BY JENNA GERSIE
Its windows splattered with glacial lake water, the ferry docked at Paine Grande, and I half-heartedly disembarked, letting Abby go ahead so she wouldn’t observe my lack of excitement. I just couldn’t match her enthusiasm. She had wanted to go hiking in Patagonia longer than I had known her. I felt like I was in competition, like the place held some higher or more special space in her heart, and I was no match for its ruggedness or its beauty. She yearned toward its surprises and challenges, and I was too predictable.
As we walked down the slippery dock, she turned to grin at me. “We’re here!” she gushed, and before I could change my expression, she turned back toward the mountains rising above Pehoé Lake. Looking up, I chided myself for comparing a geographical region to my role in our relationship.
I followed her in the line of hikers, the yellows, reds, and blues of rain covers on backpacks creating a Twister board of the Torres del Paine scenery. As we left the dock, the crowd thinned out, some hikers headed to the Paine Grande Lodge to check in or use the bathroom or buy overpriced bags of pasta or cans of tuna, others aiming straight for the trail, not wanting to waste any time. By the side of the lake, a male upland goose stood sentinel and stoic in front of his mate and chicks. The sight made me want to lift my chin a little higher.
It was eleven kilometers to Grey Lodge, the refugio near Grey Glacier. We would come back down the same trail again the next day—the only way to complete the W-shaped trail was to walk each arm twice. Our hike would take us four days; I’d spent as much time, more, in remote settings, but I’d never really backpacked before. Abby, though, was seasoned. When she was a child, her family spent vacation time in national parks, camping and hiking; she’d done a NOLS course in the Rockies during college. My family vacations, when we went on them, were usually renting a house at the beach. We’d pack an old milk crate full of books and make no plans other than to sit on the sand, reading. Still, I’d always loved being outside.
I had no problem keeping up with Abby’s pace down the trail. My legs are long—I have several inches on her—and I’m not unathletic. I carried some extra weight—our tent and most of the food—but it wasn’t my load that made me want to pause more often. I wanted to examine the details of our surroundings—the tall grass going to seed, the dark clouds skating across the pale sky, the sparrows flitting from the trail at our approach. Not a kilometer down the trail, I realized that we were on different hikes; Abby was powering ahead of me, unimpeded by the sharp gusts of wind or the needle tips of rain beginning to hit her in the face. I sighed, deciding to get wet rather than stop to dig my rain pants out of my pack, and moved to catch up.
“You alright?” she asked, hearing my labored breath.
“Yeah, of course,” I said, and tried to exhale out of my nose to be quieter. What came out sounded abrasive, like a dog breathing loudly in sleep.
Soon, the narrow rocky path leveled out on top of a ridge, Grey Lake spread below us. Windswept whitecaps blossomed atop its dark waves. My pants, which only minutes before had been wet with rain, were nearly dry from the wind. Abby paused and turned to me, her face bright. The wild light in her eyes, along with the brashness of the elements and the grey lake and sky and rocks all around us, startled me.
“We’ll see the glacier soon!” She pulled the trail map out of her pocket and folded it to show just our section of the trail before the wind could rip it out of her hands.
“Let’s get down off the ridge a bit before you blow away,” I told her, and instantly regretted it. I had said it as if she were weak, that thing she hated the most. She looked away from me, put the map back in her pocket, and kept walking. I sighed and followed her downhill.
We walked through a sheltering copse of forest; we walked over small wooden bridges above gushing streams of glacial thaw; we walked uprock and downrock, slipping sometimes on slick surfaces, mud-covered stone, snowmelt. We walked through a forest of foxglove: tall stems supported magenta or white blossoms like bells, bright against a green backdrop, rain drops perched on their petals. In a grove of trees, a Magellanic woodpecker drummed against a fallen log, her black crest comically flipped back behind her head. She thrummed with my heart beats.
Atop the ridge again, the lake was no longer grey; it was that clear, aqua, impossible color of glacial meltwater. Icebergs that looked small from where I stood, but were at least the size of small cars, floated, white with brilliant blue etchings. Grey Glacier came into view, immense in the distance. Its face was pale blue and bumpy, like an egg carton. Beyond that, it stretched between two mountains that rose up gradually from the glacier’s crinkled surface. I took out my binoculars to look at the crevices where dirt and rock debris collected to turn the ice black, the blinding white, pale turquoise, sky. I drank it in, gasping as if I came up for air from too-cold water. The ice was disappearing in front of my eyes, dripping, turning into Grey Lake.
For the rest of the day’s hike, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the glacier. It was brilliant and powerful and sad. Near the camp, a sign showed how much it had retreated since the 1940s; so many years ago, we would have been hiking alongside the glacier, rather than the cold lake.
At camp, we traded hiking boots for flip-flops and hung our socks up to dry; we cooked and ate; we refilled water bottles and washed our faces. We completed tasks methodically, ate ravenously, spoke minimally. In our sleeping bags, Abby scrunched up next to me, a caterpillar wiggling in its cocoon. I put my arms around her, felt ice melting from my surface, felt myself warming. “Today was really good,” she said, and later, when I tried to unravel her, “Not now. There are too many people nearby.”
Sleep came heavy and warm. In my dreams, Andean condors soared past mountain peaks, their shadows tracing the trail below, but Abby wouldn’t look up. I woke up feeling like they had carried something away with them, leaving only a memory of flight behind.
In the morning, the way back to Paine Grande was unexpectedly easier than yesterday’s trail. The wind was at our backs, pushing us along. The glacier was also at our backs, but I kept turning around to steal glances, then hurrying to catch up with Abby, then turning around again for last looks. The sun stayed out for most of the morning, shining rainbows through misty air near the peaks, where mountain lions could slink their way along the ridgelines, unseen.
We stopped a few kilometers from Paine Grande to have a snack and nestled against a grassy slope, out of the wind. Abby pulled plastic bags from her pack, rolled a few slices of sweaty cheese in a tortilla and handed it to me, then made one for herself. We chewed.
“There’s a raptor right in front of us,” Abby whispered.
A Chimango caracara had appeared on a glacier-worn strip of rock across the trail. It walked along the rock with pale, taloned feet, tilting its head this way and that, seemingly unbothered by our presence. It flicked its beak along the grassy ground next to the rock, gathering insects. It paused, ruffled its cinnamon feathers, then stood motionless on the rock, mere feet away.
“I wish we had stopped more to look at the glacier.”
“What?” Abby turned from the bird. The caracara cocked its head toward us with the same questioning gaze.
“We’re rushing so much along the trail,” I said. “I just wish we took advantage of the moments like this, to see everything, to look a little more closely.”
Abby was calm. “But you never said you wanted to stop, did you?”
“Well, no,” I replied, frustrated. Something jumped in the grass, and the caracara went back to its insect search.
“So don’t be upset with me,” Abby said, reasonably.
“I’m sorry. I just feel like we’re moving too fast, not enjoying ourselves enough.”
“I didn’t realize you weren’t enjoying yourself.” Abby packed the tortillas and cheese, zipping her pack shut with a finality that indicated she was ready to move on from this conversation. The caracara flew away.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I just want to slow down a little, be in the moment together a little more.” I didn’t tell her that I could have used another tortilla.
“Well speak up when you want us to do something differently,” she said. “Are you ready?”
We stopped to fill our water bottles at Paine Grande and I made Abby tea, part of my effort to smooth things over. It felt like days ago that we had disembarked from the ferry, but it had only been yesterday afternoon. We’d walked so far, and we were back where we started.
I felt foolish for my outburst, but after Abby rinsed her mug and clipped it to her pack, she let me lead the way. She was levelheaded as always and had offered this as a solution without making a big deal out of it. We walked alongside the aqua blue lake, over grassy hills covered with daisies and dandelions and clover, and into a valley filled with the silver skeletons of trees, bare and with bark smoothed by fire. In the distance, the same white trees rose up like the teeth of a comb in the mountain’s shadow. Clouds moved ahead, greying the sky and the lake. I started to feel better once the trail dipped into a forested area, where the bony, skinless trees were replaced with bark and leaves and the feeling that things lived there. I even picked up speed as the trail got muddy, skipping over puddles.
At Francés, our campsite that night, we smiled at each other over the flame of our camp stove, splurged on a bottle of wine, watched the stars form over the lake. “I love you,” Abby told me. “I’m sorry I spooked the caracara away.”
I kissed the top of her head. “It was my fault, anyway. Maybe we’ll see more.”
We did see more the next day: Chimango caracaras and southern caracaras, perched in trees, flying above the lake, walking along a picnic table at one of the refugios, scrounging for food from backpackers who gave it away. But the same tensions I brought to the surface when we saw the first caracara returned; there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it.
I don’t know what it was: exhaustion from the trip, or maybe seeing Abby so in her element when I was out of mine. The wind had ripped away at our tent all night, and the rain had formed a small puddle near my face, soaking through my fleece that I’d used for a pillow. I had barely slept, and I had no choice but to wear my wet fleece. I was grumpy and exhausted.
We walked through what felt like a montane rainforest: everything was lush and blooming, bright and drizzly, with bird chants and the songs of distant waterfalls. It was lovely, but I wasn’t enjoying it. Distracted by my thoughts, I tripped on a tree root, and I had to run to catch myself, thumping my fumbled feet in front of me until I was able to straighten myself out.
I heard Abby laugh behind me. “Are you okay?”
Something inside me slipped, a sheet of ice calving from a glacier and crashing to the watery surface below.
“Of course I’m okay.” My face burned. “What’s even the point in asking that?”
“Just checking.”
“Well why do you do that? Just because you think it’s the right thing to say?” I turned to see her wide-eyed, surprised by my sudden anger. It didn’t matter that I had tripped, but her seemingly harmless laugh humiliated me. “I’m sorry I’m not as perfect as you,” I muttered.
“Why are you attacking me?”
“I’m not attacking you!” My words darted out like icicles.
“You are,” she said. “And you’re ruining this trip with your insecurities.”
I tore off down the trail, leaving Abby behind. She was a fast hiker, but I was mad and shameful, and my long legs raced downhill at a pace faster than she cared to keep up with. Why would she follow me, anyway?
Soon, the forested, muddy path brought me to the shore of the lake. The milky blue water, which had looked so peaceful from above, was raging, the wind forcing waves to the pebbled shore as if the lake were a sea. The black and tan rocks, water-worn and round, clinked against one another like marbles beneath the waves. I picked one up and threw it into the swell, then another. I sat down on the rocky beach and squinted at the hazy sky, mist collecting on my face.
I got up when I heard Abby’s pebbled steps on the shore, and I followed her back to the trail. Our plan was to spend the next two nights at Las Torres, hiking our last day up to the base of the granite towers, a point with an iconic view and what Abby had been most looking forward to. The sun came out over hilly trails, wildflowers brushed our ankles, and I felt ashamed. We didn’t say anything to each other.
After walking at lake level for a little while, we started to ascend a steep, sandy path. A mountain rose to our left, small glaciers scouring out slides on its peak. Inside, I felt like scraped bedrock. I kept climbing. I passed Abby and continued upward, taking long steps, determined, for whatever reason, to show her that I was made of something tougher than she thought I was, or rather, than I thought I was.
From its peak, the path began to descend slightly, and I began to feel needles beneath my kneecap spreading outward. I ignored it and kept walking. The trail went uphill again, and these upward steps didn’t hurt. I told myself the pain I had felt wasn’t real, just something tempting me to pause or perhaps apologize. But I was too self-absorbed for that. Abby was still behind me and I kept going.
Again, the trail dipped downhill and the pain was sharp. I felt like I was twisting my kneecap each time I landed on my right foot. Soon, every other step became an awkward half step as I turned my right foot inward and stepped sideways to take pressure off the front of my knee. I was slowing down quickly, and I heard Abby catch up behind me.
“Are you okay? Why are you walking like that?”
I knew I looked stupid. My face was hot and for the first time in months I felt like crying. I swallowed what felt like ice chips in my throat, and a few tears blurred my vision. I took a breath; I couldn’t cry in front of Abby, especially not now. “Let me just take a break for a second,” I told her.
I sat down on a boulder and rolled up my pant leg. I could see immediately where my knee had begun to swell as if I’d fallen on ice.
“Can I see the map?” I asked, too embarrassed to complain about the injury but starting to seriously worry about making it to camp. I unfolded the map, refusing to look up at Abby’s face. We still had at least ten kilometers to go.
Already deflated, I sat as Abby took my pack from me and hefted it onto her front. “You shouldn’t carry the extra weight,” she told me. I stood, intending to be at least half as tough as she was, but winced as I straightened my leg. Unbending the joint felt like slamming a finger in a car door, sharp and dull at the same time.
The lake below was colored shades of aqua green by the hills and sky that rose from its glassy surface. Abby didn’t mention that we wouldn’t make it to the base of the torres together; she would either go alone, or not at all. I stepped to the trail behind her. Blood roared in my ears like a glacial stream, heavy with runoff.
Jenna Gersie is a PhD student in English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studies American literature and the environmental humanities. She is managing editor of The Hopper. Her writing has appeared in About Place Journal, Zoomorphic, and elsewhere.