* * *
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. When you’re a kid, 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. So by the time you’re an adult, the question “Want to go skiing next weekend?” actually sounds like “Want to go bungee jumping using this old dental floss I just found?” The big selling points for ski trips, or the ones most regularly paraded out for my unskilled benefit, are mugs of warm liquid. Wait. Let me get this straight: While all my friends exercise, bond, and embrace the outdoors, my reward for a hard day of solo snowman crafting is more hot chocolate? To what do I owe this glut of me-time? Maybe later, when I grow bored of lying on rugs, I can wander into town and spin postcard racks. No, no winter sporting expeditions for me, thank you.
Upon arriving in Quito, I solicit the advice of my hotel’s Peruvian receptionist, a shock-pretty university student whose affections I like to think I have won. This I have achieved by waiting patiently while other guests ask stupid questions and then asking brilliant ones of my own. Like how to flush the toilet in my room. When not manning the front desk, booking expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, the receptionist likes to climb mountains. This turns out to be common in Quito. The capital is located in a goose pot of one of the most densely collected circles of peaks on the planet, including Cayambe, Cotopaxi, the fun-to-say Pichincha, and the fluid-looking Imbabura, with its mystical importance. The Incas used to worship it. Imbabura is Zen in rock form. It’s also not the one I intend to climb.
When I tell her of my interest in climbing Cotopaxi, a massive landform I apparently can’t be bothered to google, she seems unfazed. She went last month. The volcano has a symmetrical crater like a punch bowl in clouds. It’s one of the most stunning things 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 axes from which all the power of the universe emanates—I decide to play up my ignorance.
I explain that I am a novice climber, by which I mean very. It’s a miracle I haven’t spontaneously fallen to the floor in the time we’ve been speaking. I point at her phone and encourage her to pull up a photograph of the mountain I used to hike every summer in New Hampshire. It’s the most frequently climbed mountain in North America. I was nine 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, trying to broaden the image with her fingers.
“Exactly,” I say.
Convinced of my greenness, she knows just the person to escort me up the mountain, a friend of hers named Edgardo. Edgardo is a professional mountaineer, in that sometimes apparel brands send him parkas. Which is good enough for me, as I have been sent no parkas. He doesn’t usually do beginner tours but he “is a climber who is a very good climber.”
A few phone calls later and Edgardo is set to arrive the next morning. He has agreed to take me up Cotopaxi for a reasonable fee. At this point I know so little about mountain climbing that I don’t think I’m skimping by avoiding a more official expedition. Actually, it’s the reverse—I reason I must be paying more than normal to limit my stranger quotient. 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 the forced loneliness of nonfluency for the intentional loneliness of nature immersion. I imagined glacial streams and wildflowers, salamanders and roots. Whatever I thought, it has since been corrected. Painted over. Like Dogs Playing Poker.
* * *
When Edgardo shows, I am sitting in silence with the few other foreign guests dotting the spare hotel dining room. The soft morning light shines through the spikes atop the security gate outside. I am pretending to read a Spanish newspaper and polishing off a breakfast of corn and eggs, when a petite man darts across the room wearing what appears to be the mountain climber’s answer to the scuba suit. A coarse braid of hair swings over one of his shoulders. The braid is so thin at the end, I am amazed its owner managed such a delicate procedure.
Edgardo carries with him a strappy backpack 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. But I sit still, holding the newspaper, using it as a shield. Every set of eyes in the room watches Edgardo lean 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 get the things and we meet outside in one hour.”
And that is the longest 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 “This remote control only
