We walked our bikes behind her horse up a switchback dirt trail, to a crest. We could see the whole valley below, a green heaven with the last rays of sunlight turning it purple, pink, and lavender. She pointed us to a patch of grass where we could set up. No trees for hammocks, but the ground was flat and the grass looked inviting. It would be perfect for putting our tarp on the ground and sleeping under the stars.
Our braided Lady of Mercy gazed down at us with a sun-wrinkled dark face and wise eyes. She looked to me as much a part of this place as the trees themselves. Like she grew out of the ground. I surveyed the place and decided it would be easiest to just sleep under the stars. I asked, “Lluvia? Esta noche?” I hoped I said the right word for “rain.”
She stepped off her mule and thought. She looked at the sky. Looked at the horizon. Looked at the sky again. She said, “No, no lloverá.” I was certain she could feel the weather, and knew its ways like a prophet. When she offered water, we dropped our bikes on the little mesa and followed her to the next hill. There was her home, a disheveled pile of tin, wood, and clay, like a hobbit hole mixed with a child’s fort. She lived alone. A thin plume of smoke rose from the chimney. It was weirdly beautiful. She tied her mule to a thin tree by her house. Next to her home was a black plastic tube stuck in the side of the hill. Out of the tube poured water. Crystal-clear water. She took a cup and filled it with water and gestured for us to do the same. A moment’s hesitation. Can I drink water straight out of the ground? Then we filled our water bottles and drank. It was sweet and cold.
She asked, in simple fractured Spanish, “You from United States?”
“Yes.”
“My son lives in United States.”
“Really? Where?”
“United States is a big city. I do not know.”
Weston and I made eye contact, and we loved her. She lived here with a few chickens and a goat and a mule. Her son is in the U.S., she thinks, she does not know where. Was he thriving or dead? For news, did she ride her mule to some distant post office? Was the son’s father in the picture somewhere?
How different our lives were. She did not live in the world of the Internet, of push notifications and endless crises, of social media and texting and passive-aggressive e-mails and life in the modern age. She lived in a shanty on the side of a mountain, all alone with her few animals. I wondered if she was happy. I wondered if she thought about happiness and how to get it, the way Americans do.
Meeting her and drinking that sweet water made my headache go away. We put our big blue tarp down and lay on top with our sleeping bags. We didn’t chain up our bikes. Who would take them? I used my jacket as a pillow. The temperature was dropping quickly.
“She just lives out here, all alone,” Weston said.
“There are so many different ways to be human.”
“I like her.”
“Can you believe, we would have been ruined if she had been a mean rancher shooing us away.”
“The universe,” he said.
A moment of silence later we were asleep.
* * *
—
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, I was awakened by cold. My face was inside my sleeping bag, but my butt and legs felt odd. Damp. I pulled my face out. It was raining. And our tarp had collected the rain into a pool of ice water around us. Weston and I were in our sleeping bags, half underwater, in a pool. I leaped up. My sleeping bag was soaked. My backpack was soaked. I quickly moved my phone into my pannier and rolled it tight and waterproof. Weston stirred and sat up and realized he was soaked. He moaned a sad and dejected moan. No outrage. Just total defeat. We crawled around in the dark, trying to help our situation. We had been lying on two tarps, one Weston’s and one mine. So we drained the pool from the center of our ground tarp, wrung out our sleeping bags, then spread the second tarp as a cover and crawled back in. We were shivering and my piercing headache had returned.
“This is horrible,” Weston said.
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve never been this cold before,” he said.
The rain continued for hours. And hours. It never stopped. The pool returned but we were too cold to move. We didn’t sleep again. At least I didn’t. An eternity passed.
Finally, at first light, we wadded up our soggy clothes and sleeping bags and tied them on our bikes.
“That was the worst night of my life. I can’t do this. I can’t believe I ever left the beach,” Weston said, to himself more than to me. I thought of his trip to Hawaii. I thought, “He won’t come back to this.”
We pushed our sad bodies and sad bikes to the road and tried to ride. The road wound up and farther up, as if never intending to level off or turn into downhill again. Before long, the freezing cold and the wet made riding unbearable. Weston stopped and got off his bike and began walking it. I did, too. “Let’s just hitchhike,” I said. Weston nodded.
We stood by the side of the road and thumbed as a few trucks drove by. We were willing to wait all day. The rain stopped, then the sun came out but we were too tired to celebrate. Just exhale. After an hour or two, a police SUV stopped. When I asked if they would take us to town, they said yes. We had to take the wheels off our bikes to fit them in the back. The policemen must’ve known we were too tired to talk. They just drove in silence, listening to the radio, and dropped us in town.
“Wow,” Weston said, walking his bike. “I trusted that native woman with the weather, just because of how she looked. I thought she was a gift from God, like He brought her to us. I was lazy and just assumed she knew everything. And I had the worst night of my life. And we were rescued by cops. Cops!” He shook his head. “God’s favorite lesson is humility.”
We got a cheap little hotel room to warm up. We took hot showers and laid our clothes out. We ate some soup in the tiny hotel restaurant. An older couple walked in suited up in elaborate motorcycle gear—expensive jackets and helmets, and special rip-proof pants and boots. The woman had blond hair and the man had spiky gray hair. They were probably in their fifties. After a few minutes of overhearing Weston and me speak English, they introduced themselves. They lived in Malibu and were on a motorcycle adventure across Peru. I impressed them with all my knowledge of Malibu and the fact that I knew exactly where their house was on the coast. But the familiarity and shared knowledge and laughter made me terribly homesick. To meet strangers and just speak with them. Effortlessly. To not worry about misunderstanding or cultural difference or otherness. To be the same. I’d wanted to run from it. And now I wanted to run to it.
The couple ate their soup and hopped on their fast motorcycles and disappeared down the road in seconds. I looked at our bicycles chained up outside. Those slow metal idiots.
Along the final eighty miles into Cusco, Quechua people crowded the road, or stared at us from beside their sheep and mud-clay homes. The children ran out to gawk. Trees were rare up here, except for planted groves of eucalyptus. Mostly we biked through grassland and steep mountains and over streams of snowmelt.
Weston and I barely spoke as we rode. I thought about his trip to Hawaii. I felt an anger that I couldn’t place. Just a knot in my chest. Just a feeling of “I want to get away from you.” I assumed it was simply too much time together and too many hard circumstances. When I wasn’t looking at him ahead of me on his shitty bike, I was thinking about Jesus. About what Weston had asked me. How he had forced me to say things out loud and made me sound foolish. How he’d called me a coward. He had such the upper hand on the other side of faith. But I scoffed at him in my head. Drug addict. Nihilist. Always skipping from one thing to the next. Running from the truth. Running from himself. Assuming the answer is hidden in some chemical or lifestyle.
As I rode I made the case for faith. If God exists, He’d want a relationship with His creation. Right? And if so, He’d have to anthropomorphize Himself, or else He would be completely unknowable. He’d
have to stoop to our level, express Himself in a way that we could understand. Okay? So if He did that, anything He did would look too small for Him. Indeed, it might look made up. And the story of Jesus is the story of life, sacrifice, death, and rebirth. This story is told in nature. The seed falls to the earth and goes into the ground to be born again as a tree. The caterpillar dies to become a butterfly. Every day the sun must submit to death and night before morning can come. Maybe the Christ story is God’s humble way of reaching out to us, saying things a little too plainly, even brutishly, in order to have a relationship with us. And then there’s the beautiful community of the church. The friendships. The sense of purpose. The upside-down priorities of Jesus. He was a revolutionary. Putting the poor first. The meek. The weak. The left behind.
Making the case to myself helped me feel better. Whatever was good in me, my culture, my mom, my friends, and my mentors was tied into this story of Jesus. Jesus had kept me from kissing a boy for twenty-eight years. Jesus had kept me from myself. I had thrown myself upon Him so that He might fulfill me. If He unraveled before me, or worse, vanished, what would I make of my youth?
The thoughts and feelings came in waves. In heat in my chest. In dizziness. In staring at Weston with a knot in my stomach and a desire to run away.
* * *
—
WE HAD ARRANGED to stay in Cusco with a friend of a friend from back home who had lived there as a kid. Her host family was excited to have us, and I was excited to have a home base for a few days. A free place to stay. I just hoped the family would be chill and let us come and go. But I was excited to pick their brains and learn from them. They were tour guides to Machu Picchu. I’d dreamed of it since sixth grade. It was the ultimate Indiana Jones fantasy to me. These people knew all the history. I was excited to ask all the questions.
The farms and sheep gave way to gas stations and markets and suburbs and brown-brick apartment buildings. The traffic got congested. We were approaching Cusco. I found a café with Internet, e-mailed our host, got my Google Maps working, and then navigated us to their house. It was a town house lined up with dozens of identical ones in a grid. The mom opened the door and welcomed us with a big hug and excellent English. They gave us one of their kids’ bedrooms and hot showers and home-cooked meals. They showed how well versed they were in American culture by giving us Smart TV control, their Netflix password, and beers in the fridge. They were also devout Christians, and we held hands to pray before each meal. Weston was polite with the praying, but when everyone else’s eyes were closed, he would be wide-eyed, looking at their faces, looking around the room. I’d peek through squinted eyes, and quickly shut them before he saw me looking. I don’t know why I felt embarrassed for him to see me looking.
Checking my e-mail at the house, I found that my friends had booked tickets and organized the whole hike to Machu Picchu while I was out of contact. The idea that they had committed to coming, and organized it all, felt comforting. I had feared that my friends weren’t thinking of me, weren’t wondering where I was, weren’t impressed. But they had booked the tickets. They had booked a guided hike. They had found hostels and restaurant recommendations. When I told Weston about it with excitement, he just said he couldn’t afford to pay for a guided hike to Machu Picchu.
“Oh,” I said. I sat for a minute. “I’ll pay for you. You can’t come to Machu Picchu and not see it.”
He said, “Okay, thank you,” as if I’d just passed him the salt.
The city of Cusco floats in the sky. It sits in a bowl of hills at an elevation of 12,000 feet, looking as if it had been poured out of a giant wheelbarrow—bricks and stone dumped into the valley to create a vista the same color as Medellín and most of Bogotá, a reddish brown. Ancient, narrow streets of cobblestone lead through a town that shows Inca architecture everywhere. Walls built during the Inca empire, so massive that the Spanish couldn’t destroy them. Giant stones fitted together as if by laser. As if a crane lifted them into place.
We stayed for a week. Weston bought a little weed from kids at a hostel. We were online most days, reading articles and Facebook and talking with friends. I was figuring out when my friends would arrive, what we needed before the five-day trek, where they’d stay. We walked the town, even did a guided tour of ruins inside the city. I bought a beanie and a two-person tent. I thought we’d need a tent now, because the high Andes were often treeless and too cold for a hammock.
Then it was time for Weston to leave for the beaches of Hawaii. He’d be gone for about a week, he said. Then he’d come back, and everyone would descend on Cusco and the hike of our lives would begin.
I was relieved to see him go for a spell. I didn’t like how I had grown frustrated with him. But damn. The money thing. The endless conspiracies and questioning of society. And questioning of me. How can you enjoy the day if you’re dismantling the world and the people around you piece by corrupted piece? I remembered the joke “love minus distance plus time equals hate.” I just needed a minute of distance, so I could appreciate Weston for who he was. I was excited to think less and enjoy more, even for a week.
After he flew out, I spent time with our host family and read at cafés. I wandered around town and spoke very little. I liked the autonomy. My mind settled, and I quickly forgot everything about Weston that annoyed me. I pictured him happy, out of the cold, barefoot on a Hawaiian beach, free of this trip and of me. He wasn’t shivering anymore. Did I already miss him?
I found an old book in our host family’s house: The Conquest of the Incas, by John Hemming. I read it every day, swept up in the wild tragic sadness of the Spanish invasion, the Incan empire in civil war, the European diseases racing out ahead of the conquistadors, doing most of their bloody work for them. I found the best cafés and stores in town, excited to show my friends. I was excited for the new energy of new friends. I was excited to love adventuring again. And the repose was nice.
Weston Instagrammed every day, something he never did on the road. Photos of him shirtless on the beach. Of wedding festivities. Of warm sunsets, coconuts, surfers. The day before everyone was going to fly into Cusco and he was set to return, he texted.
“Hey, man, I missed my flight. Trying to see if they’ll change the flight for free.”
“Oh, no. Well, we head out on the Machu Picchu hike in two days. Think you can make it before then?”
No response for a few hours. Then he texted, “Looks like they’ll charge me over two hundred bucks to change my flight. I don’t have that. Looks like I’ll be in Hawaii for a while. Just following the signs, you know? If one door closes, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Oh. Okay,” I wrote back. I had already spent hundreds of dollars to pay for his Machu Picchu hike. He missed his flight. I didn’t ask him why he’d missed it. I was simply not surprised.
“Do you think you’ll be able to get back down here? Is your return flight just gone?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. Not trying to force anything. I’ll call them later and figure it out.”
“Didn’t they buy you a round-trip flight?”
“Yeah,” he said.
His short replies sent a clear message. He was not desperate to get back to the Andes. My mind went straight to: Well, it’s just me now. He’s gone. Bummer. He’s always following the damn universe. Is anything ever his fault? Did I scare him away? Is my bad attitude to blame?
Chapter 16
EMPIRE FALLS TO EMPIRE
(Machu Picchu)
When I said goodbye to my host family, we hugged for a long time, and it was then that I realized how restful my time with them had been. How safe and nourishing. It felt nice to have a family and a mom again. Heading to the airport I felt giddy to meet my incoming friends.
The six of them filed off the plane and into the lobby, bringing with them a happy barrage of energy.
“Wow! This altitude!”
<
br /> “I already have a headache.”
“I have an entire CVS in my fanny pack.”
“I need to exchange money.”
“I need a poncho, stat!”
“I took four years of Spanish. I remember nothing.”
Seeing them was a reminder of my father’s advice: Your friends still love you. They haven’t forgotten about you. When you see them again, it’ll feel like nothing has changed. We were laughing and telling old inside jokes and talking about politics and gossiping about friends who can’t ever seem to get their shit together. Even at 12,000 feet in the Andes, being with them was home. A few of them were best friends, some were newer friends in their “year of yes.” Me? I was excited for any taste of home, so even relative acquaintances who asked if they could come along got a hearty “Yes!” All of them were exactly what I needed.
Two of them, Annabelle and Jordan, were among my closest friends from Los Angeles. We’d processed relationships, family drama, philosophy, and life together for years. I was excited to talk with them again, and in this holy place, too. I had Weston’s words, his challenges, my own inner debates, swirling. But also the pain of the ride and the fatigue of it all. Seeing them lit the spark of curiosity again. Of wanting to understand. With Annabelle and Jordan, I had a safe place to test and examine what Weston had wrought upon me. The room of my mind felt torn up and turned over.
We all spent a day in Cusco acclimating and exploring. Jackie wanted to go to Starbucks. She had never left the United States before and was a bit shaken by the foreignness of it all. We acquiesced, and with a grande passionfruit iced tea in hand, she cheered up, and we explored the town.
For our five-day trek to Machu Picchu, the tour company would drive us through rural villages and river valleys to the base of Salkantay peak. There, we’d unpack and load up the mules, then hike over a 15,000-foot-pass and down to Machu Picchu, which sits at 8,000 feet. My friends had convinced the trek company to do the whole thing in three days. I asked how you could hike five days’ worth in three, but they assured me that our guide was confident we could. “The trek was made so that older people can do it. You’re all young. We can push it,” he had told them. Besides, we would have mules to carry our gear and porters to cook and help set up the tents. It all sounded so opulent, and it was. But Machu Picchu and Patagonia were the two main draws for me in South America. I had camped and kept it cheap for thousands of miles. For this experience, I was ready to go big.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 25