PART FOUR

Ecuador

A TINY CHUNK OF THE CLOUD FOREST
HAS MORE TREE SPECIES THAN THE
ENTIRE BRITISH ISLES.

 

 

I’M PACKING FOR ECUADOR, rolling T-shirts like cigars and stuffing them in my backpack, when I hear Adam’s motorcycle through the open window upstairs. Normally he rides the Yamaha to work, to access HOV lanes and speed his commute, but tonight he needs the adrenaline, the speed, the rush of night air. His seventy-year-old dad, George, has cirrhosis of the liver. Adam spent most of the day at the hospital, at his father’s bedside, watching him slide toward death.

I hope I’m here for the funeral, I think, meeting Adam at the door. I didn’t understand the importance of funerals until Dad died; until I found such comfort from family and friends. A few years ago, when Adam’s grandmother died, I felt I shouldn’t attend the funeral. His grandmother was German and spoke no English. We would smile and nod on the occasions I saw her, before the Alzheimer’s grew severe. Adam was close to his grandmother, and I’ve always regretted, in a major way, not attending the funeral.

He follows me into the living room, sinking into our comfy-yet-crummy couch. Our dog, Molly, sniffs his jeans. His padded purple motorcycle jacket and stubble give him a bit of a Mad Max, sci-fi look.

He brought me his headlamp. It was on the equipment list from Earthwatch, the volunteer organization for the Ecuador trip. I forgot to buy one and it seems essential. I’ll be working on a global-warming research project in a remote region of the Andes Mountains, in a mountain cloud forest north of the equator, home to pumas and rare spectacled bears. The lodge is accessible only by foot, a two-hour walk from the nearest road. Supplies are delivered by mule. Electricity is limited to a generator’s short stints. As a volunteer, I’ll help scientists collect data as they study the effect of global warming on this diverse area, home to forty-five species of mammals, nearly four hundred tropical bird species, and thousands of species of plants.

“How’s your dad?” I say, easing into my favorite chair.

“I dunno … I’m just—I’m stunned by how fast he’s declining. Last week he stood up. His thinking was clearer.”

“Julie used to see that at the hospital. People have a last stand. They can be totally out of it, the end seems near, and then boom—they’re alert, they’re talking … but it doesn’t last.”

He nods. Adam has a brash, sarcastic sense of humor, but tonight he’s just … weary. Pale.

“The doctor said his kidneys aren’t functioning. He’s got fluid building in his brain and lungs. The drugs haven’t helped and his liver has failed and he can’t breathe without an oxygen mask. This afternoon we just—we decided to give up. Give him as much comfort as possible. He’s getting morphine. Once his breathing stabilizes, they’ll remove the oxygen mask.”

“And then what?”

“Then he’ll lose consciousness.”

“And then how long…”

“I don’t know.”

He changes the subject, asks if I’m done packing, tells me he talked to Terry. I mention I saw Tom over the weekend, who in the course of the conversation revealed he not only doesn’t wear underwear—which we knew—but he doesn’t wear it when he bikes, runs, or exercises.

“I would think he’d have chafing issues,” I say.

Adam smiles faintly. “He probably doesn’t have any hair on his ass.”

I offer a beer, but he heads out. He’s tired, he knows I’ve got a 7 a.m. flight to Miami, then Quito. “Hang in there,” I say as he leaves, knowing it’s a useless thing to say, but having no wisdom to offer.

I finish packing, and watch Julie eat a bowl of raisin bran when she gets home. This is her noon-to-eight workday, which usually stretches to nine thirty. In the morning I leave a goodbye note on the stove. I drive to the train station, slug my long blue backpack over my shoulders. By 6 a.m. I’m on a commuter train, on my way to National Airport, on my way to Ecuador. I turn on my phone. Among the junk e-mail is a note from Adam.

Friends,

I wanted to let you know that my father passed away at about 2:15 a.m. We were by his side and he passed peacefully.

Adam

I know this is best. I know it ends the suffering for Adam’s dad, though it’s only beginning for Adam’s mom. But I also know I won’t be here for one of my closest friends. When dirt falls upon the casket, when mourners say their goodbyes, I’ll be in the Andes Mountains, cut off from the world, cut off from the people I love.

The plane descends on its valley path to Quito, mountain brawn filling the windows, the black shadows of clouds against the forest below. The city sits at roughly 9,300 feet—the second-highest capital in the world—on the eastern slopes of the Pichincha volcano. Between the trees and scraggly peaks it’s like we’re approaching some South American Shangri-la; a magical cloud city, though like any city Quito is a mix of old splendors and new ills; of wealthy hillside homes and hard barrios lacking hope.

After feeling so confounded by the language in Xi’an, the bright Spanish billboards seem almost familiar on the cab ride to my hotel. A sign featuring a shapely babe with airbrushed cleavage says, Tenemos el mejor señal, which of course means, “We have the best—”

Okay, I don’t know that last word—I’m guessing it’s “sign”—but still. That’s an exciting translation moment, as opposed to me staring dumbly at, oh, . (That means “tea.” Tom and I spent days searching for a tea shop in Xi’an, not knowing we’d passed them repeatedly.)

I even chat a bit with the taxi driver after warning him that my Spanish is no bueno.

“¿Cuál es tu país?” he asks.

“Estados Unidos.”

“¿Cuantas días en Quito?”

“Un día,” I say.

“¿Un día? Ohhh—hay muchas cosas a ver en Quito.”

The inn, La Casa Sol, is charming, painted in vibrant yet washed-out oranges and blues. Located in La Mariscal, Quito’s new town, it sits in a quiet neighborhood, though nearby restaurants and bars seem full, a mix of college-age tourists and Ecuadoran yuppies. I check my e-mail on the hotel computer. I want Julie to know I’m alive before I vanish into the Andes. She’s already sent me a note: “The house is too quiet. Take lots of pictures to share when you get back. Miss you, love you.” I tell her I miss her and love her, too.

In the morning I take a cab to Quito’s old town. It’s my only day to explore before the trip to the cloud forest. My friendly driver, Byron, first drives me up El Panecillo hill, which offers a wide valley view of the old town: the white buildings with red roofs, the church domes and brownish haze, the massive Basílica del Voto Nacional with its dual Gothic spires. Behind me is Quito’s winged virgin, more than one hundred feet tall, an arched halo of stars above her silver head, a chain-bound serpent at her feet.

I’d thought about walking the steep streets to see the virgin, but the guidebook notes that the route is prone to “violent muggings.” Hence my ride with Byron, who drives me back down to the old town’s central square. The Plaza de la Independencia dates back to 1534, walled on each side by the city’s key buildings, from the Archbishop’s Palace to City Hall. Statues and fountains rise between crisscrossing sidewalks; fanny-pack tourists pass an Inca woman in a green felt hat and plaid shawl, her ponytail resting next to the sleeping baby strapped against her back. Men sit on benches in sun and shade, possibly killing time, possibly out of work. One reads a newspaper. Another picks his ear. A gray-haired businessman gets a shoe shine beneath a puffy crepe myrtle. Soldiers with machine guns chat in clumps.

Quito is known for its ornate Spanish colonial churches, so I work my way to La Compañía de Jesús, the city’s most lavish church, where a local college student gives me a tour. The ornate arches and pillars are painted gold; intricate carved patterns filled with touches of red. On a wall near the entrance, my student guide shows me a massive painting of a jam-packed, orange-hot hell. Lucifer stands with a snarling three-headed dog, watching over the anguished residents of his domain. Drunks. Whores. Murderers. Adulterers. Cheats.

“What’s that one?” I say, pointing to a man at the bottom.

“Registrador,” she says. “Lawyer.” We look at each other and laugh.

I leave, eat lunch, and think about Adam’s dad. I’d e-mailed Adam yesterday from the train; he wrote back as I ate pizza in the Miami airport: “I’m still a bit in shock over how quickly everything went,” he said.

He’s in my thoughts as I wander old Spanish streets with bright white spires and tiled domes, the buildings yellow and cream and blue, railed balconies lined with flowers. I wish I could do something for him. And then it hits me, quite unexpectedly: I’m in an old town loaded with historic churches. I could pray.

I don’t really know how to pray, though I suppose there’s no right or wrong way to do it. After much wandering, I visit the 350-year-old San Agustín church, walking to the convent: a courtyard with stout palm trees, a fountain in its center, surrounded by an arched two-level cloister. I peek in a dark rectangular room that, I learn later, is more like a meeting room for area priests. Two rows of tall-back Baroque benches line the walls, approaching an altar. I enter and stand before a cordoned-off Jesus on a green cross: St. John on his left, the Virgin Mary on his right. A church staffer sees me, walks in, and flicks a switch behind a wood door.

Let there be light.

Only the ceiling corners and altar are illuminated; the mournful, bleeding Jesus. The room is silent except for the splash of the courtyard fountain. Praying here, rather than in the lush church, isn’t exactly logical; it’s like visiting the Palace of Versailles and ensconcing myself in the laundry room. But this, I decide, feels right.

I lower my head before the roped-off altar and Christ’s punctured plaster feet. I close my eyes, and I pray aloud for Adam’s dad. And I pray for his soul, if there is a soul, or whatever the soul may be, though I realize—damn—I shouldn’t qualify it and I shouldn’t say damn so I pray again for his soul. And I pray for Adam, and his mom, and his family, and while I’m at it I pray for Julie, and for my mom, and my sister, and her family, and for Tom and Terry and all my friends, all the good people in my life, and then, well—how often am I going to do this—I pray for the world, and I pray for peace.

I feel embarrassed when I’m done, even though I’m alone. And I sit outside on a bench, watching the courtyard fountain; the water shooting high from the mouth of a boy, his face gazing at the sky, a lion at his feet. The spray sparkles in the sun, and I listen to rustling palm leaves, the drops of water splashing in the concrete pool. And I stay a long time. Listening, looking, thinking.

I’m not someone who minds being alone, and maybe it’s because I’m in a different country, on a different continent, but that evening, sitting in my Spartan room, lying on the bed, my pillow my only companion, I think—

Wow. I am really bored with me right now.

I’d spent the morning by myself. I ate lunch by myself looking out on the Plaza San Francisco, watching a big-bellied woman and her son toss bread to hungry pigeons. I took a cab by myself back to the hotel. I checked my e-mail, browsed a knickknack area with local pottery for sale, snagged an Ian Rankin novel from the bookshelf—Julie is a fan—and returned to my room. Now it’s evening and I’ve reread the same page four times when mercifully the phone rings.

“Someone is here to see you,” says the female clerk from the front desk. Waiting there is Charles, a fellow Earthwatch volunteer.

I’m rescued.

Charles lives in Kent, England, the birthplace of my great-grandfather, who brought his eight children to America in 1907. Maybe it’s the accent, or the high cheekbones and jutting nose, but Charles reminds me of an old-time English army officer; the kind of military chap you see in movies patting his belly and telling jolly good stories about long-ago battles. He works in London and appears to be roughly my age. We’d exchanged a few e-mails, weeks ago, after Earthwatch sent a roster of volunteers, but I didn’t have his phone number, and didn’t really expect him to swing by La Casa Sol.

We walk past gated guesthouses and closed shops to Azuca, a busy Latin bistro in Quito’s new town. The place exudes sleek chic, from the thumping techno-pop tunes to the small silver tables with silver lime-cushioned seats. We sit outside under heat lamps that resemble tall metallic mushrooms and order beers. This is Charles’s second Earthwatch trip. In 2007 he worked in Madagascar: a project studying lemurs. Ten years earlier, a cyclone had ravaged the lemurs’ home in the Monombo rain forest, toppling up to 90 percent of the largest trees. Volunteers gathered data to determine how the lemurs were coping, and whether trees and vines were growing in the regenerating forest, to help scientists determine their long-term sustainability.

“We had pit toilets,” he tells me, leaning back in his chair. “A bamboo shack with a hole in the ground. I’d go in the morning. Before the flies woke up. The shower was another shack—you’d dump cold water over your head from a small bucket with a plastic cup. It was better to wait until evening—the water would warm up a little during the day.”

We down a second beer, then stroll to Mama Clorinda, a homey restaurant serving traditional Ecuadoran dishes. The outside is nondescript, but the inside is cozy: red-and-white-checkered floor, tables packed tight. We meet up with two other volunteers. Earl is an Australian in his midsixties: lean, white hair, firm handshake. An entrepreneur who once owned a racehorse and now works in shipping in Perth, Earl visited Buenos Aires and Iguazú Falls before arriving in Quito, where he narrowly evaded a robbery attempt in the Plaza de la Independencia, a common two-man scam that works like this:

       Scammer #1 spills a nasty paintlike substance on your pants.

       Scammer #1 apologizes in an overblown way and helps you de-goo yourself.

       Scammer #2 swoops in while you’re distracted and steals your wallet or bag.

Earl was touring the old town with a guide, who instantly recognized the ploy and told him to keep moving. So he escaped with his valuables, though the pants were ruined.

“Those were me best pants,” complains a smirking Earl.

Wayne rounds out the group. He works for an oil company in Houston; his blond beard and friendly, confident air make him seem older than thirty. Charles and Wayne have spent two days together, traveling north to the famous market in Otavalo, buying alpaca blankets and Panama hats. Wayne also bought a whistle with a carved troll face for his goth sister. “The craftsman used cow’s teeth for the teeth of the troll—always a sign of quality,” says Wayne.

On the way back they were pulled over by police and Ecuadoran soldiers.

“They were probably just bored but they wanted to check all our luggage,” says Charles.

“That’s not all they checked,” says Wayne.

“No, right—they made me spread with my hands on my boots so that they could have a quick feel between my legs.”

“Welcome to Ecuador,” says Wayne.

“I think it might have been part of a bet—one of the army guys was laughing.”

I order roast chicken for dinner, which comes with a llapingacho, a crispy fried potato patty mixed with cheese. The conversation is enjoyable, even though I barely know these guys. The people who take these types of trips are rarely jerks, though there are exceptions, of course. Jonathan told us about a college-age girl who volunteered at Escuela Cuestillas after Julie and I left. She didn’t like the children: they were too high-energy. She rarely worked, reading a book during classes. She was volunteering, she told Jonathan, because it would look good on her résumé.

When Julie and I left the school for the last time, the students accompanied us to the waiting van. When this girl left on her final day, she walked alone.

Two months before going to Ecuador, I traveled with Julie to spend a week in England with Jonathan and his partner, William. Hannah, our diminutive f-bomb-dropping Spanish teacher friend from New Jersey, had organized the trip the previous summer, then bowed out because of debt issues, tax issues, and the deaths of her two cats, her companions since her divorce.

I thought about canceling as well, given how much I’m already traveling, and the expense of my voluntourism trips (the one upside: most of them are tax-deductible). But I knew Julie wanted to go, and I wanted to see Jonathan, as well as James. They’ve both traveled to the United States: we’ve met them in New York City for reunions with Hannah. Besides—travel is the one area where Julie and I splurge.

We spent a few days with Jonathan and William, using their Birmingham home as a base for day trips, then the four of us rode the rails to London to visit James, who lives about twenty minutes outside the city with his girlfriend, Nancy, a fellow CCS volunteer who worked in Costa Rica after Julie and I left. James drove us to Windsor to see the castle. A student of royal and military ceremonies, he explained the intricacies and symbolism of the changing of the guard. (James kept a photo of the queen in his room in Costa Rica. When someone drew a mustache on her, he was not amused. “It is against the law to deface the queen,” he declared.)

Our last night in England, hanging out in James’s flat drinking tea before dinner, we reminisced about Costa Rica. James told us about Lola, one of the ladies who founded the recycling group where they worked. Before leaving San Carlos, Jonathan and James took the ladies out for a going-away thank-you dinner. As midnight approached, Lola offered to drop them off at the “gringo house” on her way home. She also wanted to show them her business. James knew nothing about their destination when they got in the car, until Jonathan casually mentioned, oh yes, we’re stopping at a funeral parlor.

“So it turns out she’s Costa Rica’s first female funeral director,” said James. “And she’s quite proud of it. As well she should be. It’s elevated her standing in the community, particularly among the women. So we said, great, yeah, fantastic. Let’s do it. And we went to this funeral parlor. And then I thought, ‘Well, this is a bit creepy.’”

“Gas lamps, candles—total silence—it was eerie,” said Jonathan.

“She starts opening the coffins, and inviting us to feel the silk lining and the wood finish and the little window in the lid. And she’s getting excited! She’s like, ‘Look at the quality! Look at the craftsmanship!’ I thought she was gonna ask us to get in.”

“She locked the door as well,” said Jonathan. “We were worried she wouldn’t let us out.”

“Yeah—and then she gave us business cards!” said James, laughing.

“In case you die while you’re in Costa Rica,” I said.

“I was beginning to think maybe the gringos were gonna get whacked.”

“She’s a stalker preying on English recycling volunteers,” I added.

Nancy had several placements in Costa Rica, and found herself one day at a new school. “For some reason all the teachers start leaving, and my teacher takes me along. And I don’t speak Spanish so I have no clue what’s going on. I just thought, ‘Oh, okay, we’re going somewhere…’”

“Woo hoo! Field trip!” says Julie.

“Right. And they left all the kids behind. So I get in the teacher’s car and we drive up the street into a village and there’s a house with all these people standing outside. We get out of the car, and we walk in this person’s house, and there’s a coffin in the middle of the room!”

“And you don’t know anyone,” I say.

“No! I don’t know anyone! And all these people are milling about talking to me in Spanish and I’m just standing there not knowing what to do.”

“Was the coffin open?” Jonathan asks.

“I didn’t look in but it definitely wasn’t covered.”

“Probably one of Lola’s,” says James.

We all laugh. I’ve never liked the open casket. When my grandfather died—my father’s father—I asked to see him at the viewing. I was eight. He’d died in the hospital of a blood clot the day before he was due to come home. But the man in the casket wasn’t the man I loved. Granddaddy was a handyman. I’d never seen him in a suit and tie. Or in a casket, for that matter. When Dad died, my mom and my sister and I decided: no open casket.

I’ve always joked that when I croak I want my stiff right arm sticking out of the open casket, palm up, holding a platter of candy and nuts. So people can grab a snack while they’re peering at my pasty face. Adam wants to be painted with clown makeup and dressed in clown shoes that stick up through a slot at the end of the casket.

You hear that, death? We mock you. We have no choice.

Everyone in James’s flat that night had lost someone close to them. Jonathan lost his mother. Nancy’s stepfather died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. For we the survivors, our mission—our obligation—is to live and to laugh and to learn, and to pry joy from life, and to bring joy to others, and to strive, as I know Dad strived, to help more people than we hurt.

That evening, we walked to an Italian restaurant near James’s flat. We drank wine, and Jonathan ordered champagne, and we told stories, and we laughed, and though no one ever said it, we felt grateful for our enduring friendship.

Our Earthwatch group meets in the morning at a hotel about two short blocks from La Casa Sol. We introduce ourselves, shake hands—we’re a mix of five Americans, three Brits, two Canadians, and Earl the Australian—then load the belly of the bus with backpacks. A sad-faced boy, kindergarten age, tries to sell us gum. He walks from person to person, holding out his spearmint wares, unsuccessful, before plodding down the street.

We see indigenous candy sellers as our bus rolls through Quito, mothers and children on narrow concrete islands between streets, stooped over boxes of gum and mints. About fifteen miles north of the city we cross the equator, passing the Mitad del Mundo monument: a hundred-foot-high pyramid, a globe upon its flat top, like an erect equatorial nipple. GPS systems now indicate the equator is actually about eight hundred feet to the nipple’s north.

After stopping in a nowhere town called Nanegalito, our last chance for a bathroom and a bite to eat, we wind through green mountains, finally leaving pavement for a gravel road. A scruffy dog barks at our bus from a one-level house; a boy and his mother wave. We bump-bump-bump to a small, rustic lodge that is literally the end of the road. From here we’ll walk. Mules will carry our backpacks. Mules carry all supplies—primarily food and beer—because other than walking, or perhaps parachuting, there’s no way to reach the Santa Lucía lodge. We’re assured the mules live a luxurious life by mule standards, spending more time eating grass than hauling beer.

A welcome sign gives the distances. It’s about a two-mile walk, but a nearly two-thousand-foot climb. We ascend a dusty dirt road still being cleared by bulldozers, part one of our trek. This close to the equator, the sun is intense, despite the hazy sky. I’ve smeared on sunscreen in Tom-like quantities, but perspiration surely flushes it to my feet. My lungs are laboring, and we’re still forty minutes away from the mountain forest that looms before us.

Earthwatch rates this trip as strenuous, the most severe of its ratings, with promises of “hiking up to 15 miles/day, possibly back-country and/or uphill; carrying equipment weighing up to 40 lbs.” Fortunately I’m lighter than I was a few months ago. I lost eight pounds in China, I assume from a calorie-busting combo of fresh food, no desserts, no sodas, and lots of walking.

“So if this is a song is it ‘Stairway to Heaven’ or ‘Highway to Hell’?” asks a wheezing Wayne.

“Think of it as the aperitif,” says Natalie, wiping her face with her arm, brown hair in a ponytail. Natalie is married to Nick, one of four British researchers for the climate-change project. They can’t be older than thirty. She decided that staying home in London wasn’t nearly as exciting as joining her husband in South America. She’s been here for a few weeks.

“This is the hottest day yet,” says Natalie. “But from here on it’ll be cooler.”

“And steeper,” adds Nick.

After a brief rest, we walk again, passing lumpy piles of mule doo as we enter the woods.

“Just follow the nutrition and you’re probably on the right track,” says Charles, his tan shirt dark with sweat.

“All poo leads to home,” says Wayne.

“That sounds like the title of a bad kids’ book,” I tell him.

The walk is a series of sharp, steep switchbacks. We stop for periodic, much-needed breaks. I rest my hand on the moss-covered stub of a fallen tree, gasping, looking through a gap in the trees at the valley below. Leaves clack in the wind like faint applause. Birds and bugs chatter. I’d arrived in Quito a day early to acclimate to the altitude, but it didn’t work. For all the rain forest’s aural charms, the most prominent noise, it seems, is my panting.

“It’s like I’m chain-smoking Marlboros,” I tell Wayne. The pattern of the hike will continue for an hour and a half: climb, stop, pant. Sweat, sweat, sweat.

“The only good thing,” says Charles, huffing between sips from his CamelBak, “is that the more water I drink, the lighter my pack gets.”

The trail remains steep as we approach the lodge. When we finally exit the forest, transitioning from near-vertical path to flat grass, I laugh. A staff woman, Sofi, hands me a glass of lemonade. The lodge is a two-story wood building, a log-railing porch lined by bright orange flowers, covered by a green tin awning. Above that it’s largely glass, a mix of square and rectangular windows, rising in a peak to the sloped top-floor roof. For the next eleven days, this is home.

At almost the same hour I was trudging up trails to the Santa Lucía lodge, Adam walked to a podium at the Lord of Life Lutheran Church near our homes. Unlike the last night I saw him, Adam was clean shaven, wearing a suit and tie. Setting papers before him, he read his eulogy, nervous, yet finding strength, speaking naturally as if to a circle of friends—like speaking to us over beers at Fat’s. He told stories: his dad enjoyed hunting, and as a teenager Adam reluctantly helped his father butcher deer in the garage. “When it came time, he would come get me and say, ‘I need your help—put on an old shirt.’ I would hug the deer carcass to keep it from swaying while my dad sawed and carved. He would remind me to breathe though my mouth so I’d stop dry heaving.”

I look out over the Andes, my own gasping starting to slow. I am conscious that, in my own way, I too am hugging the carcass: still comparing myself to my father, dead now three years; knowing that I won’t be a parent, yet unwilling to let go.

When I was in China, my nephew graduated from college. Julie rode with my sister and brother-in-law and nieces to the convocation ceremony at McDaniel University in western Maryland, made the two-hour drive up and the two-hour drive back. Now she’s attending the funeral for Adam’s dad, without me. She hasn’t complained about my travels, hasn’t told me I’m a self-centered prick. Yet.

I’m rooming with Wayne and Charles in cabana five, the last cabana at the end of a dirt path. We cross a bridge, about eight feet long, to reach the cabin door, crossing a gully that becomes a stream in the rainy season. The green-tin-roof cabins sit along the side of a ridge. The cabanas are spacious, with room for two bunk beds and a single bed, plus a two-seat wicker couch. Tall windows line the back wall, providing a view of descending forest. There’s no electricity, but the bathroom has running water (though go easy on the agua, we’re told). Folks in the lodge use an outdoor bathroom that reminds me of a horse stable, long and wood and open, with two sinks, two urinals, and two composting toilets with a view that is staggering for a lavatory: a panorama of the Andes, the mountains in layers of fading silhouettes. To the left, the clouds creep in, as they do almost every afternoon, obscuring the peaks, creating the damp environment that allows mosses, ferns, and orchids to thrive. Nick later points out the deforestation of one distant ridge. “That’s the kind that mucks up the watershed,” he says.

Our cabana is supplied with candles and two candleholders. I’m glad I borrowed Adam’s headlamp: at night, the path becomes utterly, impossibly black. The more immediate issue, however, is horseflies. As we unpack—Wayne plays The Cure on an iPod he connects to a battery-operated speaker system—the horseflies buzz like long-term occupants annoyed by new guests. Horseflies are actually new to the area, says Nick, and they’re unfazed by bug spray. Wayne was stung as he relaxed postclimb in one of the lodge’s two porch-side hammocks, the stinger poking through the fabric to pierce his butt.

Charles kills a horsefly with a sandal—wham!

“You won’t be listening to The Cure again, ya bastard,” he says.

Later that evening I kill one with a book. The window is spotted with blood; the mangled body lies on its back. It looks like a mafia hit.

“Maybe we should leave it—to send a message to the other horseflies,” I say.

Wayne nods approvingly and looks at the assorted fly carcasses on the windowsills.

“The killing grounds,” he says.

A British volunteer, Edward, captures horseflies in a glass and releases them out the window. The next day, when we’re in the woods for an orientation, Wayne discusses the ethics of horsefly murder with Anita Diaz, a botanist who’s part of the research staff.

“Is it morally wrong to kill horseflies?” he asks.

“Oh no, no,” she says. “Kill the little buggers.”

We assemble that afternoon in the main level of the cabin-like lodge, where one of the researchers, Tim Cane, a geography specialist from the University of Sussex, outlines Santa Lucía’s risks and hazards—all the things that can bite us, blind us, sting us, spray us, kill us, give us a rash, or transform every solid in our intestinal system to liquid.

We sit on picnic-style wood benches. The upper floor is mainly bedrooms; this first floor is an open area that serves as dining room, meeting room, research facility, and gathering spot. Tim looks to be in his thirties, black hair buzzed to almost flattop length, though it’s gone above the forehead. A two-day beard—seemingly obligatory for the men here—darkens his round face.

“For a rain forest, this is a fairly benign environment,” he says, beginning his list of perils. “It’s extra dry at the moment, so hiking boots are okay—you probably won’t need Wellies. The trails are good—they’re wide—but you’ve got all the normal hazards: roots, sticks, rocks. Go slow. Some of our activities will be off the trail. It can be slick, lots of holes, and the ground can be unstable. You don’t want a broken leg or a sprained ankle. The bamboo is strong, it’s good for pulling yourself up a hill, but watch for thorns. The moss here has needles—watch for that as well. There’s a type of poison ivy that stings for two minutes. And snakes—watch for snakes—they can be poisonous—though no volunteers have been bitten here. They’re slow and a little sluggish at this altitude.”

I assume he means the snakes and not the volunteers.

“Watch for little scorpions. And centipedes. They can have a painful bite. And the caterpillars—they fall from the trees—that can be a really painful bite. The locals are careful to avoid them. Ants and spiders have an uncomfortable little nip. The wasps and bees—run away if you break open a wasp nest. Multiple stings can be quite fatal. Don’t eat berries, obviously. Many of the plants here are poisonous.

“Okay—large mammals. If you see one, you’re lucky. If you see bears, they’ll run. Pigs can be aggressive. If a pig comes after you, all you can do is kick him and try to run up a tree. Mites: They have intense bites. They go for your ankles. The bites will itch for a couple of days. As far as machete work, leave that to the pros. Even they struggle with it. We’ve had two guys hit themselves in the knee. So give them distance. The last thing you want is a machete to the jugular.

“If you use the laser equipment, don’t shine it in anyone’s eyes. Oh—and the sun is really strong at this altitude. Stay covered. You can dehydrate easily: bring plenty of water. And bring a first-aid kit. Your team leaders will have one as well. This is a humid area, so there’s a slightly greater risk of infection. And watch for tarantulas, though you’ll be lucky to see one.”

I think he’s done.

“Okay—diarrhea.”

He’s not done.

“We all get the squits at some point.”

The squits?

“I was laid up for two days last year,” says Nick. “It was bad.”

Bad squits.

“If it happens, you’ll just have to ride it out,” says Tim. “And stay hydrated.”

Finally, he’s finished. The only condition he doesn’t cover is the massive paranoia now permeating the room.

A few months before I learned about the squits, on a spring night in D.C., a perky volunteer for an environmental group bounded toward me on the sidewalk with a clipboard.

“Hey—how about giving me a high-five for our favorite planet!” he chirped.

I was racing down Seventh Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue at my usual damn-I’m-this-close-to-missing-my-train pace, weaving around tourists and red-jersey hockey fans on their way to a Caps game, past the Temperance Fountain: an 1882 gift to the city from a dentist who believed that if folks drank from its dolphin-shaped water fountain—which sits in a four-columned gazebo and hasn’t worked for years—they wouldn’t drink, say, gin.

Just as the Temperance Fountain makes me want to guzzle mai tais through a beer bong, this high-five request is an eco-turnoff. I’ve seen these well-meaning volunteers manning downtown D.C.’s sidewalks, wanting you to sign something, implying through their giddiness—or their dismay as you skip their clipboard spiel—that if you were smarter you’d love the planet or whatever cause they’re promoting almost as much as they do. But I also understand why my perky Seventh Street volunteer must be appalled by the disregard he encounters while trying to high-five pedestrians on behalf of the Earth. Because none of us seem bothered by breathing polluted air, eating food grown with polluted rainfall, and drinking water from polluted rivers and reservoirs. Factory soot, car exhaust, livestock poop, lawn chemicals—they’re all streaming into our atmosphere and water supplies and swishing around in our lungs and our blood. Studies have found toxins in breast milk. But unless you’re a fisherman who can’t fish because of an oil spill, or a homeowner with nuclear waste glowing beneath your daffodils, or you’re the victim of any colossal unnatural disaster, environmental issues don’t seem to affect you on a day-to-day basis.

That’s the problem with global warming. It’s hard to freak out about monstrous levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and small rises in temperatures when everything seems pretty much the same today as it did yesterday. Your kid is still struggling with algebra, your bills are due, and there’s not a damn thing for dinner. And then there’s the task of wrenching ourselves from a global economic system based around massive consumption of fossil fuels. Not easy.

But someday we’ll be judged by the poisoned planet and carbon-drenched atmosphere we’re leaving behind. Someday, future generations will say, “You knew what was happening—and you did nothing.” And that’s why I’m here. If I were a parent, I’d be worried—really worried—about the planet we’re leaving our children.

In the Andes, rising temperatures are already damaging one of the Earth’s most vibrant ecosystems. “Ecuador is a top-ten biodiversity hot spot,” says Mika Peck, leader of the research work in Santa Lucía. “A patch of ground here—meaning a one-hundred-by-one-hundred-meter area—has more tree species than the entire British Isles.”

Mika is an athletic forty-year-old University of Sussex professor who looks like he’d be more comfortable in a pub than a lecture hall. Our first night, he gives a PowerPoint climate change presentation on his laptop. Seventy percent of Ecuador’s rain forests, home to one of the world’s largest arrays of plants and animals—and an important force for capturing carbon—has been destroyed. Tree by chopped tree, miners, loggers, and ranchers are clearing forests (cattle pastures are a particularly ineffective use of the land given the poor soil, which leads to more clearing). The forests’ winged and four-legged residents are not only losing their habitats, but their numbers are diminishing from animal trafficking and hunting (a jaguar was recently shot nearby, Mika says, because it attacked a herd of cattle).

Here in the higher altitudes, climate change is the top threat. Increased temperatures mean more condensation in the damp rain forests. That causes the cloud base to rise: one meter every year, says Mika. Without the clouds, plants that thrive in the misty environment are exposed to direct sunlight, which could eventually annihilate them. Rising clouds also mean more rain: Mika has noted an increase in landslides. All of this affects where plant species live, or can’t live, which in turns affects the animals who feed on them.

Santa Lucía has already seen the potential catastrophes associated with rising temperatures. Mika mentions the Jambato toad, last seen here in 1987—a hot year. The toad likely perished from a chytrid fungus, which can’t survive in temperatures less than 17 degrees Celsius. Now, as in ’87, temperatures aren’t cold enough to kill the fungus, which means it could once again wipe out whole species. “And extinction,” Mika reminds us, “is forever.”

At 6:42 a.m. the sun creeps over the Andes and into my face: nature’s wake-up call. Birds squawk from nearby trees as I pull the covers to my neck and squint at the wide window view. Waxy green leaves rustle in the foreground, mountains with broccoli-like trees stand behind. Since Wayne and Charles are on the shady side of the room, I wake first, and I’m already at the lodge eating breakfast—coffee, porridge, buñuelos (doughnut-like fried balls)—when Charles arrives.

“Are you not at work yet, you lazy bugger?” he jokes.

I’m enjoying my coffee. The beans are grown and roasted about an hour’s walk down one of the trails. Since there’s no electricity, I helped grind the beans by hand, turning the crank as Natalie dropped beans through the metal funnel, brown powder spilling into a pan. It’s a hearty workout. Gyms everywhere should replace Nautilus machines with manual coffee grinders.

The night before, we each signed up for one of five research projects, from camera traps to bird tracking. These first two days I’ll assist Anita’s group with habitat assessment. The goal is to study how vegetation differs between primary and secondary forests, and how this affects plants, bird populations, and mammals (what they’re eating, is there enough of it). To do this, we’ll create plots in areas where Mika and his team have shot aerial images, and make a series of estimates: For example, what percentage of the ground cover is deadwood, what percentage is mosses and lichens, what percentage is liverworts and ferns, and so on. We’ll make similar estimates of what we see in the canopy. Roughly forty questions in all.

“So it’s like a game show,” I say as we begin our hike to the work site.

“Only no prizes,” adds Ellen.

Ellen is one of the six British students who accompanied Anita from the University of Bournemouth. At age forty-two, she’s about twenty years older than her companions, and she’s romping through the rain forest because a Bill Bryson book changed her life.

“I was working as an office manager for a company involved in maintenance for Ministry of Defence properties,” she tells me as we hike. “I had to attend meetings and produce minutes, provide spreadsheets, organize contractors, invoicing—none of it terribly interesting.” Then she read Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, his book on the origins of the universe and man. On page two of the introduction, he writes that even a long human life lasts only about 650,000 hours.

“I remember reading that sentence, and attending a meeting at work, and thinking, ‘Why am I giving you lot one of my hours?’”

A floppy tan sun hat covers her short auburn hair; a red handkerchief covers her neck, matching her red backpack. She’s been in Ecuador for almost a month, leaving her husband at home, working in three different reserves before arriving in Santa Lucía. Her walking stick is wrapped at the top with silver electrical tape: it was splitting from overuse.

“I remember reading the e-mail from Anita about this project and thinking that come what may, I wanted to be involved,” she says. She’s studying ecology, conservation, and wildlife at the university while working for a consulting firm that conducts ecological studies for developers.

We hike about an hour to the site, along trails hacked by Ecuadorans almost fifty years before. Pioneer farmers cleared areas along the ridge, hoping to grow crops, moving on once the soil was depleted. I’m winded when we arrive. Anita rambles off the trail to confirm the location, disappearing through steep brush to match numbers on her map to tree tags.

“She’s like a goat,” marvels Ellen.

The cloud forest, for Anita, is a source of giddy wonder. She notes the differences between various epiphytes, jumping and laughing when excited. “Brilliant! Cheers!” she shouts upon spotting some rare plant. She’ll squat in front of a bug, her thin butt almost in the dirt, camera in an insect’s face. I’m convinced she sleeps with a bromeliad under her pillow.

Anita climbs back up, issues directions, and we all go off the trail—down about a thirty-degree slope—breaking into groups to set up measurement areas. To do this, you pound a pole in the ground, then use string to create four distinct sections—north, south, east, west. One of us will stand in each quadrant. Ellen will bark out questions, and we’ll shout back answers, which she’ll jot on her clipboard.

The rain forest is not for the claustrophobic. I’m encircled by vines, trees, ferns; by palm leaves the size of car doors, by fuzzy, frilly branches that brush my neck and back; by heart-shaped aroid leaves slapping my face. It’s like rush hour on a cramped botanical subway.

The ground looks solid as we descend—it’s dense with foliage and rotting wood—but it’s slick and easily gives way. A rotting log crumbles beneath my boot. I duck my head, descending carefully, like Liu Baojian walking down steps. Flecks of seeds cling to my shirt. The thump of a hummingbird pulses by my ear, but as soon as I turn it’s gone.

I volunteer to shove the pole in the ground. Ellen points out the spot and I climb, carefully, stooping below branches and vines and platter-sized leaves.

Which is when I slip.

Months earlier, we all received an equipment list, which included work gloves. My gloves, at the moment, are on my bed in the cabana. As I fall, I reach for a tree, and a chunk of brown bark slices behind the thumbnail on my left hand. It’s throbbing—instantly. I pull out a clump—it’s poking above the nail—but most of it is trapped behind the nail, as if inserted by interrogators to induce a confession. For now, there’s nothing I can do. We haven’t started our work. Only after an hour and a half of recording data, of guessing what percentage of the ground is sticks versus dead logs, after an hour-long hike back to the lodge for lunch, can I finally confront the thick green and brown foreign object wedged behind my nail.

Bridget, one of the students, loans me her tweezers. Ellen hands me her clippers. “That’s really in deep,” she says. “You should soak it in hot water. With salt.” I fill a coffee cup with steaming water, tap a salt shaker, then go to the outdoor bathroom with the amazing mountain view. It’s tedious work: I soak, dig, tap slivers of bark into the sink. And then I soak it again. But I soon realize that scooping and gouging isn’t sufficient. This requires something more serious.

This requires self-surgery. Meaning I’ll have to cut the nail low. Uncomfortably low.

I stare at my pounding thumb. And then I clip at about the midpoint of the nail, cutting down at a sharp angle. As I cut, I think of Julie: normally she would be treating my wound. I extract nearly all of the bark. Helen, a sexagenarian volunteer from Canada, brings me some hard-core extra-sticky bandages. I wash my sore, wounded thumb in the sink, cover it with ointment, then wrap it with the bandage.

Everyone has finished lunch by the time I enter the lodge. I quickly down some locro—a soup made from potato, cheese, avocado, and corn kernels—and then beans and rice, a lunchtime staple, along with baked plantains. We remove our shoes before entering the lodge, and when I’m done with lunch I struggle to tie my boot laces.

Like so many things in life, I’ve taken my thumb for granted.

When I was a kid, my mother hosted a garden club party, which I found odd since we didn’t have a garden. Garden club, I assume now, was code for a mommies’ cocktail hour, although my mom is a notorious nondrinker, which is probably good because she has an addictive personality. She’ll get hooked on a type of candy—once it was caramel creams—or a song: we’d listen to Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” again and again in the car when I was a kid, my sister and I performing the Pip parts. Dad once asked Mom’s cousin, Lee, who’s had a forty-year love affair with marijuana, to never give my uptight mother a joint.

Lee grudgingly agreed. “Really, it’d be the best thing for her,” he said. “It’d help her relax.”

The night of the garden club shindig, Dad and I were banished from the house. Dad was taking me to dinner and then bowling, but first we drove to Arlington to see Granddaddy. He was home alone that night. My grandmother was probably playing bingo, one of her passions. I went with her once: she played six cards at a time, cigarette hanging from her mouth, studying the cards like an astronomer eyeing stars.

We took Granddaddy to Gino’s, a now-defunct chicken chain. Granddaddy was in a chatty mood, telling a story, one my sister and I loved, about how he set down his hat at a Kmart, forgot it, went back the next day, found a price tag on it, and wound up re-buying his own hat.

By the time we took Granddaddy home, it was too late to go bowling. Dad apologized, but I said it was fine. Even that young, I knew that something cool had transpired. Just the three of us, together. The kind of moment you’d do anything to re-create.

We got home about fifteen minutes early, so Dad kept driving, past our house toward the river town of Occoquan, down Route 123. Now it’s a four-lane highway, then it was a two-lane road through low-hanging woods. The car’s high beams were the only light.

“I had an old car in high school,” Dad said, referring to his car with the wheel that fell off. “Sometimes the lights wouldn’t work. When they’d flick off it’d look just like this—”

He flipped off the lights. We cruised at 50 miles per hour in absolute darkness.

I screamed in shock and delight, and Dad laughed—hard. It wasn’t easy to make him laugh, but when he did, it was full body. He turned the headlights back on. I’m sure they were off two, maybe three seconds, but it felt like we were roaring through deep space; an Oldsmobile in a black hole. I practically hyperventilated with giggles.

“Don’t tell your mother about this,” he said, still smiling.

Now, on my first night in the Andes, I leave the lodge and walk the trail to the cabana, using Adam’s headlamp to see. And then I turn it off, and I take a few quick steps in absolute darkness.

Feeling stupid is good. It keeps you humble. Makes you learn. I felt stupid working in New Orleans, and Costa Rica, and China, and I feel stupid doing these vegetation surveys.

Ellen holds the clipboard, shouting questions in her “school-ma’am-ish voice,” as she calls it, recording answers on a worksheet. The rest of us stand in our leafy quadrants. In the interest of speed, she abbreviates the questions, such as “What percentage of the ground cover is leaf litter,” to a quicker shorthand.

Ellen: “Okay, ground cover. Percentage leaf litter—Ken.”

“Ten.”

“Bridget?”

“Ten.”

“Phillip?”

“Five.”

“Janet?”

“Five.”

“Percentage twigs—Ken?”

“Twigs?”

“Twigs.”

“Er—about thirty.”

“Thirty or thirteen?”

“Thirty.”

“Bridget?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Phillip?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Janet?”…

After close to an hour of this, we move to another site. It takes some getting used to. I struggle to remember which plants are which when Ellen calls them out. “Total percentage bromeliads on trunk,” she says, and I think—

Shit—what’s a bromeliad?

Oh yeah—the thing that looks like a pineapple.

On another occasion—really stupid—I record the circumference of a tree rather than the diameter with our handmade yellow tape measure.

Ellen assures me our readings are pretty much in line with everyone else’s. The university students still struggle to identify orchids, she says. By day two—the most taxing day of the trip—I’m more comfortable. We head to the bird tower: a wooden tower for bird-watching, about 3.75 miles away, at an altitude of eight thousand feet. We won’t return to the lodge for lunchtime beans and rice; instead, we each receive a brown bag to stuff in our packs (and yes, I packed my gloves).

Initially we make good time, arriving at Nathaniel’s farm—a key landmark on the main trail from the lodge—in thirty minutes. Nathaniel runs the lodge where we’re staying. It’s an attempt at eco-tourism; Earthwatch’s involvement helps make it a sustainable venture. His former farm—a house and a rickety open stable—is a frequent stopping point for breaks and toilet trips. Directions often begin with, “You go past Nathaniel’s farm, and then…”

We walk a bit farther, and then our same group as yesterday—Ellen, Bridget, Chloe, Helen, me—surveys site FP30. We descend off the trail, moving gingerly down the dense forest slope. A hummingbird feeds on bell-like flowers. I wind up in a patch of aroids, their leaves brushing my face. We’ve finished the ground and dead-wood surveys when Mateo, a botanist from Quito, announces—oops—we’re in the wrong area.

“I’m a bit cheesed off,” says Ellen as we climb back up, since she’d asked more than once if FP30 was correct. We assist the other team, even though they don’t need assistance, then gather on the trail for an energy bar break.

And then Chloe shrieks.

The pea-green snake is coiled around a palm stem, its head and upper body frozen along a large leaf at about the height of my chest. Uniform black patterns, the kind you’d find on a woven straw basket, are stamped in scaly X’s along its back. Because it’s thin, it doesn’t look overly threatening, though we all know better. Its body is compact, close to the stem, a defensive posture, perhaps. Or a pre-strike position.

“Don’t get too close—I think it’s poisonous,” says Chloe.

We get too close, holding cameras within a foot of its eyes.

Anita arrives.

“Ahhh—an eyelash viper! Brilliant!”

She takes photos as well, pointing out the viper’s triangular head and noting that yes, these vipers are quite poisonous, and can strike up to a meter away, and then someone remembers a story about a woman whose right foot was amputated after getting bitten on a trail by a viper not all that different from this scaly specimen.

We all nod and say, “Huh—interesting …,” as we quickly step back.

“I’d rather not go home with my right foot in my backpack,” I tell Ellen.

“Oh, don’t worry—your wife is a nurse.”

“Yeah—that’ll work. ‘Honey, I’m back—can you reattach my foot?’”

We walk again. Up. I ask Ellen if she’s enjoyed her weeks of work, but the higher we go, the harder we breathe, and the harder it is to talk.

“I … love it …,” she huffs.

She enjoys the hikes, the isolation, calling out the survey questions, managing the forms.

“If you haven’t noticed … I’m a bit bossy,” she says.

For her dissertation she’s studying the effect of wind turbines on bats. “Suffice it to say … for the bats … these turbines … are not the environmental solution … to energy problems.”

Mateo stops and points through a gap in the trees. Far in the distance, on the edge of a sprawling ridge, is a whitish dot. “The lodge,” he says. Three other group members—Helen, Chloe, and Hailey—are lagging behind, so we wait for them and enjoy the view. Helen is in her sixties, and seems fit, but she’s struggling with the altitude and steep trail. Hailey is a little out of shape; Chloe smokes.

Anita crouches on the rising trail. She’s barely sweating. Same with Mateo, who has the nonchalant look of a man on a morning stroll.

“We may not reach the tower at this pace—we won’t have time to do the surveys,” says Anita. “We can’t make so many stops.”

And so we split: a group of four will do surveys here, the rest of us will move on. Our pace quickens. A drizzly fog slithers through the trees. I’ve hiked at higher elevations with Julie, but this is draining, partly because of the humidity, partly because of the climb.

“Well … my heart works,” I say to Ellen.

Sweat drips from my chin to my pants. Ellen asks Mateo how much farther.

“Twenty minutes,” he says.

Thirty minutes later she asks him again.

“Fifteen minutes,” he says.

We’re probably slowing him down. The guy still isn’t even sweating.

We hike up, up, up—and then a few short, steep downs—and then up, up, up.

“Oh my … goodness …,” says Ellen as we turn a corner, realizing we have more to scale.

At a small, flat clearing, we stand behind thigh-high West African grass, the trees parting. Clouds consume the mountains, the trees disappearing under a blanket of gray; like God is dissatisfied, erasing His work. The grass flutters in the wind, and it looks lovely until you realize: it’s a nonnative species. It shouldn’t be in Ecuador.

Another twenty minutes of hiking and finally, mercifully, we see it. The tower. After a few wheezing cheers, we unload our bags and take turns climbing up. It’s three stories, rickety, built on top of a metal-roof shack. I go first. It’s wobbly. Really wobbly. With each step it jiggers and jerks, yanked by the swirling wind, which chills my sweaty shirt. At the top, three flights in all, is a bare-bones wood platform. Forget the view: the fog is so thick that not only has the forest vanished, but even the roof below seems dim. Between the mist and the seclusion and the tower’s swaying shipwreck design, standing alone up top is … spooky. Like the place is haunted by dead ornithologists.

I climb down for lunch in the wall-less cabin. Each lunch bag contains a juice box, a Nestlé Crunch bar, and two foil packages: one with rice, the other with potato salad. No forks. Ellen makes a spoonlike scoop out of foil, but it’s only semisuccessful. I go with the trough method, dumping the potato salad into the rice, cupping the foil in both hands, and plunging my face in. Much more effective, and more satisfying in a primal, me-hungry kind of way.

The postlunch plan is to do two surveys, but the fog is so thick—and visibility so poor—it’s impossible to see the canopy. I can’t even see Ellen beyond the ferns and vines and wide leaves; I hear only voices, a bird swooping and calling, the flap of its wings echoing off the trees. I stand on a fallen tree, awkwardly, holding on to another thin tree for support. If I lower my left foot, the ground gives out.

Anita halts the survey. It’s pointless. She and Mateo stay to wrap up some additional work, and the rest of us begin the three-hour hike to the lodge. I’m the only American with four Brits, and they ask me about U.S. national parks. I tell them about various parks I’ve visited—Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Great Smoky Mountains—though given the thick clouds and impending darkness, I’m reminded most of a trip Julie and I took to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons with Teresa and Tom.

Teresa and Tom and I tended to pull ahead of Julie on the trails, partly because she’s pokey, partly because she’d stop to shoot photos of wildflowers. We’d wait for her, since separating is high on the list of dumb things to do while hiking (on one hike the four of us walked waaay around a bison that blocked a trail). We were trekking up the Amphitheater Lake Trail, about a 9.5-mile round-trip hike and a three-thousand-foot climb in the Tetons, the payoff being two lakes at about ten thousand feet. But as we approached the aptly named Disappointment Peak, we again became separated from Julie.

Storms arrive fast in the mountains. The temperature dropped about twenty degrees. Black clouds, grim and muscular, rolled over the mountains. Showers and thunder shook the trees.

We walked back down the trail, calling for Julie, yelling over the rain and wind.

Juuuuuuu-lieeeee!

The rain became hail. We scurried near the lake, seeking shelter beneath the trees.

We called her name again.

The three of us huddled, freezing from the rain and the suddenly frigid temperatures, hail bouncing off our packs.

“She could be anywhere!” I yelled.

“Maybe we should just go back down and meet her at the trail-head!” Tom yelled back.

No way. I wasn’t leaving until we found her. For all we knew she’d sprained an ankle, been mauled by a bear. No. We were staying here. I imagined myself telling her parents, “Well, we didn’t know where she was, so we left.”

I checked a few side trails. Tom and Teresa stayed put. We didn’t want all of us splitting up. I splashed up a trail that led to a campsite, yelling her name, competing against the rain and the wind, the trail like a stream.

I walked farther through the woods. A few more minutes, I told myself. I shouldn’t go too far. The hail had stopped, but the rain was loud, like static.

When I turned a corner, she was walking toward me, drenched.

I’ve never felt relief that strong.

I didn’t run through the puddles to embrace her. I didn’t lecture her on the need to stick with the group. She didn’t lecture me for leaving her behind.

I smiled faintly from under my dripping hood. She smiled back.

“It’s good to see you!” I shouted above the rain.

“Where is the bucket of tarantulas?” asks Zachary. He’s a British college student, a mix of erudite book smarts and daring nature-boy physique, topped by a Thor-like mane of blond hair. He needs the tarantulas so they can be photographed and ID’d. It would be easy to dislike him, given that he’s a tall, brainiac young stud who tends to walk around shirtless with his bucket of tarantulas and a machete (that’s right, he gets to carry a machete), but I’ve reached a point in life where I’m beyond being jealous of eighteen-year-old wunderkinds. Besides—he’s such a nice kid he’s impossible to dislike. The bastard.

While Zachary searches for his tarantula bucket, I’m engaged in my newest activity to boost mankind’s knowledge of the cloud forest: picking through muck to search for grubs, slugs, leeches, cockroaches, and whatever critters might be living inside a bromeliad.

Investigating the muck, we’re told, will help scientists understand how much these slimy, wiggly creatures depend on plants threatened by global warming. The project works like this: Mika shoots a weighted rope around the base of a branch with a slingshot-like device, then, when it’s tight, uses a foot system to pull himself up. Once there, he whacks off a bromeliad with his machete, climbing as high as sixty feet (he’s the only who can do it because he’s the only one insured to do it). Apparently some of the Ecuadorans—expert climbers who can scale trees quickly with their hands and feet—find the heavy apparatus amusing. Gabriel, a staff member and ornithologist, climbed about fifty feet to set up a tree swing (which we’re forbidden to use, since a drunk volunteer once leapt off the swing and broke his leg). When Mika hooks up his ropes, says Natalie, the Ecuadorans look like they’re thinking—

We could shimmy up that tree in a few minutes.

“They probably think we’re right wussies,” she says.

Wayne chops off the leaves from one of Mika’s bromeliads and rinses them with a watering can over a net, which collects the mud and debris for inspection. Chunks of mud are put in a bowl, along with the bromeliad’s core, and brought to one of the tables inside, where Phillip, Natalie, and I sort through it to find anything that’s living.

I hit instant biological jackpot: scorpion.

Phillip and Natalie serenade me with oohs as I hold up the two-inch-long scorpion with tweezers. Many species here are unidentified—Natalie says I should campaign to have the scorpion classified in my name (Scorpicanus buddus)—which surprises me: I thought mankind had pretty much discovered all the creatures that are crawling, flying, or running around the Earth. Our focus, I assumed, had shifted from discovering species to exterminating them. Yet here in the Andes, unidentified species, particularly plants, lurk everywhere. We occasionally pass a red flower that looks like a fat, bloated, prickly hot dog, which Anita and the other researchers had never seen before. She nicknamed it the “Diseased Willie,” for obvious reasons, a name the women find more amusing than the men. (Adam and I recently accompanied our wives to a fortieth birthday party for a mutual friend. The birthday girl received a book called Sex After 40, which contained nothing but blank pages. The women found this losing-their-breath funny. Adam nudged me: “You notice none of the dudes are laughing,” he said.)

I study my scorpion. He’s already dead, which means I don’t have to watch him drown in a beaker of alcohol. The researchers will send any creatures we find to a university in Quito for identification.

The work is tedious. We sift through small piles of dirt in rectangular petri dishes, studying them with magnifying glasses. Phillip finds a thick slug and unwittingly slices it with his tweezers; its midsection oozes purple goo. I mainly find tiny white larvae, which can’t be more than a millimeter or two in length, presumably the offspring of caterpillars or worms. They squirm as they plummet to the bottom of the alcohol-filled beaker. In one clump of mud—which smells like pond scum—I pluck out ninety-seven mosquito larvae.

We talk to pass time as we sift. Natalie chats about her and Nick. Before earning his degree in environmental science, he was an expert carpenter who specialized in cabinets, but he grew weary of his upscale clients. “He got tired of taking out a posh kitchen and replacing it with another posh kitchen,” says Natalie.

She wants to have kids. She mentions a single friend who got inseminated. “I think she should have adopted,” Natalie says, dropping some sort of mitelike creature into the alcohol. “So many children need homes.”

I once considered being a sperm donor. I even filled out an online application for a nearby fertility clinic, not to ensure the Budd seed got planted in some lucky egg, or because I thought I’d take my mystery child to baseball games and amusement parks. I just thought that maybe, assuming my sperm were up to snuff, I could help some couple that couldn’t have kids. And no, I didn’t tell Julie about this.

I then received an e-mail from the clinic:

Thank you for your interest in our donor program. Your application lists a birth date of 1966, which unfortunately will not allow you to complete the six-month contract period before turning 40. At this time we will not be able to accept you as a donor. However, you have the option to earn significant rewards as a donor RECRUITER: an average of $500–$1,000 for every prospect you recruit who successfully enters our donor program. We will gladly provide marketing information and tools to assist you in this effort.

So they don’t want my sperm, though they’d love a donation from someone like Zachary.

My sister has three children, so the genes of my parents will live on. But the Budd name, as it extends through my father and grandfather, ends with me. And that ends one helluva long string of creation. Think about it: It took two people to create you. Four people to create your parents. Eight people to create your grandparents. It’s astounding, really, when you ponder how many Homo sapiens pairings occurred over the last two hundred thousand years so that someone could give birth to you, to me, to all of us.

I sit at the long wood table in the lodge, and I spend the morning plucking more larvae from smelly mud, and I drop them with tweezers into the beaker of alcohol. Their tiny white ridged bodies curl as they descend, until they die upon the bottom of the glass.

Rather than spend the entire day picking through bromeliad gunk—“It’s like factory work,” says Natalie—she takes Phillip and me for a postlunch hike down roller-coaster trails, searching for more high-in-the-canopy bromeliads. We pass two tall, heavenly waterfalls, the second forty-five to fifty feet high, the mountain wall thick with mosses and ferns.

Once we identify a worthy bromeliad candidate, Phillip and I wrap a red string around the damp trunk, and loop a numbered round metal marker—like a dog tag—before tying it. Natalie records the tree’s position with a GPS. Eventually Mika will climb it and chop down the bromeliad so its insides can be investigated, its residents plopped into more alcohol-filled beakers.

The trek back up is arduous, but we move at a decent clip. When we return, sweating, reaching the back side of the lodge, I stop.

“Tarantula,” I say, pointing to the ground.

We huddle around it. The tarantula isn’t moving. Natalie calls young Zachary, the resident bug expert.

“It’s paralyzed,” he says, crouching down. “See?”

He lifts one of the tarantula’s hairy back legs. Lifting a tarantula’s leg to test for paralysis is probably on the list of frowned-upon activities for students and volunteers.

A wasp creeps through the grass toward the tarantula. As Zachary explains it, a sting from the wasp—called a tarantula hawk—is what caused the spider’s paralysis. Now the wasp drags the tarantula to a burrow, where it’ll stuff the still-alive-but-paralyzed tarantula inside. There, the wasp will lay an egg in the hapless spider, which will slowly die in the burrow. Eventually the egg will hatch, Zachary says, and the little wasp baby will eat its way out of the tarantula’s body to start a new life.

Ah, the glories of nature. Eat food, become food. Return to the soil and enrich the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Have your insides eaten out by a burrowed wasp baby.

Death is one of God’s shrewder, if less popular, creations. Our participation fee for this brief, uncommon opportunity to experience life. And what would life be without death?

Roughly a year before I arrived in Ecuador, my grandmother went to Fairfax Hospital with pneumonia. She was eighty-eight. The clouds of Alzheimer’s were consuming more of her mind.

“If you want to see her,” Mom told me, “you better do it soon.”

My sister and I called my grandmother “Daa,” a name thrust upon us for reasons we never understood. Daa had six brothers and sisters and they all had Smurf-like nicknames—Humpet, Sommer, Honey—so I suppose this was the continuation of some unfortunate family tradition. Most of Daa’s siblings called her Kinky because of the kinkiness of her hair, clearly oblivious to the word’s leather-whips-and-candle-wax connotations.

When my sister went to the hospital, a day before I did, Daa was drifting in and out of consciousness, talking to her deceased sister Elizabeth and my father. “Don’t sit there,” she told my sister, pointing at the empty end of the bed. “Bob is sitting there.”

Who knows, my sister said later—maybe Dad really was sitting there.

I went to the hospital the next morning. It was worse than I expected. Until then, she’d been forgetful, and she occasionally said peculiar things, but now she seemed more frail, more distant—her consciousness altered. She reached for invisible objects on the blanket with withered, blue-veined hands. She put the invisible objects to her mouth. Sometimes she’d mumble or say random words in a weak voice. My mother’s name. Family. Bob. And then she’d say something lucid—“This isn’t a fun way for you to start your day”—followed by something not so lucid: “I’m just trying to straighten the table.”

Sometimes she’d look at me, squinting, as if trying to make me out.

When Terry’s father, Howard, approached death after successive heart attacks, he began hallucinating. Terry was alone with him in the hospital. Howard stared at a bare white wall.

“What are you looking at?” Terry asked, sitting next to the bed.

“I’m watching a movie,” said Howard. “Lonesome Dove.”

So Terry stared at the blank wall with him, watching the movie that wasn’t there.

Now Daa licked her lips, breathed heavy, dozed, then lifted her head, squinting.

“You look like you’re up to something,” she murmured.

The room was dark, the medical machinery humming. Remarkably, a few days later, she would return home, looking vibrant despite never leaving bed, and seeming, for that first weekend at least, alert. Unlike Adam’s dad, her last stand would endure a few months. She would live past her eighty-ninth birthday, lingering in hospice care. But it was clear that day, as she plucked unseen items from the bed, that death was near. And I looked at her, asleep despite the tubes and the screens and the beeping devices, and then I looked up at the TV: while my grandmother approached death, an in-hospital service called the Newborn Channel showed a new mother breastfeeding her baby. The circle of life in a strange electronic way.

When it’s me on this bed with tubes and machines, when it’s my heart wrenching to a halt like Dad’s—when I’m the tarantula trapped in the burrow—I don’t want any regrets. I don’t want to be defined by disappointments.

For all the brilliant scientists here, Wayne is the true genius. He brought Scotch.

“I decided if I’m literally in the middle of nowhere and I have a zero-luxury lifestyle, maybe I can make it just a little more comfortable,” he says.

Genius.

I was planning to scrub a few clothes after walking back from the waterfalls, but as soon as he offers Scotch, I toss the stinky shirts on my backpack.

Wayne holds up a shiny silver flask shaped like a small bowling pin. “It’s Oban,” he says, opening it. “Fourteen years old.” He pours about an inch in my glass, then his, adding a little water from a pitcher covered with tin foil to keep out bugs.

“Scotch aficionados say the water brings out the flavor. It’s a chemical thing. You don’t want ice. If Scotch is cold, you taste the alcohol and not the nuances. Drink it straight and it burns the hell out of your nose. But a little water dilutes it just enough to get rid of the burn, but doesn’t cool it down to where you can’t really taste it. I know—it’s weird. But it works.”

“You’re like a whiskey chemist,” I say.

I sit on my bed, Wayne sits on the wicker couch. I sip.

“Damn,” I say. “This is really nice.”

As we drink we hear shouts from a cleared-out dirt field below and behind our cabana, where a soccer game rages: the gringos versus the Ecuadorans (though all the gringos are Brits). The Ecuadorans usually win, as well they should: they have home-field advantage.

Wayne wipes a dribble of Scotch from his mustache.

“Have you always had the beard?” I ask.

“Nah. I grew it for the trip. I didn’t want to shave. I figured I’m going into the mountains, I should have a beard. It’s appropriate. How ’bout you—ever grow one?”

“I had a mustache for about seven years. I looked like a lounge singer.”

“Like Ron Burgundy?”

“Pretty much.”

“Ever thought about going for the full beard?”

“Well, the problem is that it comes in half gray.”

“That’s the distinguished beard!” he says. “That’s the look.”

I laugh. “I once let it go unshaven for about a week. And then I got up one morning, looked in the mirror—my hair was messed up, I had this nasty brown and gray stubble—and I thought, ‘I look like an old alcoholic.’ That was the last time I tried to grow a beard.”

When I came back to the cabana, before we poured the Scotch, Wayne lay in his top bunk, talking on his phone to his wife. Somehow, despite our remote location, despite our distance from civilization—despite my understanding that we might as well be on Mars—Wayne was getting a cell phone signal. It was only one bar, and it was inconsistent, but it worked. Charles, it turns out, is also getting a signal.

“I spent the morning answering e-mails from the office,” he says.

I question Nick about this after dinner.

“We’re nowhere near a tower—the signal somehow bounces over the mountain,” he says.

I’m deeply disappointed by this. I like our isolation. And yet as Wayne spoke with his wife, I pulled my phone from my pack. I held it. I pondered turning it on, though now, as we drink Scotch, it’s still off, sitting on the bed next to me.

A sweaty Charles enters the cabana from the soccer game, jubilant.

“England won—three to two!” he proclaims. “Mike had two goals. Zachary had the game winner. Mika stopped close to thirty shots.”

“That’s great,” says Wayne. “We’ll probably get smaller portions at dinner now.”

He rises from the couch and pours Scotch for Charles, who wipes his face with a towel and pulls a few bags of banana chips from his suitcase. “I didn’t know you have a stash,” I say, practically pouncing as he rips them open. (I got hooked after buying some in Nanegalito.)

It’s like being in a college dorm. We’re drinking, listening to music, doing dumb stuff—Wayne tries out his snakebite kit on his forearm and yelps in pain from the suction—we’re grubby, eating chips … it’s an unexpected benefit to the trip.

We take turns showering before dinner. I go first, running the water only twice: to get wet and then to rinse off the soap and shampoo. The water goes from freezing to scalding then back to freezing as I adjust the knob, with ten-second, just-right ahhhh periods in between. There’s no mirror, so I shave blindly with my electric razor, wondering if I’m missing spots.

I get dressed and sit on my bed. My phone is next to me. I think about turning it on. Maybe I’ll get a signal, maybe I won’t. If I do, I’ll think about calling Julie. And I’ll answer e-mails from work. And I’ll check headlines. But I keep thinking of that old line of Jonathan’s that is still with me three years later: You only really learn about yourself when you’re out of your comfort zone. And so I never turn it on. And I put it back in my pack.

In the evenings, before dinner, the lodge’s front porch becomes happy-hour central. The kitchen sells Pilsener beer and Chilean wine, hauled to the lodge on the strong backs of mules, as Wayne and Jade know too well. Jade is an Atlanta native turned Brooklynite who’s here through her company. The day before, as they walked back to the lodge from a work site, they heard a speeding clip-clop behind them. They turned and saw two mules, loaded with beer and supplies, approaching at a dead gallop. Wayne and Jade leapt off the trail into the brush.

“They just missed us,” said Wayne.

Nathaniel walked nonchalantly behind, they said, and kind of smirked as he passed.

“You could almost hear him saying ‘silly gringos,’” said Jade. “Scared the crap out of us. Can you imagine? Death by beer donkey.”

Volunteers and Bournemouth students sit on porch benches and pull chairs from the tables inside; I lean against the rails, facing the clutter of Wellies and buckets and stray walking sticks. Earl, the pleasant gray-and-white-haired Australian, pours his beer into a glass.

“This beer is Kimberley cool,” says Earl.

“Kimberley?”

“Kimberley is the hottest place in Australia,” he says with a wink.

Earl’s blue fleece jacket is zipped high. The evenings are cool. I walk with my beer from the porch across the grass. The panorama view never fails to provoke awe. On a night like this, when the clouds complement rather than gobble the sky, the sunset is a slide show of fire, yellow beams streaming through dark clouds, a spotlight on valley trees. As the sun drops, the sky turns pink, the mountains layered like torn paper; the clouds like smoke in battle. The sun burns, alive, then fades, fades, fades.

We enter the lodge for dinner, usually a small amount of meat, some veggies, a colossal mound of mashed potatoes. The potatoes frequently take up half the plate. Tonight we have meatballs. Given that beef is expensive, I wonder if any of the mules are missing.

After dinner, a group of us sit inside, finishing beers and talking. That afternoon in the woods, Charles had found a nutmeg: smaller than a golf ball, almost perfectly round except for a slight nub at the top. He’s flicking it into a glass he’d laid on its side. Over time, it evolves into a game: to see who can flick the nutmeg closest to the edge of the table without its rolling off. We mark the leader’s spot with a strip of yellow tape tied in a bow. Because the table is uneven and not terribly smooth, the ball teeters near the edge, tugged by gravity, maybe staying, maybe falling, leading to cries of triumph—Oh Oh Oh Oh YEAAAHHHH!—and despair: go go go STOP! Awwwwwww…

We first call our new game Flickball, but it then becomes Flicknut.

It’s Jade’s turn. She drinks her beer, then steadies her right hand behind the nut.

“In a few days we’ll be gambling on this,” I say.

“Try a few minutes,” says Wayne.

“Please,” says Jade. “I need quiet.”

The light is dim; a few feeble fluorescent lights powered by the generator. Jade flicks the nut with too much oomph: it rolls off the table toward Wayne, who catches it.

“Be gentle with the nut,” says Wayne.

Flicknut devolves, naturally, into a series of nut jokes. Holding your nut, handling your nut, stroking your nut, warming your nut. Charles has the best shot so far, about an inch and a half from the edge. Jade then surpasses him with a curving shot reminiscent of a golf putt.

About eight flicks later, Charles lands another shot near the edge. Wayne kneels at the end of the table and examines the nut’s placement. He nods, then marks it with the yellow tape.

“Another victory for England,” says Charles, arms raised to the air.

New theories develop: spinning the shot, banking it off a beer glass. And new obstacles: a corner beer trap where Jade and Jean, a Canadian volunteer, have placed their glasses.

“Be the nut,” says Wayne, as Jean prepares a shot.

On a second Flicknut night, after Mika showed some folks a documentary about mining companies on his laptop, people actually huddled around us, watching.

“What’s this?” says Nick.

“Flicknut,” says Wayne, concentrating, now wearing a striped knit glove he bought in Otavalo to give his flick a softer touch.

The night ends when the generator is turned off. We walk back to the cabana, Charles and Wayne and I, the light from our headlamps bouncing along the trail and the aroid leaves.

“Flicknut is a good example of how people adapt when they don’t have electricity,” I say as we carefully walk in a row.

“And yet it’s strangely satisfying,” says Wayne from the front.

“Think it’ll take off in the States?” asks Charles.

“People will watch anything,” I say.

“We’ll contact ESPN,” adds Wayne.

“Good idea,” I say. “Monday Night Flicknut.”

Flicknut, I decide, is a good metaphor for life: enjoy what you have instead of lamenting what you lack.

Our rice-and-beans lunch is still a half-hour away, so I watch hummingbirds dart around feeders at the side of the lodge. A cheap out-of-tune guitar twangs from inside. Two teenage Ecuadorans, Jason and Julia, are here to assist with research. They live in Nanegal, a village at the bottom of the mountain, and they’re here as a reward: the two led an environmental initiative at their school. Jason is tall, athletic, frequently wears a wool cap during the day despite the humidity. He’s teaching himself guitar, using one the lodge keeps for guests. I admire his persistence, though as he repeats the same four awkward out-of-tune chords, I’m reminded of Tom’s attempt to play the accordion in Xi’an. Except Jason has been “playing” for twenty minutes.

We’re back early from our newest assignment: checking camera traps. The traps are set to photograph spectacled bears and pumas, to help researchers determine their population size. The camera takes three pictures when triggered by motion sensors. To attract their furry subjects, we spray the traps with puma urine and bear urine. Unlike the pee smell of, say, a New York City subway station, puma urine smells like a rather old shoe, while the bear urine has the surprisingly pleasing scent of vanilla extract.

We walk to the trap sites—me, Wayne, Jade, and three other volunteers—with Javier, who seems less like a scientist than a bass player with an Ecuadoran rock band. A series of pierced hoops and studs run down both ears, complementing a looped nose ring. His pierced lower lip rests above a frizzy soul patch; a small ponytail brushes his neck.

Dipping down a side trail to trap number one, Javier teaches us the art of adding puma urine to a camera trap. First, you rip chunks of cotton into five marble-sized balls and shove them in a vial. Next, you spray the urine into the vial and onto the cotton. I do ten stinky squirts, but Javier says to do more. I add another ten. My hands now smell of puma urine.

“Great—every female puma in the forest thinks I’m an eligible bachelor,” I say to Jade.

“Maybe it’s female urine and you’re attracting males.”

We lodge a stick in front of the camera trap—the camera is mounted on a platform—and tape two vials on opposite sides of the stick with silver duct tape. According to the small orange spray bottle, this is 100 percent pure puma urine.

“One hundred percent pure,” I emphasize to Wayne and Jade.

“Don’t be fooled by lesser-brand puma urine,” says Wayne.

The back of the bottle includes a warning: do not drink. Which means that somewhere, some idiot drank 100 percent pure puma urine. Probably a teenager, hoping to catch a buzz. I briefly wonder how one obtains urine from a puma, though I’m not sure I want to know.

Javier says this is much stronger-smelling bait than what he used previously. And I must say, when we return to the lodge for lunch, the smell lingers on my fingers and my thumb bandage even after I wash my hands. We add urine to two traps, and pull memory cards from the cameras, but we can’t find the third trap. Javier leads me, Wayne, and Janet down a steep side trail at Nathaniel’s farm while Jade, Jean, and Olivia, a marathoner from Maryland, stay up top, secretly taking samurai warrior photos while waving the machete. We pass through a pasture of waist-high grass and ant colonies, swarms of black ants bustling in dirt Manhattans. The itchy African grass is so thick it’s hard to see the wavy, potholed trail. We descend past a wire fence and approach a clump of thick trees at the forest’s edge.

“Hmmm,” says a puzzled Javier, looking in the woods.

There should be a camera trap here. But there isn’t. So from a scientific standpoint, we’ve hiked down this steep, itch-inducing trail for nothing, though from a tourist perspective the view is impressive: the mountains solid with trees, the morning sky free of impending clouds. Javier will later review a map and realize we went down the wrong trail.

So we hike back early to the lodge for lunch. We’re supposed to spend the afternoon adding more urine to traps, but Javier is trying to recover data he lost on his laptop. As he scrolls through Windows menus, the clouds roll in thicker and earlier than any day so far. The mountains perish, lost behind a whitish-gray mist; the few visible trees become skeletons. Which means there’s nothing to do. I offer to help Helen and Earl pick through bromeliad gunk, but it’s a small batch, so they don’t need me. I’m so bored I watch.

Yesterday, after work, Natalie took a group of us for a late-afternoon swim not far past the waterfalls. It was about an hour’s walk away, and when we reached the swim spot, everyone stripped to bathing suits and shorts. To access the pool, we walked first through a fast-flowing stream, stepping unsteadily, the stones hard on wimpy feet, the water a painful, nipple-hardening, color-draining cold.

The stream grew deeper. And after lumbering through waist-deep water, and exiting to cross slick rocks, we reentered and sloshed to the pool, which is Garden-of-Eden lush: an icy cascade of clear, clean water, surrounded by shimmering ferns. I stood in the stream and admired the simple, stunning beauty, and wondered—

Are my feet going numb?

Seriously—I can’t feel my feet.

Swimming required a level of courage I couldn’t quickly muster. Brooke, a red-headed University of Sussex student with pale freckled skin, submerged herself for five seconds, gasped as she resurfaced, then couldn’t stop shivering. Wayne and a few others bravely swam to the leaping log, as it’s called, which descends to the center of the pool: you straddle it, climb up, stand, then jump back into the water. Zachary, of course, did a flip. Phillip leapt twice, though the second time, as he attempted to reach shallow water, panic blanched his face. I thought the water was so cold it drained his strength—his lips were blue—but he later blamed the currents. I reached for his hand and pulled him toward me.

I’d been delaying, but I knew I had to go under. How many times will I swim in a nerve-piercing rain forest pool? Hell, this pool may not exist soon if the snowcaps disappear. So after another few minutes of stall tactics—studying the pretty flowers, marveling at the tall trees—I finally submerged.

How do I describe this.

Back in college, my soon-to-be-former dentist once convinced me that I didn’t need Novocain for a filling. The resulting pain was an intense, body-stiffening cold—like a jolt of electroshock therapy.

That’s what this was like. Underwater dentistry.

I swam two strokes, resurfaced, and flipped on my back. For a millisecond I thought about reaching the log but the currents were strong and despite my flailing efforts to swim I was shoved back to shallow water. Once I stood up, it was over. I was not going back under.

“You get used to it pretty quickly,” Natalie gushed, swimming leisurely as I shivered.

I hadn’t realized it until then, but she’s mentally ill.

Natalie joins me now in the lodge. She opens the door and fog seeps in, slithering along the floor. It’s like we’re in Transylvania. As the fog grows so does the chill. I’m sipping a cup of hot tea and writing in my journal. Jason, the local Ecuadoran teenager, is still trying to figure out the guitar, and by my account has played the same minor chord for upwards of fifty minutes.

Natalie sits at one of the picnic tables to talk, her tan pants splattered with mud. She’s smiling her usual isn’t-life-grand smile and asks about my morning.

“It was good—interesting,” I say.

“Camera traps, right?”

“Yeah. We were supposed to go back but Javier is having some sort of computer issue.”

I ask her something I’ve wondered on each of these excursions. Perhaps it’s hitting me because we’ve been sitting around all afternoon, but I’m wondering if we’re helping, or if Javier and all the scientists here could work faster without us.

“I mean, I can see the benefits of having us dig through bromeliad gunk. It’s like stuffing envelopes. And I can see where you need bodies for Anita’s project. But I can’t imagine Javier really needed us to spray puma urine.”

“Well—sometimes they can do things faster on their own,” says Natalie. “It takes a few days for you guys to get used to the walks and the altitude and all that.”

“And to learn what the hell we’re doing.”

“Yes. But something like the bromeliad sorting isn’t the best use of the scientists’ time. And we’re doing five projects now—without volunteers we were doing two.” Ellen echoed this over breakfast: her group can do far more surveys with four Earthwatch volunteers on their team.

But our involvement presents trade-offs. Yes, we provide free labor for simple work, and we’re paying to be here, which helps fund the research. The researchers, however, are sometimes forced to be hotel managers, dealing with my room is too cold, I’m out of toilet paper, where’s my vegetarian meal types of issues.

“Tim once had to walk to one of the cabanas and wake up a group of women and tell them it was time to work. It interferes with their research, which annoys them, because that’s why they’re here,” says Natalie.

But really, she emphasizes, the big benefit isn’t the work we do, as helpful as that may be. It’s hiking the Andes, hearing the birds, swimming the impossibly cold pools. How can people care about saving this place, or all that lives here, if they haven’t experienced it? Some people in urban areas—she’s seen it in London—are afraid of the forest.

“If you feel that way,” she says, “you probably just think it’s shit.”

Natalie heads upstairs to her room; I write more in my journal. Jason takes a guitar break, so Wayne tunes it. “Bless you,” I say.

Javier invites us into the office. Having given up on his computer problem, he’s reviewing memory cards we collected from the camera trap. This batch is unsuccessful: the camera was activated by wind-rustled leaves and research teams. So we have no photos of spectacled bears, but several shots of passing Wellies.

He shows us a shot from last month: two pumas stare directly at a camera. Next he pulls up videos of monkeys he filmed in a reserve south of Quito. Their lands are now threatened. Similar monkeys used to live in Santa Lucía, but they’re all gone. Javier explains the monkeys’ plight in his limited English.

“They have no house,” he says.

Earthwatch required us each to submit a medical form, signed by a doctor, testifying that we can handle the rigorous work here in Santa Lucía without experiencing, say, a coronary seizure. To get that signature, I underwent a physical, my first since high school. The results were positive—blood pressure was okay, cholesterol levels were fine—but I was past the age, I discovered, when men are supposed to have the dreaded prostate exam. Which involves … you know. A finger. Up there. Where there shouldn’t be a finger.

I was ultrawary because Adam had a prostate exam and experienced a severe case of postfinger trauma.

“How was it,” I’d asked him on the phone.

“Dude,” he said, “it freaked me out. I still don’t feel comfortable.”

When he left the doctor’s office his wife said he looked ill.

This is the first time I’ve met the doctor who’s giving me the finger, so to speak. Julie frequently refers patients to this practice and it’s covered by my health insurance plan. As he slaps on a rubber glove for, you know, I’m thinking, “Shouldn’t we get to know each other? Maybe go to a movie? Talk about our feelings?”

“I need you to unbuckle your trousers,” he says.

“Oh, yeah—sure.”

Like I do this all the time.

“And then just bend over please.”

“Okay…”

Adam called me that evening.

“How was it,” he said.

“You know, what really surprised me—I mean it really caught me off guard—was how much I enjoyed it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m kidding.”

Given that I’m pondering a prostate exam upon waking up tells you how energetic I feel. Most mornings here I’ve felt like a hundred-year-old man. My legs are stiff from hiking. I wake up in the night with calf cramps. My joints crack. Jade tells me at breakfast she’s thought about eating wild berries so she can get sick and stop hiking.

I delay getting up by counting my mosquito bites: I have twenty-seven on my feet and calves alone. Some of the bites are from mites, which hang out near the ground and nip your feet. We walk in our socks in the lodge, to avoid tracking in mud, so our mealtimes are probably the mites’ mealtimes as well. I also wonder if bedbugs are using my legs for nocturnal nibbling. I’ve started lifting my blankets every night to check for critters, a habit I developed after seeing the eyelash viper, and the tarantula, and then a worm that was longer by far than my boot. Some worms can grow up to four feet in length.

“That’s a big worm,” said Wayne.

Wayne has bites on his back, legs, and the bottom of his feet, which are sticking out of his sleeping bag at night and making him a ten-toed buffet. The hiking is a mix of pleasure and pain, he says: it helps scratch the bites on his feet, but it also causes them to swell—and hurt.

My most impressive bite is the swollen-red knot on my left elbow, which looks like a surgeon inserted a golf ball next to the joint.

“Most likely a spider bite,” says Nick as we begin our hike to the work site. “You probably got it in the grass.” That would be the high grass from our errant puma urine expedition.

“If it gets any bigger I’ll have to declare it at customs,” I say.

I’m with Nick and Tim today for the “Canopies and Carbon” project. One of the many ways to monitor the effects of climate change, says Nick, is to study how tree species are reacting to rising temperatures (are they growing differently, are their numbers shrinking, and so on). One way to do this, particularly in rugged terrain like the Andes, is with aerial photography.

The researchers’ efforts to create aerial images have been more notable for their failures than any successes. First they tried a helium balloon, but they needed something quicker and more mobile. (And more reliable: it crashed. The altitude affected the balloon’s buoyancy.) Next was a remote-controlled helicopter, but low-level clouds interfered with its sensors—and, yes, it crashed, thanks to an inexperienced pilot.

“A vulture came after the wreckage,” Mika told us. The helicopter is now buried near the lodge.

Eventually they perfected their use of a second remote-controlled helicopter, and they’re now using its images to map the forest. Because if you don’t know what the forest looks like now, you can’t know how global warming and human encroachment are changing it over time.

“But having hundreds and thousands of photos of forest canopy is useless unless you can identify the species, and no one has the sensory skills or the time to do that,” says Nick. Ideally a computer program would do the work—two thousand species of plants are growing in Santa Lucía, so distinguishing what’s what isn’t easy—but that’s possible only if each species has a unique signature that’s detectable in photographs. And that’s the point of their research: to see if such patterns and signatures exist in the aerial shots—to ID tree species by analyzing their crowns—and to see if the signatures exist in normal photos (as opposed to infrared images).

I confess: I only sort of understand what he’s saying. And in a way, that’s why, as I write this, climate change still elicits cynicism. The subtleties and intricacies aren’t easy to communicate. So when there’s a massive snowstorm, the talk-show skeptics smirk in the camera and say, “Well, so much for global warming. It’s freezing out! Hey, I’d love some global warming—hahahaha.” Never mind that this is like saying a fat guy can’t possibly be obese because he ate a bag of carrots. Many climatologists predicted intense snowfall and other winter extremes as a result of rising temperatures, due to changes in the atmosphere. And temperatures are indeed rising. From 1880 until this moment, as I stand in the Andes, global temperatures have climbed about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Three months after I leave, scientists will declare this the warmest decade on record. A fifty-year U.S. Geological Survey report released a month earlier found that glaciers in Washington and Alaska are shrinking rapidly (cities like Anchorage receive their drinking water from lakes fed by glaciers), while British researchers released findings showing that one of Antarctica’s largest glaciers is shrinking four times faster than was expected ten years earlier.

As an inhabitant of this pretty planet, I find this disconcerting, just as I would if a team of home inspectors gave me a well-researched report showing my house may have faulty wiring. Aren’t the risks high enough that we should act? Many climatologists compare it to people who buy fire insurance, even though their homes may never burn. You protect yourself against unknown but potentially catastrophic risks.

What surprises me, however, is the skepticism I’ve heard here from some of the researchers. They’re skeptical that anything will be done about CO₂ emissions. They’re skeptical that the public and politicians have the stomach, the will, to do anything about climate change. They’re skeptical that anything can be done about climate change. There’s a disconnect: the public is debating whether climate change is happening; the scientists are studying its effects.

“The climate is changing, and it’s getting warmer—I find the evidence of this undeniable in scientific terms,” Nick tells me. “Mankind has certainly contributed to accelerating this change, perhaps significantly, perhaps not so significantly. Judging by the available evidence and a bit of common sense, I think the contribution is significant. And I do think human society can exert an element of control over the changing environment. But I don’t think we’ll exert that influence in any way that is useful, partly because the climate is teetering at a tipping point beyond which our influence can only diminish.”

He admits he’s a cynic by nature. He believes our collective governments are more interested in thriving economies than a healthy environment. To which I say: no kidding. But if governments everywhere took the gazillion dollars they pump into bank bailouts and defense programs—all the billions we spend on new technologies for killing people—and instead invested it in sustainability and clean energy, well, just imagine—

Stop.

“That’s never going to happen,” he says.

Oh.

“Which is why I say we won’t exert sufficient influence to do anything.”

To a certain extent, they blame themselves for the public’s cynicism since, as Tim notes, scientists frequently aren’t the most effective communicators.

“I worked with a guy, Harold, who only focuses on leeches,” he says as we march past Nathaniel’s farm. “They’re leeches that attach themselves to slugs. That’s all he talks about.”

“He must be popular with the ladies,” I say.

“You can ask him, ‘So, Harold, what’s happening in the news?’ He won’t know. Leeches.”

As we walk, Nick spots a tiny frog on a palm leaf. Its eyes protrude like marbles from its head.

“Nathaniel says there used to be frogs everywhere here,” says Nick.

“We’re probably walking past them but we can’t see them because our eyes are ruined from computers,” says Tim.

I mention Javier’s spider monkey videos; the monkeys that are losing their habitat.

“They probably disappeared here about twenty years ago,” says Nick. “Hunted to extinction for food. They’re quite tasty.”

Nick studied brown-headed spider monkeys—a rare spider monkey subspecies found only in the northwest of Ecuador and southwest Colombia—in another reserve two years ago, in a project led by Mika and a primatologist.

“If they have no experience with humans, they just look at you. But most of them have been shot at, so they don’t like us—partly because you’re invading their territory, but mainly because they’ve had bad experiences. They’ll throw branches at you, they’ll howl—which is stupid because it makes them easier to spot—they’ll throw poo and try to wee on you.” It depends on the species. Another type sends one monkey out to stare at you while the others hide.

I ask about repopulating them here in Santa Lucía, but Nick says it’s tricky. They don’t always adapt or reproduce. Elsewhere in Ecuador, a team reintroduced a pair of howler monkeys to an area, but the monkeys were both male. Which makes reproduction a little tricky.

After about two hours we reach our destination: a patch of steep woods bordered on the left by waves of African grass. Cattle graze near the edge of the trail.

“I’m guessing the cows aren’t native,” I say to Tim.

“Uh, no,” he says.

I consider asking him if there are cows in England.

Nick and Tim have brought a series of aerial photographs in plastic sheets. The plan is to march through the woods, confirming that the trees ID’d in the photo match the trees tagged by botanists a year or so ago. We leave our bags at the trailhead, walking carefully down. A wasp nest like a flaky skull hangs above us; wasps crawl on it, emerging from quarter-sized openings. Nick is soon hacking a new trail with the machete; Helen, Charles, and I follow.

The first tree we check is supposed to be tagged. But it isn’t.

“Probably bloody Earthwatch volunteers,” Tim jokes. “They’re useless.”

Nick asks me to work my way to trees 86 and 87. “Work” is the key word here: the trail is a sort-of trail, steep and slick, either barely created or long abandoned. I clamber down, slowly, stepping over logs and plants, ducking under limbs and leaves, using saplings and vines for balance.

“Can you shake eighty-seven?” yells Nick.

I can’t see him in the density of the forest; I can only hear him.

“I don’t see it yet!” I yell back.

“Do you see a clearing?”

“Yeah—I can see light on the plants.”

“See that palm? To the left of the tree with the orange flowers?”

It takes me a moment.

“Okay—got it.”

“Can you get over there?”

Well…

The ground is a mix of soil, roots, plants, leaves, and twigs. I’ve been told the slopes are a 30-degree angle, but as I zigzag about thirty feet across, taking the same high steps you would in deep snow, 45 degrees seems more accurate. I drop to my knees and crawl under a massive, mossy fallen tree, then turn sharply to what I believe is 87.

“I’m not sure I can get there!” I yell. “There’s another big downed tree in front of me. Give me a minute.”

Mosquitoes whine, competing with my stomach’s growl. Somewhere a bird screeches, screeches, screeches—nature’s car alarm. I feel as though I’m underwater: the murkiness when the clouds move in, the thick fuzz on trees like barnacles on a ship. A large yet slender black spider crawls up my shirt sleeve. I flick him off and look at the tree I suspect is 87 and—

Ah! I spot a tag. A fallen tree dips as I step on a limb, but it seems like it’ll support my weight. I heave myself over the trunk. And then I scoot, twist, turn, stretch, hop, crawl, shuffle, and inch my way to the tree and the tag.

“This is tree eighty-seven!” I holler, triumphant.

“Can you shake it?” Nick yells.

I do my best, then move on to other trees, creeping like an infantryman under branches and vines. Near tree 90 my feet slip and I slam on the mountain, clutching a sapling to stop my slide. But I become quite adept at maneuvering through the cloud forest obstacle course.

At the end of the afternoon, I climb back to the top, pulling myself up with saplings, vines, and roots: it’s like walking up a playground slide. Closer to the trail, Nick extends a hand and yanks me up. I smile and I think—

I’m happy to be here.

It’s something I don’t do enough, something most of us don’t do. Savoring an experience. We usually do the opposite, distancing ourselves from the moment, as though no event can be experienced unless you photograph it or text about it. (A year ago I went with Terry to see Bruce Springsteen in Richmond. During one rowdy song Bruce slid across the stage on his knees. The woman in front of us missed it—never knew it happened—because she was texting, “Guess where I’m at!”)

As we begin the long trek back to the lodge, I hope I can step back and occasionally revel in the routine. If I could re-create one moment in my life, it’d be that night, as a boy, when I had greasy fast-food chicken with Dad and Granddaddy. As ordinary as life gets. But I want that same flash-second acknowledgment whenever I experience the special ordinary; when I find joy wriggling through the dirt.

Earlier, when Nick shared his cynicism about governments and mankind and the lack of will to save our troubled planet, he said this doesn’t depress him. “I’m happy contributing to something I believe in,” he said, “whether it’s ultimately futile or not.”

I’m back in the cabana when Wayne returns from working with Anita’s group.

“It’s Scotch o’clock,” he says, flinging his backpack on the top bunk.

“That makes me so happy,” I say.

Like an old married couple, we talk about our days, using the long shelf under the window as a bar. He pours the Scotch as I pull the foil off the water pitcher.

Wayne has just about recovered from a stomach bug he and Charles picked up in Quito. Their mistake, they believe, was drinking the ice in their happy-hour mojitos. They also ate balon de verde, a local delicacy made from green plantains and, as Charles put it, “the bits of pig you might normally throw away.”

“I actually brought a stool softener here,” says Wayne. “What was I thinking?”

Charles is still having issues. Three days ago he switched from Imodium to Cipro, a prescription antibacterial drug. The pills are working up to a point—he can hike the trails without waddling into the rain forest with cramps—but each morning starts with, well … explosions.

“Man,” said Wayne one morning, groggy, still in his sleeping bag on the top bunk. “It’s like the Fourth of July.”

The evening Scotch poured, I sit on my bed, and Wayne shoves aside stuff on his lower bunk and takes a seat. He changes shirts. I ask him about the large tattoo on his back between his shoulder blades, which looks like a Celtic cross. “That was a tough time in my life,” he says. “I wanted to make a statement about what I believe in.”

I decide not to pump him for info, and he doesn’t volunteer it. We chat, and instead of the past, he discusses the future. He and his wife want to have children next year. He wants anywhere from two to four, since he came from a family of four.

“Do you have kids?” he asks.

“No, no …,” I say, sparing him the history.

I can see that Wayne will be a great father. He’s like Adam and Terry in some ways: fun, positive, a strength that comes from a clear sense of self. Before I left for Ecuador, Terry told me that his son Clarence, now three, was starting preschool. Terry writes a blog, and wrote about the day: “As we walked up the sidewalk toward his preschool, my eyes filled with tears as I thought that he is no longer completely ours—he also belongs to others. It was all worth it four hours later when I picked him up—he saw me come to his class, yelled ‘Daddy!’ and ran into my arms. I love being a dad.”

As I take these voluntourism trips, a lot of people—all of them parents—say they wish it were them. That they were traveling to Asia or South America. But they would never trade parenthood to see the world. I would trade these travels in an instant.

“I know this is painful for you,” a friend once said. I was surprised to hear the P-word, because I don’t think of it that way. Pain is such an intense word. Pain is for people with real problems: people with cancer, people in war zones, people who see more flies in an average day than food. Before Dad died, Mom would sometimes ask, “Are you and Julie ever going to have a baby?” And Dad would say, “Oh, leave him alone—they know what they’re doing.” I regret not talking to him about it, even though this isn’t like my old superhero action figures; it’s not something he could fix. And I know what he would have said, what anyone would have said: Somehow you need to make peace with this. You need to accept it by making it acceptable. You need to give of yourself. He would have said what Zhang Tao, the head of La La Shou, said in China.

There comes a time when you must do more than complain.

Flush with a warm, pleasing, Scotch-induced buzz, I walk with Wayne and Charles from the cabana up the dirt trail to the lodge. After dinner, as everyone chats inside, I drift onto the porch, slip my feet into my hiking boots, and shuffle out to the grass, laces dragging behind me. This is the first night—the only night—that the clouds part to reveal the sky. The volume of stars is almost overwhelming, sparkling in clumps, the purple Milky Way glowing. Back home, even though we’re in the burbs instead of the city, streetlights and strip malls dim the night, leaving only the most obvious stars: the dippers, Alpha Centauri.

I go inside and find Nick. He’d told me on clear nights you can see three of Jupiter’s moons. He joins me outside, beer in one hand, binoculars in the other. We rear our necks back, mouths open; baby birds fed by the night.

“Look there,” he says, peering and pointing. “That’s it—right there.”

He hands me the binoculars. The three moons shine. Jupiter has four major moons, known as the Galilean satellites: Galileo observed them back in 1610. Dozens of smaller moons also orbit the gaseous planet.

The Inquisition famously accused Galileo of heresy in 1633 for supporting the Copernican notion that Earth was not the center of the universe. If only the Inquisition had known that we are the center of nothing. Some astronomers hypothesize that multiple universes exist, that universes may appear and disappear with the regularity of popcorn popping in a bag. Which means our shiny blue planet isn’t simply a speck in a colossal, expanding universe. We’re a speck of a speck on a speck of a speck, residing inconsequentially on a speck of a speck (that sits, yes, on a speck of a speck of a speck). If the universe is a closet, our world isn’t even a stray flake of lint. And if our world is less than lint, what does that make humanity? What does that make you or me? Our puniness in the universe—a puniverse?—can be overwhelming. And yet somehow … it’s comforting. It makes life more precious. Telescopes have identified more than twelve hundred possible planets in our spiral Milky Way galaxy, but some astronomers believe, based on the number of stars, our galaxy could be home to 100 billion Earthlike planets. For now, however, as far as we know, Earth is a cosmic fluke: the only planet where everything is just right. The perfect distance from the sun. The perfect atmosphere. Water. In that same Bill Bryson book that inspired Ellen to change her life, he talks about the conditions that make our universe possible. If gravity had been wimpier or more robust, if the Big Bang had been longer or shorter—everything might be different.

One night, as we sipped Scotch, Wayne pronounced a skepticism of scientific theories. “All these people talk about evolution and the Big Bang,” he said, “but I think those require as much faith as mine.” I’ll spare you the evidence for the Big Bang—it’s solid—but the key thing for us small-brained little humans is this:

You, me, our friends, our family—we’ve all been given that rarest of opportunities, the chance to experience life. About 650,000 hours of life, as Bryson said, in a universe that’s 13.7 billion years old; a universe that appears to have only one place where you’ll find humans, pumas, toucans, worms, spider monkeys, tarantulas, eyelash vipers, ferns, aroids—all the mind-boggling species in our shrinking family of life.

Shouldn’t we cherish this? Wasn’t that one of the lessons of Dad’s out-of-nowhere death?

If we’ve been given two uncommon gifts—our existence and our planet, which we’ve abused with gusto, as though Earthlike jewels are as common as new cars in a showroom—shouldn’t we treasure them? Shouldn’t we revel in our time on this minuscule, miraculous world? And if our fellow lucky-to-exist beings are suffering, shouldn’t we find this intolerable?

I hand Nick his binoculars back, and I thank him, and we watch the sky in silence.

On our one free day after six days of work, eight of us trek to see (we hope) the rare spectacled bears that feed in the mornings at the mountain’s base. Our guide, Ernesto, is missing an arm, his right tan sleeve pinned to the shoulder. A one-armed bear guide leads us to wonder, naturally, if the arm was gnawed off in a bear-related incident. Ernesto seems pleasant enough, though I sense that if a bear snacked on his arm, he in turn inflicted some serious carnage on the bear.

We walk along a flat trail, speaking in hushed Elmer Fudd be vewwy quiet tones. Ernesto picks up what looks like a green olive. He squeezes it: there’s a seed inside, along with greenish goo. He hands it to me, taps his nose. It smells like avocado. This is what the bears eat.

Just when we think it’ll be a no-bear day, Ernesto beckons us, urgently waving his hand. There, high in a nearby tree, sits a black spectacled bear. The body seems lean, but his head is huge, white fur around his mouth; the clawed paws are clearly dangerous weapons. He utters Chewbacca-like growls, and exhales like a steam locomotive—poosh.

We admire the bear for a while, and take our time before returning to the lodge, walking along a stream nearby. I was sure the hike to the lodge would be easier this time, since we’ve been tromping around the mountains for over a week. Better stamina! Stronger lungs! But it actually seems worse. My right knee flares, a sharp ache that started the day before. Every time we go up one of the man-made wood steps that appear in spots on the trail, it’s serious pain.

Earl and Phillip and I go at a leisurely pace, stopping frequently. Phillip says one of the staffers at the lodge has a reputation for romancing female volunteers. The cloud forest Casanova hasn’t seduced anyone in our group—as far as I know—but his success rate is legendary. Maybe it should be Birthwatch instead of Earthwatch.

Later I discover something else about the staff. Sofi, the cheerful, quiet woman who greeted us with lemonade our first day, lives in Nanegal. She hikes this trail twice a day: up in the morning, down in the evening. Every day. She must laugh when she sees us wheezing and pouring sweat. Right wussies, as Natalie said. What’s a challenge for one is routine for another.

The next morning, I’m up at five thirty for my last assignment: a daily bird survey. Charles and a few more ambitious souls got up at four yesterday to see the Andean cock-of-the-rock, which sounds like the stage name for a male stripper but is actually a species of bird. The bright orange, bulbous-headed males perform a loud and elaborate mating dance to attract the less-colorful females, squawking and bebopping, taunting rivals, making a scene.

I tiptoe out of the cabana, my steps muffled by Charles’s snores, and turn on my headlamp for the dark trail. Coffee. I need coffee. Guzzling a quick cup at the lodge, I head to the porch to find Gabriel, the resident ornithologist. I noticed Gabriel relaxing yesterday afternoon, sitting on the ground, leaning against a bench, legs out, feet crossed, casually reading a book about … birds. Why are there no half-assed birders? You never hear a birder say, “Yeah, I might have a beer, watch the ballgame, do a little birding.” One volunteer, a typically hard-core birder from California, carriers a recorder and a large microphone at all times: it looks like a curling iron in a holster. He expressed his delight at seeing the Nariño Tapaculo and the long-tailed antbird. Ecuador is home to approximately 1,600 different types of birds, about twice as many as in North America, Europe, or Australia. Santa Lucía alone counts among its population 394 recorded species of birds, some of which are near extinction.

We look like miners with our headlamps as we leave the lodge. This early, it’s chilly. I keep my hands in my pockets. Our group includes Helen and the Ecuadoran students, Jason and Julia. We walk to predetermined points, stand for ten minutes—I mark the precise time on my digital watch—and Gabriel calls out birds he hears or sees with and without binoculars; whether they’re perching, feeding, or flying; how far away they are.

“Tri-colored brush finch, flying, five meters.”

Helen and I record his observations on clipboards. Gray-breasted wood wren. Toucan barbet. Yellow-throated tanager. She did the bird gig previously, so she understands his accent better than I do: words like crimson sound like “creem-sone.”

As the sun rises, raindrops fall from the previous night’s shower, landing in bloops and splats. Julia picks a green centipede-like bug off the arm of my fleece. “Gracias,” I say, smiling. She’s pretty, hair in a black ponytail, shyer and more serious than Jason.

We leave the woods and walk down a narrow trail through grass that comes to my hip. Dew droplets bead on the blades. This area is being reforested: the trees are about seven years old and stand about twenty to twenty-five feet in height. Gabriel peers through his binoculars and calls out more birds, which sound like the names of superheroes. Flavescent flycatcher. Violet-tailed sylph. Red-faced spinetail.

I start to recognize a few calls: the Woo! Woo! Woo! of the plumbeous pigeon. Jason has on earbuds, though he and Julia each spot birds. Helen and I jot down more info on charts. “Time,” I say at the end of ten minutes. And we move to the next location.

Later, after breakfast—my grumbling stomach could be mistaken for a toucan barbet—Helen and I sit in the office, entering the data into a laptop. We take turns to reduce the monotony: one of us recites the info—“Booted racket-tail, five meters, flying”—the other enters it. As we work, Jason again attempts to play the guitar. He’s still dreadful, though awkwardly strumming each chord is the only way he’ll get better. Most of us aren’t songbirds, singing beautifully from birth. We slaughter the notes, we blister our fingers. We persevere.

On a downward slope behind the lodge are the “washing machines”: two slim basins on each side of a concrete block, like podiums for a quiz show, with a square pool of water below. A few days ago, before breakfast, I washed some clothes, dipping a small bucket in the water and dousing one of my quick-dry shirts. The shirts are breathable, allowing moisture to escape, yet simultaneously trapping odors.

Ellen was doing laundry as well. We hadn’t chatted in a while; I was working on other projects and she was still with Anita’s team.

“Forgive my shirts,” I said. “They have a high school gym class smell.”

She scrubbed a pair of pants, her hands covered in suds.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve been wearing these clothes for a month.”

I dipped a brush in a bowl of congealed green soap and scrubbed as well. We talked about the trip home. Ellen is terrified of flying, so getting on the plane alone at Heathrow, traveling roughly 5,700 miles to Ecuador—it was daunting.

“About halfway across the Atlantic I started to panic,” she said.

“So what’d you do?”

“Wasn’t much I could do except calm down and deal with it. And I ordered a gin and tonic.”

Having survived the flight, she expected to be the slowest member of the team since she was the oldest student, and since Anita was an experienced mountaineer. But as the weeks progressed, her endurance improved. She discovered she was one of the strongest.

We hung our clothes on the line with other dangling shirts and pants and undies and socks. Because of the humidity and the daily damp descent of the clouds, clothes dry slowly.

Leaving her husband behind at the airport was the hardest thing she’s ever done, she says. They don’t have children. At times the distance weighed on her. She wrote to him each morning in a journal, which he’ll read when she gets home.

“But to work in a biodiversity hot spot in such a fantastic habitat … it’s been fabulous.”

Sometimes in the cabana, when I’m alone, I stand and listen: the croaking frogs, the calls of exotic birds, the rain. And then the intrusion of man; distant jets, the whoosh lingering, echoing off the mountains.

After dinner one night, Wayne and Charles and I brought beer bottles back to the cabana as makeshift candle holders; Wayne shaved the candles so they’d fit. We placed them on the ledge in front of the window. An evening rain tapped the windows and roof. Wayne played reggae on the iPod.

“This is how it must have been in olden times,” said Wayne. “Except for the reggae.”

He came here, he says, because he wanted to deepen his awareness of threats to the global environment; to find the truth between the rhetoric of radical conservatives and radical environmentalists. “That was my driving curiosity. It’s not because I work at an oil company, and not because I’m trying to boost their public relations.”

It’s surprising to me, but after eleven days here he’s still something of a global warming skeptic. “My passions aren’t driven by me thinking the world is warming up and we’re all gonna roast if don’t do something about it, or that humans are one of the primary causes for global warming, if global warming is actually happening. I’ve seen both sides of the debate, and frankly I don’t think there’s enough science one way or the other. To me, it’s about stewardship. Personal stewardship. Am I being a good steward with what we’ve been given on Earth. At the end of my life, is my behavior something I can look back on and be proud of.”

What did change, he says, is his understanding of the damage humans can inflict on the environment, particularly deforestation. “Walking through those fields of grass … I was astounded that those patches were once rain forest, and who knows when they’d actually come back as primary forest—I mean, years and years and years. And looking across the porch and seeing these clear patches of land. When you hear the cloud forest is rising three feet a year in elevation, and then you hear chain saws off in the distance… I didn’t really want to have mercy on people, even if they weren’t educated in what they were doing. It just kind of made me mad.”

This trip has taught him he can live with less, he says. Charles had a similar revelation after his Earthwatch trip in Madagascar: “I realized I can’t complain about being happy,” he said.

The last night is a fiesta. We meet on the porch for our final happy hour; I share a bottle of red wine with Wayne and Charles. We tink glasses. Wayne has brought his iPod and speakers. The tunes are lost underneath the chatter until—

Simple pulsing piano chords. Three-note bass lines.

“Oh my God!” exclaims Jade.

As jarring as it was to hear “Mickey” in a Chinese park, it’s even stranger to hear “Don’t Stop Believin’” in the isolated Andes; the wind, the birds, the bugs, all drowned out by Journey, by loud gringo voices singing of a lonely world.

Dinner is a final-night treat: what appears to be roast chicken, though it could be any of the cloud forest’s delicious feathered creatures. After dessert, Nathaniel passes around a plastic milk jug filled with homemade hooch. Aguardiente: fire water. His grin seems to say, you have NO idea what this is going to do to you.

“It looks like lighter fluid,” I say to Wayne as Nathaniel fills my plastic cup.

“They probably use it to power the generator,” he says.

We drink. It’s sweet, actually. Apparently it’s some kind of fermented sugarcane. Nathaniel and his sons play music: a guitar, something like a pan flute, a bongo-esque drum with a one-two-three beat. They sing, off-key, but enthusiastically. The aguardiente helps. Natalie dances with Charles, who wears a striped wool pigtailed hat from Otavalo. He spins her underneath her arm. Helen drags me onto the impromptu dance floor, Jade later does the same. Nick, having seen these celebrations before, slips quietly upstairs.

I’m pleased, the next morning, to learn that the Ecuadoran mystery hooch has not warped my sight or central nervous system. We eat breakfast and pay our beer tabs. As our backpacks are strapped to the mules, we hang on the porch and discuss chiggers: those of us who saw the spectacled bears two days ago split into two groups, and everyone in the other group has bites. Olivia shows a few red bumps on her hip. Edward, the English volunteer who was capturing horseflies in his cabana and returning them to the wild, is unimpressed. With unexpected bravado he slips off his shirt. He’s covered with red bites—on his shoulders, back, arms, chest. We gasp and laugh and take photos.

“I took my clothes off and lay on the floor and Janet got rid of them using a head torch to see,” he says. “It took about an hour.”

After one final sweaty hike down the mountain—Anita wanders off to study plants and gets lost—we climb on the bus, drop off Jason and Julia in Nanegal, cross the equator, and return to Quito. The concrete and cars and pedestrians make Quito seem like another planet after Santa Lucía’s isolation. I check back in at La Casa Sol, then wander the new town, stocking up on bags of banana chips to take home.

That evening, we reconvene at Mama Clorinda, the traditional Ecuadoran restaurant where I’d met Wayne, Charles, and Earl the Australian the first night. Wayne had noticed guinea pig on the menu, and he’s talked about it ever since (though he seems uninterested in the cow’s foot soup or the potato soup with sprinklings of blood). In addition to our individual meals, we order two guinea pigs for our long table. The body is cut into parts—head, back legs, front legs (complete with deep-fried paws)—and presented on a yellow platter. The back legs have the most meat.

“Let me guess—tastes like chicken,” says Olivia, the fitness fanatic.

“Kind of, but more like the dark meat of chicken—it’s juicy,” I say, holding the bone and wiping my mouth. The skin looks fantastic, but it’s chewy. Really chewy. Like beef jerky coated with peanut butter. The rest of the guinea pig—the squat front legs attached to the rib cage—don’t have much meat. It’s a lot of nibbling without a lot of payoff. As for the deep-fried head, I believe you’re supposed to suck the brain out, but I’m not feeling quite that ambitious.

The evening goes fast. Laughter. Toasts. Empty wine bottles. I stuff myself, enjoying another llapingacho potato patty with my pork. We end with goodbyes, with toasts, with cheer.

Six hundred and fifty thousand hours of life. That’s what we get if we’re lucky. By my estimates, Dad had roughly 572,280 hours. I’ve used up about 382,440. The question is how best to use the 267,560 hours I have left.