Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single)

by Crosley, Sloane

  •••

  Quito is unattractive in the rain. Lush green hills look patchy and weighted down. Laundry soaks on the line. Cars honk. Drops come into my eyes from a crack in the gray window. Edgardo’s musical tastes lean toward German rap, which makes me feel like we’re the bad guys in a post-apocalyptic novel for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has ever heard German rap. The music doesn’t stray too far from this genre except for a few plays of Ace of Base’s The Sign, a track that I pretend holds emotional significance in order to get Edgardo to skip it.

  About an hour outside Quito, Edgardo pulls off the highway without warning and runs away on foot. Maybe Americans are just 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 in the middle of a five-lane highway. Or say you and I are having a discussion at a party and I have to go to the bathroom. I excuse myself. I don’t simply turn around and run like a startled horse. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to, say, pull over unannounced and go on a search for pot for 30 minutes 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. Victor popped out of the vehicle almost as fast as Edgardo, so he’s not even here to give me inscrutable Oakley-blocked looks. The gas tank is full. Maybe Edgardo has to pick up a quilt his grandmother made him or something? The landscape outside features chickens, torn advertisements for soda and shirtless children. There’s also a soldier with a gun so large strapped to his back, if he were a drunk girl and this were Halloween and the gun was angel wings, we’d be in for a lot of silly doorframe antics.

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

  I shut my eyes. When I was 4 years old I came down with pneumonia and I hallucinated that the air in my room was packed with bees. To avoid getting stung, I took refuge in the safest place in the world: under the covers. But of course there were bees there as well. Being either inside or outside of this Jeep feels like the same kind of choice.

  I open the glove compartment to find a series of unmarked CDs, ratty gloves, antacid and some travel-sized 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 fearless and harder to kill 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 finally returns, he barks at 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 it on the mountain.”

  I pull the bottle from my lips like it’s poison.

  “Do I drink the water now or do I not drink the water now?”

  “Now drink,” he says, starting the car.

  I unscrew the cap again.

  “Drink it on the mountain.”

  I have seen many films with scenes like this. I don’t need to be part of one myself. If Cast Away, 127 Hours, Alive, Touching the Void and Panic Room have taught me anything, it’s that you should never leave home without a lighter, a bottle of Gatorade and a Swiss army knife. At this point, the abandonment/confinement genre of film is so established in our culture that people who do leave the house without an EpiPen basically deserve what’s coming to them. But the survival stuff is never the worst part. The worst part is those innocuous scenes, before the epic journey, the ones that appear to have nothing to do with anything. Chop off my arm, feed me butt cheek, lock me in a room with Jodi Foster — these will never be the moments that move me as a viewer. It’s when the trapped hero or heroine thinks longingly of some basic household staple or some nonsensical conversation that my stomach lurches. Nothing is so gruesome to the human imagination as regret.

  I am careful to drain the bottle down to the plastic rib equidistant between the top and the bottom.

  Soon there are no more shady towns to be found and no more donkeys to be avoided. The landscape becomes drearily flat as we drive over miles of open lava-worn ground. Wild dogs appear from nowhere and run after the car, barking. It starts to rain harder. The cold air whips through a crack in the dashboard and I worry about my clothing. If I ask too many questions, Edgardo tells me to be “tranquillo.” He isolates the word for effect, simply saying “calm,” not bothering with the “yourself.” I’m no expert in South American culture, but I’d bet you all the rice and cabbage in Ecuador that treating a woman like a Victorian hysteric when she asks about long underwear does not go over well.

  “Pichincha,” Edgardo points across my chest, breaking the silence.

  “I see,” I nod, though I am already starting on a path of indifference regarding the mountains.

  Victor reaches silently through from the back seat and offers me cereal puffs from a plastic bag. I shake my head. We stop the car at an adobe-style house complete with a stone path. It is bare bones but at this point any evidence of human intent registers as a luxurious. We haul our belongings — which for me includes a backpack stuffed with an old sleeping bag of Victor’s, various climbing equipment, beans and a chocolate bar. I push on a wooden door and poke my head into the house and see a musty rug, a small kitchen with 20-year-old appliances and a ladder leading up to a floor covered in hay. It’s somehow colder inside than out and smells of mildew. Then again, so do I. Victor comes in behind me. He looks up at the rafters, puts his hands on his hips and whistles appreciatively.

  Edgardo appears behind us.

  “We cannot stay here.”

  “It’s fine,” I say, fishing in my pack for toilet paper.

  I am fond of this role reversal.

  “We have to go to the refuge,” he says plainly and glares at Victor, who should know better.

  Apparently, we are trespassers. This little hacienda is not our destination. It costs quite a bit of money to rent and other people have done that already. This evening’s destination is another 1,200 feet north and we will be climbing there on foot. We stopped here only because it was raining and Edgardo thought this might be a good spot to layer up on the porch. I unfurl two pairs of snow pants, a sweater and my fleece vest from my backpack but I am having trouble with the boots. Exasperated, Edgardo grabs my leg, one hand behind the knee and the other on the boot, quickly forcing me to sit on a stone bench. He starts lacing up my boots for me. This would verge on maternal if it weren’t the most violent corset-style lacing session of all time. I don’t know what kind of mother Edgardo had. Mine used to take a heart-shaped cookie cutter to my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

  •••

  “Here is where we get out,” Edgardo says, firmly.

  The rain has turned to snow that comes from beneath the car as much as from above it. No one expected a snowstorm but apparently this one doesn’t look so bad. I am awash with the girlish impulse to be back in New York in my apartment, imagining the feel of it in mid-July when the first sign of rain is the high-pitched tapping of drops falling on an air-conditioning unit. I am freezing already, a fact that Edgardo can’t believe, despite the purple hue of my lips. I have been backed into trusting Edgardo through circumstance. Like a doctor-patient relationship, no matter how extreme my discomfort or doubt, he is the only one to tell me what’s normal. The next second opinion is about 5,000 vertical feet away. I unbuckle my seatbelt. I think that I have never been so cold in my life and then immediatel
y try to rid myself of thoughts like this. I know we’re at the beginning.

  It is beyond me how anyone could discern “parking space” from where we’ve stopped. If I opened my door and stepped straight over a cliff, I would not be surprised.

  Dead? Yes. Surprised? No.

  “Your hands are too cold,” Edgardo observes as he watches me not getting out of the car.

  I am rubbing my palms together with more enthusiasm than a pubescent Edgardo ever rubbed anything. I would stick them in my mouth if I wasn’t worried about the consequences of them being wet when I removed them. Edgardo reaches across me to open the glove compartment. I want to hug him for warmth. This is hard to reconcile, since the more I get to know Edgardo, the less I want to hug him in general. Maybe what I really want to do is gut him Jack London-style and use his kidneys for mittens. We smile politely at each other. He pockets the can of cologne, though I’m not sure whom he’s planning on attracting in a frozen volcano crater. I wear the ratty gloves with the promise that I can use his once we start climbing in earnest. Victor, meanwhile, goes bounding out of the car like a donkey, all joints and momentum. The prospect of warmth moves me to follow him. I heave my backpack on and try to keep up.

  In a rare act of kindness, Edgardo yells after Victor to slow down.

  I am like an animal too stupid to know enough to do this myself. Like those parakeets who have to have their cages covered so they know it’s time to sleep. I don’t know it yet, but with no climbing experience and only a single day at 10,000 feet above sea level, I will most likely kill myself speed-hiking. I feel fine, almost chatty for a whole minute before my heart starts banging in earnest. I take advantage of the noise of the wind to pant as audibly as I wish. I wonder if hearts explode. I wonder if that’s a line from an Ace of Base song.

  My focus would be trained on where I was stepping regardless of weather conditions. But the current wind makes this the only option. The ground is covered in layers of thick snow that yield to a second layer of volcanic ash. It looks a bit like crumbled Oreo cookies and provides about as much resistance. This slows things down. There’s the occasional flat rock to step on, which helps, but it’s the low visibility that’s stealing the show. I see no sign of this alleged second shelter and have no idea when we’ll stop. When I shout to Edgardo, asking him where the refuge is, I am told it’s in a little place called “Tranquillo.” I can feel my heart pounding against polyester, jailed in its rib cage and trying to escape. I take my thumbs and lean them against the chest strap from the inside to relieve some of the pressure. What has two thumbs and likes to get laid? This guy! Edgardo waits about 20 feet ahead of me with one foot up on a rock, as I huff and puff to shorten the distance between us. I pretend to tie my shoe. Victor has been granted permission to go on without us. I can only imagine how that conversation went. Just go, man. I’ll deal with this out-of-shape she-cow.

  The reason I needed the water is because there is no water in the refuge. Correction: there is water in a barrel by the toilets, a short walk outside from where we’ll be spending the night, but that water is reserved for tossing down the toilet to chase your shit away. We will have to boil water and then cool it for drinking. The irony here being that one of the pipes is frozen.

  On the ground floor of the refuge, there is a large space filled with booths that look exactly like the ski trip booths of my nightmares, as well as one inexplicably padlocked cabinet filled with bottles of Fiji water. Someone or someones had to do what I just did but while carting a giant glass door on their backs. They probably had to go back down for the padlock! Now it’s taking about 10 minutes to fill one pot and there are three burners for the 15 people already established in this shelter. And by people, I mean people with penises. Barring any disrobing surprises, I appear to be the only woman here. This is a coincidence. Just last night, a guide from Seattle tells me, there were two female climbers staying at the refuge. What I can’t understand is how he would possibly know this information. There’s no evidence of it. How long has he been here? Does he live here? If he lives here, should he not have figured out how to get into the cabinet by now?

  It turns out he and his clients have been acclimatizing here at the refuge for two days, having also climbed a couple of “minor mountains” in Peru in preparation for this one.

  “That’s funny,” I say, even though it’s not. “I got here yesterday.”

  “I thought you guys just arrived,” the guide gestures at Victor.

  He is untangling a pile of ropes across the room, a whole hands-free apple in his mouth.

  “Nope,” I am still watching Victor, “nope-nope-nope … I mean in flew into Quito yesterday.”

  His eyes widen.

  He asks if I’m on a medication called Diamox that prevents altitude sickness by quickening the heart and thinning the blood. I am on no such medication. I have never even heard of it. I know that coca leaves are often chewed on Machu Picchu for holistic prevention of altitude sickness. I also know that Machu Picchu is a midget of a structure, clocking in at under 8,000 feet. What should make me wary does make me wary. But it also fills me with pride. Preventive medication is for sissies. I have the red blood cells of a goddamn sherpa.

  The idea of men pushing themselves to the limit while traveling or traveling to do just that is a familiar one. Not every man hears the call of the wild, but those who do —people like Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger — are not startled by the ringing. There is something inherently manly about climbing a mountain. Though, taken literally, that would make a deep sea dive the most feminine activity on the planet. Perhaps it’s less directly symbolic and more that mountaineering allows men to try on an ideal extension of their daily selves. Here is the prize for which they have been aiming with every beer chugged, every Super Bowl watched, every video game won, every drunken piggyback ride given to a 100-pound girl. And now it’s time to let the machismo run amuck. You’re on top of the planet! Punch something! Drink a shot of gasoline! I don’t care. For women, to be on a mountain (assuming you’re not a professional mountain climber) is not an extension of stereotypical behavior but a break from it. Thus part of a successful mountain climbing expedition is to play against the worst assumptions of the opposite sex. Do this by being okay with more or less everything. Try to avoid weeping when you feel your life may be in danger. Never refer to the pile of excrement on the outhouse floor as “icky.”

  “I can’t believe you’re climbing this after one day,” says a doctor from Baltimore, part of the Seattle hiker’s team.

  He translates for the third member of their party, a Chilean, who is so impressed he repeats the simple word.

  “Un día!”

  At which point Edgardo, having just returned from the stove with a steaming pot of ramen noodles, gives the group a wave of his finger. He proceeds to rapidly debate with the doctor’s Chilean friend.

  “He says that this is not true.” The doctor’s translation has a five-second delay. “He says you have been in Quito for a week.”

  “Who,” I grab his arm, “who said that?”

  “Edgardo,” the doctor looks at Edgardo’s mouth but speaks to me, “says you told him this.”

  “That,” I say, burrowing my stare into Edgardo’s skull, “would require him asking me.”

  I sit down on a bench and inhale as deeply as I can, which isn’t very. The city of Quito, without even trying, is at 10,000 feet above sea level. The friend who recommended I go to the skeleton painting museum is a playwright who came down with altitude sickness for 18 hours upon landing. The friend who recommended I climb Cotopaxi did not. When I recount this story weeks later over multiple sea-level glasses of wine, this second friend will remind me that he is a world traveler and Australian and that he told me climbing Cotopaxi was going to be “bloody hard.”

  “When we say something’s hard, we mean it.”

  The question now is do I have theater geek lungs or Australian lungs.

  “Tranquillo,” Edgardo puts his h
and on my shoulder, “A mix-up. All will be fine.”

  I go outside into the crisp germ-free air, remove one of my holey gloves and swallow my malaria pill with a fistful of snow. Up until now, my idea of coping with changes in atmospheric pressure was a nice big yawn. I look around at the fading outlines of the neighboring mountains around us. By now it’s almost 7 p.m. I have five hours to eat as much as I possibly can and try to sleep before we head out. This I do in silence, coming back inside and sitting at a booth across from Edgardo and Victor. There is nothing but the sound of wind and stew-slurping. My head is starting to spin a little.

  Up a flight of narrow wooden stairs are a series of Holocaust beds. I wish there was a better means of describing them but rarely have I seen something that looks so much like something else. It’s as if The Brady Bunch was filmed in Nazi Germany and we’re all spending the night on set. There’s a flurry of multilingual whisper shouting as climbing partners organize and bid each other goodnight in semi-dark. I heave my backpack onto the top of an unoccupied bunk and it bounces on the mattress.

  “I sleep downstairs,” says Edgardo, who will never explain why this is, “but I will keep my pack here.”

  “Sounds fine,” I say, fiddling with the zippers on my backpack.

  I’m not really mad at him. My predicament could have been easily avoided with some light research on my part. I know that one day I will be relieved that I had not seen a photograph of Cotopaxi prior to being located on it. Because if I had, I would never have come. I will try to remember but ultimately forget the mental horse blinders that come with feeling as sick as I feel or as sick I’m about to feel. I’ll just think: Here is something I did. But right now, looking around at the other dressed-for-the-occasion packs of climbers, I feel like I got saddled with the worst lab partner in the world.