“Let’s hope this flood doesn’t destroy the universe,” Mom whispered to me before she moved to stand next to Dad. He didn’t even look at her, as indifferent as a stranger.
“Okay, this might be a good time to tell you that we think of the Inca Trail as a pilgrimage,” Ruben said, turning serious. “There are definitely easier ways to get to Machu Picchu. Most tourists go by train, then take the bus up to the ruins. If we really wanted, we could just follow the river.” With a finger, he traced the bend of the cascading river in front of us. “And be at Machu Picchu in six hours.”
“But where’s the fun in that?” Grace asked. Dressed in her green raincoat, she looked like a leprechaun.
“So we’re going to see Machu Picchu the way the Incas did,” said Stesha.
Ruben scrutinized each of us as if calculating the odds that we’d make it to our destination. “The next four days of walking through pretty difficult terrain will make you appreciate the site even more.”
“And by the time we get to the Sun Gate,” said Stesha, “I think you’ll have discovered things you’ve never known about yourself.”
Almost immediately, our group divided into four sections—Grace and I bringing up the rear. The porters, who’d disappeared about two minutes after we began walking. Ruben at the front with Dad, Hank, and Helen. Stesha in the middle with Mom, the better to answer all of my mother’s thousand questions. The last I heard before Grace and I trailed behind everyone, Mom was peppering Stesha with questions about all the plant species we encountered even though she had no interest in vegetation. Mom couldn’t even keep a cactus alive if she tried, which was why we didn’t have any plants, but she was obviously determined to wring every last bit of learning from this trip.
After four hours of what Grace dubbed “trudgery”—trudging that was pure drudgery on soggy ground—I confirmed what I already knew about myself: Can you say impatient? The trail ascended so slowly, you could barely call it an incline. So why did everyone describe the Inca Trail as challenging? But then the trail taught me a fast lesson about faulty first impressions. Too soon, I had to stop every ten feet or so to catch my breath.
If I thought I was dragging myself up the mountainside, Grace’s pace was even more sluggish, inching forward while bent over at the waist. How was she going to trek for four days if an hour of hill climbing taxed her? No one was in sight, just the two of us poking along.
“You doing okay?” I called up to Grace after deciding that it was safer to walk behind her in case she lost her footing. From back here, I could at least break her fall.
“I’m fine,” she said, her tone sharp.
One cantankerous father was more than enough to deal with, but now I was latched to an old lady who should have known better than to join a long trek? For this, I had given up my brand-new camera and come to Peru?
“You can go up ahead,” Grace told me in a gentler voice, casting an apologetic glance at me over her shoulder. She looked as winded as she sounded, which pushed aside my irritation to make room for serious concern. “I’ll go at my own pace.”
“You know what they say about slow and steady,” I shot back.
Grace may not have fallen into silence now, her labored breathing preventing that, but she plowed on, only stopping at our first view of Patallacta, gray-stone ruins atop banks of terraces. At our last break, Ruben had told us that these ruins were rediscovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, the real-life explorer who was the inspiration behind Hank’s favorite fedora-wearing movie hero. Hearing about the site was a completely different experience from seeing it, just like writing about Ginny’s chocolate soufflé was way less satisfying than eating it, especially straight out of the oven.
All misty and gray, the ruins could have been a watercolor painting. They begged to be memorialized in a photo.
Just as I crouched down for a better angle, Grace howled to the skies: “Girls!”
Worried, I hurried up the hill to her side. Was she having a mental breakdown? Maybe she’d succumbed to some kind of altitude sickness that induced delusions.
“Girls! You seeing this?” Grace spun around in a slow circle. In an even louder voice, she called, “Check it out! I’m here. I’m really here.”
“Ummm… Grace. Who are you talking to?”
Grace grinned before she wheezed, “The Wednesday Walkers.”
“Who’re they?”
“My walking group. There were five of us. We started hiking together almost exactly forty years ago.”
“Really? Where?”
“Vermont. If you weren’t burying a husband or dead yourself, you were walking.” She laughed lightly. “Rain, snow, or shine.”