I-Juca-Pirama

It was supposed to be a nature walk. That’s all I’ll say.

We met in front of the bondinho station at 8 a.m., the city still a bit shrouded in fog. We were the first group to go on a nature walk organized by the study abroad program – the guinea pigs, as it turned out. Everyone was rather sanguine about it, expecting some sort of a stroll and maybe a bit of scrambling over rocks. I very nearly wore jeans and Converse, but at the last minute sacrificed my sartorial dignity and laced up the massive blue sneakers I only wear when there is Exercise to Be Done.

Our two guides led us up the base of the trail – a walking path, really – until we got to a bend and climbed over the guardrail, landing on a tiny winding trail (trilha de verdade) overgrown with tropical fecundity, etc etc.

The first indication we had that this was not going to be a walk in the park (oh, I crack myself up) was when the foliage parted to reveal a nubbly expanse of sheer rock. “Climb using your toes and the balls of your feet, it’s easy,” said our guide, blithely standing at what seemed like an impossibly precarious angle. But he was right – we scrambled up like gawky mountain goats, ungainly but with sure feet. It was horribly unnerving to feel the vazio at my back, almost as if the Baía de Guanabara were breathing down my neck.

Heights are not my friend, I should hasten to say. The only recurring nightmare I had in my life consisted of my standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon (which I’ve never seen) and leaning inexorably forward until I fell.

So it was with some unease, I confess, that I noticed how badly my hands were shaking after the first series of ascents. “Sou brava, sou forte, sou filha do Norte,” I muttered to myself, and then, preferring to stop short of “Meu canto de morte, guerreiros, ouvi,” repeated the first couplet as a kind of mantra. Brava e forte, só isso.

After about an hour of heart-pumping climbs, my terror so evident at times that the guide doubled back to keep an eye on me (which didn’t really help anything), we came to the part that required a climbing harness. The thing in front of us was about as vertical as Mother Nature makes her rock faces, optimistically marked with a few little white blazes where it was suggested that one put one’s feet and hands. Keep in mind that I had set out expecting several hours of mild exertion, preferably on terra firme. This was beyond the pale. After watching one of the other students make the maiden voyage up, I decided to take the plunge (hopefully not literally) and strapped myself into the harness.

Everything was going all right for about 90 seconds. My massive blue sneakers are completely adequate for brief spates of running, bicycling, and other pursuits that don’t require excessive traction, but suddenly they began to betray me. With the guide above shouting instructions as to where to put my feet and hands (a majority of these commands was along the lines of “Put your right hand into that crack!”) and the Baía de Guanabara beckoning beneath me, I suddenly lost purchase. My hand slipped from the rock, the damned blue sneakers kissed air, and I tumbled downwards to an excruciating and ultimately watery death. There was a moving memorial service at PUC a few days later, the Daily Princetonian wrote up a three-paragraph article in which the residential college officials praised my work ethic and a few of my friends were misquoted, and eventually everyone went about their lives, even though a bit of a pall was cast over the study abroad program that year. É doce morrer no mar…

And then the harness snapped tight, and my fall was halted about 6 inches after it started. This would have been more comforting if I hadn’t still been dangling, face pressed to a cliff, in imminent danger of aforementioned watery death. As soon as my feet found purchase again, to the guides’ amusement, I took the opportunity to employ every Portuguese palavrão I’d learned over the past few weeks. Accurately? Possibly. Was the sentiment there? Definitely.

The rest of the climb was impossible. I’d have to dangle there overnight, I figured, and maybe be rescued by a helicopter or maybe just make a life for myself on the rock face, drinking dew and being fed nuts and berries by passing hikers or maybe by the micos, the little monkeys, if they’d share with me. Somehow, though, with a heavy dose of invective and some distinctly undignified scrabbling, I made it to the top. Given that I was already dead at the bottom of the bay, I found it hard to muster much enthusiasm. Canto de morte indeed. “Fez super bem,” said the guides, who must be accustomed to cheerful lying of this sort.

For the rest of the hike – more nubbly stretches of open rock, for the most part – I felt deeply unnerved. My feet had betrayed me once, so they could do it again. I glanced suspiciously at them, all blue and laced up and ready to slip off the mountain, and spent as much of the last 45 minutes of the ascent scrambling along on my hands and knees as I could. Finally we came to the end of the bare rock, a place with a view of all of Copacabana, and the group took a few pictures.

When we finally reached the summit, already swarming with tourists who’d taken the bondinho up, I barely suppressed a look of scorn. It didn’t seem right that they could just waltz up to the mountaintop and drink their Cokes at the little round tables. You had to earn the view. (Although, as I realized while taking photos of the orla, there’s really no way to take a spectacularly unique photo of Rio from the Pão de Açúcar.) And when I was kicking my feet above the Baía, if someone had offered me the option to pay R$50 (the cost of the bondinho) to be airlifted out, I would have taken it in approximately 2 milliseconds. But it was not offered, and so I enjoyed a panoramic view of the Cidade Maravilhosa with all the self-righteousness accorded to someone with scraped knees and an impressively authentic-looking smear of dirt across the nose (not in the picture, but I must’ve brushed a hand across my face sometime before the summit).

Guerreiros, não coro
Do pranto que choro;
Se a vida deploro,
Também sei morrer.

Oh, and there were monkeys.