June 17, 2011 - Different stories emerge from your consciousness. Like the ebb and flow of an ocean, first rising to the surface, then down again. It has been that way this week. Stories I haven't told in years finding themselves at the surface, renewed in their remembrance and telling, all with the same basic themes: finding that which was lost; the good nature of people; the impossibility of chance; magic.
In Kerrville I repeated a story from my errant travels in South America when I was 17 and again at 22. The story at 17, though, perhaps most set me on a path leading to magic and impossibility. We had been there for two months already, climbing mountains in Bolivia and seeing the country. Our team of seven had been slowly whittled down to three -- myself, my best friend from high school, Tuckerman, and his Father (our leader, loosely) Bill. We had decided on the destination of Sajama, third highest mountain in South America and the highest in Bolivia. Isolated in the southwestern Bolivian desert, the last stop in civilization would be the dusty city of Oruro, wracked in poverty and decaying.
We arrived in Oruro as the last days of an election campaign were ending. The Banzer dictatorship was giving way (or so they thought) to democracy and the cities were alive with rallies and drinking and the megaphoned voices of candidates desperate to win an election they never could. We stayed a night in a simple hotel, public showers and bath down the hall. Eager to wash the dust of the road off of me, I headed for the shower. I remember it well -- the first hot water for days and for this 17 year old, a soapy oasis in a dusty trip. I took off my two favorite rings -- both handmade. One was gold with runes etched into it, the other turquoise and silver. I set them in the soap dish, and settled into the warmth of the water coursing over me and then a long, good night's sleep. We set out early the next morning for the three-day ride to Sajama in the back of various Toyota trucks - the cheapest and most regular form of transport. It was early on the second day, now covered in dust, as I put my gloves on, that I realized I no longer had my rings and remembered that I had left them in the soap dish in Oruro.
I ranted for a bit and was despondent -- thinking: "if we just went back..." I would still be able to find them. Bill knew it was useless, but told me we would return after the climb, but that we couldn't turn back now. Of course he never intended to go back. Our route would take us in the opposite direction when we were done, back to La Paz and then home. Not consoled, I nonetheless agreed. I was powerless to do anything else. We continued to the small village of Tumarapi (sp) at the base of the mountain.
The climb was difficult. The mountain, deceptively easy in appearance, rose over 1,000 feet higher than Denali and created its own weather. We managed to get up to near 19,000 feet over the course of a few days (all mountains in Bolivia already start at around 10,000 feet, so climbs take less time) and ended up bivouacked as weather closed in on the side of the mountain on a ledge of stones that we had made, with a tent barely big enough for the three of us. Stuck on the ledge for that night and the next day, we grew bored as the night came on. Bill began to tell ghost stories of the lost climbers of Sajama -- a story about a foreign embassy staff person who was lost on the mountain and was said to haunt the peak looking for other wayward climbers.
It was as he ended this story that we hear the first sound, like a distant "hello!" shouted over the incessant, non-stop howling of the wind outside our tent. We all froze and I looked at Bill. "Stop it", I said, "that's not funny". He look perplexed and denied he had said anything, as did Tucker. Just as I was starting to get angry, the three of us, now looking at each other, heard it again. "Hello in there..." and "Is there anybody there?" A foreign accent, maybe German. I think it might have been the only time I ever saw Bill, the inveterate teaser, truly stunned and maybe even frightened. After a moment one of us unzipped the tent (not sure who) to see where the voice was coming from - this manifestation of the exact story we had just heard. There, in the gale-force wind, was a man with a light jacket, goggles, holding what look liked a space blanket in his hand. "Hello", he said. "Do you have another tent or blanket?"
His name was Thomas Deskau, a teacher of German from Oruro. He had come up the mountain thinking it was a day climb with only his light jacket and the emergency blanket. He had become disoriented in the altitude and, when night fell (as it does quickly near the Equator), he had gotten lost only to stumble upon our tent. Our tent was barely able to fit the three of us -- one on top of the other -- and the slope was too steep to allow for building another ledge and pitching another tent, so we gathered extra clothes and gave up one of our sleeping bags and set him up down wind of our tent to provide a little more shelter, half not expecting him to be there in the morning - a mirage from a ghost story.
But he was there the next day. His feet hurt, he said, but he insisted on joining us in a failed attempt to summit. We saw the summit flags, but wind and coming night forced us back down and we stumbled back to our tent in the dark. That night he told us something about Oruro and I, fully realizing that we would never be going back, drew a picture of my rings and wrote a description of the hotel down (I did not recall the name) and asked him if he could look for them when he returned. He agreed to and the next morning got ready to leave, tucking my note in his jacket. Still complaining about his feet hurting, we convinced him to take his boots off that next morning and saw that his feet were horribly frost bit -- probably from the first night. Concerned, we asked him to stay with us and said we could get him out. But we were burdened with all of our gear and he refused. He took off down the mountain. Faster and faster he seemed to walk, while we struggled after until he disappeared.
When I tell this story I shift here. I talk about getting back to Tumarapi, missing a bus by seconds and not seeing another for three days (due to the election). I describe getting back to La Paz, the cold night sleeping on sheep carcasses and machine parts, the dinner celebration with Alaskans we stumbled upon, the coup and my first encounter with an Uzi. I talk about fleeing the city and missing our ferry, thereby losing our luggage. I talk about how we got the luggage back, after tracking the bus driver and how we bribed our way across the Bolivia/Peru border to get away from the devolving country that had closed its borders. I talk about Peru and the return home. It's a long story, full of the adventures that have been at the core of my life and that shaped my first real adult impressions of the world and which likely drive me to this day. But those stories are for other times. This story ends some seven or eight months later when the mail came to my apartment in Anchorage.
That day the mail included a box from someone named Tim Beale, a name I did not know. There was a note inside which I still have (along with the box) that said that the contents of the box were given to him (Beale) by a friend of his from Europe who had been traveling in South America and had passed through Miami (where Beale lived) on his way home. The friend had been to Oruro and met a German there who insisted he take the box and make sure it was sent to the address written on it - my address. When I opened that smaller box I saw both of my rings and a note from Thomas Deskau. He had survived the return, his feet intact, and had gone, after his recovery, to the hotel that I had described. There he had asked about the rings and the desk clerk, beaming, brought them out and assured Thomas that he new the owner was bound to return. It is of little doubt that those rings were worth at least half of a year's salary for that clerk, but he had held on to them. Thomas had met a man traveling and thought it would be more reliable to mail the rings from the States, as he could not trust the Bolivian postal service. This traveler was passing through Florida on his way back to Europe and entrusted the rings to Beale so the proper postage could be put on them. And Beale had mailed them to me.
It is an odd story. Of coincidence and luck. Of the good nature of people. Of ghosts and good fortune. It is a true story. It is a magic story and it shapes me.