Blind Faith

There was a blind boy singing on the bus from the airport to Quito, the capital of Ecuador. He stood at the front of the bus, barefoot in a blue school uniform, his black hair cut short and combed. He was perhaps ten years old. When he hit the high notes, he threw his head back and you could see the empty whites of his eyes. He sang with everything he had inside him. His angelic voice and self-composure stunned everyone into silence. When he was finished, he walked down the aisle with his small hand outstretched, his eyelids shut. He put the few coins in his pocket and got off the bus.

In Quito, which sits at nine thousand feet at the northern end of the Avenue of the Volcanoes, I met up with two fellow climbers, JJ Cieslewicz and Matt “Large” Hebard. JJ is a whip-thin, 5.12 rock climber from Saint George, Utah, with a mass of red hair and a thick red