I’m still co-habiting with various voles, shrews, and deer mice. They run energetic circuits around the one-room cabin: behind the sofa, up the printer onto my desk, down to the floor, across the shelves, over the linen-chest, and across the fireplace mantel, where they peep out from behind the bowls and trinkets. Then hop! down onto the stereo and around again.

Brewing coffee in a little in-cup drip filter last week I noticed that one of the coffee grounds was not a coffee ground, after I’d drunk. I didn’t gag: I’ve seen enough restaurant kitchens to know I’ve consumed worse. In the staff kitchen pantry, they peeled off and shredded the label from my sesame oil to make a nest, and chewed holes in a ziplock bag of coffee I’d left out by accident. I emptied the shelves, swept off the droppings and swabbed down with bleach while I pictured my caffeinated mice wired up for a brainstorming session on how to breach those metal towers of food.

Some nights they party in my cabin like Bush Jr. at Yale, and I lie awake listening to them snuffle around the traps. I feel the self-pity of the killer as I hold my breath before the metal bar smashes them: they made me do it. They are unsentimental creatures. When a trap is sprung, a mouse will lick the peanut butter clean from under the warm, dead nose of its fellow rodent. I respect their respect for the primacy of the living.

I am now able to empty and reset the snap-traps, though I prefer cajolery when possible. To empty the traps I hold them upside down through a tissue to avoid contact with my victims’ popping, accusatory eyes. I try not to brush the whiskers, and I never touch the tails. In the charnel ground behind the cabin, I prise up the metal bar with another tissue and shake the trap out. The stiff little bodies with dented heads plop onto the duff, and I shout a ritual incantation: “Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry sorry little mouse!” Then I sprint to the staff kitchen to wash my hands.

Two days ago I abandoned a trap up there: a mouse had clamped his teeth around the metal bait-holder, and I wasn’t about to pry his jaws from his last meal. When I confessed, Ranger Tim retrieved it, quietly contemptuous of my simpering. I can only deal with the neatly dead. Since then he has had to de-trap another creature who haemorrhaged under the stereo, and stomp a squeaking mouse who was pinned by the ear. At the Frater cabin one morning I squeaked myself when I was greeted by a live mouse, sitting in the kitchen sink pinned by the tail. I am ashamed that my inner Carrie Bradshaw has not yet been snap-trapped by rural life. But oh, the rodentry.

If you leave them in the trap for even half a day, the carpenter ants take a break from chomping through the ceiling beams and troop down to swarm the corpse. When the mice are deposited in the charnel ground, the cadaver beetles are ready. They are fabulously industrious creatures. Our mice are usually buried within 12 hours, ready to host beetle babies. Life goes on.

Ranger Tim dropped me off at Gargantua, 35km north of my cabin and a further 14 jouncing klicks down a dirt road that might have been in Ecuador. He has walked the Coastal Trail four or five times and I kept asking him if he was sure—sure—I would be okay alone. Eventually, reassured, I swung my pack on and he yanked on the compression straps, tsk-tsking at my overloading.

Tent, sleeping bag and pad. Spare pants, underwear, shirt and socks. Gore-tex jacket, fleece, hat, flip-flops. Cookpot, cup, bowl, spoon. Four packs of noodles, loaf of bread, cheese, Marmite, peanut butter, yoghurt, teabags, oatmeal, home-mixed muesli and GORP. Swiss Army Knife. Torch. Waterproof matches and lighter. Bugspray, toothbrush, Tampax, moisturiser, camp soap. Desert Solitaire and Going After Cacciato. Moleskine notebook. Uniball pens. Excedrin, for coffee sweats. Band-aids. Map. Rope. Water bladder.

Enough to make me stagger slightly until I got used to the burden. Far too much food, it turned out. I eat extremely on a long hike, but can never predict beforehand whether I’ll be ravenous or ascetic.

Superior’s summer is too lovely to last long, but by the middle of August it was finally in full bloom. I left Tim at the car park and set off down a Hansel-and-Gretel path, a deceptively easy 45-minute stroll to an abandoned cottage. A stone hearth and chimney is all that is left in a clearing behind a sandy cove.

At this early stage the Very Difficult trail rating seemed pitched to what Edward Abbey called Industrial Tourists. So far I wasn’t hiking as much as grazing. Wild raspberries and blueberries flanked the path. Mushrooms popped up under every tree. There were snowberries—wintergreen-flavoured Tic-tacs—and wintergreen leaves. I thought of the excuses I would make rushing into a New York conference room: “So sorry I’m late. Unavoidably detained in a raspberry patch.”

This shore is bountiful. It’s a magic trick to drink sweet, cool water straight from the waves on a fine-sand beach, and to see pond frogs jumping in rockpools. There is driftwood and brushwood wherever you look, and smooth cobbles to ring the fire with. Birch paper makes perfect kindling. If you could throw a stone straight you’d brain enough game—hares, squirrels—for a fine stew.

The natural harvest is explosive this season; the best in 25 years, say the old hands. In the backcountry there are whole stands of raspberries unpicked on the beaches, and so many blueberries you soon learn to pass all but the choicest and fattest. There will always be more. ‘Booberries!’ my young friend Aidan calls them, and I wished he were here to set down in a patch to pick until he turned as purple as Veruca Salt.

The woodland stroll didn’t last. The trail spat me out onto a cobbled beach, the first of many. The Coastal Trail, not surprisingly, hugs the shore wherever possible. You cross coves of fine sand, pebbles, small stones, cobbles, jagged rocks and huge boulders. There are smooth sheets of granite, grey streaked with pink like salt-water taffy, jagged rhyolite, quartz and diabase, evil, predatory granite cobbles. I learned to pick my way over rocks and cobbles, pack throwing me off balance from time to time as I searched ahead for trail-marker cairns, cunningly camouflaged in a landscape of rocks. After hours each day my field of vision reduced to next flat rock. Hop. Hop. Brace and hop. It was blessedly dry: Vibram hiking soles are no better than rollerskates on slippery, mossy granite.

I met five other hikers on the trail. The first day I was passed by a Torontonian with a heavy knee-brace and a heavier pack who told me he was fitting in this hike before knee surgery. Might as well get value for the medical fees. We walked for a while, then I stayed behind to pick raspberries and lost him for good. He was nice, but we were glad to see the back of one another; this trail isn’t meant to be shared with strangers. The second day I sat on the beach at Beatty Cove and watched Tom and Jake gallop towards me; a pair of twenty-year-old naturalists who work for Tim, who were trying to fit the Coastal Trail into their two days off. Then I met Ralph and Mike, high school friends who had been doing a camping trip like this every year for twenty years. We shared the camaraderie of the blistered, and I wished I’d packed in Guinness like them. They told me about the innkeeper who had shuttled them to the trailhead: “I sit in a deckchair looking at these guys limping over the sand, and I ask myself, what part of backpacking is supposed to be fun?”

Outdoors, the in-head jukebox plays all day, songs I’d long forgotten that emerge with complete lyrics. Studenty stuff, mostly. I have no control over the dial.

Some days are sleepy
Some days are lazy
Some days you feel like a bit of a baby
Some days take less but most days take more
Some slip through your fingers and onto the floor
Some days you wake up in the army
Some days are better than others

———————-

Like a bird
On a wire
Like a drunk
In a midnight choir
I have tried
In my way
To be free

The first night set the pattern: I walked until six and camped in a deserted cove. I stripped and swam off the day’s sweat, then spent twenty minutes throwing a stick tied to my pink bear rope at the branch of white pine. Glad no one was watching me throw like a girl. Eventually I looped it over a branch I wasn’t aiming for and left it dangling, ready to string my food up out of reach of animals once I’d finished my ramen extravaganza.

I sat on a log in front of a small driftwood fire, eating noodles. Ten mergansers crossed the cove, so busy ducking for food I could hardly keep a count straight. The molten sun looked ready for a glassblower. When it got dark I brushed my teeth with lake water, tied up my food bag and crawled into the nylon coffin of my bivvy-sac. The mosquitos puzzled at the net inches above my face: insolently, I blew the carbon dioxide they crave. The full moon rose above the trees. A loon called. I wanted to tell someone, but no one was there. I imagined telling someone later, how I would describe it. I wondered if my friends were watching this same moon. But no one was there. At last I understood it as a secret gift; my private moon.

Next morning I packed up without breakfast, holding out for a good blueberry patch to sweeten the muesli. By eight the sun was warming my back on a huge red rock high above the lake. The water was clear to the bottom, a giant lens for studying grains of sand. I sat with my purple breakfast, a queen surveying her territory, glad to have been deeded this landscape.

   “Yah, so I busted dese people in the campground yesterday,” said Jacques as I was stirring my Red River Cereal. Jacques is an enforcement ranger, of the variety to whom a badge and a truck represent intoxicating power. A mwa-ha-ha ranger. He dreams of reading Bermuda-shorted matrons the Miranda Rights when they fail to extinguish campfires by 10pm. Every morning he tries to impress the chicks with stories of busting tourists over Regulation 748b. Every morning we turn the heat up under our oatmeal and stir faster to get out of there.
   “Yah, dey had a big basket of mushrooms. Dey were laying ‘em out on the picnic table in the campground.”
   “What kind of mushrooms?” Surely he meant the magically delicious brand.
   “I don’t know the exact type, but you know, cooking mushrooms. Dey had the butter in the pan all ready to go when I confiscated ‘em.”
   “You confiscated their mushrooms?”
He puffed up. “It’s illegal to remove natural objects from the rightful place in the park. Dat includes mushrooms. And techically blueberries and raspberries too. I woulda gone easy on ‘em if dey had five or six, but dey had a whole big basket.”
   “ Those people are on holiday! They’re probably immigrants camping with their kids. They don’t even know why you took their mushrooms. That’s so mean!” we cry.
He looks hurt. “Rules is rules.”

I was still in mourning for the berries I’d left to rot on the Coastal Trail. The whole park is carpeted with fungus. Even the bears are hardly denting this year’s fine natural crop. To protest Jacques’s lumpish enforcement policy, I dragged Ranger Tim ‘shrooming Sunday morning.

We walked the private trail from Beaver Rock to Laughing Brook with the big dented stockpot that’s been sitting outside the staff kitchen all summer. He showed me the basic identification rules: the fleshy, porous boletes, the gilled agarics, the snowy purity of the Destroying Angel. We picked bone-white coral mushrooms, strewn on the forest floor exactly like dead coral. There were brown-black pigs’ ears, turmeric-stained Slippery Jacks, speckled boletus, chanterelles. We found supermarket mushrooms and a few pearl-grey oysters. Tim told stories of tripping casualties of Amanita muscaria in early mushrooming days.

At the Pilot Cabin he spread newspapers on the porch and arranged our many finds into little groups. I opened a bottle of wine and sat in a deckchair while he frowned over borrowed field guides. We would do a tasting menu, we decided, sampling each set. More than half our haul was unidentifiable or else too close to scary species to risk, but that still left a fine spread. He got butter, olive oil, salt and pepper and good bread from the kitchen and we fired up the camping stove. First, pigs’ ears steamed on a cocktail strainer (inevitably, they fell into the water). Gelatinous and good, like the wood-ear mushrooms the Thais serve. Next, Steinpilz, sautéed in butter, served on toast. Yum. Oyster mushrooms in olive oil. Mmm-mmm.

I’d drunk enough wine to feel like inviting Jacques to the fungus party, but Tim had to go to work. We promised ourselves a good mushroom omelette for brunch next day instead. Tim was in charge, slicing sulphur-yellow Slippery Jacks. “Edible and choice”, according to The Mushroom Hunter’s Field Guide “Wipe the slime from the cap and remove the tubes before cooking”. They stained his fingers and blended pleasingly with the eggs.

Forty-five minutes later I was staring into an enamel bowl and letting loose enormous rumbling belches. Tim paced the porch looking up fungus poisoning treatment in the field guides. I retched and belched again, louder than ever.
   “Can you say your whole name in those belches?” he asked. Not funny. I wanted more than anything to get the Slippery Jacks out of my stomach.
Eventually he headed to the kitchen and rushed back holding out a tall glass that looked exactly like a pisco sour. I groaned.
   “Emetic,” he said briskly, “Salt and mustard powder in warm water. Hold your nose and chug it.” I got half of it down. It immediately shot back up my nose: hot mustard solution, like the worst icecream headache imaginable. “I’m going to make more.”
   “No! No! I can’t take it.”

But I did. Two minutes after I finished the second glass, the Slippery Jacks were returned to their rightful place in the woods and I felt suitably punished for my wanton transgression. Naturally, Tim felt no ill-effects. I’ve never had a food allergy in my life, but it turns out I react badly to slimy yellow fungus in the north woods. Could be worse.

I didn’t bring sunscreen. Usually I just use my factor 30 face cream, since Lake Superior is cool enough for long sleeves and long pants most of the time. But these were the hottest days of the year. I sustained nice second-degree burns on the tops of my ears, which stuck out under my baseball cap. They were bloody and itchy, and I thought they were blackfly-bitten until I got home. Hard scar tissue has been flaking off like pork crackling ever since. I look at my festering, hobbity ears in the mirror and think, God, I’m irresistible.

My legs and arms are still covered in cuts and bites. My feet look like I’ve been tortured: raw welts on every toe, red wounds on my heels. I gave myself a pedicure on the porch the day after I got back and as I painted my abused toenails I felt like a battered wife bravely caking on eyeshadow.

Late on the third evening, I saw a sharp rock several steps ahead. Easily avoidable. After eight hours of stumbling over cobbled beaches and boulders, though, stupidity had set in. I slowly exfoliated my left calf along its edge, thinking, oh, I didn’t need to do that. The scar is impressive.

My elbows are scraped raw from my habit of missing the tiny blue signs that led back into the woods whenever the boulders on the coast got too steep and dangerous. More than once I found myself hanging off the edge of a huge rock by my fingers, wondering whether to jump after the pack I’d tossed down. Once a sturdy fellow hiker who was also lost reached down and pulled me up onto a boulder platform an arm’s length above my head, pack and all; halfway up I slipped and skinned all my corners trying to find a purchase in the walls of the little canyon.

I lost a small roll of reserve lard I’ve been hoarding around my middle since Ecuador, and am back down to regulation SoHo dating weight. In the staff kitchen I suck in my cheekbones dramatically, but Canadian park rangers are not impressed by scrawn.

The Coastal Trail Experience was best described by Ralph and Mike, two Toronto hikers I walked with on the last day.
‘We get to camp every night,’ said Ralph, ‘and we say, How can one man be so broken?’

My laptop is still in intensive care. I’m taking the opportunity to hoist a backpack once again and try Lake Superior’s 66 kilometer Coastal Trail, which I will likely hike at AOL dial-up speeds.

See you Saturday, unless the bears adopt me and I turn into a superannuated Nell.

Last night I was jogging down the Trans-Canada Expressway, or whatever they call it. It runs right through the park. I jog for transport since I still can’t drive, and I was heading over to see Ranger Tim’s evening naturalist program, ‘Canoeing at Lake Superior’, in the hope there might be National Film Board of Canada cartoons. That’s how media-starved I am. I will run four miles down a highway roaring with 18-wheelers on the rumour of an educational Canadian cartoon from the 1960s, shown in an outdoor amphitheatre with wet seats and shouting six-year-olds.

(Canadians seem to have real affection for these cartoon shorts. Maybe they are like those weird kids who have never tasted sweets: ‘Mum, can I have a raw carrot? Ple-ease?’
Maybe they didn’t suffer the psy-ops tactics employed by our national television station in the seventies. ‘…and now, children, after the Núacht, there will be cartoons.’ Cartoons! We would sit through twenty minutes of dandruffed bumpkins reading the news in phlegmy, unintelligible Gaelic, waiting for some Chuck Jones relief. Instead, often as not we got The Story of Caves, or worse, the fecking Log Driver’s Waltz. For my baited-and-switched generation, The National Film Board of Canada opening titles inspired as much love as the nine times tables. Educational cartoons? If I were Elvis, I would have shot the telly out.)

Back to the highway. A few seconds after a truck passes, my baseball hat is grabbed by displaced air. I play a little game: I guess when it will happen and try to grab my hat just in time. I lose my hat and retrieve it from the middle lane, fast as a squirrel. Many of whom are now squirrel pancakes.

These days, truckers schedules are so tight that they make no stops at all. The shoulder of the highway is littered with what look like half-full bottles of dark iced tea. It turns out these are the pee-breaks of dehydrated men. Annick the maintenance ranger drives around to pick up them up, which is more than I would do for six bucks an hour and a beige uniform. There are dark rumours among the rangers who hitch-hike that some truckers can lift their seat cushion to reveal a hole right through the floor, an inhouse outhouse.

Truckers are too busy even to honk at sweaty women, so the endless caravan of bikers picks up the slack. The bikers are chunky middle-aged men on two-wheeled SUVs, and I like watching them when it rains. I save my sympathy for the real bikers, pedaling a foot-wide shoulder through the endless drizzle of Superior. They are the only ones lower on the highway hierarchy than me: I can see where I’m going, at least when I stop veering towards wild raspberries.

A woman in an SUV stops and rolls down the window.
   ‘Watch out,’ she says, ‘There’s a bear just over there by the side of the road.’ She points about 20 yards ahead and drives off.

I am two miles from home and two miles from the campground, and naturally the road is now completely empty. I jog a little more slowly, which is very slowly indeed. My brain, never one to say nothing when it has nothing useful to say, is humming.

I try to calculate the odds that I will be the first person ever mauled by a bear on the side of the Trans-Canada Expressway. Then I realise I’m innumerate, and therefore incapable of assessing this probability. (When I report this later to Adam Stein, he says: ‘My mother’s advice in this scenario would be, “Someone’s got to be first.” ‘)

I remember Tim’s bear from a few weeks back. That story ended up on the CBC radio news. I don’t want to end up on the news unless I am telling the story myself. A wry, self-deprecating anecdote that nevertheless reveals me as both sensitive and heroic.

(Perhaps I save a toddler from the bear. The child has wandered out from the campground, and is lost on the side of the highway, crying for her mother. The bear is maddened by her cries. He snorts and stamps. He charges the child, swiping a huge paw to scoop her up. He holds her close to his face, examining the morsel before he gobbles her up.

I…jog over and make special bear noises. I win him over with my easy charm and gentle wit. Or something. Anyway, the creature is transfixed. He begins to croon, perhaps to weep. Gently, he sets the little girl down and ambles towards me. The little girl follows; she is no longer crying. The bear lays his head on my shoulder and snuffles. The little girl clings to my leg. We have a moment. A crowd gathers. Then the TV crews arrive. I am feted: a humble immigrant with a touch of greatness, like Wayne Gretzky. Soon afterwards, Chrétien calls, offering to make me an honorary Canadian citizen in recognition of my ‘eroism. No paperwork.)

It is more likely I will win a Darwin Award. I am still running cautiously towards the unseen bear. The road is still empty. A year ago I was so terrified of domestic dogs that I didn’t like to walk by myself in the suburbs, let alone the countryside. I decide it will be a good progress milestone if I can now jog past a black bear. I have no mop to defend myself, but not to worry. Bears are smart, I tell myself. I like bears. It’s berry season, I tell myself. They don’t want no trouble.

Cut to Adam Stein’s instant messenger commentary again:

Well, I’m sorry. This story is going nowhere. I’ve wasted your time again. I wasn’t mauled by a bear. The bear didn’t even appear. I made it all the way to the campground, pumped up. Tim showed two National Film Board of Canada cartoons and a slideshow, a media feast that left me as buzzed as the first Matrix. We sat on very wet benches, which the Michigan kids next to me found a great source of wit.
   ‘AN-drew! Did you PEE your PANTS?’
   ‘Andrew, you shoulda gone to the BATHROOM instead of wetting your pants. You are so disgusting and gross.’
   ‘Ew, Andrew, do you need DIAPERS?’
I leaned over and told them what was really in the soda bottles on the highway. For future emergencies.

Postscript: My young bear, most likely the brother of the fellow shot last month, has been wandering the campground and the rangers’ work centre. The junior rangers laid a trap, but the park superintendent told them to take it down. He is just acting like a bear, not bothering anybody. When last spotted, he was sitting in a patch of grass outside the work center, happily eating a bunch of daisies.

As clueless beginners, we naturally pressed Matt for the scariest whitewater disaster stories he knew before we hit the first rapid. He obliged, and we were silent as we weighed the invested $250 course cost against the prospect of Really Bad Things.
   ´But don’t worry too much,’ he said, ‘you know, statistically, you’re much more likely to die in the truck on the way to the river.’

We survived the first day, and the second, which posed much more danger because it took place at an Ecuadorian water park. In the pool we shivered through endless unsuccessful tries at rolling while Matt shouted ‘Hula hips! Hula hips!’ As a reward, we were allowed to go down the water slide, although he warned us to try the chute on the right only, to keep the helmet, life-jacket, and nose-clips on, and to edge to the left on the final bend no matter what. This seemed a tad extreme until I got the following note today from my friend Adam Stein, who did the same kayak course (and almost the same whole trip as me, in reverse):

The third day, we took our new roll skills back to the river and finally ran a proper Big Boy’s Class II/III rapid. It probably seemed as threatening as a pool of baby drool to real kayakers, but we felt like heroes of the Amazon, and were still grinning a kilometer or two downriver, where the water was wide and shallow.

Then I heard a honk on my left. Coming towards us, in the river, was a very large yellow dump truck. We were in its path and it wasn’t stopping, though the wheels were nearly submerged. The driver leaned out the window and shouted at us to get out of the way, and we paddled like blenders against the current until we were clear.

Statistically speaking, it would have been an interesting death.

It’s not that I hadn’t noticed rivers before. You can’t miss them in jungly Tena, where they jostle to join the Amazon. There’s the Napo, the Tena, the Misuahalli, the Pastaza…From the bus window, I could even tell them apart, though not by name. This one was brown, that one was wider, another was rocky. But my glances were idle. If I didn’t need to ford them with a backpack or fill a water bottle for silty tea, rivers were just icing on the Ecuadorian cake.

But I eyed the river differently from a small red kayak perched against a rock at the top of a rapid. This river could hold me or flip me, send me shooting over rocks or scuttle me against them. I didn’t yet have the skills to persuade it my way, though Matt, the patient instructor, was trying hard.
   ´Bomber!´ he would say as I finished a weak Eskimo roll or a nervous turn. He was being kind. I still couldn’t put the spray skirt on by myself, let alone negotiate the Tena river without whimpering and capsizing.

Matt had stopped us on a little rock island to scout our first rapid. The men discussed possible routes while I picked at my lurid blackfly bites. Little about whitewater kayaking was intuitive to me. You head for the whitest, choppiest stretches of current for safety, you lean towards, not away from the rock that might tip you over. Underwater, you plunge your head down further to rescue yourself with a roll, instead of reaching up for air. I nodded as Matt pointed out various features and routes (by throwing stones at them as accurately as Huckleberry Finn), but it all still looked like plain water to me. He was a good teacher, and helped us to stumble towards our own routes instead of telling us where to go. This frightened me. I wanted to sit in and just follow him down the rapid, but instead he made us analyze our own choices over and over. He showed us the flow of the main current by tossing in a stick. We watched, petrified, as it bounced over rocks.

    ’That’s what happens if you’re a stick. But you’re not sticks, right? You know how to control this thing, how to edge your boat around that rock over there on the right instead of heading directly into it. And when you hit the little hydraulic below the ledge, you’re going to paddle hard through it instead of getting stuck in it and sucked down, right?´

Right, Matt.

Matt had lived in Ecuador for six years, though really he lived on the rivers of the world. He spoke sweet Missouri Spanish, and softened macho whitewater language with a good ol’ boy accent.
    ´That’s a bomber turn!´ he would say when one of us accidentally did something right, and the word was stretched into ´Ballmer’ so that it took us a day or two to work it out. ´Are y’all dialled into that ketchin´ the eddy thing?´

In a boat, his moves were economical and beautiful: a Missouri merman who could run a whole river with a few well-placed strokes. It seemed to us that he even spoke more fluently when he was on the water.

Matt’s great passion was river conservation, and he told us about the organization he had set up to protect Ecuadorian watersheds. He told horror stories of oil pipelines which leaked every year and had no pressure monitors, and which could only be turned off at the well. One had opened up right into the Quito water supply last year and poisoned a sixth of it, and it was going to happen again and again. He organized river festivals, taught the locals how to kayak, was trying to get a system going where local elementary school kids monitored the water supply as part of their science program. He worked with the town bigwigs to lobby the oil companies and the government to protect their rivers and present them as a tourist attraction. He ticked off rivers between the sierra and the Amazon like a California commuter discussing favorite routes. I wanted to call his mother and tell her what a good job she’d done.

On the rapid, our careful planning was forgotten with the first whoosh sucking us downriver. We hollered as the landmarks we’d picked out disappeared in a blur of water. Halfway down there was a large rock we’d debated for some time: left or right channel? I went straight over it, leaving the water entirely and then bouncing back in with an almighty whop. Aussie Chris, waiting at the bottom, cheered and wished he’d had a camera for my action shot. Matt was less impressed.
    ´Dervala, you took the path of the stick. Next time I want to see you use the paddle once in a while instead of sitting there like you’re in an armchair and letting the river push you around.’
English Chris hit the same rock I did and turned over. He was sucked down the current at speed and was pale and bruised when he fished himself out at the bottom.

Some people are galvanized by fear. I become floppy and passive, which is good on a bumpy airline flight but not helpful on a stretch of whitewater, where I bob like a profane wine cork.
    ‘Paddle! Paddle!’ Matt would yell, as I shot towards the rocks on one rapid after another, knuckles as white as the waves on the paddle that I wasn’t using. ‘Lean into the obstacles!’

I learned eventually to be my own cox, shouting at myself like a wayward dog. ‘Paddle, you silly cow. Lean into that rock. And the other one. Swerve. Here comes a wave—paddle paddle PADDLE! Oh shit! Sweep stroke on the left NOW!’

It worked—I unfroze—and with the noise of the roaring water I didn’t need to feel embarrassed. ‘Good girl. Good girl. Beer tonight. Caipirihna too.’ I would murmur in a quiet eddy.

English Chris took to calling me The Dagger. It was the name printed on my little boat, and I did it justice. I was the only one who couldn’t paddle in a straight line in flat water, and every few minutes I’d spin and skewer his boat sideways on. I tried to pass these off as pre-emptive T-rescues, but he was having none of it.

   ‘God, it’s the bloody Dagger again,’ he would sigh, as I half-heartedly wrestled with a boat going backwards before smacking into his kayak for the tenth time that day. Obscurely, I felt I was allotted a set number of collisions every day, and it was better to use them up on friendly surfaces, at least while patience lasted. It was comforting to collide with a boat containing a human who might save me instead of yet another rock. Maybe this is why I didn’t bother to master the sweep strokes that would straighten me out. The thunk of fiberglass provided human reassurance on a river far bigger than me.

    ‘Perhaps,’ Chris suggested with only a touch of English acid, ‘you might try paddling on both sides. You’ll find it helps you go straighter.’
    ‘Don’t look at the rock,´ added Matt, ´’If it’s the only thing in a mile-wide river, you’ll still hit it if you stare at it, I guarantee it. You’ve got to focus on the path you want to follow, not the obstacles.’

Eventually I flipped over in a rapid. The risk-takers in our little group had been swimming through rapids for days. Aussie Chris was cheerful and gung-ho, and his smooth arms were strong enough to muscle through even when his strokes were wrong. He usually went first, and would bob up from a spill, spitting water and grinning, while I looked on from the top of the rapid and prayed the river wouldn’t take me. My caution compensates for incompetence, and it was the last day of the course when I finally overturned. I knew I was going to hit the rock and yelped out curses. The little kayak leaned at a horrible angle, and then my head was underwater.

I was calm but stupid. I forgot everything, forgot how to tuck forward to protect my body and prepare for a roll that would right me, despite a whole day in a swimming pool where we’d done nothing else. A rock smacked me in the face. I craned around uselessly and got my nose out of the water, but my noseplugs were still on. I did it again and still got no air. I sank back down and breathed out a little, still racing on with the current. I felt very sorry for myself.

I can hold my breath for a long time. I hoped Matt might rescue me, though we were in a rapid and I didn’t know where he was. I felt a thump on my boat and thought it was more rocks. I still didn’t tuck forward, or raise my hands out of the water to be grabbed by a helper, and I let the rest of my air go in slow bubbles. I was waiting for my prince on a fiberglass charger and getting desperate. Eventually, I did what I should have done 20 long seconds earlier—yanked on the spray skirt and slid out of the boat, gasping and close to tears. I clung to the front of a waiting boat and bounced down the river, banging my legs on the rocks.

    ‘Are you okay? Can you put your feet down? It’s not deep here. You’re going to get really smacked up if you float.’ I staggered towards a rock to rest on. I was trying not to cry.

    ‘What happened? Was the flap of your spray skirt tucked under?’ Matt asked anxiously. Suddenly, I felt like an idiot. I couldn’t tell him that I had been dangling upside down waiting to be rescued, that I had wanted someone to right me up, kiss my boo-boos, empty my boat, and put my spray skirt back on for me, that I was angry that they had all abandoned me in a rapid. But it had taken me two seconds to finally get out of the boat, and everyone else had been rescuing themselves for days. I felt pathetic.

Chris had charged through a rapid to recover my paddle, on Matt’s orders. He had manoeuvred through the rest of the fast water with two heavy paddles and was waiting for us in a quiet spot downriver. Matt gave me his own paddle and hand-cranked through the same rapid. I felt meek.

    ‘Paddle your own canoe,’ my friend Candy had said to me before I left on this trip, and I finally understood the literal meaning of the instruction. I’m good at looking helpless in bus stations so that someone else will heave my pack onto the roof of the bus. I’ve made companions protect me from scary dogs and country bulls. I’ve had friends find me jobs, look after my mail, and clean up my messes. Even on the kayak course, I was shameless about letting the others carry my boat down to the water, though the first rule of the sport is carry your own stuff.

But kayaking finds you out. It’s just the boat and the river and the rocks, and none yields to princess techniques. The river punishes the half-hearted and cushions the brave, and it demands commitment to the moment like a Zen master with a stick. It changes every minute, and yesterday’s languid, clear flow is today’s swollen, silty torrent. ‘Anticipate! Then commit!’

Whitewater kayaking changed my way of seeing, like diving did before. On the long drive from back from Tena to Cuenca, I leaned carefully into the bends and edged the passenger seat towards fallen rocks on the road. For breaks we stopped the car to parse strange rivers with our new kayak grammar, which was soon to bore Chris´s wife rigid, though she was too nice to say.
    ‘Lovely bit of fast water there. You’d have to watch out for that hydraulic, but there’s a nice eddy behind the triangle rock if you could catch it coming off that ledge. Might flip you if you missed it, though.’

After the course, at night, I dreamed of kayaking through a cocktail shaker of caipirihnas, swerving around crushed ice. And during the day, I thought big, corny thoughts about courage, self-reliance, and the River of Life, while my mental editor sneered at the tired metaphors.

(A short, slightly whiny entry to indicate that I’m still alive despite silence since Quito; thanks to those who asked. Suitably rapturous entries will follow—despite complaints below I’m taking to roughing it in Ecuador surprisingly well. A tent is not that much smaller than a Manhattan apartment.)

I have a new fear to add to my already long list. I am afraid of falling arse over tip off the Andes while still strapped to my large backpack. Unlike most of my other worries, which are mental chewing gum to keep me from accomplishing anything useful, this one has some basis in reality. On the ‘Moderately Difficult’ Quilotoa trail from my Hiking Ecuador guidebook, my backpack skidded down a near-vertical scree slope and bounced gently to the riverbank a thousand feet below. I was not strapped to it at the time. Nothing broke. Still, it’s clear the thing is incompetent, and shouldn’t be on the mountains.

Hiking Ecuador keeps quoting an Antonio Machado poem: “Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace el camino al andar.” (Traveler, there is no path. You make the path by walking.) This is not uplifting in a trekking handbook, especially a copy whose pages are now soggy with sleet. Twenty minutes after I retrieved the backpack, I was trying to follow a ‘very faint trail’ up another near-vertical slope. Though I couldn’t see a trail at all, I was optimistic that sheep footholds and the odd flattened tussock counted, and reluctant to waste my investment in the dreadful scree slope. So I inched straight up on my hands and knees, clutching at razor grass and wondering why in the name of God I was carrying lipstick and mascara—not to mention a tin of smoked mussels and a Carl Jung collection—on my back in the Andes. I knew that if I lifted any part of my body more than six inches off the ground I would tumble backwards into space. So I didn’t look around until the very top, when I saw the so-called ‘very faint trail’ zig-zagging clearly up the next slope over. The scree and the sheep meadow, which had taken me more than two hours to climb, were not on the program at all.

I cried like a nasty supermarket three-year-old, snotting and swearing and blaming. The women tending sheep down by the real trail giggled as they watched me inch back down on my bum, no longer caring about ripping my sister’s Miss Sixty trousers.

I’ve lived all my life at sea-level. On the third and last day of my trek, gasping on the sandy caldera wall of the Quilotoa lake, I realized that I’d once sky-dived from a point lower than this. I would count ten steps and rest, and each step was a pitiful shuffle that sometimes ended with me sliding lower still in the volcanic ash. When I reached the rim of the crater, a hundred-mile-an-hour wind nearly knocked me straight onto my backside, pack and all. I would have welcomed the rest. I was filthy from three days of camping, and nearly insensible from the fatigue of actually carrying my own stuff for once, let alone to 3800 meters.

Ah, but a sight like this has to be earned. A bus window is the wrong lens.

   “Best night dive I’ve ever done, mate!” said Chris, my instructor, when we surfaced in the wine-dark sea. And it was, though I’d stepped on a sea-urchin in the dark and spat out my regulator when I yelped. In the dry world, gravity is stronger, and I haven’t yet got used to moving up and down at will. As I searched for my instructor in the dark, I sang a sacreligious variant on childhood hymn through my bubbles:

Chris be beside me
Chris be before me
Chris be behind me
King of my heart

Chris be above me
Chris be below me
Chris all around me
Never to part

At fifteen meters, we finally spotted the old sea-turtle that had eluded the Crystal Dive instructors for three years. They pantomimed delight with hand signals, but I felt sad for the dignified grandfather who was forced to leave his rest spot to swim away from rows of torchbeams. We formed a wetsuited cavalcade and the remora fish on his back went along for the ride.

A barracuda hunted by our dive-lights. He sliced past and snatched a middle-sized fish. Now I saw how many smaller creatures I’d ingested by proxy when I ate grilled barracuda the night before.

On the ocean floor, a blue-spotted yellow ray slid along like an omlette in a non-stick pan. Our lights passed through a huge, eerie jellyfish floating in mid-water.

My favorite, though, was the cranky squid. Chris trained his powerful halogen beam into the hollow where it lay. Like a teenager prodded to get up and do chores, it grumpily shunted along and plopped down a few inches away. And changed color. Chris followed it.
   “Jesus, Mom,” said the squid. “Can’t you see I’m resting?”
It shuffled along and changed color again, this time to dark purple.

    “Wicked, innit, how they do that colour change, the squid?” Chris said later. I agreed. But then, two months ago I wore unrelieved black, read the New Yorker and drank five cups of coffee a day. Today I wear red down to my pink-painted toes, flip-flops, and a bandanna. I’m re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I drink mango shakes. How did I become such a poster child for that annoying species, the backpacker? Perhaps I should conduct training courses for developmentally-challenged squid.