Before I narrowly evaded the cold hand of death in the Peruvian Jungle, I spent four days walking up a steep hill and had some learnin’ laid on me by a roundish 4’10” Cambodian-American in an all white hiking ensemble. I’d intended the Steep Hill part of the trip to be a physical challenge rigorous enough to balance out the mental/spiritual challenge of the spiritual retreat part of the trip. And so it was. The hill was, as advertised, steep. Climbing said hill at an altitude in excess of 16,000 feet was, as expected, incredibly difficult (take three steps, stop until lungs stop burning, take three more steps). But I managed with relative aplomb. Despite having lungs that, medically speaking, don’t “work right,” I kept pace with 21 year old outdoorsy types. Go me. It was nice to learn that I can, in fact, walk up Steep Hills. But I learned much more from the Woman in White (let’s call her “S”) than from my own ability to put one foot in front of the other. See, S failed at the walking. Spectacularly. At the orientation meeting the night before we set off, S talked a big game. She embodied almost every single negative American stereotype. Overweight, obnoxiously loud, not curious about the country she’d come to for this, as she termed it, “spiritual journey.” The next morning, we were supposed to get to our departure point by 5 AM. She arrived at 5:20. We drove about three hours to the base of the Steep Hill. We set off. S, in all white, looked like a marshmallow. She trundled along for the first hour or so. And then stopped. From a vantage point about 50 feet above her, I saw the marshmallow stop walking and bend over. Then it wobbled....