In The Cordillera Blanca

I came from the hammock-looped eddy of a seaside party-hostel in Barranco. Beer pong and club shuttles, green eyes and bunks squeaking at the joints. Had to get away from the questions that came to me in those confines.

Caught a bus and the cityscape crumbled off to tilted desert plains rashed with tattered shanties. Rain tarps snapping in the hot wind like the resilient flags of a broken militia. Felt ashamed of my own lonesome melancholy looking at it. Floating on along the Serpentín Pasamayo to see, from the second level of the bus, the desperate sprawl of urban orbit thin to dust, save a cluster of egg-shaped Hindu temples, Cueva y Templo de Sri Nrisimha Dev, so round as though built upon a potter’s wheel by hands of sea breeze and sand flecks, laid in constellate pattern down below the high sand bluffs where the ocean broke in endlessly looping indifference upon the desert beach. Shut my eyes and got sucked into that cyclical hum of wheels and ocean break and spinning fans. Resurfaced shivering at the sound of her voice. Once more hoping to lose something amongst the sting and brutality of those ice-white giants, to unflesh bones whose shape and utility I no longer sensed.

Met a local man in a beaten leather jacket at the bus station in Huaraz. He bent towards me in his naked fatigue, rubbing hands, forehead furrowed like that of a desperate magician, ready to produce anything for which I asked. Took a room in his home and waited 30 hours for the storms to pass. Wrote and went up on the roof and watched the rain fall on the other corrugated iron rooftops. Thought of her and felt sure she was gone. I could hear his kids bickering over the one computer at the bottom of the stairs. I tried to be very silent and I listened. Mototaxis hummed along the drag and under awnings street vendors sold churros, hard-boiled quail eggs, and name your piece off whole spitted pigs. I was curious to see what I’d do. How I’d go on. I was sure I would. I always had before.

Went out and got dinner early at a little family place. Really just a home with a chalk and slate sign out front. I was the only paying customer but everyone was eating the menu del dia: fried mountain trout with rice. We watched a Peruvian sitcom starring all gringo-looking actors. The eldest daughter wanted to marry me, said so. Stared at me while I ate, her forehead pleated with fatigue. I knew better than to take it personally but after months of abstaining along my journey my pants got tighter in one leg.

Took a film photo of a soggy side-road and a woman came and warned me I’d get my throat cut for that camera. It felt good to talk to somebody.

Walked up the hill and took caffeine at the one place in town with an espresso bar on the plaza. Huge dining room with red vinyl chairs, could’ve seated 150. I imagined the place buzzing with dinner carts and a splashy dinner crowd. Alas, empty and a faux-native menu for faux-curious tourists.

Sat alone in there for an hour-and-a-half, attended to by a wait staff of three, pacing my way through a cappuccino, copying the trail map borrowed from my host over into my notebook. Careful to get the little lakes and mountain peaks in the right spots, marking all their altitudes. Grinning at the fatal stakes, which, considered from this momentary comfort felt only as consequential as a talon tickling at the chin. The host came beside me and spied my notebook. He leaned over and, insisting on speaking to me in English, asked had I noticed the thin oxygen. No, not so much. He warned me not to dismiss it, he’d seen it break younger men than I. He told me to respect the elements. I asked had he made the pass himself. He shook his face and his cheeks sloshed around, his eyes remaining fixed. Oh no, never, What is the point in chasing danger when it already chases you?

The rain fell light and cool on the plaza and the women all darted around wearing cellophane over their cholitas (beribboned bowler hats, each mountain town having its own subtle iteration). One woman stood on a produce crate and clucked–incessantly–trying in vain to evangelize all those head-down and wooden-faced Catholics, occasionally hooking a fear and turning a timid glance.

Walked the main streets back, armed guards outside the little penny-slot arcades and teenagers flooding out the sweet shops back into the steady drip. Bought a rancid flan and fought it down. There were lights flashing up and down the street and it was very dark, still dripping, no stars or moon above. 

I woke early the next morning and went out into the street, saw some obscure reflection of my bearded face in a black-water puddle. Sooty-curled stray mutts nuzzled through rinds and scraps and the remains of last night’s rain tap-tap-tapped on awnings from the gutters above. Hired a proper cab, doors and all. Took it up and up, by women trudging bent under heavy sacks of potatoes, by loose chickens and dogs and a man wearing his donkey’s yoke, dragging the cart off to the side to let us pass, by brick farmhouses drip-painted with one of two repeating political propagandas, by the boulder-strewn grasslands above the highest village to the gateway of the Valle de Cojup, where mist rolled out and spilled thinning into the greater valley, tributary to main. I could see it would be a clear day in the valley but I wondered about the saddle, the snow-capped mountains still shrouded in fog.

I mounted on foot to the high passage, the weather thickening all along the way, seeing only a local guide and her Italian client towards the top, both wearing oxygen masks, retreating, both discouraging my approach in scrambled and frantic English. I acknowledged and immediately dismissed their warning.

It was hailing when I tried at the saddle and I couldn’t see six feet ahead. The trail surrendered amorphously to the raw glaciated ascent. (What else had I come for? Why else follow an apocryphal map?) My brain then a second heart pumping against the walls of my skull. I waited up there, unthinking until the fog cleared enough to see the little Laguna below. A sapphire pool so still and wordless. Just stood there in my heavy boots, blessed hard rubber and my belt loose and my sweat-soaked shirt turning cold and I cried looking at it. At abstract beauty in a life not understood. And 18-thousand feet up I couldn’t even hear her voice. Like trying to track the sound of one hail stone’s tumble among all the others. My brain a second heart breaking. Yellow flowers carved out like crystal sulfur in the white fog. Retrieving my notebook and flipping to the hand-drawn map. Holding it out in front of me, shaking. Looking from the inky lines on the dampened paper to the obscured passage looming. A chute of grey, mean gravel and razor-cold snow. My brain kicking. Teeth grinding at submission. At surrendering to a future.

Retreating to the foot of the high pass, tripping over rocks naturally cubed and graveled. Popping my tent against the exterior of an abandoned cattle corral. Waiting for both hearts to sleep.[vi]

I woke to warm light and a mind set to silence. Came out the tent and saw the blinding reflection of the morning sun on that row of snow-fleeced and pyramidal mountains. The pass still there waiting, still greater than I. 

Then out by the wild donkey, shy at my approach, the feral horses and the wooly colt waking to my steps and jolting on thin-stilt legs before coming to frozen rest like a toy pony by its mother’s flank. The little river winding along the grazed descent. Forgetting her, and not for dearth of oxygen. Huaraz somewhere down out of sight. A condor passing aloft, its damp shadow sliding in menacing silence over the Earth below.