Prompt #115: Danger and Peril
Writing Exercise: When have you had to flee from danger?
Hi Friends,
Last time, we wrote about willingly moving toward danger. This week, we’re going to write about fleeing danger, which has gotten me thinking about all the times I’ve had to run from danger (and there have been many), including a mudslide evacuation in Peru. The following essay originally appeared in my collection of travel essays, Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel, and I offer it here as an example of an essay about fleeing danger or peril and then a writing prompt.
Scared Shitless
I thought my friend Sandra had waited for me because she wasn’t as scared as I was, but I later learned that she thought we would die right then and there. The bartender was already hammering boards across the windows when I locked myself in the bathroom, cursing myself for such bad timing. My hiking group had run out of the bar and left me there, except for my friend Sandra, who is one of those unflappable travel partners who meets you on your travels when she says she will and who can handle just about anything. She knocked on the door, saying, “Girl! You’d better hurry up in there.”
As it turns out, “scared shitless” isn’t just another cliché.
Our final day hiking the Inca Trail had concluded at dawn at Machu Picchu, where Sandra and I admired the ruins and green mountainscape until the busloads of tourists arrived; then we boarded a local bus for nearby Aguas Calientes, a town in a box canyon so narrow that passing trains seemed like they might scrape the pastel-colored buildings on their way through. Jungle-clad mountains crouched above, notching the sky.
The Inca Trail was more beautiful than we had expected but also more difficult. When we weren’t climbing granite stairs, we hiked steep hills that our guides ironically called Andean flat. Even though I was used to hiking, the rugged trail was harder than I expected. After a few days, my calves burned and my toes blistered. But we loved it all—the jungle-draped mountains with their countless species of wild orchids along the trail and even the rain.
It was early April, the changeable season, the time between the wet and dry seasons, but our hike proved to be more wet than dry. Our last night, it rained so hard—the Spanish word for this is aquacero—that our guides and porters were up in the middle of the night digging trenches around our tents, which made me feel like a princesa and not in a good way—I felt spoiled.
After hiking over thirteen-thousand-foot passes, most notably Warmiwañusca (or Dead Woman’s Pass), we looked forward to relaxing in the natural hot springs that gave Aguas Calientes its name. We dropped off our muddy hiking clothes at a laundry, found a hostel, and changed into bathing suits and shorts. We met our hiking group and guides at the bar El Gringo Feliz for a couple of celebratory Pisco Sours before heading to the springs.
As we finished our drinks and exchanged email addresses, a train shrilled to a halt. People jumped from the train and scattered across the canyon, running along the pebbled tracks. Vendors abandoned their wares—blankets, walking sticks, ponchos, and postcards—on the narrow sidewalk. Shopkeepers began hammering boards over their windows. One man fell onto the train tracks, smashed his head on the rail, then stumbled to his feet and continued. Blood stained the rocks where he had fallen. We asked people running past, “¿Que pasó?” What happened?
A woman shouted, “¡Avalancha de lodo!” A man in khakis and a floppy hat translated as he ran past: landslide.
That’s when I hurried back into the bar with the immediate urge to go. The lights had gone out and the bartender nailed boards across the windows. Sandra pounded on the bathroom door, shouting: “Get out of there. Now.”
I finished up and followed Sandra through the dark bar and out the front door. The air outside thickened with humidity, drenched with the smell of wet earth. Everyone darted across the tracks. Sandra and I crossed over, joining the others who had gone in search of higher ground, but we didn’t know the exact location of the landslide. Was the mudslide on the other side of the canyon or was it on our side, oozing toward us from somewhere up there?