Real names aren’t important here, but nicknames are. This is, after all, a story about a landscape out of a dream, a sport that doesn’t seem real and a ragtag group of unbelievable characters. So aliases are more appropriate. After all, if you found out that Steve Rogers put out a fire at your house, your first question might be whether your cat or grandmother was safe. But if Captain America, Steve’s nom de guerre were used, your grandmother might come later.

Are there superheroes in this story? Not quite. But if auditions were held for some adventure sports version of the Super Friends, living in a bizarro world where evil was measured in boredom and villains were soft and idle, this motley assemblage would be first in line to try out.

In this story, there’s Gallito, the little chicken, whose power lay in explaining things like sarcasm and humor explicitly where others instinctively use tone of voice. But he always did so with a smile and a light in his eyes, even when ordering his cycling students to climb an insane hill for the third, or twelfth, time.

Next comes Tortuga, the turtle. He spoke slowly but would jackrabbit down ridiculous slopes, his mountain bike seemingly fused to his body.

Bagre, named “Catfish” for his gaping mouth, had muscles that appeared cut from the same volcanic basalt that he would cling to a hundred feet off the ground while nonchalantly peeling and eating an orange.

Add Peluso, Chango, Gustavo and a handful of others and the covey is complete.

It was my job to teach them English. My qualifications were scuffed hiking boots, an empty wallet and impeccable timing. I needed work and had taught before, so I paid a visit to a school in Cuenca, Ecuador and headed straight to the office of the manager, whose father owned both the school and an adventure tour company in town. The pair was meeting to discuss the need for a teacher to give their adventure guides enough tourism English that North American and European travelers could get crash courses in rock climbing, rappelling, mountain biking and mountaineering. I was hired on the spot.

The manager dug through some cupboards and started piling books in my arms – Advanced Mountaineering, Chucks, Bolts and Holds for Rock Climbing, Bicycle Maintenance, The Flora and Fauna of Ecuador – these texts were for my benefit only. After all, the guides already knew all of this stuff; they just needed to learn how to say it in English. I left the office and studied for a week, listing vocabulary words, sentence structures and slang that would allow the adventure team to provide their services to Anglophones.

But on the first day, my plans crashed to the floor when I caught the tail end of a story Bagre was telling to the class: “. . .and I told him he danced like a woman and couldn’t have any pretty women., and so he punched my face.” The class roared with laughter, and my job became much more interesting. These guys had excellent English. They were especially skilled at stringing together ludicrously foul combinations of curse words.  Read More...