Cross-Country Mirage

My last post was an earlier version of the first half of this essay. I wanted to post a newer draft in its entirety so that the whole essay can be read in context. One of goals in this essay was to experiment with an opinionated, not-always-sympathetic narrator. Some people were a little put off by the narrator’s comments and that was my intention, to some degree. She is spinning her own reality and is caught up in her personal experience. The rest continues after the jump.

                                                         Cross-country Mirage

We’re flying down Route 66 through northwest Texas and the windshield is thick with bug juice. Actually, we’re humming, not flying, because Olivia got a $200 speeding ticket outside of Tulsa yesterday. And it’s not really 66: it’s I-40. We’re only running parallel to 66, passing exits and open country.  The dusty roadsides in Oklahoma grew redder in Texas and the air spun with long-limbed windmills, like Quixote’s giants. Now the roadside is sandier, flatter, and because this is my first time in the desert, I’m trying to take in everything. The bugs are a problem though. Water and wipers have no effect and Olivia leans over the steering wheel, squinting through the goo.

In Tucumari, New Mexico, half an hour over the border from Texas, we pull off at a lonely Phillips 66. It’s evening already and 220 miles still lie between us and Santa Fe, where we’ll stay for the night. The sky is a pastel fire of pink and periwinkle. It strikes me as a perfect O’Keefe sunset. I realize I’ve never seen an O’Keefe sunset- did O’Keefe paint sunsets?- but we are newly in the Southwest, only 40 miles into New Mexico, and I look for her touch in everything.

Cathy fills the tank, Olivia stretches, and I try to scrape the windshield clean. The guts smear together but I focus on the driver’s side and eventually clear a panel large enough for Olivia to see through. It should be enough to get us from place to place.

Inside, we sit at a table in the mini market but we don’t buy anything because we are college students.  We had stocked up on non-perishables before setting out and we keep them in a plastic bag in the back seat of the car so we don’t have to stop for food while driving. Tonight, I use Olivia’s pocket knife to saw through tin and pry open two tuna cans. Cathy grabs handfuls of salt, pepper, mustard and mayonnaise from the deli section, and we make barely edible sandwiches. There are a few Triscuits for flavor and a can of Dole pineapple rings for dessert.

We munch our food and Cathy pushes spilled pepper on the table around in circles.

“You guys want ice cream?” she says. Olivia and I shrug. We made rules about spending too much money and consuming too many calories, and two days ago we had Mile High Pie in a roadside café in Indiana. That burst of meringue and fluffy coconut cream carried us through 100 more featureless miles, but it was an indulgence, and accordingly, there will be no ice cream tonight. Olivia sees a map on the wall behind us and rushes over. It is a large map of the U.S., the borders highlighted and the states veined with all major highways and interstates.

“Look how far we’ve come!” Olivia says. She and Cathy identify our origin and current location, and I snap a picture: Cathy points to Hanover, New Hampshire, midway up the state, and Olivia finds the rough location of our gas station just west of the border in Tucumari, New Mexico. Only now, with all the states jumbled up against each other like this do I see the enormity of the distance. It is incredible, the space between their fingers. We have traveled over 2100 miles, three-quarters of the country, in only four days.

Route 66

This is only the beginning of an essay I'm working on, about a road trip and the experience of reconciling expectations with actuality. 

We’re flying down Route 66 and the windshield is thick with bug juice. Actually, we’re chugging, not flying, because Olivia got a $200 speeding ticket outside of Tulsa yesterday. And it’s not really 66, it’s I-40. We’re only running parallel to 66, passing exits and open country.  The dusty roadsides in Oklahoma grew redder in Texas and the air spun with long-limbed wind mills. I watched them swoosh past and enjoyed the Quixotic reference- that our journey was punctuated with windmills gave it a sense of the epic. Moments ago, we realized that the passenger window is not, in fact, tinted, and that all of our staring and mugging at truck drivers has been perfectly observed. The bugs are a problem though- water and wipers have no effect- and Olivia leans over the steering wheel squinting through the gooey carcasses.

In Tucumari, New Mexico, half an hour over the border from Texas, we pull off at a Phillips 66. It’s evening already; 220 miles still lie between us and Santa Fe, where we’ll stay for the night. The sky is a pastel fire of pink and periwinkle. It strikes me as a perfect O’Keefe sunset. I realize I’ve never seen an O’Keefe sunset. Did O’Keefe paint sunsets? But we are newly in the Southwest, only 40 miles into New Mexico, and I look for her touch in everything.

Cathy fills the tank, Olivia stretches, and I try to scrape the windshield clean. The guts smear together but I focus on the driver’s side and eventually clear a panel large enough for Olivia to see through. It should be enough to get us from place to place.

We sit at a table in the mini market, but we don’t buy anything because we are college students.  We used the last of our winter semester dining money to buy non-perishables from the campus convenience store and we generally feed ourselves with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, goldfish, Oreos, and granola bars. Tonight, we match this forlorn pit stop with an appropriately dismal dinner. I use Olivia’s pocket knife to saw through tin and pry open two cans of tuna. Cathy grabs handfuls of salt, pepper, mustard and mayonnaise from the deli section, and we make barely edible sandwiches. There are a few Triscuits for flavor and a can of Dole pineapple rings for dessert.

 “This is such a sad dinner,” Cathy says.

“Well, the wings at Hooters last night weren’t free,” Olivia says.

“I can’t believe we went to Hooters,” I say. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Part of the experience though, right?” says Olivia.

“Mhh-hmm.”

Cathy swallows the last of her tuna. “What if we get ice cream? We can all split a small container. Ice cream? We should get it… right? Guys…?”

Olivia and I shrug. We had mile-high pie two days ago at a café somewhere in the southwest corner of Indiana, and then the Hooters stop yesterday in downtown Tulsa, and the Oreos in the car. Really, there’ve been a lot of calories, come to think of it. And not much physical movement. We don’t give her an answer, so Cathy munches a Triscuit and pushes the spilled pepper on the table around in circles. Olivia sees the map on the wall behind us and rushes over. It is a large map of the U.S., the borders highlighted and the states veined with all major highways and interstates.

“Look how far we’ve come!” Olivia says. She and Cathy search the miniscule names of towns, trying to make out our route. When they’ve identified our origin and current location, I snap a picture: Cathy points to Hanover, New Hampshire, midway up the state, and Olivia finds the rough location of our gas station just west of the border in Tucumari, New Mexico. Only now, with all the states jumbled up against each other like this do I see the enormity of the distance. It is incredible, the space between their fingers; we have traveled over 2100 miles.

We are doing the obligatory college road trip shotgun style because spring break is short and Olivia has to sign a lease on her apartment in LA. We allow six days for the 3000 mile trip. We book the cheapest motels in the big cities along the way: Cincinatti, St. Louis, Tulsa, Santa Fe, Williams and Las Vegas. We set aside a couple of hours to wander each city, and allot the better part of a day to the Grand Canyon and the Vegas strip.  None of us has read On the Road and although I don’t yet have these words to describe it, the absence of the Moriarty spirit makes me uncomfortable. I’m excited to cross the country and ready to give in to adventure and youthful abandon. We plan our trip sitting in a campus café; we divide the cities amongst us and are each responsible for lodging and sights in the area. I want to know if we’ll have a little time to make detours, to follow signs leading out of town to some bit of Americana. But Cathy and Olivia want to make sure we stay on schedule and make it to our reserved rooms each night: we’ll stick to the highway. They print out detailed turn-by-turn instructions from the internet to make sure we don’t stray from the path.

We leave the drained, March cold of Hanover for New Haven, Connecticut and spend our first night at Olivia’s house. In the dim, early hours of the next morning we stuff our bags into the car; Cathy and I are allowed only one a piece since the car is filled to bursting with Olivia’s possessions. She’s moving to Culver City, California for six months to intern in the film world. This trip is a just perk of the necessary relocation.

From New Haven we drive through New York, Pennsylvanian, West Virginia, and end in Cincinnati, Ohio. I sleep through most of it, waking only to take a picture in front a hunting- orange billboard advertising a Gun Show in Columbus. A Gun Show. That’s how far we’ve come from our liberal undergraduate bubble. Cincinnati is mostly empty on this Monday night; we sample beers at a brewery and ward off a man called Silver who wears his pants below his butt and says, “Hey, where you beauties from?” He reads Cathy’s sweatshirt and says, “Dart-mowth? Where the heck is Dart-mowth. Ahh com’on ladies, lemme take you around, I’ll show you a real good time.” We return to our $38 dollar a night hotel on the outskirts of the city and think we’ve had quite an adventure, our first day on the road.

Day Three is shorter; we hook north to skirt Indianapolis, then dip south again into Missouri. We spend St. Patrick’s Day 2009 eating cheap pizza in St. Louis because we can’t find an Irish pub, or any bar, with people in it. We rise early and spend a beautiful day around St. Louis, deciding to stay longer here and sacrifice time in Tulsa. We wonder what there is to see in Tulsa anyway. We stand under the arch, but do not go up. We ramble through mazes and airplanes at the City Museum and are thrilled by the vintage clothing store on the top level where we play dress up for hours. Olivia and Cathy buy crazy, bold print shirts and dresses, because they are hip kids who can pull off funkiness. Only a solid green blazer from the ‘50s fits me; I must conclude that 5’11” girls with broad hips and shoulders did not live in “vintage” times.

It’s a longer leg to Tulsa, 400 miles of pavement and featureless countryside. This is when we enter God’s country. We are shocked by the Got Jesus? and Abortion kills a beating heart billboards. This is crazy, Olivia and Cathy say in outrage, these people are crazy. The speeding ticket, given by a humorless cop two hours before Tulsa, erases any of the giddiness with which we drove and sang along to ‘90s hits, and we pass the flat, fields in silence. Once in the city, we are grouchy and hungry and Hooters is the only place still open at 10:00 pm.  We go in, feeling dirtier just by letting the bearded men in trucker hats stare at us. They must be staring out of curiosity, I think, not lust, because we are rumpled in sweatpants and there are half a dozen Hooters girls sauntering around.

Our waitress is uncomfortable, sensing that we did not come here for the sensual pleasure of a simpering young woman. We are hungry only in the most literal, gastronomic sense. She is a role-player suddenly in the wrong play and she is a poor improviser. She asks where y’all headed? We say LA, and her eyes light up cause she’s planning on heading there someday soon to be an actress. She smiles a sad smile and she knows and we know she’s never leaving Tulsa. We eat our wings in silence. Sauce drips down the D’s on our on our sweatshirts and the waitress brings us more water. The men slurp their beers. The waitress moves more slowly now, partly because it is the end of the night, and partly because she knows and we know that we are leaving Tulsa, we are going to LA, we are students, dreamers, achievers.

From Tulsa we drop to Oklahoma City where we pick up I-40, and from here on out we are in Joad territory. Checotah, Dewar, Henryetta, Shamrock, Amarillo, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, Gallup, Holbrook, Winslow, Flagstaff, Kingsman… Exit signs announce the towns, a short detour off the highway and I think of that Ford Model T loaded with grampa and granma, and Ruth and Winnie, and Al and Tom, and Casey and Uncle John, and Rosasharn and Connie, and Ma and Pa, all of them bumping along this country. Twelve people in that truck, traveling west to the peach fields, just trying to get somewhere that’s green.

I have spent the previous two months living in Ma Joad’s skin, bringing her to life every night on stage in the college’s production of The Grapes of Wrath.  I have read and reread Steinbeck’s words. I have memorized every wrinkle, every curve and plane in the Migrant Mother’s face. I know those Okies organized rabbit round ups, tracking down every hare in the area because there was nothing else to eat. I know Okie is a terribly insensitive word and I shouldn’t use it casually. I feel I’ve read everything there is to know about the Dust Bowl, The Depression, the westward migration. I have fallen in love with Ma; I wonder if a stronger woman ever lived. I lose track of where I end and she begins. My soul feels old when I speak her words and I, with her, cry my sadness into the Colorado River. My own mother comes to see the play and says it was a fine production, but it was difficult to look past my youthful skin and shiny hair and picture a bent, weathered woman who has seen too much of the world. I take this as a sign that I have failed as an actor. But living with Ma for two months teaches me strength, and I clutch Dorthea Lange’s image to my chest each night, and hide it in the folds of Ma’s apron during the show, to help conjure this woman who shepherded her brood across the country.

I am strung up with excitement, tickled to my core by the coincidence of my own westward venture. So soon after my immersion in Ma’s life, I am actually retracing her steps. I burn each day to see more, to witness the town where granma died, where Noah took to his own, where Tom fled. This feels meaningful; this is important and has come full circle and I, like Ma, am sliding down Route 66, crossing the southwest toward California.  I do not know what I hope to find on this road. But I press my face to the glass in hopes that some mirage of Ma will appear.

Beyond the Postcards

This is the first meandering draft of a piece I'm working on about Torres Del Paine....

Beyond the Postcards

In 1878, a British noblewoman named Lady Florence Dixie grew tired of her aristocratic life in England, and decided to set out for the wild, unexplored land of Patagonia. In her 1880 book, Across Patagonia, she describes her party’s trek across the scrubby Patagonian steppe; their enthusiastic hunts for guanacos- a relative of the llama- and ostrich; their discovery of glittering glacial lakes; and most memorable, their journey to the base of the peculiar and magnificent “Cleopatra Needles.” Of this particular expedition, she writes,

A glance showed us that we were in a new country…The background was formed by thickly-wooded hills, behind which towered the Cordilleras,- three tall peaks of a reddish hue, and in shape exact facsimiles of Cleopatra’s Needle, being a conspicuous feature in the landscape…we still directed our march towards the three Cleopatra peaks rising out of the snow glaciers far ahead of us.

The needle to which she refers was an ancient Egyptian obelisk transported to London and erected only months before she set off for Patagonia. The geographical feature she describes is a trio of red granite spires that soar over 8000 feet, better known today as Los Torres del Paine. Today, the same towers that Lady Florence first stumbled upon in 1879 are the most recognizable and visited feature in all of Patagonia.

The Torres, which translates to towers, are the main attraction of the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, and lure tens of thousands of visitors a year to southern Chile, on the desolate tip of South America. Backpackers load their packs and bus two hours in from the nearest town, Puerto Natales, across the featureless pampas to trek through the park, and, like Lady Florence, marvel the awe-inspiring towers.  The spires are seen on travel book covers around the world; dreamt of by adventurers and climbers; immortalized by countless artists.

The dusty well-trod path leading from the park’s entrance to the towers feels like a cattle-chute some days, when the weather is mild, and throngs of day-trippers shuffle up and back down the six-mile hike to the Torres lookout. Serious trekkers plan longer stays, completing the five-day “W” loop, or the eight-day “Circuit” of the park which takes them on the far side of the Torres and past the impressive Glacier Grey. The word “Patagonia” has been traced to mean “land of the big feet,” and being in the park, the sensation is indeed that one has been misplaced in a giant’s world. No matter the intensity or trajectory of their trek, all hikers who visit the towers pass through the Campamento Torres, or Towers campsite. Here, in the last bit of protected land, just before the earth rises above tree line, trekkers can pitch tents and hunker down in the low wind-battered forest for the night. Those who do have the opportunity to see beyond the trafficked trail and really get a sense for the mountains they’re climbing. Those who camp at Campamento Torres are the ones who scramble at dawn up the last hour of vertical trail over a boulder fields and attempt a glimpse of Torres at sunrise, when the spires flare orange and fiery scarlet and announce the day to the world.

It is a brisk, overcast fall day in late March when I dig my tent stakes into the ground at Campamento Torres. I am college-aged, a solo trekker, living in Chile, traveling through Patagonia, fluent in the language, and infatuated with the land. It drizzled all afternoon and the wind tore my t-shirt but I marched my way up from the park’s entrance anyway, taking in each view alone without a companion to turn to and gape with. I am no stranger to the wonders of Chilean mountains and volcanos, but the granite cliffs of Patagonia are exotic to me. I have seen people cry when relating the strange beauty of the Torres and the milky lake that sits below them and collects the runoff of their glacial icecaps. I have heard weathered trekkers swear that nothing on earth is more spectacular than the Torres on clear morning at sunrise. I have read countless brochures and travel blurbs championing the uniqueness of the Torres experience. I expect to be stunned.

Campamento Torres is somber this afternoon. I reach it around 4:00 pm, find an empty campsite, #45, and build my tent in silence. Although there are other tents pitched, most people are up at the Torres, or taking shelter from the impending rain. I explore the site and see the A-frame ranger’s hut, the damp outhouse, and the swollen stream where I fill my bottle and drink the runoff of last winter’s snow. Back in the forest, raindrops titter through the canopy above and the trees rustle and drip and sigh in the wet.

I knock on the ranger’s door and tell him I’ve come to register as a camper. He is a dark, short man, not much older than myself, and wears a thick, knit sweater. The peak of the A-frame is an intimate loft where I see he sleeps, with a mattress and a pile of blankets. Below, where we stand, is a wood burning stove- I feel a pang of sympathy for the donkey tasked with transporting it up the mountain- a wooden bench, and shelf with books, boxes of food and large cans labeled Café and Té. Maps of the park, of the web of trails, campsites, shelters and viewpoints, hang on the walls. They are worn and faded, much used and relied on my decades of rangers, it seems.

We fall into easy conversation because outside it is cold and raining and neither of us has anyone else to talk to. He tells me he’s from Santiago, working in the park for the summer for the adventure of the experience. The season ends in a few weeks and his deflated enthusiasm suggests that after three months alone in this hunt, the experience has been mostly sapped of adventure. I tell him I work further north, with horses in the Lakes District; he knows the area because it is a popular vacation destination for Santiaguinos, and his eye flash at the mention of horse-trekking.

“Wow,” he says. “Horses? I have never ridden, that sounds incredible. And you pack everything with you on the trail? That’s amazing.” I realize that although he looks the part of deep woods ranger, he is really a city boy. Although I am the America, this forest is more home to me than him.

“I wanted to see a different part of the world,” he says. The park is roughly 2000 miles south of Santiago, and a world completely unlike his home in the country’s smog-filled capital. “I heard the people down here were friendly. Chileans you know, we have that reputation, but here it’s like a different country- it is as though this place is too desolate for humans-”

I have noticed this also and add, “-as though the sky is too dreary, and the wind is so ferocious they are always anchoring themselves from getting blown away.”

“Yes!” he says, “They are so… closed. So buttoned up. They walk like this…” and here he clutches his sweater to his neck and bows his head to the floor as if he is bundling up from the cold. He laughs and I laugh. It is probably the first time in a while someone with enough Spanish to talk with him has stopped in the hut for a chat. He looks like he hasn’t laughed in a while. The surge of heat from the stove warms me to my core and I try to prolong my return to the frigid tent.

I ask if he has any recommendations for my hiking in the park. He says people really seem to like the sunrise hike up to the towers. I ask him if it’s worth it and he shrugs his shoulders. I decide to hike up in the morning anyway. After a cold sleep, during which the patter of wind, rain, and leaf fall on my tent never ceases, the alarm on my phone goes off. I unzip my tent and stare into the black, drizzly night. I consider getting back in my sleeping bag; the views will be few. But I am here, at the bottom of the world, in the land of giants, why wouldn’t I try for a sunrise?

I put my headlight on, strap my sleeping bag to my day pack and head out into the dark hours of morning. It is a slow hour to the lookout; I pull myself up the steep trail, jumping across streams and ducking the low, horizontal spreading trees. The air is heavy and wet and grows colder as I rise. When I reach the rock field that marks the upper limit of these slopes, snow starts to fall in small specks, and then thickens to a more significant dusting. I clamber up the final yards racing the sun, whose rays are about to brighten this mountain. Up and over one final rock ledge, and I am there, at the overlook, a mere hundreds of yards from the three gargantuan towers. The middle one is the tallest, and this morning they rise as ghostly grey specters through the haze of snow. The small lake beneath them is hardly turquoise or emerald, as I have seen in many pictures; rather, it is the same cloudy slate color as the cliffs and towers around it. Despite the absence of color, the curtain of haze which is moving to block out the right tower as I watch, and the now-heavy snowfall that wets my head, I am awestruck.  It is difficult to fathom that these spires are only the worn remnants of once-grander towers, that this is the result of eons of decay.

As I huddle down in the rocks and wrap myself in my sleeping bag, the clouds conjoin into a seamless cover, and though day has dawned, little light reaches this sheltered spot. The view in the opposite direction, from whence I came, back down the valley and out over the pampas, is nonexistent. It is cold, the wind howls through the Torres, over the lookout and back down the ravines, and snow blankets the rocks and trails back down the mountain. Two other American trekkers reach the lookout. They turn off their headlights and look around. They see the obscured towers, the sea of grey, and groan.

“What a bust,” one says to the other, “I can’t see anything. Not the towers, not the valley. Look at this- clouds everywhere.”

Motivational and commencement speakers like to use mountains as metaphors. The comparisons are relatable, though too-often trite. But once, I heard a man say that if you’re going to climb a mountain, you better make sure the climb is something you’ll value even if there are no views from the top. With the snow falling, and the towers retreating behind the haze, I think that the view from the top hardly matters at all. Thousands have seen the towers alit with the fire of dawn. Far fewer are we who have witnessed the Torres shrouded peacefully in snow in the first hours of day. 

Fall Hikes in New Hampshire

Katie and Kylie at the Great Bay in Durham, NH. Estuary walk.

Abby, Kylie, Kristin, Danielle hiking up Mt. Major with Lake Winnipesaukee behind

View over Winnipesaukee

 

The wonderful Moosilauke Ravine Lodge and 2011 DOC Trips program

Buck- knowing horses

I told my sister recently that I do not remember learning to ride. I do not remember my first feel of a horse's nose. I do not remember the first time I sat in a saddle and felt an animal move beneath me. It must have been in potato fields in Maine, on the back of our first mare, an Appaloosa named Neechee. I probably sat locked between my mother's stomach and the pommel of the saddle as we three walked around and around. I have seen pictures of my mother and Neechee and I like this, so I imagine the first time was similar. But I do not know. It may have happened on my uncle’s ranch in Ohio. Either is possible.

I do remember my first serious fall, off Lucky, onto the wooden walkway, the breath knocked out me. I remember sinking on Tenny into the quicksand, rolling off into the water and then watching her lunge her way out. I remember getting to know my pony, Tate, so well that I could anticipate his every noise, action, step. I remember, in Chile, feeling that my safety, my life, depended on my horse. I remember learning what it felt like to have to put all your trust in a horse. I remember giving myself over to them.

I came home from work this evening and planned to write a blog post. 

Instead, I watched the documentary "Buck."

It is sensational. Even if you have never ridden a horse, even if you have never touched a horse, even if you think I am a silly horse girl who devotes too many words to horses, watch this movie. As soon as possible.

I was reminded, despite my adventures on horseback, despite my comfort in a saddle, how little I know of horses and how much I still have to learn.

But in truth, this movie has less to do with horses, more to do with life. 

The story of this man, Buck Brannaman, is moving and the movie is poignant and beautiful.

You can watch it instantly on Netflix. 

http://www.buckthefilm.com/

Luis in front of the fire

This is an excerpt from a Chile story I've been writing... just working on scene and character developement.

February 22, 2011- (three days into a 12 day trek, with 8 riders, headed toward Sollipulli.)

Firelight glints off Luis’ belt buckle. Every time he readjusts in the dirt, scuffling to find a comfortable position against the wood pile, light hits the metal on his hips and flashes. This flash is a warning, I think, the beam of a lighthouse signaling danger ahead.  I laugh to myself, remembering Mathias’ advice to riders: Chile only has one predatory wild animal: Luis. Mathias doesn’t laugh when he tells this joke.  If I ran aground on the rocks below this lighthouse, he would send me home.

 Again Luis wriggles. Again light glints and I follow it to his pelvis. I look away. The smoke rises to the clear southern sky. I love searching this foreign starscape for differences. Even cloudless, it’s hard to pick out any constellations because there is a smattering of tiny, distant stars filling the voids; it’s as if someone up there hung lamps in a meandering arrangement, and then flung glitter across the sky. It’s not the work of an artist’s steady hand, but of a child’s exuberance.

The mountain silhouettes slope down, jagged along the tree line, to our clearing on the edge of Laguna Geppinger. In the daylight, we look across the water to the peaks above. The mountains are literally before us. The riders click pictures of the lake and the slopes; I imagine our course through them in two days. I’ve set out from Geppinger before, tread these paths, the muddy switchbacks, and rocks slides, the bamboo thickets, but the sight is always daunting.

My hair hangs loose now, as I sit by the fire, the strands parting and soaking in the wood smoke. Luis wears a ponytail, his black hair gathered at the nape of his neck. Tomorrow morning, in the moments when he unbinds it before regathering and retying, it will exhale all the richness of burning lenga wood and roasting meat. He always smells of wood smoke and horse sweat.

He moves again, reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket and pulls out a flask. He swigs then pushes it to me. “Rum?”

I debate a pull. Here, tucked into the Andes, cold settles both low in the valleys and high in the mountains. Sun fries our backs and lathers the horses during these midsummer days, but at night the warmth in the dirt, the heat in the air, slips away. I hold my fleece open to the flames, hoping I can zip their energy up inside; the night is brisk and my pajamas are thin. I think of my tent, of the short walk to it, and the  hours ahead. “I don’t care how cold it gets,” Mathias had warned, before my first trek with Luis two years ago, “you sleep in your tent alone.”

Half a mug of pisco already buzzes my fingertips so I say no gracias. I unlace my hiking shoes and take off my socks. They are wonderful socks, a wool blend, and they dry quickly in my boots no matter how many puddles I slosh through. I lay them on a log near the fire and hope the smoke will overpower the worn-through-puddles-for-four-days smell.

“Aren’t you going to unsaddle your horse?,” I ask Luis. His gelding has been wandering unattended since we made camp four hours ago. It sucked water from a stream while I grilled fish in a disc over the fire, and grazed among the tents while we ate dinner. The horse now stands to the side of a picnic table, its head hung low, its eyes shut. The other nine horses are across the footbridge, also easing into sleep. It's nearing midnight- our riders long ago slithered into their sleeping bags- and the fire crumbles to embers; it seems a good time to relieve it of straps and weight.

               Luis leans back on the wood pile and closes his eyes. His mouth draws puckish and he answers, “Not yet, I have many amigas down the road I may still want to visit.” He stresses the feminine ending of “friends” and grins.

“Where? We’re an hour’s ride from any house.”

“Just down the road. Through the woods. I visit them often.”

I start to say that would be a long trek for his horse to make, getting there and back before dawn. But I remember his story, confessed tipsily, fireside, weeks earlier, of a nighttime trip to another amiga years ago: “I went forty kilometers in one night! Without a light or anything… I just let the horse take me. I got back just before breakfast…. nearly fell asleep in the saddle that day…. But that was years ago, when I did not behave as well as I do now.”

Tonight’s journey would be a short one, in comparison. I don’t protest.  I ask, “They won’t mind that it’s the middle of the night?”

“They are muy…buenas…amigas.” He savors each word and their collected implication. His face relaxes into a bemused look and I try not to imagine the scene of him knocking on a woman’s door, dusty and weary. I try not to imagine him rolling into bed with her. I try not to think about his sons, Luis and Carlitos.

“Well then, what are you waiting for?” I ask.

He shrugs and says, “Do you want me to leave?”

I poke the fire with a branch. I can play coy too. “Well they’re probably waiting for you. Lonely and pining. You should go, have some fun, in case we don’t survive Sollipulli.”

He smiles without opening his eyes and mutters, “Sollipulli is easy. Ningun problema. Lo crucé con ojos cerrados.”

I have yet to see Sollipulli’s uncharted terrain, but I cannot believe they are the easy rolling hills Luis suggests. Flask in hand, his body relaxes. He is falling asleep.

I love studying his face, the dark plains of his forehead, his heavy eyebrows and broad nose. Heavy stubble shadows his cheeks and chin; he hasn’t shaved since we left Antilco. It is not a classic face. Actually, close up like this, his eyes are too small, too close together, his jaw undefined. Where is the siren song that draws so many women to his tent and sends so many young guides crashing upon the rocks? I can’t find it in his face. But I can’t stop looking for it.

“You’re not going anywhere tonight,” I say. “It’s too late. You should unsaddle your horse.” He  does not move.  “Are you going to sleep out here?”

“Puede ser,” he says, “I’ve done it many times. Good board to lean against… warm fire. Es muy… muy… comodo.” He mumbles the words, one by one. The s’s after vowels disappear and the usually springy rolled Spanish ‘r’ lazily plods off his tongue. The fire snaps. For a moment, firelight fills the feathered wrinkles around his eyes.

I look away from his face, and back at the shrinking fire. I see my socks and shriek and curse in English. Shit. Luis sits up in shock. I lunge for the socks but it’s too late: they have melted into useless tubes, the heat searing the fabric apart at the toes.

Luis shakes with laughter now, the sounds spilling out of him gently and quietly. He tips the flask in his mouth again, shakes his head and smirks at me. He is entertained, but not surprised. I laugh with him and ask if much more could be expected from a gringa. He shakes his head: it could not. Gringos are a helpless cause, his silent chortling and noiseless head-shaking says, a ridiculous bunch of mistake-making simpletons.

“I’ll take some of that rum now,” I say, and draw long as we chuckle together. I am glad Luis lets me play cowboy with him, though I am really just a gringo.

With rum sliding to my belly and mourning my best pair of socks, I say goodnight to Luis. He’ll sleep here until he wakes in the night, his bad back aching, the fire dead and his body shivering. He’ll stumble to his tent and collapse until morning when the first whisper of sunlight rouses him. “I hope you sleep well,” he says, and I wish him the same.

I retreat to my tent. I crawl past the saddlebags of food, all five of them packed under the overhang, their leathery, smoky scent filling my small space. I struggle out of my jeans and into black sweats and slip into my sleeping bag. I stuff my heavy jacket into the clothes bag, mash it into a mound, and slide it under my head. I shut the overhang flap and inner door, zipping out the stars and brisk mountain air, and close my eyes.

A Walkin’ Ten

A Walkin’ Ten

An Exercise: The story behind a photo

On a blistering day in early September, I step into the bookstore in Hanover, NH in search of air conditioning. I go to the biographies, to the bathroom behind the biographies, and wipe my face with paper towels and swab another layer of deodorant under my arms. I look in the mirror at my red cheeks, my moist brow, my clinging t-shirt, and wish I could be out of this town and back in the mountains where it is cool and breezy. I wish for the knot in my stomach to loosen. I wish for someone to take me by the shoulders, look me in the eyes and tell me that the 1,000 college freshmen soon headed into my care will be happy, healthy and safe; that it will all go beautifully. That the mountain lodge where we’ll host them will remain functional; that no student will get a concussion on our mega slip and slide; that no crisis will occur while my co-chief and I host and feed Dartmouth’s incoming class. That nothing will befall these students on my watch.

We are in Hanover today, my crew of fourteen, my co-chief, and I, for a supplies restock and a visit to the orientation program’s home base. We’ve been playing like children all afternoon, running, dancing, tumbling, laughing. But the heat is uncomfortable and I feel huge. Huge and sticky. Huge and lethargic. Hugely inept. The collar of my damp shirt tugs at my neck and my skin bubbles. I think of everything we need to do before the freshmen arrive at our lodge in two days, and suddenly I’m too dizzy to stand. So I have left my excitable crew and am hiding in this bathroom behind the biographies, wiping sweat from my brow, waiting for it to regather, wiping it off again, and trying to ward off a panic attack.

I haven’t had one since high school, but this is how they start. At my senior athletic awards dinner, I nearly missed receiving an award because I was in the bathroom, clenching my fists until they were purple, crying and sputtering. I had been forced to wear a skirt and was missing a swim training session; physical insecurity combined with guilt to produce crippling anxiety. I remember standing in the bathroom, thinking I might die there, exploded with tension. I remember knowing that, really, nothing at all was wrong. My mother found me in the bathroom, gave me bewildered look, patted me on the back, and told me to return to the ceremony. I accepted my award with red eyes and a thin smile.

Here, in this blandly pleasant book store, I try not to cry and reprimand myself for unraveling. My skin feels like a million marching ants and my limbs won’t bend, but really, there is no crisis. I self-soothe, but I wish there were someone to do it for me. Then, my phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Will? How’re you doing?”

It’s my mother. The sound of her voice buckles my knees, mobilizes me, and I stumble into a stall and sit on a toilet.

“Fine. Stressed.”

“Things out of control?”

“No, just… hard.”

“Mmm. Well, I just wanted to catch you before you head back up to the Lodge and we lose contact…. It’s beautiful here today.”

“It’s so hot here, I’m sweaty and gross and overwhelmed.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine.” She’s silent for a moment. “Well… your father didn’t want me to tell you, but Tenny died last night. Colic.”

And now, I am twenty-two years old, sitting on a toilet and sobbing. Not only because the death of my horse seems monumental. It isn’t really; I’d been too heavy to ride her for years. Not only because Tenny’s absence is one more thing that will mark the difference between my childhood home and the present; that rift started many years ago. And not only because I didn’t get to say goodbye to the pet I rode, fought with, adventured on, and loved for ten years. I summoned false tears to bury two of our dogs and wondered if I was a monster as my sister wiped globs of snot and tears from her own face. Perhaps I’m too cold; or perhaps, as a child, I saw enough lifeless baby goats to learn that pets die.    

I cry now because, in this warped panic, I feel I’ve been carrying the worries of a mother with 1,000 children. I keep dreaming of injured students, legs broken, fingers sliced, concussed, maimed students. And I cry because the death of a pet gives me an acceptable reason to cry. My horse died, and now I have an excuse to release everything else.

Somewhere in the tears, I sob extra hard a few times, realizing that the backhoe will have come, dug a hole in the low pasture, and buried Tenny’s bloated body before I get home. That our equine trio is down to two. That Bubba and Mary will go on grazing and fighting over grain and hardly notice she’s gone. I cry a bit for Tenny, but mostly I cry for myself.

I give myself five minutes in the stall, then wipe my face again with water and paper towels. I go to the main floor of the store, and buy a standard Dartmouth t-shirt, on sale for $7 dollars. I go back to the bathroom behind the biographies and change.

*****

           

After two months in Chile, when Mathias and I have grown close and stay up late at the dinner table, talking about the horses and riders, Chile and America, our adventures, our curiosities; when we both feel my being here is more than a footnote in Antilco’s history, that I have come home, he begins to tease me.

“Man, you got here that first day,” he says, “with that gloomy look on your face, I wanted to put you on the bus and send you home. You walked around for days, so polite and quiet, so withdrawn, I thought, ‘ughh, I don’t want to deal with this for three months.’”

This is not the first time I’ve been told my at-rest face is one of anger and sadness, so I return the serve to Mathias, “I was just being polite! This isn’t my house. You LOVE rules, Mathias, I was just trying to figure out what they were so I could follow them. Would you rather have some crazy, laughing fool who followed you around all day, giddy and talking?” His face drops; the thought horrifies him.

“Well, you’re lucky I let you come. It was only because I didn’t really have another option.”

“Oh- Because it worked out so terribly?,” I ask.

“No. Of course, we’re thrilled you’re here. But let me just say, next time you apply for a similar job, my god, send some better pictures! That poor, skinny sweating horse- so ugly! And you, scowling and so…”

He stops himself before he calls me ugly too. He isn’t being mean and I’m not offended. But my stomach flips when he mentions the horse.

When I applied for the position I had to scrounge to produce a few pictures to satisfy his demands of ‘three pictures of the applicant on horseback.’ In my months with Mathias, I have been asked to opine about potential guides. I have seen how he scrutinizes the photos, at times too judgementally, looking for character details in the rider’s posture, smile, hands, feet, the cock of their head, the style of their hair. He mines the snapshots for information, hoping they’ll tell him whether the applicant is cut out for three rough months alone on a ranch in Chile, battling bamboo thickets, stubborn horses, and even more stubborn riders. He thinks he knows, but he’s just guessing.

In the end, the only photos I found were several years out of date and not particularly nice. In the one he mentions I am sixteen. I wear a volleyball team jacket, a Hamptons Shakespeare Festival Sweatshirt, jeans and boots. My hair is pulled into the severe ponytail I wore everyday until I started college. Black athletic sunglasses hide my eyes, which are my softest feature. If they were visible, Mathias may have looked at them and thought of me as sweet, or potentially warm. Tenny sweats beneath me, her chestnut coat frenzied into a lather as it always was, even in winter, which it must be in this picture, judging by the barren trees and the extra jacket tied to the back of my saddle. My torso bulges, my thighs are meaty and spread against the saddle; I look big atop the horse. The tool shed behind us, small, weary, shingled, seems to lean. The photo flatters nothing and no one. It depicts a lifeless backdrop, a frightened horse, and a stern rider.

Mathias smiles lovingly at me and continues teasing. “I saw that picture and thought, ‘Well, at least she’ll be used to riding skinny horses,’ and that outhouse is the same as ours so I figured you wouldn’t have a problem with that either.”

“So really, the picture worked then, didn’t it?” I say, not mentioning that the tool shed is a tool shed, not an outhouse. “It showed you I’d fit well here. And I do!”

“Yeah…,” he says, “But it’s just not a nice picture.”

What he means is it isn’t a pretty picture. I do not look beautiful. The horse does not look handsome. Attractiveness weighs heavily in Mathias’ analyses, and I can admit it is an unattractive shot. I decide not to argue further, or tell him that this photo expresses exactly the causal, gritty riding style that my family shares with Antilco and as such served as a perfect application supplement. With his German stubbornness, he can be unshakeably resolute.

Throughout my second stint at Antilco, only months after that sticky, panicky day in September, he mentions the picture often, referring to the poor, skinny, sweating horse. For Tenny’s sake, my heart quivers. I want to tell him that that skinny horse lunged, fought, struggled, pawed herself free of quick sand that swallowed her past her belly. I want to tell him she wove poles and circled barrels with deft, prize-winning speed. I want to tell him that she flew across sand flats with a lengthy, beautiful, grace that his stocky criollos horses can’t even fathom, that she skimmed the terrain and his horses scuffle. I want to tell him that even though my mother passed her up for a lumbering Appaloosa, and I was near driven to tears at times by her high-strung, incessant prancing, we both know she was a a horse of dignity and integrity, a queenly horse. I want to tell him, that if he had raced her down a beach, and felt the searing intelligence of her strides, the wrenching commitment of her run, then he would realize that beneath him was a true horse. That next to her, his were mere meat-headed ponies.

But I don’t tell him anything.

I laugh, and agree that the picture is ugly, because it is. I don’t tell him anything, because I know Tenny was superior only among our backyard pets. She is idolized by me because she was mine, because she is the horse that taught me to ride, to keep my hands quiet on the reins of an anxious mount. And although she was once captured as a skinny, sweating horse, it was on her that I learned everything I need to know to ride his criollos through rainforests and over mountains. That she, like the photo, is a reason I am here. 

Tenny, Bob, Ralph and me ~2004