Somehow they decided to chance it – we weren’t doing anything else pressing around there, just heading for the beach – so we loaded up the Land Rover and bounced out to where someone had suggested we might find the fearsome Dr. Reich. Near a shed in the middle of absolutely nowhere, a Toyota Land Cruiser was parked, without a sign of anyone around. When we got within a few yards we could see a pair of feet propped up on the rear seat of the Toyota. It was Maria Reich, taking a nap.After some whispering in the front seat of our car, Grandma was delegated to go knock on the jeep’s window and see what would happen. I guess the theory was that being woken up by a fellow middle-aged woman might upset Reich less than a brood of children. Grandma could speak German, too, in case language was a problem. Grandma went over, and Reich, to our shock, walked back to us with her. If the kids could be trusted to keep to the paths, she told my parents, we could follow her on her rounds. She climbed into our car and told my Dad, in curt English, where to drive.
I guess we spent a couple of hours walking in single file along the white lines, half-listening to the mathematician and concentrating hard on staying where we were supposed to be. I remember a long pause at a spot where Reich had stuck hundreds of sticks the shape of popsicle sticks into the ground along a particular set of curved lines, and tied string between pairs of sticks according to some complex geometric formula. She crouched there, an animated finger pointing here and there, explaining in a loud voice the relationships between this calculation and that, and I could only think about how the desert made you yearn for a popsicle.
The only thing I remember going wrong was when my straw sun hat blew off in the breeze and wheeled away over the black rocks. It was closer to another white path, but to get there without leaving the lines I’d have to walk for what seemed like miles. There was a quick conference, and then Reich nodded to signify that I could retrieve it. I stepped carefully across the black desert, not moving a stone, and when I got the hat back I jammed it on as tightly as I could.
On the ride back to her parked Toyota Reich held my sister Nicky, about a year old then, cooing at her and wondering if she would remember any of this when she came back. On the two or three-hour drive to Puerto Lomas that afternoon, my mother marveled at how out behavior had improved in the presence of the fearsome German. It didn’t seem that surprising to us.