When You Feel Defeated, Stop to Breathe

CUSCO FEELS LIKE A PUNCH TO THE CHEST. IT COULD BE that the reality of my jobless, newly homeless, nearly husbandless situation is finally hitting me. Or maybe it’s the altitude.

The air in this former Incan capital, perched high in the Andes, is thin and miserly. I have barely stepped off the plane before my asthma causes my lungs to tighten. I anticipated altitude issues until I acclimated to the mountains, but I didn’t think they would hit with such force and immediacy. Every inhalation is labored and requires an incredible amount of effort, like trying to blow air into a balloon that has a leak.

After a few puffs on my inhaler, I can breathe easily enough to focus on other things—the wave of tour guides, taxi drivers, hotel operators, and vendors that pushes close as Jason and I make our way through the airport. Sweaty bodies press against us. People tug at our sleeves. Brochures are thrust in our faces. Each person promises a special deal, just for us.

Jason, who has never traveled internationally, looks to me for direction. Of course, I am clueless. Prior to this, I’ve only traveled outside the United States on short, easy trips where someone was waiting for me on the other side. But I want to reassure my husband that I am confident and able, a woman who can take care of herself once she is traveling alone.

“Follow me,” I say.

Lacking actual experience, I read books instead. I practically memorized the entire “Dangers and Annoyances” section in the Lonely Planet guidebook to Peru. As we navigate the airport, I hiss nuggets of advice to Jason. “Ruthless robberies have been on the rise! Use only official taxis! Hang on to your bag! And remember, do not let anybody share a taxi with us.”

Long rows of vendors line the airport hallways. In the middle of one row is a small desk with a wooden sign that says, “Official taxi.” The fact that the word “official” is spelled “offecial” barely even registers.

“Are you the official taxi?” I ask.

“Sí, we are official taxi,” a man behind the desk replies. He motions to the sign and cocks his head, as if to say, Do you not see this sign? We are clearly offecial.

“How much?”

“Peruvian?” he says. “Thirty soles.”

This is my first time haggling. I don’t know how to counter this, other than to say, “Um, no. My guidebook says fifteen soles.”

“Ah, but there is an airport tax,” he says.

That makes sense. I shrug and hand over the money, the equivalent of twelve dollars.

The man scrawls a handwritten ticket and ushers us outside, directly into another wall of people. He gives our ticket to a different man, who hands it off like a track baton to yet another. It’s confusing, and I don’t know which man to follow.

“Wait!” I yell.

“This way!” the original vendor points to a car before he is absorbed by the crowd.

I walk to a vehicle that barely qualifies as a car, let alone an official taxi. The driver hoists the backpack off my shoulders and tosses it into the trunk, which is secured shut with a piece of dirty rope. He pushes me toward the open car door, the palm of his hand against my forehead as he shoves me inside. On the other side of the car, the same thing happens to Jason, except with some other Peruvian man we haven’t seen before. When Jason sits down, the stranger slides into the seat next to us.

“No,” I say. “No strangers in the car.”

“Is fine,” he says. “I am official taxi.”

I whisper “Stranger danger” under my breath, and Jason nods. The driver has already eased the car out of the parking lot and is merging onto a highway. Frequent clicks and pops sound from beneath the taxi. I eye every door—all locked. The back of my neck begins to sweat.

The stranger opens a briefcase on his lap, and I fear we are about to be abducted or given a timeshare pitch. Instead, the stranger hands us photographs. The lamination peels from the corners of each yellowed image.

“How would you like to see Machu Picchu?” he says with all the enthusiasm of a used-car salesman.

I fumble for excuses. “Um, we already have a trek?”

“What about market tour? We take you to alpaca farm, then alpaca shop …”

“No,” Jason says.

We have reached the hostel—I recognize the building from the online photos when I booked the place—but the driver continues to circle the block as the salesman piles more photographs into our laps and makes one pitch after another.

“You like party party?” he says.

“No! No party. Please,” I beg. “Let us go.”

“Ah, you want ancient temple.”

Finally, the driver stops the car. In a last-ditch sales effort, the stranger claims he is from the very hostel where we are staying.

“Oh, you’re staying at El Tuco?” he says. “I work for El Tuco. Special deal just for you.”

Maybe it is the fact that we had been awake for thirty-six hours straight, or maybe the stranger is finally wearing us down. Whatever the cause, Jason and I agree to let him follow us into the hostel while we check in.

I recognize Coco, the owner of El Tuco, also from the photos online. Coco uses his substantial body to fill the front door frame and shouts in Spanish. The stranger mumbles something back. Coco erupts. He screams and takes a step forward, close enough for his breath to make steam on the salesman’s face. I anticipate this will come to blows. Instead, the stranger pats his sweaty comb-over and adjusts his shirt, then turns on his heel and marches out the door.

The room is still for a long, awkward beat before I break the silence.

“May we check in?” I say. “We’re exhausted.”

“Check-in is not for three hours,” Coco says. “Please sit in the lobby and relax. And welcome to Cusco.”

THE NEXT THREE NIGHTS OF OUR HONEYMOON ARE SPENT in a sparsely furnished room at El Tuco that costs eight dollars a night. We sleep on separate foam mattresses, wool hats pulled low over our ears to fight the chill.

“I love you, baby,” Jason says from the across the room.

My lips chatter too much to reply.

The windows, lined with iron bars, look out over a highway, a school, and a tightly crammed neighborhood. The room is freezing, but the mold-encrusted shower is excruciatingly hot. I jump in only long enough to boil the germs off my flesh, though I know this will be one of my last hot showers in South America—I should be grateful for water that turns my skin the same color as a ripe tomato.

I have brought an old iPhone on the trip with me, but it’s not unlocked and doesn’t have a local SIM card, so I can’t make regular phone calls. But whenever I’m within range of Wi-Fi, I can hop on the Skype app and make phone calls, either voice or video.

When I call my dad to say I’ve settled safely in Cusco, I can reach him only on his cell phone. He’s at the last place my mom will ever live, a special facility for Alzheimer’s patients about thirty miles from the brick house where I grew up. My dad spends hours a day there, every day. Since my mom can no longer walk, he pushes her in a wheelchair around the nursing home, from the parakeet cage in the foyer to the art room where he helps my mom make photo collages and other crafts. He spoons pureed food into her mouth at every meal, because he’s convinced the nurses and aides can’t do it as well as he can. He knows the other patients who live in the same wing, people who confuse him for a son, a husband, or a brother. He waves and plays along with whatever they say.

When I call, my dad holds the phone up to my mom’s ear. I must speak clearly and loudly—her hearing has gone bad—but she doesn’t recognize my voice.

“Mom, you would love Cusco. The mountains are so big and green,” I say. “Maybe someday I’ll bring you here.” I know those words are a lie.

The truth is that I’m uneasy talking to her. After a lifetime of conversations, midnight confessions, phone calls from college, I no longer know what to say to my own mom. She offers me little in response, so I don’t know if she comprehends anything at all. My words now exist only to fill the blank space. I talk, but for no purpose.

My sister, who lives nearby and visits our mom often, is much better at navigating this territory than I am. She trots out the same conversation you might have with an employee at the post office. “Great weather we’re having. I love your sweater. That color makes your eyes pop.”

But me, I’m the emotional one, the overthinker. I recall sitting on my mom’s lap in her yellow rocking chair, her chin resting on my head as we rocked, a gentle seesaw motion over an ocean of shag carpeting. I was an unsettled child, and my mom soothed me, shhhh, shhhh. That is the part I miss most. The comfort. The safe place she built for me. I long for that now: shhh. Pulling me close until my heart is against hers.

On the phone my mom mumbles. Her words are gibberish. A sloppy soup of letters. My dad grabs the phone from her.

“Well, kiddo, have a good time. Be safe. You know your mom is very proud of you and loves you.”

“Yep. I know.” But I don’t. My mom hasn’t known me in years.

The last time I was in Ohio, several months prior, I sat with my mom in the dining room of her nursing home while she ignored a cup of chocolate pudding. Her once-blonde hair hung limp and gray. Her head lolled against her chest, her eyes downcast. Her face was purple with bruises that she got earlier in the week, a tumble out of her wheelchair when none of the nurses were watching. One doctor suspected my mom had a minor stroke, but it’s hard to tell in an unresponsive patient.

A nursing aide tuned a radio to a swing music station and pranced around the room, encouraging the residents to dance. Nobody did. The aide clapped to the music, and it was off beat.

“Mom, I think I’m going to do something really big,” I whispered, as I held a spoonful of pudding to her mouth.

She didn’t acknowledge my words or my presence.

“Mom, I’m going to travel around the world,” I said. When she still didn’t move, I put the spoon back into the pudding cup and scooted my chair closer to her wheelchair. I put my hand on her shoulder. Her body went rigid. “If you’re in there, you should know I’m doing this for you, okay? If you can’t remember anything else, please remember that.”

When she finally looked at me, her blue eyes looked past my body, as though I were a potted plant or a utility pole. Her gaze was empty. Then her lips puckered, and she bit at the air, like a baby wanting more. I scooped pudding into her mouth. She glanced up at me, and there was a flash in her watery blue eyes, a moment of awareness that fizzled out as swiftly as it came.

Sometimes I believe my mom is more responsive to me than she is to others, but I don’t know if that’s a wish, or a lie, or the truth.

When I hang up the phone in Cusco, there’s a hollow space carved out of my gut. Unrequited love is always the saddest kind. Sadder still when it’s a daughter longing for a mother who no longer recognizes her.

“You okay?” Jason asks.

“I don’t know why my dad does that,” I say. “She doesn’t even know who I am. And she definitely doesn’t know I’m gone.”

We are interrupted by animal cries punctuating the air outside El Tuco. A market is assembling on the long, slim concrete berm in between lanes of highway traffic, and Jason and I walk outside to investigate. There are cages of squirming puppies and wooden boxes of desiccated fruit, bags of grain, boxes stacked with eggs, blankets piled with wild greens. In the midst of it all, we hear tiny squeals from a mobile guinea pig slaughterhouse.

Guinea pigs—rodents that are neither pig nor from Guinea—are a popular source of protein in Peru, since the animals can be raised quickly in confined spaces. Also, guinea pigs will eat just about anything, which makes them a cheaper form of livestock than cows, pigs, or sheep.

I’m a vegetarian, so I give grilled guinea pig a pass. Instead I’ve been delighting in Peru’s substantial veggie-based options—bowls of buttery quinoa soup, skewers of grilled potato, creamy broad bean stew and slices of crusty brown bread, pale green pepino melons that fit in the palm of my hand.

That night, the dusk that settles over the city is purple. Jason and I sit at a restaurant that looks over the historic buildings of the Plaza de Armas and tuck into lomo soytado, a tofu twist on the classic Peruvian lomo saltado, in which slivers of beef are stir-fried with peppers, tomatoes, and French fries, all served over rice.

I pretend the rich food and crisp air are making me stronger. But I feel more brittle and unsteady than ever. Each day in Cusco means we are closer to our Inca Trail trek. It’s the sensation of standing in the door before my first skydive all over again—slightly sick to my stomach, terrified I won’t be able to complete this task, afraid I don’t have enough courage. And I’m doing this all for my mom, who doesn’t remember I exist.

“Is everything all right?” Jason asks.

Back home in Palm Springs, hiking is one of my favorite activities. I’ve spent many weekends scrambling over rocks and ambling down dusty desert trails. But that’s just something I do for an hour or two before brunch. My hiking doesn’t require any real commitment.

In Peru, I realize I’ve never tackled anything of such a grand scope. They are the high school jocks of mountains—massively and beautifully built, but towering, intimidating, and mean—the stuff of hiking nightmares. Just one look, and you know they are going to hurt you. By comparison, the mountains that encircle my California desert are downright delicate.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I admit.

It didn’t look so intimidating in the photos or in the piles of travel books on our coffee table. But there in Cusco, just looking at the peaks and spires of granite makes me want to cry. I can’t imagine four straight days of navigating their peaks with my own two feet. I feel like I’ve just shown up at the start line for a marathon after only watching the Olympics on TV. What was I thinking?

Beyond that, I am ill. I feel like I should have acclimated already, but after three days in Cusco I am still beset with altitude sickness. Even walking short distances causes me to clutch my chest, fumbling for my inhaler on Cusco’s fierce, sloped streets. When I’m not wheezing, I am trying to locate the nearest toilet for my upset stomach.

“Of course you can do this,” Jason says, and he hands over my extra inhaler, which he has tucked away in his pocket. “You’ve jumped out of airplanes, right? You can handle a little walk.”

The Inca Trail is hardly a little walk, but I don’t want to dwell on that. Jason has been looking forward to the trek more than any other part of our honeymoon. I can’t disappoint him, especially when I’m about to leave him for a year.

“Of course I can handle a little walk,” I say.

THE EVENING BEFORE THE HIKE, JASON AND I MAKE FINAL preparations. We separate our belongings into what is necessary and what we can leave behind.

My backpack is a hefty, fifty-pound clown car of everything I anticipate needing for my entire trip—paperback novels, a laptop, sleeping bag, first aid kit, electrical outlet adapter, vitamins, a flashlight, whistle, water sterilizer, tofu jerky, shampoo, duct tape, T-shirts, tights, dresses, jeans, two fleece jackets, one iPhone, a slim towel, and four pairs of shoes. For four days on the Inca Trail, however, only a few things qualify as necessities. Everything else can be stored in a locker at El Tuco while we are away.

Our necessities include a toothbrush, designer wool socks, several layers of fancy, sweat-wicking clothing, and ridiculous hiking poles that cost almost as much as a car payment. This was magical thinking on my part; I imagined the more expensive the equipment, the easier it would make the trek.

We have already gone through most of our clean socks and underwear. El Tuco doesn’t have any laundry facilities, and we haven’t found a Laundromat nearby, so I use a hard-bristled brush and hand soap to scrub our dirty clothes in the bathroom sink. Jason stretches a portable clothesline from one corner of the room to the other. There aren’t any nails or hooks in the wall, so he cracks the window enough to tie the line around the iron bars. When he does this, I shiver. It’s July, the start of winter in South America. The mountain air has sharp teeth, especially at night.

Jason and I pack and repack, adding and subtracting items, searching for the perfect equation—all the things we want to carry on our backs for twenty-six miles, still keeping it light enough that we won’t be tempted to toss anything off the side of a mountain. I am delirious with sleep deprivation and altitude sickness; I decide to bring eyeliner but leave behind toothpaste.

I rub my eyes. It’s already midnight, and our bus is scheduled to pick us up at 5 a.m. I flop on the hard bed and cover myself with a thin blanket.

“I’m done. I can’t pack any more. Whatever we have now, that’s what we’re bringing,” I say. “I need sleep.”

“Yeah, I’m wiped out,” Jason agrees. “And we have mountains to climb.”

He reaches for the socks and underwear, still hanging on the clothesline, the final addition to our packs before we can go to bed.

“Uh oh,” he says.

“What? Don’t uh oh.”

I stand and touch the clothes on the sagging line. The socks are wet and cold, the underwear frozen stiff. There’s no way these things will dry in time for our hike.

Frustration coils through my limbs, and I kick my bag, spilling all the things I had so carefully packed.

“Maybe they’ll dry by the time the bus gets here … ?”

The laundry has been hanging for hours. If it isn’t dry by now, it will never be dry. That’s it. Our hike is ruined before it even began. The failure feels inevitable.

Jason runs downstairs to ask the front desk if there is a twenty-four-hour Laundromat anywhere in the vicinity. He returns several minutes later with one of his hands hidden behind his back. With a magician’s flourish, he holds his right hand out and presents to me a miniature travel hair dryer.

“I borrowed it from an Irish couple down the hall,” he says. “They said we can just leave it outside their door when we’re done.”

Two hours later, the underwear is dry, but I am still blowing a weak shaft of hot air into the woolen toes of thick socks. Each time the hair dryer overheats, we have to wait a few minutes for it to start again. I teeter on the edge of hysteria, and I lash out at my husband.

“Why did I buy such nice socks? This never would have happened with my normal, shitty socks. Some of my old socks even have holes. I bet those would’ve dried real quick. But these things?” I say, getting louder and more forceful with every sentence. “Fuck these socks! Fuck it all. Fuck the Inca Trail …”

“Shhh,” Jason eases an arm around me and pries the hair dryer away with the other. “Let me dry these for a while. You rest.”

The action is small but tender and represents everything I love about this man. Where I gripe and complain, Jason is thoughtful, nurturing, supportive. For years I thought marriage was incompatible with the life I wanted to lead as an independent woman, but here is my husband, comforting me in an eight-dollar-a-night hostel, proving otherwise. What the hell am I doing leaving him on purpose? Leaving my career and my home and my dying mother? And for what? Wet socks and granite mountains?

I’m filled with a sudden longing for my mom. She was always protective. I remember how my elementary school gym teacher never let me visit the school nurse for a puff of my inhaler before gym class. Then came the day I collapsed on a dry, weed-strewn field. I awoke on a couch in the nurse’s office, my mom holding my hand and smoothing the hair from my forehead. She slid one hand behind my head and helped me tilt forward to take a puff from the emergency inhaler she kept tucked in her purse. Then my mom whispered stories until my pulse slowed and the weight on my lungs disappeared. When it was clear that I’d recovered, my mom tracked down the gym teacher and unleashed her rage on the man, hissing, “How dare you make little girls suffer? What kind of man are you?”

I can’t recall exactly how the situation was resolved—whether I was pulled from that teacher’s class or if he was ever punished. The implication, though, has remained my entire life. My husband has done his share of time comforting me, but it is my mom who always soothed me when I gasped for air.

As a child I was a sickly thing, hospitalized more than once for asthma attacks and vicious bouts of pneumonia and bronchitis. My mom stayed by my side, even when nurses tried to shoo her away. She was there to hold my hand, her strong fingers wrapped around my tiny ones, through the night and until things were right again. I wish she could do that now.

Nobody warned me about this part. When I envisioned my trip, I imagined exciting adventures, exotic locales, a jet-set lifestyle. I never thought grief and doubt would climb into my backpack and come with me. I pictured standing at the top of the Sun Gate, looking down at Machu Picchu, without ever thinking about the steps it would take to get there. This is the curse of wanderlust, when the postcard image becomes a brutal reality.

All the exhaustion, sickness, and worry that has been tipping me for days finally knocks me over. I collapse in quiet sobs on the bed, swallowing deep gulps of air. Jason holds me until I calm, then fall asleep.

The wake-up alarm sounds after just two hours, and Jason and I rub our bleary eyes as we step onto a bus.

Soon the sun will rise over the Andes, and we will be there to welcome it. Our socks are dry. A mountain invites us to climb it.