Up the Down Volcano (Kindle Single) Read Free

ripping it from your clutches and gouging your eyes out with it are good.
    Trips to Cotopaxi work like this: You drive out of Quito, a city whose traffic patterns mirror those in Los Angeles on a Tuesday at noon. Once on the outskirts of town, it’s another few hours to the base of Cotopaxi. There are a vast array of road types at your disposal. Wide ones, short ones, narrow ones, long, straight, curly, fuzzy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, HAIR! Anyway. You will find one road so bumpy, you’ll want to keep your jaw ajar so your teeth don’t chatter. Soon the towns decrease in size. The crumbling 1960’s parking structures have long since faded from view. The clotheslines have become less and less covered in clothes. The occasional one-story pastel house every half-mile dots the green landscape. Say, watch out for that donkey! You keep vibrating up a “road” whose air quotes grow increasingly pronounced. Try not to listen as your bladder curses the day you dragged it into this world. Hold onto the handle above your window and — what did I say about the fucking donkey? — swerve your vehicle to avoid hitting the animal. Drive straight into a river. Stop the car. Realize it’s not really a river at all but a swamp saved from stagnation by a pipe of brown sewage coming out of a hill. Lift any electronics off the car floor because you’re about to open your door into bacteria-infested rainforest water. Wave to your new friends, the mosquitoes. Quickly realize that you weigh exactly enough to be of use by exiting the car but too little to be of use pushing it back onto the road.
    You’re going to want to stand there for a while, like the useless bag of pasteurized milk-fed bones you are. Distract yourself from whatever it is that just bit your neck by humming the theme song to Family Ties . Realize that you know only two lines of this song and one of them is “sha-la-la-la.” Once back in the car, go through the gate to Cotopaxi National Park. From here, it’s a short drive to the last patch of land not at a 90-degree angle from Earth. The plan is to park, hike 45 minutes up to a cabin located at 15,700 feet above sea level and eat as much as you possibly can. Then make sure you’re asleep by 7 p.m. so that you can wake up at midnight and hike the measly six hours to the 19,347 foot summit before the sun rises, screwing you from above with avalanches or from below by melting the path out from under you.
    Do the whole thing in reverse.
    Now, I have to assume that much of that reads as par for the course for even the dilettante climber. I wouldn’t know. I was not she and the decision to spend two days up a mountain instead of bargaining for alpaca scarves was a thin one. The simple but constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a drama to the operation of a local ATM. Thus it becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure before embarking on any path.

    •••

    Quito is unattractive in the rain. Lush green hills look patchy and weighted down. Laundry soaks on the line. Cars honk. Drops come into my eyes from a crack in the gray window. Edgardo’s musical tastes lean toward German rap, which makes me feel like we’re the bad guys in a post-apocalyptic novel for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has ever heard German rap. The music doesn’t stray too far from this genre except for a few plays of Ace of Base’s The Sign , a track that I pretend holds emotional significance in order to get Edgardo to skip it.
    About an hour outside Quito, Edgardo pulls off the highway without warning and runs away on foot. Maybe Americans are just unnecessarily diligent about telling each other where we’re going all the time. If I hear a funny noise in the engine, I say “do you hear that?” I don’t just stop the car, get out and leave everyone inside thinking I’ve embarked on a one-man game of Chinese fire drill in the middle of a five-lane highway.