Prompt #133: Curiosity
When your curiosity leads to adventure (and a story)
Hi Friends,
Last time I wrote that curiosity is a prerequisite for being a writer, but I think it’s also a precursor to adventure, which of course gives you more to write about.
A few years back, my husband and I were hiking in Baños, Ecuador, and we spotted a little cinder-block cabin on the side of a volcano. I said, “Don’t you wonder who lives there?” My husband Tom said he did not, but that didn't stop me from walking straight for the cabin to check it out, to satisfy my curiosity, which led to this adventure and eventually this story (the longer version is in my book of travel essays Bad Tourist):
The man from the volcano stood over us, wearing a Nixon mask and waving a machete above his head. Tom and I both laughed that special nervous laugh that’s reserved for those times when you’re about to be murdered, and you hope it won’t hurt too much.
Perhaps, I thought, we shouldn’t have accepted the invitation to tea. Perhaps I shouldn't have walked over to the cabin to see who lived there.
We had been hiking the trail to Bellavista Cross, a muddy path that hugged the side of the mountain and had views to Baños through the ferns, hydrangeas, and orchids. The volcano above rumbled. Tom and I passed the small cinder-block house, and I had gone in for a closer look. Just as I got close, a man peeked out the door. He was dressed in a plaid shirt, black jeans, and tall rubber boots. He started waving, calling us over. We approached, and he invited us in for tea.
Tom still stood back, and I said, “Come on. Why not?”
On one side of the single room sat a wood-framed bed and on the other, a small makeshift kitchen with propane burners. He asked us to have a seat while he fixed us tea.
When he brought the drink to us, he explained that he made it from a bush outside his house. I didn’t translate the bit about the bush for Tom, and I started to worry that maybe we should have kept hiking.
I waited for our host to take a sip of his tea before I drank mine, like I had seen in the movies. I whispered to Tom, “Wait to drink your tea,” but it was too late. Tom looked at me like I was crazy, a look he gave me a lot in the early days of our relationship, when the things I did or said were still a little shocking to him.
I hadn’t yet told Tom that I’d been drugged in a nightclub in Peru some months earlier, so I knew he thought I was being paranoid. And maybe I was.
Our host told us about his cows, his wife and his children, though no evidence of a family existed in his tiny abode, nor of any cows on the side of the volcano. When I asked him his children’s ages, he stammered. When I asked him their names, he pointed out the window at the volcano and said, “Can’t you hear the rumbling?”
I translated for Tom, and we both agreed that we could hear the volcano.
“But that doesn’t scare me,” the man said. “I had to be evacuated in 1997.” Then he told us he had to get something outside, and he left. I assumed he went outside for more “tea.”
A few minutes later, he reappeared, wearing the Nixon mask. He raised his machete in the air, Nixon’s face frozen into a maniacal smile. That’s when he said he wanted a tip for the tea service, though it was hard to make out his muffled words through the mask.