by Tim Weed
He stood below the guardaparque’s steps and announced himself. After a moment the man appeared in the doorway, a lean mestizo with an honest symmetrical face marred only when he opened his mouth by several missing teeth. Apart from a few streaks of gray hair, he’d changed little in the intervening years. “I’m here to climb the volcano,” John said in Spanish. “Do you still manage the papers?”
The guardaparque nodded, scrutinizing John’s face. “Where are the others in your party?”
“Just one other. He arrived separately. I’ll be meeting him up at the refugio, and we will come down together.”
After a few moments the guardaparque returned with a clipboard. John filled out the form in triplicate, and the man tore off the front copy and handed it back. He peered into John’s eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this? We do not recommend climbing alone.”
“I understand,” John said. “And I thank you for your concern. But you don’t have to worry.”
An hour later he was swaying uphill under a green tarp in the bed of an aging Toyota pickup. It was a strange view of the town—a tunnel-vision microcosm of human civilization receding as the Toyota labored up the access road, a deep groove of yellow earth cut between high banks that bristled with yucca and prickly pear. A tied goat watched the truck pass and bleated pitifully in its wake like an abandoned child.
At a certain point, they crossed an invisible climatological line into what South Americans call the páramo, a high-altitude plain carpeted with bright green moss and yellowish grass. The air cooled noticeably, and fast-moving tongues of fog swept over the hillsides as if preparing to devour them. At the gate marking the edge of the national park, the Toyota shuddered to a halt, and John leapt out. Resting his pack against the barbed wire, he paid the driver and watched the truck for a few moments as it began its grinding descent into town. Then he let himself through the gate and continued on foot. Ahead, shrouded by fog but an unmistakable presence nonetheless, loomed the massive broken cone of the Conchagua volcano.
The trail was quickly swallowed up by the moss, which grew like emerald-green coral, one layer atop the last, making the ground mounded and spongy, like a moonwalk. He was definitely feeling the altitude. He reminded himself of the advice once given to him by his brother Gabe, an accomplished mountaineer: take small steps and lock your knees between strides so that your skeleton bears the weight, and your muscles can rest. After an hour or more of trudging, he sat on a grass hummock to rest. The volcano was still covered, but every once in a while he glimpsed a black spur sloping violently upward, and higher still, the occasional bluish gleam of snow. He would soon run out of daylight. If the fog continued to descend it would complicate things. Not being able to see the sky made him surprisingly skittish.
Hoisting the pack, he continued uphill toward the refugio. The ground ahead was dotted with white orbs. It was odd to see mushrooms on the páramo, but when he got close enough to examine one, he discovered with a jolt that it wasn’t a mushroom at all. It was a skull, the bleached braincase of a goat or a sheep. The horns had broken off, but the upper jaw was intact, a leer of rotten teeth. “Christ,” he exclaimed, stepping back. The skull’s empty sockets seemed to stare up at him in a shockingly personal way, as if it had been placed deliberately in his path.
Heart pounding, he walked on. The entire ground was littered with bones: goats, cows, horses, another large animal that he could not identify. Skulls and vertebrae, limbs and pelvises bleached white, or more recently dead and still oily with fat. There were rib cages half-sunken like shipwrecks in the hungry pillow moss. There were teeth loosely retained in their jawbones, or scattered like dice over the bright-green mounds. He felt a strong desire not to be alone—and in the next moment, as if in answer to his wish, he heard the distant notes of a nimbly picked guitar. It was an old Grateful Dead tune, “Eyes of the World,” one of the songs in his brother’s repertoire. Relieved, he hurried on through the swirling fog.
Another hundred yards and he could make out the refugio, a squat, whitewashed cinderblock structure that looked as familiar as if he’d left it only days before. Taking a deep breath, he pushed open the metal door and stepped inside. Gabe was sitting on a camp chair with his guitar on his lap. A fire crackled in the hearth, though it didn’t seem to be throwing off much heat. The air inside the dreary building felt just as cold as the windswept páramo.
Gabe stopped playing and glanced up from the guitar with an air of good-natured annoyance. “Took you long enough.”
“Sorry about that. I had some things I needed to do.”
“I was debating whether or not I should give up on you.” Gabe looked good, lean and tanned, flushed from the mountain air. He wore a retro-pile Patagonia fleece, off-white with a black chest pocket, eighties vintage, a garment so familiar that the sight of it caused John’s throat to ache.
He went into the kitchen and laid his pack on the candlewax-spattered picnic table. Though he hadn’t eaten all day, instead of hunger he felt only a mild nausea, attributable, no doubt, to the effects of the altitude. His hands shook as he lit the propane burner and used the lever to pump water from the tap into the blackened kettle. He dug around in the side pocket of the pack for an envelope of freeze-dried tomato soup. “I assume you haven’t had dinner?” he called out. There was no answer from the other room.
When the water was ready, he mixed the contents of the envelope into two of the refugio’s chipped blue-enamel coffee cups and took them out to the lounge. He placed one beside Gabe’s chair and sat on the floor with his back to the fire, shivering. He couldn’t seem to get warm. “Do you remember what it was like up on the summit last time?” he asked, holding the hot mug with both hands to blow on the soup.
Gabe smiled fleetingly, setting down the guitar but ignoring his mug.
“It was such a clear day,” John went on. “You could see forever, remember? It was like we were literally standing on top of the world.”
Gabe nodded, his eyes shining in the firelight. “Sure, John. I remember.”
Later, unable to stop shivering, John made his way to the bunkroom. He shook out his mummy bag and climbed inside it. It was ridiculous to carry on a conversation with a person like Gabe. Still, he was determined to try.
The following morning John got out his map, and they traced out an acclimation hike. Their destination was a minor summit that showed up as a dark convergence of lines on the map perhaps an hour’s walk from the refugio. Several times as they crossed the páramo, John thought he glimpsed something overhead, a little roll or flourish in the corner of his eye, a serrated flutter in the distance like a blowing oak leaf. But when he looked up, there was never anything to see.
The minor summit turned out to be a granite pinnacle like something out of Dr. Seuss, a lopsided tower of lava festooned with knots of páramo grass. Partway up, John started to feel exposed. The fog had lowered again, and he didn’t like not being able to see the sky. There was nothing but empty air around the spire, nothing visible above or below but swirling fog. The black rock was veined with a harder, whitish stone, loops and spirals telling the story of an ancient eruption suddenly congealed. Tussocks of grass clung to a meager existence in cracks in the stone; he grabbed hold of them for support as if they were hanks of strong yellow hair. His lungs burned from the altitude, and his knees felt weak, but he forced himself to keep moving. He tried to keep Gabe’s scuffed mountaineering boots in sight as they faded into the fog above his head.
“Take a drink of water,” Gabe’s voice called down. John leaned into the steeply slanting rock and reached for his water bottle. He didn’t feel thirsty, but he unscrewed the cap and took a few swallows.
Later, pulling himself up over the edge of the summit, he collapsed on a mound of pillow moss. Gabe stood with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out at their first clear view of the snow-capped massif. In peripheral vision, John caught a glimpse of a flickering shadow circling overhead, enormous and bat-like. Groaning softly, he massaged his eyelids
with his fingertips.
“What’s the matter?” Gabe asked.
“Nothing.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
John let out his breath. “Okay. Well, yesterday, on the way up from town, I came across a bunch of skulls scattered all over the moss. Skulls and skeletons, actually, quite a few of them. It looked like some kind of slaughtering ground.”
“That sounds farfetched.”
“It’s what I saw.”
“There’s no dragon, John. I don’t know why you keep bringing it up.”
John shook his head, puzzled. “I never mentioned anything about a dragon.”
“But you were thinking it. If you think it, you don’t have to say it.”
“Okay. I’ll try not to think it.”
“Good boy. Now drink some more of your water.”
On the meandering walk back to the refugio, John stumbled upon the wreck of a vintage Cessna. The wings were gone, and, like everything else that had been resting on the páramo for a certain amount of time, the fuselage was half-consumed by pillow moss. A section of the cockpit was exposed—the glass of the windscreen long since shattered—leaving a rectangular black hole set in a background of rusting metal and emerald-green moss. Kneeling to peer into the cockpit, he sensed a fast-moving object overhead and glanced up reflexively, fear gripping his gut like a fist. But apart from blue sky and a few lingering wisps of fog, there was nothing to see. Taking a deep breath, he squinted down into the cockpit. Once again, there was nothing to see but darkness.
When they were young boys, perhaps eight and ten, he and Gabe had taken an unsupervised canoe trip on a tiny drainage canal near their home in southern New Hampshire. It had been early spring—a year of plentiful snowmelt—and the water in the canal, normally just a trickle, had been deep enough to float the canoe. The canal led downstream from their house to a culvert that passed under a frontage road. The current was fast, and coming around a curve in the stream, they saw that the brown water was being sucked powerfully into the culvert, with a gap of only about six inches between the rushing V of water and the top of the tunnel. They’d tried to back-paddle, but the water was moving too fast. Somehow they got turned sideways to the culvert. The canoe jammed up against it, the dirty water flooding into the boat, and they capsized. John was swept under and down into the culvert. He fought his way to the surface, struggling to keep his mouth above water as the current hurried him along under the gap at the top of the tunnel. It was pitch-black and freezing cold. He experienced the terror of knowing that he was going to die.
Somehow he made it through to daylight. Gabe had managed to reach the bank without getting sucked down into the culvert, and he was waiting on the other side of the frontage road to pull John to safety. John lay on the sodden bank, gasping ineffectually like a landed fish, the panic having constricted his lungs to the point that he was simply unable to process the air. “Breathe,” Gabe ordered in a calm authoritative voice, and John clung to the word as if it were a buoy. His lungs relaxed, and he started swallowing the air in great life-giving gulps. It was only then that he understood he was not going to die.
The alarm went off. John shook himself from his stupor, leaving the sleeping bag on the bunk. By the light of a headlamp, he took everything out of the pack except his crampons, an ice axe, a few extra layers, water, and a light lunch of trail mix and beef jerky.
Out in the pre-dawn chill, the rhythm of his stride worked to numb his mind, and the hours passed quickly. By the time the sky was showing the first signs of dawn, he’d arrived at the wall of dirty ice marking the lower edge of the snowcap. His hands shook as he fumbled with the crampons. He was concerned that he would lose contact with Gabe, who—with his usual invincibility—had continued on toward the summit.
As day broke on the snowfield, John ascended through a spectrum of unearthly colors, from moon-blue to milky gold to an intense, foggy whiteness that hurt his eyes. He was struggling for breath, his muscles feeble and shaky in the altitude. The truth was, he hadn’t spent enough time acclimating. Every step jarred his skeleton, worsening a pulsing headache that was like the tolling of a cracked bell.
When the fog lifted, he finally remembered to put on his sunglasses. The mountain was a geometrical abstraction: a steep angle of bright white against a pure background of electric blue. John, exhausted, had no choice but to rest. He used the axe to hack a shelf in the nearly vertical snow slope that he could use as a kind of bench. He unscrewed a water bottle and took a little swallow, and as he screwed the cap back on, he was nearly overcome by nausea. Determined to press on, he made himself stand and shrugged on the pack without losing his balance. But the effort left him depleted. He stood in place for a long moment, swaying dangerously and gritting his teeth against the dizziness, before he was ready to move.
He resumed the climb, step by step, using the axe and the teeth of the crampons to keep from sliding to his death. In the corner of his eye he kept glimpsing shadows—dark flickers and rolling flourishes. A knot of dread lodged like a swallowed pinecone in his esophagus, and it took all his concentration to keep himself from vomiting.
At the summit, he stood on the edge of the corniced crater. The day was clear enough, though not as crystalline as that previous day. A few of the neighboring volcanoes were visible to the north and south, perfect snow-covered cones rising from the yellowish haze. To the east, beyond the crater, lay the jungle lowlands of the Amazon Basin, an endless dark-green carpet stretching out to the horizon. Overcome with emotion, he sank to his knees, then sat on the snow. Everything was fine. He’d done it.
The bus sped along a narrow highway hugging the sides of the Andean foothills that cradled the chaotic ugliness of the outer barrios of Quito. From his seat in the front of the bus, John took in the grim scenery: the garbage-choked ravines, the rivers brown with silt and sewage, the squalid shacks of rusted tin and unpainted cinderblock clinging to gray hillsides long since stripped of trees and clawed by unchecked erosion into deep, barren gullies. To his right the land fell away abruptly. In places the shoulder of the road had collapsed, leaving huge bite marks of missing asphalt the driver had to swerve to avoid.
The driver was reckless, whistling to himself as he took the curves at maximum speed. John glanced across the aisle to Gabe, who was gazing out the window with his usual calm. “What do you think of this driver?” he asked.
Gabe turned his head slowly. His face had an alarmingly vague appearance: a strange, blurred lack of definition, like a photograph taken with a waterlogged lens. John swallowed. “Never mind.”
Gabe shrugged and turned back to the window. It was another clear day. To the west they had a good view of some of the volcanoes—not Conchagua, but the broken, crevasse-wrinkled snowcap of Antisana, and to the north and south, the distant white cones of Cayambe and Cotopaxi. For Gabe, mountains had always trumped cities. Unspoiled wilderness was his creed, providing a deeper and more encouraging reality than the garbage-strewn human mess sliding by outside the bus window. Gabe’s worldview was immensely appealing to John, even if—in his own mind—he’d never quite been able to make it stick.
The driver hawked and spat into a soda can. A bus from the same transportation company passed going the other way, and the driver took his hand off the wheel to wave—which might be a problem, John thought, with a sudden surge of adrenaline, because they were coming up to a sharp left curve and the ravine to their right fell away so abruptly that there was nothing beneath them but empty air. He gripped the metal bar in front of the seat, pressing his foot to the floor in search of the nonexistent brakes. He called out a warning in Spanish as they barreled into the curve. The driver recovered himself just in time. The real brakes squealed and the bus rocked sickeningly from side to side before recovering.
John let out his breath. The driver gave him a madcap grin in the rearview, and John shook his head. Gabe, too, was holding on to the metal bar in front of his seat, but he didn’t seem concerned. His attention was still bent
on the distant peaks, the snowcaps like piles of pure confectioner’s sugar beneath an electric-blue sky. John stared at them for a moment, trying to fix their profiles indelibly in his mind. It was a relief to have made the climb, and to have come away with Gabe at his side, despite all the omens and dire premonitions.
Suddenly Gabe leaned forward in his seat, as if to look more closely at something outside the window. Then John spotted it: a small, airborne figure approaching from the direction of the volcanoes. It looked like a hawk or a vulture, except that it moved with a strange flickering wing-beat. John watched in horror as the figure grew larger and larger, the great flapping wings webbed and charred-looking, and then the long black head. The creature was not at all what he’d been expecting—less like a lizard, more like a kind of demented, predatory horse.
It swooped down and hovered over the bus, close enough to block out the sun, and cast a pulsating cloak of shadow over the road. John called out to Gabe. Gabe turned to look at him, only it wasn’t Gabe at all. It was only a city-bound campesino, with mocha skin and wind-chapped cheekbones, and black uncomprehending eyes beneath a battered pork-pie hat.
STEAL YOUR FACE
MY BROTHER Josh rolls into town on his way to a Dead show in Portland, Maine. He’s three years older than I, a modern gypsy with a tie-dyed scarf wrapped around his skull and a gold hoop earring that glints red in the light of a highway sunset or a concert stage. He’s been following the Dead for the better part of two years from his moveable home, a sky-blue Volkswagen camper-bus with a Steal Your Face painted on the front panel, the VW symbol replacing the lightning bolt in the skull’s oversized forehead.
He’s packing a sheet of cartoon acid and offers to take me along for the ride. Before I know it I’m tripping my brains out in the middle of a dancing crowd, the bassline shaking the floor and Jerry Garcia’s carnival-messiah voice filling the air of the Portland Coliseum. Josh has melted into the crowd, but it doesn’t matter because we’re all one here, everybody moving to the music in perfect synchrony like a school of tie-dyed fish.