I curled up in the window seat, hugging my knees to my chest, and gazed out at a sea of clouds. The pilot announced we were at an altitude of twenty thousand feet and climbing. Almost as high as the summit of Mount Chimborazo.
Everest may be the tallest mountain in the world, but the summit of Mount Chimborazo is the highest point on Earth through which the equator passes, the farthest from the Earth’s center.
“See, the Earth is spherical,” my dad had explained once. “An oblate spheroid. It’s squashed at the poles like a beach ball that someone sat on, bulging at the equator. So, a mountain rising up out of that bulge is higher and closer to outer space, closer to the Moon, closer to the Sun.”
What would it be like at the top of the mountain, the thin air squeezing your lungs, the lack of oxygen suffocating your brain cells, the wind clawing at your clothes? To be at the top of the mountain, looking down at the clouds. The earth hidden below, your only view the snowcapped peaks of other mountains wreathed with clouds. Would this new land be so startling, so dazzlingly surreal, so consuming that you’d forget about the earth below? Was the power and freedom so transforming that you could forget how to descend back to the life you lived before?
Was that what compelled Mom and Dad and Uncle Max to climb higher and higher peaks? And now that we’d lost Uncle Max, could my parents come back down to earth and stay there? Could I?