The Field

Evidence A for why my job is better than yours: I got paid to ride a horse through the rainforest, up a volcano.

Now, it might seem like I'm gloating or rubbing your noses in it. To be fair, I admit that I am. At the same time, however, I'll let you in on this little secret: while Evidence A is pretty darn awesome, I'm only gloating about it because the rest of the week in the field sucked. Really, truly, sucked.

To start off with, it's important to note that I have problems with motion sickness. I turn green and achy, and my best course of action is typically to just fall asleep. It turns out that it isn't easy to sleep in the back seat of a manual transmission pickup truck being driven Mexican-style on Mexican roads. Mexican drivers are very different from the American drivers that I'm used to, and really, they have to be. The roads here can be a wild collection of pits and speed bumps, and that's when they're paved. Survival driving in Mexico reminds me of what you might get from a 13 year old boy, hopped up on Mountain Dew, played Grand Theft Auto at 3 am (but without GTA's extra violence. Duh.). I bruised my right elbow from being bounced off of the door so many times during high-speed swerving maneuvers and bumps. The wildness of the ride was emphasized by the contrasting soundtrack: Barry Manilow and Manilow-wannabes, with a few forays into "It's not easy being green" by Kermit The Frog and "She-boom" by some bubblegum pop group from the past that left me wondering just how long the fall would be if we drive off of the next cliff. I had thought that my years of driving for Field Camp had fairly well inoculated me to hours spent listening to questionable music mixes; I was wrong.

Barry Manilow. He writes the songs. Would you road trip with this man?

I had 2 academic goals for the week in the field, and 2 non-academic goals. On the academic side, I wanted to look for some specific features on top of the main volcano and get some samples from a set of cones on the other side of the volcanic field. Non-academically, I wanted to swim in the hotel pool and ride a horse up a volcano. Of these 4 goals, you already know which one happened.

Academic goal 2 was undone by heavy fog that prevented us from even finding the sample sites. Non-academic goal 1 was undone by cold weather and a nasty bout of food poisoning that left me confined to the hotel for a day and prevented us from going down to Veracruz. The other two goals are related to one another and deserve a slightly longer telling.

I was ecstatic when I learned that we would be going up the main volcano on horseback, firstly because horses are just plain cool and secondly because I didn't really want to walk all that way. Previously, the team has rented horses from Don Tomás, a rancher up in the hills. Don Tomás didn't think he'd be able to help us this time, so he suggested we make arrangements with Don Guido. Don Guido has the ranch neighboring Don Tomás', but was down in the town below. Somewhere. As such, we spent a evening driving the back streets of the town (in the dark, of course!) asking people on the street if they knew how to find Don Guido.

Us: Excuse me, do you know where we can find Don Guido?

Man: Huh?

Woman: (just walking up to Man) Ah, Don Guido! He lives up in the mountains. Drive up this street until it curves right. Then look for the Corona sign. Or is it a Coke sign? I don't remember. Anyway, ask around for Señora Margarita. She'll know how to find Don Guido.

Us: Um... thanks!

With those detailed directions, we set off along unpaved back roads in the pitch black you get in an area where electricity is enough of a luxury that no one would dream of putting up streetlights. Miraculously, we not only found the correct curve in the road, but Don Guido happened to be there. He agreed to guide us up the mountain on horseback three days later, on Friday.

When Friday arrived, however, Don Guido had to back out of the plan due to an arthritis flare-up in his knees. Don Tomás, feeling bad for us, agreed to lead us up the volcano after all. He quickly rigged together enough equipment to saddle up four horses, and we started the ascent.

Me on Baya, just before we started the ascent. JM, my boss, is on the horse on the right. I only got to sit up this straight when we were stopped, thanks to the short reins.

As excited as I was to be riding a horse, I was also a bit nervous. I'm not a real rider, so I figured that I would have a very sore bum afterwards. I was also a little apprehensive about my horse, Baya, since I'd been warned that she had a habit of biting the tails of the other horses and pissing them off. Fortunately, Baya was very docile, particularly compared to the freckled horse given to Araceli (the other postdoc); that horse tried to rip down a small tree when Don Tomás saddled her. Within minutes of starting the ride, it was apparent that I would have an unexpected challenge in the saddle: my jury-rigged equipment included reins that were far too small. In order to let Baya walk, I had to lean forward across the pommel of the saddle and hold the reins with only 2 fingers. Since I was also wearing a backpack, this was doubly uncomfortable. All was going well, though, until Baya tried to walk between 2 very close trees and brushed against a branch on the right side. Slightly spooked, she danced sideways and bashed my knee into the left tree. The whole group got to pause while I cursed in a few languages and Baya shot me looks over her shoulder that easily translated as, "That's what you get for being a lousy rider. I have no desire to go up this mountain. I could have been back at home enjoying some nice grass." Shortly after that, JM's horse got skittish about stepping over a fallen log, backed up into Araceli's horse, panicked, and started kicking. Based on the muddy print left on her horse, Araceli came within a couple of inches of having been kicked in her own leg.

The forest around us was beautiful and eerie. It was the sort of place to make one believe in fairies and wood sprites, with curls of mist snaking between enormous trees and vines and Spanish moss dangling from branches. It was also strangely quiet, with little sound other than that of the horses steps as they climbed.

Finally, we reached as high as the horses would go. Don Tomás tethered them and then began leading us by foot up the trail. I am not a fast hiker, nor have I ever been, but I managed to leave my fellow academics in the dust. Don Tomás and I would forge ahead, then wait while the others caught up. This success for me became a little less impressive when I thought about it a little more: Araceli has a small child and JM is over 60. Plus, it turns out that JM was happily collecting orchids. And our guide, who I was so happy to be keeping up with as he used his machete to hack a path through the jungle, is well into his 70's and awaiting knee surgery. (But I am still cool!!!) Don Tomás kept reassuring us that we were very close, only 20 minutes, from the top. A couple of hours later when we stopped for lunch, the jungle was still tick around us and streams running down past us were a pretty good indication that the summit was still a ways away.

I finished my lunch (a tin of shredded turkey and vegetables, with a large roll) and looked around. The fog was closing in again, and the next part of the "path" looked nearly impassable. Despairing, I asked JM how on earth a particular naturalist had managed to climb the mountain in the 1700's during an eruption.

JM looked back at me a little confused and said, " Well, he went up the mule path on the other side of the volcano. It's a wide, smooth path that used to be trafficked a lot before they built the roads out here."

Incredulous, I gasped, " Then what are we doing over here???"

Looking even more confused, he answered, "I've already been up the other side before. I wanted to see what it looked like from this side."

That was as high as we got up the volcano. Despite Don Tomás' urgings that we were only another 20 minutes from the top, we decided that we had to start back down if we were going to reach the ranch again by nightfall. On the hike back to the horses, we discovered that the misting rain combined with our previous passage to reduce the trail to a steep mudslick. Where we had scrambled up slopes on the way up, we now were left clinging to vines and wild sugar cane to control our slide downhill. For comparison, imagine the scene from Avatar, where the characters use the huge leaves to bounce their way down from the treetops... now cover everything with mud and slime, and make it far less graceful. By the time we reached the horses, our legs were quivering from the effort of trying to control the slide down the muddy slopes.

We climbed back up on the horses and rode back ploddingly to the ranch. For the final hour, all I could think about was how badly I ached from being on the horse. My back and shoulders ached from leaning forward for the reins, and my armpits were clearly bruised from trying to lean through my backpack straps. My butt was sore. More than anything, though, my knees felt like they were on fire. They hurt so badly that I was unable to tap Baya with my heels to convince her to keep moving when she decided to gaze at flowers. I'm normally a bit knock-kneed, but I swear I was bow-legged by the time I got off of Baya back at the ranch.

The next morning, we started the drive back to Mexico City. For the next 8 hours or so, I had time to reflect on the week in the field while my aching body was bounced off of the door, Barry Manilow crooned, and I turned green. I had gotten food poisoning and was black from bruises, but I didn't have a single data point to show for the entire week in the field. When we finally arrived back at my apartment, all I wanted to do was collapse into Keating's arms and take a week-long nap.

Keating, my wonderful husband, had been busy while I was away. He happily told me how he'd worked things out with our friend Monica to visit the butterfly sanctuary the next day. I had known about the plans when I left, so I was glad to know that everything had been finalized. Except that we would be getting up at 5 am. And we would be going horseback riding.

To be continued....