• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

FOUR

How I Met Your Madre

New York City

Future scholars of the Adams family are unlikely to unearth much evidence of ambition or adventurous spirit. Any early interest in the outdoors that I might have developed was F squelched in the second grade when I was banned from the Cub Scouts due to a late birthday. Seventeen years later, I was splitting my time unenthusiastically between two vocations unlikely to result in a sunburn—tending bar in the Chicago Loop and halfheartedly pursuing a PhD in English literature uptown. One night, my roommate’s notoriously pushy girlfriend came into the bar, ordered me to buy her a drink and announced that she’d met an editor from Outside magazine that morning and had all but badgered him into offering me an internship, sight unseen. I reported for work a few months later and felt as if I’d landed in a foreign country. I’d had absolutely no idea that so many people were so interested in things like mountain climbing, hiking, and camping.

After six months of apprenticeship, I left to seek my fortune in New York City, a place where I knew no one. I rented a room out of the Village Voice classifieds, in the home of an eccentric lawyer who owned a converted firehouse in Brooklyn. Most mornings I awakened to find her morbidly obese house cat sitting on my face. The odd living arrangements came with one excellent fringe benefit: proximity to the lawyer’s beautiful niece. Aurita wore cowboy boots and smelled like jasmine and wanted to be a veterinarian. She happened to be Peruvian. She also happened to have a boyfriend. But she was willing to sit for hours and listen to a lonely young would-be writer pour out his guts as he was—unbeknownst to either of them—falling in love. When I moved on to a cat-free apartment, we traded a couple of answering-machine messages and fell out of touch.

My best friend from high school had moved to Bolivia to work on nature documentaries and invited me down to visit. Unless you count a brief pass through the Canadian side of Niagara Falls on the Maid of the Mist, I had never been outside of the continental United States. Within hours of landing in La Paz, we were standing in the aisle of a decommissioned school bus with a seating capacity of thirty-two (the little plaque, in English, was still bolted above the driver’s head), loaded with at least fifty people and an unknowable number of animals, careening through the Andes down a steep, twisting road that I later learned is a perennial contender for the title of World’s Most Dangerous Highway.

For a jet-lagged boy raised in the pancake-flat Midwest, the experience of stepping off that bus and staring up two miles at a twenty-one-thousand-foot peak was akin to seeing the face of God. Intrigued by tales that Aurita had told me of even greater wonders along the Inca Trail, my friend and I tried to enter Peru via the Lake Titicaca ferry but were rebuffed by a menacing teenage soldier carrying an AK-47 and wearing a Barbie backpack. I looked across the water toward Peru and vowed to return one day. Then an old man with a cane picked my pocket.

E. B. White once wrote that a person should only come to New York if he’s prepared to be lucky, and as they would for Hiram Bingham in Peru in 1911, the stars aligned for me in my first couple of years in the Big Apple. I found a job with medical benefits and a light-filled apartment two blocks from Central Park. Right before my second Christmas in the city, out of the eight million people I might have collided with on the sidewalk, I bumped into Aurita, who was now single. We went for coffee and never really separated. By the following Christmas, she was my wife.

It has been said that anyone who takes a Latin American spouse is essentially marrying the entire extended familia. In my case this brought me into the orbit of Nati Huamani. Nati had started out as Aurita’s nanny and now managed her parents’ sprawling beehive of a home in Washington, D.C., as a sort of full-time personal assistant-cook-majordomo.