Look Alive Out There

by Sloane Crosley

  My aversion to overpacking and its uptight cousin, overplanning, stems from the belief that neither tendency is a fake problem. These are not amusing tics. They are instead reflections on the personality of the packer. They suggest a dubiousness of other lifestyles (racist), a conviction that the world won’t have what you need (princess), and a lack of faith that you’ll continue being human when it doesn’t (misanthrope). And how hard is it, really? I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like “Bring a cardigan.”

  Thusly armed with my meager tributes to a four-in-one climate, I lift my bag. My bicep aches from yesterday’s visitors: a series of offensively long needles. I am off to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, because a travel magazine has told me to go there. My nebulous mission is to wander around the city for a few days, interact with locals, and write about it. It’s a dream assignment for anyone and I have never been to South America. Thus, I find it to be extra dreamy.

  Because I am the temporary ward of a media company, I am advised to seek out multiple inoculations, including one for typhus. It’s all fun and games until someone gets typhus. I am also encouraged to pick up a prescription for malaria pills should I venture farther afield. Quito isn’t Tokyo, no, but it’s a major city with running water. The quotidian equivalent of such precautions would have me being one of those people who spray hand sanitizer on subway poles.

  “Is this really necessary?” I ask my editor, who points out how difficult things will be for me if I get sick and can’t communicate.

  “You don’t speak Spanish.”

  “I hablo un poco de espan-yoal,” I defend myself.

  “Uh-huh,” he says.

  *

  Few instances in my life have made me feel so tough as helping the Duane Reade pharmacist locate my malaria pills.

  “What are we looking for, hon?” she shouts over her shoulder, thumbing her way through a bin of pills and creams for normal-people problems.

  Chain-store pharmacists put exactly as much effort into patient privacy as I do into packing. Until they invent a Libido Dampening syrup or a capsule for Being Too Darn Pretty, this will be the only time I’ll proudly announce the contents of my envelope to all the land. A line forms behind me. I feign shyness at the impressed glances of my fellow customers. They wouldn’t have pegged me as a war photographer or an aid worker but oh, how wrong they are.

  Both the pills and the shots wind up bolstering my sense of adventure, my desire to take my body out for a spin. As if I am dealing with extra minutes on a phone plan, not my immune system. Use it or lose it! I wish I could apply this attitude to my daily life, but I’m a lazy person within the confines of New York City. I won’t meet a friend more than ten blocks from my apartment if it’s too windy and the sidewalks are looking especially hard today. I am skeptical of ferries and bus transfers. Often I will walk past a restaurant and have the thought: I should order out from there later.

  But the whole point of this trip is to leave it to chance. Well, chance and Facebook. Unlike casting a social net for tips on Dublin or Buenos Aires, where comment after comment would compete in an e-thumb war for supreme regional wisdom, people are content to deliver their advice regarding Quito in direct messages. Few have spent quality time there. Three people chime in. One suggests a restaurant with fruit drinks, one suggests a museum with paintings of skeletons, and the third suggests I climb Cotopaxi, a 20,000-foot active volcano. Dubious of the Wi-Fi in my budget hotel (racist), I type up the list in advance: fruit drink, skeleton paintings, active volcano. Got it. I hold the list in my hand as I lock my apartment door. Each activity seems equally viable. Looking back, I think it’s because they were all in the same point-size type.

  *

  Now feels like as good a time as any to mention that I’ve never been skiing. You have to be under four feet tall to see the appeal of skiing. When you’re a kid, there are magic bravery crystals on the surface of the snow that whisper, telling you it’s fun to go speeding down nature’s backbone as if it won’t kill you. After a certain age, you become too tall to hear the crystals. So by the time you’re an adult, the question “Want to go skiing next weekend?” actually sounds like “Want to go bungee jumping using this old dental floss I just found?” The big selling points for ski trips, or the ones most regularly paraded out for my unskilled benefit, are mugs of warm liquid. Wait. Let me get this straight: While all my friends exercise, bond, and embrace the outdoors, my reward for a hard day of solo snowman crafting is more hot chocolate? To what do I owe this glut of me-time? Maybe later, when I grow bored of lying on rugs, I can wander into town and spin postcard racks. No, no winter sporting expeditions for me, thank you.

  Upon arriving in Quito, I solicit the advice of my hotel’s Peruvian receptionist, a shock-pretty university student whose affections I like to think I have won. This I have achieved by waiting patiently while other guests ask stupid questions and then asking brilliant ones of my own. Like how to flush the toilet in my room. When not manning the front desk, booking expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, the receptionist likes to climb mountains. This turns out to be common in Quito. The capital is located in a goose pot of one of the most densely collected circles of peaks on the planet, including Cayambe, Cotopaxi, the fun-to-say Pichincha, and the fluid-looking Imbabura, with its mystical importance. The Incas used to worship it. Imbabura is Zen in rock form. It’s also not the one I intend to climb.

  When I tell her of my interest in climbing Cotopaxi, a massive landform I apparently can’t be bothered to google, she seems unfazed. She went last month. The volcano has a symmetrical crater like a punch bowl in clouds. It’s one of the most stunning things she’s ever seen. Why wouldn’t I go? Looking at a photograph of her and her boyfriend tacked to the wall behind her—both of them wearing head-to-toe North Face and holding up ice axes from which all the power of the universe emanates—I decide to play up my ignorance.

  I explain that I am a novice climber, by which I mean very. It’s a miracle I haven’t spontaneously fallen to the floor in the time we’ve been speaking. I point at her phone and encourage her to pull up a photograph of the mountain I used to hike every summer in New Hampshire. It’s the most frequently climbed mountain in North America. I was nine years old the first time I went up. I used to play freeze tag on the summit.

  “Is the mountain on the next page?”

  She is genuinely confused, moving the screen closer to her face, trying to broaden the image with her fingers.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  Convinced of my greenness, she knows just the person to escort me up the mountain, a friend of hers named Edgardo. Edgardo is a professional mountaineer, in that sometimes apparel brands send him parkas. Which is good enough for me, as I have been sent no parkas. He doesn’t usually do beginner tours but he “is a climber who is a very good climber.”

  A few phone calls later and Edgardo is set to arrive the next morning. He has agreed to take me up Cotopaxi for a reasonable fee. At this point I know so little about mountain climbing that I don’t think I’m skimping by avoiding a more official expedition. Actually, it’s the reverse—I reason I must be paying more than normal to limit my stranger quotient. In fact, before she suggested Edgardo, I asked the receptionist if I couldn’t just handle the trip on my own. I had designs on trading the forced loneliness of nonfluency for the intentional loneliness of nature immersion. I imagined glacial streams and wildflowers, salamanders and roots. Whatever I thought, it has since been corrected. Painted over. Like Dogs Playing Poker.

  *

  When Edgardo shows, I am sitting in silence with the few other foreign guests dotting the spare hotel dining room. The soft morning light shines through the spikes atop the security gate outside. I am pretending to read a Spanish newspaper and polishing off a breakfast of corn and eggs, when a petite man darts across the room wearing what appears to be the mountain climber’s answer to the scuba suit. A coarse braid of hair swings over one of his shoulder
s. The braid is so thin at the end, I am amazed its owner managed such a delicate procedure.

  Edgardo carries with him a strappy backpack and plops himself down across from me. My coffee sloshes onto the table. I can feel it drip through the cracks in the wood and onto my knee. But I sit still, holding the newspaper, using it as a shield. Every set of eyes in the room watches Edgardo lean back in the chair like he owns it.

  “Is your name Sloane?”

  No.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you eat beans?”

  This is one of maybe five questions Edgardo will ask me in the entire time I know him. The first being the confirmation of my name. I nod.

  “Good,” he says. “I’ll get the things and we meet outside in one hour.”

  And that is the longest string of English I’ll hear from Edgardo. It’s as if he memorized it for effect, same as if the only sentence I knew how to say in Spanish was “This remote control only takes double-A batteries.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  He pushes his chair back from the table.

  “One hour,” he repeats, holding up his pointer finger in a stern fashion as if he knows I have an issue with lateness. Because I do, in fact, have an issue with lateness, this otherwise rude assumption has a positive impact. I feel like Edgardo and I have known each other forever.

  “Got it,” I say.

  “Oh.” Edgardo stops himself and removes a pair of mountain-climbing boots from his backpack. “We need to understand your feet.”

  He drops to the ground as if about to propose and grabs my ankle. A couple at the next table looks the other way. Despite their clunky shape, the boots are too small. We’ll have to add “boots” to the list of things to rent before we go—a list that evidently includes crampons, a Gore-Tex jumpsuit, and a headlamp. I am starting to detect the faintest odor of intensity to all this.

  “Is what I’m wearing okay?”

  I push back from my chair and wipe crumbs off my lap. I am wearing cotton tights and a pilled tank top. It’s less of an outfit than a few swaths of cloth to carry me from my room to a public dining room in a socially acceptable fashion.

  “Yes, yes,” he says. “One hour.”

  I go back to my room and locate the warmest clothing I can find, which amounts to the fleece vest. I lock my passport in a counterintuitively communal safe, operated by a janitor. Then, just as I’m getting ready to leave, I feel an ache in my abdomen. I go to the bathroom to find that there’s both a Cotomaxi joke and a crampon joke to be made—but no one around to get it.

  *

  Edgardo arrives outside the hotel three hours later. When he pulls up, I see that his Jeep features an orange-and-red flame extending from door to bumper and blacked-out windows. He fusses with a tarp on top of the Jeep, pulling hard at ropes. When I ask him if I can help, he says nothing. When I ask him if he’s sure I can’t help, he tells me I should get in the car—but not before looking me up and down and asking: This is what you wear?

  I open the passenger door, expecting the car to be empty. But a second man reclines in the back of the Jeep. It would seem the “we” that needed to understand my feet was not royal but literal. This second man I will come to know as Pedro. Pedro’s primary contributions to our journey include pointing out gas stations, eating massive quantities of fruit, sleeping with his arms crossed, and pulling off Oakleys. He nods as I climb into the passenger seat. A small hill of orange peels at my feet, along with a warmth emanating from my seat fabric, tells me that Pedro’s perch in the backseat is a recently acquired one.

  “That’s my assistant,” Edgardo explains over my shoulder.

  Both of them laugh. I know in my heart the joke is about their friendship and not my soon-to-be-unsolved murder case, but my unease regarding a second person operates on two levels. The first is the one in which I’m in no mood to be kidnapped in a foreign country. The second is the one in which I refuse to pay double. It’s hard to say which is more pressing. I sit in the car as Edgardo straps supplies to the roof. A first-aid kit comes loose and pops open. The windshield is showered with plastic matches and energy bars. Band-Aids flutter and stick to the glass. Edgardo and I lock eyes. He smiles, picks up a six-inch hunting knife, and shoves it back into the bag.

  Trips up Cotopaxi work like this: First, you drive out of Quito, a city whose traffic patterns mirror those of a cubist painting. Once on the outskirts of town, it’s another few hours to the base of Cotopaxi. During this time, there are many road types at your disposal. Wide ones, short ones, narrow ones, steep ones, long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, HAIR! Anyway. You will find one road so bumpy, you’ll want to keep your jaw ajar so your teeth don’t chatter. Boxy pastel houses are sprinkled on the hills in the distance. Soon the towns decrease in size. The crumbling apartment buildings fade from view. The clotheslines become less and less covered in clothes. Keep on vibrating up a “road” whose air quotes grow increasingly pronounced. Try not to listen as your bladder curses the day you dragged it into this world. Hold on to the handle above your window and—hey, watch out for that donkey!—swerve your vehicle straight into a river. Stop the car. Realize it’s not really a river you’re in, but a swamp saved from stagnation by an open sewage pipe. Lift any electronics off the car floor because you’re about to open your door into bacteria-infested rain-forest water. Quickly come to understand that you weigh exactly enough to be of use by exiting the car but too little to be of use pushing it back onto the road.

  So just stand there for a while. Distract yourself from whatever it is that just bit your neck by humming the theme song to Family Ties. Realize that you know only two lines of this song and one of them is “sha-la-la-la.” Once back in the car, go through the gate to Cotopaxi National Park. From here, it’s a short drive to the last patch of land not at a 90-degree angle from the earth. Park the car and hike up to a cabin located 15,700 feet above sea level. Upon arrival, eat as much as you possibly can before the altitude destroys your appetite. Then make sure you’re asleep by 7 p.m. so that you can wake up five hours later and hike to the summit before the sun rises, melting the path out from under you.

  Now, I have to assume that much of that reads as par for the course for an experienced climber. I wouldn’t know. I was not she and the decision to spend thirty-six hours up a glacier-encrusted mountain instead of bargaining for alpaca scarves had been a minor one. But even if I had gone the scarf route, the constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a little drama to everything. Even the maiden operation of a local ATM demands problem-solving. It becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure, until you’re certain everything should be a challenge, every path a learning curve. It is only later that someone native to the region hears you decided to ride a bicycle to the airport, laughs, and says: Not that steep of a curve.

  *

  Lush green hills look patchy and weighted down. Drops of rain pelt my forehead from a crack in the Jeep’s window. We have under an hour to go, according to Edgardo. This is a relief as Edgardo’s musical taste leans toward German rap, which, for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has heard German rap, makes me feel less like we’re on a road trip and more like we’re in a postapocalyptic novel. The music doesn’t stray too far from this genre except for a few plays of Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” a track I pretend holds emotional significance in order to get Edgardo to skip it.

  Twenty minutes later, Edgardo pulls off the highway without warning, stops the car, and runs away on foot. Perhaps this is normal. Perhaps Americans are unnecessarily diligent about telling each other where we’re going all the time. If I hear a funny noise in the engine, I say, “Do you hear that?” I don’t just stop the car, get out, and leave everyone inside thinking I’ve embarked on a one-man game of Chinese fire drill. Or if you and I are having a discussion at a party and I have to go to the bathroom, I excuse myself. I don’t dart off like a startled horse. I’m not the kind of
person who’s going to, say, pull over unannounced and go searching for weed in a random village while an overly inquisitive but otherwise tolerable American tourist waits in my car.

  I have no idea what this little pit stop has to do with getting to Cotopaxi. Pedro popped out of the vehicle almost as fast as Edgardo, so he’s not even here to give me inscrutable looks. The gas tank is full. Maybe it’s not weed. Maybe Edgardo has to pick up a quilt his grandmother made him or something. I look around. The landscape outside features chickens, torn advertisements for soda, men leaning against walls, and shirtless children. A soldier strolls by with a large gun strapped to his back.

  I push down on the door lock. Then I pull it up again.

  I shut my eyes. When I was four years old I came down with pneumonia and hallucinated that my room was packed with bees. To avoid getting stung, I took refuge in the safest place I knew: under the covers. But of course there were bees there as well. Being inside or outside of the Jeep feels like the same kind of choice.

  Bored, I open the glove compartment to find a pile of scratched CDs, ratty gloves, and some travel-size spray cologne. I pick up the cologne. It has the silhouette of a boob on it and rust on the bottom and I am not even tempted to remove the cap. I get out of the car and lean on it, which makes me feel like a prostitute but I don’t mind. I reason that prostitutes seem more in control than already kidnapped women locked in a car. A chicken runs by with a couple of kids following behind. Easily distracted from her own survival, the chicken stops to peck at a half-eaten paper plate of food.

  When Edgardo and Pedro finally return, Edgardo succinctly instructs me to get back in the car and tosses a large bottle of water on my lap. Quito is not Tokyo, no, but it is not Khartoum, either. There is absolutely no way it takes this long to locate bottled water. I raise one eyebrow at him. If drugs have been introduced to this vehicle, I think I’ve earned some.

  “Drink,” he says, adding, as I open the bottle, “you will need on the mountain.”