26 Ecuador Stories, Part I: Arrival

Today we’re in Ecuador. This is a true fact, though I’m not sure why. How did it happen? Somehow, for some reason, mere months after burying my husband, I have decided that the thing to do is visit Madeleine on her gap year. Of course! It’s one of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Dragging Your Children to South America. Anyway, I’m doing them out of order (does ANYONE go through them sequentially?), or I am when I’m not ignoring them entirely or, even better, experiencing them all at once.

I do have an inkling why we’re doing this. Three inklings, in fact. The first and most important inkling is that I’m desperate to see my eldest daughter. Skyping is fine (hurray for the Jetsons and their visionary gizmos), but it does not replace holding my actual girl with my actual arms. The second inkling has to do with Easter. The seasonal suck factor that accompanied our first Chris-less Christmas applies to our first Easter, which I need to figure out in short order. The usual procedure, which I can’t wrap my head around, involves Vigil Mass on Saturday night, Ringwalds at our house on Sunday. Easter-egg hunt in the backyard. Ham. Mashed potatoes. Chocolate-and-peanut-butter buckeyes.

Nope. Not without Chris. Not yet. Obviously, the only other option is a trip to a developing country. (Take that, Easter!)

The third inkling is trickier to explain. Since Chris died, the shit most acutely and chronically in need of figuring out is us as a family: Who We Are, and What We Do, and How We Proceed Without Him. Aside from the traumatic downsizing from five to four, the kids and I have to get a handle on our reconfigured family dynamics. There’s no Dad to leap into arguments with a firm hand, no Dad to organize people and plans and things, no Dad to lead us all into the unknown with dash and self-possession.

Recomposing ourselves without him is a challenge long and odd as I realize, bit by bit, that in figuring shit out—as I did with the Tupperware—I can choose to arrange things in a new way. My way. Our way. Whatever way makes us as happy as happy can be. So I find that I’m lax about chores, discipline, all of it. Haven’t the kids been punished enough? Do they need more scutwork to do, burdens to carry, than the stuff they’re already doing and bearing? I think not. I think, instead, that we need to get outta Albany—the rituals and psychic ruts that furrow our lives here—and flee to the south for a wild Andean excursion. And while we’re at it, heal.

But how frightening it is, this striking into the unknown without him. He was always the energetic leader, the hatcher of plans who hoofed ahead on walks around an unfamiliar city, a guidebook in one hand, a map in the other, while the four of us skedaddled behind him. It was Chris who got us downhill skiing. Got us camping on Cape Cod. Started us hiking the Adirondack High Peaks when Mitchell was only three. Helped me past my fear of heights and roller coasters. Suggested cool family trips to Niagara Falls, Ottawa, Montreal; dragged me over to the Shatner building at McGill and ordered me inside, knowing his Trekkie wife was dying to check it out but too embarrassed to say so.

“Let’s go to Europe,” he said one day, and there we went. He led us into every church he could find, dozens of them, ancient and spired and spilling with art, between Brussels and London. We four skedaddled as usual. Every nave we entered, every waffle we ate on the street, was his idea.

He didn’t just take us on adventures. He was one. I’m not a mousey thing by any stretch, but Chris had one of the largest personalities of anyone I’ve ever known, and I adapted to it. I became accustomed to pacing myself alongside him, shadowing his steps and following his moves for decades. Dancing without him isn’t easy, and at times I resist it. (Lead? Get real! That’s not my role!) And yet, I recognize this as another necessary form of F.S.O. It’s another bag I have to carry alone—except it happens to be a lot of bags, and I happen to be lugging them several thousand miles.

So I’m determined. I have to find a way to push my children forward, take them places, make them laugh. “We never go on any real vacations, like, relaxing vacations at resorts,” Jeanne remarks. “Instead, we go on adventures.”

Exactly. And this time, it’ll be me who leads them.

Unless this is all a crock. You think? Could it be that I’m simply at a loss? That I’ve just cracked up? It’s possible I’m still so flummoxed by my abrupt entree into single momdom that I’ve come unzipped. But hey, if I’m going to unzip all the way, frolicking pantslessly in some spazzariffic mono-parental breakdown, I may as well do so in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, yes? Yes. The way I see it, we have two choices: We either go as an act of strength and courage, hoping to remake ourselves in a land with no traces left by Chris, no memories of him, no signs; or we go because I’m a hopeless fucking basket case.

Either way, it makes sense.

Once this decision is made, a riot of further F.S.O. ensues. I figure out flight shit, itinerary shit, vaccinations-against-exotic-disease shit (yellow fever! fun times!), adapter shit, phone shit, currency shit (that shit’s easy, as they take the American dollar), hotel shit and, lest we forget, shit shit (I heart charcoal pills). Then there’s the killing-eight-hours-in-Miami-International-Airport shit.

Once in Sudamerica, the shit continues. After landing at Guyaquil Airport in the western coastal province of Guayas, we’re greeted with whoops and hugs by a tanned and jubilant Madeleine, who rushes out from the crowd and all but tackles us. What a joy it is to see her. After introducing us to her family’s driver, the soft-spoken Roberto, we pile our bags into a shiny Hyundai SUV and head for the beach town of Puerto Lopez, where Madeleine’s host family is spending Easter weekend.

Here, at the point in the story that involves a three-hour drive to the Pacific, I must explain the scariest shit we encounter in Ecuador—scarier than the active volcanoes, the packs of dogs, and the forceful and copious throwup ejected into a gallon-size Zip-Loc by someone I shall not name in the Hyundai that first night. (Someday I would like this person to take care of me in my dotage and, I hope, wipe drool off my shirt when the situation demands.)

The holy terror is first introduced to us, unwittingly but persuasively, by Roberto, who is as considerate and quietly giving as every other Ecuadorian we meet over the next eight and a half days. He is also completely bonkers behind the wheel. And by “bonkers” I mean: He is obviously trying to get us annihilated! Yes!!! Why else would he drive directly into oncoming traffic? Why else would he charge down the wrong side of the street at 80 mph until scant microseconds before a tragic head-on collision, at which point he swerves abruptly in front of a bitsy pick-up truck carrying twelve men, six dogs and a goat? I am tempted to grab the wheel and yell STOP IT BEFORE YOU WASTE US ALL, ROBERTO, but do not, belatedly realizing that doing so would somehow disrupt Roberto’s otherworldly Ecuadorian cool. He clearly believes he isn’t going to die (“This won’t kill me!”). This belief protects us.

In this manner—almost dying at high speeds, and yet somehow totally OK with that—we pass through one dusty town after another, pushing past packs of strays (the dogs, the goats, the pigs, the cows) as they traipse alongside us or munch on trash. Meanwhile, the Barfer barfs.

In the morning, when we awake at the beach, the world looks surreal in its brightness. We take a daytrip to an island with Blue Footed Boobies and snorkeling. I leap into the water from the roof of the boat; the kids snap a picture of my middle-aged ass mid-flight. Later, eating ceviche with plantain chips, I marvel at the country’s rugged beauty—and at the newness, so simple and thrilling, of being with my children in a place so blessedly foreign.

Chris is more absent than he is at home, where he’s always with us, always the unheard feet on the floorboards and the unfelt hug at the end of the day. Sometimes, back in Albany, I feel like a gap-toothed smile; people look at me and only see what’s missing. In Ecuador, we move through space without his spectral presence, for he was never present here at all. Here, he never existed. Here, no one knows he ever was, and no one thinks to ask.

But we’re here. We’re still together. We’re still loving and laughing and barfing and swimming, plunging through life and launching off boats into the azure Pacific. And I have an inkling we’re happy.