The Glacier

We were camping in the Andes, one of six families on a trip with a collective horde of sixteen children. Each car ride, the kids switched vehicles. They often swapped their sunhats as well, and I didn’t pay much attention to who scrambled into our car. Or I didn’t unless they got too loud, or did something that had to be stopped, as with the boy currently seated behind me, who kept pressing his toes into the back of my seat.

For several hours, we’d been making our way up a winding, increasingly narrow road along a cliff. There was no guardrail, and our car kept rocking, shiplike, with each turn. The mission of our six-family caravan was to swim in the hot springs we’d found on this mountain once before. I was certain we should have seen the hot springs by now, and my husband Gustavo, who was driving, thought so as well. He guessed we must be misremembering how far up we’d driven when we found the hot springs last time, which had been twelve years ago, before we’d all had children.

Watch out for those monsters, I told him, pointing through the windshield at a cluster of particularly large rocks that had tumbled onto the road.

I see them, Gustavo said with irritation, and I apologized. I knew he was eminently capable of spotting a giant rock in front of us without any anxious warnings from me. But what had happened to the hot springs? It didn’t seem possible that they could all be gone in just over a decade.

These chaotic trips in the Andes were an annual event. I knew the other couples through Gustavo, who’d been coordinating the campsite reservations for twenty years. The trips often felt like a marital test, although I never regretted them once they ended. On Monday, trapped again in the grinding machinery of city life, I knew I would enjoy recalling the children this morning in their bright pajamas making rock sculptures behind the tents after breakfast. Or the sight of them last night, perched on a log like a flock of birds while I reheated some pasta for them over the campfire.

I thought I had a good sense of the children by now, and yet when I turned around once more to ask the boy seated behind me to please keep his feet on the floor, I couldn’t recall his name. He definitely belonged to Andres and Nora. His dark hair was chopped into the generic, unchanging haircut Nora had given all her sons since they were toddlers. He was fairly indistinguishable, with his bony knees poking out of blue athletic shorts. Other parents on this trip likely thought the same of my own sons and couldn’t remember their names either, none of us being quite as invested in each other’s offspring as we liked to think we were.

In fact, if one of our vehicles hit a rock and fell off the cliff, there was a good chance no adults in the car would be able to name every child plummeting with them down the mountainside. I was about to remark on this bleak possibility when the minivan ahead of us came to a halt. Paulina emerged from the driver’s side, swinging her loose hair out of her face, and motioned to the van with a frown, flicking her fingers to show something had punctured their front tire.

Kids, please stay away from the edge if you get out, I warned the passengers currently in our care, though they were already slamming their doors, and Gustavo was half out of the car as well, rushing over to join the other fathers. All six of the men began vying to make themselves useful in replacing the tire. A few of the mothers gathered with the pack as well—Nora, being one of the bolder ones, insisted on taking a role in the installation of the spare.

Watching them through the windshield, I knew I had chosen yet again to be the resident...