discovered,” Gemma says. We’re here in color, breathing and alive, but my mind flashes to the black-and-white photos of doomed explorers in the early 1900s—their faces permanently frozen in smiles, oblivious to what happens next. We have no idea what’s ahead either.
My group piles into the tour vehicle, wearing every layer from our backpacks. We spread layers of sleeping bags and blankets over our snuggled bodies. My limbs are too stiff to move.
“Vamos,” Carlos says, and we set off into the snowy white morning.
The Land Cruiser slides around the road, up and down mountain paths, and everybody in the vehicle is silent. The Argentinian sleeps, while her boyfriend looks worried. I chew my fingernails, a nervous habit I thought I’d long given up.
The realization that I would not have a future was something that came to me when my mom was diagnosed, so this moment is not entirely unexpected. I put myself here on purpose, chasing adventure for the sake of living deliberately and passionately. This is the risk of being an active and living participant in the world. Death happens because life does.
I just thought my moment would come with more activity or splendor, like ice-picking my way up a particularly treacherous part of Mount Everest or BASE jumping off a rocky cliff in Norway. In contrast, this situation couldn’t be more passive—I am letting someone drive me directly into the throes of a storm, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
In that way, the power of chance is like my mom’s disease. There is no reason for the Alzheimer’s, and there is nothing to blame. She didn’t do anything risky or dangerous; she didn’t go looking for a disease. It just happened. Before my family knew what was happening to her, she was already headed downhill into the thick, fierce storm.
I wasn’t around when my mom was first diagnosed with her disease; I was working at my first newspaper job and living in Zanesville.
One night my mom was cooking dinner while my dad sat at the kitchen table and watched the news on a countertop television set. My mom had always been a bad cook, but her meals had grown consistently terrible. She made strange stews and pots of spaghetti soup. She used sugar when the dish called for salt. Sometimes she added cracked pepper four, five, maybe ten times. But my dad is a man who cares more about volume than flavor when it comes to his food.
“The craziest thing happened to me today,” she said to my father. “Today I forgot how to start the car. Luckily, this nice young man offered to help.”
That raised the skin on the back of my dad’s neck. The bad cooking was one thing, but she forgot how to start the car?
She elaborated. After she left the hospital for her weekly allergy shot, she sat in the parking lot for several minutes, puzzled, the car’s ignition a riddle she couldn’t solve. She asked a passerby for help. He turned the key and started the engine, and she drove home.
“Is that just the funniest thing?” she said.
My dad tried to convince my mom to make an appointment with a doctor, but she was stubborn and refused. She accused us of trying to put her in a nursing home, to discard her. Her paranoia worsened, and over the following weeks she became combative.
Since she wouldn’t go to the doctor, my dad was determined to bring the doctor to her. He talked to one of the colonels at the air force hospital, who hatched a plan with my mom’s regular allergy doctor. The next time she was at the hospital for her weekly visit, they brought in a neurologist. My mom never even realized she was tested—until something from the neurologist arrived in the mail.
The envelope was addressed to her. She opened it. The letter inside said she had failed to answer the simplest questions. She couldn’t identify the president of the United States. She couldn’t tell time. She didn’t know what year it was.
Diagnosis: Alzheimer’s disease.
It was the worst way to discover terrible news, and this upended her. As paranoid as she was before, the letter confirmed she had something to be paranoid about: everybody was conspiring against her.
My brother-in-law is the person who finally gave me the news. I knew something was off as soon as he called.
“Something is going on with your mother,” he said.
I sat perched on the edge of the futon in my apartment, twisting the phone cord around my finger as he delivered my mom’s diagnosis. I struggled to find the words to respond. Then I drove to The Barn, a bar stocked with neon signs, cheap beer, and profoundly lonely people, and I got hammered in the afternoon, because that felt like the only path out of this world where my mom had a disease attached to her.
If I had just not answered the phone, I thought, Mom would still be well. If I had let the phone ring, everything would still be normal. If I had only let the machine get it.
On the jukebox I played the U2 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” belting out the words from my barstool. Then I played it again, until another customer shoved money at the machine to queue up Garth Brooks. I ate a complimentary bowl of peanuts—dinner—and tossed the shells on the floor. I smashed them with my feet every time I stood, a satisfying crunch. I played Erotic Photo Hunt on the game system that was screwed into the bar, finding the five differences between two nearly identical images of naked women, feeding the console dollar after dollar, until the photos softened and the women mushed together and I couldn’t spot any differences at all.
Late that night I drove home on the back roads where the only person I could hurt was me. It was January, and everything looked murky and indistinguishable except for the leafless trees that reached over the road with skeletal fingers. I covered one eye with my left hand and steered with my right. All the blurriness that existed around me zoomed into focus, until all I could see were the high beams pointed at the road ahead.
In the Bolivian desert, the snow grows so thick that we can no longer see the other group’s Toyota in front of us. Carlos and the cook turn on a Bolivian folk album and keep the same song on repeat. After a while, the rest of us begin to sing along, even though we don’t know the words—we’re just mimicking the sounds. The music is grating, but singing along keeps me from imagining the truck falling end over end off the side of the mountain, landing upside down in a snowbank, freezing to death.
If I die, I wonder how long it will take for Jason to find out that I’m gone. I sent him several emails before I began this tour with instructions in each message’s subject line: “Open this on Day 1,” “Open on Day 2,” and so forth. He has at least a week of love letters waiting. I wonder what will happen after that last one, what he will think when there are no more messages to open.
The Land Cruiser struggles for traction, and every slide down a hill turns my stomach. The path threatens to crumble every time we slip toward the edge of the mountain. When we can’t see a path for all the snow, I wonder how Carlos knows there is actually terra firma beneath us.
The next ten hours are white knuckles and sweaty feet, my nerves tangling into knots. The mountains are snow covered, and our vehicle chews up the gravel. My teeth knock together with cold and fear. When the mountain flattens into an icy desert, our vehicle skates wildly back and forth. It is bleak. The road looks like a Fudgsicle.
At last we arrive at our next stop. Carlos parks in front of a small hostel, similar to the place we just left. This time, however, we have small space heaters. My fingers and toes regain warmth so quickly it hurts. Taking the alternate route meant we missed most of the sights on our itinerary—but we are alive, and the snowstorm is behind us.
Our treat for the night is a dip in the nearby natural hot springs. I submerge myself up to my chin, and my body loosens into the gurgling blue. My chilled bones thaw, a slow and liquid unburdening. I let my neck relax, the back of my head floating on the surface, and I breathe easy and deep. It is almost an hour before I step out of the springs. As soon as I dry off, the tundra air freezes my towel into sculptu
ral shapes, a hardness that mimics the journey we have taken to get here.
The next two days feel like traveling across the moon. In Desierto de Siloli, the lagoons glow with red and green algae, and the bizarre lava formations look like they were stolen from the set of a science fiction movie. Flocks of flamingos along the altiplano turn the sky pink each time they take flight. The ground is white with fields of salt and borax.
On our last night, we stay at a hotel made entirely of salt. The beds are made of rectangular salt blocks, draped with red wool blankets. My friends lick the walls.
In the dim light of that hotel I remove the stitches of the monkey bite, which are pushing out of my skin. I have no scissors, so I snip the top of each black loop with my fingernail clippers, then slide each thread out with tweezers. The flesh around the wound has pulled together and now looks newborn pink. My hand healed when I wasn’t even paying attention.
Our final destination is Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat on earth, an expanse of 4,086 square miles that stretches down eleven deep layers. The crust also holds about half of the world’s lithium reserves.
The desolate landscape deceives the eye. What appears to be one field of snow is actually hard and crunchy salt. You can walk here, but you won’t leave any footsteps behind.
Because there is only flat salt and a band of blue sky as far as the eye can see, nothing looks relative in photographs. No mountains to make people seem diminutive, no trees or structures to place anything in perspective. We take photos in which everything is out of proportion—holding hands with dinosaur toys, dancing atop whiskey bottles. At one point the English blokes strip naked and exuberantly leap across the flats—only long enough for some hilarious pictures before they bundle up again in sweaters, scarves, and hats. This is the best day we’ve had on the trip so far. I’m especially happy knowing the tour will take us back to Tupiza, where I can stay in a warm hostel with a hot shower. I long for this so much, I can already feel the blast of heat on my skin.
It takes many more hours of driving to reach Uyuni, a broken and brown high-altitude town, where the only real attraction is Cementerio de Trenes, a graveyard of abandoned trains. Carlos asks if we want to go there, and all of us say no. It sounds like nothing more than a celebration of the dilapidated and sad. We just want to move through Uyuni as quickly as possible.
Ever since the mining industry failed here, Uyuni has primarily served as a quick bathroom and meal stop for salt-flat tourists like us. It’s the gateway of “The Gringo Trail,” as we discover the townspeople call it, and it’s about four hours from our destination.
It is here, on a dusty and desolate street, where Carlos pulls over to the side of the road. He asks for tips, because the tour is coming to an end. We dutifully hand over a stack of bolivianos. He did get us through a terrible snowstorm, after all, and we are alive.
After he receives the money, Carlos climbs on top of the Land Cruiser. He unleashes the bungees that secured our bags to the roof, and he drops each piece of luggage, one by one, into the dirt. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
“No, no, no,” I say. I try to toss my backpack on top of the vehicle. Carlos swats the bag away and points a gnarled finger at me.
“No,” he growls.
“You’re supposed to take us to Tupiza,” I say. “That was the deal.”
We plead with Carlos, who shakes his head decisively and leaps down from the roof. A cloud of dust rises from the force of his boots on the ground.
When he reaches for the door handle to climb into the driver’s seat, the Argentinian tugs on his arm. She stops him long enough to get into a heated argument in rapid Spanish. She points to our bags, then points to the car. After several minutes of fighting, Carlos shrugs his shoulders, hops back into the Land Cruiser, and drives away. He doesn’t even look back.
Something about the situation—the cold, the exhaustion, the fact that I am stranded on an anonymous road with nowhere to go—causes me to cackle like a maniac. It burbles up like that hot spring where we soaked a few nights ago, uncorking all the anxiety of this tour.
At least I am alive. It sounds sentimental and soppy, but I have never been so grateful. I have seen the place where mountains crumble under tires, where rugged vehicles are abandoned in the snow, where tourists could very well freeze, where salt forms a vast and grueling landscape, and I emerged on the other side. Getting stranded in Uyuni is a setback, but it’s one I can deal with.
“What are we going to do now?” Gemma says.
“Leave,” Ali says simply.
My tour group friends and I find a bus station and purchase tickets for later that night—some are headed north, some of us will continue south to Argentina, most of us will never cross paths again. But tonight we still have a few more hours together.
We spend them at the Cementerio de Trenes, exploring the disrepair. We run on the tracks, and shaggy street dogs run alongside, barking. They want to play. The land around the rotted trains is flat and empty, and the birds overhead make lazy circles. We climb all over the rusted locomotives and bang on the engines, and yawping dogs leap into the trains with us. Then we are listening to the howls, both human and canine, echo through the rusted metal.
Our reverberating laughter sounds vaguely like the chuga-chug of a steam train, and this place of disintegration is once again filled with life. I was wrong when I didn’t want to come here earlier. Brokenness makes the cracks that can be filled again. Instead of a disappointment, this graveyard feels like a promise, like potential.
Your Path Might Diverge
IT’S MY LAST MORNING IN BOLIVIA, AND THE SKY IS DARK, without even a whisper of dawn. The cold is relentless enough to make me dig through my backpack, find my bag of socks (at the bottom, of course), and put a thick sock on each hand like mittens. I quiver each time the wind smacks my cheeks.
The only thing that separates me from Argentina is a bridge. Well, and an office, which is closed. And twenty-seven people standing before me in line, all of whom appear equally anxious to get the hell out of Villazon, Bolivia. But Argentina is close. I know it. And if it weren’t 4 a.m., I could even see it.
A couple dozen Bolivian women squat on the sidewalk beneath timid streetlights. Their wool skirts puddle around them on the ground. Each woman is wrapped with several rough, woven blankets, creating the overall shape of a haystack. Black bowler hats are perched on top of their heads. Shiny black braids hang to their knees.
Across the street is a man, asleep while propped against his wooden fruit cart, his snores echoing on the narrow street. Low-hanging telephone wires crisscross overhead. A pack of wild dogs ambles past.
“Why would the bus drop us off two hours before the border office opens?” says a German traveler, speaking English to his Australian travel companion.
“Because it’s Bolivia,” his friend replies. “Nothing here makes sense.”
After one frustrating month in Bolivia, complete with monkey bites, ice-cold showers, and getting stranded on the salt flats, I have to agree. This morning I am getting out, and I vow to never look back.
At 6 a.m., a man in a uniform unlocks the door of the border office, which is approximately the same size as an office cubicle. Small. About fifty people shove inside at once. The uniformed man is the only person working, and he runs from one window to another—one for Bolivians needing an exit stamp, the other for non-Bolivians needing an exit stamp. Three men in uniforms lean against the wall behind him, drinking steaming cups of tea.
An hour later, when I finally make it to the window, the three men are still standing there. “You like Bolivia?” the man says, nonchalantly, as he flips through my passport and looks over my visa.
“Uh, some bad things happened to me here.”
“Very good,” he says. He slams a rubber stamp against my passport with a loud thwack!
I am ecstatic as I walk toward the simple concrete bridge that forms the border of the two nations. “Argentina, here I come!” I say out loud.
&n
bsp; But not so fast. First there is another line for another border office, this time for an Argentinian entry stamp. The line moves quickly, however. There are several men working, all clad in crisp, tidy uniforms. There are distinct lines, with signs explaining entry to Argentina in several languages. The process is straightforward, even when I am pulled aside for a random bag check.
Finally. Argentina. A blazing blue highway sign overhead welcomes: “Bienvenido a la República Argentina.”
As I make my way across the bridge and peer over the side, differences between the two countries are already apparent. On the Bolivian side there is a field of stray beer bottles sliding toward the trickling river. Graffiti climbs the sides of structures. Grocery bags flutter against scrub brush, like strange plastic blossoms. The Argentinian side has none of that. No litter. No trash. No spray paint.
At the end of the bridge, a small white sign says “Argentina” in a delicate font, the kind of sign you might find proclaiming “The Smith Family” on the side of a picket fence. It’s adorable and strange enough that I snap a photo.
It is an easy walk to La Quiaca, Argentina. I make my way around town on foot in search of two simple things: breakfast and a bank where I can exchange my bolivianos for Argentinian pesos. I walk past an empty park and many closed buildings with shuttered doors. It’s rare to see a car drive past. An hour later, my stomach rumbles, I still have no pesos in my purse, and I’ve walked nearly every street of the small town without finding any food.
An Argentinian tries to help. He says his country enjoys breakfast much later in the day, since they don’t eat dinner until 9 or 10 p.m.
“So nobody in this whole town is eating breakfast?”
“Not now,” he confirms. “Later.”
The same man says the open bank was in Bolivia.
“Not possible,” I say. “That would make this the only border town in the whole world without a currency exchange.”