Voyager

by Russell Banks

  It was not so much the climbing that had made me anxious, because I knew I’d put myself into pretty good shape and had climbed alongside George and Laurie back home over the summer, and God knows, they were in shape. It was the altitude. Over the years, I’d hiked long chunks of the Appalachian Trail and climbed most of the higher Adirondacks and White Mountains in New Hampshire, but this was the first time I’d ventured this high. I’d heard and read too many stories of perfectly fit climbers of all ages getting to twelve and fourteen thousand feet and succumbing suddenly to altitude sickness—nausea, blinding headaches, disorientation, hallucinations, even unconsciousness and permanent brain damage. It’s like seasickness, only a lot more dangerous: some people get it, some don’t, and regardless of how much climbing you’ve done in the past, you can’t tell in advance which you’ll be this time out. Back in Quito, on first arriving from the States, I was noticeably short-winded, but only for a day, and by the second day was able to walk the city, uphill and down, with relative ease. I was cheered to learn that George and Laurie, on their first few days in Ecuador, had suffered somewhat more than I. Still, this was three thousand feet higher than Quito, and at two hundred pounds, I was hoofing a lot more body weight than either George or Laurie, and it was all steadily, steeply uphill.

  Another hour of climbing, first through cultivated slopes and terraced hillsides, then out along a treeless, fast-rising ridge with spectacular views of the valley below, and I was halfway up the first, the smallest, of the three peaks, Loma Sal Grande. I was breathing heavily, but without much difficulty, feeling strong and competent and very relieved. No light-headedness, no nausea, no headache. No noticeable brain damage. Surprisingly, it wasn’t much more difficult than climbing in the Adirondacks, and in a way easier: these Andean mountain paths—old winding goat and donkey trails—were smoother by far than the rocky, root-tangled trails at home.

  But I didn’t want to get overconfident—this was the first real test of my training program, begun halfheartedly eight months earlier, during my annual winter residence in Princeton, New Jersey. A half-pack-a-day man, the first thing I did was quit smoking. Then, to the boom-box throb of alternative rock, I began lifting free weights in my suburban basement three afternoons a week, and on the other days rode my bicycle along the old canal towpaths from Kingston to Lawrenceville. Although at the time I wore a fifteen- to twenty-pound spare tire around my waist, I wasn’t terribly out of shape—your typical moderately aging exercised ex-athlete, I guess. But I hadn’t tried to put myself into condition for serious, sustained athletic activity in decades, not since the days when little more than a slight swerve in my daily routines got me fit again. Now, however, it was taking a complete, wrenching reversal of direction, and I hated it.

  In May, when I returned to upstate New York, I got serious. Five mornings a week, I climbed one hour steeply uphill and one down on a two-mile path into the state forest adjacent to my land, gradually reducing my total time over that course to an hour and forty-five minutes, then an hour and a quarter, until I was able to make the circuit in less than an hour, practically running the whole way. Once a week, sometimes twice, I took a daylong hike up one of the higher mountains in the region, Algonguin, Giant, or Marcy. Also, three afternoons a week, I bicycled for two hours up and down the Adirondack back roads, logging more and more miles each time out, taking on higher and longer hills, until, by late August, when I made the long, steep, five-mile ascent through Cascade Notch to Lake Placid, I was drawing incredulous stares from passing motorists—Who is that gray-haired idiot? By mid-October, it was dark from 5 P.M. till 8 A.M., and the snow had started to fly, so I had to switch from hiking shoes to snowshoes and put my bike away, but no matter—I was as ready for the Andes as I would ever be. As ready, at least, as I was willing to be.

  All the way up the winding trail to the summit of Loma Sal Grande, I’d been unavoidably faced away from mother Cotopaxi; my view had been mainly of the three linked peaks ahead. The path through shiny tussocks of ichu grass was smooth enough, thanks to generations of donkeys, milch cows, goats, and their keepers, but the trail was narrow and vaguely defined, and several times I wandered off it onto a dwindling tributary and had to clamber over tipped, hummocky fields of the tough, knee-high grasses to get back on route. The solitude was splendid. I met no other climbers—no humans at all since the three native women I had spoken to back at the highway, who had given me directions to the path and giggled shyly at my broken Spanish.

  It had gotten much cooler as I ascended from the valley floor, but I was still in T-shirt and hiking shorts, kept plenty warm by exertion. The humidity was extremely low, and the steady wind blew my skin and clothing dry. I knew that I was losing a lot of moisture and was glad that the heaviest item in my day pack was water—two full liters bought this morning at the bodega next to my hotel in Quito. I was also carrying rain gear and a fleece jacket, in case the weather changed, and extra socks, an emergency medical kit, a spicy Argentine chorizo and chunk of hard cheese for lunch, and, for snacks, several Reese’s peanut butter cups, from the carton in my luggage hauled all the way down from the States.

  Finally, I crossed a pocked, stony collar and scrambled to the summit of Loma Sal Grande, a narrow, bony fist of volcanic rock, where I stopped to rest and take in the astonishing scenery. An oval bowl three thousand feet deep opened below the three humped lomas like a pale green fjord. To the north, I could make out the black rooster-comb caldera of Pasachoa, and slightly to the right, the rusty crown of Rumiñahui. Then, suddenly, as I turned farther to the east, there she was—Mount Cotopaxi, looming over my shoulder as if she’d been following me all along, so much taller and broader and more magisterial than the other mountains and sparkling white against the deep blue sky, shocking in her immensity and apparent nearness. A nearly perfect cone rising from a vast umber plain, Cotopaxi dwarfed the lomas of El Chaupi, so that, from my little peak, after my first modest Andes ascent, I found myself looking, not down at the world in triumph, as I had expected, but up, in awe.

  For the rest of the afternoon, except for lunch at the summit of Santa Cruz, the third and highest of the three lomas, I was ridge-walking and keeping a wary eye on a long, low bank of dark clouds rolling across the northern valley from west to east, coming in from the Pacific. Gradually, the clouds blocked my view of Pasachoa, then Rumiñahui, and finally they swallowed even Cotopaxi. By the time I started down from Santa Cruz and made my way across its broad, grassy shoulder, descending in the general direction of the Pan-American Highway, it had begun to rain. I pulled on my poncho and rain pants and plodded steadily downhill, chilled and drawn swiftly into my hooded thoughts, for there was little I could see now that was not ten feet in front of me—the next turning in the narrow footpath, a low, slick boulder beside it, the drooping branch of a eucalyptus tree.

  This is how it is when you climb, and I have never gotten used to it: first you expand out of yourself and enter the vast world that surrounds you, and then, just as quickly, you are forced by weather or fatigue back to your secret interior life, and you lose awareness of the outside world altogether. It’s a rhythmic, alternating expansion and contraction of consciousness that feels like the creation of mind. More than anything else, this is what has drawn me back to the mountains all my adult life. Not the scenery alone, those grand vistas of sky and rock and colliding planes of light; not even the rejuvenating, but increasingly difficult to find, solitude of the mountains; and certainly not the “conquest” of a particular summit, marking another notch on my walking stick, another patch for my backpack, like a bumper sticker on a car that’s been driven up Pikes Peak. No, for me, it’s the feeling of the creation of mind that occurs during the ascent and descent of mountains, an experience that is available to me almost nowhere else and at no other time.

  Another hour of trudging downhill on the switchbacking trail in the cold rain, immersed in freely associating thoughts and random memories, then, gradually, almost reluctantly, as if waking from an
interesting dream, I noticed that the rain had let up. I stopped to pull off my poncho and rain pants and knocked back another peanut butter cup. A few hundred yards farther down the trail, I clambered up and out of a narrow gully and unexpectedly found myself once again face-to-face with mother Cotopaxi glistening white in the dazzling late-afternoon sunlight. And there was a lovely omen, a double rainbow arching across her snowy breast, and for a long time I stood there, until the rainbow had nearly faded from sight, before continuing my descent in the lengthening shadows to the broad valley below.

  Down on the highway, I waited barely fifteen minutes before one of the overloaded Quito-bound buses hissed to a stop, and I scrambled aboard. It was jammed with people, no seats available, and I was forced to stand all the way back to the city—a tall, smiling, strangely elated yanqui bent almost double by the low roof of the bus. The seated, tired natives, returning home from a long day’s work in the fields and shops of the hinterlands, studied me with dignified, mild curiosity, as if I had been beamed up to the bus from the surface of a newly discovered planet. Which seemed only appropriate, for that is exactly how I felt, all the way back to Quito.

  The night before, at the Alameda Real Hotel, I had met my fellow trekkers and our guide for the first time. To give myself a few extra days of adjusting to altitude, I had flown into Quito before the rest of the group—except for my friends George and Laurie, who had come down two whole weeks earlier to travel and hike on their own in the small Indian villages north of Quito. Tanned and tested and ready for the more difficult climbs ahead, George and Laurie had met up with me two days before, and we’d spent a cheerful, companionable weekend wandering the streets and parks of the city, waiting for the arrival of our guide and our as-yet-unknown fellow trekkers from the States. To my delight, the hotel—filled with intrepid travelers, mostly young diesel-powered German tourists and American Elderhostelers—had overbooked and had put me into a large, luxurious suite at the $75 U.S. price of the single I had reserved months earlier. Also, the hotel had a satellite dish with the same feed as at home, and I’d been enjoying CNN, C-Span, and MTV. I had just finished watching Evander Holyfield knock out Mike Tyson in the eleventh and had crawled sleepily into my king-sized bed when there came a sharp knock on my door.

  In my underwear, I stumbled in darkness over my scattered gear, opened the door a crack, and saw a large, drooping, walrus-style mustache. Then I made out the tall, big-faced man wearing it. He was clearly tired and irritated, as was the woman behind him. I noticed huge, overstuffed backpacks and two enormous duffels on the floor beside them. Americans, I surmised, when he said their names, which I didn’t quite catch. I was in their room, he informed me, and would have to move. Coming down the hallway were two more people looking for their rooms—a young, bearded man and an even younger woman, both of them wearing loaded backpacks and dragging duffels the size of body bags. Behind them, pushing a cart loaded with at least four more body bags, came a man I recognized, our guide, Alex Van Steen, whom I had briefly met nearly a year before at the Rock and River Lodge in the Adirondacks when I first signed on for this trip.

  There had been a screw-up. I was supposed to be sharing a double room with the young bearded fellow—whose name was Mark, I soon learned, an FBI agent from Westchester, New York—and my pleasantly large suite with the king-sized bed was supposed to have been held for the mustachioed man, Fred, and his wife, Beth. Fred, I later discovered, was an ex-headmaster of a private school near Syracuse and was now a househusband caring for his and Beth’s new baby. Beth was a pediatrician. They were both Seventh-Day Adventists. The young woman struggling with her duffel and backpack behind Mark was named Michelle, a pretty, twitchy physical therapist from Arizona. The one solo woman in our group, she’d been assigned a single room—no problem there—while Alex, our guide, was supposed to share a single room with the expedition gear. Laurie and George, of course, had settled properly into a double and no doubt were deep in sleep by now, where I wanted to be.

  It took a while, after introductions were made, to straighten out the rooms and rumpled feelings. Fred and Beth grumpily agreed to take Alex’s single, which turned out to have a queen-sized bed, so that I wouldn’t have to pack up and move all my gear at midnight, a task I expressed a sharp distaste for, and Alex and I and the expedition gear would share “my” suite, Alex insisting on sleeping on the pullout couch, graciously leaving me the king-sized bed. Not an auspicious beginning, I thought, as later I settled back into bed. The simplest, most logistically and socially uncomplicated aspect of our trip should have been these few first days in a large, modern hotel in Quito, and somehow we had made it complicated and then had dealt with the complications rather gracelessly. Or at least I had.

  Alex was in the other room, anxiously going over his checklists and spreading gear across the furniture—ice axes and rope and tents and medical kits and cookstoves and fuel and pots and pans, plus all his personal gear, sleeping bag and ground pad, crampons, climbing harness, parka, rain gear, snacks, cold-weather clothing, double-lined plastic boots—all the stuff that we each had been told to bring ourselves and had filled our backpacks and duffels with. Then, just as I was dropping into sleep, Alex called out, “We meet for instructions in the lobby tomorrow morning at eight!”

  “Well, I’ll be heading out right after,” I answered. “Alone.” I am not a happy camper, thought I. And we haven’t even started camping yet.

  By the next evening, however, following my triumphant climb of the three lomas of El Chaupi, I was confident and anxiety-free, ready for more difficult climbs, maybe even ready for mother Cotopaxi herself. Feeling more sociable than at Alex’s morning meeting in the lobby, and a little guilty, perhaps, for my lack of consanguinity in the hallway the previous night, I joined my fellow trekkers for dinner at a cavernous Italian restaurant a few blocks from the hotel. Ecuadoreans dine late, so we had the restaurant to ourselves. Alex sat at the center of our long table, and over dinner, just as at the morning meeting, whenever Alex spoke, which he did often and long, the members of the expedition went on high alert. In particular, Mark, the FBI agent, and Michelle, the physical therapist, who sometimes yanked out their pocket notebooks and wrote down his advice, observations, instructions, and detailed memories of other, more arduous and dangerous climbs—McKinley, the Himalayas, even Everest. Fred, who wanted to climb McKinley next year and viewed this trip as mere preparation, hung on to our guide’s every word and asked many questions. His sober wife, Beth, who seemed not to want Fred to try McKinley, listened attentively, but perhaps for her own reasons. My friend Laurie, who had learned ice climbing back in the Adirondacks from Alex and had worked alongside him at the Rock and River Lodge, viewed him as a personal friend, admired his guiding skills, and was gently amused by his garrulousness. George followed her example, usually.

  Bright-eyed and tanned, with a movie star’s chin and cheekbones and a professional mountain climber’s taut, muscular build, Alex was eager to instruct neophyte and expert alike. As the evening wore on, however, I began to think that perhaps he did not have total confidence in this group’s ability to climb the mountains that lay before us along the Valley of Volcanoes—first Pasachoa, then Rumiñahui and Sincholagua, and finally Cotopaxi—for he had a tendency to overinstruct, even to overarticulate, as if we were hard of hearing or English were our second language. Consequently, I, too, began to lose confidence in our ability—especially mine—to complete our mission. After all, these folks were at least as experienced climbers as I (or more so, certainly in Laurie’s and George’s case) and they were all decades younger than I and looked to be in great condition, even Fred, who was an unusually large man and seemed slightly awkward for it, but appeared nonetheless to be very strong and brimming with great good health. They had all taken mountaineering classes of one type or another, and Fred and Beth had let it drop that they were Forty-Sixers, which meant that they had climbed all forty-six of the Adirondack Mountains over four thousand feet, a club I didn’t ever
expect to belong to. Half of them were serious vegetarians, even. If Alex was sufficiently worried about them that he was giving them breathing lessons, what must he think of me, at my advanced age, with my lack of experience and all my bad habits and years of sloth?

  Early the next morning, we loaded our small hired bus with our duffels and backpacks and all the equipment and food we’d need for the next nine days, and eagerly, if a little nervously, set out from Quito for the mountains. As we left the city and rode up into the green hills and south toward Pasachoa, described in the itinerary as a 12,500-foot “acclimatizing hike,” Alex pointed out the various other mountains hoving into view, right, left, and ahead, chattered in Spanish with the driver, drilled his charges from time to time on how to conserve energy and oxygen at altitude, and answered the occasional question put by Fred, Beth, Mark, or Michelle—while George, Laurie, and I gazed out the windows at the passing scenery like excited school kids on an outing who could hardly wait till we reached our destination and could get out and run around in reckless circles.

  Eventually, about thirty kilometers from Quito, we turned off the main road onto a cobbled, winding track that crossed over rocky streams and passed through the carefully cultivated land and paddocks of a large finca, the Hacienda San Miguel, until at last we reached the sloping base of Pasachoa, where there was an empty parking lot and a small, deserted cinder-block building that housed a rudimentary environmental education center. We disembarked, slung on our day packs, checked our water supplies, rubbed on sunblock, and began to walk through a large forest preserve where the narrow trail wound like a dimly lit tunnel through bamboo groves and dense shrubbery and dripping eucalyptus trees. It was very hot and humid, and as the trail shifted slowly uphill and walking turned into work, I began to sweat and wonder, Where are the mountains? Where are the views? Why am I here?