Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single)

I am told that Ecuador is graced with all four seasons in the course of a single day, and so I pack for none. Instead I stuff a bikini and a fleece vest into the pocket of negative space that appears as I zip my bag shut. A sense of satisfaction washes over me as I force-feed nylon straps through plastic teeth. There’s no reason for me to feel satisfied. You need many more items than the ones I have chosen for a day in Malibu or a circumnavigation of Greenland. But I am done with old habits. I have spent my whole life escorting aspirational accessories around the globe as if they were children on a disastrous family trip.

“You wanted to see Miami?” I put my straw hat on a glass coffee table where it will stay untouched until I repack it. “There, now you’ve seen it.”

My aversion to over-packing and its uptight cousin, over-planning, stems from the belief that neither tendency is a fake problem. These are not amusing tics. They are not superfluous reflections on the personality of the packer, but profound ones. They suggest a dubiousness of other lifestyles (racist), a conviction that the world won’t have what you need (princess), and a lack of faith that you’ll continue being human when it doesn’t (
misanthrope)
. Plus, you’ll probably have to check your bags. And how hard is it, really? It’s just the one planet. I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like “bring a cardigan.”

Thusly armed with my symbolic tributes to a four-in-one climate, I lift my bag. I wince at the small weight, my bicep aching from yesterday’s visitors: a series of offensively long needles. I am going to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, because a small travel magazine based in San Francisco has told me to go there. And because they are paying me to do so. The last time I was sent anywhere and got cut a check for it, I went to Wichita Falls, Texas. I’m pretty pumped about South America.

My mission is to wander around Quito for a few days, interact with locals and write about it. When I tell the editor I don’t speak Spanish, he thinks this will only make things funnier. When I say “for whom?” he pretends not to hear me.

Because I am traveling courtesy of a sue-able upstart, I am advised to seek out multiple inoculations, including one for typhus. The magazine does not want anything resembling a
Painted Veil
situation on their hands. I am also encouraged to pick up a prescription for “one of the malaria pills” should I venture farther afield. It seems to me that if one is going to place oneself in an environment that warrants the swallowing of malaria pills, one should have a specific kind in mind.

But let’s back up a tick: Malaria?

Quito isn’t Tokyo, but it’s a major city. The quotidian equivalent of such precautions would have me being one of those people who Purell subway poles.

“Is this really necessary?” I ask the editor, who points out how difficult things will be for me if I get sick and can’t communicate in the correct language.

Few instances in my life have made me feel so tough as helping the Duane Reade pharmacist locate my pills while a line of people formed behind me. Chain store pharmacists put exactly as much effort into patient privacy as I do into packing.

“What are we looking for, Hon?” she shouted over her shoulder, thumbing her way though a Rolodex of normal-people-problem creams.

Until they invent a Libido Dampening syrup or a capsule for Being Too Darn Pretty, this will be the only time I’ll boomingly announce the contents of my envelope to all the land. The pills and the shots bolster my sense of adventure, my desire to take myself out for a spin. It’s as if I am dealing with extra minutes on a phone plan, not my immune system. Use it or lose it.

This is not like me. I am a profoundly lazy person in real life. I won’t meet a friend at a location more than five blocks from my apartment if it’s too windy and the sidewalk is looking especially hard today. I will walk past a restaurant and have the thought:
I should order out from there later
.

Rather than research Quito on my own, I decide to leave my whole trip to chance. And to Facebook. Unlike casting a social networking net about Paris or Buenos Aires, where comment box after comment box would compete in an e-thumb war for supreme regional wisdom, people are content to deliver their advice regarding Quito in isolation. So few have spent time there. Three people chime in, writing me directly. One suggests a restaurant and a fruit drink, one suggests a museum with paintings of animated skeletons, and the third suggests I climb one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. Dubious of the Internet connection I’ll have in my small Quito hotel (racist), I print out the list and hold it in my hand as I lock my door and struggle to get my jacket over my shoulder. Each activity on this list seems equally viable. Looking back, I think it’s because they were all presented in the same point-size type.

•••

Now feels like as good a time as any to mention that I’ve never been skiing. You have to be under four feet tall to see the appeal of skiing. Everyone knows there are magic bravery crystals on the surface of the snow that whisper, telling you it’s fun to go speeding down nature’s backbone as if it won’t kill you. After a certain age you become too tall to hear the crystals. Underexposure to them alters your hearing for the rest of your life. When you’re an adult the question “want to go skiing next weekend?” actually sounds like “want to go bungee jumping with this old dental floss I just found?” The big selling points for adult ski trips, or the ones most regularly paraded out for my unskilled benefit, are hot tubs and mugs of warm liquid. Even for someone as lazy as myself, I am turned off by this gluttony of comfort. Let me get this straight: While all my friends exercise and bond, my reward for a hard day of crafting naughty snowmen is extra marshmallows in my cocoa. As it is with most things in life, this sounds at once like both Heaven and Hell. Maybe later, when I grow bored of lying on rugs, I can wander into town, spin a couple of postcard racks and try on a sweater made of bobcat pelt. No winter sporting expeditions for me, thanks.

This is more or less what I tell Edgardo, my spider monkey of a mountain guide, when he appears at my hotel on my second day in Quito. I knew Edgardo was coming. He is a friend of the hotel’s Peruvian receptionist, a shock-pretty university student whose affections I like to think I have won. This I have achieved by hanging back, waiting patiently while other tourists ask stupid questions and then asking brilliant ones of my own. Like how to use the toilet in my room.

When not manning the front desk and booking expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, the receptionist likes to climb mountains. Living in Quito comes in handy. The capital is located in the goose pot of one of the most densely collected circle of peaks on the continent, including
Cayambe
, Cotopaxi, the very-fun-to-say Pichincha and
the
soft-looking
Imbabura
with its mystical importance. The Incans used to worship it.
Imbabura
is Zen in rock form. It’s also not the one I intend to climb.

When I tell the receptionist the day before of my interest in climbing Cotopaxi, a mountain I apparently can’t be bothered to Google, she seems unfazed. She went last month. The volcano has a perfectly symmetrical crater. The summit is the most stunning one she’s ever seen. Why wouldn’t I go? Looking at a photograph of her and her boyfriend tacked to the wall behind her — both of them wearing head-to-toe North Face and holding up ice picks from which all the power of the universe emanates — I decide to play up my ignorance. It’s hard not to think of Darwin when visiting this part of the planet, and if my survival depends on me acting like an idiot, so be it. This does not present a challenge.

I explain that I am a novice climber, by which I meant very. It’s a miracle I haven’t spontaneously fallen on the floor in the time we’ve been speaking. On her phone, I encourage her to pull up a photograph of the mountain I used to hike every summer in New Hampshire. Last I checked, it was the most frequently climbed mountain in North America. I was only 9 years old the first time I went up. I used to play freeze tag on the summit.

“Is the mountain on the next page?” she is genuinely confused, moving the screen closer to her face, tapping it and broadening her fingers.

“Exactly,” I say.

Convinced of my greenness, she knows just the person to escort me up the mountain.

“He is a climber who is a very good climber.”

Edgardo is set to arrive early the next morning and has agreed to take me up for a somewhat reasonable fee. He doesn’t normally like to take beginners with up with him. At this point I know so little about mountain climbing that I don’t think I’m skimping by avoiding a larger and more official expedition. Actually, it’s the reverse — I reason I must be paying more than normal to limit my
stranger quotient. While my assignment within city limits is to befriend my fellow man, the magazine made no such stipulations for outside the city. In fact, before she suggested Edgardo, I asked the receptionist if I couldn’t just handle the trip on my own. I had designs on trading in the forced loneliness of influency for the intentional loneliness of nature immersion. I imagined plateaus and wildflowers and glacial streams. Maybe a unicorn. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. Whatever I thought, it has since been corrected. Painted over. Like
Dogs Playing Poker
. But right then, the concept of climbing a mountain alone did not strike me as any more perilous to the psyche than buying jeans alone.

When Edgardo shows, I am sitting in silence with the few other foreign guests dotting the spare hotel dining room, the soft morning light shining though the barbed wire on the security gate outside. I left my book in my room and my phone doesn’t work. I am pretending to read a newspaper in Spanish and polishing off a breakfast of tomatoes, eggs and
humitas
. Suddenly — and I mean suddenly, nothing in Quito moves this efficiently — a petit man walks in the room wearing what appears to be the mountain climber’s answer to the scuba suit. It’s all black with an internationally recognized sports logo on one sleeve. A coarse but extremely long braid swings over one shoulder and connects at the top to a round head. The braid is so thin at the end, I am amazed its owner managed such a delicate procedure with such calloused hands. Edgardo carries with him a backpack nearly half his size and plops himself down across from me. My coffee sloshes onto the table. I can feel it drip through the cracks in the wood and onto my knee. I sit still, holding the newspaper, using it as a shield. Every set of eyes in the room watches as Edgardo leans back in the chair like he owns it.

“Is your name Sloane?”

No.

“Yes.”

“Do you eat beans?”

This is one of maybe five questions Edgardo will ask me in the entire time I know him. The first being the confirmation of my name. I nod.

“Good,” he says. “I’ll go get food and meet you outside in one hour.”

And that is the longest comprehensible string of English I’ll hear from Edgardo. It’s as if he memorized it for effect, same as if the only sentence I knew how to say in Spanish was “It seems this remote control only takes double-A batteries.”

He pushes his chair back from the table.

“Okay,” I say.

“One hour,” he holds up his pointer finger in a stern fashion as if he knows I have an issue with lateness. Because I do have an issue with lateness, this otherwise rude assumption has a positive psychological impact. I feel like Edgardo and I have known each other forever.

“Got it,” I say.

“Oh.” Edgardo removes a pair of mountain climbing boots from his backpack. “We need to see about your feet.”

He’s instantly at my side. Unsolicited, he grabs my ankle. A Japanese couple at the next table avert their eyes. Despite their clunky shape, the boots are too small. We’ll have to add “boots” to the list of things to rent before we go. A list that also includes crampons, ice picks, a Gore-Tex jumpsuit and a headlamp. I am starting to detect the faintest odor of intensity to all this. Last time I checked, I didn’t need a headlamp to enjoy wildflowers. Though what do we really mean when we say “checked”? The ugly truth is I’ve never been camping, either. Not even as a little kid. Not even in my own backyard. But I’ve already reached my city-mouse admission quotient.

“Is what I’m wearing okay?”

I push back from my chair and wipe crumbs off my lap. I am wearing cotton tights and a pilled tank top. It’s less of an outfit than a few swaths of cloth to carry me from my room to a public dining room in a socially acceptable fashion.