To Shake the Sleeping Self

by Jedidiah Jenkins

  At the top, we got out of the bus and kissed the ground. We were finally there. Machu Picchu. The place I’d seen in a history book in sixth grade. The real-life Indiana Jones adventure I’d always wanted to experience.

  We walked through a maze of stone walls until we came upon an opening. We saw now that we had arrived above the town proper. There it was, laid out beneath us. Every bit of hilltop space had been used. A labyrinth of walls, meticulously made with stones much too big to be moved by hand, adorned the mountain like a crown. I had always seen the photo of Machu Picchu from this spot, the classic tourist shot of the group smiling, posing above the town. Now, as I stood in line to get that very same picture, I noticed that there were lots of people down there, walking in the town itself.

  “Wait, are we allowed to go down in there?” I asked Valentin.

  “Of course! You can go everywhere,” Valentin said.

  Our whole group whooped and hollered with excitement. We quickly got our group shot, and then ran down the hill into Machu Picchu. We wandered from room to room, imagining the grass roofs and the people living here hundreds of years ago.

  “No one knows why this town disappeared,” Valentin explained. “It is believed that this was the king’s retreat. And it was a holy place. And when the Spanish came, the people decided to forget it. They didn’t tell their children. They told no one, so that the Spanish would never know it was here. That is why it remained hidden for four centuries, until it was found in 1914.”

  I was so full of wonder that I had a lump in my throat. The beautiful ruins brought to mind our conversations that had seemed to culminate in Annabelle’s comment to me over dinner the night before.

  “I was a Christian a year ago, walked into our conversation today an agnostic, and walked out of it a mystic, possibly a pagan,” she had said, laughing.

  Some kind of understanding had died. And something new was taking its place.

  Years later, as Pizarro’s wealth and power had reached its peak, his home in the newly formed Lima, Peru, was invaded by a mob of political rivals. Apparently, conquest and riches had earned him many enemies.

  Twenty heavily armed men stormed his palace. As he tried for his sword, Pizarro was stabbed in the throat. He then fell to the ground, blood pouring from his neck, and they stabbed him many more times. In his final moments, writhing on the floor he painted a cross in his own blood and cried out for Jesus Christ.

  One empire falls. Another rises.

  Chapter 17

  NEW BLOOD INTO BOLIVIA

  (Bolivia and Argentina)

  4,411 miles to go

  After Machu Picchu it was time for all but two of my friends to head home. Over a last dinner we shared how special we had become to one another. My heart was very full, and I felt reignited to continue on toward Patagonia. Plus, Cyrus and Jordan had brought bikes and planned to travel with me for a month.

  The original plan was to go straight south, along the Pacific Coast, into Chile. But people warned us about the Atacama Desert. It starts in southern Peru and takes up the entire northern half of Chile. It is known as the driest place on earth. It gets about .6 of an inch of rain a year. A thousand miles of lifeless desert.

  Hell no.

  So we hatched a new plan. We would travel up over the Andes, bike around Lake Titicaca, drop into Bolivia, then to La Paz, and across to the colonial town of Sucré. From there down to the farmland of Argentina. The new route was more exciting to all three of us. Cyrus and Jordan wanted a taste of the freedom of the road, but that didn’t require endless desert. For them, my trip had become emblematic back home for “getting away” and “really living.” Just as my dad had predicted, instead of forgetting about me, my friends talked about me as a man “living his dream.”

  I hadn’t heard from Weston the whole week of my friends’ visit. On our last day in Cusco, I texted him, “Think you’ll make it back on the road?”

  He answered a day later. “Still in Hawaii. Maybe I can meet you in Patagonia?”

  Wow. He isn’t hurrying back, is he? I felt a mix of sadness and relief.

  “What do you want me to do with your bike?” I asked.

  “Oh, man. Maybe give it to someone who needs it?”

  Okay. He’s not coming back.

  Is he?

  No.

  I thought back to biking that first day in Oregon. Weston and I weaving back and forth, taking up the whole street, loving the August air and ocean breeze. I remember him calling me his “neighbor” every night as we’d lie in our hammocks. “Oh, how’s the family, neighbor?” he’d ask.

  “Oh, great.”

  We’d started with such fire and magic. With a shared destiny and destination. The beginning of a grand adventure is pregnant with a thousand futures. Every possible best thing. But the end is often a fizzle. For us, Weston left for a wedding. And didn’t come back. And just like that, a chapter was done.

  As we set off from the hostel in Cusco, regrets and self-blame could have buried me if not for Cyrus and Jordan. They were ecstatic. They were biking and singing and laughing and everything was new and exotic. They were discovering bike-touring like toddlers taking their first steps. Tying up their backpacks and sleeping bags between their panniers every morning. Mastering clip-in pedals. Thrilled at the downhills and cursing the uphills. Shouting “Car back!” with the confidence of a seasoned cyclist.

  Cyrus would power ahead and bike a quarter mile in front of us. “Sorry, guys, whenever I listen to Kygo my legs start pumping and I become a machine. Electronic music is my pump-up music.” He was a lovable jock who was always competing, even if only against himself.

  “I’m catching up on podcasts,” Jordan would say. “Maybe that’s why I’m always in the back. My head is lost in some weird southern town in a This American Life episode.”

  The 400 miles of road from Cusco to La Paz scrapes along the bottom of the sky—breathtaking altitudes, treeless vistas, wind-blown, rock-strewn valleys. Along the side of the road, far from any houses, it seemed, a little gang of high school kids biked up to us from behind and, unsolicited, told us where the best local hot springs were. We found the pools just up ahead behind an abandoned military post. We soaked in boiling baths of water, and steam filled the air around us. We camped nearby in an abandoned schoolhouse and froze all night. The next night we camped on a riverbank. By the time we crossed a mountain pass at 15,000 feet, our highest point, we could hardly breathe.

  “How is this safe?” Jordan said. “My head is pounding and I can’t catch my breath!”

  I was struggling, too, but hid it to show how seasoned I was.

  We waited for huge herds of goats to clear out of the road.

  There were very few restaurants, and the markets sold only prepackaged junk food. We ate bad soup when we could find it, and Jordan struggled to find anything other than cookies that was vegetarian. We ate lots of cookies. And French fries. We survived on that as best we could.

  The boys changed their popped tires like pros.

  On the fourth day we were to make it to Puno, a bustling town on Lake Titicaca. That morning, still thirty-five miles from town, we met a farmer who told us to “avoid the next town, very dangerous. Many people get robbed.”

  That frightened us. So far on the trip, I hadn’t heard local people warning me of their own neighbors. I was used to people saying “Americans fear us. But there is nothing to fear.”

  We biked on, anxious about what lay ahead. Jordan’s tire popped and then so did mine. This slowed us down, and we ended up entering the dangerous town at sunset. We found a hostel and dropped our things. The streets were swarming. Tangled power lines clotted in the narrow strips of sky between half-finished brick buildings. Mopeds, cars, and trucks pumped exhaust into the air and made the streets a pulsing mess. We put our bicycles in the hostel and our bags in our room and we
nt to dinner. Jordan brought his backpack because his nice camera and laptop were in it. He didn’t want to leave it anywhere. We ate a good dinner and stopped at another place for a drink and walked home. This town didn’t seem so bad. As we took our shoes off and prepared to relax for the night, Jordan sprung up like a prairie dog. “My backpack! I left it at dinner.”

  Oh God.

  Jordan was out the door and out of the hostel before we could offer to go with him. I’m certain he ran all the way to the restaurant, which was about four blocks away.

  When he got back, he walked through the door holding his bag like a trophy. “The people at the place saw me walk in and laughed and reached behind the counter and lifted it up. Cracking up. They spotted it after we left and held it for me. I love Puno.”

  The next day, we cycled out of town and along the shore of Lake Titicaca. The lake is so large it looks like the sea. That night we slept on the edge of the lake in the roofless ruin of a barn. We tried to make a small fire out of dried cow patties. We failed. We drank boxed wine. We watched No Country for Old Men in my tent. Piling three of us in a two-person tent for movie night was really tight. We talked for a long time about how brilliant the Coen brothers are.

  The freshness of Jordan and Cyrus’s experience was rejuvenating. They were great companions, helping me navigate, prepping food, and down to explore any- and everything. The trip felt new again.

  The next day, while stopping for a snack break, Cyrus said, “I really crave a PB and J right now.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. “That sounds so good. I haven’t had one in…years, maybe.”

  “This is our new mission,” Jordan said. “We’re making PB and Js, eating six each.”

  We fantasized about the flavors as we rode, and resolved to find the closest grocery store. We found a market in the next town. We looked on every shelf, and ultimately Jordan had to ask, which he didn’t mind, because “peanut butter” is his favorite term in Spanish. “Mantequilla de cacahuete.” He returned to tell us that peanut butter isn’t a thing in Peru. They didn’t have any. We asked all over town, and were directed to the only large grocery store in the city, inside the only mall. We parked our bikes at a hostel and took a taxi. We scoured the aisles and found one jar. It was expensive. Like ten bucks. We bought it and jelly and a loaf of bread. We raced back to the hostel discussing how many we would eat. “I’m gonna eat half this loaf of bread,” Cyrus said.

  We made one each, cheersed them like champagne, and took big satisfying bites. But finishing one, the fever for PB&J wore off real quick. Our dreams of eating six each weren’t gonna happen. We made two each and ate them and were done. We watched a World Cup game on the TV at the hostel. We relaxed and felt accomplished.

  We biked out of town in the morning and were back in the land of golden grass and bald hills. We laughed every mile. With Cyrus and Jordan, it felt like the beginning of the trip again. Oregon was a million years ago. But I had been on the trip for nine months, approaching ten. The beginning was already nostalgia, a different me. And I had changed. Did I believe Jesus was my savior? I didn’t know. I had when I started this trip. And I think I still did. But not in the same way. In some larger way. The salvation of Christ was wider, more mysterious, kinder. I kept thinking about what Annabelle and Jordan and Cyrus had said on the zigzag trail down from Salkantay. About mysticism. About faith. I felt strong, questioning alongside them. The majesty of the Inca, the devotion to their king and their gods, the dissection of my faith, the evil mechanisms of its expansion. In ways I couldn’t yet explain, the Machu Picchu experience had been a wrecking ball.

  * * *

  —

  FROM LAKE TITICACA, the three of us crossed the border into Bolivia, paying an unexpected visa fee. From there we had about forty miles to La Paz, along what’s called the Altiplano. This is a stretch of high prairie floating in the sky, stretching across much of Bolivia and northern Argentina. The puddles made from the muddy footprints of cattle were thick sheets of ice in the cold morning. By noon, we’d be shirtless in 90-degree heat. We biked at a steady 11,000 feet.

  At golden hour, we dropped into the massive city of La Paz. It is another sea of short red-brick buildings, with tall white ones in the center, and snowcapped mountains flanking its edges. It is the highest major city in the world at 11,975 ft. We spent a few days there. We went to the movie theater. We went dirt-biking. We lubed and cleaned our bikes. We headed out of there and biked for several more days to Potosí, a town that sits even higher at 13,000 feet. It was colder than ever and some days we couldn’t even have our hands exposed. We were smack dab in the middle of the South American winter. Nights and mornings were miserable. In Potosí, Cyrus got too sick and cold to bike. He said he’d have to bus to Sucré.

  Jordan and I checked the elevation of Sucré.

  We watched the final World Cup game in Sucré at a German hostel. It was Germany v. Argentina. The excitement was electric. Many of the Bolivians were rooting for Germany, because they didn’t like their arrogant Argentinian neighbors. The German hostel became the epicenter of Sucré that day.

  Germany won. And we partied hard. I got so drunk that I had the spins and had to sit up in bed almost all night. I had to sit there and play solitaire on my phone. For hours. Because closing my eyes made me spin and lying down made me spin.

  After the World Cup, it was time for the boys to leave me.

  “You gonna be all right biking alone?” Jordan asked.

  “Yeah, will you be scared?” Cyrus said.

  “I haven’t done it yet, but I’m ready. Not that I’m glad y’all are leaving. Just, at this point, I’m ready to try out the solo thing.”

  They found large bike boxes at a cycling shop in Sucré and boxed their rides up for the flight. I hugged Cyrus and Jordan goodbye and thanked them for giving me new life. They bused to the airport and left me all by myself.

  Jordan and Cyrus had done good things to my spirit. A remembering of my first excitements of biking. A chance for me to show my cycling expertise. A respite from Weston. Well, more like a transition out of Weston.

  For the first time in my whole trip, I was truly alone. I had three or four thousand more miles to Patagonia, to the end of my trip. The only person I knew in every direction was myself.

  Chapter 18

  ALL BY MY ARGENTINA

  (Solo Down Argentina)

  3,580 miles to go

  I sat alone at a café in Sucré to map out the final stages of my journey. I decided I would cycle south along the eastern edge of the Andes, into Argentina’s wine country. Mendoza was about 900 miles from the north of Argentina. From Mendoza, I would bike south, another 900 miles to the border of Chile, cross back to the western side of the Andes and into the wind-blown wilds of Patagonia. That’s the famous Carretera Austral, a gravel road more than 700 miles long that winds through the fjords and fishing villages of the Patagonian wilderness. I would cycle to the end of the Carretera: Mount Fitz Roy. That would be the end of my cycling. I wanted to do the famous route and then be done, at this famous mountain I’d always wanted to see. To make Punta Arenas, at the tip of the continent, my goal would require six hundred more miles of biking, but bike blogs had described the region as a windy, treeless, and flat expanse. I wanted to end with a beautiful bang, not drudgery for the sake of making a point. So I would finish at iconic Mount Fitz Roy (the mountain range on the Patagonia clothing company’s logo), then bus farther down to Torres del Paine National Park to meet my mom for the final hike. Then it would be Christmas and it would all be over. I would head home.

  The moment my plan fell into place for the rest of my trip, I felt it as finite. It wasn’t my whole life anymore, stretching on forever. For so many months I had seen no shape or end to it.

  I was alone now and happy to be alone. Which, for Mr. Social Jedidiah, sounds odd. But it exposes a different side of me. Traveling alone, y
ou get to be whoever you want. I don’t mean lie. I mean you get to be a blank slate. You can’t leave behind your skin color, or your height, or the handsomeness or homeliness of your face. But you can leave your story behind. If you’ve broken hearts, the new place doesn’t know. If you’ve lost trust in people and yourself, the new place doesn’t know. If everyone thinks you love Jesus, but you never really have figured out what you believe, the new place doesn’t care. It may assume you have it all tied nicely in a bow. All your thoughts and histories. Just feeling like your past isn’t a vice to hold you in place can be very freeing. Feeling like your family and the expectations and the traditions and the judgments are absent…it can fill your veins with possibility and fire.

  Something about being alone makes me sexual. The moment I’m alone in my house, I walk around naked, I look at porn, I do things just because I can. I’m unwatched. So the things that build up in me, that fear of being watched or found out, show up right when they know they can. But isn’t God watching? I don’t know. Do I fear that God is watching, or fear that some human will find out what I’ve done? Maybe I could attribute that to God, the finding out. But still, why don’t God’s eyes burn me like human eyes do?

  I think it’s because I’ve always felt that He understood me. He made me. What could surprise Him?

  By myself on the edge of Argentina, these familiar feelings sat up straight. “Jed, you’re alone. You can kiss anyone. Be anyone.”

  I had had a small dream of kissing boys on this trip. Even early on. The thought of anonymity felt scandalous and thrilling. Setting myself free, when and if I found myself alone. I was in a foreign place, far from any watchful eyes, from anyone who knew me. The invisibility. It made me realize how much of decency is built through community, through other eyes. I’d forgive myself just about anything if I felt anonymous.