The Coat Route

by Meg Lukens Noonan

  Jane’s group is heading one such effort—a project that will teach improved vicuña fiber-shearing-and-processing techniques in three rural communities. She is just days away from taking her team—and me—to Huaytara, a small village in the mountains that is going to stage a chaccu. The $47,000 in funding from Peru LNG has been deposited into her account, but her bank won’t give her access until she produces a sheaf of notarized documents demonstrating that the windfall is legitimate—and not, say, tied in to Peru’s $20-billion cocaine trade. In the meantime, she’s spending $500 a day of her own money to keep the project afloat.

  “Raul,” she calls wearily to her husband. “We have to go to the notary again.”

  It seems a simple enough task, but it will be hours before they return. There are plenty of notary publics in Lima, Jane tells me later. But finding one that is actually open for business, even during normal working hours—that’s the challenge.

  Jane and Raul live in a gated neighborhood above Pachacamac, a scrubby agricultural community south of Lima. When Jane drives toward the gatehouse, a guard comes out and lifts the spindly pole and waves her through. The security measures are reminders that this area was a hotbed of Sendero Luminoso—Shining Path—terrorist activity not too long ago. In 1992, the town’s deputy mayor, Maria Elena Moyano, was murdered at a community barbecue.

  The terrorists have retreated to the jungle, and these days the friction on Jane and Raul’s street is apt to be over whose turn it is to get the irrigation water that is piped into the cement culverts that border the small fenced yards. Water from the Lurín River sustains a small garden behind Jane’s one-story L-shaped adobe house. We walk out to the back yard and she shows me rows of manioc, lettuce, and squash. One spindly raspberry bush is propped up on a stake. In the front yard, hutches hold six guinea pigs and four rabbits—refugees from Raul’s vaccination experiments. Gray doves, which sing monotonous, pan-fluty notes from dawn to dark, flit in the bushes.

  Wheeler and Rosadio live in a world where ancient things are as common as gravel. Just down the road from their place—past the chicharonnerias selling fried pork rind and the farm stands and the empty lot where a dusty white llama sleeps among the rubble and the weeds—are the Pachacamac ruins, hundreds of acres of half-excavated ceremonial grounds and temples that date back to A.D. 200.

  We drive by the ruins on our way to the office to pick up some CONOPA crew members for the trip into the mountains. “That’s Pachacamac,” Jane says, as if she were showing me where a new Wong’s supermarket was going to be. From the road, it looks like a pockmarked sand hill surrounded by an abandoned construction site. “It’s as significant as Machu Picchu.”

  By midafternoon, we and the CONOPA guys are speeding south, the chaos of Lima behind us. Under low clouds, the highway is a dark ribbon riding the contours of the desert coast: to our left, dunes corrugated by wind; to our right, the gray Pacific, creased by swells. I am in the backseat of the truck, one gear bag on my lap, another at my feet. Jane, holding a bag of groceries, is wedged between Andres, a long-legged Spanish vet student, and me. Two young men who are part of the field staff are up front: Alvaro, bearded and intense, is driving, and Antony, boyish and smiley, is riding shotgun. Only Jane and I speak English, but she has been conversing in Spanish for most of the trip so far. I have tried to catch scraps of recognizable words, but I’ve given up. They talk too fast and I have a headache.

  Out my window, a cluster of decrepit shanties flashes by, then the quick colors of a lone fruit stand, the haunches of a scrounging dog, a bus barreling north, then more sand. I have read that this is one of the most arid places in the world, so dry that corpses dehydrate and mummify before they can decompose.

  The monotony of the drive is interrupted by the frequent freight-train rumbling of big-rig trucks, whose drivers seem to keep themselves awake with adrenaline shots fueled by the thrill of passing us on the blindest of curves. This, I will learn as we make our way into the mountains, is a signature Peruvian move.

  “Oh, mi Dios,” I say, covering my eyes in the middle of one particularly risky-looking maneuver.

  “Sí, sí, mi Dios,” Alvaro repeats, laughing. “Mi Dios.” The others smile and nod. I am happy to have amused the crew, but what I’m really thinking is, Please do not let me die on a highway in Peru.

  More sand, more ocean, more crazy truck drivers, more sand—and then the surprise of green. We have reached the outskirts of Chincha, a coastal town that has the one thing that changes life in an arid land—a ribbon of river water. From where it began as snowmelt in the Andes, this water has been diverted hundreds, maybe thousands, of times into ancient irrigation ditches, feeding the roots of potatoes and maize on high terraces and alpine valleys, then, here at the coast, giving life to acres of cotton.

  The traffic slows as the highway becomes Chincha’s main street. We have joined a slow stream of brightly painted motorized rickshaws. Schoolchildren in uniforms walk in groups past women selling bales of raw white cotton from open-air shops. Beyond the outskirts of Chincha, the sun finally burns through the clouds in an angel-song display of crepuscular rays. The shafts pool light on the sea and illuminate a rocky islet spattered white with bird droppings.

  This is, I remember reading, the Guano Coast, where the combination of millions of seabirds and a rainless climate guarantees that every surface large enough for bird feet will be permanently painted with dung. Early civilizations experimented with bird excrement as fertilizer and found that it coaxed astonishing bounty from the bad soil. Incan societies so prized the guano that the killing of seabirds during breeding season was declared a crime punishable by death. When, in the mid-1800s, European and American farmers discovered what Peruvian bird shit did for their crops, guano mining became a huge business. At the height of the forty-year guano boom, American and British ships crowded the rolling seas off the rock islands waiting—sometimes as long as three months—for their cargo holds to be filled with dung. The Industrial Revolution, the invention of man-made fertilizers, and the fact that the miners were starting to hit rock put an end to the guano rush.

  We continue south through Pisco, a town of about sixty thousand that is famous for the production of the clear grape brandy that bears its name and is the key ingredient in the pisco sour, a potent cocktail made with lime juice and angostura bitters and topped with frothed egg white and fresh nutmeg. All along the road, locals have set up stands selling bottles of the liquor and advertising vineyard tours. The town was also briefly famous for being the epicenter of an 8.0-magnitude earthquake, which in 2007 shook Pisco for 210 terrifying seconds and nearly flattened it. Five hundred ninety-six people died. Three years later, the streets are still edged with rubble and the town is full of half-collapsed buildings.

  Just past Pisco, we head inland on Los Libertadores, an ancient two-lane highway. The road skirts miles of lowland vineyards, then ascends through yellow foothills, and eventually crests on the broad tablelands of the high Andes. After a few hours of climbing, we turn off the highway in the dark and drive under a lighted stone gate that says BIENVENIDOS A HUAYTARA. The simple stone hotel we check into has a large, brightly lit lobby furnished with blocky laminate tables and modular sofas, giving it the feel, oddly, of a seventies ski-lodge rumpus room. Behind the front desk, three clerks sit close together watching a game show on a tiny TV.

  Along with other members of the CONOPA staff who have arrived before us, we walk down Huaytara’s main street, cross a small park, and head for the restaurant where Andres had called ahead for reservations—a table for nine. The place is dark. Andres knocks, and in a few moments the door opens a crack and a man peers out and says something to him.

  “He says some other people came and he fed them and now he has run out of food,” Jane reports, interpreting the conversation for me.

  Next door is another café with a table big enough for our group—and, it seems, plenty of food. I sense that there is a reason Andres wanted to go to the other restaurant,
but it is eight-thirty and we are all hungry and cold. The guys order one bottle of Cristal beer and pass it with a small glass around the table. It’s a charming Peruvian tradition of sharing that goes against my twin American urges to both guzzle my own beer and remain germ-free. Jane, sensing this, asks if I’d like my own glass. She gets one for herself, too, and orders another beer.

  The menu says they have cuy—guinea pig—pork chops (“I can’t recommend them,” Jane leans over to say) and trout. I’m not opposed to guinea pig—I tried fried nuggets of it back in Lima and it wasn’t bad—but when the plates are brought out, I’m glad I went with the trout. The cuy is large, breaded, fried, and disturbingly shaped like a flattened guinea pig.

  Heading back, Jane and I duck into a little dirt-floor shop, where a small pyramid of tangerines glows in the dim light. We each buy a Coke so that we’ll be able to have caffeine in the morning. Then, joining the others, we walk single file along the edge of the narrow street that leads to the hotel. A scrawny dog falls in behind us, trots along for a while, then gives up. The moon is nearly full, and from the hotel’s stone patio I can see the deep grooves that funnel down the mountain flanks surrounding the town. And up there, beyond the indigo ridgeline, I picture the plateau and the mythic herds, awash in silver light.

  At dawn, with the roosters starting up, I get a look at where we are. It’s hard not to think Shangri-la thoughts as the sun breaks across the valley walls, illuminating the hilltop church that was once an Incan temple. By 6 A.M. we are in the cold truck, Antony and Alvaro up front and Jane and I in the back, washing down bananas and sweet crackers with Coke. Andres has gone ahead in the other CONOPA vehicle. For an hour we bump over the potholed pavement, gaining elevation with every switchback turn, until we reach the plateau and turn onto the dirt road that traverses it. The land here has the mottled look of desert camouflage; clay-beige sand tufted with pale fescue and bunch-grass, boulders flocked with gray-green lichen—and, beyond the rocky lunar flats, coppery hills and folds of dark canyons.

  Jane points out the track of the buried liquid-natural-gas pipeline, a bare seam stitched across the steppe. Whatever else people think of the project, which turned Peru from an importer of gas to an exporter, no one disputes the fact that its construction was heroic. It took four years to run the line the 254 miles from the eastern flank of the Andes to the new liquefaction plant south of Lima. Before dropping west for the coast, it climbed to 16,080 feet. Engineers had to use a barometric chamber to find welding materials that would hold up in the thin air, and a Guinness World Records representative made the trek to the project’s frozen apex to certify that it was, indeed, the highest pipeline in the world. Besides the altitude and the cold, there were the other standard Peruvian obstacles: wind, snow, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, flood, and drought, to say nothing of the political shenanigans and violent protests that dogged the project right up until the day the spigot was turned and the first gas flowed to the liquefaction plant.

  And it is the gas, of course, that has brought Jane and her team to the altiplano. She is spending Hunt Oil pipeline money—or will be spending it, as soon as the bank releases it to her. Funding from the deep pockets of the Peru LNG project should keep her research going for years, she has told me.

  The dirt scar disappears into the distance.

  And then I see them. On a ridge, three long-necked animals stand in silhouette against the morning sky, backlit and lovely.

  “Oh,” I say, “I think …”

  “Vah-koon-ya,” Jane says quietly, sounding like a proud parent. I pull my camera out of its case, and Jane speaks in Spanish to Alvaro. He stops the truck and I roll down the window and lean out into the frigid air to take pictures.

  “Bonita,” I say when we get under way again. “Mucho bonita.” I know that isn’t quite right, but Antony and Alvaro smile and nod.

  “Mira.” Antony points ahead and I see more vicuñas—one small herd on a bare hill, their ivory chests bright in the sun, and then another group, grazing close to the road. We go by and they raise their heads and stare, taking us in—a black truck, rolling slowly, kicking up dust.

  After about thirty minutes, we reach the chaccu site. It is a wide place in the road, bordered by two low stone buildings. An outhouse stands alone in a rocky expanse, its wooden door half off its hinges. The other CONOPA truck is already here. Parked near it is a shiny white bus with curtained green-tinted windows and futuristic-looking sculpted side mirrors. The words COMUNIDAD CAMPESINA DE HUAYTARA are painted on the side.

  “That’s the community bus,” Jane says, as we unload our gear. “They bought it with vicuña money.”

  It’s the first evidence I’ve seen that the vicuña management program is yielding dividends for the campesinos. That they purchased this fancy coach, in all its incongruous touring-rock-star glory, seems funny and a little sad, like a late-model Escalade in front of a dilapidated trailer. But it is a good-looking bus and it must make the townspeople proud.

  We cross the road and head to the top of a rise where there is a makeshift corral, about twenty yards across and seven feet high and surrounded by burlap. From it, two lengths of net-lined fencing splay out down the hill in an ever-widening V. Antony sets up a video camera near the fence and points the lens down the slope. Jane and the CONOPA crew converse in Spanish. I can tell by the way they slap their hands together and stamp their feet that they are talking about how cold it is.

  I walk away from them and find a rock to sit on. I feel lightheaded in the thin air, and my heart is racing. I will wait here, with my hands in my pockets, my chin tucked down behind the collar of my down jacket. The wind picks up and I pull my Red Sox cap down. For a moment, I see myself from above: alone on a rock, on the roof of the world, because of an overcoat hanging in a cedar-lined closet in a skyscraper in Vancouver, two pins on a map connected by a tenuous thread. It seems at once hilariously inconsequential and frighteningly profound. I look out over the burnt-yellow plain, scanning for signs of the roundup. But there is nothing to see yet, just the blue of the morning sky and the faint, tissue-paper disk of last night’s moon.

  For the next hour, the campesinos and the CONOPA crew work on erecting a large blue tent, a gift to the community from Peru LNG and a key component of Jane’s project. It is designed to make the shearing process more efficient, and less vulnerable to the elements.

  “The fleece used to just blow away,” Jane tells me.

  Inside, there are stations for clipping, cleaning, and weighing the fleece. There is also a triage corner for any animals that might need medical treatment. Though the chaccu is based on Incan tradition, no one alive has memories of it, so it is open to interpretation. Some communities, especially those that attract tourists, have been encouraged by private companies with stakes in the sale of the fiber to stage elaborate costumed pageants—and even to allow audience participation. Others, like this one way off the tourism grid, are all business. The participants are in jeans, windbreakers, and baseball caps.

  The only nod to ritual was a small, private ceremony that was held the night before the roundup. On the mountaintop above Huaytara, Jane told me, the local shaman had lit on fire a container holding an alpaca fetus, cocoa leaves, and alpaca fat as an offering to the gods. A strong flame that completely consumed the contents of the tin would portend a successful chaccu; one that sputtered and died said the vicuña would not come.

  I scan the horizon again and again, until finally, way off, I see movement. It is a kind of light-brown wave, cresting a distant knoll. Antony walks to his camera and looks through the viewfinder. The CONOPA guys are pointing down the hill. I head back over to Jane, who is now standing near the fence.

  “Is that them?” I say. The wave is coming closer, and what seemed solid is now unraveling, streamers of tawny brown moving across the hill, then doubling back. As the herd gets closer, I can see that there are a hundred vicuñas, maybe more, running toward us. Behind them, a line of villagers holding a long rope
festooned with colored streamers is pressing them forward. Adult and baby animals run along the fence line and traverse the rocky slope, looking for escape. Dust rises as they sprint up the hill toward the corral. Larger vicuñas try to leap the barrier and a few make it out. A small one gets caught up in the fencing and falls, its legs frantically bicycling in the air, until onlookers extricate it from the netting. Some stop in their tracks, nostrils flaring, then dip their heads and run again.

  Children in hooded sweatshirts and dirt-caked sneakers join the men for the last stage of the roundup, laughing and urging the vicuñas into the corral chute until, at last, every animal has squeezed into the enclosure and the gate has been closed behind them. I walk over and peer through an opening in the burlap panels. The animals stand still, eyes big, ears erect. They are remarkably calm. A few bleat softly. They smell damp and peaty.

  When the shearing team is ready to start, they enter the corral, chase down an animal, pick it up in their arms, and carry it out. They stop first at the entrance to the tent for inspection by the CONOPA vets. If the vicuña is too young or has recently been shorn, it is released. If it has a kind of dandruff that makes the fiber undesirable, blood and skin scrapings are taken to be studied later, and then it is set free. If it is deemed healthy and has a full coat, it is fitted with a black hood. Though this is meant to keep the animal calm, the hood makes it look as if it’s about to face a firing squad.

  Inside the tent, the animal is splayed out on a low wooden platform, its front and hind legs restrained and held tight by helpers. It’s hard to look at this without thinking of sacrificial altars. But this is a haircut, not a bloodletting. With electric clippers powered by a noisy generator, a skilled shearer removes the fleece from the back of the animal in one piece. The fluff is rolled, like a length of weightless sod, and delivered to the cleaning tables. Here two women with tissue plugs in their nose, so they won’t inhale the fine fibers or dust, shake the fleece over a screen table, pick out bits of grass and coarse hair, then place it in clear plastic bags. Then it is weighed and recorded and added to the stockpile. Later, the fleece will be warehoused, and eventually sold to spinners and weavers, most likely in either the U.K. or Italy.