Of the myriad incomprehensible mutterings that spew forth from Edgardo’s mouth, it is unfortunate that his paranoia about crime is not one of them. He knows how to say “watch your shit” in a variety of languages and speaks loudly. I can feel us being overheard as my bunkmates climb into their squeaky beds. I can sense them bristle in the dark as they’ve nothing to do but listen to our conversation now that they’ve settled. I worry that by sheer association with Edgardo, I will be the victim of punitive theft or molestation. The latter of which would be welcome so long as part of the molesting process included the vigorous rubbing of my feet.
“Watch my stuff,” Edgardo gestures at my borrowed backpack that also happens to have his brand new climbing helmet strapped to it. Get some sleep but also watch his stuff? Sleep with one eye open? That’s more of an expression than a possibility. I ask him how the fuck am I supposed to watch his things in my sleep and maybe he should focus a little less on beans and a little more on sleeping with his helmet on.
“And what is this?” he points at my bunk.
“What is what?”
I can’t imagine to what he’s referring. The bare mattress you’d avoid by crossing the street if you saw it in New York? He picks a small leather case from my bed. Along with my dwindling plastic bottle of water and sleeping bag, that’s all that’s up there.
“You have too many things,” he says, gesturing at my series of invisible steamer trunks.
“We need to go light,” he picks up the leather case and rattles it in my face, “Do you need this?”
“Yes.” I grab it back. “I do.”
“It goes in the backpack.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
At this point everyone in the room not magically asleep by 7 p.m. is hushed and casually listening, waiting for the squall to pass.
“Fine,” I hiss. “You want to do this? Let’s do this.”
I mumble under my breath as I open the case. My thumbs are numb. There has to be as much of a male aversion to open discussion of feminine hygiene on this continent as there is on mine. I hold up three tampons, fanning them out like cards. Or scissors. Scissors for hands. Edgardo squints at them, momentarily confounded by the foreign packaging. Recognition sets in.
“Okay, okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I snap, tampons up.
Great, now I’ve completely blown my chances at molestation. A Frenchman on the top bunk next to me starts snickering and Edgardo glares at him. The Frenchman rolls over in his sleeping bag, where he whispers to his partner on the other side. At one point in the night I shake so uncontrollably, I climb down to the ground and move the whole bunk a few inches away so as not to put his bed on “vibrate.”
•••
The following cannot be overstated: Had I known what I was getting into, the thing I would have left home with — my emotional EpiPen — is a friend. Someone I trusted. Someone I had slept with. Someone to whom I owed money and thus had a vested interest in seeing me make it off Cotopaxi in one piece. All the mountain climbing accounts I have read post-Cotopaxi seem to say the same thing: You’d be an idiot to climb a major mountain alone. More than experiencing dehydration as your crampons punch through the very substance that might otherwise hydrate you, loneliness is one of the elements. Not one of these accounts suggests the more fundamental problem. That traversing a volcano in the middle of the night might be just a little bit unwise.
There is a rip in Victor’s sleeping bag. As the night ticks on and grows colder, I want to spread the extra fleece jacket lent to me by the Seattle guide over my already layered body, maybe stick my gloved hands in the sleeve ends. But every time I move to retrieve the fleece, the sleeping bag rips a little more. The rip is cunning. It will not be tricked by me slowly lifting my knees or gradually extending an arm down from the side. Frustrated, dizzy and desperate to put my boots on and go to the bathroom, finally I just sit up. The rip shows no mercy and now runs the full length of the sleeping bag. When I return, I have to clamp it shut between my knees. I experiment with comfort, using my forearm as a pillow. But the skin exposed by being forced out of the sleeping bag gets too cold too quickly. It’s unacceptable for my hands to be anywhere but my armpits or between my legs. I think of the expression “chilled to the bone” and for the first time in my life wonder what comes after that. Chilled to the marrow? Then what? If you hit the center of the center of the center, do you just start blowing icicles out your nose and die? I think again of my apartment in July. Then I think bigger, trying to recall all the times I have stopped in front of air-conditioned stores to get a break from the thick New York heat. My goal is to convince myself that it’s too hot for sleep, that I have just kicked the comforter to the ground and a simple sheet is oppressive to my skin. I strain to hear the sound of that summer rain falling on metal.
If a beetle could survive up here, I could see its breath.
I have felt this alone before but it has always been on purpose, in a field under the New England night sky or on the one miraculously unpopulated subway car. Never have I felt alone like this, surrounded by about 10 souls also trying to make a go at unconsciousness. I sit up in a panic, clutching my own throat. I had started drifting off. This would be a good thing if I weren’t also coming down with what would later be deemed acute altitude sickness. Anyone who has ever been awake and then gone to sleep is familiar with the concept of slowed breathing. But if you’re already struggling to breathe, slipping into slumber feels like an invisible force is trying to choke the life out of you. I look around me at the occupied mattresses and sigh in a pitiable fashion. I promise that I will run six miles a day for the rest of my life if given the chance to breathe normally now. I’m dehydrated and losing iron to a little cotton finger between my legs. I remove a glove and feel my own forehead, disturbed by how good it feels to have this abnormally cold part of my body comfort this abnormally hot part of my body. Tears form and I scrunch my face to fight them back. The drips of saltwater are cool by the time they get to my mouth. I lie awake, wheeze and wait.
I start to wonder about the weight of inexperience. How much of this is ignorance and how much of this is difficulty? It feels like guessing beans in a jar. I watch the silhouette of Edgardo’s new helmet not move on the floor below. Just before midnight a dainty chorus of digital watch alarms commences. Headlamps are flicked on as, one by one, climbers yawn in Spanish and French and a few in Chinese. A normal person, and I like to include myself in this category whenever possible, might have stayed in bed at this juncture. Especially with a bit of a fever and some ilk of illness that feels akin to going on a carousel with a hangover. But staying and not staying somehow feel like the same thing.
All options delivered in the same point size.
As I come downstairs, I clutch a railing with one hand and an “I’m 23, still drunk and might throw up on the subway” plastic bag in the other. I see that the doctor and his expedition are already gone. As climbers gear up around me, I gather that conditions have been iffy. There’s a storm that could get worse. Some people are concerned about a bend in the terrain that’s particularly avalanche-prone. Unfortunately, I don’t have the mental palate at the moment to discern what “iffy” means. Not until we start our ascent.
This climb is not terribly different from yesterday’s, save for the fact that it’s pitch black and there are no distracting cookie textures. Just snow below and ice ahead. At first everything is still, the mountain equivalent of a manmade lake at night. But soon the wind starts and brings with it an especially overpowering brand of sleet. In the pitch dark, the other groups move ahead and Victor and Edgardo are forced to wait for me. I move slower than a Galápagos turtle.
“Come on, come on!” shouts Edgardo.
“I’m honestly going to kill you!” I shout back, adding a sing-songy “fuck your mother,” for my own benefit.
I count to five as I step, then start over. Also of assistance is upgrading myself from stupid parake
et to stupid kitten and following the spotlight of my own headlamp as it points down. I am, I believe, just above 16,000 feet. To be clear, around 17,000 feet is the height at which you’re liable to believe your companion is an orange and attempt to peel him. Still, I press on, somehow thinking that I can outsmart any delusions that come my way. You see, We the People of Sea Level have a tough time believing in induced insanity. You say you’re born with the sociopathic strain that compels you hold magnifying glasses above ants? Sure, fine, whatever. Be crazy. But if you are not this person, if you are regular, we will spend the rest of your life teaching you to believe in the power of your mind over your body. This belief is vital to our existence, encouraging our children not to waste their brains on drugs and aiding in the cure of all sorts of terrible depressions and debilitations. But sickness is the body’s retort to such hubris. Control was an illusion. You were having a lucid dream, friend. What the mind really is, is a Tupperware container full of leftover ramen noodles.
•••
I once sat next to a man on a plane who had climbed Everest and thus had once stood approximately 900 feet below where we sat in the air. He went with his wife, a champion mountain climber famous in Eastern Europe, as well as several professional guides. They had all the tents and oxygen tanks money could buy. Still, one never knows how one will react in an environment as inhospitable to humans as the bottom of the ocean. I imagine this is part of the thrill of mountain climbing if you are remotely experienced and already 90% sure of how you’ll respond to specific conditions. The rest is a reasonable margin for the unknown. It turns out this man’s wife had a slight bronchial infection within that margin. One thing led to another, which led to her almost choking to death on a piece of her own lung. She turned blue and had to be carried into a tent where one of the guides felt her pulse and pronounced her dead.
“I said ‘What do you mean, my wife is dead?’ and the guide said ‘She’s not breathing.’”
“What did you do?” I was enraptured.
This man and I had bonded over a crying baby and a hostile flight attendant. I leaned on our shared armrest and put my chin in my palm.
“I said ‘okay.’”
“That’s it?!”
He explained to me that the unholy trinity of exhaustion, cold and reduced oxygen can lead to extreme calm. It’s not that you can’t think straight, it’s that you can only think straight. There is no emotion, just a slow and methodical logic mirroring the crunch of your steps. One foot in front of the other. The man’s wife was not breathing which meant she was dead and he wanted to know what came next. Still, I knew some part of him must have been devastated at the idea of losing the love of his life. The part that still remembered beaches and roads and all living things.
“I might have also said ‘that’s not very good.’”
As for Cotopaxi, it is only like Everest in that it’s got snow on it and it’s higher than where you are right this second. Unless you’re reading this on an airplane. Climbing Cotopaxi is something that gets done daily. Only 1,500 people have ever climbed Everest. With the possible exception of watching an Inside the Actor’s Studio marathon, conquering Everest is the hardest thing to do on the planet.
And yet as I push forward in the dark, I imagine a colossal 747 airplane swinging by to pick me up where I stand. It takes me somewhere with hot liquids and cocoa and bobcat pelt sweaters.
At the next bend, one of the headlights ahead of me pauses and shines backwards in my direction. It waits for the distance between us to close. Edgardo’s ponytail is covered in snow.
“Okay?” he says, meaning “if the answer’s not ‘yes,’ I wash my hands of you.”
I say nothing for a second, struggling to breathe. I don’t like to go for a light jog and chat at the same time. I have no choice but to lean on my knees and wheeze. Edgardo, as if suddenly remembering that time a few hours ago when he dragged my unacclimated underdressed ass up a volcano, repeats the question with a twinge of kindness this time.
“I think my legs are bigger than my lungs,” I say.
“I don’t understand this,” he says, meaning the words I have just spoken.
“Neither do I,” I say, meaning absolutely everything else.
I last approximately 10 more minutes in the dark before I huddle over and make the volcano an offering of partially digested beans. I am not the first to puke on this mountain and I won’t be the last.
One’s instinct, when depending on something faulty, is to immediately stop depending on that thing. It only takes a moment of balancing a full-sized refrigerator on stilts to realize it’s time to put the fridge elsewhere. But to have there be no “elsewhere,” to have your body betray you, is a frightening sensation. You want an extra heart to help this one pump blood. But there is no extra heart. It’s like going through a breakup and wanting to talk about your distress with the person you just dumped.
I wipe my face with snow and tilt my head back.
Between gusts of white is a drusy black sky.
The summit will have to be stunning for everyone but me.
I am done here.
Edgardo and I aren’t the best of communicators under normal circumstances. So when, back at the refuge, I request that he rifle through the Baltimore doctor’s things to hunt for a thermometer, he is appalled. Edgardo sincerely thinks I’d like to steal from my bunkmates. Yes, that’s right. There’s a thermometer shortage so grave in the United States, the government had me fly to Ecuador and fake altitude sickness so that I might do an undercover sweep for medical supplies. Though, to his credit, it’s an ungodly hour. Who’s thinking logically in middle of the night? Had we had our heads screwed on straight, it might have occurred to one of us to crack open the first aid kid buried in the bottom of Edgardo’s backpack this entire time.
The chances of my having a fever are reasonably high, much like the fever it turns out I have. I know this because around 3:30 a.m. I ask Victor why so many people are back already. He doesn’t understand what I mean.
“The headlights,” I gesture at the wall across from my bunk, where tiny spotlights bounce up and down on the wood, “people coming up the stairs.”
“No light,” he whispers.
Although the conditions were bad enough to cut short the summit goal for many, no one returned for another hour.
“Great.” I roll over and face the empty Frenchman’s mattress. “That’s perfect.”
I think of the bees. I am lucid enough to be disappointed by my own insanity.
Among the defeated is the French hiker who gets down from his bunk no sooner than he catches his breath on it. He talks to me, telling me the occasional joke that makes me cough and muster a “Oui, c’est droll. C’est très droll.” I am in and out of the moment but never sleeping. He holds my hand for two hours straight. It’s long enough for me to think that not only is this the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me but also the kindest thing I have ever personally witnessed someone do for a stranger.
Eventually the Seattle hiker, who could have made it up Cotopaxi and back jogging had several of his teammates not wanted to turn back, marches up to me and asks to pull my finger. From the top bunk, I see all of these people as floating torsos. Amateur doctors making their rounds.
“Let me see her finger,” he says to the others.
This no time for third grade games, sir.
He clips a heartbeat monitor to my thumb.
What has two thumbs and no pulse? This girl!
My heart rate is less than enthusiastic.
“Hmmm,” he says, and I slide the monitor from my thumb.
I don’t remember anyone touching my forehead but a voice says I’m burning up.
“Okay,” I sit up, having just about had it with Cotopaxi, with being sick, with pretending that everything is okay for the sake of nothing, for some adopted testosterone-fueled notion of achievement. “Okay, what are the coldest times to go down?”
Victor lifts the top layer of his sleep
ing bag.
“Hey, there’s a rip in this!”
“Between 4 and 6,” the Seattle climber presses his watch to make it glow.
It’s 5 a.m.
In daylight, it would take me 40 minutes to get down from the mountain. In my current condition, I suspect it will take me longer than that to get down from this bunk. I decide to wait it out, getting sicker, which entails more nausea and a chill that won’t quit. Still, it’s not like I’m dying. At least that what I tell the Frenchman when he asks me if I’m dying. I have never been asked this in a sincere fashion before. I am flattered that he thinks I would know. People who push themselves to the brink of their physical limitations know what dying, if not death, would feel like. When I say something tastes like pennies or piss or shit, I don’t mean to suggest I have the literal frame of reference for these flavors. But these people — they eat shit for fun.
“J’ai peur,” I confess my fear. “Mais c’est la vie.”
Actually this is not “la vie” at all. Someone’s vie, maybe, but not my vie. Mine is not a story about the rewards of conquering one’s fears.
•••
The mountain pretends not to know what it did. At sunrise, it looks perfectly innocent, as if it has just chewed my shoe and now it wants to go for a walk. Standing outside in the quiet, waiting for Edgardo and Victor to wake up, I feel my first wave of the good kind of lonely. The backside of the refuge is perched on a cliff so that the view runs right up to my feet. Twin rainbows develop in the valleys in front of me. The contrast of green hills and snowcapped tops gives the entire region a confectionary look. The mountains look like humpback whales coming up for air. It’s all so offensively pretty. And not a sign of yesterday’s storm. You could put a feather on top of the snow and it wouldn’t blow away. For a split second, I kick myself for not having gone higher last night. Play with any puppy for long enough and you too will forget about the mastication of your footwear.
Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) Page 3