by Laura Fraser
On the last day we break the silence, and people begin talking to one another about their experience. The guy I developed a silent crush on, fantasizing about his boyfriend potential—an interesting-looking dark-haired man with silver streaks in his hair—turns out not to have a very nice voice or manner, which tells you something about crushes and projection in general and why it’s often a good idea not to act right away on your lustful impulses. I leave the chattering group, unable to handle all that human noise or to ask the others their names, where they live, what they do, or how long they’ve been meditating. I fold my things and leave the retreat center quietly, saying a few words of appreciation to the people I spent the week mopping floors with in the kitchen, people who had done that dirty job efficiently, cheerfully, and well.
Then I get into my car, put the top down, and drive through the redwoods to Point Reyes National Seashore. It is early, so I go on a hike, climbing up Mount Wittenberg to the place where you can look out at the whole peninsula, the westernmost spot in the continental United States, which is edging up the San Andreas Fault at something like six inches per year. This is the spot where I sat several years ago and watched a mountain lion on a hill directly across from me, with a safe valley between us, and knew he was watching me, too. A special spot. Beyond the wildflowers and ferns and rolling stands of pine trees are the long beach, rocky cliffs, and lighthouse in the distance. I feel a contented sense that as much as I love to travel, as much as I am always searching for something somewhere else, there is no place I like being better in the world than in Point Reyes. I feel no urgency to be anywhere else.
On the way out of the park I stop in a small shop in Inverness, to dip back into human company. I look at some pretty things without a desire to buy them and greet the shopkeeper. She asks where I’ve come from, and I tell her I just spent ten days at Spirit Rock on a silent retreat. “That must be why you have this amazing glow about you,” she says. I beam a smile, then go sit in a restaurant garden and thoroughly appreciate a cool pale ale.
Back home in San Francisco, other people notice a change as well. At a party, a man who has known me for twenty years, with whom I’ve had a tumultuous and long-ago steamy relationship, wants to know what is different about me and tells me I seem “softer.” I don’t think anyone has ever called me soft before. Kathy, on a hike, is full of sympathetic joy for all the happy revelations I’ve made. I manage to maintain this peaceful aura for weeks, even on a trip to stressful, fast-paced, career-anxious New York City. There I visit an editor I’ve known for years, who’d been on staff at a magazine where I once had an altercation with another editor and imprudently used the F-word, a sin for which I was forever banned from those pages, even though I’d been a longtime contributor. “You seem changed,” she tells me. “Quieter, calmer, more relaxed. It’s nice.”
After the meditation retreat, I am nice, which ordinarily is not one of the first words even my dearest friends would use to describe me, but I realize that lovely state of sweetness and calm wears off if you don’t renew it by meditating some more. Otherwise, you start yelling in traffic again, screaming at some asshole who can’t hear you to Learn to Fucking Drive. Meditation, unfortunately, is not like a vaccine against impulsiveness, it’s more like exercise, which you have to do at least a few times a week in order not to slip back into your old irritable, impatient self. That’s why they call it practice.
I probably can’t get that lovely beatific glow back, where children, rattlesnakes, and strangers are drawn to my preternatural goodness and calmed by my presence, not without another ten-day silent retreat. But I can sit a few minutes a few days a week to make sure my pause button still works.
In the midst of all that meditating, I nearly forget I am on a campaign to find a boyfriend by forty-five, when I will be officially middle-aged. It seems to have lost its urgency. Meditation does seem to help me deal with men; all my encounters seem less dramatic and personally corrosive.
When I start dating Evan, it is easier to let go of my usual anxieties about whether he likes me enough, has all the necessary characteristics I need in a partner, and whether we are going to end up happily ever after. I can appreciate who he is, full of sunny energy, enjoy taking a hike with him and his dog, and make dinner later on, not worrying so much about how or if things will develop. I have a little space to check in with myself for a change—what’s up with this guy, how does he make me feel?—not just react to how I think he is thinking about me. I am less judgmental about him and simply notice him, whether I really want him to be my boyfriend or whether I’ll have to continue my campaign.
After we’ve been dating a couple of months, I land an assignment to go to Peru to write about its new, hot cuisine with my friend Guillermo. Evan isn’t exactly jealous that I’m going with Guillermo—I tell him the truth, which is that we’re strictly friends—but he isn’t thrilled either. I remind Evan that he said he wanted to travel with me and invite him to meet up with me in Peru after Guillermo leaves. To my surprise, since he has traveled very little outside the United States, he immediately agrees.
Guillermo, who is Peruvian, cooked up an idea with me to eat our way around Lima’s best restaurants and have a magazine foot the bill. Since he left the country, during the era of the Shining Path terrorism, Peru’s varied cuisines have become more sophisticated, mostly as a result of some young chefs who departed around that same time and returned with new, European-inspired techniques and an urge to rediscover traditional dishes and ingredients that ranged from the Andes to the Amazon.
Guillermo is excited to return to Peru after many years and writes to all his friends for suggestions about great restaurants. Meanwhile, Evan and I research an adventure company to take us on the Inca Trail and figure out where to go in the Amazon. I try to pack clothes for fine dining, high-altitude trekking, and the steamy jungle in one bag.
Finally, the day arrives when I meet Guillermo at the airport and we fly to Lima. We rent a little Jeep and drive to his mother’s house, a formal, immaculate haven in chaotic Lima. I’m glad to be with Guillermo, who knows the city and is so aware of its dangers that he won’t let me get out of the car until he opens the door for me, so he can be by my side.
We begin our mission to eat at restaurants that tell the story of Peru’s history in their dishes, starting with a visit to the restaurant owned by one of Guillermo’s childhood friends who is now Peru’s most famous chef. We try ceviche of wild sea bass with lime and red onions, which tells the tale of people who have long caught fish in the morning and had a taboo against eating it later than lunch. We taste a tiradito, sliced raw bonito, an interpretation of Peru’s nikkei, or second-generation Japanese, cuisine, along with sea urchins on tender ribbons of raw calamari. We have spicy chifa food in a downtown Chinese restaurant. We snack on anticuchos—beef-heart kebabs—from streetside carts. We stuff ourselves with stuffed peppers from Arequipa’s picantería cuisine and with risotto with black scallops that speak of the African-inflected criollo food still served in most homes. We eat roasted guinea pig, albeit an organic one, nestled in a bed of oca ravioli in a pisco pecan sauce. We even try a tough piece of alpaca.
By the time we leave Lima, heading south for Arequipa, we are ill, unable to stomach the thought of food. We can only barely appreciate Arequipa’s gorgeous city-within-a-city, the Convent of Santa Catalina, where wealthy nuns lived lavishly, painting their walls in exquisite colors, decorating with simple but impeccable taste, surrounding themselves with colonial masterpieces. We are only slightly recovered when we drive over high-altitude dirt roads to the Colca Canyon to chase after condors and sit in hot springs. Guillermo, being a Peruvian, with an endless thirst for information about history, geography, and ethnography, is a wonderful companion and guide. One of the good things about not being married is that you can be friends with men whom for whatever reason you aren’t lovers with—in Guillermo’s case, maybe the fact that we have the same birthday makes us astrological siblings, too much alike,
but we both agree we are best off being friends, so there has never been any tension. For whatever bad luck I’ve had with men in the romance realm, I can’t overlook, and probably wouldn’t trade, my great fortune in having lasting friendships with wonderful men.
After Guillermo goes home, Evan meets me in Lima with a burst of excited energy. We’ve been planning our Peru adventure almost since the time we started dating a few months before. Evan, an engineer, prepared for our trip meticulously, with geological and topographical maps, a GPS gadget, several guidebooks, and two duffel bags filled with wicking, water-repellant, bug-off layers of clothing for every climate emergency (we’re going from the Amazon to the Andes). He is taking care of all the details, and everything is under control. He printed a spreadsheet listing reservation numbers, transportation times, and contacts, as well as things we should remember to have available in our day packs each day. This is a marked contrast to the way I usually travel or with Guillermo, since we’d prepared only by soliciting restaurant recommendations, casually changing modes from lunch with a count in the oldest home in the Americas (Guillermo is a fortuneless Peruvian aristocrat) to walking around fields, talking to Indians about their crops.
Once organized, Evan is game and easygoing. We fly to a town in the Amazon and take a boat up a steamy river to a jungle exploration center, where we stay in a hut and traipse around the lush and overwhelming jungle, feeling Lilliputian, listening for monkeys, and watching out for snakes. While we’re there I think about the story Guillermo told me about his father, whose helicopter crashed in the jungle when he was three; when they found his body, they estimated he’d managed to stay alive a month before the insects and jungle diseases overcame him, which is one reason Guillermo has a mania for survival skills. The jungle is inhospitable in the extreme.
Evan, too, is a capable companion, and I feel safe traveling with him. We take a boat trip farther up the river, camp out, and wake at dawn to cross the river with a machete-wielding guide, then wait for a skittish gathering of birds at a clay wall, finally peering out from behind a blind at the brilliant sight of thousands of bright green and red macaws. It is the best adventure you could wish to have with any partner.
That night, on our return, the people who run the jungle center offer us another journey, with a local shaman, taking ayahuasca, a sacred plant that induces visions, used in local healing ceremonies. I have an anthropologist friend who has done quite a bit of research on the hallucinogenic vine, bringing scientists down to see how the ancient drug reveals the very structure of DNA in visions, so naturally I am curious. Since one isn’t often in the Amazon jungle with the opportunity to join an ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman, I decide to participate. Evan isn’t interested; he tried a few psychedelics when he was younger and says he knows all he wants to know about that particular path to those territories of his brain. He goes off to have a few reliable beers with an Englishman who is likewise staying at our camp.
Undeterred, I sign up for the ceremony alone. The shaman, an elderly Indian man in sharply creased jeans, arrives on a little boat around sunset. We gather in one of the huts—a few of the employees, a couple other guests, and the shaman—and scatter ourselves on mattresses on the floor. I dimly realize that I haven’t followed the first rule of taking psychedelics, which is set and setting, meaning a positive frame of mind, a comfortable place, people you trust. I don’t know these people, much less anything about the shaman or his ayahuasca, and though my mind is calm and untroubled, my body is still recovering from one of the low-grade bugs that gnaw on your GI tract for much of the time you spend in Peru, no matter what you do. Still, when the shaman offers me a cup of vile brown liquid, I down it, fast.
I know that ayahuasca, like peyote or mescaline, acts as an emetic, but I figure it will just make me burp, tidily empty the contents of my tummy, and then I’ll be ready for the visions the shaman is conducting, open to whatever revelations about self, nature, the universe, and the oneness of them all that the vine is willing to offer. What I don’t expect is four hours of psychedelic barfing. My skin becomes clammy, I have a tweaky sensation around my jaw, someone hands me a bag, and I begin my first round. It isn’t disgusting, exactly, but curious; I intently notice everything, as if vomiting in slow motion, the sound of the crinkling bag heightened, the expulsions colorful, my physical sensations coming from afar. The shaman, who is whistling, makes soothing sounds every time I retch. At some point, when I can close my eyes long enough not to have to aim into the bag again, I have visions, like a rolling, writhing picture of the jungle, which I could have seen had I just stepped outside the door and twirled around until I was dizzy. Given my recent gastrointestinal distress, I am distracted from these transcendent visions by an immanent need to use the bathroom, which, though only a few steps away, might as well be across the piranha-infested river for all I am able to move.
Finally, when I cough up the last bilious drops from my stomach, dry heaving for good measure, the visions stop, my intestines settle down, and I take a nap on the mattress. I am chilly, and all I can think about is how I want someone next to me, someone who will hold me close and take care of me. It is a desire that is much bigger than the moment and, in my state, seems profound. When I wake, I make it back to our hut, finally use the bathroom, shower, and toothbrush, and crawl under the mosquito netting with Evan. I cuddle up to him. “I like you this way,” he says. “You should take that vine stuff more often.” He is drunk and chatty about his evening with the English guy, and somehow I don’t feel the deep closeness I need—the one strong message the ayahuasca managed to deliver—but I’m glad to have him spoon me to sleep.
In the morning I am renewed; I have a ferocious appetite for breakfast, and whatever bug has been dogging me since Arequipa has been decidedly driven away. The shaman tells me that though I shouldn’t have taken the ayahuasca when I was still ill, now surely the bug is cleaned out—the healers use it in small doses to rid people of amoebas and parasites. We leave that lush and mysterious world on the same boat to town and then take a bus to the airport, where Evan and I depart for Cuzco, flying over a dozen microclimates in a short hour, from deepest jungle to high arid desert.
Cuzco is a spectacular city, red rooftops surrounded by high, rugged mountains. Its colonial houses remind me of what I remember of San Miguel de Allende in the high desert of Mexico, though the buildings are older and more imposing for their enormous hand-hewn stones. We explore the town and nearby ruins, eating in colonial haciendas, ex-monasteries, and modern art museums. After spending time with Guillermo, who travels light and is as fast to get up and go as I am, it is difficult to adjust to Evan’s pace: when I’m ready to head out the door, he has another forty-five minutes left of organizing his gear. You always have to compromise when you travel with someone, so I write postcards or explore the gift shop, but when he is willing to skip the Sacred Valley and Ollantaytombo, perhaps Peru’s second greatest ruins, to save taxi fare and be sure we are back in time to pick up our laundry, I say I’d like to go and he can join me if he likes, which he does.
THE NEXT MORNING we take the train to hike the Inca Trail, with our guide, Narciso, an easygoing and dry-humored Inca descendent who is an amateur anthropologist. From the first day on that ancient trail, passing ruins and villages, ascending into the high Andes, we are awed by the experience. Along with nuggets of history and mythology, Narciso passes out coca leaves to villagers we see along the trail and to our group, to help us with altitude sickness and to give us energy (I am not interested in trying any more local drugs). Evan and I snuggle in our tent during the cold nights and encourage each other up the difficult trail. We climb up the highest point, Abra de Huarmihuanusca, Dead Woman’s Pass, more than 13,000 feet high, and marvel at the view. On the last morning, we wake at sunrise to watch the dawn hit the Cordillera Blanca, the white-topped mountains, including the 20,500-foot Nevado Salkantay. Evan is elated at the morning and greets it bare-chested, arms raised in an animal howl of appreciation.
At that moment, I am crazy about him. That last day, when we finally climb the ancient, tidy stones to the Inti Punku, the Gateway to the Sun, we are both wonderstruck by the sight of Machu Picchu—that something so grand could exist in such an astonishing setting, that human beings could create and inhabit such a magical space—me with tears rolling down my cheeks, him giving me a big bear hug.
“You’re wonderful to travel with,” I tell him.
“This is easy,” he says. “It’s being together at home that’s difficult.”
ONCE BACK IN the Bay Area, photos developed and organized with scanned topographical maps, then put away, I realize he is right. Evan has a fun streak on vacation and on the weekends—when, superenergetic, he’s happy to dance, take bike rides, make love, and head out skiing—but his week is all routine. He microwaves his Lean Pocket at a precise time each morning, watches sports highlights for a few minutes, catches the bus to work, comes home, gets stoned, walks his dog, and crashes. Anything that breaks his regimen—going out to dinner, staying at my house—is a hassle. Still, as much as I like every day to be its own little unpredictable journey, I also appreciate the stability and regularity of someone to sleep with, to help me put up shelves in my office. At a certain point we talk about moving in together, and he cheerfully appoints me Director of Aesthetics, saying I can toss whatever of his postcollege furniture I like as long as he has a corner of his own to work in. We’ll live in my flat, he says, until we can buy a place we can afford, probably outside the city, where we’ll have a dog, maybe adopt a kid, and he’ll take a longer bus ride into the city every day. Since that seems like a distant day to me (and I am very fond of the city), I am willing, in the meantime, to empty a sock drawer for him and talk about getting cable.
So I have managed what I said I wanted before I hit forty-five: a man who is interested in building a life with me, with all the trimmings of successful middle age—child, dog, and house in the suburbs. But the nine months of our relationship are starting to feel like nine years. We are no longer making love so avidly, with the red tango shoes on, but complain of being tired before we roll over, facing different directions. Though I thought our trip to Peru was the first of many adventures to come, I now realize it was the first and last foreign trip he’d take in many years. Instead, he is committed to seeing his parents in Florida for most of his annual two weeks’ vacation time, and though he insists that I join him, he makes it clear that it will be no fun.