June 9 HOT
Students these days love to refer to young girls as “hot.” Hot flashes, Arizona sun, sweating in bed. It is a nefarious practice of mine during the summer if I am not traveling to “crash” the pools at local resorts. My friends and I, beach bags in hand, enjoy this undercover underdressed pastime. My favorite escape, like so many other Tucsonans, is Rocky Point. Some of the hottest places I’ve been: New Orleans gives a new name to “muggy,” Rio is a fly-ridden maw of hell, and Lipari, Sicily with its sizzling volcanic sand lent new epithets to HOT. On an epic South American adventure, my boyfriend and I, along with our close friend John, explored 10 countries.

Lima, Peru was hot in an unparalleled fashion. A few days before we were to leave the Peruvian capital in the summer of 1991, the leader of the notorious Shining Path, Roberto Guzman, had been captured in a violent raid on his Amazon stronghold. The Shining Path was a communist rebel group whose M.O. was to place homemade bombs in government buildings and tally up an impressive list of political assassinations and kidnappings. With Guzman in custody, the countryside descended into turmoil. The train to Macchu Picchu was discontinued for safety reasons, so we did not linger long in Lima as. The photos I took there: cordons of masked military men with raised AK47s, women in bright skirts, children selling candy on the steps of elaborate Iglesias. We booked a flight into La Paz, Bolivia and enjoyed Lima’s nervous ambience for only a couple of days. The morning of our departing flight, we were all a bit yellow-faced from imbibing in too many pisco sours, the beverage of choice in Peru which we had felt obligated to sample. We walked onto the tarmac carrying our backpacks and stared dubiously at the plane, a dilapidated-looking DC10 with peeling paint. We climbed the rickety portable stairs and seated ourselves, as there had been no seat assignments in the terminal. As I sat down, my armrest fell off in a cloud of dust. A few campesinos in bright clothing were scattered throughout the plane. One elderly woman had a box with holes on her lap that held a chicken. The threadbare curtain between the cockpit and “business class” waved gently in the hot breeze. As the pilots engaged and revved the engines, a high-pitched whine that sounded like failing brakes shocked us. John shuffled a deck of cards nervously. David had already curled up across three seats, but even he perked up in alarm. The plane taxied reluctantly down the runway, gaining speed . Out the dusty window I observed a cadaverous graveyard of cannibalized Russian planes – rusty fuselages gaping in the sun, tangled engines lying cockeyed next to the runway like so many blown tires along a highway. We gained speed. I could see the craggy peaks of the Andes before us like sentinels. The plane lurched from the ground with another bang, and we were airborn. The only sound was the shuffling of the cards. We all stared out the window at the plane lunged and strained to gain altitude. I could now make out deep canyons and individual trees. In the cockpit, lights flashed in warning and the pilots’ actions became frantic. Straining to look up through my tiny window, I could no longer see the top of the Andes, only a sheer rock face. The plane banked so steeply that newspapers wafted in odd directions in among the seats. The G-force of the turn took my breath away. John’s eyes were closed. David’s head was between his knees. With no armrest to grip, I held onto his arm and watched as the rock face was replaced by a dizzy sky. The plane had turned around completely and we were approaching the runway. The landing gear dropped with a cacophonous squeal and we were again in Lima. The pilots made no announcement. The campesinos scattered throughout the plane did not react as if this were unusual. John’s face was ghastly. Before ten minutes had passed, we took another run at it. We successfully crossed the Andes this time and landed a couple of hours later in La Paz, which boasted the distinction of being the highest-altitude capital city in the world at 13,000 feet.
Ah, flying stories. We all have them. The Lima flight paled in comparison to the incident from Culebra to Vieques, both islands off the coast of Puerto Rico. My companion in Puerto Rico was my best friend Tracey, an air traffic controller who I have known since childhood. We had been diving in Culebra and decided to catch a 15-minute morning hop to Vieques, a small island known for clear water, a luminescent lagoon, and great diving despite persistent rumors of undetonated bombs left over from naval operations. The sky was clear when we walked into the tiny airport in Culebra. Our plane had only four seats behind the miniscule cockpit, blue and comfortable. We settled in with our day packs and the propellers sputtered into action. As often happens during the monsoon season, a mass of dark clouds had by this time jumbled on the horizon, then directly overhead. The staccato radio voice warned of a dangerous storm. The pilot was a large man with incredibly thick and hairy forearms. The co-pilot looked to be a teenager, his light blue shirt gaping at the neck. As the Cessna lifted off over a tangle of frangipani trees, the radio static became more emphatic. The treetops heavy with mangos were the last vision before we entered a bank of electric clouds with a thud. The tiny plane took an insulting shock and visibility was now zero. I could see sheets of water flowing horizontally along the plane body and blinding, quick bolts of lightning that illuminated deeper, twisted cloud banks. White and dark mist flew by my window like a strobe light. It was always disconcerting to watch Tracey, an aviation expert who knew more than anyone the dangers of such a small plane in this weather, put her head between her knees. The plane dropped and rose like a butterfly in a windstorm. The co-pilot spoke rapidly into his headphone, trying to navigate. The fifteen-minute flight had already turned into a half hour and I realized that the pilots had no idea where we were. The pilots spoke sharply at one another, mostly directions “Izquierda,” “derecha,” and numbers, and “bajo.” We were trying to fly under the storm for some reason. The altimeter vacillated wildly. I could see the back of Tracey’s neck. Finally the co-pilot shouted “A la izquierda! A la izquierda!” and we banked to the left, the right wing almost completely vertical. Nothing but blackness and flashes of light through the front window. As quickly as it had started, we popped out beneath the storm clouds not 40 feet over a clear, calm runway. Ah, hot.