It was sunset. 11,700-foot Fitz Roy showed itself through shifting clouds. I had cycled to Patagonia. I drank a beer, feeling proud but calm. I was simply done. Like the last grain of sand dropping in an hourglass, my experiment in time ended without a sound.
I never got on the bike again.
Chapter 21
MOM AND THE MOUNTAIN
(Torres del Paine)
592 miles to go
The next day, I hiked alone to the base of Cerro Torre, which is next to Mount Fitz Roy and almost as famous. The peaks here present an incredible skyline of skinny granite spires shaped by the brutal and endless winds and rain. Like knives stuck blade-up in the snow. I asked a tourist to take my photo. I stood in the hateful wind and let my face get chapped. I hiked back to town and had dinner with some hikers I’d met from England. Then I wandered the main street and thought how alone I was in my accomplishment. All these people were on vacation, doing their own thing. They saw me and assumed I’d flown here. Or didn’t think about me at all. I was just an extra in the movie of their life. But I knew what I’d done. And so did God.
That evening, I stowed the bike in the baggage compartment under a big bus and boarded it for Punta Arenas, Chile, another thousand miles south, where I’d meet my mother and two of my friends.
On that bus, I had a lot of miles to stare out the window and think about my journey. About expectations. About destinations. I had wanted my spirit quest to answer questions for me. More than that, I needed it to reveal my questions to me, then answer them. What a burden to put on travel, which in itself is ignorant and indifferent. It becomes so hard to just enjoy the thing as it happens. We make the journey about arrival, not travel. We are so goal focused. We are the dog that won’t stop paddling as long as he sees the shore. But, man, my shore had been hidden by the fog for so long.
Of course, goals help us get a lot done. But they often remove our attention from the experience to the achievement. When we arrive at the goal, we think, then we will be happy. When we finally get there, we can celebrate and have fun. When I get that job, I’ll be fulfilled then. When I get married, I will be happy. The Eden we pine for is not under our own feet or bike tires, but over the next mountain.
I had crossed the mountain. I was in the Eden of my dreams. I had a couple weeks left in the adventure of a lifetime, but I was here. I had arrived. Now what? I suppose I’d worked through some things on the road. My faith had gotten rearranged, the puzzle pieces disassembled and spread across the table. Not put back together, but not a total mess either. I guess I did feel a warm direction, a positive pulling toward something else. I had always worried that if I took my inherited beliefs off the throne, if I took the Bible out of God’s hands and put it in mine, that my life would spin into relativistic nonsense. That’s what I’d always been told. Yet I didn’t see that happening. I had asked and been asked heretical questions. I had looked straight at the sun and demanded answers, and I was still standing. And I was not blind.
Thousands of miles from Peru, from saying goodbye to Weston, he was with me in my heart. His critical mind, fearless to excavate all possibilities, had been hard for my fragile ego. He wasn’t afraid to let things change. He’d done that his whole life. He’d fought for heaven then discarded it like a rumor. He’d tried all the fruits of pleasure and remained unsatisfied. He’d sought the world for truth and freedom, and perhaps he was closer than I was. But his liberty had done something to me. I missed him terribly. I wished he’d been with me. I wished he had been there for Fitz Roy, blowing smoke in my face and hugging me.
Thanks to him, I had come to realize that there were doors and rooms in the house of my mind that had always been there, but had been boarded up. He’d kicked some of those doors open. I had peeked through, broken rules, walked down dark hallways. And the house, even in its mystery and darkness, was still my home, and surprisingly still felt like it.
On the Carretera, some of my spiritual discomfort had settled. In my aloneness, I had forgiven people. Now they couldn’t hurt me. Only nature was real. Christianity couldn’t tell me what to do. My mother couldn’t tell me what to do. My need to belong and fit in had fallen away into meaninglessness. Mile by mile, only discovery mattered.
Yet now, at the end of the trip, I felt a dull melancholy. The way DayQuil can mask a cold, but leave you with a muffled head. I was excited, sure, but I was tired. I wondered if old age felt like this. If the end is not a triumph and fireworks, but a simple, quiet arrival. A beer in a pub and wondering what it was you had wanted so desperately. Looking back at a complex grab bag of lessons, but seeing no through line. Feeling pride of accomplishment, as I did now, but struck by your own cheating and laziness. And finally you take a cosmic bus to see your mother.
* * *
—
PUNTA ARENAS, a port on the Strait of Magellan, lies halfway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is the bottom of the world. The shore faces Antarctica. It is the southernmost significant habitation on the continent of South America, with only the islands of Tierra del Fuego and the stormy Drake Passage separating the mainland from the Antarctic. This was as far south as I would get.
I arrived and slept in a dingy hostel, my last night alone. I should say I hardly slept. I was so excited to see my mom and my friends. I woke up, had my coffee, and felt both sad to say goodbye to this weird season of my life and thrilled to be done with it.
Mom had been texting photos of things she was buying for the trip. Hiking boots on sale at TJ Maxx. A men’s rain jacket from Goodwill. Protein powder that can be mixed with creek water in case of emergency. Ebola-protection materials from a website dedicated to preparing for the end-times. A Spanish phrase book, though when she realized it only had slang and curse words, she sent me a picture of the book in the trash.
The airport in Punta Arenas had no Wi-Fi and I knew my mom’s phone wouldn’t work. It felt like trips to the airport in the early nineties, when no one had cell phones and you had to hope that the time they said they would arrive turned out to be the right time. But standing in the terminal waiting for my mom, I felt proud and strong. I felt like a man. I still couldn’t throw a football. But lots of dudes can throw a football, and none of them have lived on a bicycle for sixteen months. I wasn’t looking forward to my mother’s direct questions, her probing, even though I felt okay in my sexuality and my ambiguous faith in a way that I had never been. I just didn’t want my mother to be sad with who I’d become. I didn’t want her to be mourning her son’s dead soul as we explored the mountains together.
Then I spotted her curly brown hair and unnecessarily bejeweled sunglasses rounding the corner. She was already yelling for me, laughing through her words. “Jed, I did it! I’m a world traveler. Ecuador and now Patagonia! And at my age!” Her brightness and presence made me instantly happy.
She pushed past the other passengers and dropped her purse and roller bag for a long hug. When we pulled away, she said, “You look so skinny! Handsome, but skinny. Momma’s here, I’m not about to cook, but we’re gonna eat our way through this Patagonia!” She had booked a hotel in an old building that looked like an English castle. We would be staying a night before renting a car for the week and heading north up to Puerto Natales, the closest town to Torres del Paine National Park.
Later that evening, my friends Milla and Willow flew in. They had decided to join me for the final exploration of Torres del Paine. I was very happy about that. And honored. Plus, it was easier to be around my mother with the buffer of a third and fourth party.
My mother showed us all the ridiculous things she had packed. She had a folded, tightly packed yellow hazmat suit. She said, “You know, with all the Ebola going around the world, on planes, I didn’t want to take any chances.” She knew she was funny. But she was also serious. From under her T-shirts she pulled out a gallon bag of almonds. Willow and Milla laughed at every new revelation.
“Mom, why so many almonds?!” I said.
“Did you know you can live off of just almonds for months? Maybe forever? They’re just a backup plan.” She had nonperishable food in sandwich bags tucked in every corner of her bag. She pulled out a big plastic bag of pills.
“What are those?” I asked, incredulous.
“Water purification tablets. Just in case.”
“In case of what, Mom?”
“I didn’t know how the water would be down here. Or if we’d be lost in the wilderness and need to survive.”
I laughed. “Mom, we’re staying at an Airbnb.”
“You never know.”
The next morning we picked up the rental car and began the three-hour drive north to Puerto Natales. The trees ended at the outskirts of town, the terrain becoming rolling hills of grass with clumps of trees around the few farmhouses. In the distance, we could see snow-covered mountains. We saw rheas running along the fences by the side of the road. Rheas look almost exactly like ostriches. We were simply driving across prairie land when a huge bird began racing next to us on the other side of a fence. No one had told me that South America had its own version of native flightless birds.
“Look at that ostrich!” my mom screamed. My eyes took a minute to register what we were seeing. It was smaller than an ostrich, but tall as a man, and keeping pace with our car for no apparent reason. I didn’t have cell service or Wi-Fi so we just had to speculate how there could be ostriches down here. It wasn’t until that night that I remembered to google it and learned of the existence of these feathery indigenous giants.
We arrived at the cottage my mom had rented just outside Puerto Natales by midafternoon. It was attached to a boutique hotel sitting on a broad grassy field that rolled down to the bay, which is connected by a series of channels to the Pacific. The distant mountains were white with snow, but in town, the grass was neon green and lush. Horses waded through it.
Puerto Natales swarmed with serious hikers from all over—Europeans, Australians, Israelis, and Americans. They come here to do the circuit hikes around the peaks of Torres del Paine and Cuernos del Paine. The full circuit takes about a week. You camp along the way, stop at ranger cabins to replenish or have a beer, and meet hikers from all over the planet. For two days, we played tourists along with the crowds—shopping, horseback riding, and eating well. Then we drove the final two hours to the park itself.
The landscape in this part of Patagonia is unbelievably expansive. With very few trees, the bare skin of Patagonia shows through. The naked beauty of a raw planet. In the fields stretching away on either side we saw cows and rheas and vicuñas (which are in the llama family, though with shorter hair, golden brown with white bellies). Clouds would pile up thick and tall over the mountains one moment, then swirl into mist the next, strands of sunlight streaming through over the course of the day in a cycle from hopeful to ominous and back.
In the distance, we could see the granite towers of the Torres del Paine massif approaching. The spires sit on top of a wide-set mountain like a crown. I knew from obsessing over the map that Cuernos del Paine, one of the world’s most daunting ascents, was situated on the opposite side of Torres del Paine from us. Instead of a lineup of peaks, Cuernos del Paine looks like a jumbled collection of shardlike spikes rising in a triangle, almost like God had taken a machete to a mountain in a drunken rage. Hiking trails completely encircle both of these wonders.
We stopped at a lodge at the foot of Torres del Paine for lunch. While eating, Mom asked, “How many miles is that Torres del Paine hike?” I told her it was about six miles, all uphill, then six miles back.
She swirled her wineglass. “We should do it,” she said.
“Mom, it’s a strenuous hike. I don’t think…”
“I want to do it. I’m in good shape. I’ll go at my own pace.”
“Are you sure? What if you get hurt?”
“I’ll go at my own pace and I won’t get hurt. I can’t come this far and not try. I feel great. I walk a lot.”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“Okay, don’t start this. I’ve always known that one day my kids would start to baby me as I got older. I know it’s coming. But not yet. I am an adult and I have my wits about me and I am healthy and I want to do it.”
“Whoa, Momma! Okay! Sorry to trigger all that!” I said, laughing.
“OK, let’s do it tomorrow. On your thirty-second birthday. You know they say Jesus walked on water when He was thirty-two. He lived to be thirty-three. You’re in your years of ministry.”
“I know, Mom.”
We drove back to our cottage in the long twilight of the Patagonian summer. In the morning, I woke to her calling me from the kitchen.
“Jaayyyuuuddd,” she crooned, “Happy Birthday, my favorite oldest son.” She came into my room and hugged me in my covers. “It’s time to go climb a mountain. I’ve packed us sandwiches and little individual bags of almonds and dried fruit I found at the market the other day. All this fresh organic South American fruit.”
“Mom, that fruit is probably from a factory just like at home.”
“Well, I don’t know. It seems fresher. I have us big water bottles, metal ones, lightweight, so we don’t get that BPA poison in our systems. Oh, and here.” She handed me a crystal. “I got these at a gift shop, they are crystals from the top of the Andes and the lady said they are charged with good energy. I think we should have them in our pockets! For good luck.”
I laughed. “Mom, when I was a kid, you forbade me from having those little troll dolls with the poofy pink hair because you thought it was witchcraft and un-Christian. And here you are giving me a crystal?”
“God made crystals. The Chinese made those troll dolls. Trolls are demonic. Crystals are okay. And so are pennies.”
“Oh my gosh. You always pick up pennies from the ground and say, ‘Oooh, good luck!’ I’m just realizing how superstitious you are! You hypocrite!” We were both laughing.
“Stop micromanaging me,” she said. “I see those coins as little blessings from God. You’re supposed to give them away so both of you will be doubly blessed. Don’t be a hater!”
“Mom, never say ‘hater’ again.”
We had some coffee and pastries in the lobby of the boutique hotel, and in a moment while Mom was sitting across the lobby looking at her phone, I asked the owner, who was also the concierge, about the hike.
“Is the Torres del Paine hike difficult?”
“It is long. Very long. But you don’t need any mountaineering equipment or anything,” he said.
“Well,” I asked more quietly, “do you think my mother could do it?” He said the only person he’d seen who had done the hike at her age had been a climbing instructor from Switzerland. “Is she healthy? It isn’t impossible. It is just long.”
“She is very healthy,” I said, considering her across the lobby. She was now eating granola and texting. She was sixty-seven years old, but her dyed-brown hair, straight posture, and fast talk had made her seem ageless to me. Was she capable of climbing this mountain? Was it a mistake to let her try?
Willow and Milla joined us, and we put on our hiking boots. I carried the backpack full of snacks, water, and sandwiches. My mom hung her point-and-shoot camera around her neck with a bright multicolored neck strap. And the four of us headed back to the park.
On the drive, a memory came back to me.
I must’ve been eleven or twelve. My parents were already divorced and I was sitting in the backseat of my dad’s truck. We were driving to Sonic, to get me a Dr Pepper as a reward for helping my dad feed hay to the cows. Maybe my dad said something to trigger it, I don’t know, but for the first time, it dawned on me that my mom would one day die. The thought bulldozed my mind and knocked everything over. I can remember exactly the bend in the road where I thought it. Mom would die. I would be without
her. It felt like a terrible injustice. I remember turning my face to the window so as not to be noticed, pretending my sniffles were allergies.
* * *
—
IT WAS 12:30 by the time we parked at the base of the trail. Lots of cars were parked there when we arrived. The hike seemed like the most popular thing to do in the park. That gave me confidence in bringing Mom. There had to be other moms and dads on this hike.
As we gathered our stuff and put on our rain jackets, I said, “It definitely looks like it’s going to rain. You sure about this, Mom?”
“Honey, I walked across America, I slid down a glacier, and got hit by a car going sixty miles an hour. I can handle a little rain.”
The trail started flat, along the base of the great mountains, through low grass and over bits of broken rock. We walked for perhaps a mile, crossing streams of meltwater from the snow high above.
Mom just crept along, but we all hiked together at first. The trail quickly gained elevation, curled into a canyon at the base of two mountains, and headed up the side of one of them, hugging the canyon. Soon we moved along a steep ridge with a long black-rock slide down to the right, to white water below. At that point, Mom told us not to wait for her. “Just go at your own pace,” she said. “It’s not a race and I’d rather be careful than injure myself and ruin our day.”
“Mom, we don’t want to leave you. It’s fine,” I said.
“No, I insist. I won’t have fun or enjoy any of this nature if I feel like you’re waiting on me. Go on. I’ll enjoy God’s creation at my own pace.”
With that, the girls and I went on ahead. Still, for a while, I dallied, checking on Mom from a hundred yards up the trail. She would walk a little. Stop. Take out a snack. Walk some more. Stop. Look at a flower. Take twenty pictures of it. Twenty identical photos. She didn’t seem to think about the hours of sunlight we had left, or how much progress she was making.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 33