ghosts

4 November

With thanks to Maruja Tarre, who asked about ghosts.

There is something short of a memory, but more than sheer imagination. I know it happened. It’s a short film where I see myself walking the high sabanas of the Venezuelan Amazon. I am part of a line of about twenty persons, extended along a couple of kilometres. My backpack has thirty-some kilos of climbing gear and food, a hammock and a machete, a sleeping bag and a little clothing. We are all slowly approaching a tepui. In few days we will be slashing our path across unexplored rain forest, today is still open sabana. When and if we reach the wall, some of us will climb the six hundred meters of vertical rock, becoming the first humans to be in the flat top of the Ptaritepui. I know that we are making history, but my backpack hurts. I have tried to cushion the belt that brings its weight to my hips, but my skin is sore and it hurts. I try to lift my backpack with my hands, but I can’t do that for more than a few minutes. There is only the endless sabana and what it looks like endless pain. I am not the only one. Others groan by different reasons. There is a twisted ankle, there are huge blisters in new boots, there are very wrong backpacks and heavy and eventually useless equipment. There is also lack of training and sheer unawareness of the challenge we have walked into. From the start point to the wall there are only 40 kilometres, but we will eventually expend more than two weeks to cover them, and did run out of food long before the climbers came down.

Yet nothing of that matters.

Even in the middle of the pain, nobody even considers to turn back. This is our one chance. I am twenty few years old and the future doesn’t mean much to me… other than being a place where I will not be able to take some weeks to go and climb a lonely mountain in the middle of the Amazon. We all have seen the faces of our teachers and our parents and their friends and their colleagues, frozen in their routines and their work, in their mortgages and salaries and obligations. We know that we are heading there, without doubt. So we all have grabbed this chance, this one and only chance! to be somebody else, to do something relevant before fading away in the masses of working drones that we, undoubtedly, will become. So I walk on, pain be damned.   

33 years later, two ghosts stare from the window of a hut in the Belgium Ardennes.

In the meantime, I moved around. I earned a title, I left Venezuela and went to Switzerland to study and to climb, and I climbed little and studied less. My wife left me, yet I fall in love again and came into The Netherlands, this unbelievable flat piece of land. I learned a language or two, and raised a son, and tried to work and do politics, with some -but not much- success. I love and I am loved, though. And my beloved Chantal kept the flame, and we keep dreaming of the day that we would walk again, and so we did. We are not twenty anymore, though, but my backpack is perfect and I have learned what not to carry. My shoes fit me like a glove, and the road is ample and friendly. In six days we have walked about 130 kilometres, trough pine forests, high bogs and farmland.  We have been transfixed by thousands of cranes going south, who remind me of Olga and I hurt by her death, and I hurt by the many that are not with us anymore. Yet we walked on, and on. We have not become drones nor we will.

In our last leg, we had lunch in the bench outside of a wooden hut, build and maintained by local hunters. I look at it and to its windows. From one of them, our reflexion stare at us. I am wearing a bandana, just as I have always done when walking. Chantal smiles, as she always does. We are close to each other.

The ghosts of our past does not haunt our present.