I heard it, too. The sound of voices. We headed toward the sound and, cresting a hill, saw a bright red Raid tent lit with flashing strobes in a clearing. We looked at each other in disbelief. We had been so ridiculously close.
Sheepishly, we presented ourselves to the French race officials at CP #4.
“Ah, bon . . . one of our lost teams has arrived. Now we are missing only nine.”
So, we were not the only ones. That cheered us up. I went behind some boulders to pee, and when I came back, my team sang “Happy Birthday” to me. They presented me with a squashed, candle-topped cupcake and a damp, bent card from my mother. I had forgotten all about it; I was thirty-six. The brief break gave me time to say a silent prayer of gratitude for six years of sobriety, for my beautiful healthy kids, and even for the chance to be cold, wet, and lost in the mountains of Ecuador.
I stood above Tony while he placed the maps on the ground and plotted a route to the next checkpoint. I wasn’t a stellar navigator, either, but I wanted to watch what he was doing. He clearly didn’t appreciate my looking over his shoulder.
“There,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Charlie,” he said sharply, “I got it.”
Eventually, we did make it to CP #5. From there, we descended through a forest of gnarled trees, whose trunks were sloughing off strips of dark red bark. Moss and lichen and giant bromeliads dripped from the branches; birds and frogs warbled and trilled in the ghostly mist. It felt primeval and otherworldly. It seemed entirely possible that in the tangled green canopy, I might just spot the slit reptilian pupils of a Tyrannosaurus rex.
- - - -
We slipped our way down the slick hills and emerged from the woods on a muddy road that, according to our map, would lead us to CP #6 in the village of Oyacachi. We passed tin-roofed huts and sulfurous hot springs. Women in bright shawls and long skirts called to us to buy bangle bracelets and wool felt fedoras. When we found the Raid official, Tony handed him our passport.
“What position are we in?” Tony asked. I winced. Did we really want to know that?
“You are . . . number thirty-five,” the official said, looking at a clipboard. “The fastest teams came through in twelve hours.”
It had taken us twenty-eight hours, but at least we weren’t last. We decided to take a few minutes to organize our gear and have something to eat. Steve and I sat on a log. He suddenly doubled over in a coughing fit.
“You okay?” I asked.
“The pace is too fast,” he said before he started to cough again.
“We can back off,” I said.
“Let’s go!” I heard Tony shout. “Let’s move!”
“Shit,” Steve said.
We shouldered our packs and started walking again. A few emaciated dogs padded along for a while, then gave up as we crossed plank bridges over swampy flats and began to climb. The fog enveloped us once more and obliterated any hope we had of gaining on the teams ahead of us. We were walking blind.
It took another thirty sleepless hours to get through the next three checkpoints. It was almost comical. Tony had once looked up from the map and said, “That way,” and we had marched off into the soup, only to come upon a checkpoint and realize that we had left that one hours earlier.
- - - -
Steve’s cough was getting worse. My feet were in agony—something was digging into my ankle bones. Nancy had gone quiet. Scott let out exasperated sighs every few minutes. We slogged on in the damp cold. Late in the afternoon on day three, from a hillside above a boggy plain, we spotted trucks, tents, and a corral full of horses. We all cheered. We had finally arrived at CP #10, our first transition point.
We found the camp Rolf and Kurt had set up for us.
“Where’s my mom?” I asked Rolf.
“Asleep in the tent. She wanted us to wake her as soon as you got here.”
I decided to let her sleep while I got myself cleaned up a little. I didn’t want to freak her out.
I limped over to Rolf’s tent. “Something’s up with my feet.” I lay down in the tent and Rolf helped me get my shoes off. The pain was excruciating.
“Jesus,” Rolf said. My socks were soaked with blood. He carefully rolled them off and grimaced. My ankles looked like butchered meat. Rolf picked up my shoes and looked inside. “The plastic has worn through the padding.” He showed me the exposed heel counter. “The edge has been rubbing against your ankle bones.”
“Charlie!” My mom peered into the tent. Her face looked puffy and her hair was lopsided. “Are you okay?”
Rolf tucked my bloody socks behind his back.
I scrambled to my feet and hugged her. I could smell cigarette smoke on her clothes, and for an instant the smoke reminded me of being in a bar, and a thought zinged out: A beer would taste great right now.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Couple of blisters. How are you doing?”
She looked spent. Her clothes and boots were caked with mud. “Well, it’s been quite an adventure. Ecuadorian mud treatment. Good for the skin.”
I gave her another long hug.
Then I heard Tony hollering, “Schwab, let’s get our gear together and head out ASAP!”
I stepped out of the tent barefoot.
“Did you hear?” Tony said. “We’re in fourteenth place! We have to get our horses and get going!”
“We can’t go now,” I said. “We can only ride the horses until seven. Dark Zone rule, remember? We’d have to camp with them in a couple of hours.”
“But we’re in fourteenth place.”
“We are tied for fourteenth, Tony—with twenty other teams. Look around—no one is leaving now. They’re being sensible and waiting for morning.”
“We came here to race, Charlie, not to sit around camp with our mothers.”
“Nobody is leaving tonight,” I said slowly. “Steve is sick. My feet are trashed. We are all fried, including you. We need to sleep. It’s the smart thing to do. We can take off as soon as it starts getting light.”
Tony stomped away. One by one, he called each team member into the tent to try to convince him or her we should get going. Nobody was budging. Tony had been overruled.
At dawn the next morning, we got up and dressed. My ankles felt a little better now that Rolf had bandaged them and cut off the plastic ridge that had been chewing them up. Nancy, Steve, and I walked to the makeshift corral. The rules said that each team would select three horses and we’d take turns riding them. Veterinarians stationed at upcoming checkpoints would make sure the horses were staying healthy. We walked up to the poncho-clad vaquero, and he handed us the reins of three saddled horses.
He motioned for us to leave.
I pointed at another horse in the corral. I thought that one looked calmer than the one I had been given. “That one? Puedo tener este?”
“No. You go,” he said.
“These are fine, Charlie.” Nancy and Steve started leading their horses back to our camp. Mine, however, refused to move. I gave her a strong tug and she pulled back even harder. One of the horse wranglers came up, smacked her hard on the rear, and she took a few steps and stopped again. He hit her again and she stomped her feet and whinnied.
The vaquero raised his hand once more.
“No,” I said, putting my hands up. “Que está pasando?”
“Ella es una nueva madre,” the wrangler said.
Even with my limited Spanish, I understood that he was telling me that my horse was a new mother; the baby in the corral was hers. No wonder she didn’t want to leave. I asked again for another horse.
“No. No es posible,” the vaquero said.
Now I was pissed. I told him that we would just take two horses then and leave the mother.
“No, no. Descalificado.” He shook his head.
Steve came back to see what was going
on. I told him we were being forced to take a mother horse away from her baby.
“Por favor?” Steve asked, pointing at another horse.
“No. Descalificado.”
“Okay, okay.” I threw my hands up. “Vamos con el bebé!”
We’ll go with the baby.
The horseman shrugged and went to get the foal. I took the mother’s reins and the baby fell in behind her without hesitation. I wasn’t sure if I had just solved a problem or created a bigger one, but at least we were moving again. Tony and Scott shook their heads when they saw us coming back with a baby.
“Are you kidding?” Tony said.
“It was the best option,” Steve said.
“It was the only option,” I added.
We said good-bye to our crew and left camp, along with a handful of other teams. It was cold, but visibility had improved greatly. Patches of blue sky broke through the clouds. Tony seemed to have gotten past being overruled by the team the previous night. He even let me look at the maps with him, though it was obvious where we needed to go. Ahead of us—some twenty miles across the lunar rolling plains—loomed our next destination, the perfect cone of Cotopaxi. I felt it drawing us forward, like a powerful magnet. I imagined how it would feel to be standing on its summit. Then, I noticed a massive black bird overhead, riding the thermals.
“Look,” I said. “Is that a condor?” I’d been told they were so endangered that the odds of seeing one were slim.
“Wow,” Nancy said. “Yeah, it is!”
“Gotta be a sign,” I said. “Our luck is about to change.”
“You do know that condors are vultures, right? They eat dead flesh,” Scott said. “They picked the right team.”
We found out quickly that if the condor was indeed a harbinger of something, it was not of good fortune. For starters, the foal stopped every ten minutes or so to nurse. And all four of our horses were so afraid of water that they had to be pushed and pulled over even the narrowest irrigation channels. By midmorning, all the other teams had passed us. At CP #11, we switched riders. We had decided that no one should ride the mother horse—she got so agitated when her baby was near her, she was nearly impossible to control. Tony got on one horse and Steve on the other, and we headed out again.
As we gained altitude, the wind picked up and the temperature nose-dived. After a few hours, Nancy and I noticed that Tony had stopped talking. He was riding with his head bowed, and his body was bouncing limply with each step of the horse.
“You okay, Tony?” Nancy said, walking alongside him.
No answer.
“Tony?”
“Yeah!” he said with a start, and sat up in the saddle.
“You okay?”
He looked at Nancy blankly. “Okay. I have to pick up the kids.”
He slumped over again.
“Tony!” Nancy grabbed his knee.
He mumbled something about maps and school buses.
“Look at me, Tony,” Nancy said.
He fumbled with the zipper on his jacket as if he were trying to take it off.
“I think he’s hypothermic,” Nancy said. “We need to get him warmed up.”
“We need to get out of this wind,” I said.
We looked at the barren plains ahead of us. I pulled out the maps and compass and went through the steps Michael had taught me many months earlier. I saw a river on the map that, if I was right, should be over the next long climb. I thought the river valley would provide some shelter. It would be a good place to set up our tent and get Tony warm. My teammates looked at me expectantly.
“That way,” I said.
We crested the hill, but found no river and no trees—only another long, exposed ridgeline.
“If the valley isn’t over that next hill,” I said, “we’ll stop and put up the tent. Is everyone on board with that?”
I strode out ahead of the team, and the extra effort made my heart hammer. When I got to the top of the hill, I yelled with relief. The river was there. I could also see tents, people, and horses. Other Raid teams had stopped here for the night. As soon as we got down to the riverbank, we got our tent up and helped Tony into it. Then we covered him with Mylar space blankets and a sleeping bag, and I went to secure our horses.
The vaquero had told me that when we camped, we should pull the saddle off the mother, put it on the ground, and tie her to it. The other horses, he said, would stay with her. I did what he said and then went back to the tent.
Tony was not getting better. His shivering had escalated into full-body convulsions. Nancy and Scott lay down and sandwiched Tony with their bodies.
“If he doesn’t improve soon,” Steve said, “we need to think about using the emergency radio.”
We both knew that would mean disqualification from the race.
“If he doesn’t get better soon, we’ll call,” I said.
I went back to check on the horses. They seemed to be happily grazing. Then I walked over to see if any of the other teams had any information to share. I found a woman who spoke some English, and she told me that all the French teams here were traveling together. The Raid officials had told them that the cutoff times to get to the next transition point had been extended because of the bad weather in the trekking section. This was excellent news. I went back to tell my team. Steve was standing outside the tent.
There was more good news. Tony was coming around. I suggested we get some sleep, and if Tony was feeling up to it, take off at 4:00 a.m.
We all crammed into the tent; this time my ass and legs were sticking out the door. I was awake for a long time, shivering, listening to the wind and the whinnying horses and my snoring teammates. I knew now I wasn’t going to star in the “triumph of the rookie” story I had written for myself. We’d be lucky to stay in the race. I was cold and hungry and tired. But I was grateful to be here, grateful to be feeling it all. I had lost too many years being numb.
My watch alarm went off and I woke the others. I went to check on the horses and scanned the area with my headlamp. They weren’t there. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. I shone my light all around. No horses. Had someone stolen them? Was another team playing a trick on us? Not funny. I went back to tell the team that our horses seemed to be gone.
“What do you mean, gone?” Steve said.
“Like gone, gone. I tied one up to a saddle. The others were supposed to stay with her.”
“Is the saddle still there?” Scott said.
Steve and I walked back to look again.
My headlamp shone on the saddle, sitting by itself in the dirt.
“Shit,” I said. “She must have pulled loose.”
Unless we found our horses, we would be disqualified and it would be my fault. The only thing we could do was wait until the sun came up, then go out and hunt for them. Maybe they hadn’t strayed too far. When it got light enough, Nancy, Steve, and I went out to look. From the top of a hill, we could see other teams making their way along the river. I felt terrible; we should have been right there with them.
“Look.” Nancy pointed into the valley. “There are horses down there.”
I saw them, too. It wasn’t unusual to spot horses—we’d seen several wild herds in the past few days. But this appeared to be a foursome, and one of them looked to be much smaller than the others. Steve and I hurried down the trail. As we got closer, I could see that two of the horses had saddles on.
“Yes!”
Now all we had to do was catch them.
Steve and I split up, hoping that we could close in on them from opposite sides. The horses were having none of it. As soon as we got close, they spooked and ran farther down the valley. We decided to see if we could get behind them and at least get them running back toward our camp.
As we got close to the horses, I heard a loud whistle and looked up to see a
man on horseback riding toward me. He had on a striped poncho and a brimmed hat. He spoke to me in rapid-fire Spanish.
I shook my head. “No comprendo.”
He climbed down from his horse and unzipped my bright yellow team jacket. I thought he was stealing it. Okay, fine. I wasn’t going to fight him for it. But when he had pulled it off me, he balled it up and threw it on the ground. He motioned to Steve to do the same. Then he pointed at the horses.
“Oh, it’s the yellow!” Steve said. “That’s what’s freaking the horses out.”
Without the bright jackets on, we were able to walk right up to the horses and pick up their reins. We waved and said, “Gracias,” to the vaquero and started back to our camp. Our teammates cheered when they saw us. We packed up and headed out.
- - - -
While I had been getting our passport stamped at CP #15, I had asked the official what time we needed to get to the transition at CP #16 to stay in the race as a ranked team. He told me we had until 4:30 p.m. I looked at my watch. It was 2:00 p.m. If we hustled and didn’t get lost, I thought we could get there.
A little after 4:00 p.m., we spotted the checkpoint. After all we had been through, we were still going to make it. When we arrived, we said a quick hello to our crew and I hurried up to the French official with our passport. It was exactly 4:23 p.m.
He looked at his watch, clucked his tongue, and gave me a sad smile. “Ah, well, eet’s a good effort, but you have missed the cutoff time.” He tapped his watch. “You are eight minutes late.”
“No! We were told that we had until four thirty. We made it. You see? On time. We are on time.”
“Eet’s too bad for you, yes? They apparently do not have the updated information at the last checkpoint. You have missed the cutoff and nothing can be done. But do not worry, you can still climb the mountain if you wish. Or you may skip the mountain and continue to the bicycles. Or you may simply stop. Your choice.”
I wanted to strangle him. “My choice,” I said with calm intensity, “is to continue as a ranked team since the mistake was made by your official and not by my team. I want to file a protest.”
He stood there with his arms crossed, looking at me with bemused disdain, as if I were an American tourist who had just requested ketchup for my escargot. “It is not possible,” he said stonily.
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