Stupid Gringa

Mountains are often used to evolke the majesty of God, the splendor of the earth, and simultaneously exalt and dwarf the spirit of we mere human beings. In "man vs. mountain," the mountain has put me on my rear end every time...except once, when I was even less lucky.

It was ths spring of 1992, and I was adventuring in the Copper Canyon of Mexico's Chihuahua province with a group of schoolmates. I spent the first three days wondering when high altitude sickness (the bane of childhood ski vacations) would rear its ugly head and whatever I had managed to eat that day, but luckily, bouts of wooziness were the worst of it. We were the guests of a little mountain village. One afternoon the kids led me to understand that they were "taking us for a walk." Okay...not my first choice on how to spend a hot spring afternoon, but what the heck. I had a perfectly good pair of hiking boots back in my pack, but most of the kids were barefoot, and the group was disappearing down the road rather quickly, so I followed in my worn out Keds.

It turned out to be not so much a walk as a three-hour hike. I did well most of the way up, but I was definately among the last to make it to the summit... at which point, everyone else had already eaten the picnic lunches, and before I'd done more than taken one glance into the dizzying green valley below, it was time to go back down! Light-headed, tired, and anything but sure-footed, I again trailed the group all the way down. One Mexican man stayed behind to keep an eye on me, but we couldn't communicate and I could tell he really wished this winded gringa would hurry up.

I made a lot better time once my legs refused to hold my body up any longer. Each step became more like sequentially falling from one foot to the other. My rear-guard yelled something in Spanish, but I couldn't understand a word and it was taking all my concentration just to remain upright as I skipped from one scraggy rock outcropping to the next. I was at my most light-headed exuberant when my flat-bottomed canvas shoes lost traction. Luckily, a lifetime of skiing reflexes took over, as I steered my flat-footed free-fall on tiny shards of gravel. For seven whole seconds, I had the time of my life, and on count eight I realized that I was probably looking at a broken ankle, head injury, or... (well, it was a long way down over the side of that "trail"...).

Once I made it to the base, my friends rather non-chalantly demanded to know where I'd been (I had some choice thoughts for the people who'd left me behind, and then not saved any food; where did they think I'd been?). Not content to let me nurse my wounded pride in peace, my Mexican watchman explained what had happened to everybody. A friend translated what he'd been yelling at me just before I lost control:

"Don't run, you idiot, you're going to slip and fall!"