Thirty Pounds and a Passport * Part III

Time Out in St. Louis

Orchard in the Andes

May 9 Aerolinea Ecuadoriana #233 Cuenca to Quito, Ecuador

At 4:30 a.m. we’re up again. This time it is not the birds that are flying; it’s us. A short, early morning flight takes us from the historic colonial city of Cuenca to the mostly modern metropolis of Quito, the nation’s capital. Here we get a day room in the Hotel Quito, which gives us the opportunity to clean up, store our luggage and go out for the day to enjoy the city and do a little shopping. Heretofore, we were on the run in small villages and jungle camps, where there is little to buy, but today we fly back to the States and there are a few empty nooks in our bag that we could fill with something.

Shirley buys an alpaca sweater in the most beautiful blue colors. It will see limited use in Arizona because alpaca is incredibly warm but who can resist those colors? A silver necklace also has Shirley’s name on it; it has to come too. For me it’s CDs of Andean folk music. I love to hear the haunting flutes and panpipes. With the last nooks in our duffles filled with treasures we relax over dinner at the hotel, one of the few meals in weeks that is not pollo y papas fritas.

After a nice hot shower, (oh the bliss!) we head out to the airport for an overnight flight back to the States. Flying out a little after 11:00 p.m. we enjoy the Andes one last time in the moonlight.

May 9-10 Continental Airlines #750 Quito to Houston, Texas via Guayaquil, Ecuador
May 10 Continental Airlines #1006 Houston to St. Louis, Missouri

With an intermediate stop in Guayaquil and a change of planes and time zones in Houston, we arrive in St. Louis eleven hours later at 9:00 in the morning. It is a workday for most people so we tiredly slip into town without a welcoming committee. With a key we let ourselves into the house. Thanks Harry and Marie! First order of business is a nap and then it’s time to begin preparing for our next trip. We have only four days before we fly out again!

Everything comes out of the duffle bags and EVERYTHING has to be cleaned. The washing machine works overtime while I clean boots and binoculars and all the equipment from the trip. Even the duffle bags and daypacks must be cleaned. Everything we own is beginning to look like the rain forest and the mud forest. South American bird books are wiped clean of mud and put away. African and Asian books will be needed on the next part of our trip.

Just before Harry and Marie come home from work, we take a long hot shower, our second in two days. Oh the joy! And we put on city clothes—bright colors and something besides hiking boots. In the jungle we wore nothing but soft greens and dull browns—the same five shirts over and over. We are going out to dinner with Shirley’s family and we both want the same thing to eat—a fresh salad. In a land of poor sanitation and high rates of disease everything we ate had to be cooked—preferably fried in lots of grease to kill germs. We have not had a salad or anything fresh for five weeks.

Dinner with Shirley’s family is a treat—good food and good company. Of course there are lots of questions, “Where did you go? What did you do?” Later comes the other questions, “You did what? Why? What were you thinking?”

Shirley laughs and answers as best she can. She remembers that she had to answer those questions to herself fifteen years before.

In the final days of 1984 Ms. Shirley and Ranger Rick met in St. Louis. The ranger was director of the National Park Service museum under the Gateway Arch and headed the park’s education programs. Ms. Shirley was an accountant in charge of computer network services for a commodities corporation. Both had been married before and had been single for some years. Both had very full lives.

The ranger was doing a rehab of a 1915 two-story house in the city. He gutted it down to the bare 2x4s and started over with new wiring and plumbing and built the walls back up again. By this time, he had finished half of the upstairs into a master bedroom suite and was living there while working on the rest of the house. A wood-burning fireplace provided heat because he had not yet installed the furnace. It was the sort of living arrangement only a bachelor could love and the ranger did love it. The ranger always needed a project and this one was a doozy.

Ms. Shirley worked 5½ days a week in the highly stressful commodities industry. She played racquetball and softball and was active in numerous activities with friends to unwind from the fifty-hour workweeks in a competitive environment. Just three years before she had graduated with honors from a Jesuit university in St. Louis in five years—all the while still working fifty hours a week.

Both the ranger and the accountant had strong personalities and were not necessarily ready for another permanent relationship. But friendship yes, there was always room for friends. Opposites attract and there were plenty of opposites here. Shirley was a small town girl from rural southern Missouri who moved to St. Louis and became a city girl. Ranger Rick was a city boy with a wilderness-yearning streak who left the city for remote parks in the West. A great career opportunity brought him to the city of St. Louis but he had no doubt that he would be back out in the mountains soon.

Friendship grew as these two opposites found mutual ground in classical concerts and neighborhood regional theater. Picnics in nearby state parks provided a release from city life. Soon, as sometimes happens in life, this couple found that the strengths in each other over-shadowed a lot of differences between them and love grew. But a permanent relationship? That was yet to be seen. There were still many things to be worked out and found out. Shirley’s first gift to the ranger was home cooking and homemade cookies. Did this wilderness boy know how to eat with a knife and fork? His first gift to her was a map of the world. Did she know there were places out there beyond Missouri? Early tests were passed and trust grew. Could they spend a whole weekend together?

Monday: “Would you like to go away for a four-day weekend? I found some good airfares to Cancun. The beach there is great. Think about it.”

Wednesday: “I thought about it. Yeah, four days would be nice. It would be great to get out of wintry St. Louis for a few days.”

Friday: “You know, if we had a few more than four days, we could go across the border into Belize and visit someone I met before who is a Belize native and a Presbyterian minister. Think about it.”

Monday: “Maybe a few more days away from work would be doable. Just what exactly are you thinking of?”

Tuesday: “The thought occurred to me over the weekend that if we got to Belize, it’s a small country and it wouldn’t be much farther to go into Guatemala. We could go to Tikal to see the Mayan pyramids. That would take only a few more days. It’s a great place! Think about it.”

So a four-day trip to the Mexican beach resort of Cancun turned into an eleven-day journey, not only to Mexico but also to Belize and eastern Guatemala. “Did I remember to tell you that for going into the jungle of Guatemala, you really should have up-to-date shots for polio, hepatitis and tetanus?”

As Shirley told her mother later, “I should have learned my lesson then. It was the first time I ever had to get shots just to go on a date with a guy. You’d think that I would have figured it out right there.”

But it all worked out. Maybe it was the warm evenings atop the steps of ancient pyramids in Tikal where they watched parrots fly by on their way to roost. Maybe it was the sight of spider monkeys swinging freely through the trees or the hundreds of butterflies that flew up to greet her as she walked. Or maybe it was the many jungle trails where the ranger proved that he really didn’t get lost in the woods. Perhaps it was the exotic market in Merida where, among the diminutive Mayan people, 5’4” Shirley found she was the tallest person there except for the ranger. Or maybe it was one of those sunset walks on the beach. Something clicked for Shirley and the ranger wasn’t such a stranger after all.

This time the ranger was the practical one. When he found out that his city girl could sleep in a thatched-roof hut with spiders in the thatch, he knew he had found a soul mate.

“Will you marry me?” he whispered on a Guatemala night.

“Let me think about that,” the truly practical one said.

“Yes, think about it.”

By August of 1985 there were wedding plans to be made. “How about early next year?” Ms. Vincent asked. “There are arrangements to be worked out. One doesn’t want to rush into these things.”

“I don’t know. This November seems awfully nice to me. Think about it.”

So, there was a wedding that November on the warm Caribbean island of Antigua …… but that’s a story that has already been told.
There are three days left before we leave and things yet to be done. Our time out in St. Louis is not a time for loafing. It is more like half time at a sporting event where the team uses the fifteen minutes in the locker room to make equipment changes and plan strategies for the next period of play. The ranger needs a haircut and Shirley wants one too. There are prescriptions to be refilled and flights to reconfirm. We will be gone 2½ months this time. There is shopping to do to replenish supplies and I need to go to the bank.

“Yes, I need to withdraw $300 and it all needs to be in ones and fives. By the way, they all need to be nearly new bills, no rips or tears, no corners missing, no smudges or faded bills. Where we’re going the locals won’t take them unless the bills look new. They are too worried about counterfeits.”

Finding new fives is not a problem but the bank clerk goes through a number of stacks of ones to find enough suitable. She finally has to get more stacks from the vault. On past trips, even tips to waiters were returned to me if the American bills were worn. They were of no use to the locals because the banks wouldn’t take them.

Finally it is time to pack. We must pack even more carefully than last time and not just because we are going to be gone longer. The less a traveler takes, the more carefully he has to pack. Last time we traveled light for our own benefit. One duffle bag and one daypack per person make it easier to get around and having fewer bags makes it simple to keep track of the luggage. We can carry everything ourselves and need not worry about a porter or other help.

This time we have to pack even lighter. In Africa we will travel on a number of small single-engine planes and there is a weight limit of twenty-five pounds of luggage per person. The bags will be weighed and if found to be overweight, there will a penalty charge equal to the cost of another ticket. The weight limit is supposed to cover camera, binoculars and everything. However, I figure that they probably won’t weigh my daypack, so I can put a few things in there.

So our packing goal today is no more than twenty-five pounds in the duffle bag and five more in the daypack. For 2½ months we will take no more than thirty pounds and our travel documents. Being a male realist, I know that Shirley will pack twenty-five pounds in her duffle and put a few pounds in mine. So I pack extra light.

Essentials come first. Shirley packs a camera and a laptop computer. My first priorities are binoculars, bird books and a fistful of airline tickets. Books are heavy and I need three for the different spots on this trip. Next in priority are prescription drugs and certain toiletries that we will not be able to replenish later. Then come boot socks and underwear that are hard to buy overseas. Lastly come shirts and pants, only a few of those. We will just wash frequently and we can buy new ones if these wear out.

We are on and off the scales a dozen times before we get the correct combination of essential things and permitted weight. Finally we’ve got it right: thirty pounds and a passport.

On the last day in St. Louis there is time for a little birding to pick up some springtime birds in Missouri. Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Black-capped Chickadee, Magnolia Warbler and a few others get added to the list.

The ranger counts up the year’s total and writes it down on the last night to see the progress towards the millennial goal. At 870 it looks like the ranger is over 40% done but the easy part is now behind him. No other place on the itinerary can produce nearly as many birds as Ecuador with its species-rich Amazon jungle. There is still a long way to go to reach the magic 2,000.

Tally for 2000

Eastern & Central United States 136
Cayman Islands 49
Ecuador 669
Missouri 16

Total 870