by Dina Bennett
Sweet incense as I enter the spa immediately calms me, as does the polite, “Yes madam, we can do a massage right now.” Sangita is assigned as my savior, a middle-aged woman with a sumptuous black braid, strong-looking hands, and kind eyes. She leads me to a room that’s a cross between an operating arena and the J. Peterman catalog. It’s warmly clinical, with teakwood and brass appurtenances surrounding a surgical-looking massage table standing on ivory tile. Checking to be sure there are no trays of scalpels or sutures nearby, no IV stands or beeping monitors, I arrange myself facedown on the table and Sangita starts her massaging.
Right from the beginning I notice she’s inordinately fond of oil. No moderate skin lubrication for her, no timidity about unguents. She’s splashing so much oil onto my back and legs that I imagine her squirting great gulps of it onto her palm from a fifty-gallon drum. After rotating me onto my back and repeating the oil bath on my flip side, she asks if I’d like the head and face massage too. Already as slick as a newly caught trout, I become almost faint at the thought of what that might mean.
Ever since landing at Indira Gandhi Airport in Delhi, I have been captivated by Indian women’s hair. It is the most beautiful, the most lustrous, the thickest hair I have seen. Most of the time it’s worn long and braided. I too have long hair, but mine is somewhat fine, though there’s lots of it. Throughout our trip I’ve been weaving it into one long plait, reveling in the thought that I’m aligning myself just a little closer with the local women. But who am I kidding? My hair doesn’t come close to theirs. I ache to know the secret that makes theirs so lush.
I have read that head massage, called champi, reduces mental and emotional stress, and relieves headaches, depression, and insomnia. I’m not bothered by any of these maladies and have ground my teeth ever since I had any without any latent side effects. But I am fascinated with claims that champi activates hair follicles and stimulates proper hair growth. Legends say it was developed thousands of years ago as a grooming technique by women who used it to strengthen and improve the fullness of their hair by massaging pressure points on the scalp. Some even says that the word champi is the root from which our word shampoo is derived.
My current smothering in oil should have been a hint at what lay in store, though perhaps my oil-suffocated pores are preventing oxygen from reaching my brain. Regardless, I am oblivious to the clues, swayed instead by a desire to have pressure points on my scalp, wherever they might be, massaged.
“Yes,” I tell Sangita, “a head massage sounds great.”
“With oil or without oil?”
I ignore the red flag. “With.”
Sangita encourages me to slide closer to the top of the table. Turning my head left and right and then lifting it up, she manages to scoop all of my hair out from under me so she has full access to every strand. Then, silence. I have no idea what’s in store for me. I fight the urge to rise on my elbows to see if she might be stealthily wheeling her fifty-gallon oil drum closer. The more seconds tick away the more nervous I get.
Suddenly, I hear a chair scrape behind my head and I realize she’s back. Sangita settles herself in. Without so much as a “Hold on, here it comes,” she sections off a goodly portion of hair at my forehead and pours what feels like a cup of coconut oil onto it.
Simultaneous to the pouring, she starts gently but firmly massaging the oozing, unctuous thickness of it into my scalp and through the long strands of my hair.
My first thought: Ah, oil overdosing is the secret of the beautiful hair of Indian women. And then: Oh god, this is going to make me gag. Finally: How can I keep from launching myself from prone to vertical and throwing up?
This is where experience with carsickness comes in handy. I give myself a stern talking to about traveling for the novelty of experience. I practice a few moments of meditation to calm myself, remembering Confucius’s dictum—“Wherever you go, go with all your heart”—and talking my heart rate and blood pressure off the ledge. I let out the deep breath I hadn’t realized till then I’d been holding. In a Zen-like moment that I have to say I’m proud of, I accept the situation for what it is and decide to go with the flow.
What’s flowing is a truly limitless quantity of oil. Over the course of fifteen minutes, Sangita repeats the pour/massage series six times. A quick calculation (I’m not so Zen-like that I’m above keeping track) shows she’s used at least three cups of oil and massaged every drop into every strand of hair attached to my scalp. But with so much oil on everything, Sangita can barely get purchase on her turf, let alone dig in. Abandoning my scalp, her oil-slicked fingers wend their unwelcome way inside my ears, pressing and tugging my lobes. Oil from her cupped palms drenches my face, where more pressure points are pressed to make my body relax.
The experience is so slimy I become tense. The tension leaves me flustered. The more flustered I feel the more miffed I get. Confucius’s wisdom vanishes along with any benefits of the earlier massage. I can’t wait for this to be over.
When Sangita finally declares herself finished, I mumble thank you and stumble toward the locker room, leaving splotches of oil in my wake like one of those ancient cars on the P2P. My head does not feel good. I suspect I look like Medusa, with heavy ropes of oily hair hanging from my head like serpents. I know that spa treatments can only do so much for me, of course. Dirty or clean, scowling or smiling, patient or frustrated, I am who I am. After this one, I am also as slick as ice melting on a hot day. I head for the showers, turn the tap to hot, and step under the forceful jet of water. Lifting my face to the steaming water, I close my eyes and empty a full bottle of shampoo on my head, letting the heat and soap and water work the oil out of my scalp, my ears, my face. When I emerge, it’s a relief that not only can I now turn my head, but when I look in the clouded mirror I can see I’m still me.
Knees
EL CHALTéN, ARGENTINA, 2008
It’s the Patagonian Anti-Rally, and I have dabbled my toes in Argentina’s Atlantic waters, proof to myself that I have made it as far as I can go, and that penguins really are robust if they can enjoy swimming in such frigid water. Our Nissan jalopy has benefited from a sorely needed tune up and now is deemed ready to carry us westward from the penguin heaven of Río Gallegos. It’s time to head back to the lower Andean chain.
As soon as we merge onto the highway out of Río Gallegos, we’re suffused with that good feeling of driving again, speaking as it does of obstacles surmounted and new places awaiting us. We’re fast approaching Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, which is home to a mountain—no a basalt spire—so unique in form and so devilishly difficult to climb that, like Prince or Bono, it’s known the world over by its unadorned name, Fitz Roy, needing no embellishment of “summit,” “peak,” or “mountain” for people to know what you’re talking about. Named after Captain Robert FitzRoy of Darwin’s HMS Beagle, it was only climbed for the first time in 1952, just a year before Mount Everest. Though it’s less than half the size of Himalayan giants, its sheer granite face is often obscured by violent storms, making it a treacherous peak to summit. In mountaineering annals, it’s fabled for such long stretches of arduous technical climbing that only the most experienced climbers attempt it; the first to make it to the top were the Frenchmen Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone. It looks like a thin, elliptical spaceship that’s crash-landed nose first into a series of spiky gray teeth. In this era when a hundred people may summit Everest in a single day, it’s a successful year on Fitz Roy when one alpinist makes it to the top.
My strange connection to Fitz Roy has everything to do with my father, a refugee from the Holocaust, who, in fleeing his home in Vienna in 1938, took to the Austrian Alps as an escape route. Even after my sister and I were born, and despite building his own engineering design firm and working hard during the year, he always took time off to regenerate his spirit in the mountains. Once his company was successful and stable, he allowed himself the luxury of extended mountaineering trips through Uganda’s Ruwenzoris, Nepal’s Himalayas, Peru�
��s Andes, and of course the beloved Austrian and Italian Alps of his youth. My mother supported these endeavors by staying home with us two girls. I was still young then and admittedly oblivious to what my father was doing when he wasn’t at home.
In some ways, I was the son my father did not have, a moderately fearless tomboy who loved to make my father proud. On summer weekends he taught me how to balance on unstable rocks, to cross a river on a slippery log, to find my way back through the woods by checking what the view looked like behind me. He enrolled me in rock climbing courses on the white cliffs of the Shawangunk Mountains in upstate New York, encouraged me to learn ice climbing with a famous mountaineer in Switzerland, sent me on a five-week wilderness expedition in Wyoming’s Wind River Range with the National Outdoor Leadership School. He showed me how to form my new leather hiking boots to my feet by making them wet and wearing them till they dried, and he trained me to carry a heavy pack by filling it with four gallon-jugs of water, which I slung over my shoulders every time I went up or down our staircase at home. My father was innovative in his thinking of what girls could and should do, at a time when junior high school still had a dress code stipulating that girls could wear pants only if the temperature were 10 degrees or lower. I don’t want to sound like I’m Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie. I was growing up outside New York City in the late 1960s, a time for gender bending if ever there was one. Even so, what seems like nothing now was a big deal then, especially since at that time Roe v. Wade was visible on the horizon, but not yet law.
Though I knew little about his mountaineering escapades during my youth, his trip to Patagonia took place when I was an adult, so I was well aware how Fitz Roy utterly mesmerized him. By that time, he was in his seventies and able only to walk to Fitz Roy’s base. Still, when he talked about it, showed me photographs he’d taken, his voice took on a different tone, one of awe, of respect—of love. Its pull seemed magnetic, and at first incomprehensible, given the gorgeous landscapes he’d seen. Yet there was no escaping that he adored this peak, was smitten by its even gray pallor, its wild winds, its uncompromising thrust to the heavens. I had long thought that if a mountain could hold an experienced mountaineer and traveler like my father so entirely in its thrall, I needed to see it for myself. Despite attempting to schedule a trip here several times over the past fifteen years, I’d never been able to manage it. Now, I had a plan.
As we drive toward El Chaltén, what I survey from my car window makes it abundantly clear that Parque Nacional Los Glaciares is home not only to Fitz Roy, but to all that is sparkling and beautiful in the world of glaciated peaks. The entire landscape lives and breathes glaciers, interspersed with jeweled turquoise and green lakes. It is easily the most magnificent scenery Bernard and I have ever seen. Now that we’re back in hiking country after two weeks along the Patagonian coast, and with my dream of standing at Fitz Roy’s base about to become reality, it’s time to assess The Toe. I’ve babied Biggie for weeks now, obediently swallowed antibiotics, applied antiseptic salves, rebandaged it morning and evening. It’s improved enough that I can sleep through the night without it waking me up. And if anything were guaranteed to banish negative thoughts, it’s my first view of Fitz Roy. We round a corner on the highway and there it is, its great gray slab face silhouetted unmistakably against an immaculate blue sky. I’ve imagined for so many years what it would be like to see it, that when it finally is visible on the horizon, majestic and stunning, I’m overwhelmed.
I can’t come up with anything eloquent with which to commemorate the moment. “There it is,” I say to Bernard. “Fitz Roy.” Tears spring to my eyes as I accept that, since my father died four years ago, it is too late to let him know I’m finally here.
We set out for Fitz Roy the very next morning, and immediately get lost. We know the peak is there. We know we are stumbling along trails that should lead to it. But we can’t get there. Still, I refuse to let go of my good mood. After all, I’m hiking for the first time in weeks and my magical mountain is nearby. Somewhere.
After several hours of tripping and slipping over lichen-covered roots, we stop to pore over the map together. We’re in a moss-hung forest that obscures all landmarks, whereas we should be traversing open meadows and seeing scree fields. After some head scratching we decide we’re on a trail taking us opposite of where we should be going. But where’s the right trail? And why is this a question that someone who’s navigated over 7,800 miles even needs to ask?
We turn around, Bernard striding in front, me falling further behind. Having refused on principal to wear my knee brace and having left my walking sticks in the car for the same reason that has everything to do with stubborn pride and nothing to do with logic, I walk gingerly, intent on not bashing my toe against any rocks, and nursing my unstable knee over uneven terrain. Already my quest to the base of Fitz Roy, to see what my father saw, has taken on outsized importance. This is never a good thing with me, as in such situations I lose all grasp of reason and stick to my original idea long past the time when anyone could find stubbornness attractive. Or useful.
After an hour or so of backtracking, modified by some creative bushwhacking related to where we think the proper trail should be, we find ourselves in a treacherous field of monstrous boulders, tossed there like marbles by a playful giant during some distant glacial ice age. They’re almost close enough to each other to hop from one to the next, if one were well-balanced and strong, which I’m not. “I think this’ll get us to the right place,” Bernard says, and is off like the mountain goat I used to be, springing blithely from one to the next.
“But wait, wait,” I yell into the wind. “I can’t do this.” Abandoned, I slide down a boulder on my backside, stumble across the loose scree, and clamber up the next. And so we go, Bernard sprightly, me on hands, knees, and butt, until I’m too aggravated to continue.
“Dina, stay where you are,” I hear from somewhere far ahead. Not that at that point I am even moving. I see Bernard bounding back in my direction. “I’ve found it. There’s a huge river up ahead,” he tells me. “It’s raging. It looks like the trail’s on the other side,” he finishes brightly. He is so pleased with himself that I want to slap him.
“Well, can we get across?”
He hems and haws. “I don’t think so. Maybe you want to come see?” Bernard surely can make the decision of whether we can cross on his own. But he seems to want me by his side, which is something I try hard never to refuse. Pushing myself up from my rock perch, we set off. Now Bernard stays with me, giving me a hand from one slick boulder to the next, till we come to an abrupt halt in front of frigid silver rapids rushing headlong from glaciers cleverly hidden above the placid green lakes we passed on our drive to what we thought was the trailhead.
“Bernard, there’s no way we can cross this. It’s too wild. Did you see a bridge anywhere?”
“No. Sorry.”
I survey left and right, hoping I might see a crossing, even one of those slippery trunks that in days of yore I was able to cross like a circus acrobat. There’s no bridge in sight.
I slump on the grass by the river’s edge. “Here I am, Little Miss Navigator who’s guided you halfway around the world, and I can’t even tell what direction we should be going.” My voice cracks; I hate admitting defeat. Bernard peers at me sorrowfully. My profound disappointment is upsetting both of us. This won’t do. Aside from not finding my special peak, it’s a glorious day, with sun, a breeze, tiny yellow flowers growing around me, and close by enough cold water to slake even the most outrageous thirst.
I peel a tangerine and offer some sections to Bernard, wiping a sly tear from the corner of one eye, which I pretend is a spurt of tangerine acid. I put on a weak grin as I chew. This is a trick I learned from a gruff professor in college who offered me some sage advice: Even if you’re angry or unhappy, when you smile it changes your tone of voice and you come across as cheerful. And pretty soon you feel cheerful, too. “So,” I continue, looking for a
way to turn the situation around. “We are not going to get to Fitz Roy today.” Bernard chews and nods. “For one thing, I can’t leap about on these rocks anymore. Not without my brace,” I confess, though it bruises my ego to admit it. “But, there’s a bright side,” I say, and now my smile is genuine. “We’re here for three days, so we have time to come back for another try. Which is great! No?”
The way Bernard gapes it’s as if he’s suddenly noticed Yoda sitting next to me. I know what he must be thinking: Who is she kidding? For three hours she’s barely been able to walk for stumbling. He opens his mouth to voice his doubts, then decides against it. Though I’m trying to present a cheery exterior, Bernard knows me too well. He can tell from my eyes that I am crestfallen. He puts his arms around me and I sag into his chest, choking back a sob. “Come on,” he says, rubbing my back gently. “Let’s head for the car and we’ll figure out what to do next.” What I’d like to do next is cry, if only to indulge for a good long moment my setbacks on this trip, to give due recognition to the disappointments and to how I’ve braved them, even if only in my modest way. But since I’ve never fully revealed to Bernard how long I’d wanted to see Fitz Roy, he can’t know that years’ worth of planning is on the verge of being shattered. My disappointment is my own, and that’s how I’ll have to bear it.