constant in all things

Posted February 12th, 2008 by Michelle

Ahem. Sorry about yesterday’s blog. Sometimes my fantasy life simply has to take over my factual life, and in that fantasy life, Viggo Mortensen comes riding in on Hidalgo (but as Aragorn) and whisks me away to fight very clear bad guys so we can save the world. Instead… well. My life is slightly different than that.

This blog goes out to my dear friend Stacey.

I met Stacey (although she no longer goes by that name) when I was 10 months old and her mom started babysitting me. I don’t remember life without her. Growing up, I was always stunned by her smarts and her beauty, and I think she enjoyed my rebelliousness and the fact that I had so many boyfriends from such an early age that we were always walking down to the Hy-Vee so I could call them on the payphone. As a child, she stayed in Iowa, where I was born, as my family trapsed around and out of the country. We always tried to find ways for her to come visit me, but it never worked out; instead, I kept coming “home” to Iowa to see her. Her parents’ house in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is truly the only childhood home I know. They still live there, and the fruit trees that Stacey’s dad planted when each of his children were born now tower over all of us when I visit.

But as soon as she grew a little older, Stacey’s travels far exceeded my own, as she first visited Europe and then Africa, Indonesia, the South Pacific, and a thousand places in between. She’s been to places I can’t pronounce, and has a PhD on a subject my small brain can only begin to understand. She’s brilliant, and a scholar, completely down to earth, and can drink me way under the table. She’s totally pragmatic, but talk about ghosts and she’ll get nervous since she doesn’t want to tempt them, just in case.

Stacey and I made a pact last June as we were flying, together, to Peru.

Our stopover in El Salvador…

Every five years, we decided, we’d go on a major international trip. We planned our trip to Peru for about three years, so that would put us on a pretty good schedule. She has a family and a baby and a very full life; I have, well, umm, a very full life too, but it seemed to both of us that we could fit in an awesome overseas (or exotic) trip at least that often. Since Peru, we’ve been emailing each other about where to go next, and I think we haven’t had enough of ancient cultures and ruins just yet, so it looks like we are headed to Central America, and perhaps as early as 2009 (since our five year plan just felt like too long).

Stacey has been my best friend my entire life. She is an extraordinary travel partner, patient with my low blood sugar grumpiness, game for any kind of fun, excited about the small stuff, and gets “museum head” about as quickly as I do. But I don’t know that I’ve yet thanked her for what she did for me in Peru.

Our main reason for going to Peru was to climb Machu Picchu. It was going to be an arduous hike, to say the least: four days of mountain climbing, three major peaks, starting at 11,000 feet and climbing to well over 14,000 feet. Sleeping, of course, in tents, carrying a decent amount of gear. Both of us trained as best we could, which is to say, not as much as either of us wanted to, but we felt reasonably prepared and ridiculously excited.

The first day, I was feeling superb. I’d gotten over most of the altitude sickness I’d experienced the day before, and I get a pretty mad rush from pushing my body to extremes. We had some serious hiking that day, but none of it unmanageable, and both Stace and I, I think, were feeling pretty good. To climb the trail, you have to go with a tour group, and we chose our based on how they treated their porters, their friendliness towards vegetarians, and their (comparatively reasonable) price point. We were hiking with a team of 12, and all of them seemed engaging and interesting. Very promising first day.

Me, still under the mistaken impression that I was a badass.
That night, we hunkered down in our tent, layered with every last piece of clothing we’d brought with us; we hadn’t really considered that it was Peruvian winter. It was freezing cold, but our tent overlooked the mountains and I remember watching the sun go down and seeing the stars come out and feeling really happy and lucky to be there.

A few hours later, I was wrenched out of sleep, woken by the sickness in my belly. To this day, I don’t know if it was the water, the food, the altitude, or some dreadful combination of the above, but I knew I was in trouble. I gingerly zipped open the tent- which is the loudest noise in the world on the side of a mountain at 3 AM, and launched myself out so I wouldn’t soil all that was holy on the inside of the tent. I was burning up, and the frigid air felt both wonderful and horrible. I was almost delirious. I looked at the stars, and the mists in the sky, and felt the cold, crunchy, frosty grass beneath my knees, and I begged for release. Nothing came.

For three hours I rolled in and out of the tent, hoping to vacate this illness from my body in any way possible, but no go. At one point I wandered up to the “toilet”- a glorified hole in the ground that smelled worse than bathrooms on the NY subway- and prayed. Not to anyone in particular, just to the powers that be, to be able to throw up. I stayed there for an hour, until I heard a very loud and scary rustling coming quickly toward me, and rather than meet unexpected Peruvian wildlife, I crawled back down to my tent and tossed and turned until dawn.

That next morning, I knew I was in trouble. I was in massive pain, horrible stomach cramps, and I couldn’t eat. And this was the most difficult day of the hike. The soreness in my legs from yesterday’s hike was nothing compared to the agony in my belly, and I quickly started falling behind the group. The team leader was at first worried, then annoyed, and then alternately annoyed and worried as I got worse and worse. At one point, I was literally crawling from rock to rock. I couldn’t eat, so I had no fuel; I could barely drink, so I was quickly getting very dehydrated, and I had to take frequent breaks because the pain in my abdomen would sear through me every time I took a step up. And that was the other thing: I was climbing not just a mountain, but the most difficult pass of the trek, known as, if you can believe it, “Dead Woman’s Pass”.

Finally, the whole team was sent ahead, save for the trek leader, and a porter, who carried my meager pack since I couldn’t even manage to carry a bottle of water. And, Stacey. Who stayed with me every single step of that day. She hiked about ten paces ahead of me, taking breaks when I did, talking me throu
gh the worst bouts of pain, and from her words, thoroughly enjoying herself because rather than thinking about her pace, or keeping up with the team, she could take her time and look around and really enjoy the beauty of the hike.

The last steps up to Dead Woman’s Pass were some of the most painful of my life. We did, however, get to witness herds of llamas, and scores of ancient ruins, as we made our way, and I learned just what my body is capable of when it is pushed beyond all endurance. Several times, the trek leader asked if I was going to make it, or if they needed to call a helicopter to medivac me out of there. And I didn’t answer, I don’t think, I just kept pushing, crawling, scraping my way to the top. And when I finally did, Stace was there with me. We took pictures of each other at the sign that designated just how high were were- over 14,000 feet. I don’t recommend spending any major time at that elevation.

Going down on the other side of that pass was almost as hard as going up- the pain in your knees is shocking, and the Inca steps are huge. But by the time I got to the other side, I knew, at least, I was gonna live. That night, I’ll spare you the details of my body violently ridding itself of what ailed me, but the next morning I was able to eat a little breakfast and completed the last two days of the hike. I was incredibly weak, but in comparatively little pain.

Both Stace and I managed to be really ill the rest of the time we were in Peru, but it just became a thing we had to deal with. We both had birthdays on that trip. Hers was on an island in Lake Titicaca; mine was in Lima. We decided to splurge for a fancy hotel in Lima, and although it wasn’t fancy by American standards, it was utterly luxurious at the time, and had a little hot plate for cooking. Neither of us could still eat much, but Stace went to a local store and bought fixins to make me one of my favorite comfort foods: mac and cheese. We ate buckets of the stuff, and paid dearly for it later, but it was delicious.

Indeed, it took me a couple of months to return to normal once I got back. But return I did. And I don’t know how I got so lucky to be partly brought up in Stacey’s family, and to have Stace as a friend for my entire life. Machu Picchu was a humbling experience, both in the breadth of Stacey’s patience, and in the limits of a body that you think can handle just about anything. I only got up that mountain because Stace was there with me, pointing out llamas, telling me I wasn’t missing much being hunched over a path of rocks for an entire day. I hope to be able to return the favor some day. I *don’t* want Stace to ever be that ill again, but if the situation is ever reversed, man, I will *carry* her up that mountain if need be.