The Lost Girls (10 page)

We were all wide awake now. “One time a bear clawed at my tent when my family was camping in the Adirondacks,” I said, telling the girls the first of many random childhood stories on
the road. “My dog, Corby, chased it up a tree to save me.”

“Your dog chased a bear up a tree?” Jen asked. “And wait, your dog's name was
Corby
?”

“Yeah, what? I never told you that before?” I playfully feigned offense.

“Corby
Corbett
?” Jen giggled. “That's as silly as Amanda's white cat named Whyte Kat. I'm going to start calling you Corby.”

“Fine then,
Baggy
Baggett.”

“Wait, what about me?” Amanda chimed in.

“You can be
Pressy
Pressner,” Jen exclaimed, and we laughed. I attributed our giddiness to the coca leaves we'd been chewing for the last few hours to ward off altitude sickness. (Disclaimer: Cocaine does indeed come from coca leaves, but, according to Reubén, it takes hundreds of pounds of leaves to create one kilogram of the drug. Any loopiness we may have felt while chewing the leaves was purely medicinal).

Once we'd caught our breath, Amanda reached into her day pack to pull out a foil space blanket—an emergency provision for hypothermia—and stretched it across the three of us for extra insulation. Trying to get closer for warmth, I was glad we had opted to sleep together. We were settled in head to toe: three women snuggled inside a two-person tent high in the Andes Mountains. Instead of the familiar electric glow of skyscrapers, we drifted off blanketed by a sky with a different kind of light: the same constellation that had once guided the Incas, the Southern Cross.

I lay there long after Jen and Amanda's breathing turned deep and even, next to them but alone with my thoughts. The flashing lights and honking horns gave New York City nights a sense of movement rather than stillness. I wasn't used to how deep the silence could feel when darkness clung to a mountainside. In the heavy quiet, my mind wandered to my older cousin
Adam, who'd unexpectedly died of heart failure two years earlier when he himself was just twenty-eight years old. I thought how our childhood selves, kids who had spent hours mixing the perfect mud pie or climbing the highest tree branch in the apple orchards behind my grandparents' house, would want me to be having this adventure beneath the Southern Cross. I wondered if life would seem more comforting if I believed, as the Incas had, that those stars could show me the way.

 

T
he next morning our porter, Ramón, was outside our door (well, our zippered tent flap) with coca tea before the sun's first rays penetrated the icy blackness.
“Buenos días, muchachas,”
he whispered with a singsongy cheerfulness that struck me as wildly inappropriate at that ungodly hour. The three of us huddled together, silently sipping our tea, reluctant to abandon the warmth of our down sleeping bags.

Once we'd gathered in the dining tent for a hefty breakfast of quinoa pancakes, eggs, and porridge, Reubén informed us that today was the hardest day: eight hours of steady climbing to the highest point of roughly 14,000 feet at Warmiwanusca, “Dead Woman's Pass.” I was too worried about my own survival to ask Reubén how it had gotten its name.

Reubén commanded our attention with his now-familiar exclamation, “Hey, everybuddy! I gadda question for you!” Silence ensued in anticipation of Reubén's next bit of trivia. “Who remembers the name of the man who redeescovered the Lost Ceety of the Incas, Machu Picchu?”

I took a breath to speak as Shannon shouted out, “His name was Hiram Bingham! He was a professor at Yale who found the ruins in 1911 during an expedition.”

“
Muy, muy bien,
Shannon,” Reubén said. “Why Machu Picchu was built is a mystery. Some say it was the center of the In
can Empire. Some say it was an ancient pilgrimage site thought to mark one end of the sun's path. As you walk along the trail, imagine yourself as an Inca making your own pilgrimage to this spiritual site.”

I did believe my friends and I truly were on a pilgrimage, a search for what matters most. I wasn't sure if Jen and Amanda were as excited about being pilgrims as I was, but my life in New York, so lacking in spirituality, had left me hungry to feel more connected, either to a higher power or simply to the world around me. On my first big trip during undergrad on Semester at Sea, I had signed up for a world religion course to learn how people around the planet fill their lives with meaning—exploring Shinto shrines in Japan, Muslim mosques in Morocco, and Buddhist temples in Hong Kong. One of my most vivid memories is of the first day I walked Istanbul's cobblestone streets, holding my breath when I'd heard a powerful male voice chanting through the city's loudspeakers. Masses of men stopped, threw down mats, and collectively prayed toward Mecca in a sort of sacred time-out. The clouds above cast shadows over the scene below, proving the world was still turning even though I felt as if it'd momentarily stopped. Ever since, I'd longed to go back to places where holy rituals were such visible parts of daily life, the way it was for those men.

Contemplating the divine was proving to be a somewhat helpful distraction from the exertion of climbing a path sandwiched between boulders and a steep cliff—and from the knowledge that the distance between living and falling to a tragic death was about six inches.

“How long did you ladies say you were traveling for?” asked Shannon. She fell into step behind me, saving me from imagining one of us plummeting down the mountainside.

“We're on the road for a year,” I said, suddenly sweating under the heat of the intense sun piercing through my fleece.

“This is our first country,” Amanda called back from her place at the front of the line, with Jen a few steps behind her. I paused to peel off a layer of clothing, and the others took the opportunity to do the same. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I peered at people ahead on a peak, who resembled ants marching. The six of us women had formed a pack of our own on the trail, and that peak looked so high above us.

“How long have
you
been traveling?” Amanda asked.

Since leaving New York, the standard questions asked upon an initial meeting had changed from
Where do you work?
to
Where have you been?
and
How long are you traveling?
In fast-paced, success-driven New York, most people wanted to know whether a new acquaintance was, say, a Wall Street banker or a graphic designer. But on the travelers' circuit, the amount of time you've been on the road and number of countries you've visited pegged you as a causal vacationer, newbie vagabonder, or seasoned backpacker.

“We're doing six months through South America,” Shannon answered. The others in her trio, Elizabeth and Molly, had fallen back behind us after resting for a little longer.

“It's so hard to find chunks of time to get away, especially if you have a boyfriend. Are you all single?” Jen asked.

“I've been dating my boyfriend for almost seven years,” Shannon said after a brief pause.

“Holly and I have been with our boyfriends for more than three years,” Jen shared, talking slowly to conserve her precious breath. “Shannon, do you think you'll end up marrying him?”

Shannon's walking stick made a steady thudding rhythm as she leveraged over the stones, and her breathing came out ragged between words. Maybe being in motion like that made it easier for us to open up so quickly because Shannon answered, “Everybody keeps asking me that question, but I never know how to answer because it's not really up to me.” She sounded
tired—both physically and emotionally. She revealed that her boyfriend was in medical school and that he kept postponing the marriage talk. Then she added, “I'm just not sure how long I'm supposed to wait.” She pulled her dark hair into a long ponytail as she walked, and I noticed sweat beads clinging to her neck.

As I listened, it occurred to me that Elan and I had never really had a big marriage talk either, apart from a mention or two about the far-off future. Marriage hadn't been on our minds when we had met at twenty-three years of age (him) and twenty-five (myself ). But the years had sped by as if on fast-forward, and I understood that the pressure to check off that adult milestone couldn't be avoided. I wondered if that pressure, mixed with his path as an actor, which would likely send him away too someday, would cause cracks in whatever that force is that holds a couple together. I hoped that it wouldn't. I hoped that, as clichéd as it sounded, love really would conquer all.

As I scanned the path for potential ankle twisters like tree roots and loose rocks, it struck me as funny that our group was on the Inca Trail discussing quarter-life crisis issues such as commitment (which apparently aren't confined to U.S. borders). After meeting the Irish girls, I was willing to bet that they were also struggling with the same questions we were: How long should I date a guy before getting married? Do I want to have kids? How can I make a living doing what I love?

Talking soon became too much effort as the climb grew steeper and the air thinner. That was just fine by me—I didn't want to think about the future anymore. Worrying about stuff like marriage and jobs and things that only
might
occur were just distractions from what was actually happening that very moment. We were almost at mile 12, and my mind was focused on the rhythm of the walking sticks clacking upon the uneven stones; the sweet smell of rotting leaves; the dull burn of my
thighs as they repeatedly lifted my legs; the starbursts dancing before my eyes as sunlight filtered through my sunglasses; the salty taste of sweat when I ran my tongue over my dry lips.

I forced any thoughts about the rest of my life out of my head and was content to stare down, concentrating on the task of putting one foot in front of the other. I paused only periodically to replace the layers I'd removed earlier as the temperature dropped and wind slapped my cheeks. After about two hours of steep but steady climbing, I was so consumed with taking it one step at a time that I was startled by the cheers erupting from the mountaintop ahead.

That must be Dead Woman's Pass!
I spied a rocky crest blanketed in clouds and nestled between two peaks. Bands of hikers yelled encouragement to those still on their way up. “You're almost here. Just a few more steps!”

Turning around, I saw specks of people below on what looked like a vertical path from my high vantage point. Natural endorphins must have flooded my body after hours of climbing because my thighs were suddenly completely numb. My lungs, however, weren't: My entire chest was burning from struggling to suck in as much precious oxygen as I could from the atmosphere up that high.

“Just a few more minutes, and we've made it halfway!” I called to Jen, who was walking steadily about five feet in front of me. Normally I'd have been up front, trying to push my body to the max by running toward the invisible finish line. But today I was willing myself to slow down and soak up the scene. I'd imagined what it would be like to walk this trail since high school. I wanted to hold on to the moment so it wouldn't disappear so quickly. Amanda had made it to the top just seconds earlier and wasted no time in pulling out the video camera. Though Jen had wanted to do the trip without stopping to document it, I was happy Amanda was making the effort to preserve our first
big achievement together—especially because I never thought to stop and record the moment. I didn't want to forget the view from the top of our first mountain, where the sky itself looked so big it dwarfed even the snowcapped summits shooting up from valleys sprinkled with wildflowers.

 

O
ur third day, roughly twenty-four hours later and 5,000 feet below the hike's highest point, we reached the last campsite. It proved to be practically luxurious compared to the pasture-turned-distillery where we'd camped on our first night or our second night at the base of Dead Woman's Pass, where it got so cold ice crystals formed on our tent. Our group joined what seemed like hundreds of others in the lodge, where you could purchase showers by inserting coins into a metal timer. Though the bathrooms still lacked a few things I'd always considered essential (toilet paper, soap, a little bleach action), simply being able to rinse the grime from our matted, hat-head hair felt totally indulgent.

As we sat down for our last supper, it felt like the night before Christmas. The anticipation in the air was so thick that you could practically cup it in your hands. The next morning we'd start hiking around 4:30 a.m. to make it to our final destination, Machu Picchu, in time to see the sun's first rays illuminate the ruins.

We weren't waiting until tomorrow to celebrate, however. Reubén organized a tipping ceremony, and the porters stood in a semicircle directly across from our team of trekkers. The group of men with their callused, sandal-clad feet shyly shared their stories, and Reubén translated each into English for us. Reubén mentioned that Ramón had started this job when he was sixteen and that his fifty-four-year-old father, also working on this trek, was the oldest on the team. I'd noticed that Ramón was usually smiling. He smiled while shouldering a load as big
as his body; he smiled while squatting over a pot cooking our dinner; he smiled while cheering on the tourists whose gear he carried. His life might not have been easy, but still he smiled.

Besides offering money, the trekkers also pooled together things to donate that we no longer needed, such as socks, T-shirts, and flashlights. Reubén assigned each donated item a number and wrote the numbers on scraps of paper to be plucked from his black cap. Each porter was invited to pick one, and they all clapped wildly when someone drew a number that corresponded to, say, an opened tube of antibiotic ointment. The porters' faces lit up, and they chanted,
“Gracias!”
as they clutched the bundle of castoffs.