Rebeccalou: This Writer’s Life

Thanks to the Great Recession, my days are looking eerily like my mother’s did when I was a kid. While 14-year-old Tess spent her Saturday at a friend’s house watching back-to-back episodes of Gossip Girl, I cleaned her room in a fashion that would have made my mother proud. The vacuum cleaner and I unearthed a few hundred bobby pins, a couple of CD covers, two discarded paperbacks from last year’s reading list, and the odd sock. I cleared the closet floor of flip flops, character shoes, jazz shoes, ballet slippers, our daughter’s first pair of sexy heels, Birkenstocks, assorted flats, hiking boots, cowboy boots, and Uggs, and wrote “shoe bags” on a shopping list for The Container Store. I sorted clothes under the categories of keep, giveaway, and toss. I filled two trash bags with things you don’t even want to know about and scrubbed the stains on the carpet like a woman gone mad. The day was a labor of love and an exercise in spiritual practice: Stay present and pass no judgment.

Let’s talk laundry. We are a family of active adults and teenagers who begin the day in clean clothes, who practice yoga, take walks, ride bikes, play sports and, I’m happy to report (in reference to the adolescent male in the house), shower daily—all good things in my book. My mother used to say I changed clothes more often than most people change their minds, so maybe this is payback. When the kids and Tony were newcomers in our home, I got the occasional kick out of counting the number of loads I did on any given day. The intrigue wore thin a few thousand towels ago. Now, if I don’t hear the washer or dryer running, I figure something has gone haywire, like maybe the refrigerator has stopped working and the food is slowly rotting—that is if there’s anything left from the grocery run I did three days ago.

Which brings me to food. My family loves regular meals. I love regular meals. It’s just that supplying them on a daily basis gets old and tiresome and tedious. First there’s figuring out what to eat, then shopping, hauling bags, unloading bags, cooking, and cleaning up. I’m lucky in one regard: this group will eat whatever I set before them. When I opted for a scooter date with Tony instead of another trip to the grocery store last Sunday afternoon, the kids were thrilled with what I billed as a novelty…grilled cheese and roasted vegetables.

So what does all this domestic activity have to do with the Great Recession and my mother? In my family of origin—another family of five—I was one of the lucky benefactors of Mom’s cooking, cleaning and care taking. I took for granted the dinners served promptly at six, the home-baked cakes, cookies and banana bread, the washed and pressed clothes that magically appeared in my closet, and an orderly, lemon-scented, impeccably clean home. I also knew I didn’t want her life. No offense Mom, but mine was the generation of females who would have it all, starting with career. I had earned three college degrees by the time I turned 26, and never looked back. Okay, rarely looked back…until my mid-thirties when the baby urge hit in full force and the stresses of corporate life started to feel somehow not worth it. In the course of trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I reinvented my professional self a half dozen times. And in the attempt to hold things together as a working mom, I sampled pretty much every support system that exists for employed women in modern America, from live-in nannies and carry-out dinners to standing Friday-night babysitters, summer camps and cleaning ladies. Until now.

In prolonged economic downturns like the one we’re in, the demand for copy writing dwindles to a slow drip. So I’m picking up the slack around the house. I’ve turned the home front into a bustling scene of getting to what I’ve put off, delegated to the spouse, assigned to the children, or ignored. This was not an intentional move. I have long held that men and women need to share domestic responsibilities, knowing that “sharing” often entails convincing the man to do something more than put his dirty underwear in the laundry basket. I scored big with Tony. A working single dad for seven years before we got together, he knows what it takes to keep the ship afloat. And during his 25 years of cutting and coloring the heads of females, he’s heard his share of lazy-husband and disengaged-father stories. So he gets it. Does he parent with the same intensity that I do, or obsessively wipe the kitchen counters until they gleam like stars in the night sky?

No.

But he parents effectively and loads the dishwasher without being asked. What really counts is that, with me working less, he has stepped it up and is working more. The kids and I see less of him, but the bills are paid.

Which makes him about perfect, although he directed a comment my way the other day that still has me questioning just who he thinks I am, and I quote, “You’re the most sensible person I know.” What happened to adventurous, or courageous? What about witty, clever and irresistible? Even smart would do, but SENSIBLE? My mother used the word to describe footwear. From choice of shoes, she inferred character—and meant it as a compliment. For the first thirty-seven years of my life, i.e. before Ali came along, I didn’t want anything to do with the word or the concept. Any psychologist worth her salt would have a heyday upon learning that during my years at Conde Nast, the woman who was raised under a canopy of “sensible” spent thousands of dollars on designer shoes, along with clothes, handbags and Donna Karan shimmering sheers in matching shades. A friend in Denver still teases me about the day I walked into the ad agency dressed in olive green from head to suede toe…but I digress. Fast forward twenty years and the man I sleep with has called me sensible. Apparently he’s forgotten I ride a scooter in city traffic and climb mountains in South America.

Does professional woman turned cook, cleaning lady and laundress make good sense? In this economy, probably. Thank god for the blog, and for you who read it. The writing makes me feel like I still have a real job, even though the pay is lousy. Would I rather be creating headlines than folding laundry? Most days, yes, although it’s harder to believe our planet is on the verge of imploding with warm cotton in my hands. And knowing my husband stands on his feet with his arms in the air for 12 hours, even I’m hard-pressed to insist it’s his turn to cook when he walks in the door. We have a system that happened all by itself: I cook, he loads the dishwasher, and I come around later to wipe the counters one last time.

By the way, I learned there’s a chance I’ll be working on a website for a client I haven’t heard from in a year. Maybe this Great Recession is finally receding. I better clean another closet while I still have the time, but first I’ll whip up a meat loaf.

He wears thick-soled, heavy-duty hiking boots and a yellow University of Pittsburgh baseball cap. A miniature gnome dangles from the center pocket of his backpack. Most days he’s in long sleeves and shorts, a Makalu trekking pole in each hand.

“Give me a color from the Crayola deck of 64,” he says. “The big box.”

We’re sitting outdoors in the Sacred Valley of Peru, a large umbrella overhead to shade the noonday sun. Someone comments on the hedge of fuchsia bougainvillea. “If the color’s not in that box, I don’t know it.”

This is the heart of Inca land, where stone, stucco and mud-brick houses line narrow cobblestone streets. Small, meticulously tilled fields of potato, beans and cabbage grow alongside the road. We stop at the Inca ruins in the village of Ollantaytambo, and walk through a crowded market lined with Quechua tribal hats and baby alpaca shawls, bags and scarves. The guide leads us to an ancient stone structure designed to transport water. She talks with pride about the ingenious Inca irrigation systems. To demonstrate, she passes her hand across the trough, causing the flowing water to stop. She swipes the channel a second time, and the water begins to run. The guide turns to Dan, takes his hand, tells him about the barrier that’s strung knee-high across the grass, and ushers him to the trough. She places his hand in the cool water then slides his fingers across the stone at the mouth of the channel.

“Whoa, no water. That’s cool.” The guide swipes his hand a second time. He feels the water flow.

“Very cool.”

A tumor cost Dan the sight in one eye when he was three. The cancer relapsed and, at the age of seven, he lost his other eye. The man has climbed the 19,340-foot Mount Kilimanjaro—the highest peak on the African continent—and trekked to Everest base camp in Nepal. He has jumped out of an airplane more than 300 times. To prove he is not without fear, he tells the story of once trekking along a narrow ridge when someone in his group starts talking about the drop-offs.

“Sometimes not being able to see where you are is a good thing,” Dan explains from the back of the van. We’re driving through the high plateau on our way back to Cusco. “You don’t realize the danger you’re in. Once I heard the guy describe just how narrow the ridge was, and how steep the drop-offs were, I was scared shitless.” There are sighs and nods from the group, but no one has a story to top his. We’ve all been on ridges at elevation and we’ve all been scared. We can’t imagine being there blind.

The following morning, twelve of us step out of the van outside the village of Mollepata and begin the six-day, roughly 35-mile trek to Machu Picchu. We are in the Andes on the Salkantay Trail, a route foraged centuries ago by villagers and their horses and mules. The trail opened to the public in September 2008.

Dan’s wife, Teresa, is expecting the couple’s first child, a daughter, in November. She has her physician’s clearance to 12,000 feet, which means she’ll hike with us the first day and again at the end of the trek. On Day 1, a jingling wristband of sleigh bells hangs from Teresa’s backpack. Dan follows the sound and listens for her verbal cues. He responds with the agility of a trained athlete.

“Rock left. Switchback right. Steep down.”

Like hearing lyrics from a song none of us knows, we watch the synchronicity of a well-rehearsed high-mountain dance. For most of us, the experience of hiking with Dan, or anyone like him, is a first. I close both eyes, take a step, then another, trying to imagine his world. The eyelids fly open before I’ve counted to five, so strong is the urge to see where I am going, so entrenched the desire for control.

After dinner we throw on another layer of fleece and step outside into a cool night. “You can only see this when there’s no moon,” explains Jose. “This is our one chance all week.” We look to the sky and there, to the left of the Southern Cross, wedged between Scorpion and the Milky Way, is the sleeping llama, another icon in the lore of the Incas. The animal is tucked into the blackness of a sky splattered in stars, his head folded into a curled front leg.

“Anyone want to borrow these?” Phoebe holds up her binoculars.

“I’d love to have a look,” says Dan, his mischievous grin nearly as bright as the sky overhead. The group erupts in laughter.

For three days we climb steadily toward the namesake of the trail—the Salkantay—the mountain most revered by the Incas, the second highest in Peru. With Teresa waiting for us in a lodge down trail, we take turns guiding Dan, carrying the bells, giving the cues. Where we go, he goes—across crude, narrow bridges, through rocky switchbacks, down muddy slopes. To watch him negotiate loose rock, up AND down, is to abandon all excuses…for sore ankles and throbbing knees, for tired lungs and blisters on the feet. Instead of excuses we feel gratitude, and lots of it.

It turns out this trip was about getting my self back—the wise, lighter self who lives below the angst of ego and responsibility, the self who knew I needed to forget about the rotten economy, trust that my family would manage without me, and go. What I didn’t know about before I left was the man who would open my heart another notch, who would expand my mind and give me that rare gift of humility and self-empowerment. If he can do this blind, well, here we go.

We cross the pass at 15,237 feet on Day 3, celebrating with hugs and photos, piling rocks atop the cairns already there, with blessings for our children and loved ones. With his finger in the air, our guide traces the routes of five international expeditions that have attempted summits of Salkantay, the successful and the tragic. He checks the clouds overhead, promises lunch in an hour, and turns to lead the descent.

The mountain that has held our eye for three days is suddenly to our backs. Loose rock is harder to handle going down, balance trickier as the body redistributes its weight through the pelvis and torso. The lungs find freedom but the joints are stressed and cranky. To a blind man, the descent is a series of steps—thousands of them—into nothingness. Add mud, or wet, slippery rock from snowmelt, and the experience must be terrifying. Dan’s technique is to bend both legs at the knees, his poles out in front like the forelegs of a horse, his trunk upright. The jaw, cheekbones and forehead lock in acute awareness of every step. There is no letting up for the Crouching Tiger, not once. To lose concentration could mean disaster of the worst possible kind.

Three more days of down, and up, and down again, and we walk at sunset into the town of Aguas Calientes. Overhead, in misty cloud-cover, looms the magical Lost City of the Incas, Machu Picchu.

“Was the trip at all spiritual?” asks a friend a month after I return home. We’re sitting outside at a Starbucks on a late August afternoon. No longer under a summer sky, the sun has shifted to cast bright amber light through a hanging basket of petunias. I wonder if the color fuchsia was in his box of 64.

“There was a lot about that trip I found spiritual,” I say, and tell her first about Dan.